19 Purchase Street (34 page)

He put the letters along with the mother's postcards in the top drawer of his dresser. Made room for them by removing some packets of off-track betting slips, losers that a fellow had picked up from the floor day-by-day for Gainer to use to offset any income tax in case he happened to win a large triple or something.

Then, after uncapping another beer, he got back to the box.

Norma's purse.

It was a soft, roomy leather one from Bottega Veneta. In it, among the usual make-up implements and such was her Swiss Air ticket, the unused portion. Gainer read the face of it and would never cash it in. Also, Norma's passport indelibly rubber-stamped with all her arrivals and departures. He noted the most recent and final Zurich entry.

He removed everything from Norma's wallet, examined each item as though it were a fragment of her. Her driver's license, her L. E. Horton business cards, a merchandise credit receipt for $67.50 from B. Altman's. A snapshot of him at age eight, sitting on the street steps outside that first Vicky apartment. Another snapshot of Norma and Alma taken by the rail of a boat, a large-looking boat under way. Norma squinting into the sun. Alma with a hand up shielding her eyes. Wisps of hair across their faces, fair hair and dark being whipped up and entwined by wind. Both wearing casual summer dresses. A charming photo for its candidness, Gainer thought, a loving picture. He would have it reproduced, enlarged. Alma would surely like to have one.

Tucked in the smallest, tightest pocket of the wallet was a slip of paper. Gainer nearly overlooked it. A page from a notepad, cheap off-color paper like newspaper, folded twice into little more than a one-inch square. It had the Dolder Grand Hotel imprint on the bottom right corner. Scribbled in dull pencil above that was what appeared to be a date and a number and an initial that was either J.M.P. or G.N.B. All of it was almost undecipherable. It didn't appear to Gainer to be anything important. He continued with his looking.

He didn't stop until he'd finished the entire box, sorted aside whatever papers might be important, threw nothing away. By then it was dark. His stomach let him know he hadn't sent anything solid down to it all day. He didn't feel like eating at home. He freshened up and changed into clothes more appropriate for night, went over to the city, overtipped the maitre d' at II Monello so he got a table for four. Ate too much bread and butter before the pasta arrived, six kinds of pasta with six different sauces. Sipped away a half bottle of a 1971 Ruffino. Decided not to go home yet.

At one o'clock he was at Xenon. Sitting on the perimeter of the dancing with some house wine in a highball glass. He wasn't actually at a table, he had pulled a chair up to that vantage point.

Gainer never danced. There was something about all those jerks and gyrations that didn't appeal to him, at least not as a participant. But he enjoyed being the spectator, so there he sat, more or less passing judgment on the moves being made out on the floor. He began making composites of the girls. Mentally put that one's great legs with that one's spectacular ass. Those tits with that belly. That hair with … that face …

He recognized that face. Did not know it personally but had seen it practically everywhere.

Her name was Harrie. Short for Harriet, everyone assumed, and it didn't seem her last name mattered. There was only one Harrie. She was currently the model who had it made the most. Every working hour of every day for four months in advance on her booking chart at the Ford Agency was filled in, and there were just as many secondary bookings in case a client cancelled. She was averaging three thousand a day including commercials and product exclusives. A certain facial expression had become her trademark. Her variations on it were slight: up a notch for arrogance, down a couple for sultry evil. She could do no wrong in front of a camera. Even the most blase photographers said she had a tremendous
motor
. She was, indeed, an extraordinary twenty-year-old creature. So beautiful she seemed an anomaly.

That face.

That body.

Harrie danced them right to Gainer. She extended her hand to have him up and dancing with her.

He shook his head no, left her hand stranded.

She dismissed him with a flick of it, danced away.

Gainer didn't think much more about it until during the next number she came skimming and turning his way again, stopped abruptly and stood still, eyes to eyes with him about a reach and a half away. The music was so loud she resorted to charades.

Pointed at Gainer.

Held a make-believe phone to her ear.

Pointed to herself.

You … call … me.

She conveyed her number by holding certain numbers of fingers up in succession, ran through them twice to make sure he got it.

T
HE
picture of Harrie doing that was in and out of Gainer's mind around two o'clock as he walked to catch the tram over to Roosevelt Island. He admitted he was flattered, in a way. Harrie could have anyone. Maybe, he thought, it was what he needed, would do him good to crash against her. He clearly remembered her number.

His legs kept going for the tram.

Two minutes after he arrived home he was in bed reading a recently reissued Nabokov novel. Within twenty minutes he was asleep.

His phone rang.

His immediate thought was Leslie.

Harrie's opener was a complaint that it had taken her over an hour to get his private unlisted number.

A sleepy grunt from Gainer.

“Come over and fuck me,” Harrie said.

That woke him more.

“Just half dress,” she said. “I'll send a limo for you. I've got one on standby.”

“It's three o'clock,” Gainer said instead of okay.

“I thought it was four.”

“I'll call you tomorrow maybe.”

“Can't. Got a booking.”

“Sleep,” he advised.

A little protesting whine from Harrie. “Christ, have I ever got the wets for you. You should feel me.”

He visualized those words coming from that face. She had him leaning, thinking he could easily put on jeans and shirt and slip bare feet into loafers. With the telephone receiver still held to his ear, not to miss whatever else she might say, he rolled over and cantilevered off the edge of the bed, located the telephone outlet on the wall behind the nightstand and pinched out the connector.

L
ESLIE
returned Friday morning early. She let herself in quietly, found Gainer in bed. She did not know he was so anticipating her key in his lock that he came awake with the first click, and while she was undressing he pretended sleep, watched through the diffusion of his lashes. She eased herself carefully onto the bed, fit lightly against him. Then he came awake all at once and it was obvious he'd been faking it. He practically attacked her. She couldn't keep from giggling against his mouth.

Everything was all right now.

They were together again.

A serious kiss with a lot of missing in it, followed by several around one another's necks.

Would he like some orange juice? Leslie asked, and without waiting for his “yes” went to squeeze it.

The kitchen sounds were a joy to him because they were caused by her. She returned with the juice of ten oranges in two large glasses. “Mind the seeds,” she said.

“How did it go in Boston?” Gainer asked.

“About as I said it would.”

“No fun.”

“Croquet at the Myopia Hunt Club was the high point.”

“Did you have to flash much?”

“You mean often?”

“Both.”

“Only when it seemed the thing to do … or wanted to.”

“Shame.”

“Never. What have you been doing? Still got the walks?”

“Not so much.”

“Did you do anything exciting … meet anyone, or whatever?” She looked up to nothing in the corner of the ceiling to seem more offhand.

Gainer took a long, slow swig of orange juice, got a seed.

“Hmm?” she persisted lightly.

Don't answer. He could feel her intuition swarming about his head. “Does Rodger ever expect you to do more than flash for those people?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“He might.”

“No, he's smarter than that. They'd put it on his plus side for a night and his minus side forever.”

“They're important to him.”

“Apparently.”

“Who are they?”

“Just money. Tell me, who did you meet?”

Her intuition closed in. “No one, exactly. I dropped by Xenon night before last.”

“Oh?”

“For about an hour.”

A half-full, all-purpose model's smile from her. “And you got hit on.”

“Some.”

“Hard.”

“You might say that.”

“But you walked away from it.”

“If that's what you believe, that's what I did.”

“
Touché
,” she said, not liking it but taking some of her own medicine.

Gainer got another orange seed, put it in reserve beneath his tongue while he ejected the first one. He tried for the wicker wastebasket over beside the dresser. Missed. He'd pick it up later.

“Who?” she asked.

“Who what?”

“Hit on you.”

“No one you know.”

“But someone you do.”

“Stop cramping.”

“It's not cramping, it's … caring.”

Things wouldn't get back to right until he told her, Gainer thought.

“Didn't you ask me what I did?” Leslie said.

“Sort of.”

“Well, fair is fair.”

Gainer yawned twice and told her what had happened with Harrie, played down that it had been Harrie, and if a tinge of self-satisfaction came through it was at least unintended. He recited it in a monotone word-for-word and moment-for-moment so there wouldn't be any gaps to fill in. But there were anyway.

“What was she wearing?” Leslie asked.

“A blue dress, light blue.”

“Swishy?”

“Just a dress, not much to it.”

“How about her hair?”

“She had it up but it was falling.”

Leslie had a set to her mouth, her cheek muscles drawing the corners up ever so slightly. It was all she could do to keep from gritting, and was anything but pleased that Gainer remembered so much about the girl. Leslie knew who Harrie was, of course. Would have had to been blind not to. Just the night before, while watching television from a guest bed in a grand house in Hamilton, Massachusetts, she had seen thirty seconds of Harrie over and over. Harrie peddling some designer's jeans, delighted to thrust her darling ass into the faces of half the country. Harrie selling slick lipstick, shaping her mouth into over-lubricated innuendoes.

Now, without thinking what she was doing, Leslie slipped her feet into her high-heeled sandals. She was reminding herself not to be jealous, that with Gainer the most destructive thing she could be was jealous. She had never been jealous of anyone. Before.

She walked to the dresser. Picked up his seed. Dropped it into the wastebasket.

“Maybe I should clean up your aura,” she said.

“Doesn't need it.”

“For sure?”

“Positive.”

Gainer doubled his pillow behind his head. He remembered Leslie once having said that as a man waited and watched the last thing a really knowing woman took off was her shoes. And there, before his eyes, was the perfect example why. He had the urge to go over and lick the back of her knees, to start with.

Leslie was not really seeing herself in the mirror over the dresser. She plucked at strands of her hair that was as enticingly tousled as ever. I'm not afraid of the competition, she thought. Can handle the competition, upright or however. It was just that if she had to go up against anyone, why did it have to be the goddamn twenty-year-old indisputable all-around champ?

She alerted the angle of her view in the mirror so that it featured Gainer behind her. She recognized the look in his eyes, the set of his mouth, and if what they said wasn't truth, it was the next best thing.

She turned around and jumped on him.

N
EVERTHELESS,
that afternoon Leslie called for and got an emergency double session at Janet Sartin. Put her face under merciless operating room lights, a ten-times-one magnifying glass big as a dinner plate and asked for the honest-to-God truth. She was told she had the skin quality of a twenty-five-year-old, partly because she'd kept the sun off it. And, yes, there were just the slightest lines starting at the outer corners of her eyes, not crow's-feet by any means, more precisely the legs of a baby spider. No, no frown lines, nor those vertical above-the-lip lines or any sign of her neck going to crepe. And that was under magnification. She relaxed and had a facial.

From Janet Sartin she went up to East Sixty-seventh to Lydia Bach for an hour on the ballet barre with Lydia herself supervising the exercises. Lydia remarked several times how amazingly limber Leslie was, supple as a twenty-year-old, she said. Leslie accepted that might be a half-truth, which made it a twenty-nine-year-old, only one year older than Gainer. She spent about half the hour doing pelvic pushdowns, Lydia's specialty.

After that she stopped in without an appointment at Davian's and was grateful when David, after the briefest second thought, squeezed her in between two very recognizable models. One he didn't spend as much time on, and the other would just have to wait. Leslie made David promise that while he gave her a trim she didn't really need, he would yank out every gray hair he came across. Unless, of course, it got to be a bit much, she said with a quick poor-me grin. She anticipated any number of painful little tugs but David only kept snipping away. Not because there weren't grays here and there among her marvelous nutmeg red. David was just too tactful to take her seriously.

She was over her anatomical paranoia.

That quickly.

Showed how superficial it had been.