Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

He was ten years younger than she was.

  She was close to hysteria when he arrived late for their first rendezvous and admitted openly that he had been with a college friend – and slept with her – and then said goodbye to her forever.

  She had no reason to doubt this.

  She was overcome, and wept, at the first sight of his naked body.

  Their affair, which was intensely sexual, began officially (as she saw it) when she whispered two words to him: “Be rougher.”

  His first attempts were mannered, but he quickly became skilled at it.

  They would meet at her apartment, which he found cold and which he – of all people – made livable with a number of purchases. Rugs and paintings.

  He was a venture capitalist, though he rarely spoke of it, and lived with his parents.

  In the year they spent together, she could not recall a single day during which they had failed to make love.

  In July and August, they remained in the city and enjoyed having it to themselves.

  A song (with patently absurd lyrics) was in the air and became the backdrop of their affair.

  She considered her lovemaking spontaneous, without thought or calculation. In truth, she had certain skills, the use of her teeth, for example, on his penis and scrotum.

  Though she had the other, he preferred that she wear plain cotton underwear.

  He enjoyed watching her masturbate.

  She enjoyed watching him watch her – but only now and then.

  He locked her out of the apartment one night. She stood shivering and naked in the corridor. Tacitly, she had agreed to this. A neighbor, disappointingly, ignored the spectacle. When he finally opened the door for her, predictably, they made love with a fury.

  They kept raising the ante, not out of boredom, but for the adventure.

  She gave him a leather crop. For his rides in the park, but not entirely.

  As a gift, she offered him a girlfriend, but on condition that she be present. He accepted – once – and they survived the experience.

  He often slept with his face buried in her vagina.

  When the sex was most intense, he complained of feeling pain and she realized she’s been clamping down on his penis as he came. Perhaps to ward off pregnancy. She stopped doing that.

  Never once did he say he loved her.

  Nor did she say that she loved him.

  Although she did.

  For a time.

  And she was confident he loved her.

  He took her to have cocktails with his parents. She could see the hatred in his mother’s eyes – and the weary understanding in his father’s.

  They took only one vacation together. As they stood on a hill and looked out on Charlotte Amalie Harbor, she felt a need to suck his penis.

  She often felt that need.

  She wrote a novella in five days, as part of the vacation.

  But it wasn’t any good.

  At a party, her editor made a snide comment about his prominent nose. She changed editors. But it continued to bother her.

  Though he could do the Times crossword puzzle in a flash, he was not terribly verbal. That troubled her as well. What he did for the most part was to look at her in silence and try to anticipate her every need. As if he were a nurse and she had been ill.

  Which she had been, in a sense, having walked out on a troubled marriage.

  But she had recovered. And begun to notice other men. Some were closely allied to her professionally. Others were not.

  She broke off their affair suddenly, perhaps with some cruelty, as if she had lost confidence in a book she was writing and set it aside. She said she wanted to try again with her husband. Which wasn’t true.

  He took her decision poorly, sending back the first editions of her novels that she had given him. Mutilated.

  He begged her, literally on hands and knees, to stay with him. Behavior that sealed his fate.

  She saw him only once again, months later, by chance – at a diner. They each had a cup of coffee. She asked if she could call him for dinner.

  He agreed to this, but said that he was seeing someone, therefore it could only be for dinner.

  She was offended by the assumption that she wanted more (she had) and did not call him.

  Years passed.

  She had always felt that she would have other affairs, of equal or greater sexual intensity. She felt it was her due.

  But this did not come about.

  At a certain point, she came to realize that it never would.

  Joined at the Hip

  “IF YOU WANT TO GET SPRUNG, tell ‘em you’re lonely for your dear old mum.”

  The line of dialogue, which was intended to be spoken by a demoniacal guard, and followed by a cackle, caused the prisoner to sit up on his flimsy metal chair and to come out of his trance.

  I had chosen the line deliberately. It existed in a novel written by the prisoner, one published before he had broken through to a wide audience. You’d need to have been a devoted reader of Monroe Gillis to have remembered the line. None was more devoted than I was.

  I recognized him from the photograph on his book jackets – and I had attended one of his talks at a mystery writers’ convention in Saratoga. He was – and continued to be – a raffishly handsome man whose looks were somewhat out of joint with the times. Slender, somewhat delicately put together, he wore a small moustache and his profile was a classic one. He had the look of a minor matinee idol of decades past. (Indeed, a feminist, who disapproved of the portrayal of women in his books, had denounced him during his talk in Saratoga as a “poor, poor creature of the’40s” before storming out of the auditorium.) Gillis was sixtythree. Even in drab prison clothing and with a three-day growth of beard, he still managed to throw off a careless charm.

  I was not the detective assigned to the case. But as a diehard Gillis fan, and with a reputation in the department of being a “culture vulture,” I had little difficulty obtaining a permission to visit the distinguished prisoner.

  The murder he had almost eagerly confessed to committing was adjudged, by several veteran detectives, to be a particularly vicious one. The victim was Dmitri Slotkin, a theatrical producer, mainly of lightweight drawing room comedies, imported from London. He had been killed by a single thrust, or chopping blow to the bridge of the nose, the weapon a Filipino “fighting knife” with a l4-inch blade and an ebony handle. In the hyperbolic report of the arresting officer, the victim’s head had been split open “like a coconut.” It was the celebrated writer himself who had made the call to the police. He had then calmly taken a seat beside the victim, but not before – and this was an odd detail – looping his belt through that of Slotkin – thereby attaching himself to the dead producer.

  After his virtually immediate confession, he had been arrested and then arraigned and now – in a holding cell that seemed even more cheerless than most – awaited sentencing. I was curious to learn what circumstance it was that had driven a distinguished author and a man of great sophistication (not a word I throw around lightly) to an act of such homicidal fury.

  Having established my bona fides with the quotation of a line in an obscure book of his, Gillis, a natural storyteller, seemed only too happy to discuss his unfortunate case.

  “Slotkin and I were doing a play together, you know,” said Gillis, setting the scene as if we had both settled in for an exchange of stories beside a campfire.

  I recalled vaguely seeing an item to that effect in the press and hoping for selfish reasons it was only public relations fluff. If true, it would have meant an interruption in the regular flow of Gillis novels, an unhappy development for his legion of fans. Then, too, I was aware that authors of greater stature than Gillis – Henry James, Scott Fitzgerald, as examples – had broken their backs on the frustrating and unforgiving shoals of the theatre world.

  “When did you first meet?” I asked.

  “Two years ago,” he said, then paused and corrected himself. “Two and a half, to
be truthful. I think of it as two and a half years torn out of my life.”

  He had been pacing the length of the cell as he spoke, but this last admission seemed to drain his strength. He sat down heavily, as if to recover.

  “I’d never attempted a play before, but I’d always enjoyed the theatre and thought, as a change of pace, I’d take a try at one. I was apprehensive when the finished piece was circulated by my agents. Much to my surprise and delight, Dmitiri Slotkin, whose name I recognized, called and said he wanted to produce the play. We arranged to meet at his offices in mid-Manhattan. I found him to be a bluff and charming man, even by the standards of theatre – a world in which charm – or what passes for it – is as abundant as running water. He seemed genuinely happy to have been offered the play and said he planned to mount it that very season. We would have no difficulty, he assured me, in finding a director. ‘I can get you twenty,’ he said, with a snap of his fingers. He pointed out that his approach to producing was to concentrate on a single play each season. Mine was the one he had chosen. No backers would be required. ‘When you have Dmitri Slotkin,’ he said confidently, ‘you don’t need anyone else.’ And in the months – and then years that followed – he was to repeat this statement like a mantra.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as unusual?” I asked Gillis.

  It was common knowledge that the cost of mounting a play in Manhattan had become astronomical. Typically, a producer would take on as many as four or five partners to lighten the burden.

  “I didn’t think much about it at all. Slotkin had a substantial reputation. I felt I was in very good hands and took the production of my play as a given. I even allowed myself to think ahead to a celebratory opening night party, perhaps at Sardi’s, thereby assuring myself of a small niche in a grand theatrical tradition. It was only as I prepared to leave his office that I was thrown off stride by the question he posed to me.”

  “What is your play about?” he asked.

  “In retrospect, I can see that this should have thrown up a flag. How could he possibly produce a play whose meaning escaped him? Nonetheless, I did what I could to answer him. At the heart of the work was a young man’s having to choose between art and commerce. Since this did not sound particularly flashy, I took a minute or two to relate the events of the story as they would unfold on stage. He considered this, and after stroking his beard thoughtfully, he clapped me on the back and said: ‘No matter . . . We are now joined at the hip.’ This was yet another phrase I was to hear more than once in the months to come.”

  I thought back to the crime scene, as described in the police report.

  “That would account for the belt business. . . .”

  He smiled, as if relishing his handiwork.

  “It was a touch I couldn’t resist . . . theatrical. . . .”

  Obviously, the play never opened. If it had, I was enough of a theatregoer to have known about it.

  “So he disappointed you. . . .”

  “That’s a mild way of putting it. It was as if I’d been lured into some kind of shell game. Directors, the few who expressed interest, were hired by Slotkin and subsequently fired. There were a series of readings for people who were obviously potential backers, although Slotkin insisted they were ‘friends’ who might be useful in getting the word out that a hit was in the making. Casting and rehearsal dates were announced, then canceled. Several seasons passed, during which time Slotkin managed to produce three cabaret-style evenings, two small-scale musicals, several dramatic readings, and one huge turkey of an alleged comedy. I was invited to attend them all, and I did so, as a courtesy. One was more tedious than the other, which only increased my irritation. . . .”

  I hadn’t seen a Monroe Gillis mystery novel in the stores for several years – and I guessed, correctly, that during this period, he had set aside his work on the novels.

  “That was the worst of it,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “I was so convinced that the play would eventually go on that I completely neglected the other. Good God, I could have written three novels in that time. When I think of the loss of income alone.... So you can imagine my feelings when Slotkin showed up at my studio one day and announced that he was unable to find any support for the play and would have to withdraw as a producer. He claimed it was one of the most painful decisions he’d ever had to make – and assured me that he would read any future efforts of mine with interest.”

  “Do you feel he deliberately misled you?”

  “I doubt that it was deliberate. I think he had some vague interest in my play. But what he seemed to value more was being associated with me. I realize this sounds presumptuous, but I kept hearing reports of this. He would take people aside and tell them that he was doing the first theatre piece by the world-renowned mystery writer, Monroe Gillis. . . . He dined out on that . . .”

  “Still . . . you must have been infuriated when he dropped the play.”

  “I suppose I should have been, but oddly enough, that was not the case. Was I upset? Of course. But I have strong recuperative powers. I knew that after a brief mourning period, I’d be able to start up the engine and go back to what I do best. And to be frank, I had become unsure about the play. It may be that I am simply not cut out to be a playwright and ought to leave that field to those who are to the theatre born. Then, too, the sheer chutzpah of the man showing up at my studio to deliver his hideous message no doubt caught me off guard. There didn’t seem to be any point in shouting at him, berating him. I simply could not work up a proper level of outrage to fit the situation.”

  But of course, obviously, he had. And we had come to the whole point of my visit. I tried to phrase my question delicately.

  “What was it that finally . . . set you off?”

  Gillis put his hand to his forehead in concentration, as if he wanted to get it exactly right, for some sort of record.

  “Soon after Slotkin left my office, having dropped his bomb, I took myself off to the Caribbean. I had decided that what I needed for a fresh start was a change of scenery. It was a strategy that had worked for me before. Sunshine, those wonderful rum drinks, a little blackjack, and in short order I’d be off and running on a new project.

  I’ve never had a shortage of ideas.... It occurred to me that I might do a mystery novel that would make use of some of the scenes in my abandoned play. No point wasting them. I chose a small hotel in Barbados. After a day or two of idling around, I jumped in and tried an opening scene, which came across as being forced and stilted. The theatre experience had evidently taken more out of me than I was willing to admit. Rather than get into a state, I set the work aside and walked out to the patio which was beside the hotel pool. It was a lovely day. As I looked around for a comfortable spot, I noticed a young woman who was stretched out on a chaise lounge. Though I tried to be discreet, I could not stop staring at her, the reason being that she was one of the most unforgivably beautiful women I had ever seen. Other than to say that she was fair-haired and that her features were flawless, I won’t attempt to describe her. I lack to power to do so.”

  There was no reason to doubt Gillis’ judgment in this area. He had spent a good number of years in Hollywood as a screenwriter and had been exposed to more than his share of lovely women. Several of his wives had been legendary in this category.

  He continued: “As she got to her feet, I half hoped to detect some flaw in her appearance. I had come to the island for a specific purpose and I did not need this distraction. But the Gods had apparently not quite finished toying with me. If her face was perfection, her tall slender body and her totally unselfconscious movements were even more so. By current standards . . . that thong business . . . the two-piece bathing suit she wore was modestly cut, all of which had a reverse and almost unbearably erotic appeal.

  “What set off her appearance even more dramatically was the odd-looking individual who followed her to the pool and seemed to be her companion. He had a good height, but his shoulders and chest were sparrow-like,
his stomach huge, and his legs spindly and shapeless. I would prefer not to comment on the scattered patches of hair on his head and his womanish breasts. He might have been thrown together out of random body parts. What was most disturbing is that they seemed to get along remarkably well, his disagreeable appearance not seeming to matter to her in the least. He stood at the edge of the pool, barking out remarks to her in some strange tongue that I couldn’t quite make out. It seemed to be their private code. Whatever it was he was saying seemed to delight her. She swam for a bit with a grace that was heartbreaking. And then, before the fates could intervene, he hurled himself into the pool and the two went splashing and cavorting about and having the time of their lives. At one point, unconscionably, she leapt upon his spindly shoulders, to be joyously carried, piggy-back, from one end of the pool to the other, her crotch pressed trustingly and maddeningly against his neck.”

  He took a deep breath as if to recover from the unsavory image.

  “All of this struck me as being horrendously unfair. The mismatch between them – unnoticed by her – had to be an affront to nature. After she had left the pool and dried herself with a towel, she lay upon her stomach and lowered her top, allowing her surprisingly heavy breasts to swing free. It had crossed my mind that he might be a cousin or some sort of freakish sibling, but the casual and intimate manner in which he spread lotion on her shoulders and the backs of her legs led me to believe that they were lovers – no matter how appalling the prospect might be.

  “I cannot tell you how offended I was by this ungodly coupling and how much I wanted that woman. For my own purposes, of course, but also to redress some awful blunder in the natural order. Under normal circumstances, it would not have presented a huge problem for me to meet her . . . or perhaps I should say to meet them. There weren’t that many guests at the hotel. I would simply have introduced myself, asked if they were from the States and what had brought them to the hotel. Something innocuous along those lines – and with a pretense of being interested in the two of them. I might have asked her friend what sort of work he did and quickly gotten it across that I was a writer of mysteries. Perhaps they’d heard of me. And I’d insist on presenting them with a signed copy of my latest novel. I made sure to carry several in my valise for this very purpose. This might, inevitably, lead to the three of us having a drink in the evening, perhaps going to dinner. And then slowly, I would ease closer to her, gently and perhaps imperceptibly nudging her friend or companion aside. I am not suggesting that this would necessarily have led to my going to bed with her, although the odds would be in my favor. What I’m saying is that I was determined to have her and that somehow I would do whatever it took to achieve this – charm, wheedle, cajole, if necessary bull my way into the situation until I had her. I had been able to pull off this sort of thing before. . . .”