Rich Man, Poor Man (55 page)

that had sickened her while she was in the arena, suddenly became inspirers of desire, the magnificent, harsh bodies tumbled around her. Sex for a woman was in a demonstrable way an intrusion, a profound invasion of privacy, as was a blow given by one man to another. In the uneasy early-morning bed, after the disturbing night, the lines crossed, blows became caresses, caresses blows, and she turned, aroused, under the covers. If Willie had come into bed she would have welcomed him ardently. But Willie was sleeping, on his back, snoring softly from time to time.

She had gotten up and taken a pill to sleep.

During the morning, she had put it all from her mind, the shame of the night covered with the innocent mask of daylight*

She shook her head, opened a drawer full of panties and brassieres. When she thought about it, ‘panties’ seemed a hypocritically innocuous word, falsely childish, to cover such desperate territory. Girdle was a better word, though it was from more melodious periods of language, and she didn’t wear girdles. Boylan’s teaching.

The phone rang again, persistently, but she ignored it as she dressed. She stared for a moment at the clothes hanging in the closet, then chose a simple, severe blue suit. No advertising the mission. The emergent rosy body better appreciated later for having been concealed before. She brushed her dark hair, straight and long to her shoulders, the broad, low forehead clear, serene, unwrinkled, concealing all betrayals, all doubts.

She couldn’t find a taxi so she took the Eighth Avenue subway uptown, remembering to get on the Queens train that crossed over to the East Side on Fifty-third Street. Persephone, coming from the underground in the flowertime of love.

She got out at the Fifth Avenue exit and walked in the windy autumn sunshine, her demure navy-blue figure reflected in the glitter of shop windows. She wondered how many of the other women she passed were, like her, briefly parading the avenue, drifting cunningly through Saks, diaphragms in place.

She turned east on Fifty-fifth Street, past the entrance of the St Regis, remembered a wedding party on a summer evening, a white veil, a young lieutenant. There were only a certain number of streets in the city. One could not avoid them all. The echoes of urban geography.

She looked at her watch. Twenty to two. Five full minutes, in which to walk slowly, to arrive coolly controlled.

Colin Burke lived on Fifty-sixth between Madison and Park. Another echo. On that street there had once been a party from

which she had turned away. When renting an apartment, a man could not be blamed for not picking through his future lover’s memories before putting down the first month’s rent.

She went into the familiar white vestibule, rang the bell. How many times, on how many afternoons, had she rung that bell? Twenty? Thirty? Sixty? Some day she would make the count.

The buzzer hummed at the doorlatch and she went in and took the small elevator up to the fourth floor.

He was standing at the door, in pyjamas and a robe, his feet bare. They kissed briefly, no rush, no rush.

There were breakfast things on the coffee table in the big, disordered livingroom, and a half-finished cup of coffee, among piles of leatherette-bound scripts. He was a director in the theatre and he kept theatrical hours, rarely going to bed before five in the morning.

‘Can I give you a cup of coffee?’ he asked.

‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had lunch.’

‘Ah the orderly life,’ he said. ‘So to be envied.’ The irony was gentle.

Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘you can come down and feed Billy a lamb chop. Envy me later.’

Burke had never seen Billy, had never met her husband, or been to their home. She had met him at a luncheon with one of the editors of a magazine for which she did occasional pieces. The idea was that she was to do an article on him, because she had praised a play he had directed. At the luncheon she hadn’t liked him, had thought him cocky, theory ridden, too confident of himself. She hadn’t written the article, but three months later, after several scattered meetings, she had gone to bed with him, but of lust, revenge, boredom, hysteria, indifference, accident… She no longer probed her reasons.

He sipped at his coffee, standing up, watching her over the cup, his dark-grey eyes tender under thunderous black eyebrows. He was thirty-five years old, a short man, shorter than she (Am I doomed all my life to small men?) but there was a thin intensity about his face, dark-stubbled with beard now, a strained intellectual rigor, an impression of directness and strength, that made one forget his size. In his profession he was used to ordering complex and difficult people about and the look of command was on him. He was moody and sometimes sharply spoken, even to her, tortured by failures in excellence in himself and others, easily scornful, given sometimes to disappearing without a word for weeks at a time. He was divorced and was reputed to be a lady’s man and in the beginning, last

year, she felt that he was using her for the simplest and most obvious of reasons, but now, standing across the room from him, watching the slim, barefooted, small man in the soft, navy-blue bathrobe (happy matching of afternoon colours) she was sure she loved him and that she wanted none else but him and would make great sacrifices to remain at his side for her entire life.

She was talking about Burke when she had said last night to her brother that she wanted to sleep with one man not ten. And in fact, since the beginning of their affair she had made love, with no one else but him, except for the infrequent times when Willie had come to her bed, in nostalgic moments of tenderness; unhappy, fleeting reconciliations; the almost forgotten habits of marriage.

Burke had asked if she still slept with her husband and she had told him the truth. She had also confessed that it gave her pleasure. She had no need to lie to him and he was the one man she had ever known to whom she could say anything that came to her mind. He had told her that since their first meeting he had not slept with another woman and she was sure that this was so.

‘Beautiful Gretchen,’ he said, taking the cup from his lips, ‘bounteous Gretchen, glorious G. Oh, to have you come in every morning with the breakfast tray.’

‘My,’ she said, ‘you’re in a good mood today.’

‘Not really,’ he said. He put down the cup and came over and they slipped their arms around each other. ‘I have a disastrous afternoon ahead of me. My agent called me an hour ago and I have to go to the Columbia office at two-thirty. They want me to go out West and do a movie. I called you a couple of times, but there was no answer.’

The phone had rung as she had entered the apartment, again as she had dressed. Love me tomorrow, not today, courtesy of American Tel and Tel. But tomorrow, there was no trip to the museum for Billy’s class, freeing her until five o’clock. She would have to be at the school gate at three. Passion by children’s hours.

‘I heard the phone ring,’ she said, moving away from him, ‘but I didn’t answer it.’ Abstractedly, she lit a cigarette. ‘I thought you had a play to do this year.’ she said.

Throw away that cigarette,’ Burke said. ‘Whenever a bad director wants to show unspoken tension between two characters, he has them lighting a cigarette.’

She laughed, stubbing it out.

‘The play isn’t ready,’ Burke said, ‘and the way the rewrite’s going it won’t be ready for another year. And everything else that I’ve been offered is junk. Don’t look so sad.’

‘I’m not sad,’ she said. ‘I’m horny and unlaid and disappointed.’

It was his turn to laugh. ‘The vocabulary of Gretchen,’ he said. ‘Always to be trusted. Can’t you make it this evening?’

‘Evenings’re out. You know that. That would be flaunting it. And I’m not a flaunter.’ There was no telling with Willie. He might come home for dinner whistling cheerfully two weeks in a row. ‘Is it a good picture?’

‘It can be.’ He shrugged, rubbing the blue-black stubble of his beard. ‘The whore’s cry,’ he said. ‘It can be. Frankly, I need the money.’

‘You had a hit last year,’ she said, knowing she shouldn’t push him, but pushing him nevertheless.

‘Between Uncle Sam and the alimony, my bank is howling.’ He grimaced. ‘Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863, but he overlooked the married men.’

Love, like almost everything else these days, was a function of the Internal Revenue Service. We embrace between tax forms. ‘I ought to introduce you,’ she said, ‘to Johnny Heath and my brother. They swim like fish among the deductions.’

‘Businessmen,’ he said. ‘They know the magic. When my tax man sees my records he puts his head in his hands and weeps. No use crying over spilt money. On to Hollywood. Actually, I look forward to it. There’s no reason these days why a director shouldn’t do movies as well as plays. That old idea that there’s something holy about the theatre and eternally grubby about film is just snobbism and it’s as dead as David Belasco. If you asked me who was the greatest dramatic artist alive today I’d say Federico Fellini. And there hasn’t been anything better on the stage in my time than Citizen Kane and that was pure Hollywood. Who knows - I may be the Orson Welles of the fifties.’

Burke was walking back and forth as he spoke and Gretchen could tell that he meant what he was saying, or at least most of it, and was eager to take up the new challenge in his career. ‘Sure, there’re whores in Hollywood, but nobody would seriously claim that Schubert Alley is a cloister. It’s true I need money and I’m not averse to the sight of the dollar, but I’m not hunting it. Yet. And I hope never. I’ve been negotiating with Columbia for more than a month now and they’re giving me an absolute free hand - the story I want, the writer I

want, no supervision, the whole thing shot on location, final cut, everything, as long as I stay within the budget. And the budget’s a fair one. If it’s not as good as anything I’ve done on Broadway, the fault’ll be mine and nobody else’s. Come to the opening night. I will expect you to cheer.’

She smiled, but it was a dutiful smile. ‘You didn’t tell me you were so far along. More than a month…’

‘I’m a secretive bastard,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t want to say anything until it was definite.’

She lit a cigarette, to give her something to do with her hands and her face. The hell with directors’ clichés of tension. ‘What about me? Back here?’ she asked, through smoke, knowing again she shouldn’t ask it.

‘What about you?’ He looked at her thoughtfully. There are always planes.’ ‘In which direction?’ ‘In both directions.’ ‘How long do you think we’d last?’

Two weeks.’ He flipped his finger against a glass on the coffee table and it tinkled faintly, a small chime marking a dubious hour. ‘Forever.’

‘If I were to come out West,’ she said evenly, ‘with Billy, could we live with you?’

He came over to her and kissed her forehead, holding her head with his two hands. She had to bend a little for the kiss. His beard scraped minutely against her skin. ‘Ah, God,’ he said softly, then pulled back. ‘I have to shave and shower and dress,’ he said. ‘I’m late as it is.’

She watched him shave, shower and dress, then drove with him in a taxi to the office on Fifth Avenue where he had the appointment. He hadn’t answered her question, but he asked her to call him later so that he could tell her what the people at Columbia had said.

She got out of the taxi with him and spent the afternoon shopping, idly, buying a dress and a sweater, both of which she knew she would return later in the week.

At five o’clock, dressed once more in slacks, and wearing her old tweed coat, she was at the gates of Billy’s school, un-diaphragmed, waiting for the class to come back from the Museum of Natural History.

By the end of the afternoon he was tired. There had been lawyers all morning and lawyers, he had discovered, were the most fatiguing group of people in the world. At least for him. Even the ones who were working for him. The constant struggle for advantage, the ambiguous, tricky, indigestible language, the search for loopholes, levers, profitable compromises, the unashamed pursuit of money, was abhorrent to him’, even while he was profiting from it all. There was one good thing about dealing with lawyers - it reassured him a hundred times over that he had acted correctly in refusing Teddy Boylan’s offer to finance him through law school.

Then there had been the architects in the afternoon, and they had been trying, too. He was working on the plans for the centre and his hotel room was littered with drawings. On Johnny Heath’s advice, he had chosen a firm of young architects who had already won some important prizes, but were still hungry. They were eager and talented, there was no doubt about that, but they had worked almost exclusively in cities and their ideas ran to glass and steel or poured cement, and Rudolph, knowing that they considered him hopelessly square, insisted upon traditional forms and traditional materials. It was not exactly his own taste, but he felt it would be the taste best appreciated by the people who would come to the centre. And it certainly would be the only thing that Calderwood might approve of. ‘I want it to look like a street in an old New England village,’ Rudolph kept saying, while the architects groaned. ‘White clapboard and a tower over the theatre so that you can mistake it for a church. It’s a conservative rural area and we’re going to be catering to conservative people in a country atmosphere and they will spend their money more easily in an ambience that they feel happy and at home in.’

Again and again the architects had almost quit, but he had said, ‘Do it this way this time, boys, and the next time it’ll be more your way. This is only the first of a chain and we’ll get bolder as we go along.’

The plans they had sketched for him were still a long way from what he wanted, but as he looked at the last rough drawings they had shown him that day, he knew they would finally surrender.

His eyes ached and he wondered if he needed glasses as he made some notes on the plans. There was a bottle of whiskey on the bureau and he poured himself a drink, topping it off with

water from the tap in the bathroom. He sipped at the drink as he spread the sheets of stiff paper out on the desk. He winced at the drawing of a huge sign, CALDERWOOD’S, that the architects had sketched in at the entrance to the centre. It was to be outlined in flashing neon at night. In his old age, Calderwood sought renown, immortality in flickering multi-coloured glass tubing, and all Rudolph’s tactful intimations about keeping a single modest style for the centre had fallen on deaf ears.