The Old Man and Me (27 page)

I combed my hair and put on my shoes and went.

He opened the door for me, a complete stranger in a new brocade dressing-gown. Kempt and cosy and combed and spruce. And rested. And rosy. I forced myself to stand still in the doorway for I felt jittery and fidgety and wished I had taken more time over my toilet.

I said hello to him and nothing more.

He stepped aside to let me pass and then, with the far-off, pleasant but nonetheless intense curiosity he might have shown about the tribal customs of the aborigines, he asked me why I had a streak of red in my hair.

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I even toyed with the idea that “streak-of-red” might have some symbolic meaning that eluded me but he gripped me hard by the arm and planted me firmly in front of the hallway mirror.

What a sight I was! I hadn’t looked at myself in a mirror,
really seeing myself, for over a week (and he, all plump and smiling; fresh-linened, perky pocket-handkerchief’d, eau-decologned, thymey, and healthy in the background for contrast). However, he was right. There was a red streak that ran curiously down my hair from the parting. I rubbed it gingerly. I had some idea that it might be blood but it didn’t hurt. I rubbed my fingers together and sighed with relief. “It’s my lipstick,” I said.

“You don’t put lipstick on your hair, you put it on your lips. How did you get it in your hair?”

“The top of the lipstick has been loose for some time and unless I pinch it hard when I put it back on, it keeps falling off. I must have forgotten to.”

“I didn’t ask you that. I asked you how it got into your hair. Are you going to answer me?” He was very upset, shouting, and he was upsetting me too.

“The lipstick must have gotten on to my comb,” I explained, opening my bag and showing him. “That’s all. And then I combed my hair with it.” I was striving for that nice, right blend of logic and nonchalance. But my throwaway wouldn’t work. He’d made me nervous and that thing, that desperate thing, that ever present possibility of my flip, kept coming through. I could see by the handbag twisting in my hands and it was worse than a pity. Damn that giveaway streak in my hair. It said danger to him. It said watch it, danger. The danger is still here, still playing around her, sliding up and down that crazy red streak in her hair.

I followed him into the drawing-room and we sat down. I was doubled up like a knife on the edge of the chair, fatefully waiting.

“What will you do now?” he asked. But first a large block of silence to cement our new relation. An ocean to establish our new distance. “What will you do now?”

And still I sat, still doubled up, but very quietly so I could let it sink in, so I could get it, feel it in my bones. React. Recover. Stop making a fool of myself. I, who had once been held in the highest, in the utmost exaltation, not two weeks ago, fallen from favour, now come humbly to beg, humbly awaiting bread crumbs.

“Don’t know,” I replied, cool as I could. “Hit the road I guess. Looks like I’ve had Angleterre.” Then quickly, so as not to notice he hadn’t said Don’t go, stay, “You’re looking well.” Or did I say sexy? I hoped not but oh, how I yearned for him, that’s all I could think about, his hands on me and his mouth on mine. Damn that red streak. What could I do while it was there? I kept touching my hair and my hands were getting covered with lipstick.

“I
feel
well,” he said, radiating. “I’ve had a good rest. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The other night in the ambulance—”

I forced myself back into the chair, curled into a tight ball.

“I told you I wanted to die. I really thought I could die with you helping me—”

“C. D.,” I was pleading suddenly. “I am beyond strategy. I am speaking to you for the very first time in my life without strategy. The only thing I know is that I love you and need you and want to serve you to make it up to you.”

“—but,” he went on unheeding, he was up now, walking around the room so jaunty-stepped, so high-spirited, so fine-feeling’d in his skin, “I couldn’t. Looks as if I’m indestructible.” He chuckled. “Weak, foolish, bad as I’ve been all my life, nevertheless I did not want to be destroyed and—what’s more—” crowing, “—I couldn’t be. I am John Bull,” he added gleefully. “Indestructible!” He looked it too. He looked Jolly John Bull for better or worse indestructible. “And I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life for pointing it out to me,” he finished gently.

I sighed and shook my weary head. I saw that my youth, my ordinarily strongest ally, was against me. For I was unused to failure, thrown by it, helpless to rise above it. He, the old man, so old and so vigorous; and me, young but so tired.

“Ah, C. D., can’t I rest here awhile?” To twine my arms around him, hug his great girth and feel him there, the whole him, the sum total of my desires. “I’ll be good, I promise. Ah now, don’t. Stop it.” (He, giggling again.) “I’m being serious. I’m fighting for my life. What’s to become of me? Look at me. Look at the way I look.”

“I have a plan,” he said, dominating the room from the fireplace, large, tubby, and serene, one arm resting gracefully on the mantel. “Here it is. You go back to America. You’re better off over there, eh? America and England, hmm? Youth and Old Age, yes? You go ahead; I stay put. You forge on; I hold back. And,” he added ruminatively, “I’ll hold out too.” Very neat.

“Oh f— the analogy!” I cried out in my pain. “I don’t want to go back, I’ve seen them all, it’s all the same. The prestige seekers. The Off-beat In-Groups. The Station Waggoners. People being fine old families and phony old fools. And this beach is private and that man’s a local, and all the vast sparsely furnished apartments overlooking the East River. Why go back? I’ve seen them all.”

“Ah, but you haven’t seen them on their knees.” Laughing and shaking and brimming over like Jolly Old St. Nick.

“What do you mean?”

“Simply that that is the position they will assume viewing you from the height of your X dollars.”

Then he drew up a chair vigorously
—
it was the first time I’d ever seen him even draw up a chair—and pulling it close to mine, and plumping himself upon it, he continued with animation: “Now here is my plan: We Nations split the loot. Agreed? Fifty-fifty. Can’t say fairer than that, can I? Ah well”—giggle—“I’d be afraid not to. Bad risk having you running around loose and poor, never knowing who the next victim might be. I’d have no peace of mind.” And he threw me one of his looks setting off those snakes of laughter, those little trilly snakes of laughter he was always able to, wriggling round inside me, so tingly they were like baby orgasms.

Yes, yes, you have me there, you sly old fox. Keep me laughing, boy, keep the picture frame around us picaresque, absurd. It’s your strongest weapon now against my Tragic Queen of Sorrow: little nails of laughter piercing through my suffering.

However, the content of his last words had not escaped me. Half the loot. I let it sink in for a while. So it had come to that. Blackmail. The old pirate was paying me off.

“Aren’t you ashamed to be sitting here like this bargaining for your life?” I asked with my first show of spirit.

“Certainly not.” He was still benign.

“Well I don’t want the money,” I said grandly. “What would I do with it?”

“You’re going to take it and you’re going to find out what to do with it,” he blasted at me, suddenly losing his temper. “What’s the matter with you, girl, you take a year out of your life, lie, cheat, assume false identity, attempt murder, go through elaborate silliness hourly to get the money and then you say you don’t know what to do with it.”

“I only wanted it because it was mine.”

We both sat stock still, rocked back on our heels in our astonishment for we knew I had spoken the truth from the innocence of my heart and its ramifications stunned us. I had only wanted the money because it was mine. I’d never had any idea of what I would do with it, had never given it a thought; a truth as irritating to him as it was bewildering to me.

“Because it was mine, because it was mine,” he began, mocking me simperingly. “Now you’re going to find out what ‘mine’ means. Now you’re going to find out what money means. Only use it. Use it as Pauly did if you like, to buy a cad and a rotter for her second husband, or as I did—greedily on myself in the beginning, in the, what shall I call it?—my early Meissen china-cup days—and then as bait for you, my dear, to get myself destroyed. Or give it away as saints do, or gamble it away like fools. But use it. See its power to corrupt or save. But use it. Learn from our stupidities. Profit by our example. Have you got your fare home?” he asked, switching abruptly.

I nodded, licked.

“Good. Though if you hadn’t I should have supplied you
with it.”

“Thank you,” I sighed, at last remembering my manners.

“Not at all. Simply another use for my money. Protection money so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life worrying about you sticking pins in my image.”

“How did you find out about that?” I asked startled.

He gave me a really terrible look. “What?” he roared. “This is the last straw,” he thundered. “Out, out, OUT!” He had risen large and looming, filling the room with his fury, pointing a chubby finger theatrically towards the drawing-room doors. And I jumped up cringing, little Eva turned out into the storm.

But he recovered himself with a swish of his brocade dressing-gown. “I must get dressed now,” C. D. was saying, suavely, looking at his watch. “Sorry, my dear, I have people coming in. For drinks.” He kept advancing upon me as he spoke, sort of chesting me out of the room. “Cheer up and think about the X dollars. You’re too stunned now, I expect. That lawyer in New York will be issued instructions.”

“For drinks?” I murmured sadly, backing away towards the door, thinking of happier, cooler times.

“For drinks,” he replied implacable. C. D. had given me time. And the time was up.

I tried once more. “I’ll write you of course when I receive my—I mean your—”

“Please do.”

“And you’ll answer me?”

“Oh, my dear child.”

“All right all right all right,” I said hurriedly, “But someday...”

But I no longer existed for him. The wall was up surrounding him, the impenetrable wall of suavity behind which he hid without trace while he kept chesting me out into the hallway towards the front door. I turned, suddenly surprising him unaware with a final kiss on his lips, and was rewarded by a fleeting glimpse of my old mischief-making, mischief-loving soulmate Seedy. One glimpse was all I was allowed. When I left the house and looked back I saw him in the doorway: Bland. Brand-new. As if none of it had ever happened.

That year passed away like a day. Often it seems it never happened. Maybe none of it ever really did. Maybe it was all a dope-riddled dream. But here I am at 3.00 a.m. in the morning standing in the middle of my living-room in New York with xxxxxxxxxxxx dollars. And what am I going to do with it?