Rich Man, Poor Man (73 page)

‘She works,’ Rudolph said defensively.

I don’t approve of wives working,’ Calderwood said. He shook his head. ‘Ah, Rudy - and you could have had everything.’

Everything, Rudolph thought. Including crazy Virginia Calderwood and her pornographic letters.

Neither Brad nor Johnny Heath were wildly enthusiastic, but he wasn’t marrying to please them. Enthusiastic or not, they both came to the wedding at City Hall and drove out to the airport with the bride and groom and Florence.

Rudolph’s first husbandly moment came when they checked in and Jean’s luggage was nearly a hundred pounds overweight. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘what have you got in there?’

‘A change of clothes,’ Jean said. ‘You don’t want your wife to walk around naked in front of all those Frenchmen, do you?’ ‘For a girl who doesn’t like the trappings of luxury,’ he said, as wrote out the cheque for the overweight, ‘you sure carry around a lot of supplies.’ He tried to make it sound light, but he had a moment of foreboding. The long years of having to pinch pennies had made him careful about money. Extravagant wives had ruined men many times wealthier than he. Unworthy fear. I’ll handle her, if necessary, he thought. Today he felt he could handle anything. He took her hand and led the way towards the bar.

They had time for two bottles of champagne before they took off and Johnny Heath promised to call Gretchen and Rudolph’s mother and tell them the news once the plane was off the ground.

The days grew warmer. They lazed in the sun. They became dark brown and Jean’s hair turned almost blonde, bleached

by the sun and salt water. She gave him tennis lessons on the courts of the hotel and said that he had a talent for the game. She was very serious about the lessons and spoke sharply to him when he didn’t hit out correctly. She taught him how to water ski. She kept amazing him with the number of things she could do well.

They had lunch brought to them at the cabana overlooking the speedboat mooring. They ate long langouste and drank white wine and after lunch they went up to their rooms to make love, with the windows shuttered against the afternoon sun.

He didn’t look at any of the girls lying almost naked around the hotel pool and on the rocks next to the diving board, although two or three of the girls well deserved to be looked

‘You’re unnatural,’ Jean said to him. “Why am I unnatural?’

‘Because you don’t ogle.’ ‘I ogle you.’

“Keep it up,’ she said.

They found new restaurants and ate bouillabaisse on the terrasse of Chez Felix, where you could look through the arch

of the rampart at the boats in the harbour of Antibes. When they both made love later they both smelled of garlic and wine, but they didn’t mind.

They took excursions to the hill towns and visited the Matisse chapel and the pottery works at Vallauris and ate lunch on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or at St-Paul-deVence, in the white flutter of doves* wings. They learned with regret that the flock was kept white because the white doves drove off pigeons of any other colour. When occasionally the doves did tolerate their impure fellows, the proprietor killed them off himself.

Wherever they went, Jean took her cameras along, and took innumerable pictures of him against backgrounds of masts, ramparts, palms, waves. ‘I am going to make you into the wallpaper for our bedroom in New York,’ she said.

He no longer bothered to put on a shirt when he came out of the water. Jean said she liked the hair on his chest and the fuzz on his shoulders.

They planned a trip to Italy when they got tired of the Cap d’Antibes. They got out a map and circled the towns of Menton, San Remo, Milano for the Last Supper, Rappallo, Santa Margherita, Firenze, for Michelangelo and the Botticellis, Bologna, Siena, Assisi, Rome. The names were like little bells chiming in sunshine. Jean had been everywhere. Other summers. It would be a long time before he learned everything about her.

They didn’t get tired of the Cap d’Antibes.

One day, he took a set from her in tennis. She fought off set point three times, but he finally won. She was furious. For two minutes.

They sent a cable to Calderwood to say that they weren’t coming back for a while.

They didn’t speak to anyone at the hotel except an Italian movie actress who was so beautiful that you had to speak to her. Jean spent a morning taking photographs of the Italian movie actress and sent them to Vogue in New York. Vogue cabled back that they were going to run a set in their September issue.

Nothing could go wrong that month.

Although they still were not tired of Cap d’Antibes, they got into the car and started driving south to visit the towns they had circled on the map. They were disappointed nowhere.

They sat in the cobbled square of Portofino and ate chocolate ice cream, the best chocolate ice cream in the world. They watched the women selling postcards and lace and embroidered tablecloths from their stands to tourists and they eyed the yachts moored in the harbour.

There was one slender, white yacht, about fifty feet long, with racy, clean Italian lines and Rudolph said, ‘That’s what machinery is all about. When it comes out like that.’

‘Would you like to own it?’ Jean asked, scooping up her chocolate ice cream.

‘Who wouldn’t like to own it?’ he said.

‘I’ll buy it for you,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘And how about a Ferrari and a mink-lined overcoat and a forty-room house on the Cap d’Antibes, too, while you’re at it?’

‘No’, she said, still eating her ice cream. ‘I really mean it. If you really want it.’

He examined her closely. She was calm and serious. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Vogue isn’t paying you that much for those pictures.’

I don’t depend on Vogue,’ she said. ‘I’m awfully rich. When my mother died she left me an obscene amount of stocks and bonds. Her father owned one of the biggest drug companies in the United States.’

‘What’s the name of the company?’ Rudolph asked suspiciously.

Jean told him the name of the company.

Rudolph whistled softly and put down his spoon.

‘It’s all in a trust fund that my father and brother control until I’m twenty-five,’ Jean said, ‘but even now my income is at least three times the size of yours. I hope I haven’t spoiled your day.’

Rudolph burst into a roar of laughter. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What a honeymoon!’

She didn’t buy him a yacht that afternoon, but as a compromise, she bought him a shocking pink shirt in a faggy shop alongside the harbour.

Later on, when he asked why she hadn’t told him before, she was evasive. ‘I hate talking about money,’ she said. “That’s all they ever talked about in my family. By the time I was fifteen I came to the belief that money degrades the soul if you think about it all the time. I never went home a single summer after the age of fifteen. Since I got out of college I never used a cent of the money my mother left me. I let my father and brother put it back into the business. They want me to let them keep using the income when the trust expires, but they’re in for a big surprise. They’ll cheat me if they can and I’m not out to be cheated. Especially not by them.’

‘Well, what are you going to do with it?’

‘You’re going to handle it for me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. For us. Do whatever you think best. Just don’t talk to me about it. And don’t use it to make us lead soggy, fancy, useless lives.’

‘We’ve been leading pretty fancy lives these past few weeks,’ Rudolph said.

‘We’ve been spending your money and you worked for it,’ Jean said. ‘Anyway, this is a honeymoon. It isn’t for real.’

When they got to the hotel in Rome there was a cable waiting for Rudolph. It was from Bradford Knight and it read, ‘Your mother in hospital Stop Doctor fears end is near Stop Believe you should return soonest.’

Rudolph handed the cable to Jean. They were still in the lobby and had just handed over their passports to the clerk at the desk. Jean read the cable silently, gave it back to him. ‘I suppose we ought to see if there’s a plane out tonight,’ she said. It had been nearly five o’clock in the afternoon when they drove up to the hotel.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Rudolph said. He didn’t want to have to think about what to do about his mother’s dying in a crowded Roman hotel lobby.

They went up in the elevator and watched while the clerk who had accompanied them opened the shutters and let in the late sunlight and the roar of Rome.

‘I hope you enjoy your stay,’ the clerk said, and left.

They watched the porters come in and arrange their luggage. The porters went and they stared at the unopened bags. They had planned to stay in Rome at least two weeks.

‘No,’ Rudolph said. ‘We’re not going to see if there’s a plane tonight. The old lady is not going to do me out of Rome completely. We’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll take one day for you and me. She’ll be alive when I get there. She wouldn’t do herself out of the pleasure of dying before my eyes for anything in the world. Unpack.’

As soon as he got back on board the Elga Andersen in Genoa, he knew he was in for trouble with Falconetti. Falconetti was the bully of the ship, a huge, ham-handed man, with a small turnip-shaped head, who had been in jail for armed robbery. He cheated at cards, but the one time he had been called on it by an oiler from the engine room he had nearly strangled the oiler before he was pulled away from the man’s throat by the rest of the men in the mess room. He was free and dangerous with his fists. At the beginning of each voyage he made a point of picking fights with four or five men and beating them up brutally, so that there would be no doubt about his position below decks. When he was in the mess room, no one else dared touch the radio there and everybody listened to the programmes of Falconetti’s choice, whether they liked it or not. There was one Negro on board by the name of Renway, and when Falconetti came into the mess room he slipped away. ‘I don’t sit in any room with a nigger,’ Falconetti had announced the first time he saw the man in the mess room. Renway hadn’t said anything, but he hadn’t moved, either.

‘Nigger,’ Falconetti said, ‘I guess you didn’t hear me.’ He strode over to where the man was sitting at the table, grabbed him under the armpits, carried him to the door and hurled him against the bulkhead. Nobody said or did anything. You took care of yourself on the Elga Andersen, and the next man took care of himself.

Falconetti owed money to half the crew. Theoretically they were loans, but nobody expected to see his money again.; If you didn’t loan Falconetti a five or ten dollar bill when he asked for it, he wouldn’t do anything about it at the time, but two or three days later, he would pick a fight with you and there would be black eyes and broken noses and teeth to spit out.

Falconetti hadn’t tried anything with Thomas, although he was much larger than Thomas. Thomas was not looking for

trouble and stayed out of Falconetti’s way, but even though he was taciturn and pacific and kept to himself, there was something about Thomas’s manner that made Falconetti pick on easier targets.

But the first night out of Genoa, Falconetti, who was dealing a poker hand in the mess room, said, when Thomas and Dwyer came in together. ‘Ah, here come the lovebirds,’ and made a wet, kissing noise. The men at the table laughed, because it was dangerous not to laugh at Falconetti’s jokes. Dwyer turned red, but Thomas calmly poured himself a cup of coffee and picked up a copy of the Rome Daily American that was lying there, and began to read it.

‘I’ll tell you what, Dwyer,’ Falconetti said, ‘I’ll be your agent. It’s a long way home and the boys could use a nice piece of ass to while away the lonely hours. Couldn’t you, boys?’

There were little embarrassed murmurs of assent from the men around the table.

Thomas read his paper and sipped his coffee. He knew that Dwyer was trying to catch his eye, pleading, but until it got much worse he wasn’t going to get into a brawl.

‘What’s the sense in giving it away free like you do, Dwyer,’ Falconetti said, ‘when you could make a fortune and distribute happiness at the same time just by setting yourself up in business with my help. What we have to do is fix a scale - say five bucks for buggering, ten bucks for sucking. I’ll just take my ten per cent, like a regular Hollywood agent. What do you say, Dwyer?’.

Dwyer jumped up and fled. The men at the table laughed. Thomas read Ms paper, although his hands were trembling. He had to control himself. If he beat up a big thug like Falconetti, who had terrorised whole shiploads of men for years, somebody would begin to wonder who the hell he was and what made him so tough and it wouldn’t take too long for somebody to recognise his name and remember that he had seen him fight somewhere. And there were mob members or hangers-on everywhere along the waterfront, just waiting to rush to some higher-up with the news that he’d been spotted.

Read your goddamn newspaper, Thomas said to himself, and keep your mouth shut

‘Hey, lover.’ Falconetti made the wet kissing noise again. ‘You going to let your boy friend cry himself to sleep all by his little itsy-bitsy self?’

Methodically, Thomas folded the paper, put it down. He walked slowly across the room, carrying his coffee cup. Falconetti looked at him from across the table, grinning. Thomas threw the coffee into Falconetti’s face. Falconetti didn’t move. There was dead silence at the table.

‘If you make that noise once more,’ Thomas said, ‘I’ll slug you every time I pass you on this ship from here to Hoboken.’ Falconetti stood up. ‘You’re for me, lover,’ he said. He made the kissing noise again.

‘I’ll be waiting for you on deck,’ Thomas said. ‘And come alone.’

‘I don’t need no help,’ Falconetti said. Thomas wheeled and went out on to the stern deck. There would be room to move around there. He didn’t want to have to tangle with a man Falconetti’s size in close quarters.

The sea was calm, the night balmy, the stars bright. Thomas groaned. My goddamn fists, he thought, always my goddamn fists.

He wasn’t worried about Falconetti. That big fat gut hanging over his belt wasn’t made for punishment.

He saw the door open on to the deck, Falconetti’s shadow thrown on the deck by the light in the gangway. Falconetti stepped on deck. He was alone.