Island, p.50
Island, page 50
He did and had no answer.
“Things are too topsy-turvy now.”
The sweetbreads came, bathed in a creamy sauce that was as good as Fran had promised. “The secret is a few drops of Pernod plus some other things.”
In desperation, he said: “I asked you to marry me. I asked you twice. Why won’t you answer?”
“Please, not now. It’s too—” She actually was starting to cry.
“Are you saying no?”
“No, I am not saying no. I am just not saying yes. I can’t answer you now. I am undergoing too much of a strain. You would understand if you knew what it was like to be poor.”
“I’ve been poor. In fact, by your standards I’m poor right now.”
“I mean poor poor. And the discrimination. You don’t know how hard I’ve had to work to get out of that.”
“Did you have to wear hand-me-down clothes?”
“All the time. From my sisters.”
“Were you at the very bottom of your class in school, where everybody picked on you or looked down on you?”
“Oh, no, Fred. I was voted the second most popular and the third prettiest.”
“I was never voted anything,” he said bitterly. “And I think I know as much about poverty as you do.” He subjected her to a long up-and-down gaze. “Just look at you, I mean, right now. I never even saw anybody who dressed like you until I was in college.” His eye took in the restaurant. “And all this. You’re paying for this meal because I can’t afford to. So at least let me pay the tip. How much should I give?”
“Give eight dollars.”
“In Lincoln Harbor, three of us could live for a couple of days on eight dollars. Just don’t talk to me about being poor. As for prejudice, I’ll give you that one. As I grew up, I got to the point where I was dishing it out, not getting it. But on a personal level, what do you know about being looked down on by everybody until you felt like nothing?”
“You felt that way, ever?”
“When you met me I was busy climbing just as hard as you are now. I just couldn’t do it as well. That’s why—Now listen to this. That was so hard, combined with everything else, that’s why I drank.” He grabbed her hand. She made a feeble attempt to pull it away.
“So marry me.”
“You would come to New York?”
“No. I’ll never be able to live here. Besides, I’ve got some responsibilities up there I can’t run away from.”
“So you see,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “It’s a problem, a thing to think about.”
“You could become a caterer in Lincoln Harbor.”
“I thought about that. When I was there. I asked Cora Munson if there were any caterers in Lincoln Harbor. She said no.”
“There you are.”
“I asked her why. She said there was no demand for caterers. People had picnics or servants.”
“You could start a business. Be the first one there.”
“No, Fred. Not now.” She refused to say more. He had to be content—with what? A hope? A thin crack of hope? He walked her back to her brownstone. Was she holding herself a little closer to him? Or was it his imagination? At her doorstep: “Good night, Fred.”
Again an engulfing desire to embrace her, but he could not bring himself to make the attempt.
“How about tomorrow? Can we have lunch?”
“I will be busy all day tomorrow.”
“Will I see you again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Can I write you?”
“You can write.”
“Will you answer?”
“I will try.”
“What is there to try about?”
“I don’t know. Oh, Fred—” She ran up the steps and closed the door.
47
HE WALKED BACK TO PARK AVENUE, HIS MIND A confused dark sea, and started downtown. He had no notion of where he stood or how to proceed other than to send her a letter, no idea of what to put in it other than to reiterate his proposal. The thought of putting that down on paper curdled him. Spelled out, an awkward sentence or two—how could he expect her to accept, let alone respond? And if she didn’t accept, what would there be left to say in a second letter? He arrived at 808 Park Avenue with the sickening feeling that, once again, he had blown it, had been too tentative, not masterful enough.
Walker greeted him holding a goblet the size of a balloon, swirling half an inch of amber liquid in the bottom. He led the way into a library with shelves running from floor to ceiling, many of them filled with identical green leather spines. There was a desk in the room, with a green-shaded light on it, a sofa, a couple of easy chairs, the ultimate up man’s hideaway. Walker threw himself into a high-backed leather chair and put his feet up on the desk.
“Have a touch of this,” Walker said, waving the big glass bubble.
“No, thanks.”
“You’re making a mistake. This is special old Armagnac. Nothing in the world like it.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Too bad. I don’t offer this to everybody. What brings you to New York? I haven’t heard a peep out of you since you and Julia split up. That must be four or five years ago.”
There rose in him the ghost of a feeling that this was where up men unbuttoned themselves, in a luxurious bachelor’s haunt. Here two friends could exchange confidences, man to man, in a place never before entered by him, with an unspoken invitation to become a part of it. This feeling gave him the confidence to say: “I came down here to ask a girl to marry me.”
“Well,” said Walker, swirling his balloon and sniffing deeply. “Congratulations. Is it anybody I know?”
“I don’t think so. Her name’s Fran Collins.”
Walker swirled his Armagnac; apparently the name meant nothing to him.
“She runs a catering service.”
Another swirl. Then: “Hey, wait a minute. Is she a good-looking girl, you know, a smallish one in a black dress who runs parties?”
“That could be the one.”
“Where did you meet her? She doesn’t talk to people at parties. I mean, I tried it. She’s all business.”
He had a sudden glimpse of the role Fran had to play: attractive woman on public display all the time but oh so careful not to cross the line between business and coziness. “I met her before she became a caterer,” he said.
“Oh,” said Walker. “You want to marry her?”
It came out more easily than he had ever imagined it would: “I love her.”
“Good in the hay?”
He flushed. If this was unbuttoned man talk, so be it. “Yes,” he managed to say, realizing as he spoke that he didn’t truly know. He had only divine intimations, dazzling glimpses.
“Sure you’re not mixing love with sex?”
“Sure.” That came out strong and clear.
“Easy to do, you know.” Walker offered him a cigar, which was refused, and then lit one himself. “These are English-market Cubanas. Are you sure …?”
“I don’t smoke.” Feeling a need for assertion after his rejection of all these manly vices, and such civilized ones when practiced in an environment like this, he was emboldened to ask: “Are you married?”
“Me? Oh, no.”
“I thought maybe you and Irene George might…”
“Oh, no. Irene’s not somebody to be married to. I don’t mean to say that I’m not fond of Irene, that she isn’t superlatively good at what she does best and what I like to do with her. But beyond that Irene has nothing to offer. She’s interested in only two things, clothes and sex. As I say, she’s a wizard at both, but I would never want to be married to her. She doesn’t read, she doesn’t play cards, she’s not interested in politics or business or sports.” Walker blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling and took another deep breath of brandy. “She’s not someone you can love. She’s someone you make love with, if you see the difference.”
“I think so.”
“And you really think you love your caterer? Why?”
To his astonishment, he discovered that he had never asked himself that question. Why did he? No need to ask it; it was just there. And was this any business of Walker’s? Unbuttoned talk got out of hand too soon for comfort. He didn’t answer.
“You don’t know?”
“Of course I know,” he said indignantly. “It’s just hard to put into words.” Then he let go as the torrent of her virtues fell on him. “She’s honest. She’s smart. She’s got a lot of courage. She’s overcome a lot of handicaps. I admire her for those things. I think she loves me. That’s the important one.” It was, it was. Bolder yet: “So who do you love if you don’t love Irene?”
Walker thought that one over, inspecting the end of his cigar. “I guess I don’t really love anybody in the way you’re talking about. I like a lot of people. I like a lot of women. I—you know, if you want to put it in quotes, I do ‘love’ them, but I’ve never met anyone I’d like to marry. Irene would like to marry me. She smells a lot of money here, and she would know how to spend it.”
He studied Walker, now a good deal heavier than he had been five years before, the ex-hockey player gone to fat. Walker had become a plump smooth man. His face was smooth, the skin tight and pink, his hair edging backward at both temples. He resembled a ripe plum, his maroon smoking jacket covering a comfortable paunch, which was just visible over the tips of a pair of black velvet pumps on the desk, each with Walker’s initials braided on it in gold.
“Lot of divorces these days. Come from falling in love and then finding out you aren’t. The sex thing. It’s a great inspirer of sudden bursts of what people keep mistaking for love. What I love is all this.” He waved his glass around the room. “I love my work. I love the life it lets me live. I love this”—a wave of the bubble—“and this”—a flourish of the cigar. “I guess you could say I love Irene; she’s part of the package. But it’s really my work I love.”
A terrible truth hit him. “You could live without Irene?”
“Sure.”
“Then you don’t love her.” Suddenly it was that simple, that awful.
“I guess not. I don’t pretend I do, except when—you know—”
Feeling more and more unbuttoned and reckless: “Does Irene pretend?”
“You know, I never asked her. In those circumstances it’s not exactly something you ask. In fact, it’s not even the right question. She knows what she wants. I give it to her. That’s it.”
“You never really fell in love with anybody?”
“Oh, all the time. But it never lasts.”
“Well, I guess that takes care of love,” he said.
“It sure takes care of sex, puts it in proper perspective. After all, where do you find love after sex?”
Another insight. This was an astonishing conversation. “I would think that’s where you should find it.”
“No, pal. You’re a romantic. After sex is where you lose it. Marry your caterer and you’ll see.”
If he only could. “So what does last?” he asked.
“My work,” Walker repeated. “I love my work, and I’m very good at it. I specialize in residential properties on the East Side. Like this building. It’s mine.”
“You own it?”
“Well, not exactly. My company, Greenwillow, owns it. But I own a good hunk of Greenwillow, so it comes down to much the same thing.”
“Greenwillow?” he echoed. “Do you go in for islands too?”
“A few. Just a sideline.”
“Did you know you were drilling a well right now on an island that belongs to me?”
Walker sat up. “No, I had no idea of that. In Lincoln Harbor, right? I hope we do find water; it will be good for both of us. I’ll make a note to check on it. Otherwise I might forget. These islands are little side bets on the boom that’s sure to come in water properties along the coast.”
“I signed a contract to sell it to you if I do sell.”
“That’s good. But I doubt if much will happen right away. Anyway, my real business is something that I don’t understand why more people don’t get into. It’s ridiculously easy. It’s a tax thing. You get together a group of people and buy a building. Then you write off big losses every year in depreciation and deduct those from your income tax. In a few years the building has no value on paper, although its real value has gone up—everything goes up because of inflation—and you sell it to somebody else, who will do the same thing with it. You pay the capital gains tax on your profit and buy another building. Pretty soon you’re working three or four buildings at the same time. Of course, this only pays if your income is up around five hundred thousand dollars.” Walker looked at him over the top of his glass. “I guess you’re not in that bracket yet, or I’d ask you into the next property we put together.”
“My income,” he said, “is about five thousand dollars a year.”
“Come on. The last time I heard, you were knocking out big hits in the advertising business.”
“I gave that up. I suppose you could say I drank it up. That’s why I turned down the brandy you offered me.”
“Funny,” said Walker. “I always took you for the quiet type. You never got down in the mud when we were living it up on Seventy-first Street. Then you married Julia Fanshawe. I didn’t know what to make ofthat.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that.
“I mean, Julia wasn’t exactly a datable girl.”
“Bob dated her. That’s how I met her.”
“Bob never dated her. Bob played cards with her. My God, did you really think …? I mean, when did you …?” Suddenly in too deep, Walker squashed his cigar in an ashtray. “I mean, you must have known that Bob didn’t date. I thought you were a friend of Bob’s.”
“I was.”
“Then you know he didn’t like girls. I don’t mean he went for men. I just mean he didn’t go for girls. He never has.”
A total stunner.
“Bob’s interested in only one thing. He wants to be the best court-tennis player in the world. And he is—almost. You asked where he was. He’s in England, playing the guy who thinks he’s the best player in the world. The Englishman took him the first time around, but it was very close. You know those court-tennis courts, the funny shape they are, those funny angles. There apparently are some very slight differences in them. Not anything that you or I would notice. But if you’ve lived in one court day after day for years, the way Bob has, those little differences matter. They’re the difference between winning and losing a close match. And the walls—they’re not made of exactly the same stuff. Even the paint on the floor, so the balls bounce a little differently. Bob has a second match to play over there, and then they come back here for two at the Racquet Club. If Bob can stay close over there, he’ll murder the guy over here. So he will be number one in the world. He might even win the second match over there. If he does, it will be a walkover here.”
“What will he do then?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe he’ll begin to take more of an interest in women and a little less in his own body. Right now he’s in training all the time. He doesn’t seem to have any close friends anymore. I wouldn’t see him at all, except that he lives two flights up from me.”
“In this building?”
“I got him the apartment when I took over his real estate business.”
He willed himself to keep his mouth shut and concentrate on the books in the shelves. Unbuttoning had two sides.
“Bob wasn’t going anywhere. His family had some properties scattered around the city. But the old guy who was running the business wasn’t going anywhere, either. I told Bob that I would give him an apartment here—-give it to him—in exchange for his properties, and also give him half the income he was getting from them. If I didn’t double that within five years, I’d return his stuff to him. He could keep the apartment. I put in that five-year clause because I didn’t know how fast I could turn around some of the stuff he had—it was in parts of the city I was unfamiliar with. Anyway, he said yes and I went to work, and I did it in three years. Now Bob has more money flowing out of his ears than he knows what to do with. He pays no attention to it. As I say, he lives for himself, for his body, for the perfection of it. It’s a kind of Greek thing. Remember those Athenians we studied at college, the ideal youth, the straining for perfection, the adoration of older men? All that. So when you ask me what he’s going to do when he becomes world champion, I can’t answer. My guess is that he’ll defend his championship and go on defending it until some other young god comes along and takes it away from him. The tricky thing is, what will he do when that happens?”
“Doesn’t he have other interests?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I scarcely see him these days.”
“But you said he lives right upstairs.”
“We have different hours, different lives.”
“At the Racquet Club?”
“Not there, either. I quit the Racquet Club. Nothing but young athletes and old drunks. My club is the Links now. It has members like me, people who know what they’re doing.”
The thought that his ideal could be as self-absorbed and as isolated as Walker made Bob out to be had such a stubborn angularity to it that he could scarcely fit it into his head. And yet there was a beauty to it that he could recognize in his memory of his college hero. Bob had a style, a distinction to him that, no matter how odd his goals might be, would still leave him standing high and bright. Anyone who sets out with an ideal and realizes it has achieved a glory of some kind and is entitled to rest on that achievement. He had his own goal now, although he had come to it very late and the prospect of realizing it was pretty dim at the moment. “So what’s yours?” he asked Walker.
“My what?”
“Your goal in life. What are you aiming at?”
“My work. I’d like to take on something really big, like the Chrysler Building, or begin putting up skyscrapers myself. I haven’t the capital to do it now. But maybe in another ten years I will. Meanwhile”—he waved his arm at the green book spines in his shelves—“there’s my stamps.”
