Rich Man, Poor Man (23 page)

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Gretchen Jordache, Willie Abbott.’

‘I am happy I walked down 46th Street this morning,’ Abbott said.

‘Hello.’ said Gretchen. She nearly stood up. After all, he was a captain.’

‘I suppose you’re an actress,’ he said.

‘Trying.’

‘Dreadful trade,’ Abbott said. ‘To quote Shakespeare on samphire?’

‘Don’t show off, Willie,’ Mary Jane said.

‘You will make some man a fine wife and mother, Miss Jordache,’ Abbott said. ‘Mark my words. Why haven’t I seen you before?’

‘She just came to town,’ Mary Jane said, before Gretchen could answer. It was a warning, a go slow sign. Jealousy?

‘Oh, the girls who have just come to town,’ Abbott said. ‘May I sit in your lap?’

‘Willie!’ Mary Jane said.

Gretchen laughed and Abbott laughed with her. He had very white, even, small teeth. I was not mothered sufficiently as a child.’

The door to the inner office opened and Miss Saunders came out. ‘Miss Jordache,’ she said, ‘Mr Nichols can see you now.’

Gretchen stood up, surprised that Miss Saunders remembered her name. This was only the third time she had been in the Nichols office. She hadn’t talked to Nichols at all, ever. She brushed out the wrinkles in her dress nervously, as Miss Saunders held open the little swinging gate in the partition.

‘Ask for a thousand dollars a week and ten percent of the gross,’ Abbott said.

Gretchen went through the gate and towards Nichols’s door.

‘Everybody else can go home,’ Miss Saunders said. ‘Mr Nichols has an appointment for lunch in fifteen minutes.’

‘Beast,’ said the Character woman with the stole.

‘I just work here,’ Miss Saunders said.

Confusion of feelings. Pleasure and fright at the prospect of being tested for a job. Guilt because the others had been dismissed and she chosen. Loss, because now Mary Jane would leave with Willie Abbott. Flak above Berlin.

‘See you later,’ Mary Jane said. She didn’t say where. Abbott didn’t say anything.

Nichols’s office was a little larger than the anteroom. The walls were bare and his desk was piled with playscripts in leatherette covers. There were three yellowish wooden armchairs and the windows were coated with dust. It looked like the office of a man whose business was somehow shady and who had trouble meeting the rent on the first day of the month.

Nichols stood up as she came into the office and said, ‘It was good of you to wait, Miss Jordache.’ He waved to a chair on one side of his desk and waited for her to sit down before he seated himself. He stared at her for a long time, without a word, studying her with the slightly sour expression of a man who is being offered a painting with a doubtful signature. She was so nervous that she was afraid her knees were shaking. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you want to know about my experience. I don’t have much to … ‘

‘No,’ he said. ‘For the moment we can dispense with experience. Miss Jordache, the part I’m considering you for is

frankly absurd’ He shook his head sorrowfully, pitying himself for the grotesque deeds his profession forced him to perform. Tell me, do you have any objections to playing in a bathing suit? In three bathing suits, to be exact.’

‘Well…’ She laughed uncertainly. ‘I guess it all depends.’ Idiot. Depends on what? The size of the bathing suit? The size of the part? The size of her bosom? She thought of her mother. Her mother never went to the theatre. Lucky.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t a speaking role,’ Nichols said. The girl just walks across the stage three times, once in each act, in a different suit each time. The whole play takes place at a beach club.’

‘I see,’ Gretchen said. She was annoyed with Nichols. Because of him, she had let Mary Jane walk off with Willie Abbott, out into the city. Captain, Captain … Six million people. Get into an elevator and you are lost forever. For a walk on. Practically naked.

The girl is a symbol. Or so the playwright tells me,’ Nichols said, long hours of struggle with the casuistry of artists tolling like a shipwreck’s bell under the phrase. ‘Youth. Sensual beauty. The Mystery of Woman. The heartbreaking ephemeral-ness of the flesh. I am quoting the author. Every man in the audience must feel as she walks across the stage, “My God, why am I married?” I am still quoting. Do you have a bathing suit?’

‘I… I think so.’ She shook her head, annoyed with herself now. ‘Of course.’

‘Could you come to the Belasco at five with your bathing suit? The author and director will be there.’

‘At five.’ She nodded. Farewell, Stanislavsky. She could feel the blush starting. Prig. A job was a job.

“That’s most kind of you, Miss Jordache.’ Nichols stood, mournfully. She stood with him. He escorted her to the door and opened it for her. The anteroom was empty, except for Miss Saunders, blazing away.

‘Forgive me,’ Nichols murmured obscurely. He went back into his office.

‘So long,’ Gretchen said as she passed Miss Saunders.

‘Goodbye, dear,’ Miss Saunders said, without looking up. She smelled of sweat. Ephemeral flesh. I am quoting.

Gretchen went out into the corridor. She didn’t ring for the elevator until the blush had subsided.

When the elevator finally came, there was a young man in it carrying a Confederate officer’s uniform and a cavalry sabre

in a scabbard. He was wearing the hat that went with the uniform, a dashing wide-brimmed felt, plumed. Under it his beaked, hard-boiled 1945 New York face looked like a misprint. ‘Will the wars never end?’ he said amiably to Gretchen as she got into the elevator.

It was steamy in the little grilled car and she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She dabbed at her forehead with a piece of Kleenex.

She went out into the street, geometric blocks of hot, glassy light and concrete shadow. Abbott and Mary Jane were standing in front of the building, waiting for her. She smiled. Six million people in the city. Let there be six million people. They had waited for her.

‘What I thought,’ Willie was saying, ‘was lunch.’

‘I’m starving,’ Gretchen said.

They walked off towards lunch on the shady side of the street, the two tall girls, with the slender, small soldier between them, jaunty, remembering that other warriors had also been short men, Napoleon, Trotsky, Caesar, probably Tamerlane.

Naked, she regarded herself in the dressing-room mirror. She had gone out to Jones Beach with Mary Jane and two boys the Sunday before and the skin of her shoulders and arms and legs was a faint rosy tan. She didn’t wear a girdle any more and in the summer she dispensed with stockings, so there were no prosaic ridges from clinging elastic on the smooth arch of her hips. She stared at her breasts. J want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it. She had had two Bloody Marys at lunch, with Mary Jane and Willie, and they had shared a bottle of white wine. Willie liked to drink. She put on her one-piece, black bathing suit. There were grains of sand in the crotch, from Jones Beach. She walked away from the mirror, then towards it, studying herself critically. The Mystery of Woman. Her walk was too modest. Remember Primitive Serenity. Willie and Mary Jane were waiting for her at the bar of the Algonquin, to find out how it all came out. She walked less modestly. There was a knock on the door. ‘Miss Jordache,’ the stage manager said, ‘we’re ready when you are.’

She began to blush as she opened the door. Luckily, in the harsh work light of the stage, nobody could tell.

She followed the stage manager. ‘Just walk across and back a couple of times,’ he said. There were shadowy figures sitting towards the tenth row of the darkened auditorium. The stage floor was unswept and the bare bricks of the back wall looked

like the ruins of Rome. She was sure her blush could be seen all the way to the street. ‘Miss Gretchen Jordache,’ the stage manager called out into the cavernous darkness. A message in a bottle over the night waves of seats. / am adrift. She wanted to run away.

She walked across the stage. She felt as though she were stumbling up a mountain. A zombie in a bathing suit

There was no sound from the auditorium. She walked back. Still no sound. She walked back and forth twice more, worried about splinters in her bare feet.

Thank you very much, Miss Jordache.’ Nichols’s dejected voice, thin in the empty theatre. That’s fine. If you’ll stop in the office tomorrow we’ll arrange about the contract.’

It was as simple as that Abruptly, she stopped blushing.

Willie was sitting alone at the small bar in the Algonquin, erect on a stool, nursing a whiskey in the greenish, submarine dusk that was the constant atmosphere of the room. He swivelled around to greet her as she came in carrying the little rubberised beach bag with her bathing suit in it. The beautiful girl looks like a beautiful girl who has just landed herself a job as the Mystery of Woman at the Belasco Theatre.’ he said. ‘I am quoting.’ Over lunch they had all laughed at Gretchen’s account of her interview with Nichols.

She sat down on the stool next to his. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Sarah Bernhardt is on her way.’

‘She never could have handled it’ Willie said. ‘She had a wooden leg. Do we drink champagne?’

‘Where’s Mary Jane?’

‘Gone. She had a date.’

‘We drink champagne.’ They both laughed.

When the barman set their glasses in front of them, they drank to Mary Jane. Delicious absence. It was the second time in her life Gretchen had drunk champagne. The hushed, gaudy room in the four-storey house on a side street, the one-way mirror, the magnificent whore with the babyface, stretched triumphantly on the wide bed.

‘We have many choices,’ Willie said. ‘We can stay here and drink wine all night. We can have dinner. We can make love. We can go to a party on Fifty-sixth Street. Are you a party girl?’

‘I would like to be,’ Gretchen said. She ignored the ‘make love’. Obviously it was a joke. Everything was a joke with Willie. She had the feeling that even in the war, at the worst

times, he had made fun of the bursting shells, the planes diving in, the flaming wings. Images from newsreels, war movies. ‘Old Johnny bought it today, chaps. This is my round.’ Was it like that? She would ask him later, when she knew, him better.

The party it is,’ he said. “There’s no hurry. It’ll go on all night. Now, before we fling ourselves into the mad whirl of pleasure, are there things I should’ know about you?’ Willie poured himself another glass of champagne. His hand was not quite steady and the bottle made a little clinking music against the rim of the glass.

‘What kind of things?’

‘Begin at the beginning,’ he said. ‘Place of residence?’

The YWCA downtown,’ she said.

‘Oh, God.’ He groaned. ‘If I dress in drag could I pass as a young Christian woman and rent a room next to yours? I’m petite and I have a light beard. I could borrow a wig. My father always wanted daughters.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Gretchen said. ‘The old lady at the desk can tell a boy from a girl at a hundred yards.’

‘Other facts. Fellas?’

‘Not at the moment’ she said after a slight hesitation. ‘And you?’

The Geneva Convention stipulates that when captured, a prisoner of war must only reveal his name, rank, and serial number.’ He grinned at her and laid his hand on hers. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you everything. I shall bare my soul. I shall tell you, in many instalments, how I wished to murder my father when I was a babe in a crib and how I was not weaned from my mother’s breast until I was three and what us boys used to do behind the barn with the neighbour’s daughter in the good old summertime.’ His face became serious, the forehead prominent, as he brushed back his hair with his hand. ‘You might as well know now as later.’ he said. ‘I’m married,’

The champagne burned in her throat. ‘I liked you better when you were joking,’ she said.

‘Me, too,’ he said soberly. ‘Still, there’s a brighter side to it I’m working on a divorce. The lady found other divertissements while daddy was away playing soldier.’

“Where is she? Your wife?’ The words came out leadenly. Absurd, she thought. I’ve only known him for a few hours.

‘California,’ he said. ‘Hollywood. I guess I have a thing for actresses.’

A continent away. Burning deserts, impassable peaks, the

fruited plain. Beautiful, wide America. ‘How long have you been married?’

‘Five years.’

‘How old are you anyway?’ she asked.

‘Will you promise not to discard me if I tell you the truth?’

‘Don’t be silly. How old?’

‘Twenty fucking nine,’ he said. ‘Ah, God.’

‘I’d have said twenty-three at the outside,’ Gretchen shook her head wonderingly. “What’s the secret?’

‘Drink and riotous living,’ Willie said. ‘My face is my misfortune. I look like an ad for the boys’ clothing department of Saks. Women of twenty-two are ashamed to be seen with me in public places. When I made captain the Group Commander said, “Wile, here’s your gold star for being a good boy in school this month.” Maybe I ought to grow a moustache.’

‘Wee Willie Abbott,’ Gretchen said. His false youthfulness was reassuring to her. She thought of the gross, dominating maturity of Teddy Boylan. ‘What did you do before the war?’ she asked. She wanted to know everything about him. ‘How do you know Bayard Nichols?’

‘I worked for him on a couple of shows. I’m a flak. I’m in the worst business in the world. I’m a publicity man. Do you want your picture in the paper, little girl?’ The disgust was not put on. If he wanted to look older, there was no need to grow a moustache. All he had to do was talk about his profession. ‘When I went into the Army, I thought I’d finally get away from it. So they looked up my card and put me in public relations. I ought to be arrested for impersonating an officer. Have some more champagne.’ He poured for them again, the bottle clinking an icy code of distress against the glasses, the nicatined fingers trembling minutely.

‘But you were overseas. You did fly,’ she said. During lunch, he had talked about England.

‘A few missions. Just enough to get an Air Medal, so I wouldn’t feel naked in London. I was a passenger. I admired other men’s wars.’

‘Still, you could’ve been killed.’ His bitterness disturbed her and she would have liked to move him out of it.