Short Stories: Five Decades (117 page)

“Wait a minute, luv,” she said. “There’s a buzz at the door. Hold fast, like a dear.” She put her hand over the phone. “Hey, Becky,” she said to Rebecca, who was screwing the top on the nail-polish bottle, “how’d you like to hit the town with a divine—”

“Hit
what?
”

“That beautiful boy from the bookstore is on the phone. He’s invited me to dinner. But—”

“That
dwarf?
” Rebecca said.

“He’s not so small, actually,” Beulah said. “He’s very well proportioned.”

“I don’t go in for comedy acts,” Rebecca said. “He’d have to use his ladder even to get into scoring territory.”

“There’s no need to be vulgar about my friends,” Beulah said frigidly, realizing finally that the whole Sixth Fleet wouldn’t be able to get her roommate out of the house today. “And I do think it shows a surprisingly ugly side to your character. Prejudice is the word, luv. It’s a kind of anti-Semitism, if you want to know what I think.”

“Tell him to pick on somebody his own size,” Rebecca said, taking the nail polish into the bathroom.

Beulah lifted her hand from the phone. “It was the super with the mail, luv,” she said. “Bills and more bills.”

“Yeah,” said Christopher dispiritedly, “I know how it is.” He remembered that Beulah Stickney owed him $47 since July, but of course this was not the time to bring it up. “Well, have a nice time.…” He prepared to hang up.

“Hold on, Chris.…” That was his name, Christopher. “Maybe something can be salvaged from Be Kind to Aunts Day, after all. Maybe I can get her drunk at the airport or she’ll turn out to be suffering from some dreadful female disease and will have to plunge into bed.…” The plane was due at 3:15, but you never could tell, it might be held up for engine trouble or darling Jirg, who had never been out of the hills before, might be confused by the wild traffic of the city of Zurich and miss the connection or go to the wrong gate and wind up in Tehran. Or even, the way things were going with airlines these days, the plane could be hijacked or bombed by Arabs or just fall down into a lake in Labrador. One thing she couldn’t bear and that was having dinner alone. “I’ll tell you what, you just sit there among all those lovely books like a good boy and I’ll get on the horn this afternoon and tell you if Auntie looks like conking out or not. What time do you stay open to?”

“Seven o’clock,” Christopher said.

“You poor overworked boy,” Beulah said. “Stay near the phone, luv.”

“Yeah,” Christopher said.

“It
was
dear of you to call,” Beulah said and hung up. She always concluded on the telephone with “It was dear of you to call” and without saying goodbye. It was original and it spread good will.

She looked at the clock and then went into the bathroom to experiment with her hair.

***

Christopher put the phone down slowly, the palms of his hands damp. The store felt very warm and he went to the front door and opened it. He stared out at Madison Avenue. People were passing by in the sunlight. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it looked to him as though the tall people on the avenue were strolling and the short ones were, well
burrowing
. He closed the door and went back into the shop, reflecting on his conversation with
Stickney, Beulah
**. If luck had been with him, if he’d had a premonition or extrasensory perception or something, he’d have asked to speak to Rebecca Fleischer, instead of Beulah Stickney. The chances were that no aunt of Rebecca Fleischer’s was coming in from Denver that afternoon. Now, after having tried to make it with Beulah, he could not call back and ask Rebecca. There were limits. The girl would be mortally offended, being tapped to go into the game as a substitute, as it were, and he wouldn’t blame her.

He didn’t trust Beulah’s ability to get rid of her aunt before seven o’clock. He had aunts of his own and once they got hold of you, they stuck.

Back to the address book. It was nearly twelve o’clock and people would be going out to lunch and then matinees or linen showers or whatever it was girls went to on Saturday afternoons.

Caroline Trowbridge was in bed with Scotty Powalter. At one time, Caroline Trowbridge had been Caroline Powalter, but Scotty Powalter had found her in bed with his ex-roommate from Yale, Giuliano Ascione, and had divorced her for adultery. It hadn’t been a completely friendly divorce. It had been all over the New York
Daily News
and Caroline had been dropped from the social register the next year, but she and Scotty had what they both agreed was a Big Physical Thing for each other and every once in a while they spent a night or a week together until something happened to remind Scotty of his ex-roommate at Yale.

The truth was that Caroline had a Big Physical Thing with almost every man she met. She was a tall, sturdy, inbred, healthy social-register kind of girl who was crazy about boats and horses and Italians and if she had had to swear to it under oath, she wouldn’t have been able to say what was more fun—leaping a ditch on an Irish hunter or crewing a Dragon in a force-six gale or going on a weekend to a sinful little inn in the country with one of her husband’s best friends.

Despite her catholic approval of the entire male sex, she oftened regretted not being married to Scotty anymore. He was six feet, four inches tall and built accordingly and the way he behaved in bed, you’d never suspect he came from one of the oldest families along the Main Line in Philadelphia. His family had a place up in Maine with horses and he had a sixty-foot ketch at Center Island and he didn’t have to bother with anything boring like working. As she sometimes said to her lovers, if he hadn’t been so insanely and irrationally possessive, it would have been the marriage of the century.

He had called her the evening before from the Racquet Club, where he had been playing backgammon. When she recognized his voice on the telephone and he said he was calling from the Racquet Club, she knew he had been losing, because he always got horny when he lost at backgammon, especially on weekends. She’d canceled the man she was supposed to go to Southampton with—after all, husbands, even ex-husbands, came first—and Scotty had come over and she’d opened two cans of turtle soup and they’d been in bed ever since 9:30 the night before. It had been such a complete night that sometime around dawn, he’d even mentioned something about getting remarried. It was almost noon now and they were hungry and she got out of bed and put on a pink terry-cloth robe and went into the kitchen to make some bloody marys, for nourishment. She was always strict with herself about no drinks before 11 o’clock, because she had seen too many of her friends go that route. She was dashing in the Worcestershire sauce when the phone rang.

What Christopher liked about her, he thought, as his hand hovered over the phone, preparing to dial, was that she was wholesome. In the polluted city, she was a breath of fresh country air. If you didn’t know about her and her family’s steel mills and her divorce and her expulsion from the social register, you’d think she was a girl just in from the farm, milking cows. She came into the shop often, breezing in with a big childish smile, hanging onto a man’s arm, a different one each time, and buying large, expensive, color-plate books about boats or horses. She had an account at the shop, but usually the man with her would pay for the books and then she would throw her strong firm arms around her escort and kiss him enthusiastically in gratitude, no matter who was looking.

She had kissed Christopher once, too. Although not in the shop. He had gone to the opening of a one-man show at an art gallery four doors down on Madison Avenue and she was there, too, squinting over the heads of the other connoisseurs at the geometric forms in clashing colors that represented the painter’s reaction to being alive in America. Extraordinarily, she was unaccompanied, and when she spotted Christopher, she bulled her way through the crowd, smiling sexily, and said, “My deliverer,” and put her arm through his and stroked his forearm. There was something unnatural about her being alone, like a free-floating abalone. Her predestined form was the couple. Knowing this, Christopher was not particularly flattered by her attention, since it was no more personal than a swan’s being attracted to a pond or a wildcat to a pine tree. Still, the touch of her capable ex-social-register fingers on his arm was cordial.

“I suppose,” she said, “clever man that you are, that you know what all this is about.”

“Well.…” Christopher began.

“They remind me of my trigonometry class at Chatham Hall. That distressing pi sign. Don’t they make you thirsty, Mr.—uh?”

“Bagshot.”

“Of course. Why don’t you and I just sidle out of here like true art lovers and go out into the night and snap on one or two martinis?”

They were nearly at the door by now, anyway, so Christopher said, as brightly as he could, “Right on.” The owner of the gallery, who was a business friend of his, was near the door, too, looking at him with a betrayed expression for leaving so quickly. Christopher tried to show, by a grimace and a twitch of his shoulders, that he was under the sway of powers stronger than he and that he would come back soon, but he doubted that he communicated.

They went to the Westbury Polo Bar and sat in one of the booths and ordered martinis and Caroline Trowbridge sat very close to him and rubbed her knee against his and told him how lucky he was to have a vocation in life, especially one as rewarding as his, involved in the fascinating world of books. She had no vocation, she said sadly, unless you could consider horses and sailing a vocation, and she had to admit to herself that with the way the world was going—just look at the front page of any newspaper—horses and boats were revoltingly frivolous, and didn’t he think they ought to call a waiter and order two more martinis?

By the time they had finished the second martini, she had his head between her two strong hands and was looking down into his eyes. She had a long torso as well as long legs and she loomed over him in the semiobscurity of the Polo Bar. “Your eyes,” she was saying, “are dark, lambent pools.” Perhaps she hadn’t paid much attention in the trigonometry class at Chatham Hall, but she certainly had listened in freshman English.

Emboldened by alcohol and lambency, Christopher said, “Caroline”—they were on a first-name basis by now—“Caroline, have dinner with me?”

“Oh, Christopher,” she said, “what a dear thoughtful thing to say,” and kissed him. On the lips. She had a big mouth, that went with the rest of her, and she was pleasantly damp.

“Well,” he said when she unstuck, “shall we?”

“Oh, my poor, dear, beautiful little mannikin,” she said, “nothing would give me greater joy. But I’m occupied until a week from next Thursday.” She looked at her watch and jumped up, pulling her coat around her. “Rum dum dum,” she cried. “I’m hideously tardy right this very moment and everybody will be cross with me all the wretched night and say nasty things to me and tweak my ear and suspect the worst and never believe I was in an art gallery, you naughty boy.” She leaned over and pecked the top of his head. “What bliss,” she said and was gone.

He ordered another martini and had dinner alone, remembering her kiss and the curious way she had of expressing herself. One day, when she was a little less busy, he knew he was going to see her again. And not in the shop.

Oh, damn, she thought as she reached for the phone hanging on the kitchen wall, I forgot to switch it to the answering service. When she expected Scotty over, she made a practice of instructing the service to pick up all calls on the first ring, because nothing infuriated Scotty more than hearing her talk to another man. She loved him, divorce or no divorce, but she had to admit that he was a neurotically suspicious creature.

“Hello,” she said.

“Caroline,” the male voice said, “this is Christopher—”

“Sorry, Christopher,” she said, “you have the wrong number,” and hung up. Then she unhooked the phone, so that if he called again, he’d get a busy signal. She still had the bottle of Worcestershire sauce in her hand and she shook a few more spurts into the tomato juice. She added a double shot of vodka, to calm Scotty down, if by any chance he didn’t believe that it was a wrong number.

Scotty was lying with his eyes closed, all the covers thrown off, when she came into the bedroom with the bloody marys. He really filled a bed, Scotty; you got your money’s worth of man with her ex-husband. His expression was peaceful, almost as if he had gone back to sleep. The phone on the table next to the bed didn’t look as though it had been moved, she noted with relief.

“All up on deck for grog,” she said cheerily.

He sat up, monumentally, muscles rippling, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He reached out his hand and took the glass from her, looked at it consideringly, then hurled it against the opposite wall. A good part of the room turned red.

“Oh, Scotty,” she said reproachfully, “don’t tell me you’re being seized by one of your unreasonable moods again.” She backed off a little, being careful to avoid broken glass, and took two swift swallows of bloody mary for her nerves.

He stood up. It was an awful sight when he stood up naked like that in a comparatively small bedroom. It was like seeing the whole front line of the Dallas Cowboys wrapped into one moving in on you. The funny scar on his forehead that he had had since his brother had hit him with a baseball bat when they were boys, and which stood out when he was angry, was turning a frightening bright pink.

“Scotty Powalter,” she said, “I absolutely forbid you to touch me.”

Thank God he only slapped me with an open hand, she thought as she reeled back into a chair, still miraculously holding onto her drink.

“You’re unjust,” she said from the depths of the chair. “You’re a fundamentally unjust man. Hitting a girl for a little old wrong number.”

“Some wrong number,” he said. “Who’s Christopher?”

“How should I know who Christopher is? This voice said, ‘Hello, this is Christopher,’ and I said—”

“This voice said, ‘Caroline,’” Scotty said.

“Sneak,” she said. “Listening in on other people’s conversations. Is that what they taught you at Yale?” Scotty wasn’t really unintelligent, but his thought processes were cumbersome and sometimes you could fuddle him and make him forget his dreadful intentions by attacking him.