“I meant how did you know the line I was thinking of? And don’t tell me great minds work alike.”
“It wasn’t hard after that business in your office with the Jewish Vets of America this afternoon.”
They reached the house and started away from it again. Neither of them spoke as they made another circuit, then another after that. The crunching of the gravel seemed to grow louder in the silence. He was picking up speed again. She could feel the anger radiating off him. She began to shiver. He must have noticed, because he stopped and wheeled to face her.
“Come inside. You’re cold. And I need a drink.”
“It’s late. I don’t want to bother Hannah.”
“You won’t. She’s out. The institute, I imagine. Though it could be a meeting for some other high-minded cause.” He wheeled to the door, held it open for her, and followed her inside. “Do you remember the first time we met?” he asked as he led the way down the hall.
“That’s a non sequitur.”
“Do you?”
“The night my father brought you home for dinner.”
“You were an incorrigible little showoff. Spouting your French philosophy. Parading your knowledge of English literature. God, you were young.”
“Look who’s talking. The swashbuckling boy editor, out to conquer the literary world. And doing your damnedest to dazzle that callow little schoolgirl. If only your French had been better.”
“I resent that. You seemed pretty dazzled to me.”
He stopped in the doorway to his study, waited for her to go in, then followed her. Unlike the other rooms of the house, this one held no trace of Hannah. Books and manuscripts and magazines littered every surface. Some were piled on the floor. Nonetheless, she sensed Hannah’s presence. No, not her presence, her imminence. She couldn’t get over the feeling that Hannah was going to walk in at any moment.
He sat staring at her. “Ever wonder what would have happened if that schoolgirl had been just a little older?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“The hell you haven’t.” He wheeled over to a table with a tray that held bottles, glasses, and an ice bucket and kept his back to her as he spoke. “You forget. I’m the man who took you for a joyride around the office.”
She crossed the room, slipped out of her coat, and sat in the big club chair in front of the windows that looked out into the darkened garden. She’d been in the room before, but now something about the arrangement of furniture in the alcove struck her as odd. Then it came to her. There should have been two chairs, one on either side of the small table. There was only one. On the other side of the table was space for his wheelchair. Funny she’d never noticed it before. Perhaps it was the hour, or his anger, or the tension. Funny, too, how little things brought home the awfulness.
He wheeled into the space, handed her a drink, and took a swallow of his own.
“Well, why the hell can’t they?”
The return of anger in his voice startled her.
“Why can’t they what?”
“Leave a guy alone. As the character in the movie says.”
“The answer in the movie, if I remember correctly, is because they’re fond of you.”
His laugh was a bark. “Right. The Jewish War Vets of America are crazy about me. And Hannah wants only what’s best for me.”
“The Medal of Honor isn’t exactly an insult.”
“Travesty is the word you’re looking for in this case.”
“Maybe you’re just too modest.”
“Modest! Oh, Charlie, I gave you more credit.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so angry about it.”
“You really want to know? You really want to hear my war stories?”
“If you want to tell them.”
“Good girl. You know the right answer. Unlike Hannah, who’s been trying to pry them out of me for years. She’s convinced that if I just talk to her, she can make it all better. The way she does with her patients. But you don’t think you can make it all better, do you? Maybe that’s because you have stories of your own.”
“We were talking about you.”
“Ah, yes, my war stories. But here’s the problem. Which ones do I tell you? The fairy tale about my so-called heroism? Or the noir version of that little incident? How I ended up in this chair by saving my fellow man? Or the inside dope on the stupidity and evil of it all? But you have firsthand experience of that. Want to know what I was doing when I got shot? Which, incidentally, I don’t think was the work of a Jap soldier at all. I think it was divine retribution. Then again, that could be hubris speaking. If there is a God, he wouldn’t have had time to worry about me, or the rest of the company, or the whole damn Battle of Buna. Not when he had Iwo Jima up his sleeve. Now, planning that must have been a challenge.”
He gulped down the last of his drink, wheeled across the room to the tray, refilled his glass, and wheeled back, but this time, instead of sitting at a forty-five-degree angle to her chair, he came straight at her and stopped only when their knees were almost touching. There was no affection in the gesture. He was too angry for any other emotion to leak through.
“But I digress. I was going to tell you what I was doing when I got shot.”
She waited.
“I was bayonetting Japanese soldiers.”
She tried not to wince. “Isn’t that what you were supposed to do, what you were trained to do?”
“After they’re dead?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you do. You’re not as stupid as that line about being too modest made you sound. The story my old buddy Art Kaplan told today isn’t entirely a lie. I killed a lot of Japanese defending that bunker, though nowhere near the number he touts. According to the officer who recommended me for the medal—that part isn’t a lie either—the number was somewhere closer to fifty. That’s a ballpark figure. Counting enemy bodies under the circumstances was difficult. We were a little busy. Though I suppose if you’re a Japanese wife or mother or child, or the Jap himself, the exact count does make a difference.”
“You were a soldier,” she insisted. “You were just doing your job.”
“Now where have I heard that phrase before? Oh, yes, some legal proceedings in Nuremberg.”
“They felt no remorse. You do. That’s the difference. That’s what’s torturing you.”
“I see, we’ve moved from modesty to a normal human being’s regret for taking lives. You still don’t get it. I couldn’t stop. Even after I’d killed them. And don’t give me the line about how good Japs were at feigning death, then springing to life and throwing a grenade into a bunch of medics who were treating the wounded, theirs as well as ours. Those Japs were dead. I still couldn’t stop. My brain wasn’t functioning. Or rather it was working double time. Hopped up. Giddy with destruction. Drunk on devastation. High as a kite on murder.”
He stopped and took a swallow of the drink. “I suppose there’s a humorous side to it. Or at least ironic. I went off to war thinking I was a decent man. A child of the Enlightenment. Rational. Humane. Moral. My chosen profession proved it. A book publisher, someone who revered ideas, who valued the written word. Hell, I even published books on art and music. Civilized didn’t begin to describe me. One thing I knew for sure. I was no barbarian like those sadistic SS bastards who got their kicks torturing people or the Jap devils who drove men on death marches. Well, the war had news for me. I turned out to be no better than they were. Worse in fact. They were doing it for the Führer or the Emperor or some screwed-up idea of country and honor and all that crap. I didn’t even have the excuse of other GIs, the ones suffering from the Audie Murphy syndrome, who went berserk when a buddy got killed. I was doing it for fun.”
“Surely not fun.”
He leaned closer. “You don’t think so? That’s because you’ve never been there. Never seen the look of disbelief on a man’s face when he feels the bullet go through him. Comical, really. Never cut through a
line of men with one burst of a machine gun. They go down in sequence like the goddamn Rockettes. Never watched a body explode like a piñata, only instead of toys spilling out—” His mouth snapped shut. He backed the chair away and pivoted, but not before she saw the expression on his face. The features were as distorted as a Munch painting.
“History’s full of writers and artists drunk on violence,” she said to his back. He was at the bar again. “Homer’s sacking of Troy. Dante’s Inferno. Churches filled with paintings and sculptures of the damned writhing in hell.”
“Now you sound like that French schoolgirl showing off. I bare my blackened soul, and you give me literary and artistic allusions. Those men were depicting violence, not perpetrating it.”
“It was war,” she said again.
“Which plenty of men managed to come through without becoming monsters.”
“You’re not a monster now.”
“After the fact doesn’t count.”
“I think it does.”
“That’s how much you know about it.” He put the glass down without refilling it and turned to face her. “Still, it was a nice try. And I’m grateful. But let’s just forget it. I never should have started. Even with you. Come on, I’ll take you home before I sink deeper into this trough of self-pity.”
She picked up her coat and stood. “I think I can make it to the fourth floor on my own steam.”
“Somewhere in my misspent youth my father gave me two pieces of advice.”
“Your father went one better than Nick Carraway’s.”
“My father’s advice wasn’t as moral as Carraway’s.”
“What was the advice?”
“First, always see a lady to her door.”
“And the second?”
“That had to do with pregnancy, and how to prevent it. He had big plans for me. That made two of us.”
“From where I stand, it looks as if you’ve realized them,” she said as she started toward the door.
“Ha!” He wheeled after her.
They stood waiting for the elevator in silence. When it arrived, he yanked open the outer door, pushed open the cage door, and followed her in. Neither of them looked at the other as the cab rose. When it reached the fourth floor, he pushed open the doors again, and she stepped out. She turned to say good night, but he’d followed her off.
“I think this is where you thank me for a lovely evening.”
Suddenly she was annoyed. “For God’s sake, Horace, you’re not the only one with a sore conscience.”
He looked surprised, like the man he’d described who has just felt the bullet go through him.
“You’re right. I apologize. Again. Who the hell am I to lecture you?”
“A friend.”
He sat staring at her for what felt like a long time. “A friend?” he repeated finally.
“Aren’t you?”
“Is that what you think, Charlie? Really? That we’re friends?”
“More than that, of course. If it weren’t for you, you and Hannah, Vivi and I wouldn’t be here. We certainly wouldn’t have landed on our feet so splendidly.”
He was still watching her. “Oh, I get it. We have a legal relationship. Sponsor and sponsored. How about publisher and editor? Employer and employee? And let’s not forget landlord and tenant.”
“I’m serious.”
He raised his eyebrows. “So am I. You’re still missing one.”
“Short of getting out the thesaurus, I think we’ve just about exhausted the list.”
“Forget the thesaurus. All you need is imagination. No, I take that back. All you need is observation.”
“Okay, I give up.”
“Come on, Charlie. Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
She looked away from him, then back.
He closed the small distance between them until they were only inches apart. “Lovers, Charlie. That’s what we are. Why do you think I told you all that tonight? Why do you think that sometimes around you I begin to feel I’m not such a freak after all? Lovers. Maybe not in one sense of the word, but certainly in another. Maybe even in the truer sense of the word.”
They went on staring at each other for a moment. Then he reached up to draw her to him, and she bent to meet him, and the world lurched. She gripped the arms of his chair for balance, but it was too late. She was already tumbling.
* * *
The realization didn’t come to her until later that night as she lay in bed trying to dust herself off from the plunge. He’d asked if she remembered the first time they’d met, and she’d said the question was a non sequitur. It hadn’t been. It had been desperately relevant. He’d been reminding her of the lanky young man who’d come loping into the apartment on the rue Vaugirard that wet evening so many years ago, his eyes quick and inquisitive, his hair, when he took off the rain-soaked gray fedora, still full and golden, his movements easy and graceful. He’d been reminding her of the man he’d once been.
* * *
Bill Quarrels didn’t so much walk into her office as stride. He was vain about his height. He’d once told her, after a few drinks at a book party, how pleasurable it was to be the tallest person in the room. “I can see everyone, and everyone can see me.”
He dropped a mock-up of an ad on her desk, settled into the chair on the other side of it, and stretched out his long legs to make a barricade between her and the door.
She moved the mock-up out of range of her coffee mug. “What’s this?”
“What does it look like?”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“I need a girl’s take on it.”
“Why, is it a romance?”
“It’s a thriller, but it has a strong female character. Two, actually.”
She looked at the ad. “I suspect caricature is the word you’re looking for. One’s a whore and one’s a Madonna.”
“Is there another category?”
“It looks fine to me.” She handed him back the mock-up.
He took it but didn’t move.
“What was going on in Horace’s office this morning?”
“Don’t worry, Bill. We weren’t plotting against you. As far as I know your job is safe.”
She’d been joking, but when she saw the relief on his face, she almost felt sorry for him. He wasn’t much of an editor, though he did have a nose for a certain kind of book.
“I never thought you were.”
“Good.”
“I just wonder…” He let his voice drift off.
She made a show of going back to the catalogue copy she’d been editing when he walked in.
“I just wonder,” he started again, but this time when she didn’t ask what he wondered, he went on anyway. “I just wonder what you’re doing with him. A guy in a wheelchair. Not even a real man. You can do better than that. If fact, if you’re looking for volunteers—”
There was no intent behind the action. It was pure reflex. Before she knew it, she was standing beside her desk with the coffee mug in her hand. He didn’t move his legs to let her past. She’d known he wouldn’t. The mug didn’t fly out of her hand. It merely tipped as she tried to step over him. The coffee went straight into his lap.
He jumped up. “Jesus, Charlotte!”
“Sorry.”
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and began mopping his crotch. “It’s just lucky it wasn’t hot.”
She agreed that it was lucky and didn’t add that she would have done the same thing if it had been. That was how she knew, if she hadn’t before, that she was in free fall.
* * *
Bill’s shout had gone out across the common area where the secretaries sat and into the closer offices. A moment later he came out saying to no one in particular and the entire multitude that Charlotte Foret was a dangerous woman.
The secretaries went on typing, smiling secretly at their keyboards, but when Charlotte left her cubicle for the women’s room, one of them followed.
�
��Thank you,” she said. “On behalf of all of us.”
Charlotte held her gaze in the mirror over the sink. “It was an accident.”
“I was wondering how long it would take you,” Faith said when she came into Charlotte’s office a little later.
“You, too?”
“Oh, bless your generous nearsighted soul. No one has made a pass at me since the party we threw when Dorothy was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of A Star Is Born. But from him”—she tilted her head toward Bill’s cubicle—“it isn’t a compliment, only a kneejerk.”
As the day wore on, the story spread through other departments. Only Horace had nothing to say. By five o’clock she was beginning to hope he hadn’t heard, unlikely as that seemed. She was just putting a manuscript in her briefcase when he came into her office.
“Shame the coffee wasn’t hot,” he said.
She smiled but didn’t answer.
“I’ve been waiting for you to do that.”
She still didn’t answer.
“Mind if I ask what finally drove you to it? God knows he’s given you plenty of cause in the past.”
She went on staring into her briefcase. She knew if she met his eyes, she’d never be able to carry off the lie. He’d know her reaction had had something to do with him.
“Just another crack,” she said.
“Too salacious for my innocent ears?”
“Exactly.” Now she managed to look at him.
“At the risk of flattering myself, tell it to Sweeney.”
Fourteen
Later, Charlotte would wonder if the idea hadn’t been Hannah’s revenge. You want to dabble in alienation of affections? I’ll see you and raise you a couple of notches. But that couldn’t be. Hannah might be vindictive. Charlotte hadn’t forgotten the story her lame-duck editor friend had told. But to be fair, Hannah couldn’t have known the unexpected consequence of her good intentions.
When Charlotte got home that evening, she wasn’t annoyed to find the note with the pile of mail on the table in the entrance hall. She was grateful that Vivi wasn’t entirely a latchkey child, as the magazines had christened the breed, coming home to an empty apartment every afternoon. She even congratulated herself on having a daughter considerate enough to leave a note. She refused to think Hannah was responsible for that.
Paris Never Leaves You Page 18
