Yet another irritating matter crossed his mind as he waited to cross a street: the electricity people in his mother’s town were dunning him about a bill he had paid by check long ago, but sent to the wrong branch office, it seemed. And her town church expected him to honor “a pledge” his mother had made to contribute a hundred dollars a year, and could he, etc. which amounted to seventy-three dollars still due for this year. Ralph had neither sent it nor replied, but the church’s requests kept coming. If such a misguided pledge were not kept, it was no reflection upon the family’s honor, in Ralph’s opinion.
But why pain himself by thinking of all that on such a nice afternoon? There was Elsie’s three-storey house, dark red like some of the others, yet special to Ralph because Elsie lived there. Its door was closed. Ralph kept his eyes on the house as he walked along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. The street was short and narrow with a crook in it. Once there had been Minetta Brook along here, and Ralph fancied that there was a depression where Minetta Street ended in Minetta Lane, which crossed it.
Suddenly Elsie’s house door opened, voices male and female mingled, and someone laughed. A young girl and two boys came out, and Elsie was behind them, turning to pull the door shut.
“There!—Look!” Elsie cried to her friends.
There was a whoop from the others, and Ralph realized that he was the center of their attention. Ralph walked faster.
“Creep!” said a girl’s voice behind him.
“Hey! Let Elsie alone! You hear us?” roared a male voice.
“Sex maniac!…”
“Who’ve you screwed lately?”
“Ha-ha! He can run! Look!”
Ralph felt both shame and fury. He wasn’t running, just walking as fast as he decently could, and the few paces in Minetta Lane to Sixth Avenue seemed endless. A boy in sneakers had loped in front of him with arms outstretched as if to block him.
“Fuck off, ol’ motherfucker, we’re gettin’ the cops onto you!”
Where was Elsie in all this? A boy struck Ralph’s shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Cut it out!” Ralph yelled. “Leave me alone!”
“Leave him alone!” cried a girl’s shrill voice, and this was followed by laughter.
“Yee-aye! Skit! Skit, y’bastid!”
“And don’t come back! Don’t come around again, see?” A boy with rouge on his face, with lipstick, said this to Ralph straight into his face. The boy danced backward and looked at Ralph through nearly closed eyes whose lashes bore black dust or grease. “Fuckin’ creep!”
Ralph lowered his head and plunged uptown on Sixth Avenue.
“Hah!…Ha-ha-haa-aa!…Run, boy! Beat it!”
The voices mingled. An ashcan lid slithered past Ralph on the sidewalk, making a horrid grating sound. Passersby stared.
But he had finally put some distance between himself and them. Ralph slowed his pace, breathed deeply, looked straight ahead, and as soon as he had a red light, he crossed to the west side of 6th.
Ralph walked right into them. The three—not Elsie, where was she?—had somehow crossed Sixth too.
“Where you headin’?” asked the unmade-up boy. “We’re goin’ with you! Ain’t we?”
“Yeeow,” replied the rouged boy.
Ralph strode toward home, but the boys, both of them, kept leaping in front of him, brushing his shoulders and sides as he headed toward Bleecker. But why go to his house, Ralph thought, and ducked into a restaurant, went through its storm door and through its second door.
“We’re not serving yet, sir,” said a waiter.
“The telephone—”
The waiter looked reluctant, but made a gesture toward the telephones at the back.
Ralph walked between empty tables, looked behind him, and saw one of the boys coming in. Words were exchanged, the waiter fairly hustled the boy out, supported by another waiter. And outside, they lingered, Ralph could see them. Ralph pretended to be making a telephone call, to talk. When he looked at the glass door again, they were still outside. They weren’t going to leave, he realized. With the telephone against his ear, his lips mumbling nervous nonsense, Ralph suddenly saw Irma laughing at him as she withdrew a cigarette from her dark red lips, eyes closed with laughter at him, long wavy hair down to her shoulders, shaking. Bitch!
He hung up, started for the door again, knowing that it was inevitable that he face them, raised his head, said, “Thank you,” to the two waiters, and went out.
“Here he comes!” cried a boy.
Now Ralph saw Elsie smiling at the other girl, apparently saying good-bye, near the downtown corner: Elsie had to go to work soon. Elsie’s smiling eyes met his before she turned and trotted away. His shoulders back, Ralph walked uptown, the direction of home.
And it was the two boys who kept pace with him, who banged his shoulders from behind, who walked on either side of him.
“You leave Elsie alone, you hear? Or we’ll fix you, man! You bananas?
“Fuckin’ creep, fuckin’ creep!” This boy laughed merrily, as if he were doing a pleasant job now.
When Ralph turned into West Fourth, the boys were still with him. Their words were horrid. Ralph glanced around for a cop. Where should he go? He was not going to be pursued to his very doorstep! To the point of having to close the first front door against them, when in fact that door didn’t or didn’t always lock, and Ralph knew that the boys would push it open behind him, follow him to his apartment door and through it, if they could.
Ralph was suddenly beside the glass-enclosed terrace of the cafe-restaurant near Sheridan Square, hesitating. The newsstand by the subway entrance was nearby, the man there knew him.
“Hey, you!” The girl suddenly reappeared in front of him, a figure of lipstick, long hair that was plainly a wig, powder-pale face, under a garment that might have been a curtain or a counterpane. “Lay off Elsie, if you know what’s good for you!—Got the idea now?”
“You tell ‘im, Marion!” yelled one of the boys.
The boy with the make-up spat at Ralph and missed him. Naturally, no passerby did a thing to help. A couple of men and a woman only glanced from the unruly trio to Ralph and back again.
Ralph turned to the newspaper man. “I’ll take a—”
“Y’bought your Times, sir,” said the man in the kiosk. “Hey! Snazzy coat you’re wearing today!”
Ralph turned. The light was red, he could cross. Was even the newsstand man, whom he hardly knew—was he mocking him too? Ralph went into United Cigars, a corner place where he never went. It was triangularly shaped to fit the corner, and smelt of sweetish tobacco, chocolate bars. Ralph stared at racks of paperbacks. The trio was not coming in. He dared to relax a little. There were other customers in the shop, so Ralph did not feel conspicuous. He stared at a horizontal display of magazines, then strolled to the door, through whose glass top half he could see. He thought they were gone. He thought—remembering the last time, when he had crossed Sixth Avenue and found them confronting him.
Ralph at last went out briskly, turned into Christopher Street and went on toward Bleecker. True, they were not following him. They’d given it up, it seemed. No cries sounded behind him as he reached Bleecker and crossed the street toward his house, reaching already for his keys.
Upstairs, he felt suffocated with a vague shame that sat more heavily on him than his anger. Worst was the memory of Elsie, of her amused and heartless smile, her departure, leaving him to his fate at the hands of those hooligans.
Those hooligans were her friends, he reminded himself. Horrid, horrid and wrong!
Once more Ralph undid the buttons of his overcoat, put it onto a hanger, then brushed the shoulders with a clothesbrush, brushed down the arms where those boys had touched the coat. For all Elsie had noticed the coat, he thought, he might not have had it on at all, might have worn his old soiled-looking gray tweed.
“Wretched, wretched, wretched!” Ralph said to himself between clenched teeth.
16
On a Wednesday in December, Jack’s six complimentary copies of Half-Understood Dreams arrived, with a congratulatory note, short but nice, from Trews. The jacket front was his drawing of the businessman father in the family, seated at his desk with an arm flung across his eyes, while a trio of figures, perhaps mama and papa and some unholy ghost, gazed at him with disapproval. All the figures were greenish, the title was in black script done with a brush in freehand. He flipped through one copy and felt a thrill of pleasure, and even pride. It was his first book. And about time, Jack thought, since he was thirty.
Joel MacPherson had collapsed about a week ago, Jack remembered, and smiled. Joel had telephoned to say that he had collapsed from Angst about Dreams, and was taking a few days off from work, at least four days, on doctor’s orders. Dartmoor, Aegis was giving a little drinks party this coming Friday for Dreams, and Jack and Joel, Natalia and “some media people” and Trews were lunching together afterward.
This was the same week that Natalia had had a coffee with Elsie. Natalia’s impression of her had been different from what Jack had expected. Natalia had found her extremely ambitious, and said that they had spent more time talking about the theatre and art exhibitions and painters than they had about Linderman.
“She loves the Guggenheim. And Kandinsky! She’s trying to take in all of New York in one gulp—and she’s had only a highschool education, you know? I suppose it’s admirable—if it lasts.”
Natalia had been staring at her closet as she spoke, pulling out things that had to go to the cleaners. Jack had to pry out of her what she had concluded about the Linderman situation.
“Oh, he’ll surely knock it off,” Natalia said. “He’s just a lonely old bachelor who likes to look at pretty girls.”
“Yeah. I’m sure he’s lonely,” Jack said.
The question of speaking to the police about Linderman evidently hadn’t come up, and Jack didn’t mention it. Then later the same day, Natalia said:
“I asked Elsie if she wanted to come to Louis’ party and she said she’d love to. Louis’ Christmas do next week, you know?”
Jack smiled, surprised. “Elsie’s coming. Good.” It was funny to imagine Elsie in Louis’ quietly swank apartment, among Louis’ decidedly quiet chums.
“Elsie asked if she could bring a girl called Genevieve with her. I’ll tell Louis. He always likes new faces.”
The Dartmoor, Aegis party took place in Trews’ big square office whose windows overlooked the East River. There were eighteen or twenty people, some of them other editors of the house, who came in for a minute to shake hands with Jack and Joel. Joel had recovered, though he looked a bit pale. Trews had said to Jack, “Bring your child. It’s a girl, isn’t it? The press likes to see a family man.” So the Sutherlands had brought Amelia, along with Susanne so that Susanne could take Amelia home before the lunch. Natalia circulated smoothly. For this sort of thing she was schooled, and Jack knew that when he next talked to her, she would be able to tell him who was important and who wasn’t among the men and women she had spoken with.
“Do you have analytic dreams yourself, Mr Sutherland?” a journalist asked Jack.
Amelia, as if she were in her own house, was passing plates of canapes around, a feat the others found amusing and Jack pretended not to see. Jack and Joel signed several copies together, one with a special greeting to Trews. Out of that day, Jack and Joel netted one brief radio interview, which was taped in another room before lunch, but no television spot. Jack had not expected a TV offer, nor had Trews, though Trews said he had tried.
Louis Wannfeld had strung red and green crepe paper streamers from the four corners of his living-room ceiling for his party. “An old-fashioned touch, I thought,” Louis said. It was the only sign of Christmas, except for a long fir branch on the white-clothed table that held bottles and glasses and plates of caviar and olives and the like.
Isabel Katz was present, of course, as was Sylvia Kinnock who had brought a willowy boy named Ray, who Sylvia said was a dancer with the New York City Ballet. Even Max and Elaine Armstrong had been invited, though they were not close friends of Louis’ or of Louis’ friend Bob Campbell. There were lots of people Jack had never seen before, presumably friends of Bob’s, and there seemed to be as many women as men. Louis, looking almost formally dressed in a royal blue silk suit, white shirt, and black patent leather slippers, pointed out to Jack the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the buffet table.
Jack was grateful and touched. “How’s Bob?”
“Oh, he’s—over there,” Louis said, not having heard Jack correctly in the noise of conversation. “On the sofa.”
One thing about Louis’ parties, Jack thought as he moved off with his drink, the oddest assortment of people mixed, and all seemed to enjoy themselves. The size of the living-room helped. No one had to stay in one place all evening. Sylvia’s boyfriend or boy companion looked as thin as a rail, and it was hard for Jack to imagine him with the leg strength to be a dancer. Pipe-stem legs in narrow black trousers. Pipe-cleaner legs, even.
“Oh, Mr Sutherland, I saw your book!” said a sturdy young woman whom Jack didn’t know from Adam or Eve. “I know it’s a joint effort, but the drawings will sell it first. They’re funny and they also haunt you—and scare you. Maybe not you but me!” She laughed.
Jack nodded. “Haven’t seen any reviews as yet.”
“You will. I work for the Post. Hazel Zelling’s my name. I just met your wife and she pointed you out to me. I wrote something favorable about it today, but it won’t appear for a couple of days.”
“Thanks,” said Jack, smiling.
It was more comfortable talking to Isabel and the Armstrongs. Susanne had brought a copy of Dreams to the Armstrongs’ house, and they thanked Jack for it and for what he had written in it.
“Here’s to Dreams!” Max lifted his glass.
“I’m sick of it already,” Jack said. He was thinking of the copies he had sent off to his Uncle Roger and to his father, one each. He wondered if he would ever hear what his father thought of it? “Where’s Bob?” Jack said softly to Isabel. “I’m always forgetting what he looks like, and I wanted to say hello to him.”
“The plump bald one on the sofa over there,” said Isabel with a smile. “With the glasses.”
Of course. Jack recalled him now, a little less bald than Louis, gregarious and talkative, and apparently in the middle of a story now, grinning and gesticulating. Small wonder that he and Louis had been together for an uncountable number of years. Bob looked like the type who would understand and forgive everything. Jack advanced.
Jack never got to Bob, because Natalia pinched his jacket sleeve and said, “Go say hello to your friend.”
Jack had glanced around earlier for Elsie, and here she was suddenly in the middle of the room, and Louis was bending attentively over her. She wore a black satin evening dress, slit to mid-thigh. Louis was smiling broadly, beaming with hospitality. Elsie put her blond head back and laughed. She looked extremely pretty. And eye-catching.
“Hi, Elsie,” Jack said. “I see you’ve met your host.”
“What may I get this young lady to drink?” Louis asked.
“Good evening, Mr Sutherland,” Elsie said. “And this is my—”
“F’gosh sake, call me Jack, Elsie.”
“—my friend Genevieve,” Elsie said, gesturing with a black-gloved hand toward a young woman in yellow with long and slightly wavy red hair.
Jack and Louis took the girls to the drinks table. Elsie wanted tomato juice, which Louis had in a big pitcher. Genevieve was only medium pretty and looked like a bore, Jack thought. Her hair was the color of baked sweet potato. Could that be real? He wished he could get colors out of his mind tonight, because they jolted him like noises.
“Isn’t Natalia here?” asked Elsie.
“Right here,” Jack said, seeing Natalia two steps away behind Elsie, watching them.
The Armstrongs had drifted up, and Jack did the introducing. “…and Genev
ieve—”
“Perusky,” Elsie supplied, plainly making an effort to be polite and to do the right thing tonight.
Jack didn’t bother repeating Genevieve’s last name. Max and Elaine were looking at Elsie. Elsie had some kind of grease on her hair, streaks of pink rouge on her cheeks, very red lipstick.
Anyway, she was spectacularly attractive tonight, and her energy or anima, or whatever it was, radiated from her even when she stood still.
“Sit down?” somebody said.
Nobody did. Elsie and Genevieve did not stay together, yet they were never far apart. Elsie went near the big east windows, standing straight, very cool looking. Her greased hair had begun to look chic to Jack.
“Do you know that girl? Or does Natalia?” asked Max Armstrong.
“We both do. She’s—” Jack hesitated. “She’s one of our neighbours.”
“Awfully pretty. Is she a model?”
“I think she’s aiming to be an actress. She’s just twenty.”
Max smiled a little. “I’d have thought even younger.”
Jack heard faint harpsichord music, and straining his ears, he could just identify it as the Goldberg Variations. Typical of Louis or even Bob to put on a cassette of Bach. Later, during or after the major eats, someone would put on rock and there would be some dancing. Louis had rolled his rugs back.
“I thought this was a formal party,” Elsie’s voice said nearby in an uncharacteristically shy tone.
Elsie had said this to Natalia, Jack saw. Natalia shrugged and replied something that Jack couldn’t hear.
“Hey, Jack, I just had an idea.” This was Joel at his side, bright-eyed and gesturing. “Double lives, some real, some imagined. People who have real second families, second jobs in other towns. A bank director could be a thief in his spare time!—Does it sound promising?”
Found in the Street Page 13
