Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (18 page)

The doctor received the distinguished Wall Street personality in an unusually beautiful consulting room, on the floor of which rested a carpet, snowy as a llama’s belly. Because of Mr. Warburton’s age and an old football injury, Dr. Bugleford waived regulations and agreed that he would not require him to take off all his clothes for the present, though this was his usual method, to see the entire human radish stripped of subterfuge and disguise. In the case of Mr. W. the doctor would work up gradually to nudity.

While Mr. Warburton consulted his gold pocket watch, Dr. Bugleford gave his beginning lecture on civilization’s woe, the demented neuroskeletal tension we are all living in, or rather, expiring under.

“Let’s get down to facts and figures,” Mr. Warburton advised him. “For my part I’ll leave what kind of a world we’re living in to the preachers and the women.” Rising from the relaxation couch, Mr. Warburton explained that he was due back at his office in one half hour, that he had given up his usual luncheon at Whyte’s, and hoped the Doctor would be through with his examination in fifteen short minutes.

“The initial examination is over,” Dr. Bugleford smiled pityingly (and his expression of condescension was not lost on Mr. Warburton.) “Your disease is America’s. Hurry-tension. Knotted arteries and veins. Clogged network of nerves and muscles. Tight brain tissue. It’s in every atom of our atmosphere. And when one thinks, Mr. Broker, we’re 6 billion muscle fibers encased in 639 muscles all of which have got steel tight with tenseness, isn’t it natural, then, we feel bad bad bad? Well, that’s my worry, not yours: I’ll hunt for the tight spots in your 6 billion muscle fibers…”

Usually quick at a rejoinder, Mr. Warburton was struck dumb.

“Ready, Mr.
Warming
ton?”

“Warburton, Warburton, if you please,” he corrected the Doctor.

“You are as ready, now, Mr. Warburton, thank you for correcting, as you’ll ever be. As in religion, we must, in my science, obey or perish. Do you want to change your life, Mr. Warbleton, or not?”

“Warburton!”

“You needn’t raise your voice. I hear perfectly well, and stand corrected, Mr. Warburton.”

Mr. W. flushed angrily.

“You are very
very
tense, my dear broker,” the doctor moved into diagnosis. “Your disease is America’s. America is your disease. Your jaw,” he seized this portion of Mr. Warburton’s facial structure, “your lower jaw could easily be a steel trap.”

Suddenly he slapped Mr. Warburton’s chin smartly.

“Release that jaw!” he commanded, slapping the mandible again.

The doctor then rose, a smile bringing into play the myriad wrinkles of his countenance, and said: “We shall begin our treatment then?”

“Now see here, doctor,” Mr. Warburton began, but an imperious gesture from the doctor snapped this train of thought in the elderly investor, and he finished with the querulous appeal: “Got to call my office to tell them I won’t be coming back right away then.”

Mr. Warburton touched his jaw gingerly as if he had suffered an extraction.

“Nonsense, Mr. Warmington,” Dr. Bugleford reassured him, “they’ll see you when they see you, and they’ll see a changed man, let me tell you when they do.”

The doctor then placed his index and middle fingers in the corners of the broker’s eyes and pressed calmly.

“You’ll be going back to Wall Street, granted, a little late, but you’ll certainly be going back: be grateful for that. But if you go on the way you are, with that steel-trap jaw, those pounding arteries and tight nerves and muscles, you’re headed, without the shadow of a doubt, for an infraterrestrial site.”

He ushered his patient into a huge room.

“Ordinary doctors would call this the operating room,” he told Mr. Warburton. “I call it the
beginning
room.”

Lying down on a huge green couch, Mr. Warburton became aware of the doctor’s warm wintergreen breath bending over his right (the good) ear, saying:

“Now my dear sir, I think you must realize that it is the way you act, the way you do, your way of raising your hand or your leg or your salad oil or the fork with the piece of sirloin attached to it, the pitch of your voice, the rapidity with which you lick an envelope, swallow your Jack Daniels, or make love to your wife or whoever—”

“Meaning what?” Mr. Warburton raised his head and roared.

“Lie back, sir,” Dr. Bugleford was forbearing.

“You are as you behave, Mr. Warleyton, and how do you behave? I know how you behave, but do
you?
Can you catch yourself in the act of behaving as you? That is what we must find out today.”

“Smacks of theosophy, by Christ,” Mr. Warburton exclaimed.

“Smacks of what you do,” the doctor shook his head. “What you do you are.”

“Clear as mud.”

“Examine now all over again your chin. You have closed it as an iron trap might close over a grizzly’s hind leg. Examine your jaw for one hour, noting the extreme severity of its posture, and then having realized the hardness of your jaw, let it break, dissolve, flow, vanish, turn to flowing limpid water, flowing flowing flowing. Lie back, my good broker, lie back. You are flowing away, out to sea, out to the deep…”

Mr. Warburton had been on the verge of roaring again with rage, both at the doctor’s theosophy as well as his incessant miscalling of his name, when suddenly he found himself doing just as he was bid. Lying on the couch without a pillow, Mr. Warburton had visions of Gilda betraying him first with Cabot Wright, and then turning to the caresses of the Big Smoke, Brady the butler. He saw the truth during that hour concerning Gilda, but he did not somehow care, there was such a pleasant perfume everywhere, and his mouth seemed to lie open on a bed of drifting water lotus.

WAKING UP AFTER
an hour in the doctor’s “operating room,” terrified by the lateness, by the missed appointments back at his office, Mr. Warburton was still not able to be as angry as usual. He tried to vent his rage on Dr. Bugleford. In vain. Relaxation had already begun, and his personality was changing. He already saw the handwriting on the wall: once he was deprived of tenseness and anger, his business empire would crumble—he would be calm and happy and
penniless
.

Nonetheless, shaking hands with Dr. Bugleford, beaming, he made arrangements for a return visit and, rare for him, paid the atrocious fee quietly and without quibbling, on the spot.

NO MATTER HOW
much he grilled Cabot Wright in his office, or Gilda in her drawing room, Mr. Warburton could make no sense out of the affair. Cabot Wright denied the whole thing from beginning to end; Gilda wept when confronted with the question; Brady looked innocent and uninvolved. What Mr. Warburton did not understand was that his wife was more puzzled by what had happened to her than he was, that is she was not sure
what
had happened.

His darker suspicions were to be confirmed in large part that very evening when, after dinner, he purposely pretended to doze in his easy chair, while Gilda was resting her eyes with a slumber-mask, prior to viewing television. Nearly a city block away from his wife in their cathedral-size living room, Mr. Warburton heard Brady enter with his leopard stealth and grace. Through one half-opened lid he saw Gilda take the butler’s hand.

“Shall I serve you coffee here, Mrs. Warburton, or upstairs?” Brady bowed to know her pleasure.

With her free hand, Gilda removed her eye-pads (she had taken hold of his hand “blind” from habit) and nodding, said, “Here, quite naturally.” As he set the demitasse down, with a tiny plate on which rested two mocha wafers, Mrs. Warburton covered his hand with inaudible kisses. Brady remained calm, though he noted the slow accumulation of lip rouge on his epidermis much in the same way, Mr. Warburton observed, that a zoo guard will permit a lioness to lick the fingers with which he is accustomed to feed her.

“Beautiful veins on that hand, I wonder what they’re called,” Mr. Warburton heard his wife speak in a tone he had never remembered coming from her before. “I admire any sign or indication of strength,” she informed the butler. “And if I remember my anatomy—I was an art student, Brady dear, long before your mother thought of love,” and she held his hand now at a distance as one will appraise a ruby, “I believe the vein I am studying comes out of the dorsal venous network. Indeed I am sure of it.” She kissed the hand again, though less thoroughly now.

“Can I retire now, ma’am?” he inquired in a voice she had once described as pure velvet.

“
May
I go?” she corrected him. “Of course, wonderful, wonderful Brady, you may.”

She had not released his hand.

“But my dear Brady, you’ve forgotten my medicine!” she cried. “How thoughtless of you to neglect me.”

“No, ma’am, I have not forgotten,” he contradicted her. “If you’ll let me, I have it over here for you…”

He motioned to a tray near them.

“Shall I hold the spoon for you, ma’am, as per usual?” he inquired.

He had managed at last to free his hand from hers.

“If you would be so very kind, my dear friend,” Gilda nodded in the general direction of her digitalis.

Brady poured the red heart medicine into a solid silver tablespoon, and held it out near her thin blue lips. Just as he removed the spoon from her mouth, she bit down, holding his wrist in her teeth, which were, as a matter of fact, still her own. He made no effort to withdraw from her pressure, but bending down, surrendered his face to the routine score of kisses. Her impassioned embrace of his face made him lose his balance slightly and he more or less fell at her feet, allowing her to deposit kiss after kiss on his crown, “the precious wool,” as she rhapsodized over it, finer, she assured him, than any vicuña.

“Be faithful,” she admonished him gently, “as I am faithful to you and yours. And remember, beautiful Arab, wonderful wonderful Brady, we both know Mr. Cabot Wright never paid us a call, or if he did, left without his dinner. There is no Cabot Wright. There’s only, where secrets are concerned, you and me. Shine on, Brady, shine.”

When Brady had risen from his kneeling posture and left the room, Gilda rose as limber as a 16-year-old, and gambolled the full length of the room to where Mr. Warburton lay in a sleep that looked as deep as eternity. He snored.

Kissing her spouse on the lips, she brought to an end his trying role as opossum. He looked at her. Only an old soldier could have been so calm, so silent. Yet she must have sensed something in his eyes. Perhaps they were too wide-awake for a man who had appeared to be in such deep slumber. “I want to talk to you, Gilda,” he said.

“Can’t it wait until the weekend, dear?” Gilda sat on a tiny footstool at his feet, looking small, blonde and filial. “This is my big TV night of the week, you know. It’s Tuesday—gaze-night, dear.”

“I’m afraid this is a matter of gravest importance, my pet.”

“You’re not going to give me bad news about your health, Warby!” she exclaimed in real displeasure. “I’m too weak to hear about it, my dearest. I can’t bear another cross!”

He was touched, in spite of himself, and almost thought of postponing their talk.

“No, my angel,” he replied to her question, “as to my health, outside of a touch of coronary, Dr. Bugleford is more than taking care of me.”

“Thank God, Warby, thank God,” Gilda said, but her attention had gone to the television screen.

“Can’t you turn the goddam box off for one ten-minute period?”

“I told you, dearest, it’s Tuesday, my gaze-night. You have your den for talks.”

“Gilda, this concerns our very future.”

“Don’t tell me there’s been another crash or panic. I told you in 1930, it was the last time I could live through watching you worry on that scale. I mean it, Warby. I’ll never go through 1930 again with you.
I’ll
jump this time.”

“It’s not 1930, God damn it to hell, but I don’t know if it isn’t something worse…”

“About our suspicion concerning Cabot Wright,” Gilda began sweetly. “I’ve hit on a plan to prove whether he insulted me or not. It’s fool-proof…”

“I see,” he stared at her with icy dissatisfaction.

“I’m going to have you arrange for Cabot Wright to call on Zenda Stuyvesant.”

“Why that old bag?” he exploded.

“She’ll know,” Gilda told him.

“Know what, for Christ’s sake?” he demanded.

“Whether he’d be capable of offending me or not.” She lowered her eyes, and looked so sad and sweet that he was again won to her.

“So old Zenda can read minds,” he commented.

“She’ll know, if you’ll only send him to her… Say yes, Warby. Say you’ll send him.”

He kissed her on the nose, meaning, she supposed, he would.

“Gilda, are you aware, my dearest, now let me try to put this as gently as I can, God damn it…” She waited and he said quickly: “The fact is, Gilda, you smell lately like a Negress.”

“That word is no longer in vogue, my innocent. Sweety, you’re so out of touch. If you spent more time with your little wife, you’d be more in the swim.”

“I’ll make my point, love, if we sit here through tomorrow.”

“Make your point, dearest, for I’m attending to the screen now and not you.”