Rich Man, Poor Man (42 page)

Of course, Rudolph thought. That was it. It wasn’t all that sleep down South. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Anything is possible with Teddy Boylan.’

Who are all these people, she thought, looking around her own living room. ‘Drinks in the kitchen,’ she said gaily to a new couple who had just come through the open door. She’d have to wait till Willie came back to get the names. He had gone down to the bar on the corner for more ice. There always was enough Scotch, bourbon, gin, and red wine in half gallon jugs, but never enough ice.

There were at least thirty people in the room, about half of whom she knew, and more to come. How many more she never knew. Sometimes she had the feeling Willie just picked people up in the street and invited them. Mary Jane was in the kitchen acting as barmaid. Mary Jane was getting over her second husband and you had to invite her to everything. Feeling herself an object of pity, Mary Jane tried to pay her way by helping out with the drinks, rinsing glasses, emptying ashtrays and taking lone stragglers home to bed with her. You needed somebody like that at a party.

Gretchen winced as she watched a Brooks Brothers type let ashes drop on to the floor and a moment later grind the stub of his cigarette into the carpet with his heel. The room looked so pretty when there was nobody in it, pale-rose walls, books in order on the shelves, curtains crisp, the hearth of the fireplace swept, cushions plumped, the wood polished.

She was afraid that Rudolph disapproved of the party, although there was nothing in his manner that showed that he did. As always, when he was in the same room with Johnny Heath, they were off in a corner together, Johnny doing most of the talking and Rudolph most of the listening. Johnny was only twenty-five, but he was already a partner in a broker’s office in Wall Street, and was reputed to have made a fortune on his own in the stock market. He was an engaging, soft-spoken young man, his face modest and conservative, his eyes quick. She knew that from tune to time Rudolph came down to the city to have dinner with Johnny or go to a ball game with him. Whenever she happened to overhear what they were talking about, it was always the same thing - stock deals, mergers, new companies, margins, tax-shelters, all supremely boring to Gretchen, but seemingly fascinating to Rudolph, although he certainly wasn’t in any position to deal in stock, merge with anybody, or form any kind of company.

Once, when she asked Rudolph why he had picked Johnny, of all the people he had met in her house, to latch on to, Rudolph replied, very seriously, ‘He’s the only friend you have who can educate me.’

Who could know her own brother? Still, she hadn’t meant to have this kind of party for Rudolph’s graduation night and Willie had agreed. But somehow, it always turned out to be the same kind of party. The cast changed somewhat, actors, actresses, young directors, magazine writers, models, girls who worked for Time, Inc., radio producers, an occasional man from an advertising agency who could not be insulted; women like Mary Jane who had just been divorced and told everybody that their husbands were fags, instructors at NYU or Colombia who were writing novels, young Wall Street men who looked as though they were slumming, a dazzlingly sensual secretary who would flirt with Willie after the third drink; an ex-pilot from Willie’s war who would corner her to talk about London; somebody’s discontented husband who would try to make a pass at her late in the evening, and who would probably slip out at the end with Mary Jane.

Even though the cast changed the activity remained almost the same. Arguments about Russia and Alger Hiss and Senator Joe McCarthy, intellectual girls with bangs praising Trotsky… (‘Drinks in the kitchen,’ she said gaily to a new couple, sunburned, who had obviously been to the beach that day) … somebody who had just discovered Kierkegaard or who had met Sartre and had to tell about it, or who had just been to Israel or Tangier and had to tell about it. Once a month would

have been fine. Or if they just didn’t drop their ashes all over the room, even twice a month. They were by and large handsome and educated young people, all somehow with enough money to dress well and buy each other drinks and take a place in the Hamptons for the best part of the summer. Just the sort of people she had dreamed would be her friends when she was a girl in Port Philip. But she had been surrounded by them for nearly five years now. Drinks in the kitchen. The endless party.

Looking purposeful, she made her way to the staircase and started up towards the room under the roof where Billy slept. After Billy was born, they had moved to the top floor of an old brownstone on West Twelfth Street and had converted the attic into a large room and put in a skylight. Aside from Billy’s bed and his toys, there was a big table on which Gretchen worked. There was a typewriter on it and it was piled with books and papers. She liked working in the same room with young Billy and the sound of her typing didn’t bother him, but seemed to serve as a kind of clicking lullaby for him. A child for the machine age, soothed by Remington.

When she turned on the table lamp, she saw that he wasn’t asleep now, though. He lay in the small bed in his pyjamas, a cloth giraffe on the pillow beside him, his hands moving above his heady slowly through the air, as though to make patterns in the cigarette smoke that drifted up from below. Gretchen felt guilty about the cigarette smoke but you couldn’t ask people not to smoke because a four-year-old boy on another floor might not like it. She went over to the bed and leaned down and kissed Billy’s forehead. There was the clean smell of soap from his bath and the sweet aroma of childish skin.

When I grow up,’ he said, ‘I am not going to invite anybody;’

Not your father’s child, Gretchen thought. Even though he looked exactly like him, blond, serenely dimpled. No Jordache there at all. Yet. Unless her brother Thomas had looked like that as a child. She kissed him again, leaning low over the bed. ‘Go to sleep, Billy,’ she said.

She went over to the work table and sat down, grateful to be out of the chatter of the room below. She was sure nobody would miss her, even if she sat up there all night. She picked up a book that was lying on the table. Elementary psychology. She opened it idly. Two pages devoted to the blots of the Rorschach test. Know thyself. Know thine enemy. She was taking extension courses at NYU in the late afternoons and at night. If she stuck at it she would have her degree in two years. She had a nagging sense of inadequacy that made her shy with Willie’s

educated friends and sometimes with Willie himself. Besides, she liked classrooms, the unhurried sense that she was among people who were not merely interested in money or position or being seen in public.

She had slipped away from the theatre after Billy was born. Later, she had told herself, when he’s old enough not to need me all the time. By now she knew she would never try to act again. No loss. She had had to look for work that she could do at home and luckily she had found it, by the simplest of means. She had begun by helping Willie write his criticisms of radio and later television programmes, whenever he was bored with them or busy doing something else or had a hangover. At first, he kept signing his name to her pieces, but then he was offered an executive job in the office of the magazine at a raise in pay and she had begun signing the pieces herself. The editor had told her privately that she wrote a lot better than Willie, but she had made her own judgment on Willie’s writing. She had come across the first act of his play one day, while cleaning out a trunk. It was dreadful. What was funny and bright in Willie’s speech turned arch on paper. She hadn’t told him her opinion of his writing or that she had read his play. But she had encouraged him to take the executive job in the office.

She glanced at the sheet of yellow paper in the typewriter. She had pencilled in a tentative title, The Song of the Salesman’. She glanced at random down the page. The innocent air,’ she had written, ‘which theoretically is a national asset, the property of all Americans, has been delivered to merchants, so that they may beguile us or bully us into buying their products, whether the products are benevolent, needful, or dangerous to us. They sell us soup with laughter, breakfast food with violence, automobiles with Hamlet, purgatives with drivel…’

She frowned. Not good enough. And useless, besides. Who would listen, who would act? The American people were getting what they thought they wanted. Her guests downstairs were most of them in one way or another living off the thing their hostess was denouncing above their heads. The liquor they were drinking was bought with money earned by a man singing the salesman’s song. She tore the sheet of paper from the machine and balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. She would never get it printed, anyway. Willie would see to that.

She went over to the child’s bed. He had fallen asleep, grasping the giraffe. He slept, miraculously complete. What are you going to buy, what are you going to sell when you are my

age? What errors are ahead of you? How much of love will be wasted?

There was a tread on the stairs and she hurriedly bent over, pretending to be tucking in the child. Willie, provider of ice, opened the door. ‘I wondered where you were,’ he said.

‘I was restoring my sanity,’ she said.

‘Gretchen,’ he said reproachfully. He was a little flushed from drink and there were beads of perspiration on his upper lip. He had begun to bald, the forehead more Beethovenesque than ever, but somehow he still looked adolescent. ‘They’re your friends, as well as mine.’

They’re nobody’s friends,’ Gretchen said. ‘They’re drinkers, that’s all.’ She was feeling bitchy. Rereading the lines from her article had crystallised the dissatisfaction that had sent her upstairs in the first place. And suddenly, she was annoyed that the child resembled Willie so closely. I was there, too, she wanted to say.

‘What do you want me to do,’ Willie said, ‘send them home?’

‘Yes. Send them home.’

‘You know I can’t do that,’ Willie said. ‘Come on down, honey. People’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong with you.’

Tell them I had a sudden wild urge to breast-feed,’ Gretchen said. ‘In some tribes they breast-feed children until the age of seven. They know everything down there. See if they know that’

‘Honey … ‘ He came over and put his arms around her. She could smell the gin. ‘Give a little. Please. You’re getting awfully nervy.’

‘Oh. You noticed.’

‘Of course I noticed.’ He kissed her cheek. A nothing kiss, she thought. He hadn’t made love to her in two weeks. ‘I know what’s wrong,’ he said. ‘You’re doing too much. Taking care of the kid, working, going to school, studying … ‘ He was always trying to get her to drop her courses. ‘What’re you proving?’ he had asked. ‘You’re the smartest girl in New York as it is.’

‘I’m not doing half enough,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll do down and pick a likely candidate and go off and have an affair. For my nerves.’

Willie dropped his arms from around her waist and stepped back, martinis receding. ‘Funny. Hah-hah,’ he said coldly.

‘On to the cockpit,’ she said, putting out the lamp on the table. ‘Drinks are in the kitchen.’

He grabbed her wrist in the dark. ‘What’ve I done wrong?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ she said. The perfect hostess and her mate will now rejoin the beauty and chivalry of West Twelfth Street.’ She pulled her arm away from his grasp and went down the stairs. A moment later Willie came down, too. He had stayed behind to plant a martini’d kiss on his son’s forehead.

She saw Rudolph had quit Johnny Heath and was in a corner of the room talking earnestly to Julie, who must have come in while she was upstairs. Rudolph’s friend, the boy from Oklahoma, Babbitt material, was laughing too hard over something that one of the executive secretaries had said. Julie had her hair up and was wearing a soft, black-velvet dress. ‘I am in a constant battle,’ Julie had confided to her, ‘to suppress the highschool cheerleader in me.’ This evening she had managed. Too well. She looked too sure of herself for a girl that young. Gretchen was certain that Julie and Rudolph had never slept with each other. After five years! Inhuman. There was something wrong with the girl, or Rudolph, or both.

She waved to Rudolph but she did not catch his eye and as she went towards him she was stopped by an advertising account executive, too beautifully dressed, and with a haircut that was too becoming. ‘Mine hostess,’ the man said, thin as an English actor. His name was Alec Lister. He had started as a page boy at CBS, but that was long behind him. ‘Let me congratulate you on an absolutely splendid do.’

‘Are you a likely candidate?’ she asked, staring at him.

‘What?’ Lister transferred his glass uneasily from one hand to another. He was not used to being asked puzzling questions.

‘Nothing,’ she said. Train of thought, I’m glad you like the animals.’

‘I like them very much.’ Lister put his imprimatur firmly on the assemblage. ‘I’ll tell you something else I like. Your pieces in the magazine.’

‘I will be known as the Samuel Taylor Coleridge of radio and television,’ she said. Lister was one of the guests who could not be insulted, but she was out after all scalps tonight.

‘What was that?’ He was puzzled for the second time in thirty seconds and he was beginning to frown. ‘Oh, yes, I get’ He didn’t seem happy to have got it. ‘If I may make a comment, Gretchen,’ he said, knowing that anywhere between Wall Street and Sixtieth Street he could make whatever comment he pleased. ‘The pieces are excellent, but just a little bit too -well - biting, I find. There’s a tone of hostility in them - it gives

them a welcome tang, I have to admit - but there’s a general underlying feeling of being against the whole industry.’

‘Oh,’ she said calmly, ‘you caught that.’

He stared at her evenly, all cordiality gone, his office face, cool and pitiless, replacing in a fraction of a second his tolerant English actor party face. ‘Yes. I caught it,’ he said. ‘And I’m not the only one. In today’s atmosphere, with everybody being investigated, and advertisers being damn careful that they’re not giving their money to people whose motives might not be’ acceptable …’