Rich Man, Poor Man (9 page)

His quick, pale eyes noted the minute change in her expression. ‘You don’t like me,’ he said.

‘That isn’t true,’ she said. ‘It’s just that you’re different from anyone I know.’

‘Different better or different worse?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He nodded gravely. ‘I abide the question,’ he said. ‘Drink up. Here comes another bottle of wine.’

Somehow, they had gone through the whole bottle of wine and they hadn’t reached he main course yet. The head waiter gave them fresh glasses and there was the ceremony of tasting once more. The wine had flushed her face and throat. The conversation in the rest of the restaurant seemed to have receded and came to her ears now in a regular, reassuring rhythm, like the sound of distant surf. She suddenly felt at home in the polished old room and she laughed aloud.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Boylan asked suspiciously.

‘Because I’m here,’ she said, ‘and I could be so many other places instead.’

‘You must drink more often,’ he said. Wine becomes you.’ He reached over and patted her hand… His hand was dry and firm on her skin. ‘You’re beautiful, pet, beautiful, beautiful.’

‘I think so, too,’ she said.

It was his turn to laugh.

Today,’ she said.

By the time the waiter brought their coffee she was drunk. She had never been drunk before in her life so she didn’t know that she was drunk. All she knew was that all colours were clearer, that the river below her was cobalt, that the sun lowering in the sky over the faraway western bluffs was of a heartbreaking gold. All the tastes in her mouth were like summertime and the man opposite her was not a stranger and

her employer, but her best and most intimate friend, his fine, tanned face kindly and marvellously attentive, the occasional touch of his hand on hers of a welcome calm dryness, his laugh an accolade to her wit. She could tell him anything, her secrets were his.

She had told him anecdotes about the hospital - about the soldier who had been hit over the eye by a bottle of wine that an enthusiastic French woman had thrown to welcome him to Paris and who had been awarded the Purple Heart because he suffered from double vision incurred in the line of duty. And the nurse and the young officer who made love every night in a parked ambulance and who, one night, when the ambulance had been called out had been driven all the way to Poughkeepsie stark naked.

As she spoke, it became clear to her that she was a unique and interesting person who led an incident-crammed, full life. She described the problems she had when she had played Rosalind in As You Like It in the school play in her senior year. Mr Pollack, the director, who had seen a dozen Rosalinds, on Broadway and elsewhere, had said that it would be a crime if she wasted her talent. She had also played Portia the year before and wondered briefly if she wouldn’t make a brilliant lawyer. She thought women ought to go in for things like that these days, not settle for marriage and babies.

She was going to tell Teddy (he was Teddy by dessert) something that she hadn’t confided to a soul, that when the war was over she was going down to New York to be an actress. She recited a speech from As You Like It, her tongue lively and tripping from the Daiquiris, the wine, the two glasses of Benedictine.

‘Come, woo me, woo me,’ she said, ‘for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?’

Teddy kissed her hand as she finished and she accepted the tribute graciously, delighted with the flirtatious aptness of the quotation.

Warmed by the man’s unflagging attention, she felt electric, sparkling, and irresistible. She opened the two top buttons of her dress. Let her glories be displayed. Besides, it was warm in the restaurant. She could speak of unmentionable things, she could use words that until now she had only seen scrawled on walls by naughty boys. She had achieved candour, that aristocratic privilege.

‘I never pay any attention to them.’ She was responding to

a question from Boylan about the men in the office. ‘Squirming around like puppies. Small-town Don Juans. Taking you to the movies and an ice-cream soda and then necking in the back seat of a car, grabbing at you as though you’re the brass ring on a merry-go-round. Maying a noise like a dying elk and trying to put their tongues in your mouth. Not for me. I’ve got other things on my mind. They try it once and after that they know better. I’m in no hurry!’ She stood up suddenly. ‘Thank you for a delicious lunch,’ she said. ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ She had never before said to any of her dates that she had to go to the bathroom. Her bladder had nearly burst from time to time in movie houses and at parties.

Teddy stood up. “The first door in the hall to the left,’ he said. He was a knowing man, Teddy, informed on all subjects.

She sauntered through the room, surprised that it was empty. She walked slowly, knowing that Teddy was following her every step with his pale intelligent eyes. Her back was straight. She knew that. Her waist was slender, her hips curved, her legs long and rounded and firm. She knew all that and walked slowly to let Teddy know it once and for all.

In the ladies’ room, she looked at herself in the mirror and wiped off the last of the lipstick from her mouth. I have a wide, striking mouth, she told her reflection. What a fool I was to paint it just like any old mouth.

She went out into the hall from the ladies’ room. Teddy was waiting for her at the entrance to the bar. He had paid the bill and he was drawing on his left glove. He stared at her sombrely as she approached him.

‘I am going to buy you a red dress,’ he said. ‘A blazing red dress to set off that miraculous complexion and that wild, black hair. When you walk into a room, the men will drop to their knees.’

She laughed, red her colour. That was the way a man should talk.

She took his arm and they went out to the car.

He put the top up because it was getting cold and they drove slowly south, his bare right hand, thoughtfully ungloved, on hers on the seat between them. It was cosy in the car, with the windows up. There was the flowery fragrance of the alcohol they had drunk, mixed with the smell of leather.

‘Now,’ he said, tell me. What were you really doing at the >us stop at,King’s Landing?’

She chuckled.

That was a dirty chuckle,’ he said.

‘I was there for a dirty reason,’ she said.

He drove without speaking for a while. The road was deserted, and they drove through stripes of long shadows and pale sunshine down the tree-lined highway.

‘I’m waiting,’ Teddy said.

‘Why not? she thought. All things could be said on this blessed afternoon. Nothing was unspeakable between them. They were above the trivia of prudery. She began to speak, first hesitantly, then more easily, as she got into it, of what had happened at the hospital.

She described what the two Negroes were like, lonely and crippled, the only two coloured men in the ward, and how Arnold had always been so reserved and gentlemanly and had never called her by her first name, like the other soldiers, and how he read the books she loaned him and seemed so intelligent and sad, with his wound and the girl in Cornwall who had never written to him again. Then she told about the night he found her alone when all the other men were asleep and the conversation they had and how it led up to the proposition, the two men, the eight hundred dollars. ‘If they’d been white, I’d have reported them to the Colonel,’ she said, ‘but this way … ‘

Teddy nodded understandingly at the wheel, but said nothing, just drove a little faster down the highway.

‘I haven’t been back to the hospital since,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t. I begged my father to let me go to New York. I couldn’t bear staying in the same town with that man, with his knowing what he said to me. But my father … There’s no arguing with my father. And naturally, I couldn’t tell him why. He’d have gone out to the hospital and killed those two men with his bare hands. And then, this morning -I didn’t go to the bus, I drifted into it. I knew I didn’t really want to go to that house, but I guess I wanted to know if they really were there, if there were men who actually acted like that. Even so, even after I got out of the bus, I just waited on the road. I had a Coke, I took a sunbath … I … Maybe I would have gone a bit down the road. Maybe all the way. Just to see. I knew I was safe. I could run away from them easily, even if they saw me. They can hardly move with their legs … ‘

The car was slowing down. She had been looking down at her shoes, under the dashboard of the car, as she spoke. Now she glanced up and saw where they were. The gas station. The general store. Nobody in sight

The car came to a halt at the entrance to the gravel road that led down to the river.

‘It was a game’ she said, ‘a silly, cruel, girl’s game.’ ‘You’re a liar,’ Boylan said.

‘What?’ She was stunned. It was terribly hot and airless in the car.

‘You heard me, pet,’ Boylan said. ‘You’re a liar. It wasn’t any game. You were going to go down there and get laid.’

‘Teddy,’ she said, gasping, ‘please , . . open the window. I can’t breathe.’

Boylan leaned across her and opened the door on her side. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Walk on down, pet. They’re still there. Enjoy yourself. I’m sure it’ll be an experience you’ll cherish all your life.’

‘Please, Teddy … ‘ She was beginning to feel very dizzy and his voice faded in her ears and then came up again, harshly.

‘Don’t worry about transportation home,’ Boylan said. ‘I’l wait here for you. I have nothing better to do. It’s Saturday afternoon and all my friends are out of town. Go ahead. You can tell me about it when you come back. Ill be most interested.’

‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she said. Her head was expanding and contracting and she felt as though she were choking. She stumbled out of the car and threw up by the side of the road in great racking heaves.

Boylan sat immobile at the wheel, staring straight ahead of him. When she was finished and the throat-tearing convulsions had ceased, he said, curtly, ‘All right, corne back in here.’

Depleted and fagile, she crept back into the car, cold sweat on her forehead, holding her hand up to her mouth against the smell.

‘Here, pet,’ Boylan said kindly; He gave her the large coloured silk handkerchief from his breast pocket. ‘Use this.’ She dabbed at her mouth, wiped the sweat from her face, ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘What do you really want to do, pet?’ he asked. ‘I want to go home,’ she whimpered. ‘You can’t go home in that condition,’ he said. He started the car. ‘Where’re you taking me?’ ‘My house,’ he said. She was too exhausted to argue and she lay back with her

head against the back of the seat, her eyes closed, as they drove swiftly south along the highway.

He made love to her early that evening, after she had rinsed her mouth a long time with a cinnamon-flavoured mouthwash in his bathroom and had slept soddenly on his bed for two hours. Afterward, silently, he drove her home.

Monday morning, when she came into the office at nine o’clock, there was a long, white, plain envelope on her desk, with her name printed on it and ‘Personal’ scribbled in one corner. She opened the envelope. There were eight one hundred dollar bills there.

He must have gotten up at dawn to drive all the way into town and get into the locked factory before anyone appeared for work.

The classroom was silent except for the busy scratching of pens on paper. Miss Lenaut was seated at her desk reading, occasionally raising her head to scan the room. She had set a half-hour composition for her pupils to write, subject, ‘Franco-American Friendship’. As Rudolph bent to his task at his desk towards the rear end of the room, he had to admit to himself that Miss Lenaut might be beautiful, and undoubtedly French, but that her imagination left something to be desired.

Half a point would be taken off for a mistake in spelling or a misplaced accent, and full point for any errors in grammar. The composition had to be at least three pages long. . Rudolph filled the required three pages quickly. He was the only student in the class who consistently got marks of over 90 on compositions and dictation, and in the last three tests he had scored 100. He was so good in the language that Miss Lenaut had grown suspicious and had asked him if his parents spoke French. ‘Jordache,’ she said. ‘It is not an American name.’ The imputation hurt him. He wanted to be different from the people around him in many respects, but not in his American-ness. His father was German, Rudolph told Miss

Lenaut, but aside from an occasional word in that language, all Rudolph ever heard at home was English.

‘Are you sure your father wasn’t born in the Alsace?’ Miss Lenaut persisted.

‘Cologne,’ Rudolph said and added that his grandfather had come from Alsace-Lorraine.

‘Alors,’ Miss Lenaut said. ‘It is as I suspected.”

It pained Rudolph that Miss Lenaut, that incarnation of feminine beauty and worldly charm and the object of his feverish devotion, might believe, even for a moment, that he would lie to her or take secret advantage of her. He longed to confess his emotion and had fantasies of returning to the high school some years hence, when he was a suave college man, and waiting outside the school for her and addressing her in French, which would by that time be fluent and perfectly accented, and telling her, with an amused chuckle of the shy child he had been, of his schoolboy passion for her in his junior year. Who knew what then might happen? Literature was full of older women and, brilliant young boys, of teachers and precocious pupils. …

He reread his work for errors, scowling at the banality which the subject had imposed upon him. He changed a word or two, put in an accent he had missed, then looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go.

‘Hey!’ There was a tortured whisper on his right. ‘What’s the past participle of venir?’

Rudolph turned his head slightly towards his neighbour, Sammy Kessler, a straight D student, Sammy Kessler was bent in a position of agony over his paper, his eyes flicking desperately over at Rudolph. Rudolph glanced towards the front of the room. Miss Lenaut was engrossed in her book. He didn’t like to break the rules in her class, but he couldn’t be known by his contemporaries as a coward or a teacher’s pet