Guilty Parties

by Thomas Gifford

  “I hope it’s all as farfetched as it sounds to me.” I was trying not to tell him how unpleasant he sounded.

  “Oh, I’m afraid it’s not farfetched at all.” He turned the sliver of lemon peel from the espresso between his fingers, as if it might have some mysterious value. “It’s all based on what a woman looks like. In this case you. If a man settles on such a creature, as I believe Harry did, then he’ll put up with any difficulties, overcome any obstacle, until he finds another one. Rare, I suppose, but when such a man settles on such a creature—well, that’s that. Do you mind if I smoke a very small cigar?” I shook my head. “Those men are the ones who never give up, actually.” He exhaled and looked at me through the cloud. Shrugged. “That’s just the way some men are.”

  “Men are mysteries to me,” I said at last. “Granting for a moment that you’re right about Harry—it’s crazy. A face, a body, it’s just a shell, the dust jacket. I can see a man setting his sights on a dancer, an heiress, someone who’d make a great mother. But a woman’s nose? Her hair? The shape of her breasts? Crazy.”

  “No. It’s just not logical. Women have very logical minds, rather pedestrian, it seems to me. Men are more prone to flights of fancy, clouds of romance. So you object to the illogicality of it and I can only tell you there’s a hell of a lot out there that has nothing to do with logic.”

  When we left the restaurant and were forging through the heat of the night, Venables took my hand, lifted it to his lips. “You really are an innocent, Belinda. Trusting. You know what I think?”

  “I’m rather afraid to ask.”

  “I think you’re much the same as you were. When I knew you before.” He flagged a cab. “Anyway, let me see you home. It’s still early and tomorrow’s a schoolday.” He grinned innocently and winked and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I’d never met him before tonight.

  I don’t know why I asked him up for a nightcap.

  Maybe I was lonely, shaken by the news of Harry and Sally, confused and unwilling to sink back into the loneliness of the loft with all the damned canvases. So I asked him up.

  While I was in the kitchen making an iced tea for myself and another gin-and-tonic for him, he prowled the edges of the room looking at the paintings. He gave a long whistle.

  “Belinda! Sal said your work was like nothing I’d ever seen before but … this—my God, these are just incredible! Whatever gave you the idea?”

  “Maybe it’s just latent narcissism.” I said. I really didn’t want to go into it with him.

  “Lucky for us,” he said. He was staring at the painting of my breast. I came in and handed him the drink. “But if you’re so shy,” he said, “how can you stand having people see these?”

  I shook my head. “It’s another Belinda. Not me. At least I’m counting on feeling that way once they’re on exhibit—I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

  I turned to lead the way over to the couch, when he touched my arm. A pressure, not a tight grip, and I knew what was coming. I turned, preparing to gently deflect his advances.

  But he was pointing to the corner. The wheel-of-fortune. “And what’s this? I’ve never seen one of these up close, either. It’s my lucky night.”

  “Wedding gift from Sal and Harry. Back in the year one.” Once again my assumptions had proven misguided. What the hell was wrong with me? We walked over to the wheel and he gave it a whirl, click, click, click …

  “Well, let’s see. Maybe I should give it a serious turn. All right? Is that a good idea?” He slid one arm loosely around my shoulders. His forehead was glistening in the dim lamplight. The heat wouldn’t let up.

  “It’s up to you—”

  “I’ll take it seriously only if I approve of what it tells me.”

  “A good policy,” I said.

  He squeezed me. He spun it firmly and it seemed to spin forever. I felt somewhat light-headed watching, a bit dizzy. It slowed and finally clicked its last.

  He leaned down, read the fortune.

  “‘The future belongs to the bold,’” he said. He looked up at me, smiling. “What do you think about that, Belinda? Where do you stand on boldness?”

  “I really don’t know. But I am tireder than I thought, Peter. Let’s call it a night. The heat’s really getting to me—”

  “Me, too.” He put his drink down on my worktable.

  “It’s been a nice evening, Peter. We must—”

  He did it very deliberately. He tilted my chin and kissed me. He kissed me for too long a time and I tried to disengage myself easily and he wouldn’t let me go and I knew that everything was suddenly all wrong. He pushed me back against the worktable, pressing himself against me. He was hard against my belly and he was forcing my mouth open and I tried to yank away but I wasn’t strong enough. My legs felt weak and my head was spinning. He finally moved his lips to my ear and whispered something and I gasped please, don’t do this, please, stop, Peter, you don’t want to do this, it’s not right … He was breathing hard and rhythmically pushing against me, working himself up. “I want you, Belinda, you invited me up here, what’s the matter with you? Come on, it’s me, we’re grown-ups … what’s the big deal, for Christ’s sake?” His arms held me like a vise and when I tried to say something my mouth was dry, my lips stuck together. He loosened his hold, moving his hands around to my breasts and I slid along the bench, stumbled and fell, holding on to the tabletop, on my knees, my head throbbing, tears suddenly overflowing. “Belinda, don’t you understand, it’s …” And I couldn’t hear the rest of it. He stood over me. “On the bed,” he said, his voice low and insistent, a kind of growl, soft, menacing.

  “No, goddammit!” I managed to shout. I felt an adrenaline surge, tried to get up, and he grabbed my arm, jerked me to my feet and the buttons ripped off the front of my dress, sprinkled to the floor like dice.

  “It’s my turn,” he said. “My turn!”

  “You bastard! Your turn to what? What do you think this is?” I wiped my eyes, backed away. “Why are you doing this? No, I don’t even want to know—just get the hell out! Get out of here!”

  I don’t know what I expected. But my heart was slamming in my chest, I felt buttons underfoot, and my nose was running. I tried to pull the front of my dress together. My stomach was churning. I willed myself not to vomit. He stood staring at me, straightening his clothing, then seemed to cock his head, reached out to me again. With what little strength I had I hit him across the face with the palm of my hand. He stopped, looked at me as if he’d just noticed the situation turning dark and foul, and pulled back his hand to hit back.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  And his hand stopped at the top of its arc and hung there, like something dead and strung up. All I could think of was Jack, his anger, his scowl, his bitterness. And the hand dropped. He stared at me, biting his lip. There was a cut at the corner of his mouth, a thread of blood, just like in the movies.

  “Just don’t do anything,” I said. “Just leave. Don’t speak to me. Don’t say a word. Just get out and leave me alone and none of this goes any further.”

  “You really are a bitch, aren’t you? Ice cold … always were, still are. Just a bitch.” He brushed past me. He stopped at the doorway to the elevator. He stood looking at the canvases, nodding to himself as if agreeing with something I couldn’t hear. “Well, Belinda, if you want it rough, rough it shall be. Not only am I bold, I also persevere. We’ll have another little talk … perhaps you’ll come to see it my way. Do you think so, Belinda? Does that strike you as possible? It is my turn. Surely you realize that. In any case, I’ve enjoyed this little discussion. I think we’ve made great strides. Good night, Belinda.” He laughed, stepped into the elevator, and I heard him laughing in the street below. “Good night, Belinda …”

  Chapter Nine

  I SUPPOSE I’VE LED A sheltered life and what happened that night with Peter Venables was no big deal. I kept telling myself that for a couple of days but I couldn’t get the ugliness of the m
oment out of my mind—the gradual way the evening had changed, the sudden explosion of violence, the buttons bouncing on the floor, the blood on his mouth, the way I willed him to lower the hand he’d raised to strike me. …

  It hadn’t been just a deflected pass, an amorous impulse that had ended sheepishly. It had ended with that dance along the edge of the abyss, and I could still hear his laughter in the elevator, his insinuating remarks hanging like a noxious gas in the loft after he was gone. Jack would have said Peter needed a new dialogue writer, too, but I guess that was the way people talked when emotions sent them crashing on the rocks.

  For two days I tried to figure out what I should do. I felt as if I had been betrayed by Peter Venables. As if he had violated an agreement of our youth, when we had first moved in the same orbit. He remembered me as a friend and now he had chosen not to treat me as a friend. And what of his old comradeship with Jack? The bond of the Ruffians? What prompted him to come on with me, still the wife of his old pal?

  What had happened to the trust that everything else grew from?

  Was Harry really a man who had his girlfriends in a row, for his own amusement, apart from the life and the Harry I knew? And did Sally accept the situation, acknowledge it? Could Venables possibly have been riding anything but his own erotic fantasy when he said that Harry had been looking all these years for another me?

  I couldn’t sort out what Venables had said, what might be true from what his own mind had summoned up like bad dreams.

  How many of us were guilty of betraying the past? I suppose that was the question I needed answered.

  I was alone with all this. The only people who might have known the sense of hurt and loss I felt were precisely the ones I couldn’t talk to—the people who had dwelt there in the long ago with me. We were all the people of the past. But maybe I was the only one who had clung to it, its shining innocence. Maybe I was the only one who had thought it was the paradigm.

  Sally.

  She was the one I wanted to turn to. I wanted to let my thoughts overflow and hear her set me straight.

  But she was part of it.

  That was the way I saw it.

  She was part of the betrayal.

  I don’t know. Maybe I was going a little nuts.

  The night before Scoundrels All! opened I had one of those dreams that wakes you up feeling frantic and sick, covered in sweat, head aching. I went back to sleep finally and when I woke up in the sticky gray morning I had no memory of the dream.

  I made coffee and a piece of toast and sat staring out into the heat, which seemed to have grown thicker and thicker as the days passed. The man on the radio said the humidity was in the high nineties and it looked like we were in for a storm later. That was the best news I’d had in I don’t know how long.

  Then I heard a backfire in the street below and it all came back to me and I got suddenly short of breath and went to the window feeling like I ought to cry out for help.

  There had been no people in my dream.

  Just the shotgun from Jack’s apartment.

  I saw the black holes of the barrels, slowly swinging toward me like the guns of Navarone, and I saw somebody’s hands steadying it, fingers tightening on the triggers.

  Then the explosion came in my face.

  But I wasn’t dead. Or I didn’t feel anything. Because the next view I had was of a wall covered with blood and tissue and the blood was running in pink streaks and the stuff splattered on the patterned paper was falling away in chunks.

  Sally arrived in the afternoon, a nervous wreck because of the opening only a few hours away, but smiling and in a much better mood than I’d expected. Her troubles of a few days before seemed to have evaporated. Of course, I now realized that we hadn’t been quite as close as I’d always thought. Maybe it was all an act. Maybe she was being brave. Maybe she’d found out that her fears about Harry were empty. Maybe, as Peter had said, she was accustomed to Harry’s affairs and had decided she didn’t care about this one, either. When I saw her, my oldest, best friend, it struck me that I hadn’t a clue as to which of the possibilities applied.

  She came off the elevator carrying in her arms, like a gigantic infant, a cascade of yellow roses wrapped in tissue, tied loosely with a thick yellow ribbon, a floppy bow. She marched on into the kitchen and began searching for vases.

  “What in the world—” I said.

  “You’ve got paint all over your face, dear. Two vases aren’t going to be enough.” She was wearing a pale blue linen dress, sleeveless, with white piping. She was too pale herself for the outfit but with the jet-black hair and the sharp angles of her face she looked great.

  I found her a third vase. “What is this?”

  “For you. They were propped on that pathetic little wooden chair down in the lobby. Just sitting there. I asked a man carrying a box bigger than East Rutherford into the warehouse if he’d seen them delivered. He told me he couldn’t see where he was going, let alone check out deliverymen. Here’s a card.”

  I tore open the envelope.

  Apologies are in order. I’ll make them in person.

  The fan on the counter passed its waves across my face like the flutter of invisible wings, and I felt a shiver ripple along my spine. Sally was watching me, hands on hips, feet apart, waiting impatiently. “So what does it say?”

  I handed it to her and she cocked her head inquisitively. The light at the windows was reflecting the deep purple of the afternoon sky. The first raindrops were tapping on the skylight. I couldn’t tell her about Venables. I’d told him I wouldn’t and he was their houseguest on top of that and the show was opening and who needed any more problems?

  And Sal and I didn’t tell each other everything, anyway. Not anymore.

  “May I ask what that is supposed to mean?”

  I made a face. “It’s nothing. A guy … a guy I barely know made a mistake the other night …” I shrugged.

  “Ah, the adventures of the newly single!” She picked up two of the vases and smiled at me quizzically. “Well, I won’t pry. But let it be recorded that I am utterly fascinated.”

  “It’s not very fascinating. Let that be recorded.”

  I followed her into the work area. The thunder’s first crack went off like a cannon and I flinched. Like a child frightened by loud noises and the gathering darkness.

  “I’m betting on Jack. Or—hmmm—could it be Mike?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Belinda, are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course, I’m fine.”

  “The flowers. I was talking about the flowers—I’ll bet they’re from Jack, who misbehaved and is sorry … or from Mike. I mean, you have been seeing Mike—”

  “Please, Sal. Mike is an old friend. You know that—we’ve had dinner a couple of times and Mike is the spitting image of Bertie Wooster and he’s a dear. But he never, never would make a mistake about me. Okay? I rest my case.”

  Sally was leaning against the wheel-of-fortune, staring out into the rain, nodding. I mopped sweat from my face and dropped the towel on the table.

  “All right, all right. It’s your secret.” She pressed a forefinger to her lips, looking at me from the corners of her eyes.

  Sally was jittery as all get-out, which was why she’d come by the loft in the first place. The anonymous flowers—at least anonymous as far as she was concerned—had merely deflected her from her own state, and even then only momentarily. I was glad when she dropped the inquiry. I sank back and listened to the rain drumming insistently on the skylight. It was bouncing on the glass.

  In a few hours Harry Granger would be back on Broadway with the first show he’d produced since Gargoyles three years before. Opening night, a six-thirty curtain so the critics could make their deadlines, a party and the wait for the first television reviews and the Times to hit the streets. So Sally was about ready to start banging off the walls and I understood. Aside from everything else, Harry had a million dollars of his own mo
ney riding on the show. I watched Sally gulp thirstily at the gin-and-tonic she’d made herself.

  “You know Harry,” she said. “He keeps that calm pose and he never sweats and he’s always amused but he was wound up pretty tight today. I could tell. He says he’s at the theater and I suppose that’s just possible. If not he’s off somewhere … working off the tension.” Suddenly her mood and tone altered. Bitterness had crept in unannounced. “You know, for so long he seemed such an innocent. They all did, really, all the Ruffians. Remember that day at the Waldorf when he was being too ingenuous even for him … Muffin! My God, I couldn’t believe it. Muffin!”

  We’d all been having a drink in Peacock Alley and Harry had mentioned a friend of his having a girlfriend on the side. “A bit of muffin,” Harry had said, winking. Sally had screamed in helpless frustration: “For God’s sake, Harry, grow up! It’s crumpet, a bit of crumpet on the side, not muffin! Get it right, will you?” Harry had blushed and looked around and—quite sincerely—apologized while Sally, Jack, and I had gotten quietly hysterical.

  Now she was moving, from one of my canvases to another, as if she’d never seen them before, inspecting them closely, clinking the ice in her glass. “Men,” she said, “are going to love these. I feel like blushing and they’re not even of me! Men … Jack, Harry, Mike, they’re all just little boys in long pants. Too sensitive when it comes to their own egos, too vulnerable, too selfish, too cruel, too prone to the easy and thoughtless betrayal … out of touch with reality, all coiled up in their little games. Belinda Stuart, where could my drink have gone?” She went to the kitchen and built another, kept on talking while I watched her from the white wicker armchair. Lightning clawed overhead, the clap of thunder bounced off the buildings in Prince Street.