Cheat and Charmer (34 page)

“Come on,” Felicity said. “Let’s go back.”

Mike stood up and kissed Felicity, and nodded curtly to Jake but didn’t offer his hand. Before he could sit down, Hunt and Veevi had swept up to the table: more hugs, more kisses, and Hunt, acting as if he hadn’t seen the very attenuated exchange between Mike and Jake, blurted out, “You know, Mike, Jake did a swell job of looking after Felicity in London. Jake, tell him the Lady Peel story,” and suddenly the story was being told yet again, with Felicity and Hunt laughing as if they were hearing it for the first time.

Mike smiled, because it would have been unsporting not to, and then Knight vacuumed everyone up into his aura as he began holding forth. To Jake, it seemed as if he were an old lion in a den of cubs, even though Ben and Jake were the same age and Hunt and Mike were only six or seven years younger. Knight had published a book two months ago and reviews were still coming in. “Say, anybody see that
Times
review? That guy oughtta be shot.” And again Jake was taken prisoner by Knight’s raspy voice. He lit into Greg Schuyler, the director who was the thinly disguised subject of Knight’s most recent novel—the protagonist goes to Latin America to make a movie but gets caught up in a revolution and is eventually responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of peasants. How could that reviewer in the
New York Times
say the book had too much Conrad in it? “You guys know Greg. Tell me, did I have to go to Conrad to write that book? And who is this guy Chesterton Keith, anyway? Some fucking English professor? What does he know about anything? Says I’m losing touch with America. Listen to this!” He pulled a carefully folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. “ ‘At the end of the war,’ ” he began, “ ‘Knight was the brightest talent in a constellation
of major new American voices that were out to give definitive expression to the war and its aftermath.’ Obviously that means you too, Mike, you know that,” Knight interrupted with a nod in Mike’s direction. “ ‘But it’s becoming all too apparent that Knight’s prodigious output of a novel every two years is putting a fatal strain on his powers of invention. The slickness of his prose, the convenient twists of his plots, and the obvious and heavy-handed use of Conrad betoken the wholesale commercialization and cheapening of his once formidable gift. He needs to come home, to sink himself once again in American life and put his finger on its pulse, if he is to recover the muscular freshness of the stories that bedazzled us in the thirties. Native sons need native soil.’ ”

Knight grinned and put the clipping back in his pocket.

“Balls,” said Hunt. He lifted his glass. “Complete and utter balls.”

“Or bollocks,” Felicity said. “As the British put it.”

“A Provincial Professor of Crappy Criticism,” said Veevi in a burst of alliteration. “The High Chair of Bad Writing.”

Knight beamed at Veevi, basking in her loyalty.

“And besides,” said Sylvia Knight, in a remark her husband paid no attention to, “all the other reviews have been raves.”

“But it’s always that one lousy review that keeps you up at night,” Jake volunteered.

“You bet your ass,” Knight said, looking at him with sudden recognition and respect.

Jake was fascinated and astonished. It would never have occurred to him that Knight would be bothered by a bad review. He himself would take to his bed for a day and contemplate suicide. But Ben Knight? “Hey, Hunt! You know Greg Schuyler. Tell him,” Knight said, nodding at Jake. “How much of that book did I have to make up, huh?”

“You’re fucking lucky Greg didn’t sue you,” said Hunt, laughing.

“Ah, he knows I love him,” said Knight, clasping his Scotch with his hand and moving it in toward his chest like a little girl holding a kitten to her breast.

“He knows it,” said Mike. “He loves you, too.”

“Where the hell is he, anyway?” said Knight.

“In the Camargues. Buying horses,” said Mike. “Listen, Ben, I’ll write that
Times
eunuch a letter.”

Ah, one of your letters, Jake thought. We know about your letters.

Knight waved his forefinger back and forth like a windshield wiper. “Forget it. Never write a reviewer. Ever. Conrad,” he said again. “Can you believe it?” he asked Jake point-blank. Jake hadn’t read the book, but Dinah had. She’d liked it. Jake shook his head. “No. It’s beyond belief.”

“See,” Knight said to his pals. “He can’t believe it, either. Those New York literary eunuchs over there, with their reviews. Clifton-fucking-Fadiman types.” But then he grinned, and Jake, who had feared that Knight might be on the verge of getting sloppily drunk, saw that he was, at least for the moment, in fine form. Jake was glad; he didn’t want to be disappointed in Knight. He wanted to believe in the big talent, as if it were all packed between Knight’s football player’s shoulders. He liked the tender way Knight looked at his friends. He liked feeling spellbound, and he liked both Knight’s visible appetites and his unapologetic reverence for them. He remembered reading in one of his
New Yorker
stories about a man whose wife asks him as he’s getting into bed whether he’s brushed his teeth. No, the man says, I haven’t. Aren’t you going to? she says. No, he answers. I like going to sleep with the taste of food and wine in my mouth.

For now, Jake calculated, Knight was in one piece. But stacking up the man’s passions and lusts against the prodigious hard work that he had to do to support the apartment in Paris and the chalet in Klosters, Jake wondered how long he could take it. Would the body outlast the talent? Could the talent survive the body? One novel had already been made into a movie. There would have to be more movies, no matter what Knight said about staying out of Hollywood—if only to meet his liquor bills. Jake observed the tender eyes and the close-cropped curly hair, the robust features, sensed the ready virility and insatiable hungers, noticed the broken capillaries in Knight’s broad cheeks, and read there a palimpsest of booze, broads, gallantry, competition, physical joy, and professional exertion, all of it gathered into Knight’s luminous defiance of time and inevitable decay.

But just as he found himself admiring the man, swept up in his atmosphere, almost dissolving with boozy camaraderie, Jake suddenly felt cautious and aloof. No, he told himself, I love this scene, but let one or two nights be enough. Knight is the real thing, all right, but Knight needs this all the time. He’s got to have subalterns and vassals, he’s got to be Arthur at the Round Table. And Mike Albrecht, who had also been hailed as the greatest of the postwar writers, was one of the courtiers. He looked like Ben Knight’s son. Anyone could see, Jake reflected, that Albrecht was
Lancelot to Knight’s King Arthur. Knight loved his friends but needed them to live his life
with
him and their own lives
for
him. But aren’t I like that, too? he argued back at himself. Don’t I do the same thing? Writers are cannibals, aren’t they?

Yet as he drank more and relaxed more and felt tired and comfortable, none of his warnings to himself seemed to matter. Felicity’s hand, which had gripped tennis racquets and other men’s cocks with guiltless gusto, slid down his thigh under the table where he, his wife’s sister, her estranged husband, the husband’s new girl, and the Crandells were intimately gathered around Ben Knight. Everyone seemed to be ignoring the many private complications behind this public conviviality, although Knight, Jake thought, had to be taking everything in. One day soon, Jake reflected, he’d take a copy of
The New Yorker
into the john with him and find this scene in one of Knight’s well-wrought stories. Knight would get the scents, the flavors, the small gestures, the glances; he’d make the story hinge on one one-line comment—so gentle, so ironic—that made everything irreversible. But Jake? What would he make of it? he wondered. He hadn’t a clue how to handle material like this. Where was the comedy? He couldn’t see it—not yet, at least. These were people who laughed at others but not at themselves. They were too romantic and attractive. When things went wrong for them, as they had for Veevi, what did they do? Was his talent—inexorably comic—up to finding a story in their lives?

Still, pitting himself against Knight, imagining some future novel he vaguely felt he’d have to write, Jake consciously took in the details.
Notice everything you can
, he ordered himself. Notice the way Mike and Veevi sit here at the same table. She looks him in the eye; he looks away. Everything in her dares him to repudiate what’s gone on between them. But it doesn’t matter to him; the past is over. So when he looks back, it’s with impersonal kindness, without love, and it kills her, that loveless look, because she once had it all with him, they had once been consumed with each other. Now each is determined only to be civil. But notice how Veevi plants her elbows on the table, no doubt to make Mike’s girl see how comfortable she is, how thoroughly she belongs. “I had him first; I’ll get him back,” those elbows, like a shield with crossed swords, seem to say.

Mike likes the rivalry between the two women. He looks at Veevi but puts his arm around Odile, who turns her face to him and makes a kissy face right there for Veevi to see. Undaunted, Veevi excludes the girl whenever
she laughs or talks, and Mike looks back and forth between the two and then at Veevi, pained. These people are fucking savages, Jake tells himself. But Knight’s noticing it, too, he sees, and relishes every minute.

Over dinner with Felicity at Les Ambassadeurs earlier in the week, Jake had heard the story and imagined the scene: Veevi, lying in bed at the American Hospital, having just had a tough delivery. In comes Mike, overcoat on his arm, hair tousled. A nurse comes in and gives the baby to Veevi, who looks at Mike and says, “She’s you, top to toe—absolutely you.” He doesn’t sit down, but stands by the bed. “I’m sorry, baby,” he says. He kisses her on the forehead. She looks up at him, smiles. He looks at the baby. “I’ll send you something.” She waits for him to say something more, but he doesn’t. “You’d better go.” He shakes his head. It’s not his fault. It’s just the way things happen.

It was a scene for a Knight story. The Mike character would be gruffly tender, would look at her as if summoning up remembrance of bedtimes past. She would be beautiful, the brown hair gleaming on the shoulders. She would claim him by asking for nothing, not just letting him go but pushing him away. And the story would be good. It would be tight, the Paris details understated, perfect. Or Mike would put it in a first-person novel and pity the man more than the woman. The man would be just about to leave for a war, or be in a war. Yes, it would make a good story. Only, Jake didn’t believe any of it. You don’t leave your wife when she’s pregnant and then make yourself the victim. You don’t fall in love and say you were struck by lightning. So you fool around, you have dames on the side. But you don’t get serious! You don’t live as if the word
alimony
doesn’t exist. And what about Veevi? he wondered. Her pink cheeks were flushed, eyes shining; she was fingering her pearls, putting on the brave-and-noble act. What kind of a woman was she, really? Spends four years hiding out in the countryside, risking her neck for the Free French, loses Stefan to an unspeakable death, but it’s losing Mike she takes the hardest. Losing him was the worst thing that had happened to her. He could see it in her face. She was still beautiful, but anyone could see that she was not as beautiful as Odile Boisvert, who had almost twenty years’ advantage over her. Veevi was bright and chatty, and she was knocking herself out, Jake saw, to conceal the torture of sitting at the same table with Mike and the girl. It was a heroic and foolish spectacle, and Jake pitied her terribly and thought Mike Albrecht was a swine. Gets on his high moral horse in that letter, then cuts out on a pregnant wife. Jake would die before he treated Dinah that way.
What kind of a prick cuts out on a pregnant wife? Oh, he understood wanting to do it. And how. There wasn’t anything natural about sleeping with the same woman for the rest of your life. But to screw up everything at home because the fucking was good with someone younger? Hadn’t Mike figured out by now that fucking the same person year in and year out
always
gets boring? What had Manny Steiner once said? “Fucking your own wife is like striking out the pitcher.”

He wondered whether he was getting drunk. The place was jammed now. People were dancing, and he had to cup his deaf ear to make out what was being said around him. Something about hydrogen bombs, bomb shelters, the movie
From Here to Eternity
, had he seen
The Crucible
in New York? It was hard to talk. He fell silent.

“Catch this one,” Felicity whispered in his ear, and nodded toward a tall, dark, hunkering fellow who stealthily approached Ben Knight and slapped his hands squarely down on the novelist’s shoulders.

Knight jumped to his feet and clasped the man in a tight embrace, and the two kissed repeatedly on both cheeks, which made Jake shift uncomfortably in his seat. If he moved to Europe, would he have to start kissing his friends?
“Mon vieux!”
cried Knight—the words unfamiliar to Jake, who nevertheless understood them to be a cry of affection. Voices filled the air in unison: “Nemeth! Nemeth! Nemeth! My God, it’s Nemeth!”

Jake’s eyes sought an explanation from Felicity, who whispered, “Bill, born Bela, Nemeth.”

Jake nodded in recognition.

“Just back from Indochina, I think,” Felicity continued, “or wherever the forces of light are pitted against the forces of darkness—or something like that. Girls adore him. He goes to war zones just to escape their maenad cries.”

Jake saw tears in Hunt’s eyes. “Jesus Christ, where the hell have you been?” he cried, also kissing and hugging the man, who continually tossed his head back in an attempt to get a very black shock of hair out of the way of an eye almost closed shut against the plume of smoke that rose from the cigarette dangling between his full lips. Jake knew who he was: Nemeth, the greatest war photographer of the age, renowned for getting himself into the same terrifying and dangerous situations as the men whose photos he took.