It had become so much more than a radio program. It had become, in time, an ideal marriage placed on display every morning for eight years, a model marriage that had been celebrated in three national magazines (one cover), a sophisticated blend of two disparate personalities.
Marriage … show—it had been a curious relationship. When the show had begun, marriage was new. As the show took on a life of its own, the marriage became somehow less alive. Now, Gillian reflected, it was almost as though the relationship had been parasitic, as though the show had begun to suck the life juices from the marriage it honored. It was the show that ate up long hours with a new book; it was the show that had at first determined there would be no children (until William’s sterility had been medically established); it was the show that had required the presence of the twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of Vassar. It was the show that prevented Gillian from contemplating such eminently logical solutions as murder or divorce.
Screwed. Gillian let her clothes fall on the dressing room carpet and studied the mirrored full-length portrait of herself. She understood her value to men, had felt their reaction often enough. Guests on the show, construction workers, taxi drivers—they all reacted. And why shouldn’t they?
Her skin, the color of India tea at summer’s end, flowed nicely over a slender frame. The breasts were small but she wore them well at age twenty-nine. Her legs were superbly designed. The hips, though trim, were deceptively full. Gillian advanced on the mirror, appraised the close-up image. Her long hair was light and now sun-streaked, gathered in a mist around her shoulders. If her lips were a trifle small, they nonetheless served to accentuate the perfectly straight line of her nose. The total effect was a blend of the aristocratic and the sensual.
Gillian turned from the mirror. The mirror, after all, couldn’t reflect the most essential attribute of them all. Gillian walked to the bar, made herself a pitcher of martinis, sat drinking, naked in the Eames chair—cold leather against skin, nice. The major quality was something reactive, a chameleon quality that somehow enabled her to transform herself in the eyes of any man. She could become—and she had felt the process often enough to know its validity—pale of skin, full-breasted, intellectual, sexy, aloof. She could be whatever the man happened to be looking for at the moment. She could become any man’s dream woman, and somehow accomplish it without relinquishing her own identity.
William had noticed this, had noticed it but never understood it. He had somehow confused it with coquettishness. Whenever a male guest would challenge Gillian, would display an intellectual vigor or simple male virility, Gillian would, as William put it so inadequately, “flutter her fan.” William claimed to have developed an emotional radar to his wife’s vibrations, but William so often missed the point, mislabeled the process. It was a process of becoming. It existed not in mechanical tricks but in acute sensitivity; it took place not in her physical alterations but in the eye of the beholder.
Hers was a talent that ought to be intensively exploited, thought Gillian, before she fell asleep. It was a deep but disturbed sleep, a heavy buzzing sleep that ended shortly after eight o’clock with the arrival of an unfaithful husband.
“For chrissake, look at yourself,” he said. “It’s past eight for chrissake.”
“That’s cute,” she said. “Do you do the weather too?”
“I mean it, it’s eight-damn-o’clock.”
“So it’s eight o’clock,” she said. “So what?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember. The damn party begins at 8:30. Oh no you don’t, don’t give me one of those looks. This wasn’t my idea. You were the one who told me about it, an end-of-summer blast, remember? Two houses over and one down. The wops. Remember now?”
The details returned to Gillian—of course, the party—and she stood up. Not until that instant did she realize she was still naked. She walked over to William, brushed meaningfully against him, then noticed the fresh lipstick prints on his collar. Those slight red smudges—was it carelessness, stupidity, a Freudian reflection of guilt?—irritated her almost as much as the thought of his infidelity. That bastard.
“We don’t have to go to the party,” she teased. “We could stay home and … oh … christen the new house properly. It’s been a long time, Billy.”
“We’ve got to get a move on.…”
“But isn’t there anything you’d rather do?” she said. “Any little thing I might do for you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact there is,” he said. “One little thing you could do for me is hurry-the-hell-up and get into something decent. It’s bad enough we’ve got to go through this thing. Let’s not make it any more complicated than we have to.”
But it was complicated, extremely complicated. For at that moment Gillian was settling finally on her plan of action. As she selected her dress for the party—emerald green, high in front, low in back—Gillian found herself shivering. In anticipation.
The only uncomfortable moment of the evening came when their hosts—Mario and Donna Marie Vella—greeted them at the door. Donna Marie was short, stout and faintly mustachioed; she looked as though she might faint dead away at the thought of having the Billy and Gilly in her home. And Mario’s introductory act, his welcoming gesture, was to hand William his business card, embossed, indicating that he was the executive officer of both the Bella Mia Olive Oil Company and the Fort Sorrento Construction Company.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” William said, as only he could say it.
“We certainly appreciate,” Gillian said, stepping on his line, “your inviting us newcomers to your home.”
After that, needless to say, matters improved. There was, as Gillian had anticipated, a wide selection of men. Fat, thin, short, tall, introverted, extroverted, dumpy, dashing—the full assortment. She mentally resolved not to rush things. At first she contented herself with remaining beside William, allowing him to squeeze her hand and pat her cheek—doing what he had always done, putting the model marriage on public display. Oh, you electronic lovebird, she thought. William was, in fact, the first subject, the first of the adult males residing in King’s Neck to come under Gillian’s scrutiny that evening.
He was, she decided, the best looking man in the room. Best looking, in the conventional sense. William had been told in his youth that some day he would be able to serve as a stand-in for Prince Philip. Now, approaching his middle years, he more closely resembled the well-dressed dummies in the Brooks Brothers windows. Bland. But he was still trim (regular workouts at the New York Athletic Club), polished (Princeton), at ease with the mighty (scion of the banking Blakes) and an asset to any gathering. The one apparent flaw was a jawline that lacked definition. Oh, say it—a weak chin.
Before beginning his second drink, William had managed to surround himself with those few people of King’s Neck who might qualify as resident intellectuals—such people as Rabbi Joshua Turnbull and lawyer Melvin Corby. There was, too, an outer concentric circle of women, the kind of women who always basked in that invisible light cast by certifiable celebrities.
“And I’ll maintain,” William was saying, “that without parties such as these, suburbia, per se, would disintegrate before our eyes. These are, after all, not merely social gatherings. They are, in the psychological sense, encounters—they’re what we have instead of group therapy. It’s my sincere feeling that if everyone in the country would go to just one suburban party a week, psychoanalysis would soon go out of vogue.”
Gillian’s shrug turned into a shudder. William was doing his Hugh Downs imitation—locating his conversation on the right side of pompous and the wrong side of stuffy. His voice—a narcissistic and mellifluent instrument of torture—was professionally resonant, overwhelmingly smooth, always able to intimidate lesser voices and superior intellects in any gathering. The immediate conversation was more than passingly familiar to Gillian; it was a replay of last Tuesday’s radio show. Gillian edged slowly away from the group and her space was filled by a plump and matr
only woman with eyes that were devouring William.
Working her way toward the bar in an adjacent room, Gillian paused to take note of the décor. Fake beams that had been scarred by an ineptly wielded claw hammer; tapestried walls; lampshades with fringes; gaudy oil paintings of watery sunsets and Italian hill villages; everything overstuffed and red and silk. Expensive and atrocious.
On her way she met the Goodmans—Marvin and Helene. She walked unannounced into what seemed to be a family quarrel of some duration. Marvin Goodman’s voice was raised, and tiny bubbles of perspiration were bursting on his forehead: “Ernie Miklos’s wife says she can get by on thirty-five dollars a week—thirty-five dollars a week for food and car.” By way of response, Helene Goodman calmly and methodically unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse. Gillian noted a strange phenomenon—as her husband’s voice rose, so did her bustline. It led to a lowering of his eyes, a lowering of his voice and finally an end to the discussion.
Then she encountered her next-door neighbors, the Earbrows—Morton and Gloria. Morton’s fingernails carried the residue of his day’s labors, a colorful mixture of green paint and grease. He was sound asleep. His young wife, Gloria, was holding the attention of a small male audience by explaining precisely how one scraped paint from cement walls, the proper way of cleaning a paint brush, the relative advantages of a Black and Decker five-eighths-inch drill, what steps should be taken to prepare a lawn for a fall seeding—all of this while her husband snored his way into an ever-deepening sleep.
Gillian turned to meet Willoughby Martin and his friend, Hank. Willoughby was saying, “We really must take a drive soon; the foliage in Maine is already changing and before too long it will all just be … oh … a riot of color.”
And Hank said, “Yes, in a few weeks it should be simply breathtaking.”
Then Gillian was introduced to the Madigans—Agnes and Paddy. “Paddy Madigan, the fighter?” she said.
“That’s right, dear,” Agnes said. “Many think the finest left-handed fighter ever to contend for the light-heavyweight championship of the world.”
Gillian then complimented Paddy Madigan on his remarkable physical condition. Paddy said nothing and Agnes did the responding: “Thank you, dear, we still manage to do our morning workouts, summer or winter, makes no difference.” Gillian then asked Paddy what business he had entered since his retirement. Again Agnes answered for her husband: “Oh, we just putter around the house these days, doing the gardening and so forth.”
At this point, what Gillian wanted was another drink. Before she could reach the bar, Mario Vella, their host for the evening, was standing up on a stool, calling for everyone’s attention.
“Quiet, please,” Mario said. “Please now, ladies and gentlemen, quiet down now. Tonight, by way of a little entertainment, we have a very special surprise for our neighbors at King’s Neck. I have persuaded my very good friend, Johnny Alonga, to come here and favor us with a few of his hit songs.”
Gillian was momentarily surprised. Johnny Alonga was a rising young singing star, reportedly Mafia-sponsored, who had sung a song, “A Dying Love,” that had been on the charts for over a year. There had not yet been a second hit record. Possibly because Johnny Alonga’s syrupy voice made Jerry Vale’s seem crisp by comparison.
As all the lights except one were extinguished, two men in tuxedos entered from the bedroom. The black man sat at the piano and quickly picked out the opening notes of Johnny Alonga’s one hit record. And the singer began to sing.
You come to me in all my dreams,
You touch my lips, or so it seems,
Your love is but a kiss away
If only I could make you stay
A dying love,
A dying love is what we share.…
In the darkened room, now thirstier than ever, Gillian was suddenly aware of the presence beside her of Mario Vella. He had allowed his left elbow to brush gently against her. In any other surroundings, in any other circumstances, Gillian Blake would have gracefully withdrawn. She didn’t. She held her ground and his elbow became more persistent.
“You like?” he said.
“Very much,” she said in return. “That’s quite a thing, having Johnny Alonga come to your house to sing.”
“I own him,” he said.
“You own him?”
“Forty per cent,” Mario said. “That’s how much I own. And you want to know what I think about that song?”
“What’s that?”
“It makes me sick to my stomach,” he said. “It makes me want to puke.”
“Oh?” she said, silently agreeing.
There might be something there, she thought. There was an appealingly unreal quality to Mario Vella; he was a fabrication, the creation of someone or something else. Beneath the razor cut and the tailored clothes and the scent of expensive cologne there was something threatening to break out of the mold. It was, carried to the extreme, as though someone had put Brooks Brothers clothes on a gorilla.
Then the song ended and Mario disengaged his elbow and walked back up to the piano.
Before Johnny Alonga could launch his next number—“Be My Love,” no less—Gillian slipped into the adjoining room, the den, the bar, the oasis. It was all but deserted in honor of Johnny Alonga.
It was then that she met the Franhops—Arthur and Raina. Arthur, the boy, was wearing his hair twisted and curled in the style popularized by Bob Dylan. Beneath his gold-buttoned, double-breasted blazer he wore no shirt. Raina, the girl, was seated in a far corner of the room staring at an unblemished white wall with wide-open Little Orphan Annie eyes.
“Don’t mind her,” Arthur said. “She’s on acid.”
“LSD?” Gillian said.
“Yeah, like acid,” Arthur said. “We were all set to play a new game tonight and then she has to go and suck on a cube and ruin it all.”
“What kind of game?” Gillian asked.
“Time Machine,” Arthur said. “We thought we’d go back in time, all the way back here to the seventeenth century, and see what the cats were doing back then. Then she goes and sucks a cube and ruins the game.”
“You mean you think most of the people here live in the seventeenth century?”
“Where else?” he said. “Not you, though, you’re something else. Outasight. Hey, do you groove?”
“I’m not sure,” Gillian said. “Do you speak English?”
“Hey, later,” he said.
That was Arthur Franhop’s exit line. Without another word he was gone. He paused just long enough to take his blind-eyed Raina with him, and moments later the quiet suburban night was rent by the sound of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle being fired up.
“Shit!” The expletive came from the last man in the room, the bartender. This was Ernie Miklos, a man who had once tended bar in his youth and willingly played the role at most of the King’s Neck parties. For one thing, it gave him an excuse to stay away from his wife Laverne.
“I beg your pardon,” Gillian said.
“Shit,” he repeated. “That kid, he’s shit. What’re you drinking?”
“Martini-very-dry.”
“That’s shit too,” Ernie Miklos said. “Burn your guts out.”
“That’s the way I started the day,” Gillian said. “And I guess that’s the way I better end it.”
There was something about Ernie Miklos that Gillian found vaguely intimidating. Possibly his eyes. Ernie’s eyes met her own head-on and then insolently surveyed her from top to bottom. Possibly it was the hair on the back of his hands—so thick and luxurious a growth of hair that it seemed more like fur than hair, more like a paw than a hand. The two open shirt buttons above the loosely knotted tie revealed still another thick stand of hair.
“Where’s your wife?” Gillian asked.
“The last time I saw Laverne,” Ernie said, “she was drooling all over your husband. Not that. I personally give a shit. How do you like it?”
“Very good,” Gillian said. “You make
a nice martini.”
She took another sip. It was a nice martini. A nice martini and an odd moment. They stood there, the only people in the room, and they didn’t say a word for three, maybe four moments. What to say anyway? Gillian knew that she had nothing at all to say to Ernie Miklos, and quite probably he had nothing at all to say to her. But was she sure? She had, after all, spent twenty-nine years on this planet without ever attempting a conversation with an Ernie Miklos or anyone, for that matter, who remotely resembled him. Finally it was Ernie Miklos who broke the silence with an eminently logical question.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he said. “Why is a broad like you wasting time with someone like me?”
“Maybe it’s because you make a nice martini.”
“Yeah and maybe it’s because I look like Richard Burton,” he said. “But that ain’t the reason either.”
“Maybe you can figure it out for yourself.”
“I am doing that,” Ernie said. “That is exactly what I am doing. I am figuring it out for myself and about the only way I can figure it is that you want something from me.”
“What would I want from you?” Gillian said.
“Maybe you would want to step outside for a while and find out,” Ernie said.
“Maybe,” Gillian said.
“You want to step outside for some fresh air or what?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
Yes—Gillian heard herself saying the word. It seemed so unnatural, so contrived, that she had the feeling she had shouted it through a megaphone. Ernie Miklos didn’t say any more. He dried his hands on his bartender’s apron, took off the apron and walked over to the plate glass doors that opened onto the patio. He had clearly had too much to drink, and the latch gave him a moment’s difficulty. Wordlessly, floating again, Gillian followed Ernie Miklos out beyond the reach of the patio lights. A strange feeling. Gillian had the eerie sensation that she was not actually a participant in the small silent tableau. She was an observer, audience for an unreal drama, a spectator at the theater of the absurd.
Naked Came the Stranger Page 3
