“Why did Mommy go to Aunt Myrna if she knew you were coming home?”
“A good question. Maybe it was because she knew I’d be home.”
“Daddy, don’t you like Mommy?”
“I like her but I don’t love her.”
“Daddies only love children?” he asked in puzzlement. There was something enigmatic about all this, and he had to find out how these things worked.
“They love mommies too. It’s just that I don’t love yours.”
Neal suddenly felt very sorry for Rhoda because his father’s love was the most powerful security anyone could have. He wondered what his mother had done to lose his love and concluded it must have been something uniquely evil.
“Won’t you forgive her, the way you do me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Neal.”
“You love me?”
“More than anything!”
“Then give Mommy a little bit of the love you have for me. I won’t mind, honest I won’t, if you take some of mine away.”
“It doesn’t work that way. You only love people because you want to, not because they ask you for it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When you’re older . . . What I’m trying to say, Neal,” he said in a voice that was uncontrollably exasperated, “is that I may have to go away.”
“To Florida?”
“No, here in New York. Find another apartment to live in.”
Neal threw his arms out desperately.
“Why? We all have a lot of room here. Maggie could get out.”
“Oh, God.” Jay sighed and poured himself another drink. “No, it’s not a question of needing more room. I’m going to live with somebody else.”
Neal began to cry. He stretched his mind to receive all that Jay had told him, but he could not grasp the meaning - only the significance of life without his father, and he was paralyzed with fear and an incandescent grief that lit his face like a candle. He grabbed Jay’s sleeve and pulled him.
“I won’t let you go. You can’t leave me.”
Jay made the child release his sleeve and sat down at the edge of his bed. A cowboy with a lasso in his hand was painted on the wooden headboard.
“When you’re older . . .”
“I’ll die before I get older if you go.”
“You’ll thank me for telling you - man-to-man - when you’re a big boy.”
“Daddy, please tell me why you’re going?”
“Because I love somebody else. Another woman.”
The room started to revolve. Neal sank to his knees and squatted in the middle of the carpet. He had never seen his dresser move so rapidly, and he watched it spin. His father’s head seemed to recede into the background and his body drifted up in smoke into the ceiling.
“It’s spinning,” he shrieked, “stop it, stop it. Help! I’m falling.” He rolled over and over on the floor, and Jay got up quickly to prevent him from banging into the bed. Jay held him by the shoulders and shook him. “The curtains, aach, they’re going to eat me.”
Jay looked at the lions and tigers colorfully printed on the light yellow curtains and propped Neal on his lap.
“No, they’re not real. You were never afraid of them.”
“Oooh, Daddy, I’m afraid, I’m cold . . . My head hurts; I have to go to the toilet, please.” He began to gasp for breath, and Jay held him tighter.
“It’s all right, don’t be afraid. You’re all right.”
“You don’t love me. You told lies. You lied to me. You don’t.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve told you the truth. I’ll always love you more than anything.”
“Then don’t go, please, please, please. Daddy, don’t leave me alone.”
“Neal, you don’t understand. I’ll see you all the time. It’s just that it’s time for me to leave Mommy.”
“But none of the other Daddies are going, are they?”
“Some do, some don’t. You’ll come and stay with me, and we’ll go out as much as you like. Baseball games, Coney Island, Florida.”
Neal stopped crying, but his face was streaked with tears, and the promises that Jay had made did not have the desired effect on him. Jay leaned over to kiss him, and he pulled away, knocking the drink tray over.
“You don’t love me,” Neal said. “You love the other lady. I hate her, and I hate you.”
“Oh, Neal, you’ve got it the wrong way around. If I love her that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It only means that instead of Mommy I love her. But whatever I feel for you stays the same. It never changes, I swear.”
“What’ll I tell the other kids when you go, and they ask me where you are?”
“We’ll think of something.”
“Tell them a lie?”
“Not exactly.”
“Daddy, why do you have to go?”
“I just explained why.”
“Does the lady have little children that you’ll love more than me?”
“No, she has no children.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“Stop asking me the same question over, will you!”
“I don’t understand.”
“You do. You don’t want to accept it.”
“Are you going now?” Neal spread-eagled his body across the door. “I won’t let you get past me. You’ll have to beat me up.”
“I’m not going now.”
“When I’m asleep?”
“No, of course not.” Jay felt very tired, and very old. Neal looked absurdly small standing against the door, barring his way.
“I’ll tell God on you,” he threatened. “He’ll punish you for leaving. Daddy, you can’t, you can’t.”
“Come on, let’s eat dinner. You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten.”
Maggie had made a special effort with dinner; she had charcoal-broiled the chicken and prepared a barbecue sauce that she knew Jay liked; there were candied yams in brown sugar and marshmallow for Neal, and small sweet peas and kidney beans. For dessert, they had blueberry pie with ice cream. The tension was relieved by the sweet-natured woman to whom Jay was devoted, partly because he sensed that her love for Neal was as genuine as his. You couldn’t buy that kind of emotion, and when you found it, you cherished it. He would be sorrier to leave her than Rhoda. Neal, white-faced and exhausted, almost fell asleep at the table. The ordeal had seemed like a peculiarly outrageous and intransigent nightmare that he tried to oust from his mind. He remained quite silent after dinner and did not complain when Maggie put him to bed, although he called for Jay, and Jay went in to him. He held Neal’s hand until he was asleep, then returned to the living room, filled a brandy snifter half full and sat back in the large red club chair that Rhoda had bought especially for him. Terry was very far away, and their week together became part of the dream of his youth: the provincial vagabond and the wealthy landowner’s beautiful daughter.
“Coffee?” Maggie asked.
“Maggie, would you do something for me?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“Stay with Neal.”
“You mean you want me to sit in his room?”
“No, I’d like you stay on when I go . . .”
“You going?”
“I’ve done a terrible thing, but I had to do it. I’m going to divorce Mrs. Blackman, or rather I hope she’ll divorce me.”
The news surprised Maggie, and she wondered why she had been chosen to receive this confidence.
“I’m sorry to hear . . .”
“I think I’m a little crazy. You see I didn’t expect my wife to be away, and yet I’m glad she is because that gives me more time. I don’t want to tell her. It’s easier for me to tell you than her. And there’s Neal. The last thing I wanted was for him to get it second-hand.”
“You tole Neal?” she said, incredulous. “Oh my, oh my God.”
“How would it have been if his mother poisoned his mind against me and said that I just upped and left and that I didn’t giv
e a good goddamn about him? He knows that I love him, and it’ll be easier for him to make an adjustment when I go. It’s never been any good between my wife and me - you saw that. And in the long run - if I go now, while she’s still young enough - she’ll be able to start a new life. I’ll see Neal as much as I do now.”
He watched the black face, mobile and lined, the warm brown eyes, slightly bloodshot. They registered shock, disappointment, and finally despair. Emotionally all women were the same; color, age, shape added individual difference, but the basic clay, the soft ooze was common to all of them. She shook her head stoically and went back to the kitchen. He listened to her heavy breathing. He’d see his lawyer in the morning, stop by the office to check over any new developments with Marty, and then catch the five o’clock plane to Boston.
The room at the Cottage Inn in Peekskill was small, narrow and had an antiseptic odor that lingered on the blankets: something sour and faintly astringent. The distempered walls were painted an anonymous gray; the eggshell ceiling might have possessed some significance if any of the women who had stared at it over the years could commit themselves to paper. The scratched metal bedstead made a bleating noise as though despondent about the awful labors it had been called upon to perform over the years. Rhoda had spent a fruitless day waiting for an interview with Myrna’s doctor, who had been able to spare her only ten minutes, but had agreed to meet her for a drink in the evening. She put on a black wool dress, brushed her hair back off the face, and waited for seven o’clock, the appointed time. She still had a half hour. The Benzedrine she had taken three hours earlier had worn off, and she swallowed another one, a larger one, of ten grains - the kind they called truck-drivers.
The week that Jay had been away took on a strange, unreal quality of living daydream. It had started with an accidental meeting. She had gone into the drugstore opposite Radio City Music Hall to buy a lipstick, and her past, in the person of Barney Green, had emerged from a telephone booth, clapped her by the wrist, led her to the lunch counter and said:
“Lady, I saved you from rape.”
She was too startled to react. His face had aged gracelessly - a small pocket of crows-feet was graven like children’s tattoos under his beady brown eyes, and his face was puffy with small white crusts of dry skin behind the ears.
“I changed my mind.” He guffawed in a leathery, automatic way. He removed his hat and revealed naked patches of scalp that he could only just cover with what hair was still available. He had a gravy stain on a dark blue tie, and a wide striped blue suit which was too tight for his bulging waistline.
“To think, only to think that Whelan’s brought us together. Hey, Rhoda, don’t tell me you forgot your best man?”
“No, Barney . . . it was just . . . that I was surprised . . . is all.”
“How’s the murderer? Haven’t seen ‘im in decades. Hear he’s got millions.”
“Dollars and women. He’s got more whores than a dog has fleas.”
“Jay? Oh, you’re kidding me, Rho. Say it ain’t so.”
“Why should I, when it’s true?”
“But with a wife that looks like you?” he touched her coat. “Mink as well.”
“A present for breaking up with his last girlfriend.”
“I can’t, I won’t believe it.” He handed her a menu. “Here, have what you like. A ball: coffee, danish, an English muffin, the sky’s the limit. I can even go to an open hot roast beef sandwich with french fries, if you insist. Only for you, though.”
“Barney, Barney, you haven’t changed. How are things with you?”
“I’m on top. Don’t you read the papers? My picture was all over the Monticello Matzia . . . a paper got out for blind Jews who read Hebrew in Braille. I’m wanted dead or alive from Kiamesha Lake to Fallsburgh. Every bartender and bookmaker has a warrant for my arrest. Next week, I have a grand opening at the Hoomintosh Haven for Honeymooners. I get two bills a week, amuse the guests playing Simple Simon, try to get off with the rumba teacher but usually wind up teaching French love to the chambermaids and women whose husbands have let them off the leash for a week in the mountains and who should be doing important things with their lives, like having hysterectomies. It’s a great life. Mussolini, the rat bastard, should have it.”
Rhoda began to laugh, a great release of energy went into the laugh, and she was grateful for it. He put his arm around her and pecked her on the cheek.
“Rhoda, mein kind, you bring back happy memories. What’re you doin’ here? Where’s Jake? At home counting his money?”
“In Florida, deciding if we ought to get a divorce.”
“Hey, you’re not serious?” He turned her chin to him. “Aw, Rho, I am sorry. I wonder what’s got into Jay.”
“Nothing, he just never changed. He makes up the rules as he goes along. Life with him is like playing cards with somebody who insists that you play until the winner drops dead. You can’t win.”
“You’ve got a kid, though.”
“The one that got away. In Scranton. Remember?”
“I’ll never forget. I never wanted no part of it, but Jay comes to me like a crazy man. Said he knocked up some whore who was going to take him to court. How did I know different? He was a friend. You help a pal out when he’s in a jam. When I saw you, I didn’t believe him, but there was nothin’ I could do.”
The counterman came up to them.
“You folks thinking of buying the place or watching to see that we wash the glasses?” he said.
“Nu, everybody’s a comedian. That’s why I can’t get work. Schmendrick here thinks he’s Milton Berle. You wearing rubber heels, friend?”
The counterman held up his shoes.
“Well, bounce up and kiss my ass.”
He took Rhoda’s arm and negotiated her past the cigar stand and out into the howling, bleak Sixth Avenue wind.
“My joint’s only fifty steps. Come up and have a drink with an old friend.” She accepted the offer and took his arm.
“It’s so good to see a familiar face,” she said.
“I got a face that’s made for listening.”
His hotel was a small, neon-lit, faceless building off Sixth Avenue, designed for men who want a quickie and sign the register “Jim Brown from Blow City,” with “wife” written in as an afterthought. It was a hotel designed to provide obscurity for the obscure, the drifters, the junkies, the gin players who needed a room to clip some yokel, the married woman who didn’t want to run into her sister-in-law while she went in for a little cradle-snatching, and the non-equity members of the profession who made home movies.
The room clerk looked up from his Western paperback, as Barney spat into an imaginary spittoon.
“Got ‘em, Tennessee, daid center.”
“Always with the jokes, Mr. Green, huh?”
“Testing your wits.”
He handed Barney the key.
“If I had wits, I wouldn’t have left school at twelve, and wound up here at twenty-six.”
“You’re one of the best, kid. Don’t let nobody tell you different.”
They went up to the sixth floor in a whining, creaking elevator in which some drunk had recently vomited.
“Thing I like about this place is the freedom. You can bring anyone in: man, woman, cat, dog, so long as they can walk. Hate landladies, and that’s from a man that’s had some of the best.”
She followed him down the corridor which was surprisingly noisy. Somebody on the floor was trying to prove that he could knock a hole in the wall with only a woman’s skull.
“It’s lively,” he said. “No deadheads here.”
He opened the door of his room which had a low ceiling, truncated in the middle by a poorly plastered concrete slab that gave it a humped shape.
“Specially built for a wealthy camel, who decided to stay in Arabia at the last minute. I got it off him cheap.”
“Oh Barney, you make me laugh. It feels so good. I don’t think I’ve smiled twice in five years.”
/>
“Who’s feeling sorry for herself? I’ll get us a little booze.” He cupped his hand and spoke into it. “Room service, send up a bucket of ice, three bottles of champagne and caviar and bagels.” He put down his hand. “Ritz crackers and a rather youthful scotch is all I can offer you.”
“Stop apologizing, for God’s sake.”
He took his toothbrush out of a glass, and rinsed it and another empty one that he pulled from a drawer.
“This bureau’s got a history that dates back before Christ. Every contraceptive known to men, from the ancient knight’s sock to our own chewing gum variety has been housed here. It’s a museum dedicated to the prevention of breeding.”
She sat in a straight-back chair near the window, covered in baggy green velour that had been rubbed smooth.
“A view. All the advantages life can offer. You come home a little depressed; you got a choice” - he pointed to the gas pipe attached to the woodwork – “you take a sniff or give a little jump, and no more problems. Somebody else’s got the problems, your old ones.”
“Geez, Barney, it can’t be so bad.”
“Hey, I’m kiddin’. You don’t think I ever” - he waved her down with his hand as though swatting a fly – “me? Never in a million Sundays. I like to suffer; it’s all part of the racket, I picked this life. It’s had some ups and downs, but I always make a few bucks, never starving. My mother didn’t tell me to become a third-rate comedian, I just decided that that’s what I wanted most in life.” He sniffed his drink and pulled a face. “This stuff’s great for massages.” He handed her a glass and chinked hers: “A little toddy for the body.”
She downed the whiskey and pulled a face.
“I like my booze and women on the young side. Here’s some water to chase it.”
“It’s not so bad . . .”
“Yeah, I know, but you’re attached to the lining of your stomach.”
The red shade of the one light in the center of the ceiling gave their faces an ochre glow. Rhoda was amused by Barney, who maintained a frantic buoyancy and lifted her up as well.
“I’ve never gone to a man’s room - in a hotel.”
“Well, let me assure you that if you decide to make a career of it, you won’t starve. Now tell me, what’s been happening with Jay? I hear about him from time to time. Successful in a big way. Hundreds of stores. Made it out of nothing. You gotta admire him.”
Seventh Avenue Page 30
