Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Would you, Tessa?”

  “To save myself, yes, I suppose I would. But I’m such a bloody awful liar anyway—I don’t know.”

  “But your lies you know are lies. That’s different.”

  “Or maybe you’re an artist,” she said with a trace of a smile.

  Suddenly she leaped up and ran across the room to him, knelt on the floor in front of him, and took both his hands in one of hers, looking up at him intently, soberly. It was her eyes, he had often thought, that had made her what she was, the film star, the celebrity—not jumping out of cakes. Without the eyes, or with other eyes, her face would have been unremarkable. But the eyes were huge, dark, liquid, and full of small electric glints. Her whole spirit was bottled in those eyes. “But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “It didn’t matter to me because I loved you then. You forget, I didn’t really want my portrait painted. I wanted a man. It never mattered whether I liked the picture—not to me. It wouldn’t have mattered, Charlie, whether you were any good or not, because I loved you then.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, and I loved you.”

  “Would you have married me?” He took another swallow from his glass, and she said, “No—don’t answer that. I know the answer.”

  “Tessa—”

  “I’m an old horse trader, so it doesn’t matter. If I give something to some guy, and the guy doesn’t give anything back to me, then the hell with him. That’s me, a horse trader—like my old man. So it doesn’t matter.” Just as quickly she was on her feet again and moving away from him. “And maybe I don’t need to remind you that whatever your wife says—like what I said—or whatever she thinks of you, like what I thought, doesn’t matter. If she loves you.”

  “You know I always sort of envied you,” he said. “You have so much. I always considered you a lucky woman. You have success—the kind of success I used to want. Everything.”

  “I always thought that you were lucky too, Lord Charles—a game winner. You had a wife, kids—nice house, things like that.”

  “But the house is gone now. I’ve fouled up everything. A new job—but it looks like I’ve fouled that up too. And Nancy …” He drained his glass. “I’d better go.”

  With her back to him she said, “Lord Charles, listen to me, you sad son of a bitch. I’ve heard—I have my spies—I keep my ear to the ground. I know what’s been happening to you, all the trouble. I know you’ve had a lot of lousy damn trouble, your poor kid—I know all that.”

  “Never mind that, Tessa.”

  “Just listen to me, hear me out, please. A lot of the trouble was money, wasn’t it? I’ve heard. But I’m rich. I want to give you some money. Shut up and let me finish! I’ve got more money than I can ever use, I’ve got a fucking fortune. Nobody to leave it to, no kids, just a lot of money-grubbing relatives. I want to give you a hundred thousand dollars. Would that help? We’ll work it out so she’ll never know where it came from. I know you need it—so take it.” She turned to face him and he saw that her face was full of little anxious lines. “You heard what I said. I mean it. Take it. Please.”

  He was standing now. “No, Tessa. No, I didn’t mean that,” he said. “No, no.” His voice was flying away from him now. “No—thanks anyway. I’ve got to go.”

  “You’ve never learned to take things, have you? People offer you things, but you never take them. It’s hard to learn to take, Lord Charles—harder than learning to give, I think. Why can’t you learn that simple rule? When someone wants to give—take.”

  “I’m sorry, no.” Outside the closed library door he could hear the heavy tread of male footsteps in the hall. “Your guest is getting impatient,” he said.

  “I’ve finally learned it, I think—to take. Maybe it was even harder for me because I’ve lived in the make-believe world of the silver screen. You said that once.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember saying that.…”

  “Well, maybe it was someone else. But you’ve never learned.”

  “It’s just that I have a certain code—”

  “Ah you and your code. They call me a whore, but you’re a whore too—a whore to your bloody code. You sell out every day to that bloody code.”

  “I don’t, Tessa. I—”

  “Code me no codes. You’re like any man. Cheat on your wife, screw another woman, then, when you’ve had enough, go trotting back to the wife and kids, feeling proud. Proud that you’ve done the right thing. By going back, you’ve honored your code. I’m a whore because I’ve no place to go to, but you go home and you’re a hero. Let me tell you something, Lord Charles. Your make-believe is bigger than mine.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You don’t love that wife and those kids. You only make believe you do. You love nobody.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. I know it now. You make believe you love them, just the way you made believe you loved me.”

  “I didn’t make believe, Tessa.”

  “Then marry me,” she said.

  “No.…”

  “See what I mean? So I’m going to have to throw you out again,” she said. “Where you’ll go I’ve no idea. But there’s the door, Lord Charles.” She pointed. “Out.”

  “Yes.…”

  “Out, quick, before the crowd gets ugly.”

  “Yes,” he said, and he turned and went out through the door, through the house, and out the front door.

  There were a few things left that they had planned to take with them in the car. But now of course there was no car. The greatest emergencies in life could express themselves in such banal ways—in terms of cartage, for instance.

  The only thing left to be packed was the coffee pot. From some sensible, housewifely sort of instinct, she felt that hot coffee should be preserved in the house until the last. It was hot, now, on the burner, and there was enough left for a cup or two. Wherever she had lived, the coffee pot, kept warm on the gas ring, had always seemed to her the heart of the house. It was another commonplace, the coffee pot, pathetic in its ordinariness, but steaming there in the empty kitchen it now seemed to her a symbol of everything she had ever loved or wanted.

  Carla had come into the kitchen to help her finish packing, and Harold was carrying boxes out to the door.

  Nancy licked a gummed label and secured it to a box. “Put your finger on this knot, dear,” she said to Carla, pulling the string up and around.

  “You’re so efficient, Mother,” Carla said admiringly. “Everything wrapped and labeled. Were you always so efficient?”

  “It’s important to be efficient, in everything you do.”

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’s—gone out.”

  “Doesn’t he know we’re ready to load the car?”

  Nancy said nothing.

  “Daddy’s upset about us moving to the apartment, isn’t he?” Carla said.

  “We all are—a little.”

  Carla opened a cupboard door and lifted out a heavy book. It was “1,001 Sandwiches and How to Prepare Them.” “Aren’t we going to take this?” Carla asked, and giggled. “Remember those barfy sandwiches Daddy used to fix?”

  Nancy studied the cover of the book. It was frayed, and wore several large stains, apparently from mayonnaise. “Yes, take it, Carla,” she said. “It’s your father’s book. Let him have his book.”

  Harold came in for a final load of packages and, leaving, paused halfway out the swinging door. “Dad’s a failure, isn’t he, Mom,” he said.

  “Don’t say such things about your father, Harold.”

  “Well, he is, though. That’s the thing,” Harold said, and swung out through the door.

  And now Carla was in tears. “I don’t want to live in an apartment,” she said. “I don’t want to leave this house. A dinky old apartment isn’t any kind of home!”

  Nancy stared at the coffee pot. Then she said, “You’re right.” She repeated it. And then, very quickly, she said, “Carla, run outside for a minute, will you? T
here’s a telephone call I want to make.”

  There was a high embankment supporting the truss bridge that crossed the New Haven Railroad tracks. Charlie had passed the place many times. He pulled his car over to the side of the road and got out, and stepped quickly over the wire retaining fence. As he started across the dry grass, grasshoppers came snapping out like sparks from a fire on either side of him, and he crossed the grass till it ended and he was on a gravelly stretch where the pebbles gritted noisily beneath the soles of his tennis sneakers. Then he was on the stone lip of the embankment, where a few scraggy dandelions gripped the spaces between the heavy stones. What a marvelously adaptable plant a dandelion was. It grew rank and luxuriant and tall in a lawn like Tessa’s, or it flattened itself against a crack in a rock. Wherever its seed fell, it grew. His sneaker toes were on the edge of the embankment, and he looked slowly down. The four sets of parallel tracks on the railroad bed glittered in the slanting sunlight, sixty or seventy feet below. Silver tracks that led to the gold fields. Yes, in the backmost corner of his mind he had always had that certainty. He had never been able to expel it. Your father did this too, its voice said. He must have, which meant that it was part of a design, a configuration. Your father, your sister, and now it seems to be your turn to go and find whatever precious metals lie where parallel lines meet. He stood there, looking down at the tracks.

  “Hey, what you doing up there?” It was a crewman, a Negro, working on the tracks, shirtless, so dark that he was nearly camouflaged against the black stones of the roadbed.

  “Nothing,” Charlie called, stepping back into the dandelions. “Just picking flowers.”

  “You could fall from up there, man!”

  Charlie threw him a brief salute, then turned and walked back to his car. A man could fall from anywhere. But he was not going to make still another empty gesture.

  The car turned east, then west, toward the village.

  In the outdoor phone booth, he groped for a dime in his pocket, found one, and dialed a number. “Paul?” he said when the man answered. “It’s Charlie Lord.”

  “Hello, Charlie.”

  “Paul,” he said, “that job just isn’t right for me. I’m sorry, Paul. I hope you understand.”

  “Well, I’m sorry too,” Paul said. And then, “What are your plans, Charlie?”

  “Oh, I’ll find something,” Charlie said. “Advertising. Something. Don’t worry about me. Something will turn up. Something always has.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Well, good luck to you, boy.”

  Then, with another dime, he dialed his own number. He tried it several times. But the line remained busy.

  When he drove into the driveway, he was grateful to see Harold sitting on the front step, smoking a cigarette. He was glad, because he was not quite ready to face Nancy yet, and to say to her all the things he had to say. Charlie climbed out of the car and came up the walk to Harold. “Hello, Harold,” he said.

  Harold gave him a little absent nod. There was still a little gold left in the day, and the trees were filled with the whine of cicadas; it was still warm.

  Harold, he noticed, was wearing an old pair of Charlie’s khaki trousers. “Hey, aren’t those my pants?” Charlie asked. He sat down beside Harold on the steps, with a sigh. “Where has the time gone?”

  “That’s right, Dad.” There was liquor on the old man’s breath. So that’s where he’d been. Well, that was probably the way it went when they started going downhill. They took to the booze, started warming bar stools. Chasing after dames.

  “Maybe it’s because I never knew my own father,” Charlie said. “Maybe that’s been the trouble.”

  “Trouble with what?” Funny, the sound the damn cicadas made, or locusts or katydids, or whatever the hell they were. A hot, whirring sound that pierced your damn eardrums. It was probably sex. Everything was.

  “We should have done more things together. I want to give you some tennis lessons. You’ve got the build for it, Harold. It’s such a wonderful game.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  Harold hitched up his trousers, revealing collapsed socks above a pair of dilapidated loafers. There was still a lot of the little boy in Harold, in spite of his maturity. But he was a good-looking boy, clean-jawed, clean-limbed. “Let’s play some tennis tomorrow,” Charlie said.

  “Fine, Dad.”

  “And don’t worry—we’ll get you back into college somewhere.”

  “As a matter of fact, Dad, I’ve been thinking. I don’t really want to go to college,” Harold said.

  “What do you want to do instead?”

  “Oh, get a job somewhere. Hack around. Maybe get a job on a tramp steamer, and go around the world. Or join the Peace Corps. Or join the army and go to Vietnam.” That would be the greatest, that tramp steamer bit. Tramping around the world on a tramp steamer, your ass in the breeze all day long.…

  “Oh, but I want you to go to college, Harold.”

  “Okay, Dad.” Harold covered a yawn with one hand.

  It was probably just a defense mechanism, something like that, that made the boy seem so distant and indifferent. It was something they all had to do, these kids: erect little defenses, little Maginot lines, around themselves. “We should talk more,” Charlie said.

  Oh, great. Lots of talk and lots of tennis. Tennis, then talk. Locker-room buddies after every game. He could see it now. Harold yawned again and scratched his leg.

  “Harold—”

  “Hm?”

  “I was thinking—going through a great tragedy can sometimes bring a family closer together.”

  Harold studied his cigarette, peered at it closely as though inspecting it for tiny flaws in the filter mechanism. “What kind of tragedy, Dad?”

  “I mean—Maggie, of course,” he said.

  “Oh, I didn’t know you meant that tragedy,” Harold said.

  “It just shows—shows how much we need each other, Harold. I was thinking—driving home—about you, me, Mother, and Carla. Especially about you. It’s funny finding you here on the steps like this because I was thinking about you—thinking that maybe your trouble—the thing you haven’t learned yet—is how to make compromises.…”

  Jesus. Now the old man was going to start trying to Communicate. It was what they all wanted. To capital-C Communicate.

  “You want the moon, but sometimes you have to settle for a little less. You want a car, I know. Keep your sights-set high, but don’t be disappointed when everything doesn’t fall into place right away. Be willing to settle for a little less. That was your aunt Cathy’s problem. She could never settle for the things she had—and wouldn’t admit there were some things she could never have.”

  “She’s the one who killed herself, isn’t she, Dad?”

  “Yes …”

  “Why would anybody want to kill himself? Makes no sense to me.”

  “It’s terrible, Harold, not to be able to accept imperfection—in the world or in yourself. I know,” Charlie said. “I’m not young any more, and I haven’t always been clever … and I’m not a very significant artist. But I’m willing to try—to try to be as good as I can be. And to work hard for all of you. And to love you all as much as I can.”

  “Sure, Dad.” Love. Sex again. What was coming next? The old sex lecture? A lot of nosy questions? It was all a crock, but what the hell? Everything was. So humor the old man. “Well, what you say makes a lot of sense,” Harold said. Placing it neatly between thumb and forefinger, Harold flipped his cigarette butt into the air. It flew in a high, wide arc and landed at a distance in the grass.

  “I’m glad you think so, Harold.” Across the street, at the McCarthys’ house, it appeared that the Lane was having another party. They were visible on the McCarthys’ terrace—Alice and Sam Mayhew, Jane and Edgar Willey, Vaughan and Vera Phelps, Genny and Bob McCarthy—holding their cocktails, and their voices were audible above the cicadas. Moving his hand to Harold’s shoulder, Charlie stood up. “Well, I’d better go find your
mother,” he said. “See if she’s ready to start packing the car.”

  He found Nancy in the kitchen, standing with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “I came back,” he said.

  “So I see.”

  “Did you know I would?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  He tried to remember all the things he had planned to say to her. He seemed to have spent them all on Harold. Standing there in the bare kitchen he for some reason remembered a trip he and Cathy and their mother had taken long ago to visit an aging Nova Scotian cousin. They had taken the old Boston-to-Yarmouth steamer, and the boat had hit a heavy storm the first night out, just off Cape Ann. Ropes had been strung along the passageways and stairs to help the passengers move about, but everyone had stayed below except Cathy and Charlie. They had made their way up to the green and gold saloon where, under a creaking and swaying chandelier, they found a five-piece orchestra, in shiny maroon tuxedos, playing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” to an empty room. The empty chairs and tables were all anchored to the floor with chains and, as the ship heaved and rolled, the tethered furniture hopped and slid and bounced about to the music. When the number ended, and the bored musicians paused to wipe the mouthpieces of their instruments before starting the next song, the chairs and tables went right on with their solitary, bumpy dance.

  As he looked at her now, it seemed to him that he and Nancy were lashed together in the same sort of complicated, jittery rhythm and shuffling pattern of time.

  “I went to see Tessa,” he said suddenly.

  “I thought perhaps you had.”

  “She threw me out.”

  She nodded.

  “I tried to call you—to see if you’d let me come back. The line was busy.”

  She raised the coffee cup to her lips. “Yes,” she said. “I was calling Daddy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. He threw me out, too.”

  Over the rim of the coffee cup her eyes quickly met his, in what he thought might be a kind of smile, but what kind of smile it was—mocking, pitying, renunciatory—he couldn’t tell.

  He laughed weakly and said, “No one seems to want either of us.”