Rich Man, Poor Man (12 page)

‘You got the bike outside?’

Yeah. But we need some gas.’ The motorcycle belonged to Claude’s brother Al, who had just been drafted two weeks before. Al had promised to break every bone in Claude’s body if he came back and found that Claude had used the machine, but whenever his parents went out at night, Claude pushed it out of the garage, after siphoning off a little gas from the family’s second car, and raced around town for an hour or so, avoiding the police, because he was too young to have a licence.

‘Okay,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s see what’s happening up the hill.’

Claude had a length of rubber tubing slung on the motorcycle and they went behind the school, where it was dark, and opened the gas tank of a Chewy that was parked there and Claude put the tube in and sucked hard, then, as the gasoline came up, filled the tank of the motorcycle.

Tom got on behind and with Claude driving they spurted through back streets towards the outskirts of town and began to climb the long winding road that went up the hill to the Boylan estate.

When they got to the main gate, made of huge wrought-iron wings standing open and set into a stone wall that seemed to run for miles on each side, they parked the motorcycle behind some bushes. The rest of the way they’d have to go on foot, so as not to be heard. There was a gatekeeper’s cottage, but since the war nobody had lived in it. The boys knew the estate well.

For years, they had been jumping over the wall and hunting for birds and rabbits with BB guns. The estate had been neglected for years and it was more like a jungle than the meadowed park it had been originally.

They walked through the woods towards the main house. When they got near it, they saw the Buick parked in front. There were no lights on outside, but there was a gleam from a big French window downstairs.

They moved cautiously towards the flower bed in front of the window. The window came down almost to the ground. One side of it was ajar. The curtains had been drawn carelessly and with Claude kneeling in the loam and Tom standing astride him, they both could look inside at the same time.

As far as they could see, the room was empty. It was big and square with a grand piano, a long couch, and big easy chairs and tables with magazines on them. A fire was going in the fireplace. There were a lot of books on the shelves along the walls. A few lamps did for the lighting. The double doors facing the window were open and Tom could see a hallway and the lower steps of a staircase.

‘That’s the way to live,’ Claude whispered. ‘If I had a joint like this, I’d have every broad in town.’

‘Shut up,’ Tom said. ‘Well, there’s nothing doing here. Let’s move.’

‘Come on, Tom,’ Claude protested. ‘Take it easy. We just got here.’

‘This isn’t my idea of a big night,’ Tom said. ‘Just standing out in the cold looking at a room with nobody in it.’

‘Give it a chance to develop, for Christ’s sake,’ Claude said. ‘They’re probably upstairs. They can’t stay there all night.’

Tom knew that he didn’t want to see anybody come into that room. Anybody. He wanted to get away from that house. And stay away. But he didn’t want to look as though he was chickening out. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll give it a couple of minutes.’ He turned away from the window, leaving Claude on his knees peering in. ‘Call me if anything happens,’ he said.

The night was very still. The mist rising from the wet ground was getting heavier and there were no stars. In the distance, below them, there was the faint glow of the lights of Port Philip. The Boylan grounds swept away from the house in all directions, a myriad of great old trees, the outline of the fence of a tennis court, some low buildings about fifty yards away that had once been used as a stable. One man living in all that. Tom thought of the bed he shared with his brother. Well,

Boylan was sharing a bed tonight, too. Tom spat..

‘Hey!’ Claude beckoned to him excitedly. ‘Come here, come here.’

Slowly, Tom went back to the window.

‘He just came in, down the stairs,’ Claude whispered. ‘Look at that. Just look at that, will you.’

Tom looked in. Boylan had his back to the window, on the far side of the room. He was at a table with bottles, glasses and a silver ice container on it. He was pouring whisky into two glasses. He was naked.

‘What a way to walk around a house,’ Claude said.

‘Shut up,’ Tom said. He watched as Boylan carelessly dropped some ice into the glasses and splashed soda from a siphon into the glasses. Boylan didn’t pick up the glasses right away. He went over to the fireplace and threw another log on the fire, then went to a table near the window and opened a lacquered box and took out a cigarette. He lit it with a foot long silver cigarette lighter. He was smiling a little.

Standing there, so close to the window, he was clearly outlined in the light of a lamp. Mussed, bright blond hair, skinny neck, pigeony chest, flabby arms, knobby knees, and slightly bowed legs. His dick hung down from the bush of hair, long, thick reddened. A dumb rage, a sense of being violated, of being a witness to an unspeakable obscenity, seized Tom. If he had had a gun he would have killed the man. That puny stick, that strutting, smiling, satisfied weakling, that feeble, pale, hairy slug of a body so confidently displayed, that long, fat, rosy instrument. It was worse, infinitely worse, than if he and Claude had seen his sister come in naked.

Boylan walked across the thick carpet, the smoke from his cigarette trailing over his shoulder, out into the hall. He called up the stairs. ‘Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?’ He listened. Tom couldn’t hear the answer. Boylan nodded and came back into the room and picked up the two glasses. Then, carrying the whiskey, he went out of the room and up the stairs.

‘Jesus, what a sight,’ Claude said. ‘He’s built like a chicken. I guess if you’re rich you can be built like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the broads still come running.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tom said thickly.

‘What the hell for?” Claude looked up at him in surprise, the light that came through the parted curtains reflecting damply on his eyeglasses. “The action is just beginning.’

Tom reached down and grabbed Claude by the hair and jerked him savagely to his feet.

‘Hey, for Christ’s sake, watch what you’re doing,’ Claude said.

‘I said let’s get out of here.’ Tom held Claude roughly by his necktie. ‘And you keep quiet about what you saw tonight.’

‘I didn’t see anything,’ Claude whined. ‘What the hell did I see! A skinny crock with a dick on him like an old rubber hose. What’s there to keep quiet about?’

‘Just keep quiet, that’s all,’ Tom said, his face close to Claude’s. ‘If I ever hear a word from anyone, you’ll get a beating you’ll never forget. Got it?’

‘Jesus, Tom,’ Claude said reproachfully, rubbing his sore scalp, ‘I’m your friend.’

‘Got it?’ Tom said fiercly.

‘Sure, sure. Anything you say. I don’t know what there’s to get so excited about.’

Tom let him go and wheeled and strode across the lawn away from the house. Claude followed him, grumbling. ‘Guys tell me you’re crazy,’ he said, as he caught up to Tom, ‘and I always tell them they’re nuts, but now I’m beginning to see what they mean, I swear to God I do. Boy, you are temperamental.’

Tom didn’t answer. He was almost running as they neared the gate house. Claude wheeled out the bike and Tom swung on behind him. They drove into town without talking to each other.

Replete and drowsy, Gretchen lay in the wide soft bed, her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling reflected the fire that Boylan had lit before he had undressed her. The arrangements for seduction were planned meticulously and smoothly practised up here on the hill. The house was hushed and luxurious, the servants were never in evidence, the telephone never rang, there was never any fumbling or hurrying. Nothing clumsy or unforeseen was allowed to intrude on their evening ritual.

Downstairs, a clock chimed softly. Ten o’clock. It was the hour the common room in the hospital emptied and the wounded men made their way, on crutches and in wheelchairs, back to the wards. These days Gretchen only went to the hospital two or three times a week. Her life was centred, with a single

urgency, on the bed in which she lay. The days were passed in expectation of it, the nights away from it in its memory. She would make restitution to the wounded some other time.

Even when she had opened the envelope and seen the eight one hundred dollar bills, she had known she would return to this bed. If it was one of Boylan’s peculiarities that he had to humiliate her, she accepted it. She would make the man pay for it later.

Neither Boylan nor she had ever spoken of the envelope on her desk. On Tuesday, as she was coming out of the office after work, the Buick was there, with Boylan at the wheel. He had opened the car door without a word and she had gotten in and he had driven to his house. They had made love and after that gone to The Farmer’s Inn for dinner and after that had driven home and made love again. When he took her into town, towards midnight, he had dropped her off two blocks from her home and she had walked the rest of the way.

Teddy did everything perfectly. He was discreet - secrecy was to his taste; it was a necessity for her. Nobody knew anything about them. Knowledgeable, he had taken her to a doctor in New York to be fitted for a diaphragm, so that she didn’t have to worry about that. He had bought her the red dress, as promised, on the same trip to New York. The red dress hung in Teddy’s wardrobe. There would come a time when she would wear it.

Teddy did everything perfectly, but she had little affection for him and certainly didn’t love him. His body was flimsy and unprepossessing; only when he was dressed in his elegant clothes could he be considered in any way attractive. He was a man without enthusiasms, self-indulgent and cynical, a’ confessed failure, friendless and shunted off by a mighty family to a crumbling shipwreck of a Victorian castle in which most of the rooms were permanently closed off. An empty man in a half-empty house. It was easy to understand why the beautiful woman whose photograph still stood on the piano downstairs had divorced him and run away with another man.

He was not a lovable or admirable man, but he had other uses. Having renounced the ordinary activities of the men of his class, work, war, games, friendship, he dedicated himself to one thing: he copulated with all his hoarded force and cunning. He demanded nothing of her except to be there, the material of his craft. His triumph was in his own performance. The battles he had declined elsewhere, he won in the face below his on the pillow. The fanfares of victory were her sighs

of pleasure. For her part, Gretchen was not concerned with Boylan’s profits and losses. She lay passively under him, not even putting her arm around the unimportant body, accepting, accepting. He was anonymous, nobody, the male principle, an abstract, unconnected priapus, for which she had been waiting, unknowing, all her life. He was a servant of her pleasures, holding a door open to a palace of marvels.

She was not even grateful.

The eight hundred dollars lay folded into the leaves of her copy of the works of Shakespeare, between acts H and HI of As You Like It.

A clock chimed somewhere and his voice floated into the room from downstairs. ‘Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?’

‘Up here,’ she called. Her voice was lower, huskier. She was conscious of new, subtler tonalities in it; if her mother’s ear for such things had not been deafened by her own distaster, she would have known with one sentence that her daughter was sunnily sailing that dangerous sea in which she herself had foundered and drowned.

Boylan came into the room, naked in the firelight, bearing the two glasses. Gretchen propped herself up and took the glass from his hand. He sat on the edge of the bed, flicking ashes from his cigarette into the ash tray on the bed table.

They drank. She was developing a liking for Scotch. He leaned over and kissed her breast. ‘I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it,’ he said. He kissed the other breast. She took another sip from her glass.

‘I don’t have you,’ he said. I don’t have you. There’s only one time when I can make myself believe I have you - when I’m in you and you’re coming. All the rest of the time, even when you’re lying right beside me naked and I have my hand on you, you’ve escaped. Do I have you?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Nineteen years old. What are you going to be like at thirty?’

She smiled. He would be forgotten by that year. Perhaps before. Much before.

‘What were you thinking about up here while I was down getting the drinks?’ he asked.

‘Fornication,’ she said.

‘Do you have to talk like that?’ His own language was strangely prissy, some hangover fear of a domineering nanny quick with the kitchen soap to wash out the mouths of little boys who used naughty words.

‘I never talked like that until I met you.’ She took a satisfying gulp of whiskey.

‘I don’t talk like that,’ he said.

‘You’re a hypocrite,’ she said. ‘What I can do, I can name.’

‘You don’t do so damn much,’ he said, stung.

‘I’m a poor little inexperienced, small-town girl,’ she said. ‘If the nice man in the Buick hadn’t come along that day and got me drunk and taken advantage, I probably would have lived and died a withered, dried-up old maid.’

‘I bet,’ he said. ‘You’d have been down there with those two niggers.’ ,She smiled ambiguously. ‘We’ll never know, now, will we?’

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘You could stand some education.’ he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, as though he had come to a decision. ‘Excuse me.’ He stood up. ‘I have to make a telephone call.’ He put on a robe this time and went downstairs.

Gretchen sat, propped against the pillows, slowly finishing her drink. She had paid him off. For the moment earlier in the evening when she had delivered herself so absolutely to him. She would pay him off every time.

He came back into the room. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. She was surprised. Usually they stayed until midnight. But she said nothing. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. ‘Are we going somewhere?’ she asked. ‘How should I look?’