by LEE OLDS
“But was Hartwig’s ever?’ Hammond asked. As to that I had to shrug my shoulders.
The four adults certainly had a splendid time at the all waltz section. Between programs they intermissioned at the glaring mirror paneled bar in the basement and when it came for the director to pull couples onto the stage to dance the finale, he’d pointed up to their box and waved them down to the enormous applause of the audience, who must’ve thought they were celebrities when, in fact, some of them might’ve known Rosenblatt and his beautiful wife but hadn’t known Hartwig or Sandy. But she was presentable in her white dress and pearl necklace and he was gorgeous as some women used to refer to him though personally I’d never use that terminology of a man, any man.
“Oh Christ, I’m so nervous,” said Sandy as Hartwig whirled her around the stage. “This certainly isn’t the Windjammer, is it?”
“No,” said Hartwig. “And there’re no Sarah nor Barney here either.”
“Thank God.” And he moved her along in time to the music, her hemline flying.
When he asked whether she was enjoying herself, she melted into his arms. Believe me after this display of socializing she was extremely confused. She quite frankly didn’t know what to think about anything. She saw one thing only, the man before her. She was hooked. Rosenblatt, naturally, intuited what was going on. He’d known them both. As long as they didn’t hurt anyone he approved. He knew how mixed up Sandy’d been as a kid and now as an adult. Then he also knew that Hartwig never seemed to get into anything but persisted in adopting the role of a Bohemian. The two could straighten one another out.
“Good luck,” said Hammond. “Though anything is possible. In many cases it’s the one consideration that keeps us going.”
“Unfortunately,” I said, “I agree.”
After singing Auld Lang Syne, the affair let out, the four figured they hadn’t had enough of the evening so they decided to meet at the Buena Vista Café in the Marina and to close that up before going home. On the way down Van Ness street, the heart of automobile row, as the iridescent light of the dealer’s neon signs blemished them, Sandy leaned against Hartwig, who was driving, nuzzled his neck with her lips while her perfume permeated his nostrils and whispered,
“I really enjoyed the evening. I’ve never had so much fun,” in an all-out revelation of the new happiness and sincerity she’d found and was constantly discovering. Hartwig realized this and also that he was the primary cause of it. I’m sure it warmed his heart as it would any man’s who’d been able to help a rich mixed up woman find herself at least a little bit on her own terms for a change.
“It’s … it’s nothing less than you deserve,” he told her. An odd answer perhaps for it suggests a lack of something in her that hadn’t before let her do so on her own and it also cements his influence in bringing that contentment about. In other words it was more self-serving than not. If only it’d ended there. That state become an eternal one.
They never do, of course, for there’s no such ‘thing’ as eternity, which is often mistaken for the perpetual becoming we are part of. But the statement stood on its own and it brought them closer together. And after all, man likes his fancies. He lives by them, true or not.
At the Buena Vista’s long mahogany bar with its white tile floor and the running bay windows, which caught the view of the bay at its best winter or summer, the four sipped Irish coffees while the large freighters with their strung lights passed like party boats in the night bound for ports distant, Hong Kong, Bora Bora, Bali, the romance of the orient, others that had just arrived having sailed from there.
The Rosenblatts lived in Pacific Heights near the house of Sandy’s mother that she still maintained even though the number of nights she spent there in a year one might count on two hands.
“Ah, the rich,” said Hammond.
“Yes,” I said, ah, the rich with their homes all over the world, only one of which they can occupy, while the homeless live like vermin in an old rug. And under their feet mind you. Under their feet. Deidre, Rosenblatt’s wife who was pseudo rebel of sorts herself, liked to dress in Bohemian getups and attend the dives in North Beach where the so-called artists hung out.
“Really,” said Sandy. “I’ve never been there as long as I’ve lived in the city. Can you believe that?”
“I can believe it my dear,” said the gorgeous blond. “You dress one night and I’ll take you.” She winked at her husband. “Without him.” Which, of course, meant that Hartwig wouldn’t be welcome either. A sort of woman’s night out without their men. Women enjoy that sort of thing, you know, especially nowadays. It’s become vogue. A new kind of drug, slumming.
John and Hartwig, of course, reveled in their college football days though one had played rugby, the other the standard game. Then John knew of a cathouse in Chinatown that Hartwig’d never heard about. He whispered that info across the table; then said out loud turning to his wife but addressing Hartwig,
“It’s fantastic. You won’t believe the things some women’ll do. You know those Orientals and their twisted brains really are smarter. That’ll be our night out.” And what’d Hartwig say, of course, as he turned to his own date.
“Sounds good to me. I’ll look forward to it. Shall we drink to it?” The two rogues then clinked glasses as a token of their own solidarity. As the night wore on the bar became crowded with late night theatergoers. John, the giant, as they called him, got up to address several of his business associates that’d come in while Hartwig kept the two women entertained. With that he had no problem, nor with the drinking either.
As the four closed up the place and stood outside exchanging compliments a new bond had been established. The couples vowed to see a lot of each other and the door’d been opened so to speak for Sandy to resume a life she might’ve followed if she’d wanted to. Hartwig could come along for the ride or not. It was up to him.
But as he stepped off the curb to their parked car he staggered a bit and noticed he had trouble regaining his balance. He’d drunk a lot in his life and pretty much knew what he could handle. Quite frankly, the ride back to the beach house was a long one, across a bridge, down a highway and over a windy mountain road. He felt he wasn’t ready to deal with it but as he and Sandy got into the car, she being tired laid her head on his shoulder and went to sleep. Though he thought of taking a nearby motel to spend the night in, he had what he considered to be a better idea. It just popped into his head. It was, he said, like suddenly being put on ‘automatic pilot’.
“Really,” said Hammond. “What was that?” I didn’t reply but continued since the answer was soon to come out in the story. Noticing they weren’t going back along the route they’d come his sluggish girlfriend managed to utter,
“Where’re we going? Where’re you taking me?” She issued a half warm smile before immediately dozing off once more. I don’t know whether she heard Hartwig’s answer, which was this.
“You’ll see,” which in essence meant nothing. It wasn’t until he pulled up in a driveway before a garage on Webster Street, got out of the car and rousted her that Sandy found out where she was. It shocked her.
“Whose house is this?” She said looking up. She appeared dumbfounded as if bound up in the very folds of an anachronism as she stood before the three story Victorian mansion, which in the dark resembled Hawthorne’s ‘House of Seven Gables’.
“Mother’s,” Hartwig volunteered inconsequentially but humorously.
“What? You’re kidding?” The announcement brought Sandy instantly back to the present. Sobered her up. “I can’t go in there.” Though as to why she couldn’t wasn’t exactly clear unless she feared the mother, who she was certain knew of her reputation and would censor her for that. The two knew each other from social circles. Then there was something to do with the case Hartwig’s father’d tried for her before he’d died. Had she seduced the old man too? Who knows? As in other instances where the knowledge of fact is extinguished along with the life of the beholder s
o was this one. Evidently the mother, Sylvia, had had suspicions then. Let’s just say the one thing Sandy’d been dreading in her relation with Hartwig was meeting his mother. To introduce him to hers had been no problem.
Sandy got feebly back into the car where she sat stubbornly frozen before Hartwig snatched her out and led her up the front stairs, an act, of course, that ended in disaster but one that also got him to Europe, or at least the promise of it, though it didn’t come from the source that had been readily at hand, his mother. That was what I was talking about when I mentioned someone’s dictating the future. And whether conscious or unconscious, this is what Hartwig appeared to have done. You be the judge …
Yet can you imagine walking into an empty mansion in the dead of night, realizing there’s only one person in it and that’s your mother, sleeping soundly, all alone in her silken nightgown in her second floor bedroom. Sleeping soundly hopefully for it was, or had been, Wednesday night and the next day, that day, was Thursday, her day in court at nine a.m. sharp that morning. She was a hard-working attorney, quite frankly, whose life since her husband died had been solely devoted to her work. Outside of her boyfriend, who visited occasionally, the maid who came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she had little contact with friends (so-called). It was no wonder when her son’d brought over Gloria, who was someone with whom she could communicate and she’d come to rely heavily on him to form a permanent relation with, the young woman, and had imagined herself as a prospective mother-in-law.
The brass lion’s head knocker greeted them as Hartwig opened the thick oak door. It was like pulling someone into the executioner’s room where they obviously didn’t want to go. And why should you when the first thing you see is a suit of armor with a pole axe ready to cut you down. Once inside, however, and the light goes on you’re bedazzled by antiquity. Your feelings’re numbed and the world before you is restored; not present. A Persian runner silently flows down the center stairway, which is sided by a carved banister at the foot of which a bronze sculpture of Minerva, a lit globe in her hand, innocently stands. And it actually worked, the light. Everything in that old house worked, including the gas fixtures that had once sufficed as lights though they were never lit now for they were considered too dangerous. This, mind you, was before the common use of electricity and the light bulb.
“And now,” said Hammond, “we’re attempting to discover the electricity anew and do away with the gas, for another medium, of course, but how quickly our viewpoints change.”
“With circumstances my good man, which are everything. You mean, I think, how quickly the world changes. Maybe just too fast for us to keep up with. We’ll see. On that we’ll see, won’t we?”
“Definitely.”
“And as if the other rooms weren’t just as impressive as showing her through the ground floor of Buckingham Palace itself, Hartwig flicked on the light switches one by one.”
The Chickering dining table, the armoire with its display of China and silver graced the dining room. A secretary with a padded leather chair, an old brass floor lamp and wall-to-wall bookcases constituted the study. The living room in which Hartwig soon had a fire going, a black grand piano stood in one corner, radiant in the light. Several velvet love seats stood on either side of a mahogany coffee table, and, of course, there were portraits.
“The portraits?” Said Hammond.
“Why, yes,” I answered. “you know every good old San Francisco family has his ancestral gallery in their home. Or at least many of them do. And they constitute paintings; not photographs. It seems to this day many of those old mansions are still fashionable in that respect. It’s like a century prior or old Europe where noble families actually identified through them. Those and their coats of arms.”
Sandy was certainly impressed. As soon as she saw Hartwig’s father, Thomas, over the mantelpiece, sitting very debonair with his hands resting upon his knees she became instantly relaxed and curled up on a love seat like a tendril.
“I loved him,” she said, “your father was a great old man.” And as she had when the first night he’d met her, she complimented his father once again and Hartwig got a warm jolt from it. He hadn’t known his father very well and though he realized some bad things were said about him, he really appreciated the good whenever they came up. Is there any other way we get to know someone?
“If they come up,” said Hammond. “The man was a poor drinker, a very bad drinker and he loved the stuff. It made him insulting and obnoxious when he… Otherwise.”
“Yes,” I said, “and I think Sandy knew that too. She was just trying to be kind. She usually was. That was her nature though she was so mixed up one rarely got to see it.”
After several glasses of champagne before the fire, at the chime of the standing clock, Hartwig said,
“It’s three, hear that, time for bed. Aren’t you tired? You were the one who said she didn’t want to come, remember?” Sandy had passed her state of drowsiness and graduated into that of a pure adrenaline rush after which one crashes drastically, but until then…
“No,” said this salacious female, “but I’ll go to bed if you will.” She apparently had gotten over her case of nerves at just being in the vicinity of Sylvia. Hartwig had a difficult time realizing there was someone else in the house with them. A lone woman in a lone bed on the second floor. So far they’d been ultra-quiet.
“Just above us, matter of fact,” as Hartwig put it. And, naturally, at her suggestion he was ready to comply for that activity, with the right woman, he was ready any time. And in that respect she was right for him. When suddenly both heard a voice from the top of the stairway inquiring,
“Son, is that you?” And…
“Of course, mother, who else? Go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He sat comfortably back on the couch as Sandy’s heart beat a little faster. She felt a lump in her throat, but presently the two heard a door close like the clap of nearby thunder and Hartwig led his girlfriend past his mother’s bedroom on tip toes and up to the third floor attic where he’d slept as a kid. The very room he stayed in with Gloria when she’d visited. And, in fact, directly above his mother’s suite.
“And do you know why there’d been peace so far?” I said to Hammond. “Guess why?” He once again shook his head.
The mother knew all this. She recognized the night (in old Vienna). And though she hadn’t been expecting her son to come over there and stay after, she knew it was he who’d come in and who she heard downstairs, and that he was with a woman. She, of course, hadn’t come down to meet her or been able to recognize her voice sufficiently well to tell the difference because she was half asleep and in her nightclothes. So she happily assumed it was Gloria. Things had gone according to plan. But how many times do we go on our assumptions as to what’s true, especially if we believe they’re backed by good faith. This, of course, would’ve been the good faith of her son. A thing mothers are not only supposed to have but are entitled to have in their sons. Hammond, for once was silent. It was almost as if he too could predict what was to come. And it did too, like a hurricane had just broken onto shore.
Once having entered the room with the four-poster bed, the same old mahogany furniture that was suffused throughout the antique house, and a thick Persian carpet with a Kerman design on the floor, Sandy went directly to the clothes locker to hang her coat and, it seems, she’d found more than she bargained for.
“What … what do you mean?” said Hammond. “A coiled snake?”
“No,” I said, “but something nearly as bad to her. Almost a complete wardrobe of women’s clothes, including nightgown, robe, slippers, the very items she, of course, didn’t have on that impromptu visit.
“Whose … whose’re these?” She said as she stood gaping at the sufficiently stocked rack before her; then finding makeup in the dressing bureau along with a woman’s brush tangled with golden red hairs.
“Whose do you think they are?” Said Hartwig gruffly and he hung his t
hings up as he stripped, changed and got into his own nightclothes. “They’re Gloria’s. She’s about your size. Put them on and let’s go to bed.”
He treated her roughly as if to minimize the situation by appearing annoyed enough that she’d back down, and also as if to indicate ‘what’s one more woman’, or maybe he was hinting that Gloria meant nothing to him. That she hoped, of course, and still hoped. Yet Sandy knew Gloria’d been there. Hartwig’d told her, only not to the extent she’d moved in an entire wardrobe, which made her feel like Hartwig was using her.
And with a timid, “Yes,” believe me Sandy felt this power and she was immediately perplexed as to how to deal with it. Without another thought as to the obligations those items implied … she still had no idea the tickets had been meant for Gloria but had assumed Hartwig’d gotten them with her in mind … she stripped on the oriental rug before the full length mirror and put on the strange garments stoically as though going to her own funeral. As to whether they fit her or not, I imagine they did. About that Hartwig hadn’t been lying, both women were nearly the same size.
In the old red flannel nightgown (a Gloria antique), Sandy rolled over to one side of the bed, pulled the down coverlet over her, turned away from Hartwig like a rejected and angry child (which she’d actually been) and awaited his attack. I say attack because sex implies that at least in the primitive sense for females are traditionally supposed to be overwhelmed by the male, a trait, which puts us closer to animals than we’d actually like to admit.
“And,” I said to Hammond, “with all that racket going on above her for an hour or so, Sylvia actually felt comforted, already like a mother-in-law or perhaps a grandmother. Yes, why not a grandmother. It actually reminded her of the better days with her deceased husband and eventually put her into a gentle, appreciative sleep.”
“You mean she still…?”
“Yes,” I said. “She still didn’t know, any more than she could tell whose voice it was downstairs. She’d just been too drowsy and the sounds too muffled to be identified. She certainly didn’t mind that the two were having sex before marriage for nowadays in our culture that’s common. You sample the goods before you buy them and no one minds that. She thought those love noises were Gloria’s even though according to Hartwig the two were substantially different.”
