The Green-Eyed Monster
Patrick Quentin
ONE
Andrew Jordan had no idea his brother was back in New York until he came home a little early from the office one evening and found Ned in the living room with Maureen. The two of them were sitting together on a low, cushion-piled couch, their legs tucked under them, drinking Rob Roys, looking deceptively cozy and relaxed.
“Hello, darling,” said Andrew’s wife. “Look who dropped in.”
Ned grinned. Andrew knew his kid brother so well that he could analyze his grins. This was a “riding-high” grin. Ned’s skin was tanned and his hair bleached almost white by the sun. Andrew tried to remember where it had been this time. The Caribbean? It was hard to keep track of Ned’s gilded grasshopper existence as perennial house guest to the idle rich.
“Hi, Drew,” said Ned. “I just dropped in to say hello, but your timing’s lousy. I’ve got to run. Some people waiting at the Pierre.”
Ever since his first (and only) year at Princeton there had always been “people” waiting for Ned at the Pierre or its equivalent. Andrew seldom got to meet them, but he knew that if they were not girls they were millionaires or celebrities or at the very least “some couple who have an amusing villa just north of Malaga.”
He said, “You staying around for a while?”
“Who knows?” Ned swallowed the rest of his Rob Roy. “I’ll give you a call, my friend.”
He kissed Maureen, which surprised Andrew since there was so little love lost between them. Putting his hand affectionately on Andrew’s shoulder, he started for the door.
When Andrew had seen him off, he went back into the living room and said to his wife, “Ned seems in good shape. What’s the news?”
“Oh—Ned.” Maureen shrugged him away. “Darling, I swore we’d be at the Reeds’ by six-thirty. We’re going to be disastrously late.”
During the eighteen months of their marriage, it seemed to Andrew that he and Maureen spent every evening in a chronic state of being late for parties. It was a way of life which wasn’t his, but since parties were Maureen’s natural element, he’d adapted himself to them. That night he adapted himself to the Reeds. By the time they got home, he had forgotten Ned.
Maureen was already in bed when he came out of the bathroom. Although he never had or never would say so and thus expose himself to her ridicule, she always reminded him of a white rose. Now her beauty was fresh and glowing as if it were nine o’clock in the morning after an eight-hour sleep. His love for her, which had been obstructed all evening by brittle, chattering people, was almost like a physical pain in him. He slipped into the bed beside her. As he turned toward her, her hand moved quickly to his cheek and patted it.
“Good night, darling. Nice party, wasn’t it? But, my God, the hour.”
Andrew had expected something of the sort and accepted the hint in silence. He knew his love for his wife was more physical as well as more romantic than her love for him, and the knowledge had made him diffident, humble and obscurely ashamed.
Reaching up with his hand, he turned out the light above the bed and, as he did so, there came back to him a memory of Maureen and Ned sitting together, legs tucked under them, on the couch. He had given it hardly a thought at the time. If anything, he’d been relieved to see them less frigid with each other. But now, as the mental picture of the two of them hovered in front of him, the easy intimacy of their pose suddenly seemed to him to have been the intimacy of lovers, as if, one second before he’d walked through the door, their two heads, both so handsome in their contrast of dark and fair hair, had only that moment broken apart from a kiss.
He knew instantly that the fancy was ridiculous, just a new and even more ignoble symptom of the jealousy which had become his almost constant companion. But jealousy, he had already learned, was a disease as irrational as it was humiliating, as shameless in its choice of suspicions as it was destructive.
He lay fighting the tension in him by trying to explain it away. He knew that most of the trouble had started when the anonymous letter had come to the office. He’d never seen one before but it was exactly as they were described in books, composed of capitals cut out of newsprint and pasted onto a plain white sheet of paper. It had said:
YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE IN NEW YORK
WHO DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT YOUR WIFE.
He had tried to dismiss it as a piece of psychopathic and meaningless malice, but the seeds of doubt had found in him a most fertile field, for ever since his childhood he had absorbed by osmosis his mother’s and Ned’s idea of him as the dull one of the family, good old Andy, dependable, plodding, whose function was to get things done but for whom life could hold no exalted rewards. Even when Maureen had consented to marry him (both his mother and Ned had been in Europe at the time) it had seemed to him a little too good to be true.
Although he’d torn up the letter and never breathed a word of it to his wife, it had left an indelible mark. From that day on, there had been an ever-present shadow lurking on the edge of the happiness which had never anyway seemed quite real, always ready to pounce on a telephone unanswered, an appointment kept a little late, lurking and growing until it could produce this latest and most preposterous fantasy.
It was the very preposterousness of the fantasy which finally gave the victory to common sense. There was nothing wrong with his marriage except for this unattractive and self-punishing flaw in himself. And as for Maureen and Ned!
As many times before, Andrew Jordan, who very much wanted to be a good man, felt disgust with himself and a great need to establish contact with his wife, as if by touching her he could become purged of this degrading mistrust.
“Maureen,” he whispered.
His hand went out toward her. With a little sigh—sleep? or pretended sleep?—she rolled away from him onto her side.
The bedroom was very dark. The darkness was infused with her perfume.
During the following week, Andrew didn’t see Ned at all. It wasn’t surprising to him. Since their father’s death, when he had taken over in the business and Ned had inherited a small but adequate income from a trust fund, they had drifted out of the close alliance which had been formed in a childhood bandied between the boredom of their father’s Riverdale respectability and erratic flights into their mother’s world of hectic, global gaiety. Whenever there was a real crisis, Ned, as Andrew knew only too well, would still come running to him. But Ned had his celebrities and millionaires to charm now and no longer needed Andrew as Old Faithful, while Andrew, thanks largely to Maureen, had been almost released from the exhausting syndrome of loving Ned, resenting him, being bewildered by him and picking up after him. At thirty he had grown up about his brother. He could see him at last, as he could see his mother, with his eyes open. At least, he thought he could.
As it happened, it was through his mother that Andrew got his next news of Ned. She called him at the office around three on a Wednesday afternoon to summon him for tea at the Plaza.
“Five o’clock, Andrew. Don’t be late and don’t stay too long either because Lem and I are going out. Bring little what’s-her-name, if you like.”
“Little what’s-her-name” was Maureen. At the beginning Maureen had struggled to win his mother’s approval, but as Andrew’s wife she had been doomed to remain “little what’s-her-name”—a vagueness which, Andrew realized, was just another symptom of his mother’s compulsive need to pay him out for being such a boring son. If his mother had to have children—which was highly debatable—the least they could do was to be “amusing” like “darling Neddy.” Any offspring of hers who by choice had taken over his father’s partnership in a small carton-manufacturing firm was something to be vague about, like a
husband who hadn’t worked out very well—like the father of her children, in fact.
Andrew called Maureen to tell her they’d been summoned. The phone didn’t answer. He tried again just before he left the office, but there was still no answer. Maureen had specifically told him she was planning to stay home all day and rest. He felt the familiar tentacle-stirring of anxiety but he suppressed it. He went to see his mother alone.
She had a suite on the park side of the hotel. Mrs. Pryde’s hotels, in Paris or St. Moritz or wherever, were always “her” hotels, and “her” hotels invariably reserved “Mrs. Pryde’s suite” for her. Not, of course, that it had always been Mrs. Pryde. Andrew’s mother, having married four times, had had many different names with which to sign hotel registers. Pryde was quite new. She had met Lem Pryde in California the year before. He was good-looking and fifteen years younger than she and penniless. After two brilliantly profitable marriages, she had felt, Andrew imagined, that she could indulge herself for once.
When he got to the suite, Lem wasn’t visible. His mother was sitting by the window, with tea laid out on a table in front of her. Even when she had been mere “Mrs. Jordan” married to Andrew’s father, she had already discovered how well tea became her. The silver, the delicate china, the atmosphere of relaxed elegance made the perfect setting for her fine-boned, exquisite profile and the little fleeting smiles which so successfully (to strangers) suggested irresistible helplessness.
“Well,” she said, “at least you’re punctual, Andrew. Where’s your wife?”
“I couldn’t get in touch with her.”
She shot him a bright glance. “It’s all going along nicely, I hope?”
“Of course.”
“That’s a relief. She’s very pretty. She was on the stage, wasn’t she?”
“She was a model for a time.”
“Well, it’s much the same thing. I do hope she’s taken to domesticity. So many of those girls get used to excitement and thrills. It’s hard for them to give it all up. I’m surprised you married such a glamour girl. You’ve always been so possessive, haven’t you, like your father? I’d have thought you’d have chosen a nice, plain dumpy sort of wife. But I’m sure it’ll all turn out all right.”
As always, with some ninth sense, she had managed to locate her son’s most sensitive spot and twist her knife in it. She poured herself a cup of tea daintily like a Viennese baroness. Then she poured one for Andrew. He could tell from the faint ripple in her forehead that something was bothering her. He’d taken it for granted anyway, because she never called him unless some “tiresome” situation had developed.
She picked up her cup and sipped. Soon she came out with it.
“Andrew, Neddy was here this morning. He tried to borrow money.”
Andrew sat up alertly. Ned’s big trouble, which had happened the year before, had been triggered by his trying to borrow money from their mother.
“Why?” he said. “What did he want money for?”
“He didn’t say. He just tried to wheedle it out of me.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand dollars.” Mrs. Pryde’s very blue eyes were watching him over the cup, the pupils slightly narrowed the way they always were when it was a question of money going out rather than coming in. “Really, I don’t understand you boys. The moment there’s trouble you come running to me. Does he think I’m made of money? Doesn’t he realize the constant drain, taxes, expenses, and Lem … Dear Lem, it isn’t as if Lem was able to fend for himself with that wretched heart of his.”
Mrs. Pryde and Lem were constantly talking about Lem’s heart. No one ever quite knew what, if anything, was the matter with it.
“Did you give him the money?” asked Andrew.
“Give it him? Even if I could possibly have managed it, I wouldn’t dream of setting a precedent. Adult males should never have to come crawling to their mothers. I told Neddy that last year. He knows he’s going to get everything when I die, except, of course, for a little something for Lem. Besides, he has his own money. Why in heaven’s name can’t he make that do?”
She leaned forward and put her hand on Andrew’s knee, a pretty hand with a huge emerald ring on it.
“Andrew, that’s why I asked you over. Do speak to him. After all, you’re so much older, you’re really in the position of his father; it’s much more your problem than mine. Do make sure everything’s all right. And if he does really need the money—well, that business of yours is doing terribly well, isn’t it? After all, no intelligent person sweats away at paper boxes unless they’re profitable.”
Andrew could feel the light, almost clawlike pressure of her hand on his knee and there came back to him all the myriad times of his childhood when his desire to win his mother’s approval had been as violent as it had been hopeless. How remote they seemed now. How remote too seemed his later hatred and vindictiveness when he’d realized that the failure between them had not been his. Now there was nothing—just Mother being Mother.
“Andrew, you will, won’t you? You’ll talk to him. He’s such a sweet boy and I dote on him. But he can be so tiresome. Oh, Lem dear …”
She had jumped to her feet as lightly and easily as a girl, because the door had opened and Andrew’s current stepfather was moving toward the tea table. Mrs. Pryde ran to him and put her arms around him. She was tiny and he was very big—a massively handsome military type with a homegrown English accent, who gave the impression of being a pukka sahib of the British Raj but who in fact, so far as Andrew could gather, had got no nearer the British Empire than a small supporting role in an Errol Flynn movie.
“Lem my darling, but where have you been? I expected you back by three.”
“Sorry, chick. Had lunch with a pal. Then, as I was walking back, I saw that good French picture at the Paris was coming off—the one you liked so much. I thought I ought to catch it.”
Lem Pryde stooped and kissed her on the cheek. His mustache stretched in a bluff major’s smile. “Miss me, chickie?”
“Oh, Lem …”
He turned and saw Andrew. He looked slightly guilty; he always did when he saw him, as if Andrew had caught him out in something. “Hello there, Andrew old boy.”
“Andrew’s just leaving,” said Mrs. Pryde. “Some boring business, but it’s all cleared up.”
As Andrew went to the door, his mother was pulling Lem over to the couch by the tea table, chattering, smiling prettily, using all her battery of charms. It had never occurred to him before that she might be capable of love. For the first time in his life he found himself feeling almost sorry for her.
But soon, as the elevator took him down, he was back thinking about Ned. Although it was a year ago, the other time Ned had tried to borrow money from their mother was brutally vivid to him. Wanting to keep up with some movie people at Las Vegas, Ned had got drunk and gambled idiotically at the crap tables and lost more than he could possibly afford. He had tried to call Andrew but he and Maureen had been out. He’d called Mrs. Pryde on her honeymoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with the inevitable results. The next morning a rich and elderly Brazilian widow, who was staying in his hotel, had accused him to the management of stealing a diamond bracelet.
Andrew had flown to Vegas. The hotel had been as eager as he to hush it up. Finally Ned admitted he had the bracelet; Andrew made him give it back and talked Madame Da Costa into keeping her mouth shut. He also paid the gambling debts with the money which, ironically enough, he had been saving to buy Maureen a diamond bracelet.
In the face of Andrew’s controlled but formidable anger, Ned had been suitably contrite; but, being Ned, he had taken it for granted that his brother would appear from nowhere and make everything all right. He’d grinned his sheepish little-boy grin, which, in spite of himself, still had for Andrew the maddening and disarming poignance it had had when Ned was nine years old and had managed to smash up Andrew’s new bicycle.
“Well, that’s the way it goes, I guess. But—do you know
something, Drew? That old Da Costa cow gave me her goddam bracelet. ‘Dear preety boy,’ she said, ‘take these leetle jewels and pay your leetle gambling debts.’ I thought it was a typical grandiloquent Brazilian gesture, so I grabbed it and kissed her pudgy hand and said, ‘Your humble servant, Senhora.’ Of course, she was blind at the time. Bourbon on the rocks. I guess in the cold light of hangover she just forgot the whole romantic episode and I was far too much of a gentleman to nudge her memory.”
He could, Andrew decided, have been telling the truth. As a child his brother had been a magnificent liar but he seldom lied to him. And for Ned, who at twenty-three had never grasped the basic principles of conventional morality, a maudlin offer from a drunken old woman would have seemed a perfectly satisfactory justification for acceptance.
“Drew, don’t tell Maureen.”
“She knows already. She was right there on the other phone when you called.”
“She’ll blow her top, won’t she?”
She had, of course. Maureen had never seen the point of Ned’s charm anyway. After that, she was through with him for keeps.
“Tell her I’ll pay you back. And, Drew, don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything dim-witted like that again.”
“You’d better not.”
“I won’t. I swear it. Cross my bloody heart.”
That had been their very secret sacred oath when they were kids.
The elevator ejected Andrew into the lobby of the Plaza. Had he been an ostrich in believing that by crossing his bloody heart Ned had made the promise binding?
When he got home, Maureen wasn’t there. It was, he knew, ridiculous to worry. Any one of a score of friends could have called her and lured her out for the afternoon. And yet they were due at Bill Stanton’s at—when was it? He went into the bedroom and consulted the engraved card stuck in the mirror. Seven-thirty. He called Ned. A man answered who said he was a house guest. Ned was out. Could he take a message? Andrew told him that he and Maureen would be out late but asked him to have Ned call first thing in the morning. He fixed himself a drink and, carrying it with him into the bedroom, took a shower.
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 1
