them

  “My name is—Jules.”

  He swallowed hard. He felt so weak!

  In Jules’s life, girls and women didn’t shake hands. Nobody shook hands. The touch of this strange aggressive woman ran through him like an electric current.

  “This apartment! It’s so old-fashioned, but it has class. A cleaning lady comes in Thursdays. I can’t be bothered. I get to bed late, and I sleep late. D’you like sleeping? You go to the strangest places, don’t you?”

  Jules, for whom sleep was sometimes a jarring experience, like falling down a stairs, smiled in confusion. “Yes. I guess so.”

  “D’you like to eat? I never eat till afternoon. Queasy tummy. I hate food, but then I gorge on it. Like sex. It’s disgusting when you think about it, so maybe better not think about it, eh, kid? And the need for food, and for sex, having bodies and being at their mercy—what’s your opinion?”

  “My opinion?”

  “You look like a Catholic boy. Altar boy. The nuns dreamed about you, I bet.”

  Jules laughed. Sister Mary Jerome? It seemed to him in that instant that this woman was Sister Mary Jerome in a new, blond, brittle form; the same intensity, the subterranean anger, the pitiless female will.

  Faye nudged Jules into a chair. She sat facing him, bemused; as in a mock interview; her lovely legs crossed, bared to mid-thigh. The sheen of her stockings. Silky blond hairs. Jules was so nervous he couldn’t stop swallowing, while Faye was calmer with every minute, making a droll face, simulating boredom. Boredom! She was wearing a dress or jumper made of some coarse tawny material, a kind of wool, with a deep V-neck, showing the cleavage of her breasts, and these were bare breasts, shadowy and sly; she smelled of a perfume sharp as thorns; she was close to laughing at him. The gorgeous fur coat was sliding slowly to the floor, like a big snake uncoiling. Jules was uneasily aware of it in the corner of his eye.

  “Sometimes I send out for food. Joe Muer’s Seafood. Y’know it? Classy! They don’t have take-out, really; I have to hire a waiter. If you stay a while…D’you like lobster?”

  Jules couldn’t bear it any longer, got up and lunged for the coat. He caught it as it spread slowly onto the floor. “Your coat—”

  “Fuck the coat. Why’re you so jumpy?”

  She herself sat calmly eying him, assessing; as a man might do, with a girl; Jules understood this is what it is, being made into a girl; a female. As your power drained from you, the other filled up with power. Faye fairly shivered with it, settling her thighs on the chair and leaning a little forward.

  “We could play gin rummy, if we can’t sleep. Double solitaire. I get lonely, just solitaire. Pinochle? You’re not a Polack, are you?”

  Jules laughed. He searched Faye’s face for a clue, the most subtle of ironic smirks, but nothing; she was teasing him, yet very serious.

  “Back there, where you almost got killed, I had a flash—‘Even if he’s a Polack.’ That’s why you’re here.”

  Jules got unsteadily to his feet. Almost, he wanted to leave; but of course he couldn’t leave; Faye drew her to him as if sucking the air between them, sucking all the air out of the room. Jules stooped over her, fumbled for her hands, found himself kneeling, as if his legs had given out, and Faye was caressing the nape of his neck, running her fingers through his hair, suddenly greedy, inflamed.

  “My Polack,” she said.

  Later, hours later, she kept him awake talking animatedly and with an air of detachment about her “ex”—to whom she’d been married five years—but she didn’t “remember his face, in any detail. Isn’t that strange? The face of my first grade teacher is much clearer in my memory.”

  Jules was in love, and eager to agree yes it was strange, it was a mystery, what Faye said and what she didn’t say. While she spoke to him he embraced her and lay with her, in her careless arms, he wept with the tangy sweetness of her body, her smooth skin, her small soft breasts, the wiry swath of hair between her legs. She was so at ease in her body, like no girl or woman he’d known; from her had come the potency to love her, to make love to her; as if, through Jules’s body, she might bring pleasure to herself. He felt as if the very bottom of his soul had been stirred, like soft mud. He’d dissolved, he was nothing. Obliterated. But the fact was, the woman was detached from him, wanted nothing from him. She did not want to know him. The powerful piercing sensations he felt had made his own body feel unreal to him. Did this really happen? How did this happen? In their lovemaking, Faye would use her hands on him deftly, even impatiently; she wasn’t tender, no more than a man would be tender with himself. Then lying back warm and exhausted and bemused talking casually of her family, from whom she’d fled, two “small sweet innocent children” who would never know “how bad their mother would’ve been for them, like tetanus.” Jules thought sleepily, She’s only just trying to free herself, like me. That’s why she picked me up. Why we’re good together.

  He had thought that first delirious night he would fall deeper and deeper in love with Faye, but it turned out he would feel no more than he’d felt at first. The sex was fast, hard, bright and scintillate, a fin darting through choppy water.

  Faye didn’t want a lover, Faye wanted a friend. “My Polack” to drive her around town. Have coffee with her odd hours of the day. So she could talk of herself, her “married-man in Bloomfield” and her adventures sometimes with his friends. The money to be had, these “rich guys” flinging it around “like cum.” When, rarely, Faye had an empty evening, Jules came eagerly to visit her, like a brother or a cousin. He was dark, slender, abashed. She was fair and cold, in the heat of sexual effort as impersonal as a cocktail lounge hostess. He resented her, and was crazy for her. At this time he was living in a single room, in a boardinghouse on John R., hadn’t told Loretta his address, his freedom was important to him. Every thought dragged him back to his family, what he owed them, but—“If I could get enough money, just once, to help them, a good doctor for my sister, then…I’d take off for California and see what’s out there.”

  “There’s nothing there that isn’t here,” Faye said, yawning.

  “Nothing?” cried Jules.

  Faye drank liquor neat, and Jules drank Cokes. He disliked the taste of alcohol, or maybe liked it too much, remembering how Loretta had given him beer to calm him down years ago. No, it was important for him to be alert always. Not like his father; not like Furlong. Being in love was like drunkenness, and he didn’t want it. With Faye, he was immune to girls his own age. They’d have been meek, mute, passive, while Faye was…very different. Yet he had to extricate himself from her, didn’t he? It was hurtful to his pride, to love a woman who was the mistress of a married man, and slept with other men, for money. Even if some of the money ended up in his pockets.

  He asked her, with that sudden bluntness she liked in him, “Don’t you ever get low, Faye?”

  “ ‘Get low’? I am low. I’m the lowest.” She laughed.

  “Don’t you ever think about—killing yourself?”

  “I’d kill some others first, before me.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I am serious. Look, Jules, maybe I thought about killing myself sometimes when I was married, but I was young then, and there was too much love in me. Now, I never think about it. I lost interest. You have to believe in all that to keep it up. My ex-husband married again, I heard, and I wish him well.”

  “You never think of him any more, of loving him? All that is gone?”

  “Of course.”

  “But isn’t that strange?”

  “Why is it strange?” She laughed.

  There was something steely in her that alarmed Jules, because she was a girl from the country and he, he liked to think, was a tough boy from the city, very knowing. But he hadn’t her hardness. “So you don’t worry about your kids? And this guy you see now, you never worry about him—going back to his wife, changing his mind?”

  “He can’t go back t
o his wife because he hasn’t left her. She doesn’t know anything. They get along very well. I know all about her, everything. This is something in the air here,” she said with a small smirk, “they’re all crazy with it, in this town. They live out in Grosse Pointe or in Bloomfield and they want to keep something hidden somewhere else—they’re willing to pay a lot for it. My God! I could tell you about a woman I know, like me she came up here by herself, and she’s rich now and would never have to fool around or worry about anything, and the crazy thing is that there was something wrong with her all along, inside—she’d had an operation and her womb is partly supported by metal or plastic or something, and if any of those men knew it they’d be sick. But how could a man know it? They don’t know anything. She gets along very well.” The scandals of automotive Detroit, the anguish of multi-millionaires, living in palatial homes far from the city’s fumes and danger but terribly restless in those homes—Faye had no particular interest in this anguish but knew enough to recognize its value.

  It was through Faye that Jules met Bernard Geffen.

  Jules was with her one evening when the telephone rang. She answered it and said, “Sure, come on up. No, he isn’t.” Jules was very hurt. In a few minutes a shaggy, nervous man in a raincoat appeared in her doorway, wet from the rain. Faye embraced him languidly, in a gesture so ritualized as to strike Jules as lovely. The man brushed her cheek with his lips. He was already smiling over his shoulder at Jules.

  “This is my good friend Jules Wendall,” she said. “This is my good friend Bernard Geffen.”

  “Wendall, is it? Wendall? I’m very pleased to meet you!” the man said, shaking Jules’s hand. Jules sensed something odd, unbalanced; this man was over fifty and looked prosperous, but he was shaking Jules’s hand as if Jules were an important person. “Are you the one Faye has told me about? You keep her company, go to movies and all that? You’re very young. It’s very nice, I’m sure—I mean—”

  “Take off your coat,” Faye said coldly.

  They spent an awkward hour or more, Bernard still in his coat, Jules wondering why he didn’t leave, Faye leafing through a fashion magazine and trying to keep up a mysterious conversation with Bernard. Jules could not make out what the conversation was about. A trip to Florida? South America? Someone’s yacht?

  “I’ll put it to you, son,” Bernard said, turning his watery gray eyes on Jules, “do you think I should make the investment? Another boat? It’s a fifty-thousand-dollar investment, but, more than that, you have to consider that I would get no interest on it, which of course I’d be getting even if it was just in a bank.”

  Jules stared.

  “There are various kinds of investments. Some depreciate, some grow. Look here,” Bernard said, taking Faye’s hand to show Jules her ring, “this diamond is worth—let me guess—nine thousand, ten thousand? Or don’t you know, my dear? Whatever it’s worth, it will be worth more in a few years, obviously, and in the meantime it can be worn, it’s very beautiful, and does justice to your beautiful hand.”

  “Is this worth ten thousand dollars?” Faye laughed.

  “Certainly. But it isn’t yours, you simply wear it, you exhibit it. You have no problems, you pay no insurance, you couldn’t even sell it if you wanted to. That’s one kind of investment. A boat, on the other hand,” he said, sighing like an old mariner, “a boat—did I show you this snapshot, Faye?” He took out his wallet and extricated a picture. Faye looked at it and passed it to Jules without comment. It was a color picture of a woman standing on the deck of a large pleasure craft, dressed in white, a rather dumpy though pretty woman no longer young. “That’s my wife there. Ex-wife,” Bernard said. “She died of cancer last year.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jules said politely. The woman in white struck him as doomed, even then.

  “We were together for a long time, off and on,” Bernard said. “Her trouble was that she didn’t understand me and therefore didn’t trust me. Everyone in her family had money but they also worked. They held down jobs. She didn’t understand my family, my father. I felt trapped inside her head.” He looked up at Jules, smiling. “My boy, would you be interested in working for me this summer? On my new boat? Maybe on my new boat?”

  Jules handed him back the snapshot. A certain movement of the man’s fingertips made him suspicious.

  “Doing what?”

  “Helping out. A cabin-boy.”

  “I drive a truck.”

  “I could pay you much more.”

  “But I have a job. I enjoy driving.” Jules felt his mouth growing tighter, and he was puzzled at this caution. So he said with forced enthusiasm, “But it might be a good idea, being on the water. It would be healthy.”

  “We could go down to the Caribbean!” Bernard said. “Your dear friend Faye could make me very happy if only she wanted to—maybe you could convince her? If the trip interested you, perhaps it would interest her? If I put you on my payroll now, months ahead of time?”

  “Bernard, are you crazy? I thought you didn’t have any money,” Faye said.

  “I have money as of last Saturday,” he said. He was very nervous.

  Jules, anxious to escape, looked with concern at Bernard’s warm, damp, rather broad forehead; there was something childlike and yet weary about this man, whoever he was, as if the peculiar energy that inspired him to talk for minutes on end might shake his feet into dancing and drive him to a frenzy, only to let him fall limp again. Rivulets of sweat ran down his forehead.

  “A certain loan came through. I admit that I have no fixed income like your friend, and I have no desire for it,” he said to Faye. “I like adventure. I don’t dare prophesy where my liking for adventure will lead. I think you know, but still it mustn’t ever be spoken between us, for your own sake and for the sake of your young friend here.”

  “What do you mean?” Jules asked in alarm.

  “Both of you, good night. I’m going to bed,” said Faye.

  She got them to the door. There Bernard slipped his arm around Jules’s shoulders and said, “She’s like a northern princess. A fairy-tale princess, very cold, enchanting. Jules, my boy, let me put you on my payroll right now. I feel shaky tonight and I’d like you to drive me home. What do you think about that, Faye, is it all right?”

  “Of course. Good night,” said Faye.

  They were standing together in the corridor. Jules looked back at the door, puzzled. He did not know whether to be angry or not, whether his honor demanded that he pound on the door or push Bernard away from him.

  Bernard was saying, “But you do have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll drive me home then?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Not far. Hardly a mile.”

  He was shorter than Jules, an agitated, busy man. He needed to move his hands in order to speak. The expensive trench coat was rumpled and stained; his trouser cuffs were spotted with mud; his shoes needed polishing. Going down in the elevator, he talked into Jules’s ear confidentially and rapidly, as if talking into a telephone receiver. Jules wondered if he was crazy.

  “I like to have people on my payroll whom I can trust. Friends of friends. Faye was mistaken about my not having money—women don’t understand these things. They only understand money when they can see it. They’re very crude essentially. They don’t understand where money comes from or what it means or how a man can be worth money though he hasn’t any at the moment. But a man understands such things.”

  “I suppose so,” said Jules.

  “What kind of people are your family?”

  “My uncle is Samson Wendall, maybe you’ve heard of him?”

  “Isn’t he in…in trucking?”

  “Tool and die.”

  “Tool and die, yes. Wendall. The name is familiar, a nice name,” Bernard said. “And your name is Julian? Jules! Yes, good, Jules, my problem is that I take thi
ngs much too seriously, I get very excited, a kind of faintness rises in me—it might be high blood pressure. But I conceive of life as drama, I conceive of history as a tragedy unfolding, and…and I need someone to drive my car for me, I have difficulties just in getting around, the most mundane things. I had a driver, a Negro, but he was always having accidents. I had to let him go. He set fire to the back seat of the car. I still haven’t gotten around to fixing it. What would you say to one hundred dollars a week?”

  “One hundred?”

  “Two hundred, should we say two hundred dollars a week?”

  “Do I just drive a car? Just around the city?”

  “I will want to go to Toronto, St. Louis, and Buffalo sometime soon, depending upon how business works out,” Bernard said quickly, as if he didn’t want Jules to check any of this, “but in general it would only be around Detroit. I need someone who can keep secrets. I need someone who’s intelligent, like you—it’s obvious from your face that you’re intelligent. Let me take you somewhere and get your hair cut.”

  “My hair cut?” Jules said.

  “It’s too long. You need a new suit. You need a coat. It doesn’t matter how I look, I’m beyond all that, but you should look right. Drive me home and keep the car overnight and come back in the morning with your hair cut. All right?”