Rich Man, Poor Man (43 page)

‘Are you warning me?’ Gretchen asked.

‘You might put it like that,’ the man said. ‘Out of friendship.’

‘It’s good of you, dear,’ she touched his arm lightly, smiling tenderly at him, ‘but I’m afraid it’s too late. I’m a red, raving Communist, in the pay of Moscow, plotting to destroy NBC and MGM and bring Ralston’s Cereals crashing to the ground.’

‘She’s putting on everyone tonight, Alec.’ Willie was standing next to her, his hand tightening on her elbow. ‘She thinks it’s Halloween. Come on into the kitchen, I’ll freshen your drink.’

Thanks, Willie,’ Lister said. ‘But I’m afraid I have to push on. I have two more parties I said I’d look in on tonight.’ He kissed Gretchen’s cheek, a brush of ether on her skin. ‘Good night, sweets. I do hope you remember what I told you.’

‘Chiselled in stone,’ she said.

Expressionless, flat-eyed, he made his way towards the door, putting his glass down on a bookcase, where it would leave a ring.

‘What’s the matter?’ Willie said in a low voice. ‘You hate money?’

‘I hate him,’ she said. She pulled away from Willie and wove through the guests, smiling brightly, to where Rudolph and Julie were talking in the corner. They were talking in near whispers. There was an air of tension about them which built an invisible wall around them, cutting them off from all the laughter and conversation in the room. Julie seemed on the verge of tears and Rudolph looked concentrated and stubborn.

‘I thinks if s terrible,’ Julie was saying. “That’s what I think.’

‘You look beautiful tonight, Julie,’ Gretchen interrupted. “Very femme-fatalish.’

‘Well, I don’t feel it.’ Julie’s voice quavered.

What’s the matter?’ Gretchen asked.

‘You tell her,’ Julie said to Rudolph.

‘Some other time,’ Rudolph said, lips tight. This is a party.’

‘He’s going to work permanently at Calderwood’s,’ Julie said. ‘Starting tomorrow morning.’

‘Nothing is permanent,’ Rudolph said.

‘Stuck away behind a counter for his whole life,’ Julie rushed on. ‘In a little one-horse town. What’s the sense of going to college, if that’s all you’re going to do with it?’

‘I told you I’m not going to be stuck anywhere all my life,’ Rudolph said.

‘Tell her the rest,’ Julie said hotly. ‘I dare you to tell her the rest.’

‘What’s the rest?’ Gretchen asked. She, too, was disappointed, Rudolph’s choice war inglorious. But she was relieved, too. Working at Calderwood’s, he would continue to take care of their mother and she would not have to face the problem herself or ask for help from Willie. The sense of relief was ignoble, but there was no denying to herself that it existed.

‘I’ve been offered the summer in Europe,’ Rudolph said evenly, ‘as a gift.’

‘By whom?’ Gretchen asked, although she knew the answer.

‘Teddy Boylan.’

‘I know my parents would let me go, too,’ Julie said, ‘We could have the best summer of our whole lives.’

‘I haven’t got time for the best summer of our whole lives,’ Rudolph said, biting on the words.

‘Can’t you talk to him, Gretchen?’ Julie said.

‘Rudy,’ Gretchen said, ‘don’t you think you owe yourself a little fun. after the way you’ve been working?’

‘Europe won’t go away,’ he said. ‘Ill go there when I’m ready for it’

‘Teddy Boylan must have been pleased when you turned him down,’ Gretchen said.

‘He’ll get over it.’

‘I wish somebody would offer me a trip to Europe,’ Gretchen said. ‘I’d be on that boat so fast…’

‘Gretchen, can you give us a hand?’ One of the younger male guests had come over. ‘We want to play the phonograph and it seems to be kaput.’

‘I’ll talk to you two later,’ Gretchen said to Rudolph and Julie. ‘We’ll work something out.’ She went over to the phonograph with the young man. She bent down and fumbled for the plug. The coloured maid had been in to clean that day and she always left the plug out after she vacuumed. ‘I bend enough,’ she had told Gretchen when Gretchen complained.

The phonograph warmed up with a hollow sound and then

it began to play the first record from the album of South Pacific. Childish voices, sweet and American, far away on a make-believe warm island, piped the words to ‘Dites-moi’. When Gretchen stood up she saw that Rudolph and Julie had gone. I’m not going to have a party in this place for a whole year, she decided. She went into the kitchen and had Mary Jane pour her a stiff drink of Scotch. Mary Jane had long red hair these days and a great deal of blue eye shadow and long false eyelashes. From a distance she was a beauty but close up things came apart a little. Still, now, in the third hour of the party, with all the men passing through her domain and flattering her, she was at her peak for the day, flashing-eyed, her bright red lips half open, avid and provocative. ‘What glory,’ she said, whiskey-hoarse. This party. And that new man, Alec What’s-his-name…’

‘Lister,’ Gretchen said, drinking, noting that the kitchen was a mess and deciding that she’d do nothing about it till the morning. ‘Alec Lister.’

‘Isn’t he dazzling!’ Mary Jane said. ‘Is he attached?’

‘Not tonight’

‘Blessings on him,’ Mary Jane said, the dear fellow. He drowned the kitchen in charm when he was in here. And I’ve heard the most terrible things about him. He beats his women, Willie told me.’ She giggled. ‘Isn’t it exciting? Did you notice, does he need a new drink? Ill appear at his side, goblet in hand, Mary Jane Hackett, the faithful cup-bearer.’

‘He left five minutes ago,’ Gretchen said, meanly pleased at being able to pass on the information to Mary Jane and wondering at the same time what women Willie was intimate enough with to hear from them that they had been beaten by Alec Lister.

‘Ah, well,’ Mary Jane shrugged philosophically, ‘there are other fish in the sea.’

Two men came into the kitchen and Mary Jane swung her red hair and smiled radiantly at them. “Here you are, Boys,’ she said, ‘the bar never closes.’

It was a cinch that Mary Jane had not gone two weeks without making love. What’s so wrong with being divorced, Gretchen thought, as she went back into the livingroom.

Rudolph and Julie walked towards Fifth Avenue in the balmy

June evening air. He did not hold her arm. This is no place

to talk seriously,’ he had said at the party. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

But it wasn’t any better on the street. Julie strode along, careful not to touch him, the nostrils of her small nose tense, the full lips bitten into a sharp wound. As he walked beside her on the dark street he wondered if it wouldn’t just be better to leave her then and there. It would probably come sooner or later anyway and sooner was perhaps to be preferred than later. But then he thought of never seeing her again and despaired. Still, he said nothing. In the battle that was being waged between them, he knew that the advantage would have to go to the one who kept silent longest.

‘You have a girl there,’ she said finally. “That’s why you’re staying in the awful place.’

He laughed.

‘You’re laughing doesn’t fool me.’ Her voice was bitter, with no memory in it of the times they had sung together or the times she had said, I love you. ‘You’re infatuated with some ribbon clerk or cashier or something. You’ve been sleeping with somebody there all this time. I know.’

He laughed again, strong in his chastity.

‘Otherwise you’re a freak,’ she said harshly. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for five years and you say you love me and you haven’t tried once to make love to me, really make love to me.’

‘I haven’t been invited,’ he said.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I invite you. Now. Tonight I’m in room 923 at the St Moritz.’

Wary of traps, fearful of helpless surrenders on a tumbled bed. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Either you’re a liar,’ she said, ‘or you’re a freak.’

‘I want to marry you,’ he said. ‘We can get married next week.’

‘Where will we spend our honeymoon?’ she asked. ‘In the garden-furniture department of Calderwood’s Department Store? I’m offering you my pure-white, virgin body,’ she said mockingly. ‘Free and clear. No strings. Who needs a wedding? I’m a free, liberated, lustful, ail-American girl. ‘I’ve just won the Sexual Revolution by a score of ten to nothing.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘And stop talking like my sister.’

‘Freak,’ she said. ‘You want to bury me along with you forever in that dismal little town. And all this time, I’ve thought you were so smart, that you were going to have such a brilliant future. Ill marry you. Ill marry you next week. If you take the trip to Europe and start law school in the autumn. Or if you don’t want to do that, if you just come down here to New York and work here. I don’t care what you do here.

I’ll work, too. I want to work. What’ll I do in Whitby? Spend my days deciding which apron to wear when you come home at night?’

‘I promise you that in five years you can live in New York or any place you say.’

‘You promise,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to promise. And I’m not going to bury myself for five years either. I can’t understand you. What in God’s name do you think you’re getting out of it?’

‘I’m starting two years ahead of anybody in my class,’ Rudolph said. I know what I’m doing. Calderwood trusts me. He’s got a lot more going for him than just his store. The store’s just a beginning, a base. He doesn’t know it yet, but I do. When I come down to New York I’m not going to be just another college graduate from a school nobody ever heard of, waiting in everybody’s outer office, with his hat in his hand. When I come down, they’re going to greet me at the front door. I’ve been poor a long time, Julie,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to do what I have to do never to be poor again.’

‘Boylan’s baby,’ Julie said. ‘He’s ruined you. Money! Does money mean that much to you? Just money?’

‘Don’t sound like Little Miss Rich Bitch,’ he said.

‘Even if it does,’ she said, ‘if you went into law …’

‘I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘I’ve waited long enough. I’ve been in enough schoolrooms. If I need law, I’ll hire lawyers.’ Echo of Duncan Calderwood, that hard-headed man. They hire schooling. ‘Ii you want to come along with me, fine. If not But he couldn’t say it. ‘If not,’ he repeated lamely. ‘Oh, Julie, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I know about everything else, but I don’t know about you.’

I lied to my father and mother …’ She was sobbing now. ‘So I could be alone with you. But it’s not you. It’s Boylan’s doll. I’m going back to the hotel. I don’t want to talk to you any more.’ Weeping uncontrollably, she hailed a cab on the Avenue. It squealed to a halt and she opened the door and got in and slammed the door behind her.

He watched the cab roar away without moving. Then he turned and started back towards the party. He had left his bag there and Gretchen was going to make up a bed for him on the living room couch, 923, he remembered, the number of the hotel room.

Alimonied, Mary Jane did well for herself. Rudolph had never been in a wider or softer bed and in the glow of a lamp on the

dressing table (Mary Jane insisted on keeping a light on) the large, warmly carpeted room, its walls pearl-grey silk, showed an expensive decorator’s touch. Deep-green velvet curtains shut out the sounds of the city. The preliminaries (and they had been brief) had taken place in the high-ceilinged living room furnished with gilt Directoire pieces and large, gold-tinted mirrors, in which the embracing couple were caught in a vague and metallic luminosity. ‘The main event takes place inside,’ Mary Jane had said, breaking away from a kiss, and without any further agreement from Rudolph had led him into the bedroom. ‘I’ll get ready in the bathroom,’ she said, and kicked off her shoes and walked splendidly and almost steadily into the adjoining bathroom, from which had immediately come the sound of water running and the clink of bottles.

It was a little bit like being in a doctor’s office while he prepared for a minor operation, Rudolph thought resentfully, and he had hesitated before getting undressed. When Mary Jane had asked him to take her home from the party, well after midnight, with only four or five guests still sprawled around, he had no idea that anything like this was going to happen. He felt a bit dizzy from all the drinking he had done and he was worried about how his head would feel like when he lay down. For a moment, he had considered stealing quietly out and through the front door, but Mary Jane, her intuition or her experience at work, had called out sunnily, ‘I’ll just be a minute more, darling. Make yourself comfortable.’

So Rudolph had undressed, putting his shoes soberly side by side under a chair and folding his clothes neatly on the seat of the chair. The bed was already made up for the night (lace-fringed pillows, he noticed, and pale-blue sheets) and he had slipped under the covers, shivering a little. This was one way of making sure he wouldn’t be knocking on a hotel door that night. 923.

As he lay under the blankets, curious, a little fearful, he closed his eyes. It had to happen some day, he thought. What better day than this?

With his eyes closed, the room seemed to be dipping and wheeling around him and the bed under him seemed to move in an uneasy rhythm, like a small boat anchored in a chop. He opened his eyes just as Mary Jane came into the room, tall, naked, and superb, the long body with the small, round breasts and splendid hips and thighs unwearied by matrimony,

unscarred by debauch. She stood over him, looking down at him with hooded eyes, veteran of many seasons, sweeper-up of stragglers, her red hair, dark in the glow of the lamp, swinging down towards him.

His erection was swift and sudden and huge, a pylon, a cannon barrel. He was torn between pride and embarrassment and almost asked Mary Jane to put out the light. But before he could say anything, Mary Jane bent and swept back the covers in a single tearing gesture.

She stood beside the bed, inspecting him, smiling softly.

‘Little brother,’ she whispered, ‘Little beautiful brother of the poor.’ Then, soft-handed, she touched him. He jumped convulsively.

‘Lie still,’ she ordered. Her hands moved like small, expert animals on him, fur on damask. He quivered. ‘Lie still, I said’ she said harshly.

It was over soon, shamefully soon, a fierce, arching jet and he heard himself sobbing. She knelt on the bed, kissed him on the mouth, her hands intolerable now, the smell of her hair, cigarette smoke and perfume smothering him.