Seventh Avenue (26 page)

“It’s not ten dollars,” Jay said quietly. “Here, have another drink.”

“Oh, my God,” Howard exclaimed. “Christ, it’s not possible! Is it real?”

“Why don’t you take it to a bank in the morning? They’ll tell you if it’s real or if I made it myself.”

“How can I say I got it?”

“You don’t have to say a thing. In a way, it’s Rhoda’s money as well - if she knew, she’d probably do the same thing.”

Eva twisted through the tight web of tables. She was surprised to find Howard still there, but she forced a smile to her lips.

“Not a word to anybody.” Jay helped Eva to her chair. “Howard’s just finishing his drink.” Jay had not counted on the degree of shock his gesture would create, and Howard began talking in a loud, excited voice, waving his arms wildly. A waiter came over and asked him to quiet down or leave.

“He isn’t used to drinking,” Jay explained benevolently.

The dance band came on, and Howard’s friends waved at him from the distance, but Howard ignored them. The force of Jay’s personality cast a spell over him, and he sat with his chin on his elbow, mesmerized by Jay’s most casual action.

“They’re going without,” Eva said.

“It’s okay, we don’t know each other really. Only met tonight . . . the ten of us won a charity raffle, and first prize was a night out at the Monte Carlo. I’ve spoiled your evening though.”

“No, don’t be silly,” Eva said. His awkwardness and stark innocence reminded her vaguely of Herbie. Helpless and vulnerable they come into the world, she reflected, and they leave untouched. Harried little men, who worry about paying the laundry bill, eat Chinese food after a big evening out at the movies. Sad little men: the minnows of the world. Invariably stoop-shouldered, with sallow complexions, ten-year-old suits, ink stains on their cuffs, who shine their shoes diligently, wear darned socks, and have a holiday every thirty years. They make up ninety-nine percent of the world’s male population, and Eva knew them well; she had married one, borne his child, and apart from his legal identity, he was without identity, faceless, a gray body of tired, defenseless flesh. For a moment, she hated Jay, for it was Jay - the one percent - who stormed the fortress of life, and reduced everything in his path to dust. It wasn’t Herbie who had been born faceless; it was Jay who had stolen his identity.

“It’s like magic,” Howard droned, thick-tongued, his eyes alight with a flame that belonged to Jay and was brought out by Jay. “How a man makes out of nothing a fortune! It’s a mystery, isn’t it?” He whispered conspiratorially to Jay: “Tell me, please, tell me, what the secret is?” He didn’t wait for an answer but sought verification from Eva: “He’s a magician, isn’t he? That’s how he does it. Magic.” Sweat beads stood out on his forehead like bubbles on a stippled wall. “How? How?” he asked in an imploring voice.

“I can’t tell you,” Jay said, after a moment’s silence. “No one’s ever told me. It just happens.”

“Happens?” Howard was incredulous. “You
make
it happen, but how do you do it?”

Jay took out a handkerchief and handed it to Howard.

“
Here, wipe your face.”

It made Eva uncomfortable to watch him, and she said: “It’s getting late, and I’m a working girl.”

Jay paid the bill, and they started to get up, but Howard remained in his seat, transfixed. In the glimmering candlelight his face appeared chalk white, bloodless and defeated. He arose with difficulty and veered against his chair, knocking it down.

“Oh, I’m a little dizzy.” He closed his eyes and held the table for support. “I’m feeling . . .”

Jay held his arm to prevent him from falling in the aisle.

“I think I’m gonna . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence, and his knees sagged. Jay caught him before he fell.

“Okay, let’s go to the toilet. Lean on me.”

“You hear that?” Howard shouted to Eva. “Prophetic words: ‘Lean on me.’“

“Maybe you better hop a cab,” Jay said. “I’ll see you.”

She shook her head obediently, her long red hair swinging from side to side as though she were trying to remember something. She leaned across Jay and kissed Howard on the cheek.

“Good night, Herbie,” she said, and there was a moment of recognition between Jay and her.

“I’ll drive him home . . .”

She walked away quickly.

“She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid eyes on, and she kissed me. Me! But she thought my name was Herbie. Isn’t that a joke, Jay?”

The day broke bright and hot. A telephone by the bedside rang, and Jay stretched out an arm and lifted it off the cradle.

“Six o’clock,” an all-night voice said. “You asked to be called.”

He hung up the phone and rolled over on his side. Eva lay propped up on two pillows, like a kewpie doll. Her eyes were riveted to the gossamer lace curtains that caught the early morning breeze. Jay’s face was hot and his eyes small and red with deep graven half-moon circles under them.

“You look like a bull,” Eva said.

He had never been able to make the adjustment to sleeping with a naked woman, and although he thought he had learned everything there was to learn about every angle and curve of Eva’s body, it still never ceased to amaze him. She had the kind of finely textured skin like ancient parchment that he could stroke for hours, finding satisfaction in a purely obsessive, tactile way, so that when he came to make love to her it seemed to him that he was destroying, or perhaps abusing, the perfect image that existed for him.

“You’re staring,” she said, as he sat on the side of the bed. “You can touch them. They’re yours to touch.”

He leaned across the bed, bisecting it, his chest on her lap, and he kissed her breasts, ran his fingers along the soft underbelly, and kissed them again.

“Your face is all prickly.”

“I’ll never leave at this rate.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“I’ve got such a rotten taste in my mouth,” He went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth with energy, then returned to the bedroom.

“Why don’t you have a shave, then come back to bed?”

“Best offer I’ve had all morning.”

“The best one you’ll get.”

He shook his head morosely . . . the denial of pleasure always made him act like a man on the verge of disaster. He wanted to have a bath, but decided against it because he would then catch the morning traffic.

“Want me to come down and have breakfast with you?”

“No, I’ll grab a cup of coffee at the drugstore. What are you gonna do all dressed at seven in the morning? You can sleep a few more hours, can’t you?”

“Not really. Trouble is, you get used to sleeping with someone and if they’re not there, either the bed’s too hot, too cold, the sheet’s sticky, the street noise bothers you. A million and one stupid things.”

He slipped on a pair of tan lightweight slacks and went back to the bathroom. The shave refreshed him, but he couldn’t shake his depression. It was 6:40, and he packed hurriedly. He couldn’t find his socks, so she got out of bed and located them in the back of a bureau drawer. She put in three pairs and stood in the center of the room by the luggage rack, with that curious disorientated expression people get when they’re faced with alternatives at railroad stations. He took her arm and turned her to him and hugged her.

“Gets crazier by the day, the way I knock myself out. Like a man trying to balance both ends of a seesaw. What’s the point of it?”

“Well, you’ve always got an out. You can drop me, and your life won’t be so complicated.”

“Christ, you talk the most godawful shit at times.”

“I’ve forced you into this situation.”

“Listen, Eva, nobody forces me to do anything that I don’t want to do. Try to think of what’s ahead of you. You’ll be working with me . . . We’ll get straightened out, I promise.”

She walked with him to the door and stood there for a moment after he had gone. Friday to Sunday was a long wait. Years! She closed the door when she heard a maid humming to herself. She felt suspended between two equidistant walls, and running from one to the other never had any effect on her proximity to the walls because she was running in concentric circles. She pulled up the window and watched him get into the car and drive away.

“Seesaw/Marjorie Daw/Seesaw/Marjorie Daw,” she sang in a lifeless voice.

“
H
aaa
-
peee
Burrrth
-
daaay
to you,
Haaa
-
peee
Burrth
-
daaay, Dear Nee - yell,” the cheeping children’s voices trilled, squeakily discordant, as Neal stood dizzily surveying the sapphire blue ocean liner on the table, its five candles flickering in the gust-filled room. He took a deep breath and the air crackled in his lungs as he expelled it. The candle smoke, like discharged guns on the top of an escarpment, filled the air with the reek of melted tallow. Faces, some familiar, some strange, flicked across his view with alarming suddenness - open faces with wagging tongues, fey smiles, and a monstrous number of teeth. Why did they have so many more teeth than he had? Why were some of them lined with gold and silver bands? The teeth came towards him, the face kissed him and held him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe, and the face had a funny smell, like the kind that cats have when they’re wet. He reached out and tried to capture his grandmother’s tooth, but it was cemented against her incisor and would not budge.

“I want teeth,” he whined, and Celia threw back her head and laughed. “Dad-dee buy me some,” he said in a cajoling voice that held the threat of tears.

“You wouldn’t like it,” Jay said, helping him to his seat, Neal gave a yawn, but before he could get comfortable Rhoda seized his hand, inserted a knife in it, and guided it over the cake, where much against his will an incision was made across the afterdeck. He tried in vain to pull his hand away, but she pressed it down again into the soft bed of sponge and cream; the jam in the middle looked like blood, and he drew back nervously.

“
You’re the host,” Rhoda said.

A small dark-haired boy called Zimmerman, with a ferocious mouth and the manner of a cutpurse, laid siege to the cerise-colored smokestacks that tilted waywardly towards the passenger cabins, and Neal swiped him viciously across the knuckles with the handle of the knife. Zimmerman yelped and turned to a fat disgruntled woman, who wore a capacious black tentlike dress which, with her sallow complexion, gave her the appearance of a hippo suffering from jaundice. She removed a fat hand from her mouth and waved her splintery-skinned fingers and gnawed nails in Neal’s direction. She tugged her lips, and there was a hint of retaliation on some dark stairwell on some rainy afternoon in her dark eyes.

“Well, honestly . . .” she began, then trailed off abruptly as though the cerebral activity needed to lodge a more intimidating protest was too much for her. Swallowing the saliva required for her labials, she slumped back in her seat and glared murderously at Neal.

“Gee, Ahm sorry,” Rhoda said, rescuing a smokestack for Zimmerman, and placed it in his sweaty palm. He sniggered triumphantly at Neal, who, in a rage, picked up a fork to attack again, but Jay diverted him at the last moment.

“
Watta stingy kid!” Mrs. Zimmerman moaned.

“He’s excited!” Jay replied. “This birthday business . . . well . . .”

“
Say you’re sorry, to Bea,” Rhoda insisted.

“
Sare-
ree
,” Neal droned.

Jay petted Neal’s head, and the child rewarded him with a captious smile. He had coal-black hair, colloid, green eyes, a small, but flared nose, and the ivory-tinted skin common to children who are confined to their homes as soon as the weather becomes mildly threatening. He fought tenaciously against the semi-invalid treatment he received from both his mother and Celia, but because Jay insisted on it neither of them dared disobey. Jay’s feeling for Neal bordered on idolatry, and he could not keep his hands off him; the physical presence of his own flesh and blood inspired a sensation of religious ecstasy. His identification with Neal was so complete and overwhelming that Eva complained regularly of it, regarding Neal as an adversary in the ubiquitous battle she fought for Jay’s affections; but she recognized, over the years, that Jay’s paternal solicitude was genuine, and that she had no alternative but to let herself be regulated and indeed manipulated by yet another human factor in the life of a man who desecrated the human factor in everyone else’s life. The promise of a divorce loomed on the horizon, but repeated postponements, because of his mother’s failing health, Rhoda’s loyalty, and the fact of his love for Neal, had reduced it to a collation of broken hopes. She lived on nerve, even though she lived in sumptuous comfort, and was able to control her disappointment skillfully, turning it, perhaps subconsciously, into a mask of stoicism, inactive but alive.

She and Jay divided their time between New York and Syracuse, where the factory that had begun life as a failure now mushroomed out into an amorphous complex of buildings employing two thousand people, the largest mass-production dress factory in the East. Jay had even begun to use synthetic fibers to cope with the demand, and he had sixty retail outlets that swallowed with a voracious lack of discrimination whatever he produced.

Jay slipped away from the children and went into his dressing room to make a call on his private line. On the fifth buzz, he was about to slam down the phone, but Eva’s voice came through.

“Where the hell’ve you been?” he said angrily. “I’ve been calling all afternoon. I asked you to wait for my call.”

There was silence at the other end.

“Sorry, Boss. I don’t work on Sundays. It’s in my contract.”

“Aw cut the crap, Eva.”

“I waited till two. I got thirsty and lonely.”

“I couldn’t ring at two because the kids started coming.”

“We could’ve stayed in Syracuse for the weekend, and you wouldn’t have had this problem.”

“Don’t be funny. You know it was Neal’s birthday.”

“Look, if you called up to have an argument, then I can do without it.”

“Just a minute . . . I’ll see you at six at the apartment.”

“Well . . . if you must . . .” She hung up, and he stood in the middle of the room, the phone wire coiled round him like a cobra, with a puzzled and distressed look on his face. Things had begun to get out of hand with Eva. He still occupied the central position in their relationship, but she had recently started to assert herself. The door opened abruptly.

“I wondered where you disappeared to,” Rhoda said.

“Had to make a call.”

“She give you a stand-up?”

“It was business.”

“The kind of business that gets lipstick on your drawers . . .”

“Oh, shut up. It’s the kid’s party, so try to behave yourself.”

“From you, a remark like that sounds so ridiculous that it’s funny.”

He brushed past her and her head banged against the pine door without hurting her, but she became angry, and stormed after him, her eyes darkening. The children were playing “London Bridge,” and she stopped, rooted in her tracks, when she spied Jay arm in arm with Neal, as though the touch of innocence would somehow redeem him and she would have him again newly born, pristine, her love enhanced by his lack of experience. It was an idle thought, and she let it slip out of her mind. They had been through too much together for her ever to recapture the quality of emotion that he had created and then discarded like a rag. She had no illusions of a renaissance of feeling on his side; she only hoped that he would tire himself out, and then come to her exhausted and bleeding, devoid of pride, and pleading for acceptance. The only avenue of attack, she realized sadly, was through Neal, for the child represented what he had never in his life found time to develop: an inviolable principle that transcended his own megalomania.

The children, bored with “London Bridge,” started up “Farmer in the Dell,” and Jay did a little square dance with Neal, who reluctantly allowed himself to be spun round. Rhoda wondered whether she ought to ask Al’s advice: of Jay’s family he was the only one she found remotely sympathetic, perhaps because she knew that he had suffered as much as she had. Her sisters-in-law she avoided, except when a family function brought them together, and now that she could not go to Myrna, the void in her life had grown progressively larger with every passing year. Neal might have filled the hole, but he was completely under Jay’s domination - Jay’s personal possession, not a child to be shared and loved by both, but the object of one, the stronger one. She had a curious sensation of estrangement that occasionally became hostility when confronted with those large inquisitorial eyes, that innate
droit de seigneur
that the child alarmingly revealed in her presence. Even though he was only five, he was hard to manage, and there was a certain unconscious superciliousness about him that she traced directly to Jay’s influence. Jay had won on all fronts, and she was tired of fighting. The only hope she retained, curiously enough, was for Neal; perhaps one day he would see Jay with her eyes, not with antipathy but clearly enough to make his own judgments.

Al sat in the corner on the sofa, sipping coffee, and Rhoda caught his eye.

“
What can I do for you?” he said, moving over to make room.

She opened her eyes wide and sat down heavily, next to him.

“
Tell me how to lose twenty pounds!”

He laughed kindly and put his arm around her.

“Your weight’s okay by me. I always like a woman to be
zoftig.”

“
You’re a sweetie, Al.”

“What’re you looking so worried about? A new home . . . everything the best that money can buy . . . a successful husband who’s on the way to his second million.”

“I haven’t got a goddamn thing,” she said with truculence, “and you know it. I haven’t got a marriage, and I hate my life.”

“
Success does that to some people,” he mused.

“Success hasn’t got anything to do with it . . . he was a bastard when he didn’t have what to eat.”

“You don’t have to tell me what I already know,” he said in a hushed voice.

“
It isn’t that he’s all rotten . . .”

“Just most of him. But he’s a good father, so there’s that in his favor, isn’t there?” He was groping, and he didn’t like himself for it, but nevertheless he wanted to learn more about Jay. Hatred had had a singular effect on him: it had made him curious, and he treasured every detail of dirt he could pick up that confirmed his own opinion of Jay. At times he would lie awake at night, going over all the little slights and infamies he had been subjected to by his brother, and he had the recurring dream of confronting Jay in court with a bulging dossier in his hand, listing every act of deceit Jay had ever committed. Like all obsessions this had the effect of draining his energy and producing precisely the opposite effect on his relations with Jay; he performed the exceedingly difficult operation of removing any suspicion of personal jealousy from his remarks on Jay’s character, and his public performance was so deferential, so shamelessly sycophantic, that he came to believe that the performance was a part of a master plan he had evolved with which to bring Jay to his knees.

“A good father?” Rhoda’s tone was incredulous. “Shall I tell you what he’s doing?”

Al’s palms sweated, and he waited apprehensively for Rhoda’s testimony.

“
He’s being
good to himself.”

Al put his coffee cup down on the side table and peered around
suspiciously to see that no one could overhear them.

“
I don’t
follow .
. .”

“He doesn’t think of himself as Neal’s father . . . he sees Neal as himself in miniature, and as he loves himself more than anything in the world, it’s easy to understand why he’s so good to Neal. And he can leave me out in the cold.”

Al considered the evidence and nodded his head thoughtfully. Another link in the chain of circumstances he would use to entrap his brother. For the moment, he couldn’t think how it related to his case, so he filed it.

“Typical of him. I hate to say I told you so, but I did, if you remember.”

“
Hah,” she made a
sharp,
ironic sound, but it wasn’t a laugh.

“
Someday . . . someday, you’ll see,” he said obscurely.

“
I need your help.”

“
Anything,” he said.

“I caught him on the phone just before. I’m pretty sure it was a woman.”

Al lifted his hairbrush brows in surprise.

“
With who?”

“
I’d like you to find out.”

“
That’s harder than it sounds.”

“
You work with him.”

“
For
him!”

“I know that he fools around, but I’ve got an idea that this is somebody he’s had for a while. He must’ve been pretty desperate to take a chance on me catching him on the phone, and right in the middle of the party.”