Cloud Nine

  “Oh, Mrs. Stu! Oh!”

  Sonya started to cry, then kissed Mother. Mrs. Lang said: “We have something in mind, Sonya. We’ll give you a present too.”

  “We don’t aim to be skunked.”

  At Mr. Lang’s remark we laughed, as usual.

  Then at last, around four, we were home, Sonya with the veil pinned up, but without her corsage, as she tossed it to one of the girls, the one who came up with a handful of rice to throw at us, as we sailed down the courthouse steps. I unlocked the door, put the bags inside, and picked Sonya up in my arms. Mrs. Persoff, who lives next door, was cutting peonies in her garden, and suddenly stopped and stared. “Yes!” I called to her. “It’s what you think! Congratulate me!”

  She dropped her shears and clapped her hands, and Sonya blew her a kiss. I carried her in. “Okay,” I said, still not putting her down. “Frog turned into a prince—three wishes coming to you, say what they’re going to be!”

  “I want to be carried upstairs.”

  I carried her up. “What next?”

  “I want to be flopped on that bed.”

  I flopped her. “One more?”

  “I want it turned into Cloud Nine.”

  I turned it, for the rest of the afternoon.

  Chapter 15

  NEXT MORNING, LIFE WENT on as before, and yet was entirely different. When I went into the office, they all gave three cheers. Elsie the switchboard girl, the three salesmen, Jack Kefore, Mel Schachtman, and Gordon Carter, and Helen Musick, my secretary, and five minutes later, from the way they acted, you’d have thought I’d always been married—except for Mrs. Musick. She followed me into my private office, wanting to know the “details,” especially who the bride was, whether she knew her, and so on. I cut back to the Christmas speech, said I “fell for her then, pretty hard, and began taking her out,” then pretended I’d hesitated a bit, on account of the bride-to-be’s age, and then “suddenly made up my mind—and that’s about all.”

  At least some of it was true.

  I added: “You’re coming to dinner tonight.”

  “Oh no! She doesn’t have to do that!”

  “She’ll be calling you.”

  “Well I certainly look forward to meeting her!”

  Then I got to the things that were waiting for me, mainly interviews with people who’d called in in response to our Sunday ad, about houses they wanted to list with us, to sell. It was something I couldn’t wish off on a salesman, for two reasons: It involves appraisal, which salesmen weren’t too good at, and it also involves a risk, the risk of losing a listing, in case the owner wouldn’t accept the price I put on his place. In that case, I won’t take the property on. I think I’ve said I lose three out of ten listings that way, but the ones I do get sell fast. But a salesman won’t take that responsibility of losing a listing for me, so the result, if you leave it to him, is a bunch of places that hang fire for months, because of some silly price the owner thinks he can get if he just gets tough and holds out for it—while the overhead goes on, the woman who shows it gets sore, and your reputation sags, with the “For Sale” sign out on the lawn for months, where SOLD, Graham Kirby is the one thing that builds you up.

  So, with a half dozen people waiting, I had to dust out and talk. For the next day I did, and landed four of the six. One of those I landed was typical, a retired admiral, employed by a defense contractor, a helicopter concern, as lobbyist, but now ordered out to San Diego. Of course, he had to get rid of his house, which was in Riverdale, not far from Mother. I called on him Tuesday morning, had a look around, then went inside and told him: “I can sell this place for you.”

  “The price will be eighty thousand dollars.”

  He got it off in a rough, quarter-deck voice, not even asking me to sit down. “...Wait a minute,” I said, choking back a rise in temper. “Who said what the price will be?”

  “Well I do, I hope.”

  “No. You don’t, and I don’t.”

  His wife, a quiet little woman in her fifties, looked up at that, and began staring at me. I went on: “Admiral, the buyer will. But it’s my business to know what he’ll pay, so I’ll say what we’ll ask. You don’t have to take my word—put your appraiser on it, and if his figure’s higher than mine, then I’ll stand corrected, and accept what he says. But I’m an appraiser, myself, and I’ll be greatly surprised if his figure and mine differ much. But this much I guarantee: You cannot get eighty thousand, and if you insist on that price, you’ll wait and wait and wait, and show the place and show it and show it, and lose the interest on your money, which is compounded the first of next month, and pay and pay and pay, for upkeep, water, and taxes—and in the end, you’ll have to take seventy thousand, which was all it was worth in the first place.”

  “The price will be eighty thousand.”

  “Then get another broker.”

  I turned to go, but the wife darted in front of me, to block my way to the hall. “Please, Mr. Kirby,” she begged me, “don’t go—not yet.” And then, to him: “Who knows what this place will bring? Mr. Kirby, whose business is real estate, or you, whose business is chopper blades? And who’s going to sit here month after month, in Maryland, all alone, while you’re in California, living the life of Riley? I won’t have it! You can’t order people to pay eighty thousand dollars, as though they were seamen or something. You can’t—”

  “The price will be seventy thousand dollars.”

  I must have glanced at one of the chairs, because he suddenly pushed it toward me and asked me to please sit down. I bowed, thanked him, but waited until she sat down. She did, smiling at me. He sat down and we started to talk, he suddenly uncorking such matters as only an Annapolis man has.

  When I got back to the office, Mother was waiting, with a dispatch case full of old pictures of me, “which I thought Sonya might like to have—perhaps for framing.” So we sat there a few minutes, going through those old snapshots of me, with the Cabin John grammar school baseball team, with the Northwestern High football team, as a Boy Scout, at the wheel of my first car, and with the gloves on, as a member of the Yale boxing team. And then, suddenly, what she’d really come about: “Gramie, are you asking me to lunch?”

  “...Yes, of course.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll ask permission.”

  She had Elsie ring Sonya, and then: “Sonya, your mother-in-law.” And after the greetings: “I’m here in your husband’s office, with some pictures I came across, that I thought you might like to have—and he’s asked me to lunch. Is it all right with you if I go? ... Oh, thank you.”

  And then when she’d hung up: “You can’t do things behind her back—it’s protocol. It’s the linchpin of marriage.”

  So we went to the Royal Arms and ordered, and then she drew a long breath. I said: “Cool it—Jane’s not a complete fool, and—”

  “Gramie, all women are fools. Complete fools.”

  “She hasn’t yet turned into a she-wolf.”

  “Don’t worry, she will.”

  “And even she-wolves have to eat.”

  “With you, she might go on a hunger strike.”

  “Not with the bill collector. And she might, she just very well might, listen to what he says.”

  “You mean she’s beholden to you?”

  “She eats when I send the check.”

  “Unless she decides to sell out.”

  “In which case, we can bid the place in and get started, instead of waiting ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty. These spry, pretty women live a long time. Look at Grandma Moses.”

  “Then, very well, we’ll see.”

  “So why don’t we change the subject.”

  “Why don’t we? Perhaps, at last, I could bring up what I wanted to talk about. What I had in mind when I fished my invitation.”

  “I’m sorry—I thought it was Jane.”

  But, as usual with her when something is really bugging her, she circles around it and past it and by it quite a few times, before zeroing i
n and getting at what she meant. But then at last: “Gramie, I’ve been up against it, directly for at least ten years, indirectly longer than that, this problem of men who like women—or we’ll say, of a boy who likes them too much. Strangely, not much has been written about them, at least by the psychiatrists. I suppose the reason is the underlying premise of psychiatry, of modern psychiatry, at least, is that sex frustration underlies most mental disorder—in which case these tomcats could seem to be wholly normal, perhaps the only normal people we have. Well, all I can say is, they don’t look normal to me. And I had the bright idea of hearing what they had to say, especially one of them, Casanova, who I got interested in through my weakness for music—I long ago realized that he was the real Don Giovanni, the model for the librettist of that opera—”

  She named the librettist, but I don’t remember the name. Then she went on: “Casanova was probably the greatest tomcat who ever lived—”

  “In college, in one of our courses, the professor called him the greatest literary figure of the eighteenth century.”

  “I think we could call him that—certainly he was the parent of Dumas, of Hugo, and especially, of Thackeray. But Gramie, by his own revelation, he had a screw loose somewhere. Let me explain what I mean. In Spain he had a rough time, largely through the intrigues of a woman who loused him up, had him thrown into prison, tortured, in all ways treated horribly, and Casanova is most bitter against her, on moral grounds, believe it or not—it seemed she was the daughter of her grandfather, that is, that grandpappy had a few with his own daughter, and this woman was the result. I was quite persuaded myself, and pleased with Casanova that he should see the genetic principle involved. But now watch what happens. He escaped from Spain, of course, and some time later, when he’s back in Italy, he runs into a girl, a young married woman, who wants a child and is barren. Gladly, Casanova steps into the breach, or we could say, climbs into the bed. But he knows all the time that this girl is his own daughter. In other words, he commits the very same incestuous offense he complained so bitterly about in Spain. That’s what I mean, when I say there was a loose screw, somewhere inside Casanova.”

  She stopped, ate her lunch for a while, but then went on, right where she left off. “And take Aaron Burr, a real tomcat, who slept up with every boulevard floozie he met on the streets of Paris. Or take Daniel Sickles, perhaps our greatest American tomcat. He married a girl, a complete ninny, and then paid no more attention to her than as though she didn’t exist—and he, by the way, was a pupil, in his youth, of—” she named the librettist again, and I still don’t remember it—“when he was on the faculty of Columbia College. So Mrs. Sickles had an affair with Barton Key, son of the Key who wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, on September 12, 1814—later the birthday of Graham Kirby, a real date in American history—and then Sickles shot Barton Key, shot him and killed him in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. He was acquitted, but then, and only then, did he begin to take an interest in this poor, weeping nitwit, who of course had been crucified, this wife, whom he now took back and began sleeping with. It was too much, and shortly after she died—but what kind of depraved nature was it, that felt this unnatural compulsion, to defile her as he did? I tell you, there’s a screw loose in these men!”

  I may have said something, but don’t now recall what it was, and pretty soon she went on: “He was in last night, Burl I’m talking about, to bring back my trunk and pick up things he’d forgotten. And I told him everything—about the marriage, and also about the miscarriage, as a way of letting him know how completely detached he was, from that girl, for the rest of her life. He just laughed at the idea that she could have miscarried. ‘Oh boy,’ he crowed, ‘there’s one for the book—Big Brother decides to marry her, and right away she miscarries.’ Then he persuaded himself you’re a fag, as he called you, unable to husband Sonya, and for that reason under the necessity of finding a way to pretend that the child she’ll have is yours. So you put out this false story, as a way of wiping the slate clean to make way for a new beginning. But then, like Sickles, he gets a pious notion of what he owes this girl and what he owes his child: This ‘child of my loins,’ as he called it—a regular baptism of his father’s semen, so he’ll grow up healthy and normal. Gramie, now at last I get to it, what I came to tell you: You must keep her from this madman. She mustn’t see him, let him in, or have anything whatever to do with him. Do you hear me, Gramie?”

  “I do, but so happens I think I can help.”

  “What do you mean, help?”

  “Cure him of his obsession.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “A good sock on the jaw may help.”

  “I’d love to see it happen, but I wouldn’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Let’s get back to Casanova: In London he fell for a girl who played him for a sucker. Who took him for money, and then wouldn’t, as they say, put out. He all but lost his mind, it was the turning point of his life. Until then he’d been well-heeled, elegant, and big. After the interlude with her, or without her, actually, he became seedy, necessitous, and petty. I doubt if socking Burl would cure him of his obsession with Sonya, but letting it die of attrition, of not seeing her, of his incorrigible habit of getting somebody else—that might help.”

  “Okay then we’ll freeze him out.”

  “Gramie, she mustn’t see him.”

  “Well, why would she?”

  “She mustn’t let him into the house!”

  “Well, she knows that, of course!”

  “He might invent some trick to get in.”

  “Will you stop imagining stuff?”

  “She mustn’t go to this place he’s moved into. He’s taken over his father’s old office, in the Harrison Stuart Building. He’s staying there temporarily—”

  “I’d call that office a pad.”

  “Whatever it is, he’s living there.”

  “The pretended private office was all fixed up as a bedroom with bath attached, where your lately deceased husband took lady visitors, mostly women on relief—”

  “I know what my late husband did!”

  “Then tell it like it was.”

  She blew her top, and took a moment to calm down again, touching her lips with her handkerchief, and not for some time becoming herself again. I felt more or less like hell, but discussing Harrison Stuart in an easy, quiet way was something I was incapable of. After a while she said: “I’m trying to say she must never go there.”

  “Okay, you said it.”

  That afternoon, I talked with more prospects, and one of them kept me until six, so when I got home Helen Musick was there, and Sonya had fixed dinner. It was kind of a funny job, a mixture of Domestic Science, Joy of Cooking, and Mixology, a pamphlet I had, for drinks. She didn’t drink herself, but had put out martini makings, according to the pamphlet—gin, vermouth, lemon peel, and ice, big rocks that she chopped with an icepick, from lumps she froze in cartons. The icepick she put in a table drawer, by the door that led to the rear part of the house, “to remind me,” whatever that meant. I made a martini for Helen and me and poured a Coke for her, and we visited, very friendly, with Helen warming to her. Then we had dinner: fruit cup, of melon, grapefruit, and strawberries; roast chicken, peas, new potatoes, and salad, and brick ice cream with brandied cherries. We went back in the living room for more conversation, but around ten Helen left, I taking her out to her car. “I just love her,” she whispered. “So natural, so sweet, so friendly—she’s just the person for you.”

  “What she have to say?”

  “Helen? Well, you heard her.”

  “Your mother! What did she want?”

  “She told you: She brought pictures of me.”

  “Where are they?”

  “At the office—I haven’t been there since lunch. I came direct from a guy who wants me to sell his house.”

  “What did she say? About her! Mrs. Sibert?”

  “Nothing. I did but she didn?
??t.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “The same, no more, no less.”

  “Then what did she talk about?”

  “Burl, and the torch he’s carrying for you. She says you mustn’t see him. Mustn’t let him in this house, mustn’t go to that pad where he lives.”

  “Does she think I’m a kook or something?”

  “I don’t know what she thinks, only what she said.”

  “Burl’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “Well, I’m not, so that makes two of us.”

  “Mrs. Sibert is.”

  “Maybe, but I know nothing to do about it.”

  “The thing of it is, what I do about it.”

  “For now, may I suggest?”

  “...Suggest what?”

  “Get a cloudy look in your eye.”

  “Is that all you ever think about?”

  “You know something better to think about—?”

  “...There isn’t innything better!”

  “Peel.”

  “Carry me upstairs first.”

  “I’m getting hooked on you. Could it be love?”

  “I don’t but it’s sump’m.”

  Chapter 16

  THEN, FOR THREE OR four weeks, came the period of readjustment, when all kinds of things got done, and we shook down to a new life. Mr. and Mrs. Lang came over, and we straightened the announcements out—they sent envelopes to the office, and I addressed them myself, so they’d be ready when the engraved cards came from the stationer. Then I took Sonya to the bank, to open a personal account. I wanted her added to my account, to make a joint thing of it, but she wouldn’t hear of the idea. “I might make some silly mistake,” she said, “that would cost you all kinds of money. So she opened her own account, with a check for $1,000 that I gave her, and that covered that. Then there was her car, as well as her driver’s license. I got her a little blue Valiant, that she picked out for herself, and sent her to driving school, where she learned fast, and got her license in a couple of weeks.