The Rendezvous (7 page)

‘Very happy,' he said. ‘You always do, my sweetheart. I'm such a lucky guy I can't believe it. You know, I looked round those people tonight at Ruth's party, and I thought, There's only one woman in the place, and she's mine. Only one really feminine, beautiful woman among the lot of them.'

‘I wish we'd had a child,' she said suddenly. ‘I'd give anything to have one. I feel it so terribly that you've missed that because of me.'

‘You're not to feel anything like that,' Robert said. ‘I don't give a damn about children. You're all I want. You know that.'

‘I'm the lucky one,' Terese said gently. ‘Not you, darling, me. Did you see Julia Adams tonight?'

‘Yes, pretty briefly. She was looking for that architect you took out on the balcony. He's the current boy friend. Why?'

‘I thought I might ask them to dinner with Joe and Vera. He gave me his card – the architect, I mean. Amstat, Karl Amstat, that was his name. He was rather nice, Robert. I think you'd like him.'

‘If you like him, I guess I will too.'

‘All right, I'll call Julia this week.'

Amstat didn't answer the door immediately; the bell rang twice while he was in the bedroom, emptying clothes out of the closet, two suitcases gaping open on the bed. He wasn't expecting any caller and he let them ring. It wasn't the first time he had packed in a hurry, but he had begun to think it wouldn't be necessary again. He had been safe for six years with the expectation of being safe for ever. But not now, not after meeting Terese Masson. It was the kind of damnable coincidence that couldn't be foreseen, it was incredible that she hadn't remembered him, but this was only temporary luck. The next time they ran into each other she might see something about him which she had missed in the middle of a crowd of people or standing on a balcony in the dark.

He was going to have to run again. The doorbell went on ringing. He swore and went out to see who it was.

‘Well,' Julia said, ‘so nice of you to walk out on me at the party. Would you mind telling me why?'

She didn't wait for him to answer, she walked past him into the living room and sat down.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘You know I hate cocktail parties. I couldn't see you, and I couldn't stand it any more, so I left. Now I'm tired, and I want to go to bed.'

‘Not with me, presumably,' she said. She made no attempt to get up; she took off her gloves and lit one of his Turkish cigarettes; she was so angry at the way he had humiliated her in front of the Bradfords that she was going to have a row with him whatever the outcome.

Amstat didn't move from the middle of the room. ‘No, not with you,' he said. ‘Or anyone else tonight. I'm sorry I didn't wait for you, but I've told you before, Julia, I'm not an American lap-dog. Now I'll take you home, if you like, but I'm not going to waste time quarrelling.'

‘I'm not going home,' she said. ‘I want to know what's the matter with you, Karl, and you're not going to brush me off. You've never walked out on me before, you didn't even call me afterwards and now you're trying to throw me out. I want to know why, that's all.'

‘I've given you the reason and I've said I'm sorry. Twice. That's all there is to it. Now please go home.'

Julia hesitated; she had never seen him like this. He had become a stranger. ‘Karl,' she said, ‘don't let's fight. The last I saw of you was when you went out on the balcony with that crazy wife of Bobbie Bradford's – then you vanished. I thought maybe you'd picked her up, and I was furious.'

‘What do you mean, Bradford's crazy wife?'

He felt anger rising in him as he looked at her, sitting smoking and swinging one foot backwards and forwards, using the word in that contemptuous way. He really disliked Julia at that moment.

‘What I said! Crazy – well, sort of, anyway. She lost her memory during the war. Why are you looking at me like that? What the hell do you care if I call her crazy?'

‘What do you mean, she's lost her memory? She seemed perfectly normal to me.'

He turned away from her, getting a bottle of whiskey and two glasses out of the cabinet; he couldn't let her see his face.

‘Well of course she's normal,' Julia said irritably. ‘She just can't remember anything that happened before she married Bobbie. I heard she'd been in some kind of air raid – anyway I don't know, it's just what Ruth told me. Who cares?'

‘Have a Scotch,' he said. He had poured himself a drink and gave her one.

She patted the sofa beside her; he looked tense and angry still, and she was frightened. More frightened of losing him than she had ever been about anything in her life before. ‘Come and sit down and make up with me,' she said. He didn't come, he went on standing there, looking at her without seeing her, sipping his drink.

That was the explanation. That was why Terese hadn't known who he was, and it meant, incredibly, that she would never know.

‘Darling,' his mistress said again, ‘come here. I hate fighting with you. I know I was bloody and I'm sorry.' She managed to laugh as if it were all very unimportant. ‘I'm just a jealous female. Come and kiss and make up.'

He sat beside her and immediately she put her arms around him. She was never diffident about initiating love; she gave him a long deep sexual kiss which left him completely undisturbed, while his mind registered that he must keep her out of the bedroom or she would see the suitcases.

‘No, Julia, not tonight,' he said. ‘I'm tired and I've got a lot of work to do. I'll take you home.'

She looked at him and shook her head. ‘I wish we'd settle this thing, Karl. I wish you'd marry me.'

‘Why spoil it?' he said. ‘Why try and tie it down? It didn't work with you before – it probably wouldn't this time. I'll come round tomorrow early, about five. We'll spend the whole evening together.'

‘And the night,' Julia said. ‘I'm getting so I want to wake up in the morning and find you still there.'

‘You will,' he said, ‘if that's what you want.' He kissed her and made an effort. ‘I'm sorry I made you angry, darling. I really meant to call you later and explain.'

Julia stood up, collecting her bag and gloves; she was a very graceful woman and she had recovered her poise. ‘Forget it, sweet. It was just a jealous fit. Amnesia or no amnesia, she's a very attractive woman, and that's a very cosy balcony. You needn't drive me home; my car's out front.'

He went down in the lift with her and put her in the car, and kissed her open mouth through the window before she drove off. Then he went back up to his apartment, into his bedroom and began to unpack. There was no danger from that incredible encounter. She would never be able to identify him. He didn't have to run, after all.

3

‘I don't think the Bradfords give good parties,' Vera Kaplan said. She traced her mouth in bright pink lipstick and smiled at herself to make sure that none of the colour had gone on her teeth. Her husband was dressing in the next room and the communicating door was open. ‘She's so dull, that's the trouble,' she went on, raising the vocal tone a little to make sure he heard. ‘I find going to dinner there as bad as your medical friends.'

Joe was not the type of man who had a dressing room, it wasn't part of his background to dress apart from your wife, but she had made him do it, and now it was useful because they quarrelled so much that he spent many nights there. He heard every word and disciplined himself not to answer, not to be irritated.

‘She's so dull.' His wife had hated Terese Bradford from the moment she met her; he had tried hard to analyse the particular compendium of jealousy, suspicion and symbolic resentment that made Vera so implacable, and even his professional understanding baulked at the intensity of her dislike. But then people often chose quite unrelated objects on which to focus their own failures, their own sense of inadequacy and injustice. He was so far out of love with Vera that he could see her situation and feel genuinely sorry for her. He was a Jew, and when Vera Calston Hughes married him she had broken the most important of all the social taboos governing the American upper class. If she had been a drunk or a nymphomaniac, or just stupid, ugly and a bitch to the world, she would have been kept within the magic circle of those who could actually trace their descent to some free thinker of the eighteenth century who had emigrated to the States from England or the Netherlands. But she had married a Jew, and made herself a member of the untouchables and not just the medium-grade untouchables like the Irish or the Italians, but a Jew who was despised and discriminated against even by the last two. At such a level Negroes didn't exist at all, except as servants or a Cause, like spastic children. Poor Vera. He tied his bow tie and made himself go into the bedroom and let her take a few more jabs. She must feel the need to hurt him or she wouldn't try so hard to do it.

‘It won't be too bad tonight,' he said. ‘Bob says there's a Swiss architect they're inviting; he sounds like an interesting guy. You may like him.'

‘I may.'

She didn't turn round; she went on making up her face. She had been a pretty girl when she met Joe and fell in love with him; she had money and a name that got into the social columns and he was the most intelligent man she had ever met, and one of the nicest. More often than he knew Vera recognised how nice he was, and looking into her own embittered character, grieved that she hadn't been strong enough to see the marriage through without losing her self-respect and then her love for him. She hadn't spoken to her family for ten years. She would never forgive them and she took refuge in this attitude because she envisaged someone dying and her being able to refuse forgiveness. And it wasn't only on her side, it wasn't just the stiffnecked Boston aristocrats in their rigid entrenchment in the past; they had thrown her out and refused to meet her husband, but his Jewish parents and their tightly knit community had rejected her in a different way. Vera could go into their homes and be treated with great courtesy, offered everything first, deliberately made part of every conversation, and still be completely alien to all of them, the stranger who didn't understand, didn't belong.

Joe had his work, he had his career to compensate, and anyhow Vera felt he hadn't lost anything by the marriage. Nobody cut him, or asked them to parties where the guests were picked for their tolerant racial attitudes. Joe didn't even notice these things; they were part of a system which he had never penetrated deeply enough to be aware of the subtlety, the cruelty of the snubs his wife was made to suffer by her friends on his account.

But he knew what the trouble was; he knew the real reason why she didn't move when he came near her, or answer when he said he liked the way her hair was done. She just went on fitting a big pearl and diamond ear-ring into her left ear, and letting him see she didn't love him any more, and she could have screamed because he understood the reason.

‘They don't usually go in for intellectuals,' Vera said, returning to the attack. ‘Tell me, darling, I said she was dull just now, but maybe I'm unfair. Did all that psychiatric stuff you did affect her – slow her down a little?' Now she did turn and she smiled up at him.

‘No,' Joe Kaplan said, ‘it didn't.' He hadn't meant to rise, but he had had a long day and it came out in spite of the futility and, above all, the repetition of this particular argument.

‘Vera, why don't you get off Terese's back? What's she ever done to you?'

‘That's just it,' she said. ‘I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm not the one who's on her back – or ever has been. How about you?'

It always made him furious, though she'd been accusing him for years, and he became violently angry yet again.

‘I have never had an affair with that woman. I have never touched her. She was my patient and she still enjoys that kind of immunity as far as I'm concerned.' He breathed loudly and deeply to control himself and said the next thing very calmly. ‘I'm not a violent person, Vera, but the next time you make any kind of a crack about me and Terese I'll slap the bitchery right out of you. Now I suggest we might get a move on or we'll be late. As a doctor I appreciate punctuality, and as a Jew I like to be polite. I'll be outside in the car.'

He walked out of the room, closing the door quietly as if nothing had happened. His wife sprayed herself with Casaque, put a sachet into her bag and checked that she had her lipstick, vanity case and kleenex; she wore a black dress by Jakes and her figure was like a girl's. She was an immaculately groomed woman and it was all part of a routine she had learnt long ago and never relaxed. The result was what she saw as she took a last look at herself, sables over the left arm, dress, bag, shoes, everything in perfect harmony, with the right amount of jewellery. ‘As a Jew I like to be polite.'

He knew what was wrong with her, and she was suddenly very sorry that she hadn't been able to deceive him. He ran a Volvo 28, and in spite of her protests that it was vulgar and unsuitable, he had ordered it painted bright red. He loved the car, and he drove it at high speeds. She got in beside him and they began moving downtown through Park Avenue towards the Bradfords' apartment on the corner of 56th Street. At the last traffic lights Vera said, ‘Did you really mean that? You've never slapped me in ten years, and God knows you should have done.'

‘I guess not,' Joe Kaplan said. ‘I spend all day trying to sort out other people's problems and then I come home and threaten to sock my own wife.' He put out a hand and squeezed hers. ‘I'm sorry honey. Forget it.'

‘I just don't like her,' Vera said. ‘He's sweet, poor Bob, and he could have married anyone – I suppose it annoys me to see another woman being fussed over all the time.'