I returned to Washburn and explained.
“I have never written you a letter,” said he. “I never heard of you before coming upon your name in the classified directory this morning.”
I stared at the cracked ceiling over my desk and quoted one remembered cliche from the letter that was certainly apposite to the whole bag of worms: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” An as it were photographic reproduction of the actual epistle was projected onto my screen of memory: “Danemark” had been the spelling there given. Were an umlaut furnished to the first c, this would be the rendition of that geographical term as written by a German.
“Excuse me for what might appear as impertinence,” I said to Washburn. “But does your wife happen to be Teutonic?”
“Too tonic?” he replied in what seemed genuine bewilderment. “Your queries have now, I’m afraid, taken a definite turn towards the cryptic, Wren. I suspect you as yet haven’t recovered from the singular events you described to me a moment ago. If I were you, I’d put these mysteries in the hands of the police.” He returned to his own narrow interest, as even people far poorer than he tend to do unless they are hypocritical: I had not escaped the cynicism of New York. “You will take my case?”
My own interest, a desperate one currently, was of course in making an income, lost corpses notwithstanding. I gave him my terms: a hundred dollars a day, one-fifty in advance, three hundred guaranteed, plus expenses to be submitted and paid every five days, he to accept my own accounting throughout, which however would be modest. He must also sign a form giving me immunity from certain types of litigation—for example, a suit charging invasion of his own privacy; far from an outlandish provision, incidentally: I had been so threatened by the first client I had ever had, and settled by reducing my fee.
He met these obligations without argument. He did better: he put three hundred-dollar bills into my hand. In view of this generosity it would have been in poor taste to press him further about Bakewell, Villanova, or for that matter, Newhouse.
Along with the money he gave me the following information about his wife. “Freddie is a tricky woman. It’s possible that those calls she seemingly answers in code are fake—by which I mean real enough for the caller, who might be an encyclopedia salesman or whatnot on routine business. And herself collects cigar butts in some public place, ugh”—he portrayed disgust, an expression that came easily to him, who had been halfway towards it since entering my inner office—“brings them home and strews them around.” His face cleared. “Even smokes them herself—in that case, starting with fresh cigars, naturally.”
“What would be her motive for such an imposture?”
He threw his wrist towards his shoulder. He wore a dull-silver watch no thicker than a Necco wafer. He was expensively accoutered in every respect.
“To get her stiletto in me.”
“I’m neither priest nor lawyer,” said I. “But since I do act in a confidential capacity, the more I know the better I can perform. Can you tell me why she might torment you in such a fashion?”
He gave a further burnish to his forehead. “She’s a cold woman. She is aroused only by cruelty. I’ll tell you frankly: that’s why I have never bought her a pet— except a bowl of Japanese fighting fish.”
When he had risen to pay me and sign the release, the superb fabric of his jacket smoothed of its own luxurious weight; this was true of his trousers as well. Mine, when I stood up, had to be plucked free from the nether cleft. I hadn’t been able to afford first-quality attire for many years—since birth, indeed. But now I held his three hundred dollars.
“I was admiring your clothes,” said I.
“I simply throw on anything I find on the floor in the morning.”
“I suppose they’re custom-made.”
He waxed apologetic. “I’ve no choice, with my weird body. I’m indecently deformed. My legs are a good inch longer than those of the average person my height, and my waist is out of kilter with the chest, thirty as opposed to forty-three. Really grotesque.”
“Strange complaint,” said I, awed by these Greek dimensions, with my own thirty-two-inch belt and suits in thirty-six regular.
“But see here,” he said, “they could do really a good job on a well-built chap like you, if you’re looking for a tailor: Hallam and Tennyson, of Burlington Gardens.”
“You’re speaking of London?”
“They do of course pop over here in spring and fall, which is outrageously convenient for me. I don’t get to England every season.”
I folded the bills and put them into the side pocket of my twenty-nine-dollar double knits. I took a ball-pen from the litter on my desk and, not being able to find a proper notepad, used the back of a large square green envelope that, by the look of an inscription on its face in pink ink, contained a special announcement from B. Altman & Co. concerning fancy lingerie, mailed indiscriminately to all holders of Charg-a-Plates, though mine had not been used since the purchase of three handkerchiefs, two years before.
“I’ll need some idea of your wife’s comings and goings, if they have any regularity.” I also asked for his requirements: whether mere information to seethe over privately, something to throw in Freddie’s face, or evidence to take to court.
Suddenly he turned frosty. “Isn’t that my business?” Perhaps his pride had got to him; surely it was none too pleasant for a fellow of his physique and with his apparent financial resources to admit to possible cuckoldry before another man (ill-dressed and in a shabby office), professional though I was. This was not my unique encounter with that feeling.
“Ah,” said I, with compassion. “It’s no reflection on you. At least as far back as Virgil, women have been varium et mutabile. That is, if you’re rusty on your Aeneid, unreliable.”
This failed to warm him. “I hope you know what you’re doing. That pseudo-intellectual approach won’t go far with Freddie. She’s a real ball-breaker.”
I assumed my own cool style. “Results guaranteed,” said I. “Money back if not satisfied.” An easy promise; I could always invent something if I found nothing, rascal that I was, homeless, hungry, impoverished rascal.
I got her schedule from him, much of which was astonishingly precise. She went to her hairdresser every Monday at 4:00 P.M. and again at the same hour on Friday; in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays she played bridge always at home; Wednesdays at 3:00 she had a yoga lesson in Greenwich Village—
“There may be something there,” I interrupted, raising my pen from the Altman envelope. “A lot of those Asiatic fads in my opinion are mere covers for sex play. Behind all the spiritual trappings—”
“Negative,” said Washburn. “The yogi is some genuine Hindu, not the darky you might expect to find.”
“So?”
“They’re all gay, aren’t they? I’ve met him. He looks like a little brown girl: big eyes, round face, you know. And he’s only about five feet tall. Limber little devil, though. He can twist himself into a pretzel, in that turban and loincloth.”
Nevertheless, I planned to check out Mr. Chai Wallah. Washburn betrayed some naïveté. From the filthy wall-paintings of Ashanti, not to mention the Kama Sutra, available in recent years on every paperback rack, we know the Indians as a carnal people. A serpentine body is no impediment to a satyr.
Other activities, some scheduled and others sporadic, were given by Washburn as characteristic of his wife. Shopping for food, trudging to the dry cleaner, and browsing at fire sales were not among them. They had a live-in housekeeper. They made their Manhattan home in a duplex in Sutton Place. The likely amount of Washburn’s money continued to burgeon in my fancy. I foresaw as long and leisurely an investigation as I could manage.
Dealing with these matters, Washburn fell into an apparent despondency. When he finished the list he groaned, looked around the room, and said: “How squalid.”
The adjective was quite just if in reference to my office, certainly, but I am never quick to make perso
nal application of what is more appropriate to a client’s own predicament. The cuckold is, or was once, at least, a stock character in the farces of France and Italy, but in America he has always played a dreary role, because seldom even for native Catholics has marriage been considered seriously sacramental; thus whatever pain comes from its miscarriages is merely private, with no reference to social arrangements designed in heaven. Perhaps this explains why I, a student of traditional cultures, have never wed.
Beyond this observation I might note that my professional services are sought almost exclusively in financial and not emotional interests. If money is not in question, it is a rare spouse who as an exercise in pure masochism hires an investigator to confirm a suspicion that his or her mate is errant.
“Do you mind telling me,” I asked Washburn, “who controls the money in your family?” I naturally assumed it was exclusively he; dependents are in no position to be aggressive in collecting evidence of betrayal, and that a gigolo should wear horns is almost a moral impossibility.
Thus I was amazed to hear him say: “Freddie does.” He pinched his right earlobe. “I’m a flunky, let’s face it.” But the admission seemed to cheer him; he began to smile again. “It’s been a damned good six years, though, and well worth the trouble for the perquisites alone.” He winked. “Vintage vino and fine fodder. If it’s over now, I’ll have to go back to the top of the chair lift and see who comes up.”
“You’re quite the skier?”
The question provoked him into outright jocosity. “Apparently I look like one when I wear a boot on one foot and a cast on the other.”
Confessions of charlatanism are ingratiating. His served to distract me from undue envy. I shouldn’t have minded being wealthily espoused myself, my tastes having been thus far in life indulged, so to speak, by pressing my nose against the wrong side of plate glass. They had been acquired by collecting the vintage lists provided on liquor-shop counters, and reading such manuals as the Penguin Posh Food. I also eye the well-dressed (insofar as they can be found any more) on foot and in advertisements, and I watch revivals of drawing-room comedies of the 1930s, since the end of which epoch elegance has not been represented in public entertainment.
My simulation of epicureanism served to dupe the liberal-lawyer’s wife, who was raised in the commercial class of Great Neck, but, owing to my habitual lack of access to true luxury, would scarcely pass muster with a Frederika Washburn. Washburn himself, if false as a sportsman, displayed what seemed the natural grace and/ or insouciance of the gently reared. Even the indifference to his open fly, on entering my office, suggested that; as did the bone structure of cheek and jaw, his leggy carriage, and also his eyes, which were rather smaller in circumference than those of the average plebe. (This theory may attract scoffs, but it is my contention that the wellborn often have little eyes, in the paler range of coloration.)
“But you, yourself, come from a good family?”
“If you mean money, you’re right,” he said. I was relieved to hear this, my speculations having this day been so often proved in error. “But my father has arranged so that I can’t get any of it, even though he dies, until I’m fifty years old. I was raised as virtually a ragamuffin. I wore hand-me-downs from an older brother. I was sent to public schools and then for two years to a shabby little community college that occupied the buildings of a disused insane asylum. I had to work as a common handyman around the place during most of my childhood. While the proper caretaker sat in the tool shed drinking beer and leafing through stroke magazines, I cleaned out drains, waxed floors, and the like, and my wages were two dollars per week. The idea of this was to build my character. The result was that I acquired the ambition to become only a parasite when I left home.”
Washburn’s spirits had fallen again in the course of this account.
To cheer him, I said: “In that you have succeeded, I gather.”
He brightened slightly. “It wasn’t till I met Freddie that I really ever was able to do what I wanted.” “Which was?”
“Spend money!” His shout, given volume by his vehemence, based on experience—delayed, perhaps, but still gained early enough: he looked about my age—now made it impossible for me to withstand the onslaught of envy. Also, I suddenly had to urinate.
I quickly took his phone number—though of course without a profession he had no office, he had a private line at home and an answering service which took messages when he was absent—and blurting a promise that he’d hear from me before the week was out, I ushered him through the front office, past Peggy’s stare (for she had returned), along the hall to the elevator—the floor of which, incidentally, showed no blood drippings—and saw him inside. Then I hastened to the lavatory.
I was within six paces of it when the door to The Ganymede Press was flung open, a little man in black hat and black raincoat dashed out, leaped across the corridor, and plunged into the water closet, throwing the bolt violently. That sort of thing being routine in New York, I saw nothing especially sinister in this example. And with Washburn gone, I returned to the stoicism with which I had survived the years of denial, inconvenience, and discomfort that are the habitual lot of commoners and kings in this metropolis: even visiting Prince Philip had been trapped once in midtown traffic; well-kept Washburn would ride back to Sutton Place in a filthy taxi, his elegantly trousered hams prodded by broken springs, an empty Fresca can rolling against his boots.
The door being wide open, I looked into the Ganymede office for the first time ever. Sitting at a desk was the middle-aged woman I had briefly glimpsed in the hallway from time to time, and had always been somewhat astonished so to do, given my assumption as to the nature of their commerce. Sometimes she had been accompanied by a man of the same years. He was not in evidence now, and it had not been he who beat me to the toilet. The office was a far cry from mine: the floor decently carpeted, the windows Venetianed and maroon-draped.
Soon noticing me, the woman smiled and nodded in a maternal fashion I had not seen since leaving my little home town, where it was not unusual for someone else’s mother to be amiable to a boy. When I answered her greeting in kind, she beckoned me to enter.
“Would you like a homemade brownie?” she asked, extending towards me a china plate on which a dozen or more cubes of that confection were mounted pyramidally.
I found myself simpering, an effect that comes over me involuntarily when in the presence of women of her age and demeanor, i.e., “nice ladies.”
“I’d just hate myself for spoiling such a pretty arrangement,” I cooed, or to be exact, said with a set of lips and teeth that might have been used to imitate a dove though no oo sound came literally into play. I think I picked up this style from my father. In many ways, my little town was one that time forgot. But so was Queens, if one could judge from Peggy.
“Mmm,” I continued, squirreling my teeth for the first taste, taking it, then speaking through my munch, “goor, delisha! Made these yourserf?”
“Oh, no,” said she. “They’re from the Homemade Bakery, over on Second Avenue.”
Names of course have no real referents in Manhattan, where fish shops sell “fresh” frozen mackerel, “local” vegetables come from Pennsylvania, and “egg creams” are concocted without either cream or eggs, but in fact the brownie that crumbled in my jaws was quite O.K., rather better than those of yore, from which my aunt seldom had been precise enough in eliminating shards of walnut shell.
I have earlier mentioned my suspicion concerning the business of the Ganymede folks, the lovely Greek boy of that name having been brought to Olympus by Zeus to replace ox-eyed Hera in the marital bed, as anyone can read in bawdy Ovid among other places. That a gray-haired lady, her glasses secured by a neck ribbon attached to the temple pieces, might have a conscious role in the dissemination of literature for those who crave male children was, if not to be encountered daily, neither outlandishly beyond possibility in this Sodomist time and Gomorrhean place.
Nonetheless,
it was kind of her to give me the brownie, and I thought the least I could do in return was to voice a pleasantry.
“How’s business?”
She grimaced and made the so-so gesture with a fan of fingers in a half-turn of wrist, bosom-high.
To the left was a door that no doubt led to the private office of the man I had usually seen with her; again, it was of good quality, not like mine: blond wood, chromium knob. My glance was cursory; I didn’t want her to think me a snoop. Their trade did not require my approval. The most culturally resplendent era in the history of man, the time of Pericles, when more philosophers, poets, and heroic sculptors were extant synchronously than have been accumulated by the twenty-five centuries since, was also the Golden Age of Pederasty. Far be it from me to find a message in this state of affairs. I am immune to the lure of catamites. In fact, I abhor children of either sex.
Notwithstanding these sentiments, however, I could not see a book or periodical on the premises. The outer office was smaller than Peggy’s, and because the back lofts in Sam Polidor’s building were much larger than those in front, it could be presumed that the space beyond the private door was more generous than mine.
I suppose my inspection took longer than I thought. When I looked again at the woman, she wore a different type of smile, one I can only call, owing to its glint, a leer.
“Have you something particular in mind, or would you like to wait for the boss? He’ll be back from lunch soon.” She rolled her chair away from the desk and stood up, lowering her spectacles to hang from the ribbon. “Why don’t I just let you browse inside, in peace?”
I have a horror of disabusing courteous strangers of their expectations. Taken as a floorwalker in more than one department store, I have forthrightly directed women to the counter in question, insofar as I knew which, or, failing that, pretended it was beyond my jurisdiction and pointed to the authentic functionary.