Jack winced. “No. To tell you the truth.”
Joel’s face fell, then Jack laughed, and so did Joel. “Okay,” said Joel, and drifted off.
Joel wasn’t hurt, Jack knew. They had known each other too long, had had similar exchanges too often. Joel would torture himself by wanting to quit his job, and not quit it, by dreaming of a different life that he thought he wanted, but perhaps didn’t want. And out of this might come a few more good ideas.
When Jack next saw Elsie, she was sitting on an arm of the sofa and Louis was standing beside her. Louis extended a hand, Elsie took it, and they crossed the room and disappeared down a hall.
People were starting on the buffet, and Jack joined them. He saw the yellow-clad, red-haired Genevieve near him with an empty plate, looking a bit lost.
“Like some of this?” Jack asked her, because he had a slice of turkey on a fork just then. He laid it on Genevieve’s plate. “Are you an actress?” He didn’t know what to say to Genevieve.
“No. I sell cosmetics. At Macy’s.”
“Oh.” She was a bit loaded with cosmetics herself, bluey-green eyeshadow, brick-red nails. Her yellow dress, tightly belted and resembling in front the back of an Arab’s pants, must be one of the ones he had glimpsed in that closet on Minetta Street. Did Genevieve know that he had been in that apartment for a few minutes? “And how’s the old guy these days? Ralph?”
The vagueness suddenly vanished from Genevieve’s eyes. “Oh, that’s a little better! Did Elsie tell you she and a couple of her friends scared the—scared him so, he ran off? They chased him up Sixth. He’d been hanging around in front of our house.”
Jack grinned. “Chased him. Good!—You mean he’s staying away now.”
“Well, since that day. Of course he can still turn up at Viv’s.”
“Viv’s?”
“The coffee shop where Elsie works.”
Jack nodded. “So you didn’t talk to the police?”
“We decided against it. The less you have to do with the police—If they started investigating some of our friends—They are our friends, but I’m not sure the police would like them.”
Jack nodded understandingly. “Your friend Elsie’s making quite a hit tonight.”
“Doesn’t she look great? I dunno how she does it on no sleep. Last night—well, maybe two hours. And she’s got to work Sunday to make up for tonight she’s taking off.”
“What was she doing last night?”
“SoHo. Oh—” Genevieve shook her head and the red tresses stirred a little. “Some new nightspot. Guitar music.—I can’t take the late hours, because I have to be at work by eight-thirty and not half asleep either. But then I’m three years older than Elsie.—You’ve been very nice to Elsie. You and your wife. She likes you both.”
Jack bowed. “It’s been a pleasure.” He was ready to drift away, and he thought this a good time.
“And what did you glean from Genevieve?” Natalia asked Jack a couple of minutes later.
“She works at Macy’s in the cosmetics department.”
Natalia smiled, lips closed. “I knew that.—Elsie’s doing all right for herself tonight. Louis thinks she’s divine.”
He and Natalia left early, because Susanne wanted to go back to her family’s apartment tonight. Elsie was staying on, and when they left was sitting on the arm of a big chair, surrounded by Louis, Sylvia and her friend Ray, and also Isabel. In the taxi going homeward, Natalia said Elsie had wanted to see more of Louis’ paintings and drawings, so Louis had taken her into the hall and the two bedrooms. Louis had a Goya of which he was very proud, Jack remembered.
“Pity Elsie’s friend’s such a drip,” Jack said in the taxi.
“Isn’t she.—Did Elsie give you one of those flyers about the guitarist?”
“No.”
“I’ll show you at home. A girl guitarist Elsie thinks is pretty good. Named Marion. Elsie wants us to go hear her. Some bar in SoHo.”
Jack wasn’t keen on SoHo nightspots, and as far as he knew, neither was Natalia. “Okay. If you’re ever in the mood.”
Natalia said, “Ha!” since in the mood had another meaning for them. “I don’t think Elsie’s going to be with Genevieve very much longer. It’s Genevieve’s apartment, and I suppose a Minetta Street place has its charms, but—”
Jack waited. He took Natalia’s hand, gloved as it was, and put his head back. He liked long, rolling taxi rides, when the driver was clever enough to miss all the reds. Tonight the dark scene out the window had spots of blue and silver for Christmas.
At home, all was quiet and in order, Susanne reading a book in the living-room, and Amelia asleep. They all whispered, so as not to awaken the child. Jack offered to telephone for a taxi for Susanne, but she said one was easy enough to find at Sheridan Square at this hour. Susanne’s occasional taxi fare was repaid to her by the Sutherlands.
Natalia took a shower, and Jack followed her. She was in the mood tonight, Jack didn’t have to ask, and that was nice.
An hour later, as they lay naked and sleepy in bed, Natalia with a cigarette, she said:
“What’d you think of Sylvia’s dancer friend tonight?”
“That skinny fellow? Looked like a drip.”
“Sylvia says he’s a dynamo on stage. Ray Gibson, his name is.”
“I’d like to see him jog two miles. He also looks brainless. Why’s Sylvia interested in him?”
Natalia drew on her cigarette. “She probably doesn’t find him interesting.—She told me he wants to do a little social climbing, so she brought him.”
“Social climbing at Louis’?”
“Well, a different gay set, maybe.—I can’t believe it, but I’m hungry again.”
“Good. So’m I.”
Quietly they explored the fridge, and ate at the kitchen table. They discussed the rather important problem of what to get Natalia’s mother, the woman who had everything, for Christmas. Natalia’s half-brother Teddie was not coming east after all, so it was imperative that they go to Ardmore, where her mother had decided to spend Christmas, instead of at her Philadelphia apartment, because she was giving a Christmas Eve buffet party and needed space. Maybe the latest Times world atlas would be a good present, Jack suggested, because he happened to have seen an ad for it, and because her mother loved looking at maps of where she had been and were she might go next.
“Brilliant, Jack darling!” Natalia whispered. “I’ll pick it up at Rizzoli.”
They would have two Christmasses, one at her mother’s and one here at home.
“By the way,” Jack said, “Elsie’s friend with the long hair—she said Linderman’s leaving them alone lately. Some of Elsie’s friends chased him out of Minetta Street and had him on the run!” Jack smiled.
“So Elsie told me—Have you seen him lately? I never have, but I must say I don’t look around for him.”
“No. Oh yes, once this week, I think. He didn’t see me. He was sporting a new overcoat and a Russian fur cap. I wouldn’t’ve recognized him if not for the dog.”
17
Prayer is a form of betting, Ralph wrote in his notebook and underlined it. He continued:
It is another way of saying, “I hope,” and the person praying doesn’t count on it. Only when something works out do we hear anyone say, “I knew my prayers would be answered!” What rubbish and cant!
Enough! Ralph could have gone on. The entry above the prayer entry read:
When will the United States get it through its head that the Likud party doesn’t want peace? That peace would ruin all its plans? They are Artful Dodgers of peace, hating and fearing the meaning of the word.
He sat at his wooden table thinking, being quiet. It was the day after Christmas. Ralph had had only God for company yesterday, but his dog was enough. He had thought of dropping a Christmas card into the Sutherlands’ box, and he would have written, “A pleasant holiday season and good health to you.” He would not have sent a card saying “Merry Christmas,” that mo
st banal of phrases, and connected with the presumed sanctity of the virgin-born Jesus. Christmas, a season dragged down by the very people who screamed it every year, was too dismal to contemplate, dismal for the poor, an obligation for others, a happy season only for children of well-off parents, and for people who sold things at prices seasonally adjusted higher—yes, and in stores where signs were put up saying: This is also pickpocket season so be careful. Ralph had worked Christmas Eve day and Christmas Day night, and he would work again this evening at Midtown-Parking. Business was brisk there, and the FULL sign was usually on display in front.
He had not delivered a card to the Sutherlands, but he could send or bring one for New Year’s, he thought. Just a friendly gesture. He would address it to both, of course, though he sensed a great difference between the two: Sutherland was a finer man than his wife was a woman. Ralph believed that Mrs Sutherland was sly and secretive, possibly also snobbish and spoilt. She apparently went out to work, but she didn’t work every day, Ralph thought, and not at regular hours, because Ralph at least twice had seen Mrs Sutherland going off at 11 or 12 noon toward Sheridan Square to look for a taxi to wherever she was going, though once he had followed her, and she had gone into the Christopher Street uptown subway entrance by the newsstand there.
And she too had made Elsie’s acquaintance now. The day before Christmas Eve, Ralph had been buying his Times around 1 in the afternoon, he had walked past the glass-fronted cafe-restaurant near Sheridan Square and seen Mrs Sutherland and Elsie in lively conversation at a table, having lunch with wine. A cold day, that had been. They had perhaps been talking about him, Ralph thought. Naturally, John Sutherland would have told his wife that the man he had thought was honest and decent because he had returned Sutherland’s wallet, was now “annoying” a young girl named Elsie, who had actually sought out him, John Sutherland, for help. Ralph Linderman could imagine the conversation, once a woman got hold of the story! Ralph detested remembering that instant when he had seen Elsie and Mrs Sutherland so vigorously tête-à-tête, but the image kept returning to him, as if something in him wanted to torture him by repeating it like a flashing light: Mrs Sutherland on the left, her long streaky blond hair down to her shoulders, smoking a cigarette as usual and gesturing with the hand that held it, and Elsie leaning a little across the table, fresh-faced and fair-haired, smiling her delightful smile, the smile she never gave him.
Ralph had been wearing his old tweed overcoat and a cap that day, hoping in fact to catch a glimpse of Elsie, maybe shopping on West 4th, without her instantly spotting him. If she did see him, she always turned the other way or crossed the street, which pained Ralph.
Just what were Elsie and Mrs Sutherland up to? If he had seen them once together, very likely they got together at other times. Ralph imagined that they were fashioning some bulwark against him, some way of preventing him from speaking to or even getting near Elsie again. Yet how could they? Had he yet broken any law, written or unwritten? Hadn’t Elsie’s hooligan chums been guilty of harassment and disorderly conduct in public when they had pushed and shoved him on Sixth Avenue? Was there any law against anyone walking through Minetta Street, pausing for two minutes to contemplate one of the interesting old houses there? Ralph’s sense of injustice brought the dreary Lebanon situation to mind again. He had watched that creeping horror since how long? More than a year, anyway, when Israel had rolled its tanks in with the avowed intention of getting the PLO out, and Ralph had at once thought “more land”, which was their eternal objective. Ralph read things the Israeli government said backward, such as “peace” and “security” and found it useful. The truth was, they preferred insecurity, enemies around them. Then the massacres at those two Palestinian camps, the dirty work done by someone else, of course, the Christian Phalangists, while the Israeli soldiers who controlled the territory looked on, pleased as Spaniards at a bullfight. Irksome that America financed all that. Then to cap all the wrongness, America had sent Marines as a “peacekeeping force” to Beirut, as if America could be seen as anything but the ally and financer of Israel, and of course the inevitable had happened, a suicidal truck-bomb attack on the Marine quarters, which killed about two hundred and fifty Americans, most of them nineteen-year-olds who hadn’t a clue why they were in Lebanon in the first place. Wrongness and wrongness! All sick-making and phony! What had Reagan said to the parents of those boys? Nothing but more fuzziness, as the Americans crept out of the mess as quietly as possible, ships fading over the horizon. Ralph liked to think that American public opinion would not have stood for any more rubbish, any more lies as to objectives. Ralph still had faith.
He still sat at his table with his ruled notebook beside him, but he stared at a wall, and his heart beat faster with his angry thoughts, and he hated that. He went into the bathroom, where he was trying out some small wooden boats in the tub.
These three boats looked like floating top hats, though their brims were disproportionally wider than the crowns, and the boats were of different sizes. The crowns represented superstructures where the controls would be. One boat was made of a cigar box lid which he had rounded with a knife, the others of slightly thicker wood which he had found in the street and rounded. The superstructures were cylinders of wood. Ralph had a collection of metal rings, wood scraps, small steel springs that he picked up from the floors of garages where he worked, and from dump carts. He was trying out the little boats, when weighted with teaspoons and forks, to see how closely they might approach a shore, which he had simulated by leaning dinner plates and saucers around the edge of his tub’s bottom. Not ideal, as sand would be, but maybe he could learn from it. The tub had about seven inches of water in it. As far as Ralph knew, no such boats were in use at ports and river docks in primitive places where not enough dredging had been done. His objective was to get the little boats as close as possible to the shore for unloading. The boats should be able to rotate on their own axis and be able to fit into a semi-circular floating dock. Ralph sloshed the water observing drafts, recovering teaspoons, imagining heights of waves that a storm might throw up, imagining a round boatside touching shore.
God’s prancing and whining, his yelp of impatience, reminded Ralph that it was time for an airing.
“You’re my clock, God.” Ralph stood up. It was nearly noon, indeed time for God’s airing, after which Ralph intended to sleep a little. He might play with the boats later, depending on when he awakened, if he had a few minutes to spare before work.
With the New Year, Ralph’s hours changed at the Midtown-Parking Garage, and he was on the 4 p.m. to midnight shift now. He could keep almost normal hours and enjoy the daylight. Midnight seemed early to him, the streets were still lively at Sheridan Square, when he got off the bus by half past midnight or so. After airing God, Ralph sometimes walked down to the coffee shop where Elsie worked five nights a week until 2 a.m., though the nights varied, from what Ralph could see, and he was never sure she would be on. If she was, she managed never to serve him, and put up a good show of not seeing him. Ralph sipped his coffee, hardly took his eyes off Elsie, and ignored the nudging and whispering among the other girls behind the counter. He wasn’t drunk or drugged, he wasn’t spilling his coffee on the counter or the floor, as some of the other clients did. Ralph knew, however, that he annoyed Elsie by turning up at close to 2 a.m., and lingering till the place closed, till there was some awkwardness that Ralph could see through the kitchen window of the place, because Elsie wanted him to go before she went out the door, and the other workers knew this. Elsie had merely to walk up Seventh, through Carmine Street and across Sixth to Minetta Street. He had followed her one night, when she hadn’t been aware of him, he was sure, and he had seen her make a beeline for home.
Ralph Linderman walked downtown on Seventh Avenue at a leisurely pace toward the slit of light where Elsie was, or he hoped she was tonight. It was half past 1 a.m., he would have just the proper time for a coffee, and he had brought the Times with him and was going to pay Els
ie no mind, not even glance at her, so that she might leave for home in a normal manner, and he might—if he felt like it—follow her at a distance.
Twenty paces or so before the coffee shop door, Ralph slowed and almost stopped. A man and woman had crossed Seventh downtown from him, were now walking toward him, and the woman was Mrs Sutherland. A light had fallen on her hair, which Ralph would have known anywhere and at any distance at which he could have seen it: parted on the right side, some of it often falling over her left eye, and now he heard her short laugh which struck him as familiar, though when had he heard it before? The man with her was not John Sutherland but a more slender figure and he wore a top hat and a dark coat.
Near the patch of light in front of the coffee shop, the man swept his hat off in a graceful way. They were going in!
Ralph waited, curious, wondering if it were wise if he went into the place now. He advanced cautiously, stood to one side of the glass door and peered in. He saw Elsie talking to Mrs Sutherland, who had taken a stool and was sitting sideways on it. Elsie was smiling broadly. The man with Mrs Sutherland was bald-headed, though rather young looking, grinning, restless on his feet, standing near Mrs Sutherland with his top hat in his hand at his side. Elsie pulled the bow that fastened her apron in back, and disappeared through a door. Other patrons in the place glanced at Mrs Sutherland and at the man’s top hat and patent leather shoes.
A moment later, Elsie appeared in a polo coat, walked around the end of the counter and joined Mrs Sutherland and the man, who looked at Elsie with a toothy smile. Ralph stepped into the darkness as the trio approached the door. He walked uptown, slowly, listening to hear, if he could, which way they were walking.
When Ralph paused, he heard nothing but the traffic’s hum, and he turned. The three of them were walking downtown. Ralph followed. It was a cold night, windless but sharply cold. Ralph wore his older and thinner overcoat, and he had brought no gloves, and wore no hat. He turned his coat collar up, and he kept his hands in his coat pockets.