Hard Rain Falling (30 page)

“Yes.”

“He must be pretty rich.”

The gray-haired man laughed. They made other stops. They unloaded John, who was awake and sullen but not speaking, in front of an apartment house on Washington; and the gray-haired man took his wife, the other woman in back, to their home, another Pacific Heights mansion, but not as large as the first one. Then he drove Sally to her apartment on the east side of Telegraph Hill. Before she got out of the car she kissed Jack on the mouth and said, “I’m really sorry I got you fired. Come and see me if you need a job or anything.” She got a card out of her pocketbook and handed it to Jack. Then the two men drove off.

“Where to?”

Jack gave him the address.

“It was really as much your fault as anyone’s,” the man said. “We all take the blame and pass it around, but it was your fault. All you had to do was recognize the situation.”

“Fuck the situation,” Jack said. “I’m sleepy and hung over and pissed off. Did you drive me just so’s you could tell me it was all my fault?”

“No, I thought maybe you’d have a drink with me, and we could talk. I imagine jobs aren’t very easy for you to find.”

“I’m not supposed to drink,” Jack said. “But screw it. I’m not supposed to lose my job, either. You know, if your friend decides to push it, he can get me thrown back in. I committed a battery on him.”

“He won’t. He was humiliated; that’s about all he wants.”

They drove down Columbus to Broadway and parked the car. After they had gone into a small bar and sat down the man introduced himself as Myron Bronson and they shook hands formally. The waiter came over and Bronson ordered Irish whisky with water back for both of them.

“There was a party last night,” he said. “If these things go on too long, they always end badly. You have to understand that these are very nice people most of the time. This morning they were all in a mood to hate each other, and you got fired. By tonight they’ll have forgotten all about it, or remember it in context of a hangover, as a way of inducing guilt.”

“What about you? You’re not drunk. What are you doing with them?”

Bronson smiled. “I learned to drink a long time ago, when there were some rules. But you’d be surprised about John. He’s really a very nice fellow. He’s the one you hit. He’s a lawyer, and a very good one.”

“What about you? What do you do?” Jack was thinking about the Rolls parked outside.

Bronson said, “I have some money. I don’t really do anything. I have an office with a desk in it that cost more than most people make in a year, but I don’t use it very much.” He raised two fingers for more whisky.

“You’re a rich man,” Jack said.

“I suppose you could say that. Yes. Of course.”

“Did you earn it, or did somebody give it to you?”

Bronson looked amused. “Why are you asking me all these questions? Are you trying to get even? It doesn’t make any real difference where the money comes from, as long as I have it. It’s impossible to
earn
the kind of money I have, so you’d have to say it was given to me; but I’m not like Morgan; I don’t think God gave it to me. But I’m glad I have it. Let’s not talk about money.”

“Very boring,” Jack said. He finished his second shot. “Now let me buy you a drink.” He waved his hand at the waiter.

“Hangover gone?” Bronson asked.

“I do feel better,” Jack said. He liked the rich man. He liked the way he dressed, and he liked his somewhat long, curly gray hair, and his mustache, and his fine gray eyes, and his amused smile. The rich man looked like a good rich man, not a bad rich man, although Jack was not sure what the distinction was, and just being with him made Jack forget his new problems, as if all he had to do was ask Bronson and Bronson would give him a whole wad of money and everything would be fine. It was a pleasant feeling. He wondered if Bronson felt this way all the time; never having to worry about money.

“What’s it like to be rich?” he asked. “No shit. We’re not friends, we’ll probably never see each other again. So you can tell me.”

“I suppose you’re right. When I was a boy,” Bronson said, “I was a Mormon. I was sent to Germany by the church to be a missionary. I got there in the middle of the German inflationary period. Nineteen twenty-three. For ten thousand marks you could buy a newspaper. Upper middle-class families were dining on cabbage soup. Nobody had any toothpaste. Some people just laughed at me. That was all right. Others thought I had an answer to their problems, and that was bad. That kept me awake nights, that look of hope in people’s eyes, as if all their troubles came from believing in the wrong God. But that didn’t happen often. Anyway, the whole thing struck me as a gigantic fraud; the church, the religion, the belief in the myth, everything. But I didn’t stop yet, because, you see, the money was coming from the church. And my family. So for weeks after I was absolutely certain there was no God, I kept on with my missionary activities. I felt like a fool. Eventually I gave it up and went to Paris to be a poet.” He laughed. “My father and mother absolutely refused to send me any more money. I absolutely refused to come home. All of this absoluteness by mail. Finally my father changed his mind and sent me money. I became an expatriate. I spent most of the money on girls, and the rest of the time, when I wasn’t trying to make friends with the older Americans, I would stay in my room, reading
Black Mask
or trying to write poems about what I had seen in Germany. I suppose they were just awful, but some of them got published. The problem was in getting the French prostitutes to see the importance of this. Besides, my artistic conscience was bothering me. You see, I really wanted money, a lot of it. I didn’t want to believe that that was what I wanted, because it seemed such a shabby ambition. At any rate, I went to New York eventually, after my parents’ money ran out, and `immersed myself in the roots of my native soil,’ which is to say, starved. This went on for six months. It was awful. I suppose I went insane. I started making money; I had a flair for the kind of intricate blackmailing necessary to life insurance sales, and after a while I began investing. Since I thought of myself as a cynic and a thief anyway, I had no trouble doubling, then tripling, my investments.” He smiled at Jack. “You have no idea how intense I was in those days. I was a priest. I made a lot of money and I managed to keep it. That’s all. I’m still in the life insurance business. I own three companies.”

Later, when Bronson let Jack out of the car in front of his building, he said, “Look, don’t feel too angry with Saul Markowitz. He spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. He’s a very withdrawn man.”

“I haven’t got a worry in the world,” Jack said. He was drunk from the fine whisky, and he waved good-bye to Myron Bronson and loped up the stairs. When he woke up in the afternoon he was angry at himself for not having conned Bronson out of something, but then he realized it would have been very difficult to do, if Bronson’s story of his life was true. Somehow, it did not sound true. It was all too easy. Yet, such things did happen, he supposed.

It would have remained an episode, one of those odd meetings that happen to people who drink a lot, if it hadn’t been for Sally’s card, which Jack found a few days later on his bureau. He had already been to see his parole officer and the two of them were trying to find him another job. Saul Markowitz had already called the parole officer and had smoothed things over, so there wasn’t going to be any trouble. When Jack found the card he remembered that she had said something about getting him a job. He decided he would use it as an excuse to go see her. Maybe there would even be a job in it. But that was not why he was going to see her. He had not slept with a woman in two years, and the thought of her made him weak with desire. It was like getting out of San Quentin; first there was one life and you just got used to it and pretended that there was nothing else, and then suddenly you remembered all the other things that could be done, and the urgency became frantic, everything else blurred away. Jack bathed and dressed in his cheap slacks and sport coat, and then to burn away the excess nervous energy he walked all the way from Pine and Jones to Telegraph Hill. When he got to her apartment, after going up and down the wrong streets twice, he was steamy hot and angry, half-certain that she was not there, or not alone, and that he should have telephoned, or she would not remember him, or would remember him and cut him cold—but none of that was true. She opened the door and laughed in recognition and asked him in, and he walked past her into the apartment, his stomach muscles hard with tension, his face burning. He felt like a child who has come to beg some free candy from the grocer.

She was not beautiful, Jack decided; just very pretty. She had the high cheekbones, well-defined nose, and blue-black hair of an Indian, but her eyes were as blue and intense as his own, and her skin was pale rather than sallow. She wore her hair up to show her slender neck to its best advantage, and as she turned around for him to follow her into the apartment, Jack automatically looked down at her ankles. They, too, were slender. Jack fell in love with her. He was not sure exactly when he fell in love, but he always remembered thinking, as he glanced down at her ankles, “I’m in love. With her.” He felt ridiculous.

After three quick drinks and twenty minutes of tense (for Jack) conversation, they went to bed. The telephone interrupted the conversation twice; the first time a woman friend of Sally’s, the second time her date for that evening, and she, her eyes on Jack, said into the mouthpiece, “No, I’m sorry as hell. My damn period just started and I feel awful. I’m going to take a couple of Nebs and”—she winked at Jack—”go to bed with a fat novel.”

After she hung up, Jack said, “Did it?”

“Did what?”

“Did your period just start?”

“No, but it’s a beauty of an excuse, isn’t it? Takes the heart right out of them.” She stood in the middle of the room, looking down at Jack. He was seated cross-legged on a cushion beside the small fireplace. “You didn’t come over here to talk, did you?”

“Well, you said something about a job.”

She laughed. “That was just to get you over here. I don’t have any jobs. Unless you’d like to be paid for sleeping with me. Have you ever taken money for it?”

“I’ve never had an offer,” Jack said. He stayed on his cushion. “I’ve never met a chick like you, either.”

“I’m debauched,” she said. “The coachman got me in the back seat of the family phaeton when I was twelve; and from there on out it’s been all downhill.”

“Why do you talk such bullshit?” Jack was vaguely irritated. He had come over here to rape, not be seduced by a fast-talking whore. She had him off-balance and he did not like it. He felt inferior and young, and even intimidated by the expensive furnishings of the apartment.

“Why, isn’t all talk bullshit?” she asked. She had her hands on her hips, and her face was in shadow. “I’ve been waiting for you to say something obvious, but you don’t seem to know how. Don’t you know how to score with
chicks like me?
You’re supposed to talk in double entendres, and then come up behind me while I’m mixing the drinks, and put your hand on my fanny. Then I turn around, grunting like a hog, and lay a big fat spitty kiss on you. Then we take off our clothes.”

Jack stood up. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but if you want to go to bed, let’s go.”

She grinned. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’m making fun of you?”

“No.”

“Well, then; one of us is going to have to
lead
, and the other
follow
. One of us has to make the first move. Are you the type that likes to make the first move, or do you prefer the girls to do all the work? Or, I guess we could sort of stare at each other, and go `
Ooh!
’ and fall into each other’s arms.”

“I want it without all the bullshit. I haven’t slept with a woman in a long time.”

Something changed in her eyes, but her mouth was still amused. “Oh, really? Neither have I.”

“
Jesus!
”

“Well, why are we standing around talking?”

“How the fuck should I know? Let’s go.”

He took her hand and led her back into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. He was afraid she was going to ask him to ignore the mess, but he should have known better. She broke away from him, humming, and started to undress, slipping out of her slacks like a man, pulling her sweater over her head and coming up to Jack for him to unhook her brassiere. That cleared away the fog, and for the first time that night Jack began to feel really passionate and happy. In a very few moments they were on the bed naked together and not talking.

Jack had been afraid that after all that time it would be over too quickly, and he tried to put off the moment of penetration as long as possible, and then even that became dangerous and he entered her quickly; he had been right, and they were finished almost before they started; but before Jack had time to feel sorry about it, Sally went down on him, her appetites increased rather than diminished, and Jack did not have time to consider what to do, it was there in front of him to be done, and he dissolved into the animality of it, and for the next hour vanished into an ecstasy he had forgotten existed. It was too good to think about, too sweet to investigate, and on his third climax he almost fainted, and although his eyes were open he could see nothing but bright colors, as if he had gone blind to form, and then with one final teeth-rattling spasm he did subside into unconsciousness.

They were awakened around midnight by the telephone. It went on for fifteen sputtery rings before quitting, and by then they were smoking cigarettes in the semidarkness. He could feel her smooth skin against him, but he was beyond arousal.

“I suppose,” she said, “that I ought to tell you what a wonderful lover you are. For your manhood’s sake. But I’m so sick of that
macho
crap. I think you’ve really got it. But not as a lover. You’re okay, but you don’t know much. You’ve got vitality, but any teen-age boy could do better. And of course any woman. But all you really need is practice. You’re out of practice.”