“Feeling any better?”
“Yes, thanks, Daddy.”
Jay washed Neal’s hands and face and helped him on with his pajamas. Neal appeared to be better although shaky and chalk-faced. Jay made some strong lemon tea and brought it in to him.
“Drink it. It’ll settle your stomach.”
Neal forced the hot tea down, but before he could finish it, he fell off to sleep. Jay sat on his bed for what seemed to be hours. It was 3:30 when he looked at his watch. He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. The apartment had become tatty and squalid since he had left it. The sofa in the living room needed to be resprung, a corner of the wallpaper above the sink had been ripped off, there was dust under Neal’s bed, dirty clothing hanging out of the hamper, soap scum on the bathroom faucets, dirty dishes in the sink, an empty pantry, grease stains on the stove, the carpet had loose threads; the apartment was beginning to take on that skeletal threadbare quality that neglect rather than poverty creates. It had about it the look and smell of a temporary headquarters for people in flight who had grown indifferent to their surroundings. He sat at the kitchen table that he had bought and said aloud: “And to think this was a home.”
Voices drifted in from the foyer and laughter. He got up from the table.
“Ooooooooh, there’s somebody here . . .” Rhoda said nervously when she heard his footfalls on the wooden floor. Sports darted in front of her and said:
“Keep calm. I’m with you.”
Jay stopped short when he reached them.
“What do you want, buddy?” Sports said, flicking a wooden hanger in Jay’s face.
“I’m Neal’s father.”
Rhoda opened her eyes and came out from behind Sports’ protective wing.
“Jay? What’re you doing here? Neal, something’s happened to Neal?”
“A lot you care.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t give a shit about him.”
“Now just a minute,” Sports interjected.
“Shaddup you. This doesn’t concern you. We’re talking about our child. What the two of you do is your own affair. But the kid is my concern.”
“Jay, I don’t want to argue. It’s late and . . .”
“Late! Why should that worry you now? You leave him alone all day . . . all night. Do you know or care if he gets into trouble? Did you know he got home at 2:30, drunk! And that he vomited, and I put him to bed. He went out with some kid and had pizza and beer. Beer! He’s twelve years old. What’s gonna happen to him?”
“I’ll beat him till he’s black and blue,” Rhoda said, outraged.
“If you were home, he couldn’t do that.”
“Don’t tell me what to do with my life. I had enough of you for years.”
“I’ll have Neal if he’s getting in your way. With pleasure.”
“I’ll never give you the satisfaction of having him.”
“I’ll apply to the courts.”
“You can apply till doomsday. I divorced you, remember, and it was for adultery, and the courts don’t reverse their decision. You signed him away in any case.”
“I’ve still got my rights.”
“For one month in every calendar year, and every fourth weekend.”
“But you don’t want him.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re not gonna have him. Do I make myself clear?”
“Rhoda, for God’s sake. You’re not hurting me, but Neal. He’s the one who’s suffering.”
Jay turned to Sports, his hands outstretched, and said: “Who’s he?”
Rhoda sneered: “He’s not a stranger, but my fiancé.”
“Do you want money?” Jay asked. “I’ll give you money, and we’ll get the decision reversed if you sign him over.”
“Amazing,” she said to Sports, who was skimming through the sporting events in the newspapers. “Now he wants his son. When I was carrying him, he knocked me down, and paid for an abortion I never went through with.”
“Oh, God. Old dirt. You have to drag it in.”
“Your wife is such a terrific influence?”
“She does what I tell her to do.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Why don’t you go home, Jay? This isn’t your house anymore.”
“It’s a disgrace. A filthy pig sty. The way you’ve let everything fall apart, neglected it. Dirty. And horrible that my child has to live here when I can give him everything. So you’re paying me back through him. You’re not a fit mother.”
“The apartment ain’t so bad,” Sports said. “I’ve seen worse. A couple of coats of paint and some new paper.”
“A fit mother? You can afford to talk . . .”
“Not bad at all. A few new pieces and . . .”
“You’re moving in?” Jay demanded.
“Yeah, if it’s awright with you?”
“In a place that another man paid for. Sleeping in a bed I slept in with . . .”
“I ain’t squeamish. So lookit, Jay. If you said your piece, why don’tcha call it a night and let us all get some sleep, huh?”
“Rhoda, I’ll make you sorry you were born.”
“You’ve done that already, so save your threats. Stick ‘em up your ass or write me a lawyer’s letter.”
He went to strike Rhoda and stopped in his tracks when he saw Neal staring at him.
“I woke up. Why’re you screaming at Daddy, Mom? Why’s everybody always screaming?” He covered his ears with his hands when they started to shout again. They stopped when they saw him rush back to the bedroom. Jay went after him, and Rhoda screamed. “Get out, scum.”
Jay rushed to Neal’s bedroom. Neal had crawled under the blankets and was squirming underneath.
“Neal,” Jay said softly. “I’m sorry.”
The child’s head came out of the blanket, and he looked from Jay to Rhoda with an expression of long-suppressed rage, of frustration, and such loathing that Jay shrank back.
“I wish you were dead,” he said.
Jay backed out of the room like a hyena in retreat, discovering that the carrion is still alive. “I’ll get you for this, Rhoda. You’ll go down on your knees to me before I finish with you,” he said.
“I want him more than anything,” Jay said, pacing in the long living room, which was a tribute to all the antique shops on Third Avenue: Meissen, Louis Quinze, Directoire, Chippendale, and Dresden - about eighty thousand dollars’ worth of bric-à-brac, none of which Jay admired, appreciated or understood - populated the room in the form of tables, vases, lamp bases, chairs, sofas and figurines. “He’s so goddamned unhappy.”
“And you can make him happy, I suppose?” Eva asked.
“I can try. At least he won’t be neglected. The conditions he’s living in make me sick.”
“But Rhoda says no, so that finishes it.” She was relieved to end the discussion on that final note. Jay had returned at four in the morning. She had suspected that he had been on the town with a woman, but he hadn’t been drinking, and he had woken her to explain the condition in which he had discovered Neal. She had been grateful to Neal for keeping Jay off the streets for the night. The child was all that prevented Jay from falling apart. Neal had made Jay respectable. It was a sickening truth that she had difficulty in facing at ten o’clock in the morning.
“I’ve got to get him back.”
“You can’t,” she said sullenly.
“I can make life pretty tough for Rhoda.”
“Neal won’t thank you for it. And anyway it’s against your nature to force little people out of business. You wouldn’t get any pleasure from it.”
“I’d get my son back.”
“For a smart man, you’re acting foolish. Have patience. If she marries this character, she’ll want to get rid of Neal. He doesn’t sound the kind of guy who needs a kid around his neck. She’ll be grateful for your offer.
“So I keep quiet and sweat it out.”
“I’ll help you. Don’t forget I’m an ex
pert in patience and sweating, and jumping through hoops of fire. I could do a circus act.”
He swallowed his coffee and embraced her with affection. There was still something left of the old feeling - it hadn’t all been left in other people’s beds. He let her go. She smiled wistfully at him as though reading his mind.
“If you decide to let Lorna come and live with us, it could be great. You and Lorna, me and Neal. It would be a family for once. I want a family.”
She turned sulky at the mention of Lorna’s name, and she poured herself another cup of coffee. She raised the cup to her lips, then put it down absentmindedly on the drum table. Her hair hung down to her waist, a red flame that was reflected against the black satin quilt of her robe.
“Think it over, Eva.”
“I don’t like reproaches walking on two feet in my house.”
“Well . . .”
He forced her down on his lap. She had a bed smell commingled with the faint faded odor of Sortilege.
“It’s dangerous doing business with you,” she said. “I should take a lesson from all the others who’ve had their throats cut while you were helping them on with their coats.”
“I’m not so bad, am I?” He slipped his hand inside her robe, and her breasts were warm and soft. The nipples hardened under his hand, but she got up abruptly.
“It’s not fair to make a pass at me before I’ve been to the hairdresser.” She laughed to herself bitterly. “I look a wreck . . . I would, when you decide to . . .”
“I didn’t think a husband could make a ‘pass’ at his own wife.”
“Well, that’s what makes you different from all other husbands. You make passes. And I’ll tell you something, you bastard, that’s part of the reason I’m still in love with you.”
“Go to the hairdresser.”
“And what’re you going to do, sit around and mope?”
“Dunno. Thought maybe I’d see Harry.”
“He plays golf every Saturday at Park Knoll.”
“Yeah, I know. He keeps asking me to have lunch with him there. Maybe I will. Who knows, it might be fun to join.”
“Join?” She put her hands over her eyes and cackled. “You join a country club? Christ, what next? Become a joiner, Jay Blackman. And be like everyone else? Enjoy life. Meet new people, go to parties, be part of society.”
“Okay, I’ll join, if that’s what you want.”
“I’ve only been asking you to do it for ages. Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that we’ve been out here for almost two years, and we don’t even know our next-door neighbor? I’ve given up hope.”
“Well, things’ll change. Look, I’ll ring Harry, and you drive out when you’re finished at the hairdresser. We’ll all have lunch.”
“Yes, sir.” She came over and kissed him on the cheek. “You need a shave, baby.” She rubbed her hand through the bristles of his beard. “It’s getting a little gray. The boy wonder grows old and gray.”
“I’m not through living yet.”
“God, I hope not. Who knows, I may be able to stop taking my medicine.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice? To have you sober for a full day.”
“I can stop whenever I like,” she said adamantly. “I’ve only been waiting for a chance to prove it.” She was about to leave when she added in a quiet voice: “Jay, I’ve been faithful to you.”
“Yeah, sure, don’t worry about it.”
“You do though. When I was with Marty, nothing happened.”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” he said, rising angrily.
“Please listen, nothing happened. We lived together as brother and sister. He can’t! But he made me swear that I’d never tell you. I guess I must love you more than I ever realized, ‘cause I never expected to break my promise.” She closed the door softly, and he fell back into the settee. It was uncomfortable, made for a museum, not for a man to sit in. He’d have to get a comfortable chair. They’d start to live in the house.
Neal! Neal! Neal! The name, the child, haunted him like a vision of paradise. The luminous green eyes, the snubbed nose, the dark wavy hair, the agony of a child torn apart, remained with him. He admitted no judges but himself, and by his own standards his life had been a failure and could only ascend to success if Neal were happy. In some strange, illogical way, every action, beneficent and despicable, every experience, could be justified if Neal turned out all right. He realized as he drove up the winding country road to Park Knoll that his life depended on Neal, that he was the captive of his own eidetic image. Neal, the new self, must supersede the old one. He had a wild, buoyant sense of hope when he thought of Eva. He could redeem the overdue pledge he had given her. It still might be possible. His existence resembled a pawnbroker’s attic in which little bits of himself lay strewn on the ground, dusty and dessicated, tarnished, visions, images, actions, experience, flung into a pervasive desuetude, so that he had nothing more to give, no more credit to demand - the only remaining course was to claim what had formerly been his and use it, use it well this time.
Jay had a foreigner’s contempt for the large, grandiose lobby. A composite of knotty pine walls, spineless furniture that looked like a gypsy’s idea of arts and crafts, chichi bamboo room dividers, modern paintings that would have been sensational as wallpaper patterns for the toilet, and a pack of be-slacked, tweed-dripping matrons done up in Fifth Avenue’s idea of English gentry. Jay wondered if these women knew that the tweeds they flaunted had been soaked in prime Scottish urine in order to give them the right texture. About six of them gave him frantic stares. A tall blonde standing by a leather-topped desk with a small illegible sign that he gathered was a reception, gave him a fine clinical smile. She looked like a failed air hostess, or perhaps a successful one.
“You’re not a member?” The question was couched in a shrill reproachful tone.
“Nothing to be ashamed of, is it?”
She looked up from her horn-rims and decided that he was a gate crasher.
“I’m sorry, this is for members only.”
“I’m a guest.”
“Oooh!” - entirely different tone – “some confusion?”
“My fault,” he said gallantly. “I have no manners.”
“You must have to say that.”
He gave her Harry’s name, and she did a few “oh-ahs” and said: “Is he on the links?”
“On the balls of his ass most likely.”
“Pardon?”
“Try the bar.”
She had Harry paged by a superannuated bellhop who shuffled through the lobby carrying a blackboard with Harry’s name printed on it, groaning sotto voce: “Mr. Harry Lee.”
Harry emerged from a glazed door that had “Venetian Bar” written on it. He got a bit tangled in his tattersall plus fours as he strode up to Jay. Now that he had touched seventy, a melodramatic sanguinity peeped through the stiff-as-leather bronze that had become his natural color; little armies of crisscrossing capillaries ran like squirming worms under his skin.
“So, I’ve got you here at last,” he said, tapping Jay on the shoulder.
“Would you sign, please?” the blonde demanded.
Jay made an X on the book, and she glared after him.
Roughly a hundred people were jammed into the Venetian Bar. Gondolas on the wall displayed fat ladies with too much rouge on their cheeks sitting idly back to admire the azure sky of Venice.
“Well, what do you think of the place, Jay?”
“It’s like a mikvah, and you look like the lifeguard in your costume. Why not a dress?”
“You wear these for golf. Plus fours are traditional.”
“Give me a jockstrap with luminous nailheads any day.”
“You’re still impossible. I guess you’ll never get used to the better things in life. Have a drink.”
“Okay, you twisted my arm. Eva’s gonna meet us here at one.”
“Terrific. You two straightened yourselves out?”
“Maybe.”
/>
“Aren’t you sure?” He sounded aggrieved. Jay knew that he was particularly fond of Eva, and disturbed by the course their marriage had taken. It was as though he had a personal stake in their lives.
“Yeah. It’ll probably be all right. It’s my kid who’s worrying me to death.”
“Since when?”
“Since the day I split up with Rhoda. She’s got herself some zombie now who’s planning to marry her bank account, and the kid’s all upset. He’s neglected and pushed around, and it kills me that I can’t do anything to stop it. I mean to say” - he spoke in a loud voice, and the bartender wondered if he had too much after only one drink – “my kid, getting the short end of the stick. I could give him everything.”
“What about Eva? How does she feel?”
“She wants to have him if we can get him.”
“What’s the guy do?”
“I think he’s a gambler or half-assed bookie, or both.”
“Then you sit back and wait. They’ll run out of money, and she’ll want to make a touch, and then you’ve got them by the balls.”
“That’s what Eva thinks. But in the meantime, Neal’s running wild and getting drunk.”
“Drunk?”
“I went by at two o’clock last night and the kid wasn’t home. Came home at 2:30 loaded on beer and sicked his guts out. Rhoda went clubbing with the sportsman. And we had an argument which the kid heard. What am I supposed to do? Tell me.”
“Keep after her. Hound her, and if she runs out of money, you step in.”
“I thought of asking all the manufacturers in the market to cut her credit, but I can’t in my heart do it, even though I want him. If she found out that I was behind it - and she’d know - she’d never let him go.”
“Well, worrying about it isn’t going to help. How’re things at the office?”
“We finished with the underwriters last week. I’ve sent you a full account of it. We go on the market in two weeks, and they think we’ll be oversubscribed at least six times, so that we’ll open with maybe a two-dollar premium. The traders’ll get in and out with a quick profit and she’ll settle down at about a dollar higher than the underwriting price.”
Seventh Avenue Page 40
