“A place where they serve enormous plates of food. Like this.” He spread his arms.
“Where’s that?”
“Mexican Gardens. We can walk from here.—Didn’t we ever go there? Seems to me we did.”
Amelia couldn’t remember. “You’ve got ink on your finger.”
Jack glanced at the middle finger of his left hand. He often had ink there. “So what?—I’ve got a story to tell you.”
He told her about losing his wallet, worrying because he’d never see the snapshots again, and there’d been quite a lot of money in the wallet too. Then the mysterious telephone call, and the meeting down on the sidewalk with the stranger and his dog who was named God. As he spoke, Jack picked up a pencil and the memo pad from the kitchen table.
“He looked like this, hair sticking out a little, sort of needed a shave—frowning and smiling at the same time. And here’s the dog that looks like a pig—but a friendly pig, smiling too.”
Amelia laughed, watching the pencil move.
“But he had my wallet and all the money was in it, and he wouldn’t take even twenty dollars as a reward. Now isn’t that a nice story? Isn’t that a nice man?”
Amelia tilted her head and smiled thoughtfully at the cartoon. “How old is he?”
“Oh—maybe just over fifty, maybe fifty-five.”
“Fifty-five?”
“Well, your grandma’s maybe nearly fifty-five. Yes, sure. But this is more fun than a bible story, isn’t it?” Jack asked, recalling that Natalia had told him her mother had been reading some bible stories from a children’s book to Amelia, an effort that probably hadn’t lasted long, because Lily wasn’t the religious type. “And this is a true story.”
“Aren’t the bible stories true too?”
“Ye-es. Well, mostly. Anyway, Amelia, if you ever find a wallet or a handbag and if you can find out who owns it—I hope you’ll do the same as this man did, take it back to the person who lost it.”
Amelia tipped her head again. “If I found a purse with a lot of money?”
“Yes!” Jack laughed. “You should’ve seen how happy this fellow was when he gave my wallet back! It really made his day!”
4
Natalia telephoned the next morning, just after Jack had returned from depositing Amelia at Mrs Vernon’s apartment.
“I called before…Oh, just what I thought, the Vernons,” Natalia said. “I wanted to be sure you’re home, because I can’t find my keys—to the apartment, I mean. Maybe they’re packed in a suitcase.”
“I’ll be home. Where are you?”
She was at a filling station, and she thought she could make it in about an hour.
“Don’t rush it. Take care, darling.”
Jack went back to his worktable. His house front drawing lay there, lightly penciled in, ready for ink. But for the next couple of minutes, Jack drifted around the apartment, tossed a cushion into place on the sofa, though Natalia didn’t care if things were neat or not. There was food, and it would be lunchtime when she got here, but Natalia didn’t care about regular mealtimes either, and there was never any telling whether she’d be hungry or not.
He was deep in his work, pulling a brush point delicately upward to create a tree branch, when he heard two notes of a car horn, different to him from other street noises. He went to the living-room window and saw Natalia across the street, opening the hatch of her red Toyota. The street’s surface was dark with a light rain that Jack had been unaware of.
“Hey!” he shouted, and she looked up. “Be right down!” He saw her wave at him.
Jack grabbed his keys and ran down. “Hi, darling.” He squeezed her arm in her old fur-collared raincoat, and quickly kissed her cheek. “You tired?” He pulled a suitcase out of the back.
“No, but it was raining like hell in Pennsylvania.”
The car fenders were spattered with grimy dirt, Jack noticed. “This too?” He held a duffelbag.
“Yes. I’ll take the bookbag.” She locked the car door, then the hatch, after tugging out a burlap bag lumpy with books and bearing a Harvard University insignium.
Upstairs, it turned out that Natalia was tired, and from what she said, it sounded as if she’d slept only two hours or maybe not at all. She’d seen Louis and some of his friends for dinner somewhere, and then Louis had telephoned in the wee hours.
“I just got sick of it, so I took off pretty early.”
But by then she was talking about people coming to the house, about a boring lunch at the golf club with her mother’s friends, not about being sick of Louis.
“Get out of those shoes, at least. Relax.”
She wore white sandals with heels, a summer skirt and a shirt with the tails hanging out. Maybe she hadn’t changed since last evening, Jack thought.
“Want a shower? A drink? There’s plenty of Glenfiddich.”
“Yes,” said Natalia, sitting on the sofa, removing her sandals. She lit a Marlboro, and leaned back.
Jack made a scotch on the rocks in an old-fashioned glass, because Natalia didn’t like tall glasses. He inhaled Natalia’s scent, faint and exciting. Even the whiff of her cigarette smoke was exciting.
“Thanks, Jack.” She smiled at him, lips together, her gray-green eyes warm. There were tiny wrinkles under her eyes which make-up could conceal, if she ever bothered. Her eyes were not large, and their upper lids drew a bit over the inner corners. She seldom smiled broadly, unless she laughed, because she was shy about her teeth, which were not as white as she would have liked, though their color was not due to smoking. Her legs were not her best feature either, being just slightly too heavy. What was it that gave her her fantastic sex appeal, and not merely for Jack but for a lot of other people? Maybe her voice, which was full of humor, and intelligence too, though a little husky sometimes, and Natalia cleared her throat more than most people. Jack often thought that on the telephone, Natalia could simply cough, or clear her throat, and he’d know instantly that it was she. He very much hoped that he could put her into the mood of going to bed with him this afternoon before the return of Amelia at probably half past 4.
“How’s your work going?” Natalia asked.
“Oh—tell you about that later. Show you. I’m on the book jackets.” Jack was kneeling in the big armchair, forearms on the chair’s back. He would have loved to leap over, crash onto Natalia, scotch and all, and make love to her on the sofa. “And your mum?”
“Oh, mum,” Natalia groaned, looking at the ceiling, and laughed. “Teddie’s coming Sunday. He’ll keep her amused.”
Teddie was Natalia’s younger half-brother by a second marriage of her mother’s. Natalia’s father was dead, and Teddie’s father was divorced from Natalia’s mother. Teddie was twenty and in college somewhere in California. He had been raised by his father, who had custody.
Natalia remarked that the apartment looked in good shape. It was not a usual remark from her. Jack sensed that she was worried about something. Halfway through her scotch, she said she wanted a shower, and got up. While she was in the bathroom, Jack put her suitcase in the bedroom, undid the latches without lifting the lid. His heart was beating with a gentle and pleasant excitement. How’s your work going? Jack had to smile. Half the time she didn’t care, Jack felt. His work was just his way of amusing himself and maybe of earning a little money, he supposed, in Natalia’s eyes. She thought some of his drawings were clever, but she was more interested in painting, needed to look at good art to stay alive, as if art were her vitamins or sunlight. Jack was not a fine artist. And for another thing, she didn’t need his money, he well knew.
Natalia came out of the bathroom in her yellow terry-cloth robe that had been hanging on the door, blue fluffy houseslippers, her hair darker around her face, as Amelia’s had been yesterday, and Jack averted his eyes, simply because he felt like gazing at her. Natalia detested slavish devotion, he reminded himself, even laughed at it.
“I might help Isabel out a little next week,” Natalia said, recovering
her drink from the coffee table. “She’s got a Pinto show coming up.” She sipped. “And he’s a pain in the you-know-what.—You know?”
“Um-m.” Jack recalled Natalia’s tales of the nervous but self-assured Pinto, a newcomer from Brazil with a couple of shows behind him in Amsterdam and Paris. “When is this?”
“The show? In about a week.—I’ll just help her hang and stuff. And she’ll pay me something—which I can always use. We can, I mean.” She laughed a little on the word “use”.
“So she’s dumping Pinto on you?” Jack’s voice held contempt, for Pinto.
“Twenty-six years old and thinks he’s it.” She lit a cigarette. “Well, he isn’t rotten. It’s—” She shrugged. “He just isn’t good.”
Jack knew. It was a matter of getting some good reviews and getting his price up, Natalia might have said. Jack remembered Pinto’s stuff, the couple he had seen reproduced in a brochure Natalia had shown him, reddish backgrounds and a lot of gray silvery circles of various sizes daubed on in what looked like heavy paint.
“Might go on into the fall—Isabel,” Natalia added.
Jack knew, and in a way he was pleased. Natalia had worked at Isabel Katz’s gallery before. She made a good receptionist, and could even sell pictures, and had. Natalia looked nice, she had pleasant manners, and a pushy saleswoman she was not. “Are you possibly hungry?”
“I bet you are. What’ve we got?”
“Sliced roast beef? And horseradish?”
“Yummy!” She danced on her toes and rubbed her stomach, like a child.
They laid out the cold things together, and there was also some ham and potato salad left over, and fresh French bread bought this morning. A sweet breeze blew through the open front windows all the way to the back of the apartment where windows were also partly open, and where green tops of trees showed higher than the sills. Jack had poured a glass of Chianti for himself, and Natalia had another scotch. She looked happier now, and a trace of color had come to her rather pale face. Natalia never made an effort to acquire a tan in summer. And she was looking sleepier by the minute.
Jack buttered a last piece of bread for himself. “I lost my wallet Wednesday evening, and a man returned it to me. Everything there, all the dough, credit cards, everything.”
Her eyes widened with interest. “Lost it where?”
“Right in front of the house. On the street. I’m sure just after I’d paid off a taxi—about five-thirty in the afternoon. Anyway an hour or so later after I’d missed it and was agonizing, thinking about the credit cards—no, the photos, pictures of you, in fact—the telephone rang, sort of an old guy’s voice, asking if I was so-and-so and had I lost anything. So I said yes, a wallet. He said he had it, and he’d see me in about ten minutes. Downstairs. And there he was, and he wouldn’t take a reward, not a hundred, not even twenty bucks!” Jack slapped the table edge with his fingers and laughed.
“All the money was in it?”
“Yep, and I’d just been to the bank. Over two hundred and he knew—exactly. He’d counted it.”
She gave a short laugh. “He must be a born-again Christian.”
“Matter of fact he told me he was an atheist. ‘So naturally I returned your wallet,’ he said. Probably hates churches. Oh, and he’s got a dog named God. Some kind of mixed breed, black and white.”
“Dog named God.” She smiled, shaking her head. “Dog spelt backwards, sure.”
Jack sighed, happy. “Why don’t you conk out for an hour? After that drive—it’ll do you good.”
But she got up for one more cigarette from the coffee table. “I will.—God, it’s nice to be here!”
That made Jack even happier, but he said nothing. Slowly, he began to clear the table, letting Natalia do what she wished. She carried a couple of things back to the kitchen, went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, then disappeared into the bedroom, saying:
“See you. Wake me in an hour if I’m not up.”
When Jack eased the bedroom door open a little more than an hour later, he found Natalia asleep with the sheet drawn nearly to her shoulders, face down with her profile clear against the pillow, her right hand curled under her chin. It looked an oddly thoughtful pose, and Jack smiled. An art catalog with a glossy white paper cover was splayed near her, with the word ART in big black letters on the front cover. A thick book by Irving Howe lay closed beside her left shoulder.
Jack folded his arms and leaned against the door jamb, making not a sound, but her closed lids fluttered and opened. “Are you—possibly in the mood?” he asked.
She turned over and opened her arms to him, smiling a little.
In a trice he had his clothes off, and had slipped in beside her. Our own house, he thought, finally, after three months of Ardmore. He loved the faint scratchiness of the fine blond hair on her thighs, her waist that was smooth and quite round, not flattish before and behind, like most women’s waists. And she kissed him with enthusiasm.
But at the last, it wasn’t the success Jack had hoped for. Feeling sure she was ready, he had let himself go, he had felt her breath in his ear. And afterward he had known from the way she breathed, that she hadn’t reached a climax. He kissed her breast.
“Sorry. Dunno what’s the matter.—‘S nothing.”
Jack raised his lips from the firm flesh under her breast. “Next time.” He got up.
But the next hour held a curious heaviness for Jack. He was certainly not sleepy from the glass of wine or from having made love to Natalia, but his feet felt weighted. Amelia was due back. He and Natalia talked about her school on West Twelfth Street, the Sterling Academy for Young People, a name that usually made Natalia lift her lip with an amused and deprecatory smile.
“You really think it’s good enough, considering what it costs?” Natalia asked in a somewhat irritated way.
They had been here before. It was a place to park tots and kids up to school-entering age and even up to nine years, and the Sterling Academy presumably taught them something too, like the three R’s. It was within walking distance, and a schoolmarm would walk Amelia home, unless Jack or Natalia rang up and said they would fetch her. For two hundred dollars a week, a five-day week, Amelia got a good lunch too.
“I think you told me the Vernons thought the school’s okay,” Jack said, feeling that he’d said this maybe twice before, “and they come a long way to get here.”
What was Natalia really worried about, he wondered? Something not serious, perhaps, but the slightest worry always showed on her face.
“What we need is a grandma taking over,” Natalia murmured, “with the patience to teach them reading and arithmetic and all that.”
“A grandma living at home?” Jack laughed.
“No, I mean some—” She jumped and shook her fingers with nervous impatience as the telephone and the doorbell rang at the same time. “I’ll get this one,” she said, moving toward the telephone.
Jack pressed the release button, left the apartment door ajar, and ran downstairs to say hello to Mrs Vernon and thank her.
But Amelia had been brought home by a girl of about twenty, whom Jack had never seen before, but recognized as the opposite number to Susanne.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Jack Sutherland, the father of this.”
“Oh. How do you do? Here’s Amelia.” The girl smiled. “Everything’s okay, I think. No skinned knees to report.” This girl was English.
“Good. Thanks a million.”
The girl nodded, said, “Bye-bye, Amelia,” and was gone.
They climbed the stairs. Amelia was chattering, and Jack hardly listened. Natalia would have said something to Amelia about her not having said thank you and good-bye to the girl who had brought her. Rudeness.
“Afternoon, Mr Hartman!” Jack said to a middle-aged man coming out the door of his apartment on the second floor. “Yes, we’re back—for a while.”
“Glad to see you again. Hi, Amelia.” With a friendly smile, Mr Hartman went down the stairs, carr
ying a neat plastic sack of garbage.
Natalia was still on the telephone, leaning against the wall by a front window, smoking, murmuring. Jack at once sensed that the caller was Louis Wannfeld, and rather switched off. The conversation could go on for fifteen minutes.
“Had a good time?” Jack asked Amelia.
“Yes. I’m thirsty.” She pretended to reel against a wall. “We had LSD—Ooh!”
“Take some water,” Jack whispered, repressing a smile. “LSD, f’gosh sake!”
“We did and I feel aw-w-ful!” Cross-legged, leaning against the kitchen wall, Amelia tried her best to look bleary-eyed.
“Quiet, your mom’s on the phone.” Jack drew a glass of water and handed it to her.
“…outrageous…” Natalia was saying. “No. No, I wouldn’t. Look, I’ll call you back, there’s so much—Ten minutes, maybe?—Okay.”
“Mom, I’ve had LSD!” Amelia spread her arms and seized her mother round the thighs.
“Ow!” said Natalia as the child crashed into her. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Mom—Jack—Daddy, what did the mayonnaise say to the lettuce?” asked Amelia, changing her act, because the LSD had fallen flat.
Natalia groaned. “I don’t give a damn. These awful kids’ jokes, Jack. I get ten a day.”
“I don’t know. What?” asked Jack.
“Close the door, I’m dressing!” said Amelia.
“Oh-h-h.” Jack feigned boredom and he was bored, suddenly. Or was he merely ill at ease? He wanted to go into his workroom and draw the curtain. He looked at Natalia. “I think I’ll take a walk. You want to phone back—” He glanced at the white telephone.
Natalia started to say something, looked at the child, then beckoned to Jack to come into the bedroom. She whispered to him with the door almost closed, the knob in her hand. “That was Louis. He thinks he’s got cancer. May as well tell you now.”