Living Room (16 page)

He then tried a device that enabled him to shut off his phone and record messages, though he sometimes forgot to turn the phone back on after he finished work, or, as this morning, to shut it off. And so, as his mind was racing through page after page, his pen trying to catch every fleeting nuance the morning’s work had brought, the unshut-off phone rang and rang and rang, and he wished it dead until, in dismay, he finally picked up the instrument.

“Yes?”

It was Mary Wood’s voice. In the days of their intimacy, she would begin conversations not with words but a sound, her private, low-key way of recording her sexual contentment with Al. He
was cool even when affectionate, the
opposite of Jack, whose explosive passion made their lovemaking a collision. Al came to her, fitting in like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a careful, firm connection. How different men were, how surprised she was at her receptiveness to both of them. For a few weeks, taking pleasure in both these men overwhelmed the conscience that finally shook her, made her realize that something had to crack, the ménage. Jack, the marriage, herself. She kept Al’s friendship, broke off the affair.

She hated Al for a week or two because he didn’t seem to care. Then she understood.

Al’s attitude had been deliberate. He liked Mary. He had been surprised when their bodies became involved in their relationship. He was not, insofar as he could judge, in love. He privately despised his skill at conveying detachment. He would not continue to risk the marriage of friends. When Mary gave him the chance to keep the friendship, he took it gladly.

This morning, Mary began, “I thought you’d never answer.”

“I was working. Can I call you back?”

“Won’t be a minute. Did Shirley call you?”

“Something about a television set. Let me call you back later.”

“She wanted you to catch her on the Cavett show, you dumb, cruel bastard.”

Like a child,
Al thought.
Come and see me in the school play.

“She may have blown her career on that show,” Mary said.

Silence.

“I
am
interrupting something.” Then, “You really didn’t take to her.”

“I just haven’t thought about it.”

“I’m sorry I called,” she said, and hung up.

Al found it hard getting back into his work. Was Mary somehow vicariously getting back into a relationship with him through Shirley? And Shirley, was he really that uninterested?

*

Shirley did not go to Max Caiden. She went to a drugstore phone booth and rang Twitchy.

“They gone?”

“They’re standing down the hall.”

“Can they hear you?”

“Doubt it.”

“Well, they can’t hear me. I want you to get the damn Lincoln thing to the dealer, name’s on the back. Find out what he’ll pay, and phone me. I’ll be home. Did you hear what that son of a bitch Marvin called me?”

Twitchy hesitated.

“Talk to you later,” said Shirley.

When distraught, Shirley’s first thought was of a movie. If it was distracting enough, she’d calm down. But she didn’t feel she could sit still, so she decided to walk it off. A decision began to jell as she headed in the general direction of home.

*

Forty minutes later, the doorman at Shirley’s building greeted her with, “Home early, Miss Hartman?”

Shirley, fishing for her key in her handbag without breaking stride, said, “Mumble.” He didn’t quite hear, but the sound of it seemed to satisfy him.

Past him, Shirley felt the ping of guilt. The man was being courteous, not bucking for his Christmas tip.
Why can’t you be civilized?

At her fifth birthday party, in the middle of one of New York’s record-breaking heat waves, Shirley’s mother had suggested to the nine assembled children, five boys, four girls plus Shirley (even then Mrs. Hartman was making sure that everyone was part of a couple), that given the humidity, each of the children take his or her top off to be cooler. The five-year-olds obeyed as if it were part of a game. Giggling, they took their tops off. Then the mothers, who had stayed behind to help with serving the ice cream and pinning the tail on the donkey, noticed that Shirley was pulling off not her top, but her pink skirt and white underpants. She stood there, naked from the waist down, proudly differentiated from all the kids with their tops off, who were now staring or trying not to stare at the birthday girl. Shirley remembered her mother’s swooping over like a great hen, trying to conceal her daughter from the circle of eyes, and saying over and over again in Shirley’s ear, “Why can’t you be civilized like the others?”

Letting herself into her apartment, Shirley thought,
we live in a cemetery of past remarks,
the ghosts of phrases that hang on for the rest of one’s life, haunting the present.
Why do you always have to be different,
her mother had said when the party was over, and it took Shirley over twenty years to learn that if a question is to be answered with a question, hers would be,
Why should different people try to be the same?

She kicked off her shoes in the living room, the left one with too much energy. It arced across the room and missed the Lehmbruck by a hair, thank heaven. Shirley realized that the phone had been ringing ever since she entered the apartment, once, twice, three times, now the fourth time, and she went for it, picking it up on the fifth ring.

“Hello,” she said breathlessly into the receiver.

“It’s me,” said Twitchy. “You’ll never believe it.”

“How much?”

“Nine hundred bucks.”

“That fellow Caiden is serious. He could have sent a box of candy.”

“Listen, Shirley, I’m nervous as hell. I called you from the dealer’s. You weren’t home.”

“I walked. I’m sorry.”

“Well, he said you wouldn’t want a check, that was part of his understanding with Mr. Caiden. I had to sign a receipt for nine hundred in cash. Shirley, I go home by subway I can’t carry that kind of loot. Are you coming back today?”

She told Twitchy to deposit the cash to her account in the bank, but as she talked her mind would not allow her to brush aside the thought she had had on the way home.

“Where I put your salary checks?”

“When you fill out the slip put the amount in the cash column. Twitchy, I want to dictate a memo to Mr. Crouch.”

“Can’t I get rid of this cash first?”

“You know me, if I don’t say it when I think it…your steno book handy?”

“Okay,” said Twitchy, the reluctance evident in her voice.

“To A. Crouch from S. Hartman. ‘When in the course of human events…’

“Are you talking to me?”

“Yes, that’s the memo.”

“It doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’ll sound like me, all right. ‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one person’—got that?—‘to dissolve the bands which have connected them’—make that ‘connected her’—‘with another, and to assume the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle her, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that she should declare the causes which impel her to the separation.’ Am I going too fast?”

“No. It sounds familiar.”

“Not familiar enough. Let’s go on. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all persons are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…’”

“You mean inalienable.”

“I mean
un
. ‘Prudence will dictate that jobs should not be changed for light or transient causes, but your attitude toward something I said off the top of my head on the air is insufferable. We can
afford
to give an idea away. We’ve got plenty of them. I’ll be back in the office when I receive a written apology from Marvin, which I’m going to frame above my desk instead of that Lincoln thing Max Caiden gave me.’ Period.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Shirley, if you ever switch jobs, will you take me with you?”

“You bet, hon.”

Just dictating it made her feel better, off her chest, onto his desk. Then the damn phone rang again.
I thought that girl was in a hurry to get to the bank.

“Yes, Twitchy,” she said into the phone.

“I’ve never been called that before.” It was Al’s voice, laughing now.

“Well,” she said, “this is a surprise.”

Awkward hesitation.

“I expect it is.”

“Is what?”

“A surprise. Surprised myself a bit. I’m calling to ask for a date.”

“Oh?”

“It’s not a dinner, theater, movie date.”

“Am I about to be shocked?”

“Depends.”

“I’m not very shockable. What’d you have in mind?”

“My proposal,” he said, clearing his throat, “is that you join me on BOAC’s flight 490 to Bermuda this afternoon.”

Shirley was used to eliciting surprise in people, not being surprised herself.

“I haven’t heard you say no.”

“You haven’t heard me say yes.”

“All you need to pack is two or three changes and a bathing suit. It’s just for the weekend.”

“If you want to fuck, wouldn’t it be cheaper to do it in New York than Bermuda?”

“Actually, I didn’t have anything that specific in mind. I finished a section, a tough section of the project I’m working on, and thought a break would be nice.”

“So you called four or five girls who were busy and—”

She wished she hadn’t said it.

“I don’t blame you for thinking that. I can prove I haven’t called anyone else.”

“How?”

“I reserved the second ticket and the second room in your name.”

“On the assumption I would say yes.”

“On the assumption I could cancel if you said no.”

“You sound very self-confident.”

“I didn’t know you were against self-confidence. Listen, if you’re overwhelmed by work at that advertising agency of yours, we can skip it.”

“I’m very tempted to be somewhere Arthur Crouch can’t find me for a few days. I hadn’t expected it to be Bermuda.”

“Ever been?”

“No.”

“Not bad.”

“What’s this project you’re working on?”

“Why don’t we talk about it in the sunshine?”

Again a pause.

“If you’d rather not, I’d better cancel. It took time to reach you. I had tried the office first. Then I—”

“I accept. It’s a wild idea.”

“I can pick you up in three-quarters of an hour, is that time enough?”

“When were you planning on coming back?”

“I’ve booked flight 491 Sunday evening.”

“For two?”

“I wasn’t planning to leave you there.”

“If I tell my secretary, my boss might wring the information out of her. If I tell my father, he’ll worry about airplanes, sharks, and you.”

“And if you tell nobody?”

“It’ll be the first time in my life that I’ve gone off without someone knowing where I was.”

“May I suggest you don’t tell the lady matchmaker.”

“Mary?”

“Yes. Let’s keep it simple.”

“Bermuda on forty-five minutes’ notice simple?”

“Forty minutes now.”

When he hung up, she thought he didn’t know her address. Of course he knew her address, he looked it up. He asked Mary. He wouldn’t have asked Mary. He’ll show. If he doesn’t show,
tant pis.
It’s his expedition. Let him take charge, you just coast. What’s to lose?

*

It took her ten minutes to throw things together into her cosmetic case and a Lark under-the-seater. When the phone rang, she figured it was Arthur and didn’t answer.

When the ringing stopped, she thought maybe it was Al and he had changed his mind. Maybe he had been joking.

She checked her face in the bathroom mirror, wrote out a note for the maid, ticked off what she had packed to see if she had left out anything essential.

When Al’s cab arrived, to his surprise she was downstairs in front of the building.

“No sweat,” she said. “You’re on time, I was early.”

The cabdriver put her cosmetics case (“I’ll be careful lady, I know these things are all glass inside”) and her under-the-seater in the trunk, and they were at the Queensboro Bridge before she realized how long they had both been silent.

“I’m glad you said yes,” said Al.

“You invite girls to Bermuda often?”

“I’ve been there half a dozen times, usually alone.”

“Usually?”

“Once or twice a friend.”

“I didn’t mean to pry.” Then after a moment, “Why Bermuda?”

“I like to get away on short notice for long weekends. Look at a
map. Where can you go that doesn’t eat up a lot of travel each way? Bermuda’s tidy, everything looks freshly painted, you don’t feel like a rich American trespassing. You’re not listening,” he said gently.