“You’re very warped,” Jay said. “Now let’s change the subject.”
They changed the subject, or at least Jay did.
“How’re you doing in school?”
“All right.”
“All right, he says, when everybody tells me that he’s the smartest kid in the whole school.”
“I’ve heard this routine before.”
“A genius. That’s what his teacher told me. Tops on his I.Q. test.”
“You should’ve warned me and I would have brought earplugs.”
“Don’t you take any pride in him?”
“Why should I? He only stands between us. Once I thought it was Herb who was our personal ghost. Now I know it’s not, never has been.”
“Who’s Herb?” Neal asked.
“An old friend of Eva’s.”
“What happened?”
“Just deal you into the conversation? That what we’re supposed to do?” Eva said.
“I just wanted to know.”
“None of your business.”
“Herb died a long time ago,” Jay explained.
“We killed him. Me and your father.”
“If you open your trap I’ll dump you right out of the car.”
Jay pulled into the Little Neck Steak House, and the parking attendant took the car. He and Neal walked ahead, and Eva trailed them in. A rustic wood-paneled bar led into the restaurant. It was crowded, and people were talking loudly and burning holes in each other’s clothes with their cigarettes. Everyone seemed to be high in one way, or another.
“Can I have a horse’s neck?” Neal asked.
“Course you can.”
Jay pushed his way into the bar, and the bartender, a tall, blond man with a tired hangdog expression, a walking encyclopedia of other people’s troubles, suddenly became animated.
“Well, as I live and breathe, Mr. Blackman.”
“Hiya, Charlie. Since when’ve you been working here?”
“A month tomorrow. From the opening. It must be a good few years since I seen you last. You stopped coming into the St. Moritz with Mr. Fredericks.”
“A lifetime ago.”
Eva shoved her head through.
“Hello, hello, hello. Still the most beautiful redhead in New York.”
Eva blinked.
“Charlie?”
“Right, Miss Meyers.”
“Blackman.”
“Congrats.”
“Still double scotches on the rocks?”
“She’ll drink anything. Sneaky Pete, if you sell it here.”
“Always with the jokes, Mr. B, huh?”
“Junior’ll have a horse’s neck.”
“That’s ginger ale with grenadine, a slice of orange and a cherry,” Neal said.
“Done,” Charlie said. “It’s good to see a few familiar faces.”
“What kinda crowd they get here?”
“A few hookers. Amateurs. Cheaters and players mostly doing the circuit. Husbands can’t afford the prices.”
“I might come by during the week,” Jay whispered.
Eva found herself a barstool, a few drunks away.
“Meet my boy Neal.”
Charlie extended a wet paw and shook Neal’s hand.
“If you’re anything like your father, you’ll go places, Neal.”
Neal sulked against the bar. He found comparisons with his father distasteful. He didn’t want to be like Jay, and everyone he met told him he ought to be. He couldn’t understand adults. He would have preferred to spend the weekend with Zimmerman watching Lady Farberman, who operated nonstop on weekends. She had had more pricks in her than a porcupine, Zimmerman said, and Neal thought the joke was terribly funny and repeated it to everyone. Eva was ready for another drink before Jay had even bent his elbow.
“Things okay by you, Mr. B?” Charlie said, nodding his head in Eva’s direction.
“Oh, marvelous. I’d like her to drive home now. Right now.”
“In her condition?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You useta be so happy together.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Jay finished his drink and went over to Eva. “Ready to eat?”
“I am eating.”
“Yeah? Well, don’t embarrass me.”
He slipped Charlie two five-dollar bills.
“One’s for you . . . and she can drink the other. If she starts getting loud or falls on her ass, send me a telegram.”
“Thanks, Mr. B.”
“I’ll have one more at the table. No bar scotch, though, Charlie. Black Label.”
A crowd of people waited behind a cord where a slim-hipped man in a tight-fitting suit flapped a pack of menus against his wrist. Jay walked up to him.
“Blackman, table for three.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Blackman. I took the reservation myself. Got a nice booth for you facing the fireplace.”
Neal picked up the menu while the waiter stood punctiliously waiting for their order . . .
“I got a drink at the bar,” Jay said. “Ask Charlie.”
Charlie brought the drink to the table and gave Jay a perplexed look.
“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Blackman. With the kid here, I don’t like to . . .”
“Don’t worry about him. Just spit it out.”
“She left.” He shrugged his shoulders awkwardly and leaned on the table, avoiding Neal’s stare of amazement. “With some guy . . . a greaseball mambo teacher that hangs out here. A sort of specialist in married women.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“You want me to call the parking lot and have them stop his car?”
“Don’t bother. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and she’ll have an accident.”
Jay’s mood was buoyant throughout dinner. Like one of those “magic” blackboards with a thin sheet of translucent paper on it that could erase automatically when you lifted it up, he succeeded in extirpating Eva from his mind. She existed in some kind of vague peripheral relationship to him, and he could shut her out whenever he chose to do so. It was a facility he was grateful to possess. From the moment he had resumed his affair with her, after leaving Rhoda, he had known that not only were they doomed people, but they were also out of love. He neither desired her nor affected desire: it was all as dead, as insubstantial as cigarette ash. He had been motivated by a lack of feeling, a tired insouciance, a hollow sensation and the urge to fill it in some way, and he had married her, although he realized that she no longer wanted or needed marriage. They lived on an emotional continent of old wounds and forgotten passion. The ingredients for a fire were there, but they had become useless, partly, Jay knew, because he had become inaccessible. He could not even conjure up the ghosts of his dead loves: Specters also turn to dust. Only with Neal he came alive and he perceived with one of the few important insights he had ever had about himself that his all-embracing love for the boy was the result of love diverted, which did not render it any less potent. Neal came to possess him and he created an aura around him that people reserve for objects of piety, and rightly so, for when they are invested with flesh, made incarnate, they destroy and are destroyed.
“You’re not happy, are you, Dad?”
“When we’re together I am. I only wish that could be more often. Once a week and every fourth weekend aren’t enough. I live for seeing you . . . I build my life around it. Doesn’t matter if I’m busy or have to go out of town. Nothing’s as important to me as being with you.”
“I can’t live without you.”
“I know that. Maybe it’s good that you can’t. Eva’s not the sort of person that you should live with.”
“Is she always as bad as tonight?”
“It’s mostly when you come that she goes off the rails. And the crazy thing is that deep down she cares for you. Eva buys all the presents I give you. I mean sometimes she’ll pop into the showroom and say: ‘Jay, I just saw the most terrific sweater for Neal.’ And I say: ‘Buy it then.’ And she’ll hold
up a bag. ‘That’s just what I did, Jay. I bought it.’ There’s a lot of good in her. Mostly, I guess, it’s my fault, because I’m always talking about you to everybody, and she feels left out. Especially as she’s got a kid who she never sees and can’t stand.”
“Why’s that?”
“Reminds her of things she’d like to forget. Oh, Neal, it’s such a mishmash. You think you’re doing something because you want to, and you find out too late that you never wanted it in the first place. And you’re lumbered. Make sure you learn from my mistakes and when you’re old enough to get married be certain that there’s no bad blood between you and the girl and you’re not doing it to make up for something you did wrong. An apology shouldn’t last a lifetime.”
“Dad, if I tell you something, will you promise not to go back and tell Rhoda?”
Jay smiled at him and nodded.
Neal always called his mother by her first name when he spoke of her with Jay. The division had been made for him, and he could not reunite them, either in his mind or in conversation, because this created an illusion of unanimity that altered the balance of reality, and Neal was forced to avoid this myth in order to survive. He hated confusion. There were carefully defined borders, artificial ones, and they must be observed.
“Rhoda’s got a man.”
“A man? I thought men.”
“A special one.”
Jay made a gurgling sound as he swallowed his brandy.
“Since when?”
“Dunno. I found him asleep this morning.”
“What’d you do?”
“I burned his clothes - in the incinerator.”
“Whaaat? Burned them? Just like that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s pretty funny. Practical joke, huh? I’ll bet Rhoda and him were teed off.”
“It wasn’t really a joke. He might’ve been a thief or something, and he could have tried to escape. But not without his clothes.” He looked at Jay for support, and Jay touched him affectionately on the shoulder. “I mean he was a stranger . . . and I was a stranger, and anything could’ve happened. He could’ve attacked Rhoda.”
“A gorilla couldn’t attack Rhoda.”
“I thought of something even worse to do: pour boiling water on his face, so he couldn’t move until I got the police.”
“I’m glad you didn’t do that,” Jay said uneasily.
“He tried to be nice when I got home from school.”
“He was still there? Without his clothes . . . ?”
“He was wearing some of the old stuff you left.”
“What’d Rhoda have to say?”
“Angry. She was very angry, and she screamed, but I didn’t tell her the truth, I couldn’t. I can’t tell her the truth about anything.”
“I couldn’t either.”
“I always lie to her and tell you the truth,” Neal lied.
“The man try to hit you or something?”
“He didn’t have the guts to. He wants Rhoda’s money.”
Jay seemed perplexed and leaned conspiratorially close to Neal.
“What makes you think that?”
“He would have beat the hell out of me if he was a man. If he didn’t want something from her . . . She should’ve introduced me, don’t you think? It would’ve been different then, don’t you see?” he said with feverish animation.
“Of course, Neal. She should’ve introduced you. Making a flophouse outa your home. The woman’s got more nerve than brains. She doesn’t think about anybody but herself.”
Neal nodded gravely.
“I’m glad I told you.”
“You can always tell me everything, like I do you. We’re not just father and son, we’re buddies. You’re my best friend.”
“I’d trust you with my life,” Neal said.
“You are.”
Jay was disturbed by Neal’s predicament and they drove home unusually silent. Huntingdon Close was a tree-lined cul-de-sac and Great Neck’s most fashionable road. It represented for Jay the embodiment of all the synthetic ideals he had picked up from the movies: the penniless provincial foreigner who eventually winds up his jaded existence on millionaire’s row - self-made, country-club set, hunting lodge in Vermont, winter villa in Florida, a boat on the Sound - in short his new life was a sharp reproach to the society that created both him and the illusionary vision he sustained in symbolic counterpoint. Jay, however, had broken the mold. Except for the house, which he had built at Eva’s insistence, he enjoyed none of the privileges that money entitled him to. He had undergone a profound change, so profound that he could not gauge the extent of it, and he never regarded it as anything but a sudden and inexplicable loss of faith in his old ideals. His business no longer had any fascination; through sheer energy and ability it had become largely autonomous: it was too big for any man, and he and Marty had delegated most of the responsibility to half a dozen young creative people who injected a new dynamism into a giant grown unwieldy. They had three hundred shops from coast to coast and a dozen factories operating round the clock, and although the reins of the business were still held firmly in Jay’s hands, he no longer had the drive and initiative that had created a multimillion-dollar business out of a small shop and a marginal wholesaler’s loft.
The center of his universe was Neal; only Neal could re-create the terrible, agonizing love that he had felt towards Terry. It was primarily an uncreative relationship in that it ripped out his heart and guts, for he realized that the child was suffering, that his loyalties were still divided, that he had developed a shell of armor as obvious as that of a turtle, and that he was too old for his years. His manner and attitude Jay found inscrutable. The divorce was a fact of life that Neal had accepted calmly, but it had driven him underground, and Jay always had the sensation of pursuing an elusive and wily animal with an innate sense of survival and all the destructive weapons of the beast in retreat.
Of all things, Jay had developed a conscience about Rhoda. He recognized the wisdom of activating the dead battery her life had become. The store he gave her in the divorce settlement provided her with a purpose and an interest. She was an excellent saleswoman, but she had been too deeply schooled in Finkelstein’s business methods, and this very nearly destroyed the store. Two years earlier she had got into a terrible muddle with her accounts, bills were overdue, manufacturers were screaming about injunctions and subpoenas, and the staff was stealing with impunity. Jay had heard through trade gossip about this state of affairs, and at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, after almost two years of freedom, he had presented himself at the shop with two of his accountants, a batch of signs that proclaimed “Sale! Sale! Sale!” even though it was only November, and he had in ten minutes fired every sales assistant - eleven of them - given them two weeks’ severance pay, and had closed the shop for the day.
When Rhoda had arrived, she was astonished to find the store closed and had pounded on the door for a good ten minutes.
One of Jay’s minions let her in.
“What’s going on?” she had protested. “Did we have a fire?”
“No, Mr. Blackman’s taken over.”
“Taken over? He can’t do that. It’s not his to take.”
She rushed into the small office in the back where the accountants were wrestling with double-entry books six months out of date, which seemed to have been kept by someone using the continental form of seven and who had then decided that seven and four made eight.
“Jay, what d’you think you’re doing? Where’s all the girls?”
“I threw them out. I’m trying to straighten out this shithouse.”
“Who asked . . . ?”
“I can’t let you go under . . . It makes me look bad.”
“What about my staff?”
“I hired six girls, Saturday morning.”
“Six? I had eleven.”
“You had six girls. The other five sat on their asses when they weren’t robbing you blind.”
“Yo
u don’t have any authority here. It’s mine.”
“I’ve got the authority of the bankruptcy courts. ‘Cause if I don’t take the bull by the horns, you’ll be sitting there next month, and tears won’t do a bit of good. They’ll chop you up like you were a piece of liver.”
She pointed to a bespectacled little man with exquisitely shaped hands, using three different colored inks.
“Who’s that?”
“That, Rhoda, is an accountant. He sees to it that if any stealing’s going on, you’re doing it. You’re getting rooked, left, right, and center.” He held up a sheaf of papers. “Bills, most of them ninety days overdue. They can put you in the hands of a receiver for something like this. It’s a miracle you’re not on the street already.”
“What do you mean by that?” she said angrily.
“Look, Rhoda, what you don’t know about business could fill the Encyclopedia Britannica. When you got the store, the articles of incorporation were dissolved. I told you to become a limited company for fifty dollars. Any neighborhood shyster with a notary public stamp couldn’ve done it for you. Limited company, limited liability. They can’t touch your personal assets. You wouldn’t listen to me. They can put a lien on your bank account, take all your personal possessions at home . . . furniture, clothes, Neal’s things, goddamnit! Do you understand now?”
The little man triggered some figures on an adding machine.
“Eleven thousand, two hundred and forty-six dollars, and sixty-one cents,” he said. “Could be worse.”
“Which means a loss of thirty thousand dollars on top of that, at the old net-profit figures. Added to a five percent loss in potential turnover figures. Forty-eight thousand.”
The man turned some pages, did a few quick sums, and turned to Jay.
“How do you remember figures like that with so many stores and factory production figures as well? You’re five hundred dollars off. How do you do it?”
“If you knew the answer to that, I’d be the accountant and you’d be running the business. You make out the checks, and I’ll sign them.”
“Do you want to establish any cash balance with any of the people she owes money to? They might not want to give her credit in the future.”
Seventh Avenue Page 36
