Necessity (6 page)

She watches his face. He isn't smiling any longer. He says in a different voice, “Who the hell remembers General Charles King now.”

“I'm afraid not I.”

“Why, shoot,” he says with a scoffing theatrical snort, “without Charles King there'd've been no John Ford, no John Wayne, no nothing.”

He is glaring at her. “I gather that doesn't mean a whole hill of beans to you. So tell me, Mrs. Hartman. What are you doing here?”

She smiles to deflect the challenge. Liking him, she says, “What if you found an investor to back you with operating capital?”

He looks as if cold water has been thrown in his face. He catches his breath. “What are you saying to me?”

“I'm asking whether you'd prefer to settle your debts and close up shop and go spend the rest of your days in a trailer park—or whether, given the chance, you'd stay in business here.”

It evokes his ebullient laugh. “What the hell do you think?”

She turns a full circle on her heels, surveying the place.

He says: “It'd be very painful if I thought you were kidding around with me.”

It's nothing wonderful, really. A self-indulgent novelty-specialty enterprise in a cutesy-poo shopping mall. A couple of walls of books, most of them of no interest to anyone whose interests don't include such arcane memorabilia.

No one from her past life will ever dream of looking for her in a place like this.

“I'm not kidding around with you.” She faces Doyle Stevens. “How much do you need?”

“Thirty-five thousand for the moment. And no guarantee you'd ever see a penny's return on it.” He says it quickly and takes a backward step, ready to flinch.

She says, “You're just a hell of a salesman, aren't you.”

“I'm glad you're perceptive enough to recognize that God-given talent in me. Marian doubts I could sell air conditioners in Death Valley. God knows what ever got me into retail trade.”

“Do you regret it, then?”

“I regret I'm not rich, yes ma'am.”

“I doubt that.”

“Do you now.” His smile has warmth in it for the first time.

She asks, “How much does the business lose in the course of a year?”

“Depends on the year. By the time Marian and I take our living expenses out—we can usually figure on breaking even more or less. But the last two years have been poorer than normal. Partly the economy. Partly that our customers keep getting older—the demographics would make a market researcher weep. Half our clients are geriatric cases. Sooner or later their eyesight goes bad or they pass away. Whichever comes first.”

A motorcycle goes by with a roar calculated to offend, and the white-haired man glares toward the window. “Our new generation there doesn't give a hang about the old West. When was the last time you saw a Western in the movies? You don't see any horse operas on the tube any more. Was a time twenty years ago there'd be two dozen cowboy series on the television every week.”

He looks grim. “Remember
True Grit
? When was the last respectable Western book on the bestseller list? It's a sad thing, you know, but there's a generation out there all the way up into their twenties who think the American myth has something to do with automobiles. They've never heard of Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp or Cochise.”

A man's voice startles her from behind her shoulder. “Doyle, there's a bloody story in that.”

It's the customer in the khaki suit. He has a book in his hand. “This any good?”

Doyle Stevens takes it in his hand.
“The Journal of Lieutenant Thomas W. Sweeny.
Westernlore.” It brings out of him a reminiscent smile. “An absolute delight. Sweeny founded Fort Yuma, you know. Remarkable stories about the Indians down there. They had paddlewheel steamboats on the Colorado River in his day, did you know that?”

She remembers her brief stroll. “You could hardly float a toothpick on it now.”

The customer sizes her up. “That's the bloody dam builders. You know a hundred and fifty years ago before it got overgrazed and before they bottomed out the bloody water table with too many deep wells, a good part of what's now the Arizona desert used to be grassland. Green and lush.”

“It's a shame,” she says with a polite little smile, wishing he would go away.

Doyle Stevens says, “Mrs. Hartman—Graeme Goldsmith.”

She shakes his hand. His eyes smile at her with more intimacy than she likes. He's odd looking, especially up close where his astonishingly pale blue eyes take effect. It's been too long since he's been to the barber; he has a thatch of brown hair just starting to go thin at the front and she thinks she detects a pasty hint under the camouflaging tan: likely he drinks more than he ought to.

“That's G-r-a-e-m-e,” he says. “Nobody can spell it. My mother fancied the bloody name.”

Time has faded the accent but he is distinctly Australian.

Doyle Stevens, about to burst, says, “Looks as though Mrs. Hartman's going to be our new business partner.”

“That so?”

She says, “If Mrs. Stevens approves.”

“Well well. Good-oh. We'll have to give it a proper write-up in the
Trib.
”

An alarm jangles through her.

Doyle Stevens says, “Graeme's a reporter on the
Valley Tribune.
”

“Not to mention I'm a stringer for the UPI newswire,” Goldsmith says quickly.

She hatches a smile and hopes it is properly gentle. “I'd rather you didn't print anything about this. It's sort of a silent partnership.”

“Any particular reason.”

“I don't want publicity. A woman living alone—you know how it is. It's the same reason I have my phone unlisted.”

“Okay, Mrs. Hartman. I can buy that.” But she has seen it when he latched onto the statement that she lives alone.

Doyle Stevens says, “You want to pay for that book or were you just going to walk out with it?”

Graeme Goldsmith still has his blue eyes fixed on her face. “How much?”

She tries to keep her glance friendly when it intersects with the Australian's but after he pays for the book she is glad to see the back of him.

A reporter, she thinks. That's just what I need.

18
Every day she visits the mailbox of the dummy apartment in hope there'll be something to collect.

By July 25 nothing has appeared except junk mail and Dorothy Holder's Social Security card: it comes from the forwarding service in Las Vegas.

Taking a break from her on-the-job training in the retail bookselling business and from the flying lessons that take up a good part of every third afternoon she drives to Carson City where she applies for a Nevada driver's license in the name of Dorothy (NMI) Holder.

In these towns you don't go into the good restaurants and eat alone; some of them won't seat you at all and the others assume you're looking for a pickup. You eat instead in chain diners and coffee shops where your palate has become exceedingly bored with oversteamed vegetables and bland American provincial cooking.

By now she has memorized DuPar's menus and those of the House of Pancakes. She has had one too many Open Face Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches With Brown Gravy. Walking into this particular Holiday Inn restaurant she is dreaming wistfully of Guido Tusco's fettucine al pesto, of Henri's Dover sole amandine, of the Manhattan chowder that Marjorie Quirini used to make from clams her husband had dug out of the Great South Bay that very day.

It is in that frame of mind, walking in and waiting to be seated, that she sees Bert and recognizes him.

Terror roots her to the spot.

It can't possibly be—can it?

He sits at the bar with his back to her, the muscles pulling his jacket tight across the wide lean shoulders, and his big long close-cropped dark head is cocked a bit to one side as he stirs the drink in front of him. He sits hipshot on the bar-stool with one leg dangling and the other propped stiff against the floor—his habitual posture.

Standing bolt still she tries to fight the panic.

What in the hell is he doing
here?

Come on. Jesus. Get a grip … just sidle on out of here …
move.

She's paralyzed. Pinpricks of fear burst out on her skin.

Her mesmerized stare is fastened to the back of his head.

Unwillingly her eyes crawl up to the mirror beyond him, the mirror behind the bar. He's looking right at her.

For a moment it doesn't register. All she knows is that he's staring at her.

Then she sees his face—it was there all the time, a pinched dewlappy face she has never seen before.

A stranger.

It's not Bert after all.

Relief is so powerful that when the hostess comes toward her with a menu she beams a radiant smile upon the bewildered woman. But by the time she slides into the Naugahyde booth she's gone faint and weak and she orders a double martini, extra dry, and sits shaking in all her joints until it arrives.

Not him at all. But what an uncanny resemblance from the back. The shape of his head, the cant of the wide slabby shoulders—even the waist-nipped cut of the light tweed jacket.

It's so easy to be fooled …

He was just like that, she recalls, the very first time she saw him. Propped tall against a bar stool with his back to her.

It was in—what was the name of the place? One of those tony discos in the Hamptons. Filled with groupers, of whom she was one that summer: two weeks of sharing a dumpy cottage in Sag Harbor with five other girls.

He was in lime sherbet slacks and a madras jacket. She danced with him. He was long-boned and awkward: a graceless dancer, but he had an attractive way of laughing at his own clumsiness. And his hard lean musculature made the other men in the place look like marshmallows.

The hoarse rasp of his voice intrigued her. He had a quick sense of humor.

“Your name's Matty, isn't it?”

“How did you know that?”

“Matty Sevrin, right? I asked your girlfriend over there. When you went to the Ladies'. What's it short for? Matilda?”

“Madeleine.”

“Pretty name.”

He said his name was Al. She asked if it was short for Alfred. No; his name was Albert.

“Then I'll call you Bert.”

“Why?”

“So it will belong to me,” she said. “It'll be my special name for you and we won't share it with anybody.”

She was just kidding along at the time. Flirting with him. Harmless. It meant nothing.

He seemed an outsider here, a bit older than most of them, amused by the swirling racket. He bought her a drink and said he'd seen her in a magazine spread, modeling fashions. She was pleased to be recognized.

(Weeks later he admitted the falsehood. He hadn't recognized her from ads. He'd pumped her girl friend at the bar. By then they were an item and she forgave him the white lie.)

They danced again; he asked her where she was staying.

It was getting late and the disco noise was starting to get to her. By then she'd fended off half a dozen young men and maybe she was just tired of it or maybe she was impressed by his hard body and his good-natured mature self-assurance and the way he didn't come at her head-on with all guns blazing. She decided she liked him enough to give him the phone number of the cottage.

He didn't offer to drive her home; he didn't make a pass or even imply one and she found this refreshing and disappointing at once. But she thought about him constantly.

Two days later he drove up in a white Seville with his friends, a married couple he'd collected at the L.I.R.R. station—Jack and Diane Sertic; thirty-fiveish, all of them. Bert made introductions and she got in beside him, carrying her racquet and wearing her whites. The Sertics were in Ralph Lauren purple and Bert called them snobs.

She sips the second martini and it all floods through her recollection as if it has just taken place an hour ago. She remembers how they chatted on the twenty-minute ride about the idiotic tribal rituals of the Hamptons and the lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes for which you had to pay a scandalous $18 a pound that summer.

The road seemed to have been reserved for use by Rollses and Cadillacs, with the occasional BMW for levity. And then Bert drove them into the sinuous pebbled driveway of the eight-acre Stanford White estate he was renting. It had sixteen rooms; pillars and a porte-cochere and a fountain on the lawn that sloped down to the shore. She noted a red two-seater Mercedes sports car and an Audi sedan parked in the four-car garage.

Jack Sertic was impressed. “What do you have to pay for it?”

“Forty thousand for the season.”

“Not bad.”

She tried not to gape. Bert said, “Used to belong to one of the owners of the 21 club. See the dock down there? They ran liquor in from here during Prohibition.”

“Nothing changes all that much, does it. Now it's coke and Acapulco gold.” Jack Sertic grinned at Bert.

They played two sets of mixed doubles. The Sertics were good; she and Bert were better. Enjoying the victory they went on to lunch at the beach club.

They swam in the afternoon. A foursome of Bert's friends came by, played a raucous game of croquet, drank planter's punch and departed.

She flowed with it all, in a pink silky haze: it seemed so Gatsbyesque. A little high on rum she drowsed in the shade and listened to the others talk about Studio 54 and about a thoroughbred stallion that was being syndicated for a million five and about an Arthur Ashe–Jimmy Connors match that had taken place a week ago. Bert told a rambling story about two gangs of screw-ups, one employed by the CIA and the other by the Mafia, who he swore had actually gone to open warfare several years earlier, the battleground being Port-au-Prince where rattletrap Second World War bombers piloted by CIA dipsticks had tried to bomb Papa Doc's palace, only to have their aim thrown off by unanticipated antiaircraft fire from the palace roof.