Seventh Avenue (50 page)

“I’ll have another drink. Make it scotch.”

“Bad idea to mix your liquors.”

“You sound like an expert. I’ve been playing this game a little
longer than you.”

She poured him a large scotch on the rocks. He let the ice chill
it for a minute, then took a long drink, and as she was standing with
the bottle by his side, he reached out for her arm.

“C’mon, hit me again. Fine,” he said when she had filled it up.
“What I can’t understand is why he didn’t come right out with it.
Everybody would’ve been a lot happier.”

“You wouldn’ve run for your life.”

“I suppose I would’ve. Did you ever tell him about us?”

“I gave him an edited version.”

“I’d love to hear it.” The drink had gone to his
head,
and he felt
a bit woozy. It was a momentary sensation of being high that he experienced from time to time when he was excited, and
that
hit a
plateau after he had half a dozen drinks. A leveling off followed
that
invariably gave him the illusion that people were nicer and
cleverer than they usually were, and women inevitably assumed a
grace and desirability
that
made his infidelities seem natural
fulfillments
, adorned with romantic accoutrements, instead of drunken
sex with strangers.

“Have another drink,” she said anxiously. They were on their
fifth.

“Well . . . ?”

“I had to protect myself.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to do less.”

“I said that you were only interested in having an affair with me.”

“So he wrote me off like a bum check.”

“I’m afraid he did.”

“And our Boston adventure. Did you leave that out?”

“No, I put it in a different light.”

“This is
marvelous. P
lease go on. I feel like
the good guy for once.”

“He knew you were in Boston. I called to say that you’d come up.
And after our disagreement . . .”

“That’s nice: ‘disagreement.’ What was that all about?”

“That I refused to go to bed with
you, and you walked out.”

“Now I know what an edited version is. Thanks.” He rose from
the armchair.

“You’re not going?” she said, alarmed.

“My foot’s fallen asleep. Just shaking it.”

“So what’re we going to do?”

“That sounds like big drama. We’re gonna eat a steak at the Little
Neck, and then we’re gonna do what we intended to do.”

“Which
is . . . ?”

“Cheat.”

“Uh-huh,” she said with a leering smile. “You always buy your
girls a steak?”

“It depends on how much I care.”

“I’m flattered.” She had begun to drag her consonants and slur.

“After I’ve had a few drinks and a steak, if I’m still interested in
knocking the broad off, I figure I’m interested. And if I’m not, I give
her cab fare.”

“Jay.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him with such
urgency that he was almost touched. “Jay, I’m sorry. Genuinely.
I’ve messed up my life.”

“We all have, so don’t feel bad. I’m president of the organization.
We’ve got chapters from coast to coast.”

She threaded her hands through the hollow of his arm and leaned
her head on his shoulder. “It should’ve been you and me. We loved
each other.”

“For a while.”

“I’ve never loved anybody but you, Jay,” she intoned his name
mournfully, and his heart began to palpitate.

“What, Terry?”

“It’s a tragedy. I’ve had two children by a man I never cared for.
Maybe that’s why I’m a lousy mother.”

“The kids shouldn’t have taken the rap.”

“It’s awful. I wanted your children.”

“What about Neal?”

“I would’ve loved him. I said some stupid things. I was very
young.”

“And I was too old.”

“You still as crazy about him?”

“It’ll always be Neal. You see, he’s me, and I’m him, and there
aren’t divorces in that kind of marriage.”

At the Little Neck, Charlie fawned on them as though they were
royalty. He set out a fresh platter of hors d’oeuvres, and wiped the
bar as they sat down.

“You straighten out that little matter, Mr. Blackman?”

Other bars, other places, but the same faces, Jay thought. The
same
bored,
restless little people in search of excitement, change,
new circumstances, and old experiences.

“Yeah, I straightened it out. Say hello to Mrs. Lawson.” Charlie
said hello. “If she comes in on her own, you look after her and keep
the dancing teachers away.”

“Sure will,” Charlie replied. He’d do anything for money.

“We’re old friends, Mr. Blackman and I. He used to squire me
about when I was a child.”

“Yeah, squire her about, hear that, Charlie? A lady!”

She couldn’t explain why she had bothered to mention the fact
that she and Jay had known each other before, and of all people, to
a bartender
she had only just met. There was no making it respectable, so why should she try? She had thought about Jay incessantly
over the years, at first with anguish and then with a sense of loss so
profound that she had reached a state of indifference about what happened to her. What she particularly regretted was the fact that she
had acted totally out of character. She had tried to bring herself down
to his level, only to learn - too late for it to help - that he was above
her. He was
decent,
and she indecent. He had
principles,
she had
none; he cared about other people, she only about herself. His roughness and lack of education she had assumed were commensurate with
a lack of character. If
anything,
he had too much character and too
much innate decency to put up with her behavior. Perhaps her father
had understood this, and perhaps that was why he had singled Jay
out as the son-in-law he would have preferred.

“Jay, would you marry me?”

He scooped up some lettuce with his fork and chewed it.

“The salad’s terrific. I love
roquefort cheese dressing.”

“Your breath will smell
from it.”

“Don’t let it worry you. Why don’t you eat something? I promised
to buy you a steak, and I’m a man of my word. They won’t run out
of booze. You can drink more on a full stomach.”

She pecked at her steak glumly,
and he studied her long fingers
out of the corner of his eye. She attracted
him,
and he wanted her to
repulse him. She hadn’t aged
much;
her type never did. They had
a permanent youthful freshness and vivacity that took them right
up to fifty. Eva would turn old overnight. He should have married
Terry. Perhaps that would have prevented
him
from making one mistake after another. But now the situation was impossible, or was it?
He mustn’t hope for too much. When she put down her knife and
fork and stared listlessly through space, he picked up her hand and
kissed it.

“That was sweet,” she said. “I like to have you touch me. It means
something.

“What does it mean?”

“That what I’ve made of
things .
. . me . . . it’s not completely hopeless. To have
the
man you
love . . . well, it’s different. Nothing else matters. I love you and I always will.”

“That’s nice.”

“A lot of women have been in love with you.”

“Too many. One would’ve been enough.”

“I’d like to cry.”

“Don’t bother. It doesn’t mean a thing
anymore
. C’mon,” he patted her hand, “we’re old friends having a drink and some dinner
together, so let’s keep it light and pleasant. You’ve got a good husband, two little girls, security, so what’s the point of getting depressed? No good at all.”

“What about
afterwards?”

Afterwards took place in her bedroom. He sat in a soft-backed
chair with a drink in his hand gazing at little figurines on her dresser.
She had rolled down the
bedspread,
and there was a mauve satin quilt
under it. All that was missing were the dolls. Other men’s beds, other
bodies. The room was
warm,
and she opened the window, and then
when she pulled the curtains they drooled listlessly in the faint breeze.
She lit a cigarette, then brushed her hair without enthusiasm. The
bedstead was brass and when she lay down her hair was reflected
in the metal ball at the corner. He finished his
drink
and took her
cigarette from her and puffed it.

“If you want another drink, there’s a bottle on the dresser.”

“Separate rooms, you and the doctor?”

“He reads late every night.”

“A good excuse.”

She rose from the bed angrily and went for the bottle
of
scotch,
but he got there first and took her wrist.

“Jay, don’t play games with me. If you’re not
interested .
. .
well, I’ve had to live with it long enough, so I’ll die with it.”

“What’s brought this on?” he asked with surprise.

“For God’s sake, I’ve been through it. Shall I tell you about
Mitch?
Would you like to hear?”

“No, I don’t think I would.”

“Well, I’ll tell you whether you care to hear or not. He has something wrong with him. Psychological, physical, who knows what?
Whenever he comes near me, he has his, you know what, so we’ve
never properly consummated our marriage vows. Do you understand? And it’s a mercy I’m grateful for.”

He wanted to ask her about the children, but she said: “We’ve
had two children. And if you only knew the sickening things I’ve had
to go through to have them, how it was achieved, maybe you won’t
get all hypocritical about the kind of mother and wife I am.”

“I’m sorry,” he said ruefully. He had been toying with
her,
and
he realized that she had regained her moral ascendancy over him;
it was like a delicate watchmaker’s scale, and he had gambled with
her and lost. He knew why he had gambled: to confirm and justify
his decision to abandon her, but he was
wrong,
and he went towards
her with a new sympathy
that overwhelmed him by its fullness.

“I love you, Jay. Can you understand that? I’m not a housewife
on the loose desperate for a man, any man.
I’ve overcome
that feeling years ago. So don’t think you have to go to bed with me because
it’s expected of you. Nothing’s expected of
you,
and don’t treat me
like a piece you can walk all over just because I was stupid one night
a long time ago with you. In fact, if you believe I’m really like that,
like I acted then, I’d prefer you to carry that memory around with
you instead of the way I really am, the real one. I’d like you to be
able to vindicate your judgment of me, and that way you can.”

He stared at his face in the mirror,
and he wondered if he was as
dissolute as he appeared. His eyes were bloodshot and small, but he
was sober.

“I love you,” he said. “I wasn’t going to admit I did because I was
let down, and I didn’t want you to have the satisfaction of knowing
that I still do love you. But it’s silly really. The trouble is too much
time’s
passed, and it’s not possible to start again.”

She put her arms round his neck and pressed his face against hers.

“Don’t leave me again, Jay.”

Later the knowledge hit him like a thunderbolt. His blood insisted
that he had done the right thing - he loved Terry. Somehow he
would have to come to terms with Eva, for he sensed that the ruined
mansion of his life might be restored, and not with plaster and mortar, but with love. He had to
love;
it was more important than being
loved.

Neal
was shipped to summer camp with the same dispatch as
a soldier in wartime, to be trained, disciplined, toughened and taught
how to survive in
a forest.
The camp had militaristic leanings and was
under the charge of a maniacal spartan, a P.T. instructor in a Bronx
high school whose wife’s inheritance provided the initial capital for
the camp. It was called the
Moscalero
, after a degenerate and now
extinct Apache band whose anarchy and vindictiveness were legendary. Carl Holtz, the commandant of Camp
Moscalero
, saw no contradictions, either moral or social, in the name or the training program he had devised for his initiates. “I want them to be braves. Like
the Spartans of yore,” he told anxiety-ridden parents who wanted to
get rid of their children for the summer. He usually genuflected
when he provided his sales talk, then did twenty-five push-ups and
twenty-five sit-ups in the middle of the living room to demonstrate
that he practiced what he preached. The camp accommodated one
hundred and ten
boys,
and that meant Carl did a lot of push-ups
every year. “Not bad for a man of fifty-six?” he would demand with
that peculiar hunger for praise that was at the back of every rhetorical question he asked - and he only asked this type of question.

On
sight,
Neal detested him. And when the bull-necked, squatly
built, hawk-nosed, simian-shuffling man asked him to call him “Uncle Carl,” he could have killed his parents. What irked him was the
knowledge that the camp represented a solution to both his parents’
problems. At the meeting
that
had been held in Jay’s office and was
attended by both Rhoda and Sports, her minister without portfolio
and without, as Jay learned, a pot to piss in, only Eva had come to
Neal’s defense.

“
I don’t see why he shouldn’t come to the
beach house
with us,”
she said.

Jay could only think that he would be tied to Neal whenever he
might be with Terry. He didn’t love Neal less than before, but he
very definitely loved Terry more than he thought he could love any woman. So he rationalized: what he was offering Neal was supervision, the very opposite of neglect.

“He’d get bored in a week at the beach and there aren’t many kids to play with.”

Holtz had walked around the office on his hands to show just what a well-conditioned fifty-six-year-old man could do when he was a student of gymnastics.

“Don’tcha get tired?” Sports asked, out of breath watching him.

“Tired? I do this to relax. Well, Neal, wouldn’t you like to learn how to do this?”

“Not particularly,” Neal had replied flatly. He had developed the ironist’s tool of laconicism.

“You could show your friends, and boy’d they be jealous,” Holtz continued, his face the color of an overripe tomato, split-skinned and on the way to going rotten.

“They’d stop talking to me if I walked around on my hands.”

“Don’t be rude,” Rhoda ordered. She couldn’t afford to let Neal upset her summer plans.

“Yah, go on, Neal. What d’you wanta sweat yer head off in the city for? Go to public swimming pools and get athlete’s foot for?” Sports observed with what Neal had discovered to be a positive genius for irrelevancy.

Holtz had righted himself, and he took up Sports’ theme agilely.

“No athlete’s foot at Moscalero,
I
can tell you. We’ve got a lake, our own. Lake Crow. Exclusively ours” - he flapped the brochure in Sports’ face – “and it’s two miles across. Every boy over thirteen is required to swim it to pass his Junior Life-Saving Test, and then he can wear his Red Cross badge on his swimming trunks.”

“Neal loves to swim,” Rhoda said.

A document was brought out from the inside pocket of Holtz’s sweat-stained seersucker jacket that released the camp from its responsibility for the boys’ health and safety. This safeguard was interwoven among clauses dealing with camp uniforms and snaked out as “Untoward, unforeseeable accidents . . . Camp Moscalero . . . accepts no legal responsibility and no claims thereof will be entertained.”

Jay examined the document. It was six hundred dollars plus fifty dollars for spending money on trips, and seemed exceedingly reason
able to someone in his income bracket. He picked up his pen and was
poised to sign when Neal shouted out: “Don’t, Daddy, it’s a concentration camp.”

“
Oh, dear me, it’s not. The only things we concentrate on are
sports, self-reliance,
swimming,
and making men. No, no, you’re very
wrong, Neal. You’ll change your
opinion,
you’ll see.”

Neal recognized the implicit menace in Holtz’s manner, and he
reversed his tactics. His parents and Sports were insistent and diligent in their desire to be rid of him. Why Eva wanted him around was
a mystery, but she no doubt had a motive, so he accepted the fait
accompli, for there was nothing he could do. He dissolved the antagonism that had been built up in Holtz, by saying:
“I’m probably
wrong .
. . Uncle Carl.”

Approval. A sinister smile
that
developed into a guffaw, a pat
on the back, spiritual bonhomie. The pen did its
work,
the deed was
done, and Uncle Carl got his check for $650 without a whimper and
not on the special installment plan available to economically pressed
parents. Jay, with an insight
that
shocked Neal, made a valiant effort to smooth over the terrain that Neal had disturbed.

“
He comes from a divorced home, and he’s a little oversensitive.”

“
Of course. I understand,” Holtz said, and he did, a bit.

“
Don’t hang it around his neck like a dead albatross,” Eva said
sharply. Defeat might be made to work for her. “You wouldn’t like
Neal to use that as an excuse or hide behind it.”

Thoroughly perplexed but ruminating on the wisdom of this
remark, Holtz rambled something vague about taking the middle
ground. His casuistry was discernible to Neal.

One hundred and ten braves of varying sizes, ages and dispositions,
some with pimples, some not yet old enough to have them, met at
the beginning of July on an incredibly muggy morning at the bus terminal on Forty-Second Street. Parents forced their protesting charges
into the buses, decorated with
the green
and red pennants of Camp
Moscalero
. A species of being Neal had never before seen entered
his life; the camp
counselor
. Most of them were on the short side of
twenty,
and all went to colleges of some description. Uncle Don,
Neal’s
counselor
, was nineteen, squinty-eyed, with toothpick-thin
arms swarming in
hair,
and a crew cut. He had a red whistle on a
lariat
that
he blew every five seconds to the consternation of everyone in the perspiring crowd. He
didn’t seem very
intelligent,
and Neal
sensed that he would be susceptible
to flattery and brown-nosing.
Neal’s bunk was made up of four other
boys
who looked
as disconso
late as he felt. One of the boys, wearing
a
name tag the
size of a ham
burger, blubbered into a snot-filled handkerchief. His name
was Artie
Kahn. Uncle Don made several vain efforts to quiet
him down by
blowing the whistle in his ear, but nothing
stopped Artie. He had
been delivered, and left, by
two fat parents who didn’t want to miss
any sun on the beach.

Like some prophet announcing
doomsday, Uncle Carl emerged
from the center of the crowd, shouting
through
a
large megaphone:
“We’re off, folks. All parents off the buses. Leaving in one
minute.”
He slipped into a station
wagon,
and the buses started up and
turned
in small circles around the platforms to form a convoy. The trip
took
five hours to Milhaven, Connecticut. The buses made one stop at
a
roadside rest during which Artie vomited huge slabs of salami,
and
Bobby Fish, another bunkmate, made a break for freedom,
but was
caught by Uncle Don as he tripped down a steep gradient.

“
Say you’re sorry,” Uncle Don demanded
in a high-pitched ade
noidal voice.

“
Fuck yourself,” Bobby replied.

There were too many people
watching Uncle Don for him to at
tempt to swat Bobby, but
he did
say
that he was putting him down
on his shit list.

“
And when
somebody’s on
that
list, they gotta work their asses off
to get off.”

Neal was sure that
he
and Bobby
would
be
allies if not friends.

Camp
Moscalero
rested on an acclivity just
outside Milhaven. It
was well
laid-out,
and the facilities reflected Uncle Carl’s
caste of
mind. High hurdles on a cinder track, a bar for high jumping,
an
other bar for pole vaulting, tennis courts
that
were
chapleted
with
weeds, a baseball diamond with eight inches
of
grass, a
wooden
basketball court, archery targets, and an enormous pit filled
with saw
dust to train Olympic
long-jumpers
. The bunks were a series of
raw
timbered, functional cabins, situated in a quadrangle, and the
mess
hall and Uncle Carl’s manse were on the top of the hill. It took a
good five minutes to walk up the hill from the
bunks
to the
camp
proper, and Neal supposed that Uncle Carl
wanted
his
braves to work
up an appetite before they
got
to the
dining
hall. There
was a
shower
house
behind the bunks
that
served thirty boys, and each
bunk
contained a can and two sinks.

Half a dozen trunks were lying on the porch of Neal’s bunk, and
Uncle Don announced that they’d have a swim after unpacking. The
beds were laid out in a daisy chain, and Neal took the one next to
Bobby’s.

“
My name’s Neal Blackman,” he said. “And if that scumbag puts
a hand to you, I’ll jump him.”

“
Thanks,” Fish said, surprised. “Maybe they aren’t all fairies here.
Where you from?”

“
Brooklyn. And you?”

“
The Bronx. Tremont Avenue. Know it?”

“
No, I only know the Grand Concourse.”

“
Been to camp before?” Fish asked.

“
No, I didn’t want to come. But Uncle Fat Ass started walking
around on his hands in front of my parents, so they signed me on.”