them

  The other man made an abrupt, hacking sound meant to be a laugh.

  Samson had begun as an unskilled worker at Ford’s decades ago; he had gone into tool-and-die work; he had left to begin his own business, a supplier to larger businesses. He had made his way without blundering, without stupidity, rising, drawing in investors, until now he could boast of having made six other men besides himself millionaires. Jules was sitting beside a millionaire. Yet it did not seem convincing: Jules might have been sitting at a lunch counter beside a stranger.

  “The hell of it is, it’s six hundred thousand dollars’ worth,” Samson was saying to Yates, flicking his thumb angrily, “so what do we do? The bastard says some entertaining. I said to him, ‘What entertaining?’ But you get nothing out of them—they got their own kind of language up in New England! So I called Mike and told him and he says, well, there’s this guy at Metro Airport, you contact him, and what he does is arrange for some girls that are at the University of Michigan—”

  “At the what?” said Yates.

  “The University of Michigan. Girls. Students. It’s thirty dollars a night, but I said to Mike, are we expected to pay for it?—because six hundred thousand is six hundred thousand but I never got in this kind of business before, and maybe it’s too late to start. So he says let’s keep still about it and see who wants to pay the thirty bucks, that will decide it. Not a question of thirty goddam bucks for how many—how many is it? four or five guys?—but Jesus Christ nobody’s going to push me around.”

  “Where’d you hear the University of Michigan? Are you kidding?”

  “I don’t have time to kid,” Samson said angrily.

  Their drinks arrived. The restaurant seemed lighter. Samson leaned forward against the table to talk into the face of Mr. Yates, a man something like himself, and now he began to talk about his boat. Jules was always hearing about this boat. It was fifty feet long and had cost many thousands of dollars but did not always work; the motor did not always start. Samson kept inviting Jules out on the boat but never got around to giving him any specific time.

  Samson said to Yates, “I was on the phone five times this morning with my lawyers, and the hell, do you think they can straighten a simple goddam thing like that? Jesus! What she did was a damn fool thing, tossing a big watermelon overboard—it was spoiled and rotten, the goddam thing—and there were these kids water skiing, so wouldn’t you know it, but all hell broke loose, and my wife, she keeps wanting to call them up, the parents, and cry over the phone or something. I told her that’s exactly what they wanted…”

  Jules’s gaze drifted wearily to one side, and there he saw Nadine herself. She was sitting with two other women, looking at him. His heart jumped in his chest. He looked away at once.

  His uncle was talking about the boat and the lawsuit. One lawsuit followed another. A new lawsuit on Monday. Lawsuits. Lawyers. Judges. Court. “Life didn’t used to be so mixed up,” Samson said, screwing his face around so that it looked almost like the face of Jules’s father, brought back horribly from the grave, a sour, perplexed, suspicious look. It seemed that he had hired a bright young man from a certain company—this outrage blended in with the yachting accident—and this young man had turned out to be a thief, a common thief, “a son-of-a-bitching bastard of a thief, the little cocksucker!” Samson said loudly. A new lawsuit. A company in New Jersey was suing him, Samson Wendall, for hiring that man, and already the man had quit and was working for another company out in California, the bastard, and was this what life was coming to?

  Mr. Yates ate celery noisily and sipped at his drink and said, “I heard of the exact same thing happened to Indiana Floeman. The exact same thing.”

  “How’d they make out?”

  “Went bankrupt.”

  “I didn’t know he was stealing plans from them. I didn’t know anything.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  More drinks arrived. Jules, very nervous, looked back toward the woman he believed to be Nadine but could not decide: his vision was too jumpy. He felt as if he were suffocating. His uncle’s cigar smoke maddened him. Then she glanced over at him again and their eyes met and he knew that she was Nadine, Nadine herself. He let his gaze fall from her heavily, as if struck by a blow.

  Now Samson was saying something about George Romney—was he a crook or a saint? Yates joined in loudly. One of them hated Romney and the other admired him. Jules could not make out which man had which opinion, perhaps they traded opinions or confused them, but still the discussion rushed on in an amiable, loud manner, while Jules sat transfixed.

  He looked back at Nadine.

  She was sitting with two other women, older than she. She was no longer looking at him. Half turned from him, inclining her head to someone’s words, she was very still, her arms and throat were bare; she wore black, with her black hair drawn up onto her head and wound about in an elaborate manner. Jules felt his heart sink to see it, it seemed to him so beautiful. He wanted to press his mouth against the thick, shining coils of hair. He wanted to come up behind her and embrace her, for, after all, hadn’t she lain in his embrace years ago? hadn’t she accepted his kisses, his caresses, his passion?

  “You, boy, what’re you staring at?”

  Jules looked back at his uncle.

  “Kid, you look like somebody sat you in the electric chair.”

  “I’m all right,” Jules said coldly.

  The air of the restaurant surged and ebbed. Jules could feel it pulsating. He tried to eat and watched the men at his table eating, ready to imitate them. A strange deeper darkness rose out of the restaurant’s pretentious subdued light, a sense in Jules of evening, of nullity. It frightened him because he could not understand it. It was as if a door were being opened deep inside him but it was not a true opening, not a true beginning, an opening instead onto nothing.

  But a steady excitement began to rise in him, coating him with sweat. She won’t leave without talking to me, he thought. He was aware of Nadine at that table, eating lunch with two women, strangers, leaning forward toward them, smiling, talking, a deathly woman standing at the very brink of Jules’s life, prodding him with the toe of her expensive shoe. His head was heavy and dazzling. He realized that he still loved her and that his desire for her was stronger than it had been. She herself had changed, she was older, more elegant, with a peculiar translucent, uncanny beauty, as if she had now imagined herself a different woman, exactly the woman to win Jules. In spite of the attentive pose of her spine there was something trancelike about her, as if she were listening to her friends’ words too closely. Like Jules, she was always pretending—he felt that truth about her. She was eager, the back of her neck bent to hear, and Jules felt himself slowly disintegrating.

  When he answered his uncle’s questions his voice sounded slow and heavy. He could hear it from a distance. Fortunately his uncle and Yates had had enough to drink and were themselves in a kind of buffoonlike trance, stamping and pawing, lurching forward to concern over the slow car sales, lurching backward to a muttered remark about someone’s yacht, someone’s watermelon. Jules could make no sense of it. He saw Nadine get to her feet. He wanted to call out to her but did no more than watch helplessly as she reached for her purse, exactly as the other women did. Then she turned, slender and arrowlike, as if surveying the room from a vantage point that was invisible and invulnerable, undisturbed by the various eyes that moved upon her. He saw her approach him. She wore fashionable shoes, in the extreme style of the day, open heels with thin straps, small knobby heels, a tortoise-shell decoration on the front. He let his eyes move slowly up to her face, as if reluctant really to see her, and his uncle and Yates gaped at this strange woman who came up to Jules and handed him a piece of paper. He took it at once from her fingers and put it in his pocket, not surprised. She walked away.

  “Jesus Christ, what was that?” Uncle Samson cried.

  “We went to high school together,” sa
id Jules.

  “High school!” Samson cried. “Jesus, some of them look like boys, flat in the chest—my Gawd, that won’t do—you went to high school together?”

  “High school together,” Jules repeated.

  “Jesus, they look like boys, I don’t approve of it. How’d you know…” Samson’s eyes went slowly out of focus. Jules wondered if his uncle would fall asleep at the table, as he had at the last luncheon, snoring softly as the busboy wiped crumbs silently away, careful not to disturb him.

  “Order us all a little brandy, son,” he told Jules.

  * * *

  —

  Her last name was no longer Greene. She no longer lived in Grosse Pointe; she lived in Bloomfield Hills. It was a long drive out Woodward Avenue. The drive began for Jules in a frenzy of excitement and nervousness but changed gradually to a strange serenity, a sense of floating, as if he were driving a car whose mechanism was set for a certain fate and would not fail to get him there. At first the traffic alarmed him but at about Six Mile Road the buildings fell back and the ragged green of Palmer Park began, followed by the city golf course and a series of cemeteries. Seeing cemeteries did not bother Jules; he thought them the most beautiful of the sights in Detroit. Woodward Avenue was divided by a strip of green, littered with junk but still green, a delight to the eye. As he drove along his despair lifted. So long as he owned his own car he could always be in control of his fate—he was fated to nothing. He was a true American. His car was like a shell he could maneuver around, at impressive speeds; he was second generation to no one. He was his own ancestors.

  Nadine drew him with a strength he could not resist. A foolish sap was flowing sweetly in his veins. What could he care about his dying Uncle Brock, a body in a welfare-ward bed, his lip eroding away and his eyes bright with disaster and hope? What could he care about his sister Betty, who’d been picked up on an L & L charge—lewd and lascivious behavior, which could mean anything at all; he had an idea dope was involved, but what could he care about her when everything in him rushed toward Nadine, a stranger? Of his mother, his sister Maureen, his half-brother, it was impossible to think seriously. He thought only of Nadine.

  The drive was long and the day warm. He tried not to speed. Past the suburbs north of the city, along the long, long avenue, through Birmingham, into the city of Bloomfield Hills—which was no city at all, which had no business section and seemed to have no homes, all of them set far back in the countryside on quiet lanes—he steered his way with a sense of jaunty doom. She had handed him a piece of paper with her name written on it, with an address. She had suggested no date. He had waited one day, two days, and on the third day had risen shakily with the conviction that he would tell his Uncle Samson he had to see a doctor that afternoon, and so escape the old man’s authority, his promise, his cold sane eye…

  Along the edge of the highway, past the neatly mowed wild grass, were wild weeds past their prime. What sent him rushing out to Nadine was a terrible desire to sink himself in her, to fulfill himself in her, to get to some avenue straight and clean as Woodward but more permanent, an avenue of clarity in his mind: what was the truth about himself? What was the meaning of his life? He felt that his life’s meaning was irrevocably linked with that woman.

  It was a conviction he’d come to on one of those Sunday visits to his uncle. Maureen had come along reluctantly. Loretta was level from a week of no spectacular defeats, her mouth pursed for sympathy. Jules had felt it, their sympathy—women at their best, their most healthy, giving sympathy to a man, their eyes growing moist with love for the death of a man. He felt that, he understood. This sympathy women drew up from the deepest, most private part of their beings, from a frightening sense of doom, of mortality, and now it was being directed toward his uncle—a man without worth, a failure!—and someday it would turn onto Jules himself, searching him out like a beacon, precise and knowing and forgiving but not personal. It was this impersonal, blind compassion, almost a yearning for physical union, that he felt in Nadine though she hadn’t the body of a mother or a sister but the body of a stranger.

  He found her house. It startled him to see how much it resembled the other house built by her father. Set back on a larger lawn—land being more plentiful here than in Grosse Pointe—it had a raw, expensive look, a look of newness totally impersonal. Jules drove up the oval driveway and parked in front of the door, dizzy with a sudden sense of déjà vu. He saw himself sharply from a distance, a character in a photograph or in a film. An X hovered over him, near him, pointing him out. He was aware of a lawn mower somewhere, a sharp, persistent droning. As he took the keys out of the car’s ignition he felt a strange sickness rise in him, the dread of the foreigner in a neatly cultivated land. He had come too quickly to the fulfillment of his desire.

  The sound of the lawn mower grew louder, but he could not see where it was coming from.

  Nadine herself opened the door. She reached out to take his hand, but some hesitation in him made the gesture into a handshake. “Hello,” she said.

  Jules nodded. She was breathy, strange, in a dress of some aqua silkish material, showing the soft flesh of her upper arms. To offset his nervousness he said, smiling, “This all seems familiar to me.”

  With a swing of his eyes he indicated the hallway, the white table with its bowed legs, the scarlet-cushioned chairs, the heavy mirror near the stairway. In that mirror he and Nadine were reflected unnaturally, their faces expanded by the curve of the glass.

  “I’ve lived here for three years,” Nadine said, anxious to please him but not knowing what he meant. “It isn’t familiar to me yet.”

  The handshake ended. She drew away slightly, embarrassed. He closed the door behind him and they embraced, though formally. She stepped aside with an apologetic laugh. She bumped against the white table—it looked like an antique, off-white, brushed with gold.

  Jules said, “Did you hurt yourself?”

  She laughed again, shaking her head. How could she hurt herself in this house?

  “This is a beautiful place,” Jules said. “It’s just like you. Everything in here is like you, exactly.” He half wanted her to deny this, but she did not understand; he could sense how his words, his presence, cowed her.

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t understand,” she said.

  She led him somewhere. Jules, stunned by her face and her body, allowed himself to go slack as soon as she turned; though he was only a few feet from her now he felt full of dread. Had he this essential dread of other people, was that his secret? He wanted Nadine and yet dreaded her? She turned. She sat down on a small sofa. Jules sat beside her. A cloud of abstraction came over him—one of the most peculiar, freakish experiences of his life—a few frigid seconds of dissolution, of immobility. He might have been led through an open door into a temple and there confronted with a faceless and soulless being, or he might have woken as if he were himself on the raw, blank, lighted side of the moon, everything smooth and unreal, where his own soul would be lost, flowing out of his terror and into nothing. She seemed to him nothing—he could not recall her. He felt chilled, faint, as if he were undergoing a physical transformation she could not help seeing.

  Her face was fuller than he remembered. Her skin was lightly flushed now, rosy and excited, particularly along the ridge of her cheekbones. Jules could not move. He began to imagine, reluctantly, the beating of her heart and the pulsing of her rich blood. He stared at the woman as if he himself were not really here, not beside her, but as if he were peering at her through a telescope. She had the tense look of a woman aware she is being spied upon. She seemed terrified but not of anything she could see.

  “You don’t seem real to me,” she said. She reached out and touched him.

  The moment passed for Jules. He began to breathe again. Nadine, catching his mood, took hold of his arm childishly and tried to smile at him. She seemed to be staring out a window, hopefully. “You’re not going to
ruin my life?” she said.

  “Never.”

  “Why didn’t you come earlier?”

  “When, today?”

  “No,” she said impatiently, “earlier—the other day, the day I saw you. I went home and waited for you. I waited for you all day.”

  “You mean Monday? You waited for me on Monday?”

  “Yes, of course. What did you think? I couldn’t think of anything else. I went home, I got rid of those women, I waited for you.”

  “I didn’t think you would want me so soon.”

  “Yes, I wanted you.”

  “But now it isn’t too late?”

  “You’re so strange. You make me afraid of you.”

  “I’m afraid of you,” said Jules.

  He brought her hand up to his lips. He kissed it, closing his eyes. He was really afraid of her, afraid of burying himself in her body and breaking her bones, killing her. She seemed so ready to be killed. Her body had a precarious look to it, as if it were always on the verge of physical hysteria—a man had only to touch such a body to destroy it. He said, “Nadine, look. Tell me what you want. Tell me what your life is now. Keep talking to me and explain everything, will you?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Who did you marry, what are you doing, do you have any children?”

  “No.”

  “When did you get married?”

  “I went to college off and on, then dropped out to get married.”

  “Who is it?”

  “That isn’t important.”

  “It certainly is important!”

  “A man, a nice man, a corporation lawyer—”

  “What kind?”

  “Corporation law, tax law,” Nadine said. “Everything is taxes and how to get out of them.” She was staring at Jules’s hands, which held hers, and it seemed for a moment that she knew far less than he about herself. He would have to lead the way. “He’s gone now. He left on Monday for New York. He’ll be back tomorrow.”