Seventh Avenue (49 page)

“Drunk?”

“I went by at two o’clock last night and the kid wasn’t home. Came home at 2:30 loaded on beer and sicked his guts out. Rhoda went clubbing with the sportsman. And we had an argument which the kid heard. What am I supposed to do? Tell me.”

“Keep after her. Hound her, and if she runs out of money, you step in.”

“I thought of asking all the manufacturers in the market to cut her credit, but I can’t in my heart do it, even though I want him. If she found out that I was behind it - and she’d know - she’d never let him go.”

“Well, worrying about it isn’t going to help. How’re things at the office?”

“We finished with the underwriters last week. I’ve sent you a full account of it. We go on the market in two weeks, and they think we’ll be oversubscribed at least six times, so that we’ll open with maybe a two-dollar premium. The traders’ll get in and out with a quick profit and she’ll settle down at about a dollar higher than the underwriting price.”

“How did you manage to beat them down on the percentage they wanted?”

Jay laughed contemptuously.

“They sent three or four college boys to deal with a crook. They’re crooks too, but they like to think they’re gentlemen or rather they want you to think they’re gentlemen. I’m honest about it. I admit that I’m a thief. Hey, this’ll kill you: one of them wanted to fix me up with a call girl to soften me up.”

“You’re kidding.”

“So I said: ‘Schmuck O’Brien, it’s my invention. Call girls. I was fixing people up with call girls when the best part of you was running down your father’s leg.’ So I gave them two and a half percent. Which they didn’t like, but they took it, and no stock options either. I told them they could get stock options with a company that needed them, not with an organization that’s a blue chip the minute it goes on the Board. While I was fighting with them, I kept wondering to myself: ‘Who am I doing this for?’ You, Marty, myself, our eighteen thousand employees, but in my heart I knew that it was for Neal, so that when he’s old enough he won’t have to kill himself. It’ll all be there for him, and he’ll be the gentleman, the human being, the college graduate. And then I go back to Brooklyn and find him laying in the apartment alone, with nobody, like a little gutter rat.”

Through the crowd of early drinkers, a woman’s arm emerged and thrust itself between Jay and Harry. She was caught in the crush at the bar and Jay nudged a man by his side who was gargling an old-fashioned and said:

“This lady’s going to be minus an arm if you don’t move.”

The man shifted his weight uneasily, and the woman came into view.

“I saw you from across the room.”

“I don’t believe it,” Jay said.

“I’m still fighting to get near you.”

“Terry . . . This is Harry Lee.”

“Lawson’s my married name. God, Jay, it’s been years and years and years.”

“An old friend,” Jay explained to Harry.

She ignored Harry and pushed up close to Jay.

“I’m having lunch here with my partner and my
wife,”
Jay said.

“Are you back with Rhoda?”

He flushed, unaccustomed to the question, and the memory of his short furtive experience with her.

“No, I’ve remarried.”

“Really? When, for heaven’s sake?”

She sounded a bit too interested, Jay thought.

Harry finished his drink quickly and said:

“Nice to have met you, Mrs. Lawson. I’ll just see about our table.”

She had filled out, Jay thought. Her body had lost its lanky, girlish shape; a suppleness, a firmness of limb, had removed that high nascent pubescence that had first attracted him. She was a young woman, with limpid uneasy eyes that flicked from one face to another in the room. Too many late nights and too much booze, he surmised. She was the only woman wearing a dress, a khaki green
paisley print with a high neck, and open-toed leather sandals - Cape
Cod vintage. Her voice had altered slightly, it was a bit deeper and
the harsh Boston twang had a mixture of New York in it - not normally an improvement, but it was in her case. Her nails were
chewed down to the skin, and she reminded him of about ten thousand other mixed-up women whose lives he had fleetingly entered
and left, not unlike a bee who pollinates, then moves on, instinctively.
He had a
predilection,
or was it a weakness, for
unhappy dissatisfied women. He wished they’d leave him alone.

“. . . It was about a year ago, on a Sunday morning with the papers in bed. We thought he was reading, and Mother screamed. Mitch
and I were spending the weekend with them. Mitch rushed in. Too
late. Nothing worked. Digitalis. Well,
a chapter
ends. Or maybe a
book.”

“You’re
happy . . . ?”

“Happy?”

“Ask a stupid question . . .”

“You get a stupid answer. I’ve got two little girls now.”

“It happens to everybody.”

“Louise and Pamela. I’m not much of a mother though. I mean I
like buying them frilly underwear and pretty dresses, but it’s all surface affection. I don’t worry about them unless they’re sick in bed.
I guess I take them for granted.” She pointed to her chest. “I’ve got
a hole in here.”

“Not T.B.”

“Could be T.B., but it’s not. Just a hole. A cavity.”

“And Mitch is the doctor you once told me about?”

She hummed something to herself under her breath.

“The same. He’s got an appointment at the Presbyterian Hospital.
We left Boston a year ago. Been in Great Neck now for about nine
months. It’s the same wherever you go. Hungry
people
looking for
somebody to eat. You join a country
club,
and you dine in company.
Are you a member?”

“No, don’t really want to join, but my wife insists, so I’ll give in.”

“Tell me about your wife.”

“I’ll tell you myself,” Eva said, taking Jay’s arm, as though it
were a trophy brought back from a safari. “Short and sweet.”

“This is my wife Eva,” Jay said stiffly, “Terry Lawson.”

“One thing about Jay: if there’s an attractive woman in the room, I know where she’ll be.
Holding Jay’s elbow.
Did you know, Miss
Lawson . . .”

“Mrs. Lawson. Terry . . .”

“Terry, if I must. Jay sleeps with more women accidentally than
most men do on purpose.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jay said, slamming his drink down.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Blackman,” Terry said, moving
away .
. .
“
Jay . . .” she waved.

“Wherever we go you have to open your goddamn mouth.”

“Am
I wrong? Just tell me!”

“She’s married to a doctor. They have two
kids,
and we knew
each other a long time ago, and there’s nothing between us, never
has been. She was a kid when I met her, sixteen or something.”

A blush of embarrassment broke through the milk-white powder
on Eva’s face. She never knew when to believe Jay. She had accused
him unjustly in the past and been proven wrong, but there were other
times when she
had
not remotely suspected him, only to learn later
that he had betrayed her. The petty infidelities were not important,
meaningless in the long run; it was the chain of muted half-truths,
impossible to verify or disprove
that
represented the ultimate in
subtle treachery. She remembered meeting Hiram Gilbert at the
Plaza, where she had gone to have lunch with a friend. Gil had
strode across the lobby, with great
gawping
steps and taken her hand.
His face had been familiar, but she could not place him until he said:
“Havana, your honeymoon.” And then she had recalled. Suddenly in
the lobby he began pawing her familiarly, and she had tried to escape
and he kept up a flurry of half-hearted, half-understood words that
bounced off her brain. “Poetic justice.
You an’ me.
That’d teach
him a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. You still with the
sonova
-bitch? Mah wife, she
run
off with a nigger, but afore she left, she
tole
me that
yoh
husbin
slep
with her in Havana, on
yoh
honeymoon.
You get shot of that
bastard,
then you give ole Gil a ring,
heah
.” She
had run from the lobby in
a panic
. Down Fifth Avenue.
Knocking
into people.
Into Radio City Music Hall, where she watched the stage
show in the empty balcony for an hour. Then home. The slow, deadening journey on the L.I.R.R. through the symmetrical suburbs and
the slums of Brooklyn.
A man
on the train had bought her a drink.
What was his name? In advertising or public relations. In Garden
City she got off the train with him and they drove to a motel but the
man got too drunk and passed out and she took a taxi back to Great
Neck alone and waited for Jay to come home. And when he did, she
could not bring herself to mention the incident because she was too
drunk to say a word.

“Harry’s got a table for us,” Jay said.

“I don’t want to join unless you really do.”

“Aw, Christ, Eva, make up your mind. What’s the Hollywood production for? What’s the big deal? Be an executive, make a fast decision. Yes, or no. I couldn’t care less. If you’re having such a problem,
it must be because you think it’s important. So let’s join and end the
discussion, which is one goddamn bore.”

He telephoned Terry two days later, ostensibly to apologize for
Eva’s insulting behavior. She sounded distracted and far away, and
he was almost sorry that he had called when she said:

“I probably would’ve reacted in the same way, if
I’d’ve
been her. It
might’ve been,” she added regretfully.

On the strength of this, he invited her to dinner. She accepted.

“God, you’re brave, with
that
wife.”

“What about the doctor?”

“He’s gone to Baltimore for
the week. Johns Hopkins has a lecture course in his field. I won’t tell you about it because you’re probably not interested.”

“Are you?”

“Touché.”

“What?”

“You’ve scored a point.”

“Good, I’ll see you at six.”

She lived in a large gabled house about a mile from him. It was
the sort of house that no one lived in for very long, and had changed
hands a dozen times in twenty years. It rambled and had
a weather-beaten
appearance
that
, with the ivy
that
undulated like a pack
of snakes on the façade, made it like one of those overgrown residences universities convert into library annexes. It was well-furnished
though, by Eva’s standards. A lot of antique crap that she would’ve
swooned over. Terry seemed ill at ease in the house. The studio
apartment in Boston had been more in keeping with her character.
Marriage had made her taste drearily respectable. She mixed
the
drinks
competently,
Jay thought. It was difficult to find a woman
who
did not know how to mix drinks competently. The times, he reflected.
Everybody’s grown up, with too much time, too much money that
they hadn’t earned, and life becomes something they hope to escape
from, using good scotch and eighteenth-century beds. He was grateful to have Neal, for Neal gave his existence a meaning that none of
the people he knew either wanted or needed.

“Did you know my father was very disappointed that nothing came
of our meeting?”

The information staggered him, particularly the flippant manner
in which she tossed it off as if it were mere cocktail party small talk.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Here’s your drink. Test it.” He sipped it. It was cold and tasteless: a vodka martini. “It leaves gin standing still.”

“There’s that to say for it.”

“Why would I lie? It’s over and done with. And I couldn’t lie about
the dead.”

“I can’t think why you would.”

“It’s the truth. He admired you, and when he learned that your
marriage was breaking up, he wanted to give me first crack.”

“But I remember him insisting that I should go back to my wife.
A lot of bull about divorces holding men back.”

“The test.”

Jay sank back into the soft cushions of the club chair she had
forced him to sit in.

“The business partnership was a gambit to get you there. To involve you two in something binding.”