“Gimme one of those fucking tarts,” she said in a bored but expensive voice.
Mr. Markowitz and the counterboy were both out at the tables, hovering over the drunks, but Jack said, “I don’t do that,” and went back into the bakery. The woman’s vulgarity had irritated him, perhaps because he had always supposed the rich had their own vocabulary to go along with their money. But then maybe the woman wasn’t rich at all, but just ran with the rich. Maybe none of them were rich and had just stolen the Rolls. Maybe the guy inside was dead, a couple of bullets in his chest. Ha ha. Maybe the woman will take pity on me and buy my freedom.
Mr. Markowitz came into the bakery, his face composed and intent. He came up to Jack, who was greasing pans.
“Look here, my boy,” he said, “one of the customers said you insulted her. What happened?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. He kept on greasing the pan. “She asked me to wait on her and I said I didn’t wait on people. That’s all.”
Mr. Markowitz shrugged, his eyes blank. “I’ll tell her it’s a union regulation or something. You sure you didn’t do anything? She’s kind of funny.”
Jack reported the conversation as accurately as he could, feeling nauseated from the smell of lard and irritated with Markowitz for not just taking his word and getting the hell out of there.
“Well, it sounds like her all right. But we got a business to run. You should have helped her. Suppose you trot on out there and apologize to her. Okay?” He patted Jack on the shoulder, smiling.
“Do I have to?”
Mr. Markowitz looked at him carefully. “No, you don’t have to. But what the hell...“
“Okay,” Jack said. He went out to the tables, wiping the lard off on his apron.
There were three women and two men, and one of the men, with curly gray hair and a gray mustache, looked embarrassed. The other man was younger, slouched down in his chair, his face bearing an expression of righteous indignation. All three women were unapproachably beautiful, and drunk. The man with the gray hair did not look drunk.
“I’m sorry if I said anything wrong,” Jack said to the woman.
The younger man said, “Is that your idea of an apology, sonny? Just because you’re an ex-convict doesn’t make you exempt from manners. Let’s hear you apologize.”
“John,” said the man with the gray hair, “for heaven’s sake.”
Jack looked at Mr. Markowitz and said, “Yeah.” Mr. Markowitz was expressionless, not even wearing his usual smile.
“Well, it just infuriates me to see some thug insulting a woman like Sally, that’s all,” the younger man said. He had a nasty voice, irritating and cultured.
Sally herself was grinning up at Jack crookedly, drunkenly. She said, “I don’t mind it at all. Maybe that’s what bothers you, John. That and the fact that you’re chicken-livered.”
“Oh, dear,” the man with the gray hair said mildly.
Jack felt impotent. He knew he had been called out here as an exhibit, something for these people to amuse themselves with; and he knew he was probably expected to lose his temper. Mr. Markowitz had obviously told them all about him. The younger man was getting up, rockily, as if he were ready to fight Jack. Everything was disconnected; Jack still felt sick and hung over, and he did not want to lose his job. He looked at Saul Markowitz, who simply looked back at him.
“You goddam thug,” John said to Jack. He had moved out onto the sidewalk and was standing in a half-crouch.
Jack said to his boss, “Who are you going to back up?”
“What a tragic choice,” Sally said.
“Nobody,” Saul Markowitz said. He turned to John. “I think you’ve had too much to drink, John. Maybe you’d better go home. The tab’s on me.”
“Okay,” John said, not moving. “But what about your ugly thug? Is he going to apologize to me, or do I have to take him apart?” He grinned loosely, and suddenly threw a wild, roundhouse punch at Jack.
Jack parried it easily with his left and crossed sharply with his right. John went back, on his feet, for a dozen or more steps, and then collapsed on the sidewalk, his knees drawn up, his arms out.
“Well, that was easy,” Sally said into the silence.
“John is eighty-six,” Saul Markowitz said, “and you’re fired.” He got out his fat wallet and peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to Jack. “I’m sorry. But you could have handled him without that.”
Jack took the money, counted it, and stuffed it into his ducks. The gray-haired man came up to Jack. “I’ll take you home,” he said.
“I have to get my other clothes,” Jack said.
“I’m sorry about all this,” Mr. Markowitz said.
“Yes, I suppose you are,” the gray-haired man said. Jack went inside and got his clothes out of his locker and said good-bye to the bakers and came back out front. They had picked John up and put him in the back seat of the Rolls, along with the passed-out man and two of the women. Jack and Sally sat in front, Jack by the window. He had never been inside a Rolls-Royce before; it wasn’t as luxurious as he had supposed, but he liked the smell of the leather.
“What a sullen, rotten, depressing morning,” Sally said. “Like every fucking morning of my fucking life.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” the driver said gently. “You started it, you know.”
“I know,” she said. She put her hand on Jack’s leg and squeezed. “I just wanted to see this piece of meat in action. And John’s so easy to get riled. All you have to do is attack his fucking macho, and he’s off.”
“Do you have to use that word so much?” the gray-haired man asked. He wheeled the silent automobile up the hill and into Pacific Heights. “We’re going to get the idea that you don’t really understand the implications.”
The two women in the back seat had been talking to the passed-out man, and one of them leaned forward and said, “We’re going to have to have help with Charles.”
“I’m going to KILL MYSELF!” a voice bellowed from the back.
“No you’re not, Charles,” the woman said. “We’re going to take you into the house and give you a nice bath.”
“I am going to CUT MY THROAT!” Charles yelled.
Sally giggled and leaned close to Jack. He could smell her perfume faintly. Her hand was still on his leg, which he did not mind at all. He minded none of it. First he had been the sideshow, now they were.
They stopped in front of a large white house on Pacific Street, with a red tiled roof and wrought-iron balconies from the third-floor windows, and Jack and the gray-haired man helped Charles into the house. A Negro woman dressed in black opened the heavy paneled door, and said “Oh, dear,” and helped them get Charles up the stairs and into the largest bedroom Jack had ever seen in his life. The whole bedroom was done in crimson and soft white, and while they undressed Charles his wife came in and pulled back the drapes, and Jack saw the whole marina below them, the yachts, the brilliant blue bay, and beyond, looking so close, Alcatraz. On their way back to the car, Jack said, “Does he own this place?”
“Yes.”
“He must be pretty rich.”
The gray-haired man laughed. They made other stops. They unloaded John, who was awake and sullen but not speaking, in front of an apartment house on Washington; and the gray-haired man took his wife, the other woman in back, to their home, another Pacific Heights mansion, but not as large as the first one. Then he drove Sally to her apartment on the east side of Telegraph Hill. Before she got out of the car she kissed Jack on the mouth and said, “I’m really sorry I got you fired. Come and see me if you need a job or anything.” She got a card out of her pocketbook and handed it to Jack. Then the two men drove off.
“Where to?”
Jack gave him the address.
“It was really as much your fault as anyone’s,” the man said. “We all take the blame and pass it around, but it was your fault. All you had to do was recognize the situation.”
“Fuck the situation,” Jack
said. “I’m sleepy and hung over and pissed off. Did you drive me just so’s you could tell me it was all my fault?”
“No, I thought maybe you’d have a drink with me, and we could talk. I imagine jobs aren’t very easy for you to find.”
“I’m not supposed to drink,” Jack said. “But screw it. I’m not supposed to lose my job, either. You know, if your friend decides to push it, he can get me thrown back in. I committed a battery on him.”
“He won’t. He was humiliated; that’s about all he wants.”
They drove down Columbus to Broadway and parked the car. After they had gone into a small bar and sat down the man introduced himself as Myron Bronson and they shook hands formally. The waiter came over and Bronson ordered Irish whisky with water back for both of them.
“There was a party last night,” he said. “If these things go on too long, they always end badly. You have to understand that these are very nice people most of the time. This morning they were all in a mood to hate each other, and you got fired. By tonight they’ll have forgotten all about it, or remember it in context of a hangover, as a way of inducing guilt.”
“What about you? You’re not drunk. What are you doing with them?”
Bronson smiled. “I learned to drink a long time ago, when there were some rules. But you’d be surprised about John. He’s really a very nice fellow. He’s the one you hit. He’s a lawyer, and a very good one.”
“What about you? What do you do?” Jack was thinking about the Rolls parked outside.
Bronson said, “I have some money. I don’t really do anything. I have an office with a desk in it that cost more than most people make in a year, but I don’t use it very much.” He raised two fingers for more whisky.
“You’re a rich man,” Jack said.
“I suppose you could say that. Yes. Of course.”
“Did you earn it, or did somebody give it to you?”
Bronson looked amused. “Why are you asking me all these questions? Are you trying to get even? It doesn’t make any real difference where the money comes from, as long as I have it. It’s impossible to earn the kind of money I have, so you’d have to say it was given to me; but I’m not like Morgan; I don’t think God gave it to me. But I’m glad I have it. Let’s not talk about money.”
“Very boring,” Jack said. He finished his second shot. “Now let me buy you a drink.” He waved his hand at the waiter.
“Hangover gone?” Bronson asked.
“I do feel better,” Jack said. He liked the rich man. He liked the way he dressed, and he liked his somewhat long, curly gray hair, and his mustache, and his fine gray eyes, and his amused smile. The rich man looked like a good rich man, not a bad rich man, although Jack was not sure what the distinction was, and just being with him made Jack forget his new problems, as if all he had to do was ask Bronson and Bronson would give him a whole wad of money and everything would be fine. It was a pleasant feeling. He wondered if Bronson felt this way all the time; never having to worry about money.
“What’s it like to be rich?” he asked. “No shit. We’re not friends, we’ll probably never see each other again. So you can tell me.”
“I suppose you’re right. When I was a boy,” Bronson said, “I was a Mormon. I was sent to Germany by the church to be a missionary. I got there in the middle of the German inflationary period. Nineteen twenty-three. For ten thousand marks you could buy a newspaper. Upper middle-class families were dining on cabbage soup. Nobody had any toothpaste. Some people just laughed at me. That was all right. Others thought I had an answer to their problems, and that was bad. That kept me awake nights, that look of hope in people’s eyes, as if all their troubles came from believing in the wrong God. But that didn’t happen often. Anyway, the whole thing struck me as a gigantic fraud; the church, the religion, the belief in the myth, everything. But I didn’t stop yet, because, you see, the money was coming from the church. And my family. So for weeks after I was absolutely certain there was no God, I kept on with my missionary activities. I felt like a fool. Eventually I gave it up and went to Paris to be a poet.” He laughed. “My father and mother absolutely refused to send me any more money. I absolutely refused to come home. All of this absoluteness by mail. Finally my father changed his mind and sent me money. I became an expatriate. I spent most of the money on girls, and the rest of the time, when I wasn’t trying to make friends with the older Americans, I would stay in my room, reading Black Mask or trying to write poems about what I had seen in Germany. I suppose they were just awful, but some of them got published. The problem was in getting the French prostitutes to see the importance of this. Besides, my artistic conscience was bothering me. You see, I really wanted money, a lot of it. I didn’t want to believe that that was what I wanted, because it seemed such a shabby ambition. At any rate, I went to New York eventually, after my parents’ money ran out, and `immersed myself in the roots of my native soil,’ which is to say, starved. This went on for six months. It was awful. I suppose I went insane. I started making money; I had a flair for the kind of intricate blackmailing necessary to life insurance sales, and after a while I began investing. Since I thought of myself as a cynic and a thief anyway, I had no trouble doubling, then tripling, my investments.” He smiled at Jack. “You have no idea how intense I was in those days. I was a priest. I made a lot of money and I managed to keep it. That’s all. I’m still in the life insurance business. I own three companies.”
Later, when Bronson let Jack out of the car in front of his building, he said, “Look, don’t feel too angry with Saul Markowitz. He spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. He’s a very withdrawn man.”
“I haven’t got a worry in the world,” Jack said. He was drunk from the fine whisky, and he waved good-bye to Myron Bronson and loped up the stairs. When he woke up in the afternoon he was angry at himself for not having conned Bronson out of something, but then he realized it would have been very difficult to do, if Bronson’s story of his life was true. Somehow, it did not sound true. It was all too easy. Yet, such things did happen, he supposed.
It would have remained an episode, one of those odd meetings that happen to people who drink a lot, if it hadn’t been for Sally’s card, which Jack found a few days later on his bureau. He had already been to see his parole officer and the two of them were trying to find him another job. Saul Markowitz had already called the parole officer and had smoothed things over, so there wasn’t going to be any trouble. When Jack found the card he remembered that she had said something about getting him a job. He decided he would use it as an excuse to go see her. Maybe there would even be a job in it. But that was not why he was going to see her. He had not slept with a woman in two years, and the thought of her made him weak with desire. It was like getting out of San Quentin; first there was one life and you just got used to it and pretended that there was nothing else, and then suddenly you remembered all the other things that could be done, and the urgency became frantic, everything else blurred away. Jack bathed and dressed in his cheap slacks and sport coat, and then to burn away the excess nervous energy he walked all the way from Pine and Jones to Telegraph Hill. When he got to her apartment, after going up and down the wrong streets twice, he was steamy hot and angry, half-certain that she was not there, or not alone, and that he should have telephoned, or she would not remember him, or would remember him and cut him cold—but none of that was true. She opened the door and laughed in recognition and asked him in, and he walked past her into the apartment, his stomach muscles hard with tension, his face burning. He felt like a child who has come to beg some free candy from the grocer.
Eighteen
She was not beautiful, Jack decided; just very pretty. She had the high cheekbones, well-defined nose, and blue-black hair of an Indian, but her eyes were as blue and intense as his own, and her skin was pale rather than sallow. She wore her hair up to show her slender neck to its best advantage, and as she turned around for him to follow her into the apartment, Jack automatically l
ooked down at her ankles. They, too, were slender. Jack fell in love with her. He was not sure exactly when he fell in love, but he always remembered thinking, as he glanced down at her ankles, “I’m in love. With her.” He felt ridiculous.
After three quick drinks and twenty minutes of tense (for Jack) conversation, they went to bed. The telephone interrupted the conversation twice; the first time a woman friend of Sally’s, the second time her date for that evening, and she, her eyes on Jack, said into the mouthpiece, “No, I’m sorry as hell. My damn period just started and I feel awful. I’m going to take a couple of Nebs and”—she winked at Jack—”go to bed with a fat novel.”
After she hung up, Jack said, “Did it?”
“Did what?”
“Did your period just start?”
“No, but it’s a beauty of an excuse, isn’t it? Takes the heart right out of them.” She stood in the middle of the room, looking down at Jack. He was seated cross-legged on a cushion beside the small fireplace. “You didn’t come over here to talk, did you?”
“Well, you said something about a job.”
She laughed. “That was just to get you over here. I don’t have any jobs. Unless you’d like to be paid for sleeping with me. Have you ever taken money for it?”
“I’ve never had an offer,” Jack said. He stayed on his cushion. “I’ve never met a chick like you, either.”
“I’m debauched,” she said. “The coachman got me in the back seat of the family phaeton when I was twelve; and from there on out it’s been all downhill.”
“Why do you talk such bullshit?” Jack was vaguely irritated. He had come over here to rape, not be seduced by a fast-talking whore. She had him off-balance and he did not like it. He felt inferior and young, and even intimidated by the expensive furnishings of the apartment.