Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

“I always want my portrait painted,” she said. “You probably think I’m a very vain woman. Well, maybe I am. But I like to study my face. I think I learn things from it.”

  “Also you’re in a business where your face is important,” he said. “And it’s a beautiful face—as I’m sure you’ve been told many, many times before.”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, the important thing is, are you any good?”

  “I think so.”

  “Of course you think so. I think I’m good too, but plenty of people smarter than me have told me I’m lousy. Does anyone else think you’re good?”

  “A few others,” he said.

  “Good. A few is enough. That’s all we ever need, isn’t it? Just a few others.” Her dark eyes flashed at him and she looked at him intently. “You’re not cruel, are you?” she said. “No, I think you’re kind. You have a kind face. I’m pretty good at faces. I can spot the cruel ones a mile away. How expensive are you?”

  “Well—”

  “Just say it. Dollars and cents.”

  “The thing is, Miss Morgan, I’ve never done a commissioned portrait before. The portraits I’ve done have all been for pleasure. I really have no idea of how to price myself.”

  “A thousand? Two thousand?”

  “Look,” he said, “suppose we say that if you like the portrait very much—”

  “Fine!” she said happily, clapping her hands. “If I like it very much, I’ll pay you very much—I’ll pay the moon! If I think it stinks—no charge. How’s that?”

  “Fine with me.”

  “It’s a deal!”

  “And I hope it won’t stink.”

  “Of course it won’t stink,” she said. And then, “Oh-oh!”

  “What is it?”

  “Mike, the bartender, just gave me the high sign. You-know-who is on her way in. Quick, let’s split. Back to my house where we can talk some more.” She took a quick swallow of her drink and was on her feet.

  “Do you mind holding my hand?” she said suddenly as she rose. “It always scares me, getting in and out of places like this. I don’t know why, but it always does—the way people look at me. Quick, let’s hurry. Take my hand!” He took the hand she offered, which was surprisingly small and damp and cold. Its little bones trembled at his touch and she gripped his hand hard, her nails biting into his palm. They moved swiftly, side by side, between the tables, as the hush fell again and faces turned to follow their hasty progress out of the bar.

  There were a lot of things she had to do that afternoon, after getting home from the doctor, to get Harold organized for the senior dance. It was less than a week away. The tuxedo and shoes had been ordered, but there were so many other things a man needed to get himself put together in formal clothes. She made a little list of them, starting from the bottom of her son’s anatomy. Black socks, cummerbund, suspenders (white), shirt, studs, cufflinks, white handkerchief, black bow tie. She was sure that was all. She was in Harold’s room now, trying to find a pair of black socks that matched, putting pairs of other socks together and rolling them into tidy packages and trying, while she was at it, to reduce if she could the incredible disorder of Harold’s dresser drawers. Shirts were thrown in with underwear, socks with pajamas. She finished with the socks, having found a full pair of black ones that needed only one tiny darn in a heel, and started on the small, upper-left-hand drawer that was supposed to be Harold’s handkerchief drawer. She was removing handkerchiefs, refolding them, assembling them in stacks, when she came upon a strange object. It was a moment or two before she realized what it was.

  She lifted it and looked at it with a strange mixture of emotions—fascination, amusement, bewilderment, and shock. It was one of those things men used. She believed they were properly called condoms, but she had also heard them called by a few other vulgar names. A French letter? What a strange-looking thing it was! It looked rather sinister, really. She realized, with a soft little flush of shame, that she had not seen one of these things in years and she had never, she realized, seen one in its pristine state, like this one. It was something she had always closed her eyes during—the moment when the man put it on. And the size and shape of the … appliance … gave her a very unfamiliar feeling. It was hard to believe that this was for Harold, her Harold, the little boy she had soaped in his tub. Oh, dear, she thought. Two completely different conclusions went to battle in her head. They spoke to her in English sentences. One said, “Isn’t it awful, isn’t it horrible that Harold’s been doing these things!” And the other said, “But isn’t he smart to take the proper precautions!” She didn’t really know where she stood on it, but she knew that she would have to speak to Charlie about it and suggest that Charlie have a little talk with Harold. Unless this meant that Charlie had already had some sort of talk with Harold. She felt all at once very much a foreigner in the world of men. And she also felt very much like a trespasser, poking around in his things, invading his private dresser drawers. Couldn’t a boy—man—have any privacy? She put the thing back where she had found it and had lifted the handkerchiefs to scatter them back on top of it in their original helter-skelter way when she saw, in the rearmost corner of the drawer, a wadded Kleenex. She picked it up. Something was wrapped inside it—something hard and small and gravelly and oddly heavy. She unwrapped it, and out fell a diamond wristwatch with a diamond band.

  She stood very still for a long time looking at it. It wouldn’t go away, and it was such an ugly little watch. As ugly as Jane Willey. Uglier. For long, blind minutes her head was empty of every thought but that one, and she seemed to have stopped breathing. Had she suspected this all along? Oh, yes. Yes, she had. That afternoon, talking to the policeman, she had thought of it—Harold, bounding up the stairs like a colt that night, wanting five dollars, going to fetch her purse. Yes, she had thought of it then. Harold. Harold went upstairs that night. But she had instantly pushed it out of her consciousness, pushed it fiercely back into the farthermost, darkest corner of that messy dresser drawer that was her mind.

  Then she knew very quickly what she had to do. It was terribly simple, brilliantly clear. She saw what she had to do almost in retrospect, as though in memory, as though she had already done it. She scooped up the watch and dropped it into the pocket of her blue cotton skirt. She ran down the stairs and out the door and up the street to the Willeys’ house.

  Jane Willey looked a little startled, and not particularly pleased, to see her standing at the door. Jane’s hair was up in enormous plastic rollers.

  “Oh, Jane,” Nancy said, “I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this, but I need your help.…”

  Jane looked suspicious. “Yes?” she said. “What is it?”

  “Jane, I’m just in the most awful fix. I’m trying to figure out what to do with my dining room. I’m thinking of yellow for the drapes, or maybe a gold—you know, a metallic? And green for the chairs. But my rug is blue and gold, and all of a sudden I’m all mixed up and don’t know what to do. I’m afraid I’m going to make a terribly expensive mistake. And your house is so lovely, you have such beautiful taste! I just thought maybe I could get your advice!”

  “Well, come on in,” Jane said, now looking very friendly. “Come on in here,” she said, leading Nancy into the small study off the front hall. “I call this my workroom,” she said.

  “You’re wonderful to help me, Jane.”

  Jane went to a cabinet. “I keep a file,” Jane said, opening a drawer. “I call it my Idea File.…”

  Nancy spent perhaps half an hour sitting beside Jane on the sofa, poring over Jane’s Idea File, looking at pictures of interiors, all clipped from the pages of glossy magazines. “Oh, now there’s an idea!” Nancy kept murmuring. “Pale blue—I never thought about that.” And, “Oh, that would be pretty too.”

  “I always say beware of stripes.”

  Finally Nancy said, “Jane—I’m sorry—do you suppose I could use your john?”

  “Oh, sure,” Jane said. “Use mine, upstairs—you kno
w where it is.”

  “Thanks, Jane.”

  Upstairs, in the bathroom, she closed the door and turned on the cold water in the bowl.

  Then, on her hands and knees on the floor, she had only one last desperate hope. Jane Willey was such an immaculate housekeeper. It seemed impossible to hope for what she wanted, that any tiny area had been overlooked. But then, with a wild joy, she saw what she had prayed for behind the toilet bowl in the corner where the base of the bowl met the tile: dust, several weeks’ accumulation of it, and tiny balls of lint, and a pretty little curled pubic hair and—oh, yes—a small urine stain on the tile. She placed the watch in the dust and whispered, “Good-bye.” She stood up and flushed the unused toilet, trusting that the water would make the customary noises as it traveled downward through the pipes. Then she washed her hands, dried them, and went downstairs.

  “Jane, you’re a godsend,” she said. “You’re solving all my problems,” and she sat down with her again.

  She spent perhaps another twenty minutes. Then, with several borrowed magazine pages, thanking Jane profusely all over again, she went home.

  She went directly to Harold’s room. He would be home at any minute. Taking a sheet of Harold’s perforated notebook paper from his binder, she sat at his desk and wrote: “That watch was not yours. It was Mrs. Willey’s. I have returned it to her house.”

  She read the words that she had written and could not even recognize her handwriting; her hand had shaken so that the letters came out queerly cramped and pointed. Her eyes blurred. Quickly she added, “No one knows. Mother,” and folded the note and placed it in the back of his handkerchief drawer, exactly where the watch had been, next to that thing of his. She dumped in the handkerchiefs and closed the drawer. She sat down hard on the bed, like a little girl who has been scolded for disturbing the class and who has been sent to a seat in the back of the room, folded her hands in her lap, and began to cry.

  When Charlie drove home that evening from Tessa Morgan’s house he was surprised to find the Lane closed off with a barrier of sawhorses and clogged with steamrollers, oilers, and trucks full of steaming tar. He parked his rattly old heap—he hadn’t been able to stop thinking of it as that—at the head of the street and walked down it to his house, walking on the grass to keep his sponge-rubber-soled shoes out of the fresh tar.

  “Well, I guess they decided to go ahead and do it without us,” he said to Nancy, referring to the road.

  “What? Oh, yes, I guess so,” she said.

  “You’re not still upset about it are you?”

  “No … no.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!”

  “This new doctor you’ve been going to seems to make you kind of edgy,” he said. And then, after a minute or two he said, “Well, you haven’t asked me how it went with Tessa Morgan.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, darling. I completely forgot this was the day. Yes, tell me—how did it go?”

  “It went very well,” he said. “I’m hired.”

  It was several days before Harold said anything to her or gave her any indication that he had found the note. Then one afternoon he burst in on her in her bedroom, where she was sitting, in her slip and stockings, brushing her hair. He stood in the door looking at her, his face twisted with such utter rage and loathing that she could not believe that it was he, her once-handsome son.

  “What’s the matter!” she screamed at him. “How dare you look at me like that! After I saved you from—from God knows what. How dare you look at me like that!”

  “Aw, cool it, Mom!” he said.

  “What does that expression mean?”

  “This!” he said and spat at her.

  “Oh, Harold!” she cried. “Oh, get out of here! I don’t want to look at you! Get out of here, you disgusting, filthy brat! Get out!”

  But it was an unnecessary order. He had already left the room.

  She flung her hairbrush after him. It struck the freshly painted wall of the hall outside, leaving a small, round hole.

  And it was several more days before Nancy Lord learned, from Genny McCarthy, that Jane Willey’s watch had been recovered. Later Nancy ran into Jane at the supermarket. Jane was pushing a shopping cart. It always amazed Nancy—the things people filled their baskets with. Jane’s today seemed filled to brimming with nothing but cake mixes.

  They chatted briefly, and then Nancy said, “I was so pleased to hear you’d found your watch.”

  “Yes, damn it,” Jane said crossly. “Mary found it. Behind the toilet—so she says. She’s got to be lying because I know she never cleans there. She really is the most stupid girl and I could kill her. Obviously she took it. Why couldn’t she have got rid of it, sold it to a fence or something? They were just about to pay the claim, and I had a lovely new one all picked out. But no. She had to get cold feet and bring it back. Excuse me,” she said, “but I’d better get into line before that other woman grabs that spot. Good-bye.” She hurried off, calling back over her shoulder to Nancy, “Say, doesn’t our Lane look scrumptious? Aren’t you glad you decided to go along with us?”

  8

  A few days after his discharge from the army, his sister, Cathy, had flown east to see him. They had gone to lunch at the Modern Museum, and she had outlined her plan to him. “I’ve really been thinking about this for a long time,” she said, “but I wanted to wait until you were out, sprung from the army, before discussing it with you.” He had never seen her more animated or excited, and she looked wonderful. The California sun had done nice things to her skin and hair. “I’ve really met an awful lot of people in this past year,” she said. “Made contacts, as we say on Mad Ave. I’ve mentioned it to several—several top people, and they all think it’s a simply splendid idea. What we’d be, you see, would be a copy and art service—at least at the beginning. There’s really a tremendous need out there for that sort of thing—much more so than in New York. In New York everything’s sewed up by the big agencies. But out there there are all sorts of new businesses springing up—small businesses, but they still want to advertise, and to do good advertising. But they’re small, and so the bigger agencies sort of give them the back of their hand. What they need, what they’re desperate for, is a small agency, like we’d be, to give them lots of personal attention and work closely with them. Now, for instance, I’ve spoken to—”

  The more she talked, the more appealing the idea sounded to him. He had certainly spent plenty of time in the army wondering about a job when he got out, about a career, about what his life would be. This idea was certainly much more definite than anything he had come up with. And it would be a bold, strong step—striking out on their own. The idea involved a certain reckless daring, which he also liked. He and Cathy had never been timid people. They had always reminded themselves of that. And they would never be timid people. Charlie had only one real reservation about it, and that was because it was Los Angeles. The West Coast still seemed a little alien to him.

  “I really don’t think it would go over back here, Charlie,” she said seriously. “I think it’s got to be Los Angeles. You see, everything is still so young out there, so booming—but you’ve got to grab it quick and get it by the tail. Because I really think Los Angeles is going to be the biggest city in the world some day—awful thought. Oh, I know it’s ugly—awful, vulgar, and ugly. But, Charlie, it’s so awful, ugly, and vulgar that it’s hysterically funny! It really is the joke city of all time, and I think you’d love it because the joke’s always on it, if you know what I mean, and not on you. Charlie, you’d drive around Beverly Hills and die laughing. There’s one Chinese drive-in restaurant that I’ve got to show you—you’d simply collapse over it. No words to describe! And the people—oh, there are plenty of slobs and s.o.b.’s, of course, but there are some wonderful ones too. And then there’s that glorious ocean—beautiful beaches—”

  “Like Nahant?” he asked her with a smile.

  “Like Nahant all year round
!”

  “Of course it’s a terrific gamble, Cathy,” he said after a moment.

  “Isn’t everything? Of course it’s a gamble, and we may lose our shirts. But even if we lose we’ll lose with such—such splendor!” she said.

  That had convinced him that it was worth a try.

  “Talk it over with Nancy before you decide,” she said. “See what she thinks.”

  He had talked it over with Nancy that night, and she had agreed that it was worth a try. She trusted Cathy, and Cathy’s ideas were nearly always good ones. And Nancy had always liked Southern California. When they moved there she had fallen in love with a particular canyon in Bel-Air. In each of the various apartments and houses they lived in during those years Nancy had seen to it that they kept moving closer and closer to Bel-Air.

  It was about six months after the partnership was formed, when their books had begun to move gradually into the black, that Cathy announced to him that she was going to marry Reginald Bailey. There was something offhand about the way she made her announcement, though, that puzzled him.

  “What’s he like?” he had asked her. He had never heard her mention that name before.

  “Oh, he’s thirty-five,” she said. “And he’s been married before. No children, though.”

  “What else?”

  “He’s about six feet tall. Sandy hair. Nice-looking. He’s executive vice-president of a big construction company. They make hideous little Levittown houses, but they make pots and pots of money at it. He’s a health nut, which is a bit of a bore. Eats health foods. Doesn’t smoke or drink, though of course I like to do both. But I guess I can get used to that.”

  “Do you love him, Cathy?”

  “I told you I’m going to marry him, didn’t I?” she said.

  Her marriage hadn’t seemed to affect their partnership much—at least not at the beginning. Reginald Bailey, when Charlie and Nancy met him, seemed like an affable enough fellow, and he certainly seemed to take nice care of Cathy. He had a large apartment in Westwood overlooking the U.C.L.A. campus, and a beach house at Malibu, where they spent weekends. Through him, but indirectly, Cathy had been able to bring a little more capital into their firm. But Charlie and Reggie Bailey had never had very much in common. And Reggie Bailey never seemed particularly interested in what Charlie and Cathy were doing. In fact, he seemed to regard the partnership as something they were doing for their own amusement. It was a little later that Charlie began to see that Reggie Bailey was a bit of a social snob and to suspect that Reggie was ashamed of having a wife who worked. Reggie would say, in a loud voice at parties, “Of course Cathy doesn’t have to work. She’s doing it for the fun of it.” Cathy never said anything when he made remarks like this. She merely looked into space, her blue eyes growing wider. In the office she worked even harder.