“You’re not sore at me,” said Joel, chewing, but with an anxious look.
“About the drawings?—Na-ah. Forget it,” Jack replied.
“Y’know—the sketch where the man, the husband, stands on that—cliff and he’s about to fall off?”
“It’s a building ledge. Yes.”
“The ledge. How about having some little women down there—sort of laughing at him. Lots of little women, some with their arms out as if they’re going to catch him and some—”
Jack laughed. “Yep. Gotcha.” He was thinking that there was room for the little women in the drawing now, and it might be a good idea.
Natalia laughed, rising on her toes, closing her eyes. She was still with Louis and Sylvia, and Isabel Katz had joined them, but only to say good night, it seemed. She left with the man to whom Terry had been talking.
“Good night, Jack. Thank you,” Isabel said. “Don’t get up!”
Before long, Jack had managed his exit too. “I’m going down with Joel,” he said to Natalia, and with a glance at Sylvia and Louis. “See you.”
Joel and Terry, who worked at CBS too, had to watch a program at 11 tonight. Jack walked with them toward 7th Avenue where there was the best chance for a taxi.
“Can’t tell you how I’ve enjoyed it, Jack,” said Terry, beaming at him. “What a terrific apartment too! Bye!”
They had found a taxi. A wind swirled, and Jack felt the first drops of rain hit his face. The hell with the rain, he thought, he’d walk for half an hour, and come back and find Natalia and Louis ensconced on the sofa, probably drinking espresso, of which Louis was very fond, even if the doctor had banned it. Susanne would have gone home, after sticking all the glasses she could in the dishwasher and starting it. And Natalia would sit till maybe 2 in the morning, because it was her birthday and she could indulge herself with her soulmate, the whole sofa’s length between them as each lolled back against a sofa arm.
Jack licked rainwater from his upper lip. His shoes were starting to feel squishy. Where was he? Way below West Houston now. He turned back and walked fast. The few people who were out in this downpour were either running or had umbrellas. Jack shoved wet hands into his pockets, lowered his head, and trotted uptown. In his right hand pocket, he felt coins, enough for a coffee somewhere, at least, to wait it out for a few minutes. The streetlights, shopfront lights made a glare on the surface of 7th Avenue. Jack crossed when a red shimmered. He had spotted a coffee shop farther up on the other side of the avenue.
Jack pulled his hands down his face, stomped his feet and went in. The place smelled of hamburgers, onions and steam and had a bright yellowish illumination, but at least it was dry. Jack stood by one of the stand-up counters fixed to a wall. Other people were coming in out of the rain, talking about the downpour. Jack finally went up to the counter which had a couple of curves to accommodate as many stools as possible. All the stools seemed taken. Jack ordered a coffee white when he got a waitress’s attention, paid, and carried the mug back to the stand-up counter.
“You look like it’s raining outside!” the blond waitress had said to him as she handed him his coffee.
Jack was still smiling at that. The girl had a friendly voice, not like a New Yorker’s voice. Jack watched the blond girl whizzing about her tasks, serving a Danish on a plate, plopping ketchup down in front of somebody else, smiling, laughing, but he couldn’t hear her laugh in all the noise. She had a word to say to nearly everybody. Her energy held Jack’s eyes. He could see the other customers responding, smiling back at her. There were a couple of other girls working behind the long counter, not in the least eye-catching compared with this little blonde who looked about sixteen.
“Whee-yoo!” said a tall black fellow coming in with a pal, and they both stamped their feet on the now grimy tile floor. “Man!”
Both the blacks looked high on something. They drifted to the back of the place, chattering in shrill voices.
Jack sipped from his mug of weak coffee, and looked again for the blond girl. Now she was bent over the counter far to his left, pink lips parted. She shook her head quickly, then laughed again, started to move off, but looked back at the man who was talking to her from a stool. He was shaking a finger at her.
“No!—No, you’re…” She flew off to the coffee machines.
Jack looked at the man she had been talking to, and recognized him. He was the man who had returned his wallet. Yes, certainly. There was his ugly dog on a leash. Now the man was getting up, ready to leave. Jack turned toward the wall, not wanting to be seen and maybe buttonholed. The guy was a bore, Jack remembered. Plainly he’d been boring the blond girl tonight too. Jack dared a glance, when the man reached the door, and watched him go out with his dog.
The rain was abating. Five more people departed.
Jack was curious about the girl, about the man, about what she thought of him. He sat down at a counter stool.
“Coffee white, please,” Jack said to a waitress who was not the blond girl. The coffee arrived. The waitress was busy and didn’t take his two quarters which lay on top of the check, but the blond girl swept by like a flying canary and did. Jack watched her, amused. She breezed back from the cash register with his partly torn check and his three cents, and as Jack slid his hand forward to take the change, their fingers touched, and the girl smiled at him. She had very white teeth, blue eyes that were not large but clear and intelligent. Her hair made him think of the word flaxen. It was straight, not thick, and cut carelessly and short.
“You’re back again,” she said.
“Yes. Say—that fellow you were talking with—with the dog.” Jack gestured toward where the man had sat.
“Oh, him! He’s nuts!” She gave a quick laugh.
“How so?”
The girl glanced around to see if she were urgently needed somewhere. “Giving me lectures all the time.—Oh, New York’s full of screwballs.” She was about to leave.
“I met him once before.”
“Did you? He comes—Okay, Lorrie!” The girl went off. A short order was ready at the cook’s window.
Jack lifted the hot coffee.
The girl came back. “He lives around here. He’s a security guard, he says. You’d think he was getting paid to guard me. You’d think he was tailing me. Except I’m not the paranoid type, I hope.—How come you know him?”
Jack smiled. “He returned my wallet—after I’d lost it. I have to admit he’s honest.”
“Oh-h, you’re the one!” Her eyes showed intense interest. “He told me all about that. He thought it was great, something like a miracle. He thinks you We great. He’s blown all out of his mind by that wallet story.—Anyway, I’m glad to find out it’s true. I wasn’t even sure, y’know? He’s so bananas. So now—” She looked off, for an instant dreamily, as if questing for words. “He keeps telling me that’s the way I oughta be—honest and so on. Ha-ha!” She rocked back with laughter, holding to the counter edge in front of her.
“El-sie!” cried one of the waitresses.
“I’ll come back!” Elsie dashed away.
Jack found himself smiling. Elsie could be an actress, Jack thought, or was her intensity confined to what happened to her?
“Goddam lamb stew,” Elsie murmured, returning. “Well—this nut lectures me about my sexlife, f’Chris’ sake, morals. He doesn’t know what a clean life I lead! Does he think I’m a prostitute or something? And what about him, I often think. Or say. Sure, I say it to him. ‘Weren’t you ever young and happy?’ Maybe he wasn’t. In that case, he’s just repressed and it’s too late for him to do anything about it, isn’t it?” She laughed without bitterness, with an amusement that brought moisture to her eyes. “He’s weird! Especially since he doesn’t believe in religion. And he calls his dog ‘God’, did you know that?”
Jack nodded. “I know.”
“Say, is he following you around?”
Jack grinned. “I don’t think so. Hadn’t noticed.”
“Watch
out. He’s out to improve the world.—He lives on Bleecker, I think. He said you lived on Grove.”
“El-sie!—Get those burgers with! They’re on your side!”
Once more she was gone.
Jack wished he had a ballpoint pen with him or a pencil. The sharp angle at the corner of her eyes when she laughed was just what he wanted for Suzuki, the fantasy girlfriend of the adolescent boy in the Dreams book. Could he remember it? The angle was best seen in profile, and with the upturned corner of her lips too. Jack’s left hand shot out and seized a short pencil that seemed to have materialized just for him, inches away on the counter. He drew rapidly on the back of his check, eyes as much on Elsie as on the paper. He had it. Whew! Good! He felt like a man who’d just captured a fish. Rapidly he drew the line of her neck, the back of her head.
“You’re drawing me?”
“Finished. Thanks.” Jack gave her a real smile, and stuck the folded check carefully into his back pocket.
“Are you an artist?” Elsie asked with a suddenly childlike curiosity. “Ralph said you were a journalist.”
“Who’s Ralph?”
“The guy with the dog.”
“Oh. No, I’m more of an artist—I like to think. I wanted to get the corner of your eyes. Eye in profile. And I couldn’t have asked you to come to my studio, could I? That’d have been like asking you to come up and see my etchings, no?” Jack repressed a happy laugh now, and there was something funny in the serious and thoughtful way the girl looked at him, as if she were pondering his last words. “Anyway, thanks—Elsie.” He got up from the stool.
“Hey!—I’ll come up if you need any sittings. No charge.”
Jack’s amazed smile was back. “Wh-where do I find you? Here?”
A laugh bubbled from her. “For the next week maybe. Sure. I’m around.” She lifted a hand carelessly by way of good-bye, and turned back to her work.
The rain had diminished to droplets. Jack felt happy, rather as if he had just fallen in love. He was familiar with the sensation, though it had not come to him often. He’d had it a few times in art class on a good day, when a female model, not necessarily young or pretty, had inspired him to produce a good charcoal sketch or line drawing or whatever, and suddenly he had felt in love with the model, as if she had a special power, only she, to bring his talent out. It never lasted. But it was easy for Jack to understand why artists, Modigliani and others, had felt a desire to bed their models on completion of a good piece of work. Absurd, considering that his effort was a few lines with a blunt pencil on the back of a check that had faint blue lines on it. He had felt like embracing this girl Elsie, as if to make sure she was real, solid.
Elsie had worn a cheap ring on her middle finger, left hand, a skull surrounded by snakes. Bright red nail polish, neatly applied. Her hands were graceful and rather lean. A couple of boys, white, had stared at her, paid her wild compliments on her blue eyes, asked her when she was going off duty tonight, and Elsie had ignored them totally.
Jack let himself quietly into the apartment, heard the murmur of voices, slipped to the right, into the bathroom, where he combed his hair. His trousers were still slightly damp at the cuffs, but no matter. He went into the living-room where the air smelled of women’s scent, cigarette smoke, where Natalia lolled back on the sofa, Louis on her right, Sylvia in the big green armchair facing them. Sylvia saw him first.
“Hi there, Jack! You were out?”
“Walking Joel and his girlfriend down.” Jack saw his unfinished Jack Daniel’s on a corner of the bamboo cabinet, and picked it up. Half an inch left. He felt as if he were returning to another world, one he had almost forgotten for a while.
“And then,” Natalia was saying in her deepish voice, through a chuckle, “could I see about a frame for him at no extra charge. After all that…”
Louis listened attentively.
Natalia balanced an iceless scotch and water on her breastbone, or sternum as the art-school teachers would call it, and might not have noticed his absence or his arrival, Jack thought. He sat down on a straight chair. Now Natalia was telling another story from the Katz Gallery, about her sale of a Pinto whose price she had upped out of her head, unintentionally, and got. The price had been uncertain, said Natalia, it was the largest Pinto and not his best, maybe his worst even, but some idiot had bought it, and Isabel had been pleased, of course. Jack was happier now, gazing at Natalia, half-listening to the conversation of the three of them. When he had come into the living-room, he had thought: that trio, triumvirate in a way, closed to him. Old friends they were, for nearly ten years, Natalia, Louis and Sylvia, and he had known Natalia merely six, even though she was his wife. Jack had felt a curious shock of anxiety, near-resentment at the sight of them when he had walked into the living-room. But he could forget this when Natalia, as she spoke, let her gaze drift toward him, linger without a change of expression, before it moved to Sylvia. He was hers, as much as she was his, wasn’t that true? Belonging to each other, living together. Didn’t that mean a lot? Yes, if Natalia were happy. Was she happy? That was the kind of question one did not ask Natalia. Who’s ever happy, she would reply carelessly, and maybe with annoyance at the stupidity of the question. If people weren’t happy, they didn’t stay together, Jack supposed, unless both were masochists or sadists battling it out, or a convenient combination of the two.
Louis hauled his tall form up and excused himself to go and swallow some pills. “No, plain water, I’ll get it, Jack.” He went off to the bathroom.
When he returned, he kissed Natalia on the forehead, wished her many happy returns, and said good night. Sylvia was joining him. It was nearly 1 a.m.
“Buzz me,” Sylvia said to Natalia. “I can manage lunch almost any day. In your neck of the woods, I mean. Or I’ll bring sandwiches,” she said with an easy smile, “if Isabel doesn’t give you a break.”
The door finally closed.
Jack walked toward Natalia with outstretched arms, and loved it when she fairly collapsed in his embrace, so that he had to support her weight. “Darling—I love you, I love you.”
“Tonight?” she asked in a surprised tone.
“What’d Louis give you? Looked like a chain.”
“Something that belonged to his maman. He shouldn’t have done it. Where is it?” She had left the box and tissue paper on a bookshelf. She lifted the chain. “This. A garnet. The silver chain’s lovely, don’t you think, Jack? But the garnet—” The garnet was rather large, making one think of an elderly Victorian lady letting it ride over a full bosom. The garnet was the size of a small lemon, but rather flat. “Looks like what you’d call an heirloom,” said Natalia smiling. “He says his mother gave it to him years ago to give to a girl, in fact.”
Jack burst out laughing. The idea of Louis giving it to his beloved, his betrothed! “‘S beautiful,” said Jack. “Hey! You have another little something.” He went to their bedroom and took a plastic bag from his shirt drawer.
Natalia opened it. This was in addition to the brown calfskin letter-holder or “portfolio” from Dunhill that Jack had given her before the party began. He had written “For the serious executive” on his handmade card, a cartoon of Natalia looking pained and absent-minded at her Katz Gallery desk. In the plastic bag was a cassette of Prokofief sonatas for strings, one of which Jack knew she especially liked, and also a paperback. The Unquiet Grave, which Jack knew she missed, because someone had failed to return her old copy after borrowing it. These items were not wrapped.
“Ooh, perfect,” Natalia said. “Lovely, Jack.”
“Amelia’s here? In bed?” he asked in a suddenly soft voice. Sometimes Susanne took her to her own house for the night, if they had a party, and delivered her the next morning.
“Amelia,” Natalia said, as if just recalling that she had a child. “Yes, Susanne put her to bed hours ago.”
Jack opened Amelia’s room door a little and peered into the darkness. A couple of cars went by on Grove, covering the sound of
breathing that he might have heard, but he could just see her form under the blanket.
“She okay?” asked Natalia.
Jack closed the door softly. “Yep.” He wanted to embrace Natalia again, she was standing so close to him now, but he was afraid it would annoy her.
They looked over the living-room, carried some glasses and ashtrays out, but Susanne had already done a fair job of tidying. The dishwasher had finished its cycle. The sink could hold what dirty dishes there were. All was well. And Christ, we’re lucky, Jack thought. To live in a nice place, not to have to worry about money, to be able to afford a reliable person like Susanne, to have a healthy kid!
Natalia was under the shower.
Jack took a deep breath. All was right with his world.
7
Jack emerged from Rossi’s Fruit and Deli with both arms around paper bags. A cold bottle of Amelia’s Coca-Cola was threatening to break the wet bottom of one bag, and Jack had his hand under it. Johnny Rossi wasn’t delivering today, because his father was down with bronchitis, and Johnny couldn’t leave the store. But the distance was short to Jack’s house. You’re so naive sometimes, Jack. Jack grimaced. Why couldn’t he get the phrase out of his mind? Natalia had said it with a smile, but it had stung, maybe because Isabel Katz had heard it, and Jack remembered her faint smile, to herself. Natalia last evening, when they’d had drinks and dinner at Isabel’s studio on East Forty-first, had mentioned “Sylvia’s new girlfriend”, who was a bio-chemist and quite attractive, Isabel had said, and both she and Natalia had remarked how much better and happier Sylvia looked since having met her a month ago. And Jack had said, “Girlfriend?” being genuinely surprised, and wondering for a moment if they were talking about Sylvia Kinnock, but they were. “You didn’t know she was gay, Jack?” Natalia had asked with a quick laugh that was almost apologetic, for him, before she gave her attention to Isabel again. Jack had said nothing further on the subject, not even after they had got home. No, he hadn’t known. Sylvia didn’t look in the least gay, with her careful make-up, or in the way she dressed, which was rather on the feminine side, now that Jack thought about it. This revelation of Sylvia’s sexual preference reminded Jack of the more than six months in which Natalia had breezed off with Sylvia to Europe and so on. Had they had an affair? Jack wasn’t going to ask. The thought, the possibility, however, made him feel slightly shaky inside.