Augusta Played (9 page)

“It's not funny.”

“I'm not laughing.”

Gus was. Hysterically. “Oh God,” she said. “I'm sorry, Norman, but you should have seen the look on your face when you turned around and saw him.”

Norman didn't at all like being laughed at, and, disgruntled, answered, “I was looking at the look on
his
face when he saw
you.”

This sobered her up. “The whole hotel will know,” she said. “You were still
dressed.”

“What has that got to do with it?” he asked, puzzled.

“Well,” she said, “well… I don't know how to explain it, but it has a lot to do with it. It's so…unequal, somehow.”

“You're not in North Carolina,” he said. “Nobody's going to be shocked. We were only doing what you're expected to do in hotels. You can guess what goes on in the other rooms.”

“But they aren't bridal suites.”

Norman was beginning to feel beleaguered, and he did not quite understand why this should be so, particularly on his wedding day. Holding himself in with the last of his patience, he took one more stab at getting through to Gus. She was
supposed
to be a fairly rational person; she was
supposed
to be straightforward, as girls went. How could the simple process of becoming a bride scramble a woman's brains beyond recognition?

“Gus,” he said, “that is all the more reason they won't be shocked to hear that you took your clothes off in this room.”

“It's not the same thing,” Gus said, wistfully. “For you to be dressed and me not is almost decadent. You can tell that by the layout of the bathrooms. We weren't
supposed
to start making love the minute we walked through the door.”

Norman flung himself on the settee and tried to think. It seemed to him that lately he was thinking more and enjoying it less.

There, on the coffee table in front of him, was the champagne.

“I guess we could have a glass of champagne,” he said. “If I can get the cork off.” He was half afraid to try.

But the cork came off beautifully, and Norman managed to pour the champagne into the chilled glasses successfully, and that made him begin to feel better, and after a while he called room service and ordered Chateaubriand. Unfortunately, the radiator went on the blink, and the hotel had to send up a man to fix it because the room was growing cold, and he, the man, came up with the food. He talked all during dinner. He directed all of his observations, which were chiefly about the weather, the plumbing, hippies, and, for some reason, Howard Hughes, to Norman, man to man, dumping Gus conversationally, so that she felt like a dangling participle. She kept looking at him while he was talking—he seemed to think it was all right for a woman to look at him—trying to determine whether he had heard about their contretemps, but she couldn't decide yes or no. After he left, the radiator resumed its comfortable hissing, and the room grew warm again, as if someone had spread an invisible blanket over the settee and coffee table and chairs and carpet. She watched a late movie while Norman read the newspaper which the maintenance man had left behind, and when the screen said THE END, she went to the window and drew the heavy draperies wide open. It was snowing. The flakes were as large and soft as cotton balls. Illumined by the street light, snow edging the sill looked like lace; falling against the traffic lights, it looked like colored sugar—spun sugar, because it was spun in the sky by the winter wind and spiraled downward in a vast and lovely confusion.

“I packed a nightgown for you,” Norman said, behind her.

“I saw.”

“It's getting late.” He was proceeding cautiously, testing gently, wishing he could read her mood in the way she stood. Her hair was so close to his mouth that it seemed it might leap to his tongue, like nylon to a metal comb. It was as if her whole body was breathing, and he wanted to inhale every inch of it. “Do you want me to meet you in bed, as planned by the architect?”

She nodded, not yet quite ready to shatter her mood of snow, but when they were both in the big bed in the other room, she whispered, in the dark, “Norman, I'm scared.”

He didn't answer at first, not knowing what she expected of him. “I think,” he said, “it's natural. At least, I hope it is, because I am scared shitless. But I'm not sure you should tell me that's how you feel if that's how you feel.”

“Why on earth not, if that's how I feel?”

“Look at it, Gus.” He lit a cigarette. “You're telling me you're not sure I'm right for you. It may be a natural fear but hearing you state it is not exactly reassuring to me. If you ask me,” he said, “it's a classic demonstration of displaced hostility.”

“Nobody asked you. Would you mind putting out that cigarette? The smoke isn't good for my lungs.”

“You never told me that before, Gus.”

“You never asked. I've worked very hard to develop my diaphragm muscles.”

Norman stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray on his side of the bed. He had to use the butt as a flashlight to locate the ashtray on the table, before he could stub it out.

“Anyway,” Gus said, “you already got your own back by telling me you're just as scared as I am. I don't know why we shouldn't be a little nervous. It's not every day that people vow to spend the rest of their lives together.”

Norman felt as if his heart was a rose planted in the garden of his soul, and somebody was digging it up for transplant, every root torn from its rightful place. “Do you think you may have made a mistake?” he asked her, barely able to squeeze the question past his throat.

“That's not it!” What was it? A sense of missed possibility. She would have liked to marry the world; instead, she was cutting herself off from most of it. And she did mean “marry,” not “sleep with.” Or maybe “sleep with”
was
what she meant. How could she know, if she'd never found out? “Norman,” she pleaded, thinking of the wide world to be seen, “let's go to Africa.”

“Sure. First thing in the morning,” he said.

“I'm serious. To see the hippopotami.”

“And the rhinoceri.”

“And the anthropophagi.”

“Wildebeests.”

“Elephants.”

“Giraffes! Zebras! Gazelles!”

“The poisonous horned viper!”

“Come on, what do you know from horned vipers?”

“You see,” Gus said, weeping, sitting up, and biting her knee, “you see how little you know about me? My father used to work in a zoo. When he was putting himself through school. He was an assistant.”

“Take it easy,” Norman said; “you're hysterical.”

“I'm not, I'm not.” She did know perfectly well what she was doing, but she couldn't stop herself; she wanted him to be just as alarmed as she was. When she caught the note of panic in his voice, she calmed down.

“Hey,” he said, soothing her, “relax.” He pulled her down beside him and stroked her forehead until she was still. It seemed to him that he held his future in his arms, and that it was going to require infinite attention and tenderness if it was to turn out the way he wanted. Deep exhaustion seized him.

So Gus pretended to fall asleep in Norman's arms, but he fell asleep first. The radiator stopped steaming. The room grew cold again; Augusta's nose on the outside of the blanket felt as cold to her own touch as a puppy's muzzle. She used to have a dog called Caesar. It seemed to her unbearably sad, that she once had a dog called Caesar and no longer did. She listened to Norman's breathing. There was always something urgent about it, his sleep-breath, something superintense, as if to breathe by night called for as much concentration as thinking by day. It seemed to Gus odd that she could never know her own night breathing as she knew Norman's, this rasp scrabbling through the netherside of day like a mole through mud: it was already imprinted in her brain along with the coded pattern of her own heartbeat. Time, slowed almost to a standstill, might be measurable only by some such corporeal signature. Then Gus thought of something else, and smiled to herself in the dark: Norman was sleeping with the light off.

16

T
HE
PIECE
OF
PAPER
was on the table in front of Norman. (The table was two feet wide and twenty feet long, a counter running two-thirds the length of the room; Phil had knocked it together one day when Norman was complaining about not being able to find a desk large enough. It was desk, dinner bench, shelf, telephone table.) Gus was at school, and the hum of the electric clock seemed to grow louder and louder in the dusty stillness of the enormous room. “What the hell,” Norman said, as much to hear his own voice as for any other reason. Then he picked up the telephone at his elbow and dialed his father's office.

“I'll try,” Jocelyn said, “but I don't think he'll take it.”

“Tell him that the Mafia will be after his ass if he doesn't. It could be the end of a beautiful relationship between Amato and Leibowitz, and His Honor is going to find himself up a certain well-known creek without a paddle if that happens.”

Sid was on the line before Norman had finished this speech, although he would not have said he was eavesdropping, exactly. Norman heard Jocelyn signing off. Did he detect a sense of relief? He wondered what Jocelyn did for a home life.

“What's this about the Mafia?” Sid shouted. “What the hell do you know from Leibowitz and Amato? Stick to musi-cology, Norman. You could offend your aesthetic sensibilities mixing in politics.”

“I may have exaggerated. Actually, there's no immediate threat from the Mafia.”

“I knew it. This is a trick. You're disowned, Norman. Didn't I tell you not to get in touch with me so long as you remain married to that—that
Gold-digger?”
There was a pause while Sid waited to see if Norman caught the pun. When Norman didn't laugh, Sid laughed for him. “Why the hell aren't you laughing?” he demanded, sinuses aching. “That was pretty good, wasn't it?”

“Yeah, Pop, terrific. But listen, I'm calling for a specific reason, and believe it or not, it's important to you.”

“This I find difficult to believe.”

“I'm being sued.”

The electric clock began to hum again, and Tweetie, who had been napping, woke up and pecked at his bird seed. Norman knocked a cigarette out of the pack against the edge of the table and lit it with one hand.

“Sued?”

“That's what I said.”

“I
heard
what you said. What I want to know is why and by whom and what it has to do with me.”

Norman cleared his throat. “I thought you might want to know those things. I say suit, but it isn't precisely a suit.”

“How is it imprecisely a suit, I'd like to know?”

“It's more the threat of a suit, actually. And attendant publicity. When you get right down to it, it's the publicity that's the threat. From your standpoint, anyway. You see, there's this bellhop. His name is Mario—”

“A bellhop!”

“—well, and he's only fifteen. He didn't look so young to me, but there it is. I sort of slugged him. His mother objects. She says I could have ruined his looks and thereby his future. I don't even remember what he looked like.”

“Where did you do this?”

He named the hotel.

“And what were you doing there, you should forgive me for asking?”

“Honeymooning.”

“And you go around slugging bellhops on your honeymoon? What kind of a marriage is this?”

“I can't explain, it just happened.”

“So, okay. This is not such a big deal, only weird. Where do I come in?”

“Like this. It's not justice Mario's mother wants, it's bread. Maybe that comes to the same thing, I don't know. I feel I had a perfect right to knock his goddamn block off, but her point is that if they take me to court, it won't matter whether they lose or I lose, because they will spread it all over the papers that the son of a Jewish judge who is hoping to sit on the Supreme Court is going around beating up Italian bellhops. She seems to be a very well informed woman, Mario's mother. And you know what it will do to the King's County machinery if Amato withdraws his support for Leibowitz. If Leibowitz even thinks that's a possibility, he'll dump you faster than if Bonanno already had a contract out on you.”

“Don't tell me, I can surmise the rest. You're asking me for the money to keep you out of court.”

“I'm not asking for it,” Norman said, exasperated. “I'm giving you the chance to offer it if you don't want my name and yours in the news. It is still the same name even though you've disowned me. I'm only thinking about what this could do to you. Besides, I was under the impression you liked buying people off. As for me, I couldn't care less. It might even be a gas to go to court,” he added, defiantly.

“Please
, Norman, do not use that expression. Okay,” Sid said. “It is clearly a case of being held by the short hairs. You want to come here tomorrow, I'll give you the money. I trust it's a one-time shot and that the asking price is not exorbitant.”

“I'll be there at noon, Pop. This time, make mine salami.”

17

N
ORMAN
KEPT
the matter of the “suit” to himself; there was no need for Gus to know about it. She was perfecting the Berio and the last thing she needed was to worry about money.

A new sense of his own capacity for being solicitous rose up in Norman; he felt as though he was expanding emotion ally, stretching his feeling-muscles. There were nuances of emotion he had never realized in himself before. He worked on his dissertation in a state of heightened vitality. Every morning he kissed Gus good-bye, leaving her to practice in the big room. On days when she went up to Juilliard, she'd meet him at Columbia on her way back, and they would grab a bite to eat at the West End Bar. February was as cold as a chunk of ice; it melted into March. The wind clattered down Broadway like a truck. One day Norman met Mario and his mother in a pizza parlor at the Ninety-sixth Street intersection.