The Lady and Her Doctor (22 page)

He was back where he had been, that was all. Back with Jenny. Jenny had been right, he thought, the sour taste of failure filling his mouth; he couldn't manage without her. The two birds of a feather, the Folsom girls, had gotten together against him. He had always been out of their class; class showed. The Folsom birds against the sitting ducks, he thought, the Folsoms against the Krops.

At seven-fifteen, Jenny would be telephoning the Haunted House. He better stop her. He better say don't bother, that he'd explain some other time, just don't bother. That way it might be possible to keep Jenny from hearing the whole damned business which otherwise Sloane might tell her. If he had to go back and sleep on the Hide-a-Bed again, flatter himself back into his lousy practice again—and what else could he do besides starve or cut his throat—it would be best if Jenny didn't know. Since Jenny now owned every penny he had scraped together, what else could he do but go back? He had better stop Jenny before he had to crawl back on his knees and listen to her laughing at him until he dropped dead!

Milton climbed wearily out of the car—as cautiously as old lady Austen, he thought—and locked the car door, noticing that this was a No Parking place but too weary to give a damn. If his license didn't save him from a ticket, let them give him a ticket. He plodded to the drugstore on the corner and gave Jenny the spiel he had planned. For once, she didn't try to make him tell her, merely begged him to get in touch. Milton rested his head against the telephone and, standing like that, looking through the glass door that way, he naturally remembered Cissie. No bikini any more. No beach any more—but no reason now he couldn't see Cissie. If he wasn't going to poison Sloane, if he and Sloane were washed up, why not Cissie?

Milton wondered how he knew her number by heart that way. If Cissie wasn't home—if the mother answered? He didn't give himself time to plan what then. He was sick of planning. What the hell had all his planning gotten him, anyway? He dialed the number he hadn't realized he knew and waited. If it was the mother, who cared? Pretty soon now, Cissie's mother, the whole baby carriage brigade, the whole neighborhood, would know Sloane had thrown him out and he was back home to Momma.

Cissie answered the telephone. “Cissie, it's me,” Milton said, “it's the doctor. I changed my mind. I got to see you just once, Cissie.”

She said, “Oh, yes!”

He could see her lips forming the words. He could almost feel her sweet breath on his hot cheek and touched his cheek there, a vast recklessness coming over him. “Cissie,” he said. “I kept you from the Stork Club, didn't I?”

“I don't care about that. Who cares about that?”

But she did care about her mother finding out and arranged their date for Friday a week when it would be safest. “Cissie, I'll meet you at the Stork Club Friday a week, nine thirty.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes!”

He heard himself laughing at her. “All you can say is yes, huh?” All she could say was yes. All she could do was look at him as if he was the be-all and end-all and say yes! “See you, Cissie!” He hung up before she could say that last “yes,” but heard it anyhow, and that was enough to make him forget Jenny's “no,” Sloane's “my dear Milton,” which meant the same thing, his mother's “no,” his brothers' “no,” his whole goddamned life which, when you came right down to it, had been one long “no!”

Cissie's “yes” was enough to give him the strength to go back and face the music because what could Sloane do to him, after all? And he knew what he could do to Sloane: tell her, tell her off, once and for all, tell her what he thought of her, what touching her did to him. “Tightwad,” he would say. “Miser! If you're the upper classes, give me vanilla! If you and your sister are the Four Hundred give me vanilla! Nympho,” he would say. “Pervert, that's what you are! A man's supposed to be the dirty-minded one! You're an excuse for a woman! Narrow-minded, am I?” She had called him narrow-minded. He should read Kinsey, she told him. “Lowbrow, high loin,” she said, “highbrow, low loin, my dear Milton!”

There was no parking ticket on the car. Too bad. He felt like tearing it up. Tearing into a cop. Busting someone in the nose. He got into the car, made a wide defiant U turn (worm turn!) and drove back to the Haunted House at forty-five miles an hour which could have gotten him another ticket, but nobody stopped him.

He drove up to the house and parked under the porte-cochere and nobody told him to get his lousy lowbrow Studie away from there. He walked up the steps and they didn't crumble under his middle-class feet and he unlocked the door and nobody had changed the lock on him. He socked the left-hand-side suit of armor with his open palm and it rattled helplessly. He looked into the big empty dining room which was tipsy with the last light coming through the crazy-colored glass panes, into the sitting room, the morning room, the drawing room, the library, the empty kitchen. As he started upstairs, he heard movement. Was the sister with her? Both of them up there laying for the Krops? Well, what went for one went for both of them!

“Milton? Is that you?”

“That's right, Milton. Milton and not the blind poet; the blind, dumb oaf, Milt Krop!”

She was standing in the doorway to her bedroom. It was dark inside. She was holding onto the door with her long narrow fingers.

“It's Milton, it's Milton! You were calling me?”

She nodded. Her hair was let down and when she bent her head some of it fell over her face and she pushed it back with her hand and backed inside the bedroom. “Amory,” she said, and backed away still more.

So the sister was there in the darkened bedroom? That guy, too, laying for me, too? He finished the flight of stairs and followed Sloane into the room. He could handle the three of them. “Milt Krop!
In
person!” No one was in the room except Sloane. “Where is your sister?”

“Milton—why did you think she was here? What has happened?”

“Why did I think—?”

“Milton!” She moved toward him.

“You said ‘Amory'!”

“Yes. I telephoned her. Amory.”

“So I thought she'd be here.”

“No, no! I don't want her here! I never want to see her! I will never see her again, Milton. You are to deal with her! You said you would.” She came closer to him, her voice came closer. “Don't you understand?”

“I understand. I understand.”

“No,” she said, “apparently not. I telephoned Amory.” His stance was so hostile that she retreated to her bed. “Darling Milton, I am going to do what you asked. I am going to give Amory the money from the house. I went this afternoon to the realty firm and told them I would accept the offer.” She lay on her bed and held out both her arms to him. “My darling, I am doing what you asked. Come to me, Milton. Darling Milton! Come here. We are all alone. Austen is gone.”

“I know Austen is gone.” Now one hand patted the mattress next to where she lay. “Wait a minute—wait a minute. Austen said you told her not to fix dinner. Why didn't you let her fix dinner?”

“Oh, my dear,” she whispered, ignoring his question. “You're shy of me. Are you shy of me, Milton?”

“Why no dinner? Are you sick?”

“‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.' Comfort me, darling, for I am sick of love!”

“You must be sick of something, to waste a good dinner—I figured God knows what it was for you to waste a good dinner!” Then Milton began to laugh because it looked like even Sloane would rather waste a dinner if it meant being murdered. Waste of a good murder was one waste even Sloane wouldn't mind! He couldn't stop laughing.

Sloane crept out of the bed toward him. “No dinner,” she whispered, pressing her body against him. “No dinner yet, love!” She was kissing his cheek, rubbing his cheek with hers, her mouth whispering soft. “Dinner later, darling. A celebration dinner, a gala. We celebrate my being—how do you say, Milton? A good little wife. Love, honor and obey.”

He could not stop laughing. “Dinner out? Eat out?”

“To celebrate my being obedient.”

“Giving me the money?”

“Amory.”

“Giving me the money to give your sister, Amory.”

“Doing whatever you want. Whatever, whatever, whatever you want, you want—”

He said, “Sloane!” and put his arms around her hard. “Oh, my God, Sloane!” he said, hugging her, using her name without self-consciousness because she was giving him what he wanted, for once the little bird with the yes note, like Cissie, for once like Cissie, loving her for once because he didn't have to kill her. “Sloane!” he whispered, not laughing now, because he was happier than in his whole life that he didn't have to kill her. “Come, Sloane!”

For the first time Milton did not feel like the shambling bull led by the ring in his nose to the female. It did not occur to him that Thursday evening that it was the woman and not the male who was supposed to “be kind.” (“Be kind,” Sloane whispered. “Now I've done what you want, you will be kind, won't you, Milton, darling?”) It was the man who was supposed to do what the woman wanted in order that she would no longer sleep alone in the next room, but Milton didn't remember that, then.

“Where will we go?”

She would not move.

“Sloane, where will we go to eat? I'm starving.”

She stretched like a million dollars.

He had gone into the next bedroom and returned carrying his pencil-stripe suit. It wasn't much but it was the best he had. He held the suit up for Sloane to see. “They won't throw me out of a decent restaurant in this, will they? How about the Stork, Sloane?” She was sitting up in bed, hugging her knees. “How about the Stork since we're celebrating?”

She put her feet over the side of the bed and studied them. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Stork. The Stork Club!”

She came over to him naked as the day she was born and began to pull his hair playfully. “Darling Milton! The Stork Club!”

“What's wrong with it?”

Naked as the day she was born, she danced over to the mirror over the dresser and struck a pose. “Do I look like the sort of person who goes to the Stork Club?”

“Well, you'd have to put a little more on but not much more from what I hear. Why not the Stork Club, huh?”

“Because.”

“Because” meant the usual reasons, probably; vulgar and middle class were the usual reasons with Sloane, but how could the Stork Club be vulgar and middle class? He was, however, too happy right then to give a damn. “How about the Automat; that's more your speed, is it?”

“Infinitely more preferable, yes.” She gave his hair a last mocking tug. “You think I'm not serious, don't you, darling? Ask a gourmet about the meat pies at the Automat, or that coffee. Did you know they won a gourmet's prize for their pastry?”

“Okay. The Automat it is.”

“Of course not. You'd hate it!”

What did he care? Let her remember afterward. He would send her a picture postcard from one of those famous places on the Riviera. “Not as good as the Automat but better than the Stork,” he would write. “Come on, come on, get dressed!”

They ended up going to a French restaurant on Fifty-second Street. He asked was it the one she had told him about where you ate in the kitchen, but she squeezed his arm and said, “Oh, no, darling. It may take a mere three generations to go from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, but it takes at least six to go from eating in the kitchen routinely to eating in the kitchen
avec plaisir
.”

“
Avec
what?” He asked her what he should do if the waiter started talking in French but she said they wouldn't unless he indicated that French was what he preferred. (Would that be ill-bred and vulgar?) When they reached the restaurant, it turned out to be swell. (“Posh,” Sloane said.) He didn't even have to pretend he could read the menu because Sloane announced to the waiter that she would order for both of them and she did, but although she made a big deal of it, it wasn't caviar or champagne and what they had wasn't under glass, or “pressed.” They had some kind of fish fillets, with grapes, Sloane explained. (Grapes?) They had a
Salade Gaulois
and some “perfect” Camembert and fresh fruit to finish. (No coffee.) There was some clear soup first Sloane raved about. “It looks like barely tinted water but when you taste it—like a prism! It breaks on the palate into a rainbow of flavor.” It did, he got what she meant, and the fish also was out of this world. Milton asked Sloane to tell him what he was eating so he could order it again, but she said, why bother, she would always be there to order for him, wouldn't she? (Like hell she would!) Then Milton realized that he had exactly four dollars in his pocket and he told Sloane she certainly would have to be around, he couldn't get the tab, otherwise, and you would have thought she would take the hint and pass him some dough under the table but Sloane only smiled and paid the waiter herself. (Vulgar to slip him the money so at least the waiter would think he could pay for it if he couldn't order it?)

French restaurants like that didn't have the food ready-cooked so, what with the conferences with the wine waiter about the wine and the rest of it, it was eleven when they finished eating. Milton felt too high to go straight home and suggested a midnight movie. How about they should look for an old Cary Grant on Forty-second Street? (When he pictured himself walking down those steps carved out of living stone, he always pictured himself kind of a Cary Grant type; that was why he wanted to see him tonight.)

“A Grant?” Sloane asked.

She didn't know who Cary Grant was any more than Milton Berle. “Not Ulysses S. Cary Grant is a tall guy; tall, dark—a smoothie.” But Sloane didn't want to see a smoothie. She didn't want to see any movie except documentaries or good foreign ones and to hell with them. Milton suggested that since they were downtown like this, they drive around looking at the Great White Way, but Sloane said they should leave the Great White Way to the people who went to the Stork Club. This time he asked Sloane if the Great White Way was supposed to be vulgar, and she said, “Yes, darling, the acme of vulgarity,” so they drove to Riverside Drive and then up the Drive and when they came to Lookout Point she asked him to stop and park and she would have been perfectly willing to sit there necking and if that wasn't the acme of vulgarity, what was? When she leaned against him, he made out his arm had gone to sleep. He began to yawn and said they better be starting back to Queens.