Boys & Girls Together (73 page)

“Like a chair.”

“Don’t you know why I came here? To her home grounds? I had to check the competition, Charley; you know—take in the talent in the room.” She stood and hurried upstairs, turning into the nearest bedroom. “Robby’s?”

Charley nodded. “Quit this.”

“It bothers you? Me in your son’s room?”

“Of course not.”

“Liar.” She hurried out and down the hall into the master bedroom. “Packing?”

“That’s right.”

Jenny opened a closet door, grabbed a dress, held it against her body. “Tiny,” she said. “On me, anyway. But then, I’m such a horse.” She gestured to a picture of Betty Jane on Charley’s bureau. “God, she’s pretty. Pretty and petite. I could kill her.”

Charley said nothing.

Jenny started to laugh.

“The joke?”

“The joke is that I can’t remember a time when we’ve disliked each other more than we do now. And what’s the subject under discussion? Why, divorce, naturally. That’s funny, Charley. Think about it. I’m furious with you for last night; you’re furious with me for coming here. Well, I’m sick of me for coming here and I’ll bet you’re a little angry at yourself for last night. We make a pretty cold quartet, you and I.” She dabbed some of Betty Jane’s perfume behind her ears and stood next to Charley. “Like it?”

“Let’s go downstairs, shall we?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

Jenny gestured toward the bed. “It’s sleepytime down south.” She lifted the suitcase, set it on a chair. “Who gets to undress who?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning no.”

“I told you, I’ve got to take in the talent in the room. Betty Jane’s welcome to my sofa bed. Anytime.”

“And I told you no.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think either of us would enjoy it.”

“Who said anything about enjoying it?” She switched out the light, undressed, walked straight into his arms, slammed her body up against his. He grabbed her, kneaded her body with his great hands. She guided them toward the bed. They tumbled down on top, rolling around, his hands raiding her flesh until she screamed “You’re hurting me!”

“Good.”

“I could hurt you—bite you—”

“Do it.”

“No, you’d like that, because then she’d see—she’d make the choice, not you. I’ll never mark you till you’re mine. So hurt me now—I don’t care—hurt me all you want to.”

Charley did as he was told.

At four the next morning he drove her to New Brunswick. She insisted on lying on the floor of the back seat. All the time he drove she giggled. When they reached the outskirts of New Brunswick, he started laughing too. He let her off and waved goodbye and went back home, making excellent time, considering how long he wasted parking by the side of the road when he was weeping too hard to see to drive.

Charley and Rudy Miller walked through the hot ghetto, skirting swirls of Puerto Ricans, eddies of Jews. Down Rivington Street they went, the late-afternoon sun still visible over the old tenements. Close ahead of them lay the babble of Orchard Street. They turned into the sound. “Yes, I’m happy,” Charley said. “Believe me, it’s the truth. Listen: there’s a reason people have affairs. And the reason is because it’s not unenjoyable. Jenny’s a great girl. She loves me. I’m really happy. I know what I’m doing and I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” Rudy said.

Charley made no reply.

“I’m fresh out!”

“Out of what?”

Rudy raised his arms high and wide and shouted “Instant Pity!” into the air. Then he stopped in front of a pickle stand and held up two fingers.

“Have a whole jar,” the pickle lady said. “Special today. Forty cents.”

“Two pickles and no lip or I take my business to Levy three stands down.”

“It’s not good for Jews to be tightwads,” the pickle lady said. “Gives the religion a bad name.”

“Levy wins me,” Rudy said, and he waved a brisk goodbye. “Oh, Charles, if I could manufacture enough Instant Pity I could likely save the world, but it’s hard to come by and I had this little bit left only, and as I was walking to the subway stop to meet you this ancient, wretched, leprous cripple hobbled up to me and said, ‘Help me, help me, my wife has cancer, my daughter leukemia, my son just ran off with a
shiksa
, my mother heard the news and went insane and the shock of that killed my father on the spot and on top of everything else my piles are acting up.’ Could there be a sadder story, Charles? I doubt it, but I didn’t weep. I just whipped out my last smidgen of Instant Pity and I gave it to him and said, ‘Take this, just add air,’ and he downed it, and do you know that inside five seconds not only was he chipper but his piles were gone.”

Charley smiled. “Remarkable.”

“If only I’d known I would have saved it. If I had it to give you, you’d love me. ‘That Rudy,’ you’d think. ‘Such heart. Such infinite understanding.’ But alas, I fail you, Charles. You’ll have to bleed alone. What are you having an affair for, fool?”

“I love her.”

“Of course you do, you have to. But have you told her?”

“No.”

“That would mean subsequent action, yes? You love her, you get divorced. So you can’t tell her. Oh, Charles, I have had, believe thee me, affairs, and I know. Hello, Levy.”

The pickle man nodded.

“This is my friend Charles Fiske, the famous Gentile. He wants a Levy pickle. I have told him that Levy is the king of cucumbers. Don’t disappoint him.”

“I saw you,” Levy said. “Talking with my competition. You held up two fingers.”

“Meaning two centuries,” Rudy explained. “I told her that’s how long it would take her to match your product. Two hundred years to be your equal, so give my friend a garlic pickle, crisp and sharp. And one for me, while you’re at it.”

Levy ducked his old hands into the nearest barrel.

“Thief!” Rudy cried. “Those are your soft pickles. Your old, soft, wrinkled, inferior—”

Levy sighed and reached into a different barrel.

Rudy took the pickles, paid for them and handed one to Charley. “Bite.”

Charley bit. Then he nodded and made a smile.

“Hardly an ecstatic response,” Rudy said to Levy. “But what can you expect from a Gentile?” They started walking again, down the loud street. “What we’re not supposed to talk about today is what we’re feeling; am I correct, Charles?”

“I suppose so.”

Rudy nodded. “When you suggested a walk down Orchard Street and then told me of your high jinks—Orchard Street is hardly the place to bare the soul. What do you want from me, Charles?”

“Cover.”

“Explain.”

“If you hear from Betty Jane, and she happens to ask did you happen to see me at some particular time, if she wonders were we together—”

“The answer is always yes?”

“The answer is always yes.”

“I like her. Why should I lie?”

“No reason.”

“Do you like her?”

“I’ve tried not to do much thinking lately.”

“Well, when you were thinking, why did you marry her?”

“Why?”

Rudy stopped in front of a clothing cart and fingered a shirt. “Stein,” he said.

Stein nodded.

“You have the finest taste on Orchard Street, you know that? Stein, if I had a million in solid gold I would still buy my clothes from you.”

“You’d be a fool,” Stein said.

“But a fool with impeccable taste,” Rudy said, dropping the shirt, walking again.

“There’s a look,” Charley said. “A look—I don’t mean just a face; I mean a whole kind of
look
—if you’re who I am—”

“Who you were—”

“Right. Who I was. If you’re who I was—what the hell, Betty Jane looked like my wife. When I first saw her, I can still remember sort of nodding, almost in recognition.”

“Some Enchanted Evening,” Rudy said.

Charley ignored him, hurrying on. “I had just turned down many millions and my prospects weren’t all that limitless and I saw this girl ...”

Charley stopped and stood there, Rudy watching him, as the people crowded by them, bumping them, pushing diem together, forcing them apart. “I saw this girl and she smiled at me and I could tell. It was very goddam romantic, if you want to know the truth.” He began shaking his head, sharply, and his eyes quickly closed. “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, I should have known something was wrong even then—I met her in Schrafft’s! How can you be romantic in Schrafft’s? She was having a sundae with this girlfriend of hers, Penny, and I walked over to them and said something crazy and we were married before the month was out and how the hell was I supposed to know. You meet someone and fall in love and they’re not supposed to turn out stupid. Isn’t that right?” He stared at Rudy. The crowd milled around them, tiny Puerto Ricans, ancient Jews. “What am I doing, Rudy? The other day I cried. I was driving and the next thing I couldn’t see the road. Will you cover for me? Will you lie? What am I doing? Am I crazy? What’s the answer?”

Rudy raised his arms again, raised them high, spread them wide. “The answer is always yes,” he said.

“Shall we get comfortable?” Jenny asked, nodding toward the sofa bed.

Charles stared at the blue walls. “If you’d like.”

“If you would.”

“Would you?”

“It’s up to you.”

“No, really.”

“Fair is fair. I made the suggestion; you make the decision.”

“I hate these goddam blue walls,” Charley said.

Jenny said nothing.

Charley made a smile. “I can decide anything except decisions.”

“Have you thought about it, speaking of decisions?”

“Thought about what?” he said.

“The name of the game.”

“Oh, that. I have.”

“And?”

“Life without you would be unbearable,” Charley said. “Have I told you lately?”

“Are you being nasty?”

“I don’t know. I just hate these blue walls so, it’s hard to tell what I’m being.”

“Why don’t we paint them?”

“Why don’t we?”

“If we painted them, they wouldn’t be blue anymore.”

“Not unless we painted them blue all over again. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Where?”

“Let’s walk along the river.”

“Sold.” She threw on her coat. “Will you be warm enough?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Well, it’s
cold
out. It’s practically November.”

“You’re from the north woods; you’re supposed to like it cold.”

“I left, didn’t I?”

“True.” He opened the apartment door, held it for her. They hurried out to the sidewalk, then slipped silently across the street and over to Riverside Drive. They entered the park quickly, walking down to the Hudson, slowing when they reached the promenade along the river. “Betty Jane went to see Rudy,” Charley said then. “Yesterday.”

“And?”

“He lied. She believes him.”

“You’re sure?”

“When you want to believe, you believe.”

“What did she ask him?”

“Nothing specific. Just was I acting funny. Rudy said he thought I was. Work pressures—that sort of thing. Betty Jane agreed with him completely.”

“Is that why he came to the office today? To tell you?”

“I guess so. I don’t know. Whenever he’s up near the office and feels like it, he drops in. Mostly he stays in the ghetto.”

“What’s with him?”

“God knows. He crazy, if that’s what you mean.”

“Why did you pick him? To lie for us?”

“Because I knew he would. He does that kind of thing.”

“Lies?”

“No. He just happens to be the kind of guy that if you ask him to do something, he does it.”

“You like him?”

“We like each other. I think I can say that.”

“Why?”

“What are you so full of questions for?”

“I’m thinking of having an affair with him. He’s kind of incredible-looking. Is he a good writer?”

“I think so.”

“And you’ve known him how long?”

“What is it with you?”

“I just want to know a little bit about my savior. How do you know you can trust him? You’ve known him how long?”

“Ever since I went to work for Kingsway. I was on the slop pile. You know, reading all the unsolicited manuscripts. You never accept any of them, but somebody’s got to read them, and I was given the job. I was reading ten books a day, sometimes fifteen—”

“A
day
?”

“You just read them until you know for sure they stink. That only takes a few pages usually. I was going crazy doing that. There’s a limit to how much of that stuff you can read. I had this Maxwell Perkins image of myself. I wanted to discover somebody. Then I came across
The Nose Is for Laughing
. I can still remember how it began. ‘First there was the nose. There were other features: eyes, a sweet mouth, elf’s ears. But first, before you could consider them, first there was the nose.’ It went something like that.”

“Whose nose?”

“The narrator’s father. It was just a little book, a novella, about this kid and his father and their life in this delicatessen. The father was very old, and his hearing was bad, and one day he got sick and went
deaf
. It ruined him. He thought he was a freak. The kid loved him, but the father “wouldn’t believe it. He just wouldn’t. So finally the kid clapped his hands over his ears until the drums popped. And he was deaf too. And the father saw the kid did love him, and when he found out, he started to cry, and the kid cried too, and that was how the book ended, the two of them hugging each other and crying in the empty store.” Charley smiled. “I would have liked that book if I’d just picked it up at the library, but after a million years of fifteen books a day, it had quite an effect on me.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, first off, I ran in to see Dave Boardman.” Charley leaned against the railing and looked down at the cold river. “I burst in on Boardman and told him I found this beautiful little novel on the slop pile and he picked up his golf ball out of his desk and started whipping it against the wall and called me feebleminded, but I kept after him until he promised to read the book that night. Just because I liked it didn’t mean anything; but if he liked it, then the firm would publish it, so he took the book home with him while I tried calling up the author. R. V. Miller and an address—that’s all the book had on it—but there wasn’t any R. V. Miller in the telephone directory and the address on the book was way down in the ghetto along Orchard Street. I’d never been there before but I went. I asked people and finally I found this crummy building and the landlady said a Miller lived there and I knocked on this door and knocked and knocked but there wasn’t any answer. Just for the hell of it I turned the knob and the door opened and there was this kid looking at me. This beautiful kid. And he said ‘Yes?’ and I said ‘Mr. Miller?’ and he said ‘Yes?’ again and I said that I was with the Kingsway people, and for the third time, he said ‘Yes?’ and I said ‘I loved your book, I loved it!’ and the next thing I knew we were both laughing and hugging each other in the empty room, just like the ending of the book all over again.”