Living Room (31 page)

She saw the evening buss on the cheek, hello, how was your day, kids dressed for bed standing up in the back of station wagons. Now the commuters with station cars were backing out of the slots, people in back of them sidestepping out of the way, near misses, no one hit, then each a space vehicle on its own, zipping away up the hill and around the bend, headed for home, martini, kids doing school work, small talk, any infidelities today, were you true to yourself and Price Waterhouse and Morgan Guaranty?

The two men still standing around waiting for their rides watched her, an unfamiliar face. Want to fuck, lady? Did men have thoughts like that? Tired after a day’s work. What’s more relaxing, sanity-restoring, than a good—there’s one’s ride. Oh, they’re both getting in, buddies, neighbors, whose wife is the late one, and did she have a lesbian relationship with the other wife, not out of preference, just to keep the days from getting too boring?

She realized too late that the station wagon that half a dozen people had piled into must have been the taxi, now gone.

At the station alone, all was dark except two floodlights in the parking lot, and the moonlit water.

The phone booth. She was dialing when she recognized the car
coming down the hill fast, Al behind the wheel. It looked like he was alone. Alone?

“Sorry,” he said, lowering the window, “a little trouble getting out of the house.”

Damn, thought Shirley, she left the dime in the phone booth. Never mind. As she got in beside Al, she saw the girl in the back seat. Age five or six, dark blonde hair just brushed, eyes of a bold rat staring her down.

“Hello,” said Shirley.

Just the stare.

“This is my daughter, Julie,” he said.

Daughter?

Al’s profile was a stranger intent on the road.

“Julie for Juliet,” he said.

Steeling herself, Shirley swung around in the front seat and said, “Hello, Julie,” and extended a hand.

The girl was looking past her. Her eyes looked as if she were screaming, but her lips moved not at all.

“I don’t think she can shake hands,” said Al, and Shirley withdrew hers as if from a fire.

They drove all the way to the house in silence.

CHAPTER THIRTY

BEFORE AL COULD PUT JULIE TO BED, he had to get a glass of warm milk down her. Shirley offered to help. Al shook his head. “I’d just as soon you not watch.”

She watched. Al patted Julie’s hair slowly with one hand, held the glass to her lips with the other. Julie sipped at the glass as if she was learning to get a liquid down.

“Want to use a straw, darling?”

No response.

“Maybe if I left the room…” Shirley said.

“I don’t think it makes any difference.”

It took twenty minutes for the glass of milk. He carried her upstairs. It took quite some time before he came down, exhausted.

“Okay,” he said. The resonance of his voice, the first thing about Al that had attracted her, was gone.

He dropped onto the couch, his legs stretched straight in front of him, a worn gymnast tired of a ritual exercise.

They sat side by side staring into the fire.

“Make you a drink?” asked Shirley. She wasn’t sure she saw him nod. She made two vodka martinis, set his down in front of him.

Shirley sipped at her drink, felt its effect immediately. Al didn’t touch his.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Not really.”

For a second she thought that Al wanted to touch her, something physical. She put her hand beside his on the couch. He did not touch her.

A log hissed, shooting sparks.

“Mephistopheles is about to make you an offer for your story,” Shirley said, not sure he heard her.

With a flare, the bottom log burned through, the fire collapsed in on itself, then roared to life.

“Down, Mephisto,” said Shirley, as if to a dog. She looked for a crinkle in Al’s cheek, any paltry sign of a smile. None.

“Some people,” she said, “have surprises left, after you think you know them.”

“Closets full,” said Al, getting up, going into the kitchen, deliberately slamming the door.

Shirley stopped short of the door. “Al?”

She heard the refrigerator open and close.

He came out carrying a half glass of milk, stood in front of the fire, ignoring her, sipped at the glass, then suddenly smashed the glass of milk into the fireplace, splattering milk and scattering glass. She watched him stride to the downstairs bathroom, again slamming a door.

From upstairs, Juliet cried out.

Then again, louder.

Shirley went up the stairs two at a time. The girl was sitting up in bed, frightened. As Shirley came up to the bed, Julie held her hands up in front of her face, expecting to be hit.

“No, no, no,” said Shirley, gently removing the girl’s hands and soothing her hair.

“Daddy,” the girl said.

“Daddy’s downstairs,” Shirley said.

“Daddy’s here.” Al was standing at the door, his face gnarled like the wound of a tree where a limb had tom off.

Julie pushed Shirley’s hands away from her, held her arms out for Al.

Shirley stepped back as Al approached.

She should not have intruded into this house,
she thought.
She was a supernumerary here. They were something she was not a part of.

*

Downstairs, in front of the fire, looking at the strange shapes of broken glass, Shirley thought, as she had from time to time, that she was destined to live the life of a woman alone. Her success was difficult for most men to deal with; her will, further, was worse. When she met someone who responded to her as she was, there would always be a wife, a ghost, a hitch.

The arms around her from behind surprised her. But her instinctive reaction surprised her more as she squirmed away before the arms became an embrace.

“I’m sorry,” Al said.

Shirley was afraid to speak. What irreparable damage would her galloping words be responsible for?

“I was unprepared for this evening,” Al said. “The nerves sprang a leak.”

He held his hands out to her.

“Please.”

“Until tonight,” said Shirley, “I thought of you as alone in the world.”

“Maybe I am. I thought
you
were.” He considered his drink. “When I met your father, Shirley, it gave a new dimension to you. It was like meeting a ghost.”

“My father’s alive.”

“So is Julie.”

He turned his back to her.

“I don’t want to pry,” she said.

She saw the shrug of his shoulders.

“How can I avoid asking?”

“I tried to warn you.”

“Al, I don’t even know if you’re married.”

She couldn’t tell from the movement of his shoulders what his expression might be.

“Please, Al, I’m not tight about an affair with a married man or any of that. It’s just I didn’t know!”

He turned to face her.

“I feel like a fool!” she said.

“I’m not married,” said Al.

“Julie has a mother, doesn’t she? Are you separated, divorced, what?”

Al shook his head.

“You’re not saying anything?”

“Julie’s mother is dead.”

How had this possibility not entered her mind?

“She must have been young. Did she die naturally?”

“Very unnaturally. I killed her.”

Her mouth was open, but no words came out.

“If I hadn’t married her, she’d probably be alive. I screwed up her life, Julie’s life, and my life. Would you like to be next?”

“Al, make sense.”

“Oh I’m making sense. Beneath my circumspect exterior may be the most phenomenal liar in the world. You know the fellow who never had a job, remember? That was a lie. I worked for her father.”

“Whose father?”

“Margaret’s.”

“Oh.”

“That was her name.”

She tried to imagine a Margaret. Then, “What was she like?”

“Blonde, bright-faced, better than pretty.” Al threw another angry log on the fire. One could hear pieces of broken glass breaking again.

Shirley, on the sofa, watched him pacing.

“Why don’t you drink your drink?” she asked.

“No.”

“You look like a giraffe up there,” she said, tapping the sofa beside her. “Come sit down.”

He looked at her. Was he about to strike her?

Nevertheless, she beckoned.

He sat down beside her.

He sat there, hands clasped over his gangly leg at the knee, knuckles white, uninterruptable. Finally, he said, “Did you ever hear of somebody called Meredith Peabody?”

“It sounds like one of those names you think you’ve heard of.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s a famous name in investment banking. The firm is Whistler, Morgan, Peabody.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“Very successful, very WASP, very rich. They used to say at Yale he’s the kind of man that when you met him you hoped he had a daughter.”

Shirley waited.

“Well, he had an only daughter, in fact. Margaret.”

Shirley tried to imagine what Margaret looked like. An older version of Juliet? Not from Al’s description.

“Go on,” she said to Al.

“Margaret liked me. It was chic in her crowd to fell for someone who was least like your old man. The extremists had black boyfriends for a while, or the early hippies. Margaret was no extremist. She picked me.”

“You fell in love with her.”

“No. I liked her for liking me, that’s all.”

“You fell in love with her father.”

“Meredith Peabody is not very lovable.”

“You married her.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s not a very unusual condition. What was she like?”

Al was on the edge of the couch, as if expecting to rise again momentarily.

“She was a beautiful car without an engine.”

Shirley wondered how Al might describe her. She had an engine.

“Want another drink?” Al asked.

“I’ve still got some. Keep talking. Please.”

Al, clenching and unclenching his hands, looked lost.

“The first evening I met Meredith Peabody he asked me what I was. I thought of sixteen smart answers.”

“What did you say you were?”

“I said I was an intellectual. He said, ‘I see.’ He said something like Margaret wouldn’t have been interested in me if I wasn’t intelligent, and I said, not intelligent, intellectual, temperamentally hooked on ideas. He wanted to know what ideas. I said any ideas worth having. I said investment bankers were obviously interested in the idea of money, a medium of exchange, an old idea. He said something like he had his money, he was mainly accumulating money for others. He made it sound like he was in charitable work.

“I remember telling Peabody about the Tarahumara Indians, no money. He perked up. I said if he were interested in ten or twelve other ideas besides money he might be an intellectual. It was a hopeless evening.

“Peabody said he was glad I had some money from my father. He said he would stake Margaret to a co-op if we were serious about each other. He kept pressing me about what courses I had taken, why languages, why not economics, and finally, I guess it was my mention of European history, he made the big offer. There was a place for me in Whistler, Morgan, Peabody. A trainee in the foreign department. I could have killed him.”

“You took the job.”

“I took it.”

“Down one notch, the one American who never took a job, took a job.”

“I was a snotty Yalie intellectual. I knew that kind of person from school. Two last names. I thought I would study them as if I
were on an anthropology expedition, not a job. They caught onto me. I found the companionship of people who reduced everything to insider’s gossip or numbers intolerable. They played games with me. Do you know what those people are like?”

“I’ve met some.”

“I mean working with them day after day. They talk deals, golf, yachting, squash, women, in that order. They will not enter into a real conversation about anything. If you ever mention anything that appeared between the covers of a book, this century or any century, forget it. The accumulation of knowledge through recorded history, forget it. That’s for college, not for life. You know how they talk about their own wives? Their children? Themselves? That’s the worst. Can you imagine a society closed so tight that if a Nobel prize winner—any Noble prize winner—came to lunch, they couldn’t listen? Anyway, Whistler, Morgan, Peabody and Chunin didn’t make it together for very long.”

“They fired you.”

“I walked out on Peabody like you walk out on Crouch once in a while, but I stayed away. I didn’t resign. I just didn’t come back. Eventually Peabody got the point. He behaved like a gentleman, mad as hell, a glove on his voice. Margaret said I had pulled the plug on his life by walking. I stayed home. I fixed up a child’s room—there wasn’t a child—as a study, desk, typewriter, you know, and started, don’t laugh, a book.”