Acceptable Losses (20 page)

“Poor Sheila,” Oliver said softly.

“Poor everybody,” Sheila said, “including Gian-Luca.”

“What did Roger do when he found out?”

“It was quite an evening,” Sheila said, trying to keep her tone light but not succeeding. “There was a terrible argument, with Gian-Luca swearing on his mother’s head that he wasn’t on drugs anymore and that he’d never stolen anything in his life. Roger told him to get out that minute and that if he didn’t, he’d go to the police. Gian-Luca refused to go. He just lay down on the living room couch and folded his arms and said he wasn’t going to move. Roger didn’t say anything. He just went over to the couch and grabbed Gian-Luca and picked him up bodily. The boy was so thin and weak a baby could have carried him, and Roger is one of the strongest men I know, and he’s awesome when he gets angry. ‘Open the door,’ he said to me, with the boy struggling in his arms. I opened the door and Roger carried him onto the landing and threw him down the stairs. He wasn’t hurt, but he was raging. He went down about half a flight before he could get up. Then he shook his fist at Roger and yelled, ‘I’ll get you for this, you cold-ass WASP sonofabitch. And your fake guinea fat wife.’ The usual conversation around the family dinner table.” She smiled ruefully. “Roger started down the stairs after him, with me hanging onto him to keep him from killing the boy, and the kid got scared and ran away. And that was it.”

“How did it end?” Oliver asked.

“Just like that. We never saw him again. But his mother called me a few months later, crying, to tell me that Gian-Luca had been arrested while he was threatening a lady in the Bronx with a large carving knife, while he was trying to grab her handbag. Only the lady turned out to be a female cop and he got a three-year jail sentence. I imagine the knife was the one he took from our kitchen. Anyway, the three years were up four months ago, and I guess he’s on the loose again, bringing glory to the family name. I imagine he deserves to be on the personal list.”

“I would think so,” Oliver said. “Did you ever tell Roger about his being arrested?”

“No. I suppose I was wrong, but I didn’t want to stir up old nasty memories. I’ll tell him tonight,” Sheila said. “I’m also going to tell him to disconnect the answering machine and the next time Zalovsky calls to make a date to meet him. Roger’s a brave man and if he knows exactly what he’s confronted with, he’ll handle it. This way he’s in a void. Naturally he sees threats in every quarter, and he doesn’t know which way to turn and it’s grinding him down. I pretend I don’t notice, but he thrashes around in his sleep as if he’s fighting shadows in his dreams and he sits up almost half of every night …”

“It’s beginning to show in the way he looks,” Oliver said. “I’ve never seen him so strained and worn out. And the work is piling up and he’s not touching it. I try to take up as much of the slack as I can, but I’m an enlisted man, not an officer, and when there’s a real decision to make, he’s the one who has to make it. Still …” He looked troubled. “I don’t like the idea of his taking the kind of risk you’re talking about—meeting whoever it turns out to be alone, probably in the dark in some deserted place …”

“He won’t be alone,” Sheila said flatly. “I’ll be with him.”

“Sheila,” Oliver protested, “the guy might be a murderer.”

“Then we’ll find that out,” she said. “Now—who’ve
you
got to contribute to the rogues’ gallery?”

“Nothing very useful, I’m afraid,” Oliver said. “I’d have said Machendorf, too. He’s rough and he was brought up like a mongrel dog, and if you can judge anything by the way a man writes, there’s an awful lot of violence there. Otherwise …” He pursed his mouth, reflecting, looking like a thoughtful infant. “Otherwise the only one I can think of is Gillespie.”

“That’s a surprise,” Sheila said. “Roger thinks highly of him.”

“
Thought
highly of him,” Oliver said. “After his first book. That was a beauty. Then he went off his rocker. Manic-depressive, paranoid, schizophrenic, you name it, he was it. When he brought in his second book, Roger thought it was some kind of crazy put-on. He made me read it, too, before he talked to the guy. It was pure gibberish, three hundred pages of it. It didn’t make any sense at all. When he came into the office to talk to us about it,
he
didn’t make any sense at all. He was in one of his manic periods, I guess, he kept laughing and striding around the office waving his arms shouting that the book was the greatest thing since Joyce and that he was sure that he was going to win the Nobel Prize with it. Then, before we could get a word in, either of us, he began to tell us that he was being hunted by the FBI and the CIA and the Russians and the Jews because he had atomic secrets they wanted to torture out of him. People were giving information against him, he had many two-faced friends, they were involved in a giant plot against him. He knew who they were. Their Day of Judgment would come. But in the meanwhile they’d turned his wife against him and she’d tried to have him committed to an insane asylum, and when she couldn’t, she’d run away from him, taking their two kids with her. That was some day … Whew!”

“What a world we live in,” Sheila said. “What a race we are. We go through days like that, we live through scenes like Roger throwing a sick wasted boy down the stairs, then we bathe, go out to dinner, go to a concert, listen to Beethoven, enjoy a play, buy a newspaper on the way home, toss the paper aside to read at breakfast after glancing at the headlines that scream about a massacre in India, an air-raid in Lebanon, an air-crash with two hundred dead. We make love, snore, worry about our bank balances, forget to register to vote, prepare for a holiday …” She made a grimace, as though she was remembering all her holidays without pleasure. Then she shook her head and said, “What did you do with that poor crazy man and his manuscript?”

“What would you have done?” Oliver asked.

“I suppose just what you and Roger did,” Sheila said wearily, “whatever it was.”

“We tried to calm him down. We told him we’d read his book, but that it needed some work before showing it to the publisher, that there were some parts we hadn’t understood.” Oliver held his glass of Calvados up to the light and squinted at it, as though, there in the pale golden essence of apple, the first fruit, he could find some solution to Gillespie’s dilemma. “Gillespie took what we said jovially. He called us his pitiful earthbound friends, naturally we couldn’t understand his book, it was written for the finer, more sensitive souls who would inhabit the world in centuries to come. In fact, he said, he was delighted we couldn’t understand the book, he would have known he’d failed with it if we had, we’d only understand it when we died many times and came back many times in new incarnations. All this interspersed with great brays of laughter. I am honoring you, he said. You are the messengers of my apotheosis. Deliver the manuscript to Charles Bernard at my publisher’s, he has a touch of the divine afflatus, you will be remembered in the annals of literature for all posterity. Then he declaimed the whole sonnet—you know it, the one that has the line in it—not brass or stone shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

“Roger didn’t tell me one word of this,” Sheila said.

“He never said anything to anyone about it and he made me swear to absolute silence, also. He didn’t want to add to the man’s troubles by spreading the word that he had gone completely around the bend. And this is the first time I’ve mentioned it to any one.”

“What did Oliver say to Gillespie himself?”

“What could he say?” Oliver shrugged. “He said he’d deliver the manuscript by hand himself the next morning. Then, as gently as possible, he suggested that it might be useful if Gillespie would have a little talk with a psychiatrist. Gillespie looked at him suspiciously. Psychiatrists were in league with
them
, he said, they excavated writers’ brains and left only empty skulls. Then he looked at a watch on his left wrist, then one he was wearing on his right wrist, then took a third one out of a pocket and looked at
that.
He whispered, as though he was letting us in on a great secret. The time in Washington, the time in Moscow and the time in Jerusalem, he confided to us, with a wink. Time to go, he said and danced rather than walked out of the office.”

“
Did
Roger deliver the book to Mr. Bernard the next morning?” Sheila asked.

“He did. He always keeps his promises, even to certifiable lunatics.” Bernard asked him what he thought about the book and Roger said, ‘No opinion. You read it for yourself.’ Two days later Bernard called. He said the book was impenetrable, that was his word, impenetrable. He’s a decent man and he could have said much worse. We got the manuscript back by special messenger the next morning. We had no idea where Gillespie was living, he had told us, he had a series of safe houses and he never slept in the same bed two nights in a row. All we could do is wait. Finally, Gillespie came into the office. It was a rainy day and he was walking around without a hat or a coat and he looked as though he’d been dragged up from the bottom of the sea. He said he’d come for his advance. When Roger told him that there was no advance and that the manuscript had been returned, he first took it philosophically. They have eyes, he said, but they do not see. Then he turned suspicious. Bernard was a false-faced friend, he had misjudged him. He had misjudged Roger, too. The cabal, he said, had many evil roots, always spreading, but the Day of Judgment would see the tree hewn down. His vocabulary had suddenly turned quasi-biblical. He took the manuscript, in a torn cardboard box, and went out. It was raining even harder than when he’d come in, and if he walked two blocks in that downpour his manuscript would have been a sodden, illegible mess in that cardboard box.” Oliver finished his Calvados. “Another one?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” Sheila said. “Is that the end of the saga of Mr. Gillespie?”

“Not quite,” Oliver said. “About a week later he came back to the office to demand his advance again. He hadn’t shaved since we’d seen him there and he must have been sleeping on park benches and flophouses, because his clothes were filthy and ragged. Luckily, Roger was out at the time and I said I didn’t know anything about the advance. You just tell Roger Damon, Gillespie said to me, that the next time I come here he’d better damn well be here. I asked him when that would be. When the book commands me, he said and left. But he didn’t go home, wherever that happened to be at the moment. He went to Bernard’s office and asked
him
about the advance, and when Bernard told him there was to be no advance, he took out a pistol and began waving it about, threateningly, shouting tags of poetry of all kinds, Bernard told me, and quotations from his book. Luckily, a secretary saw what was going on and called the police. When they came, Gillespie laughed at them and tossed the pistol to them. It was a children’s toy. They took him to Bellevue for psychiatric examination, but he put on his sanest, most convincing, modest act and they released him after a few days and we’ve never seen or heard from him again.”

Sheila closed her eyes in pain. “I hate to think of where Mr. Gillespie is at this moment and what he’s doing.”

“So do I,” Oliver said sadly. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. Except”—he paused—“except to consider that the next time he comes into the office it may not be a toy pistol he has in his pocket.”

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

W
HEN SHE GOT BACK
to the school after lunch Sheila found a telegram waiting for her. It was from her mother’s doctor in Vermont. Her mother was in serious condition. She had had a stroke and was in the hospital in Burlington.

Sheila called Damon’s office, but Miss Walton said that Mr. Damon hadn’t come back from lunch yet, but Mr. Gabrielsen was just coming through the door, did Mrs. Damon want to talk to him.

“Yes,” Sheila said. Then when Oliver was on the line she explained about the telegram and asked Oliver to tell Roger to call her at the apartment, where she was going to pack a bag before leaving for Vermont on an Allegheny Airlines plane. If he didn’t get in before going to the airport she would leave a note for him at home. “Oliver,” she said, her voice troubled, “I don’t like to impose on you, but I hate to leave Roger alone at a time like this. I don’t know how long I’ll be away, but do you think you could take him in at your place for a few days? I don’t want him alone in the apartment, especially at night, and I know he’ll refuse to go to a hotel.”

“Of course, Sheila,” Oliver said. “I’ll try. But I can’t guarantee anything. He doesn’t seem even to hear what I’m saying these days. But I’ll do my best.

I’ll ask him to stay with us or I’ll offer to stay with him till you come back or anything you suggest.”

“You’re a dear friend, Oliver,” Sheila said.

“I hope everything goes all right up in Vermont.”

“Thanks.” She hung up and took a taxi to the apartment and before doing anything else turned on the answering machine. There were no messages. She unplugged the machine and started throwing things into a suitcase. She waited as long as she could, then wrote a hasty note for Roger and left it on the little table opposite the front door in the foyer, ran down the steps and hailed a passing taxi to take her to the airport.

Damon had his lunch alone in a restaurant where he was not known. He didn’t want to see anybody he would have to talk to this afternoon. He had had another puzzling dream the night before and he wanted to try to figure out what it meant undisturbed. In the dream he was at a big party with Sheila, surrounded by a great many people, none of whom he recognized. Dinner was served from a buffet and people were wandering around with plates of food. The food was elaborate and rich, but very good. Suddenly his father came in, but it was not the smiling, rosy man in Damon’s recurrent dream, nor the young, careless man who had called to his brother Davey, who had somehow grown into Lieutenant Schulter, “Give him some money, Davey.” Now his father was of an age somewhere between the young man of that dream and the older man of the other. He had thinned down and he had a sullen, sneering expression on his face and Damon was surprised to see him because his father was supposed to be in jail. Damon didn’t know why he had been in jail or why he had been able to come out of it and asked, “How is it you’re out, Dad?”