by Peter Israel
“Stay if you want to, then. I’m going to bed.”
I went after her, following her into the bedroom.
“You can’t do this to me, Kitty,” I called after her. “You can’t abandon me and then just show up in the middle of the night and go to bed. Just like that. I demand an explanation. You went off with Thorne, didn’t you?”
She started to undress. First the high heels, kicked off, then her gown, up over her head. I’d watched her undress countless times, but now the sight of it infuriated me.
“Why won’t you tell me?” I challenged her. “Thorne left the party at the same time you did. Quite a coincidence! Now where are you going?”
In bra, half slip, and stockinged feet, she’d started for the bathroom.
“I told you,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I’m going to bed. I’ve got another terrible day tomorrow. First I’m going to take my makeup off.”
“I won’t accept that!” I shouted abruptly, seizing her by the arm.
Head down, she tore free of my grasp. For a second, her hair swirling, her head lowered, I saw the Kitty of almost a year before, that first night outside her building. But when she looked at me, there were no tears.
“You’re making me crazy, Tommy,” she said, her voice now shaking as though she was fighting for control of it. “You don’t own me. I don’t know where you got the idea that you did.”
“Own you? Who’s talking about owning you?”
“You are. Just listen to yourself. You demand an explanation, you won’t accept this or that. But you don’t own me, Tommy. Nobody owns me.”
“I’m not talking about ownership! But I have certain rights. I love you, for Christ’s sake!”
“You’re hardly acting like it.”
“Neither are you! We’re supposed to be partners! Partners in love, partners in business.”
“As far as business goes, I never said it was exclusive.”
“You what?”
“That’s right,” she said, her eyes unwaveringly on mine. “You don’t make me enough money for it to be exclusive.”
The statement dumbfounded me, not just the fact of it but the utter calm with which she said it. For a weird moment, I felt as though I didn’t know her at all.
“So you gave Thorne Safari, too,” I said finally.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you did give it to him, didn’t you? And you were with him tonight, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“And I don’t give a goddamn what you didn’t say! You were with him, weren’t you?”
A rush of anger seized me, and the impulse to hit her made me ball my fist. She must have seen it too. She didn’t flinch, but she lowered her head, neck bowed, as though she knew what was coming.
“Well, weren’t you?” I repeated. “Weren’t you with him?”
“Don’t push me, Tommy,” she said softly.
“Then answer me, goddamn it!”
She looked up at me, jaws set, her eyes just beginning to water. I saw a trace of that pleading look I’d seen before, like that part of her inner self she couldn’t hide in her otherwise implacable facade.
“Please don’t push me,” she said again.
“Then answer me, Kitty. Answer that one question.”
She looked away. I saw the sharp granite planes of her profile, the straight lines of her nose, cheekbones, her jaw. And then back again. The plea gone.
“The answer is no,” she said. “I wasn’t with Thorne.”
“Then where the hell were you?” I exclaimed, uncomprehending.
“I think we’ve said enough” was her reply.
And mine, like an explosion I was incapable of stopping:
“And I think you’re one cold-hearted bitch.”
She stared at me for a split second, then without a word turned and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. I stood staring at the closed door, immobilized for the second time that night. I was, I think, quite literally afraid to move, afraid that, if the frozen scene were to shift however slightly, something terrible would inevitably follow.
How long she was gone, I can’t say. When she came out, she was wearing her familiar blue silk floor-length robe, tied by the sash with the tasseled ends. Her face was uncommonly pale, scrubbed clean, and the lines around her eyes showed fatigue clearly.
She seemed surprised to see me still there. She stopped and stared at me a moment, then looked away, as though thinking, and walked on past me. I heard her sigh deeply behind me. Then:
“Sit down,” she said tonelessly. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
I remember glancing at my watch.
“Never mind,” she said. “I know it’s late. But you asked some questions, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to give you some answers. So sit down, please.”
She had one of those Madame Récamier chaises longues in her bedroom, half chaise, half sofa, covered in the same brocaded material as the comforter. I sat on the edge of it while she stayed on her feet, pacing about while she talked.
“Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a young woman. She was very young, very inexperienced, and like most young women she wanted to be independent. She’d had boyfriends, plenty of dates, but nothing serious, and she was in no hurry on that score. She was a college graduate. She had a job, an apartment she shared with two roommates. She was taking graduate courses at night, had enough credits already for her M.A.
“And then one day she met a young man with a beard, a very good-looking young man. A little shy, serious. He wanted to be a concert pianist. In fact, he already was one, but the kind of music he played, by contemporary composers, wasn’t much in demand. Oh, he could play Chopin beautifully, Beethoven, Liszt—any one of the classics—but what he really cared about was music by people nobody outside the music schools had ever heard of. Sometimes he played pick-up piano in cocktail bars. Sometimes he worked in a bookstore. He had little money, lived with next to no furniture, ate poorly, and practiced on an old piano—it was a Knabe—that needed a new soundboard he couldn’t afford.
“And the young woman, against the better judgment of all her friends, fell in love with him. Who could say why? Maybe it was because he told her he didn’t have time for serious involvements and she took that as a challenge. Or maybe because she thought he needed her. Or because she wanted to find out what was underneath the beard. Who knows?”
I smiled at the line about the beard. I’d heard Kitty say before that only men who had something to hide wore beards. But she didn’t smile back or so much as look at me, only continued to pace while she talked, occasionally picking up some object and putting it back down, and her voice held the same monotone.
“Anyway, she ended up moving in with him. She got a better job, quit school so as to take on freelance typing. She was a very good typist. She even borrowed the money—it cost thousands of dollars—to get his piano rebuilt. She worked for him, cooked for him and his friends, cleaned house for him, even cut his hair for him. When he finally had his first New York recital, she was the one who paid for the program and, when the recital hall lost money, negotiated his way out of paying his share of the deficit.
“They lived this way for several years. There was never a question of marriage. He didn’t believe in it, for one thing. Also, he said he needed to feel free to sleep with other women, whether he actually did or not. Anyway, his career was what counted. He worked hard at it, too. He practiced morning, noon, night, weekends. Finally, after she helped him find a new agent, he began to be in some demand. His kind of music meant college campuses, mostly. He also had two small tours in Europe and played in several group recordings, which sold poorly.
“Then one year, his agent organized a tour for him on the West Coast. He’d be away for over two weeks, giving concerts from Orange County all the way up to Seattle. In the past, she’d always gone with him when he traveled, but this time she couldn’t. He went alone. They talked
on the phone almost every night. The concerts were a success; yes, he missed her, too; the reviews he’d seen had all been good.
“When he came home, he’d shaved off his beard. Should that have tipped her off? Well, it hadn’t. He’d shaved it, he said, because he felt like it. How did she like it? Though she didn’t say so, she thought he’d looked better with the beard.
“Anyway, things went back to normal. Yes, maybe he was on the phone more than usual, but he’d always talked a lot on the phone to his friends. She hadn’t realized how much he was calling, or where to, till she got the next phone bill.
“Then one day …
“He’d been back about three weeks. She’d gone to work as usual. Nothing special about the day. She’d asked him to do the shopping for dinner and take some clothes to the cleaner’s because she’d known ahead of time that she was going to have to work late. Anyway, when she got home, late, she felt something funny, some kind of premonition …
“He wasn’t there. Not only wasn’t he there, he was gone. Not only was he gone, but he’d cleaned the place out. Every item, every stick of furniture that wasn’t specifically hers, gone. Even the piano was gone.
“She found out later that he’d sold the piano and the furniture to a dealer for cash.
“No note, no telephone call. After years, nothing.
“None of his friends knew what had happened. Or if they did, they weren’t telling. His agent didn’t know, either. She even thought of calling the police, but to say what? That he’d disappeared and she was afraid something had happened to him? And that whoever had done it had taken all his stuff too, including his piano?”
She stopped talking then and, looking about for a place to sit down, finally chose the bed, the edge. She pulled the halves of her robe together and held them, hands making fists on her thighs, and gazed not at me but past me.
“She lived there alone,” she went on, “not changing anything. Waiting, she told herself. Finally—it was around six months later—she found out what had happened. He’d had a girlfriend in Los Angeles. Maybe it was somebody he’d met on the West Coast tour, or maybe he’d had her right along. Either way, the minute he’d arrived back in New York, he’d known he had to go back. He couldn’t help himself, he had to go back. He couldn’t hide it any longer, but he couldn’t tell her either. The only thing to do was make a clean break with his past, all his past, her, everything. And that’s what he did. A very clean break.”
She stood up abruptly as though she herself couldn’t stand listening to it anymore, and shook her head slowly, side to side, exhaling deeply. When she spoke again, it was to me, and the third person had been dropped, and her eyes had gone small.
“Do you know how I found out?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“He told me himself,” she said contemptuously. “He called me. Collect, if you please. It was about six months after he cleared out. He said he wanted to apologize. He knew I’d understand. He asked my forgiveness. He’d done what he had to do, that’s what he’d thought at the time. But it had all been a terrible mistake, the mistake of a lifetime. From three thousand miles away he was on his knees, begging my forgiveness. Was there any chance I’d take him back?”
She was standing near me, the robe pulled tight around her body, looking down at me.
“What did you do?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“I hung up on him,” she said. “The next day I moved out of the apartment. A couple of months after that, I married Gar Sprague.”
No matter that she’d answered none of my questions, I wanted suddenly to tell her a lot of things: that all men weren’t like that, that I wasn’t like that, that I didn’t even know how to play the piano. Et cetera, et cetera. Failing words, I wanted to take her in my arms. But there were moments when, no matter how well I thought I knew her, I found Kitty utterly unapproachable. This was one of them. So I simply sat there on her Madame Récamier sofa until she said quietly:
“I think I’d like you to go now.”
And so I did.
13
Ah, Kitten, you told such good stories. The only match for you might have been my own father, and even there I’d be going on hearsay, for though his reputation as a raconteur was widespread, I myself had been little exposed to that side of him. To him, as I’d learned over the years, I was little more than an intermittent nuisance. I’d seen little of him after I joined the firm, not surprising since he was absent from the office for long stretches, and when I left, he was conspicuously missing among the wellwishers, leaving it (again) to Mac Coombs to express the formal regrets and official Godspeeds. As with my professional life, so with my private. I don’t recall his ever expressing an opinion, either way, on my divorce from Susan, and I’m pretty sure Mary Laura and Starkie would have failed to recognize their own grandfather had they passed him on the street.
Under the circumstances, I was not only startled but a little suspicious when, a few days after Wanda Russell’s party, he called to invite me to lunch. I tried to beg off under the pressure of work, but he wouldn’t hear of it. There were several matters of some urgency he needed to discuss with me. Besides, he wanted to find out firsthand if all the rumors he’d been hearing about how well I was doing were true.
He picked me up at my office a little after noon, impeccable as ever in a gray winter coat of some cheviot material with a black fur collar and the inevitable black homburg. Perhaps he’d slowed up some, but for a man his age, whose lifespan almost matched the century, he seemed remarkably fit, like one of those spry elder-statesman types who, long after everybody thinks he’s dead, appears on the front pages of the papers on this or that mission to Moscow or Peking. He took a cursory look at my premises to satisfy his curiosity, and then we were off to the club.
“I understand you’re on the way to a very considerable success,” he said, toasting me with a very dry Gibson. “You know, it’s remarkable how some men—and you seem to be one of them—can benefit from a radical change. I’ve known any number of great success stories, but in some cases you’d never have guessed it if you’d known them in their younger years.”
An interesting comment, I thought, for a father to make about his own son.
“Point of curiosity,” I said, “but how do you know I’m on the way to a very considerable success?”
“Oh, I have my sources,” he said. Then, laughing drily, “You forget, some of the people you’re making money for are clients I brought into the firm originally. For instance, did Wanda Russell ever tell you I once had an affair with her?”
“No, she didn’t,” I said, thinking at the same time that there were, it seemed, precious few women above a certain age whom the Senator hadn’t had affairs with.
He told me about it. She’d been splendid in her youth, he said. There had even been a moment when he’d thought they might get married, but he’d chosen my mother instead. A good thing for Wanda, too, she liked to remind him, because marrying him would have kept her from Jack Russell’s millions.
“She was quite a hot number in her day,” he reminisced. “Don’t think I was the only one who thought so, either. But then she lost it, don’t we all? The only moral of the story, Tommy, is: Don’t get old.”
This brief, wry play for sympathy, if that’s what it was, reminded me that he, at least, had tried to avoid getting old by trading down in wives. The incumbent, whom I’d never met, was still somewhere in her thirties.
It took him but a short time, and a second Gibson, to get to the point of our meeting.
“The truth, Tommy?” he said, eyebrows raised, knife and fork poised over his Dover sole (grilled on the bone). “The truth is, I’m tapped out. Amazing though it may sound, this will be the last meal I’ll eat here unless I can come up with some way to meet my arrears.”
He stared at me, cutlery still aloft, as though awaiting my reaction. Surprise? Commiseration? Condemnation? In point of fact, I didn’t know how to react. His finances had
always been a mystery to me. As far as his club bill was concerned, I suppose I’d have thought that would have been the firm’s responsibility, if I’d ever thought about it, which I hadn’t.
“I see you don’t believe me,” he went on, undaunted. “But the truth is that you’re looking at a man—your own father—who’s almost eighty years old, is drowning in debt, and doesn’t have a nickel in his pockets.”
He went on, while we ate, to review his obligations, summarizing, as it were, the balance sheet and income statement of Stark Thompson Jr., which he drew with imaginary strokes of his fork on the tablecloth. Yes, he held some assets, but everything was leveraged to the hilt, he said, and even if he cashed in, he still wouldn’t net enough to pay off his debts, much less have anything to live on.
“Add it all up,” he said, carving a bottom line on the tablecloth, “and you’ve got a negative net worth. Right now, even as we speak, I’m legally bankrupt. In fact, that’s one of the options I’m considering: to declare bankruptcy and let the vultures worry about it. Now that would be a first, wouldn’t it? A Thompson declaring bankruptcy? At seventy-nine?”
Oddly, the idea didn’t seem to devastate him at all. On the contrary, togged out in an elegant business suit, with silk tie and matching handkerchief, he ate and drank with gusto even as he described his ruin. I tried to imagine what I would have done in his shoes. Without success.
“But what about the firm?” I said. “It’s had a run of very profitable years, hasn’t it?”
“Ah yes, the firm. Not as profitable as it should be, mind you. Growing too fast. Too many partners, and the overhead’s horrendous. I’ve warned Mac time and time again. But you see …” Here he hesitated, looking in his lap for his napkin, then spotting it on the floor and leaning to pick it up. “Well”—dabbing at his mouth—“what happened there, Tommy, is that they reduced my participation a couple of years ago. I didn’t like it, mind you—after all, my name’s still on the door—but some of the younger partners felt I wasn’t pulling my weight anymore. I couldn’t altogether blame them, either. I haven’t been all that active in recent years. Still …”
