He went to play in the kitchen, getting tea, and I told him I was scared to death.
“You? Don’t be ridiculous. Nerves of steel, ice water in your veins—that’s you. Scared of what?”
“The opening, people seeing my work, the critics killing me … What if it’s a disaster? What if they laugh their heads off?”
“Then, my dear, we have a cause célèbre. In the first place, people are going to love your work. It’s so illustrative, so decorative, so sexy—the poster market is going to be immense. The critics will break down into their own various camps—hell, I could write most of the reviews myself this evening. Some will like it, some will hate it. The point is, it’s good-looking stuff, Paul will write very favorably about it—he’ll have a reservation or two to keep his integrity intact, but it’ll be a good notice. My gallery is not exactly chopped liver. You’re not some friendless waif from Dubuque braving the critical jungle alone and unarmed.” He stopped to drink his tea and loosen his tie. “Listen, this is all obvious. Why do you need me to tell you? Silly woman!”
He put his briefcase down and opened it, took out a proof copy of The New Yorker. “The poster is going to make you, my child. We’re offering it at fifteen bucks and this is the ad we’ve put in the magazine.”
I nodded. “I know, I know,” I said softly, hoping he was right about the poster. Belinda’s chin—I always thought of the model as a third party, not me—rested on her bare knee, her arm clasping the knee, though all you could see of the arm was the upper part wrapped in an Egyptian silver snake. There was just the faintest possible swell of breast below the snake. Some poster, Sally had said. She wouldn’t let Harry see it because he wasn’t old enough, she told me.
We were sitting quietly in the heat when he mentioned the reviews of Scoundrels All! It occurred to me that while he was an old Harvardian and friend of Jack’s, I hadn’t seen him at the opening.
“No, I stayed away from that particular ritual of self-fulfilling nostalgia. Good reviews, I suppose it’ll run forever. Ah, well, good luck to them.” He grimaced.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, just some unhappy memories of those happy-go-lucky, fun-loving Ruffians. Nobody ever gets over the past. I guess that must be the point of the show—college and whatnot. It stunts you, as far as I’m concerned, and you have to struggle to outgrow it. The Ruffians fight to stay where they were—makes no sense to me. I find myself approaching middle age and every once in a while somebody I know drops dead and I hear about it over cold sesame noodles and I’m not hungry anymore … the past flies up and slaps me in the face and I want to get the hell back to the present where I belong. The Ruffians, now, they’re different. All these guys are brought back together by this show and they start flexing their tired old muscles, thinking about being kids again … and something in me wants to throw up. No offense, Belinda, I know how deep your connection is.”
“Me? What about you? You were friends with all those guys.”
He nodded. “That’s the problem, I suppose. Taken as individuals, not such bad eggs. Mike, he’s a decent guy. Jack, well, he’s a jock with a pretty dark side, but he has his points. But let me warn you, at this late date, as a group they can be a beastly lot. They don’t even really know it. When dear old Harry, everybody’s best friend, got wind of my homosexuality at Harvard—not the loud, icky kind, as you know—he made sure the word got around mighty fast and the Ruffians took it upon themselves to remove me from their lives … I mean, we were friends— … and suddenly Paul and I, by being close as we were, we weren’t fit company. I know, this all comes as news to you.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, he grinned crookedly. “But we’re all grown up now and bygones are bygones and so on. What does it all mean? Don’t ask me. Everything’s always changing, anyway.”
“But they really were so rotten to you?”
“It was long ago and far away and there’s not really any point in dwelling on past agonies. But the fact is, sure, they were rotten.” He laughed as if it were someone else’s history. “I always thought they should have called themselves the Villains. That’s what they were.”
Chapter Seventeen
I DECIDED AT LAST THAT I had to talk to Sally.
I had to tell her the truth of what had happened with Peter Venables—not just the evening I had spent with him and the way he had persisted at the party, but also the mysterious appearance in the middle of that rainy night when I’d seen him watching my loft and subsequently following Jack. I was existing in an informational vacuum. I hadn’t spoken with Jack so I had no idea what had happened once they had passed from my view. But Sally might know.
The thing was, I couldn’t tell anyone else the Venables story and I’d gotten to the point where I had to tell someone. If I’d gone to Jack he’d have gotten homicidal. Harry would have thought I was off my rocker. But it was eating me up. I just couldn’t bottle it up any longer.
I had just decided to call her when the phone rang and it was Sally. Things like that had been happening to us all our lives. Our own telepathy. She was bubbling over with high spirits, which were uncharacteristic in the best of times. She sounded almost girlish and I jumped to the conclusion that things must have gotten cleared up on the Harry front. She said she was going shopping and could work her way down toward my part of town. We decided to revisit past haunts, have coffee at Figaro in the Village.
I walked up West Broadway, past the galleries and restaurants, waited for the light at Houston, watched the traffic surge through the heat waves rising from the street. The Village was crowded with hordes of tourists gasping for breath and soaking their polyester. I hadn’t been to Figaro in years but it seemed unchanged, a landmark now of the fifties when the Village was synonymous with beat and hip and bohemian. I found a dark corner that was relatively cool and ordered an iced cappuccino.
Sally arrived looking cheery and healthy, flushed instead of pallid. Quite a change from the day she’d summoned me to the Spencer show and told me Harry was in love with another woman. Hardly the same woman. She swept in, dropped a Saks bag, a Macy’s Cellar bag, and a small blue Tiffany’s sack on an empty chair. She lit a cigarette, ordered something cold, and blew out a long sigh.
“Well, it really is a hit! Can you believe it? The theater parties are buying now, we’re selling through Christmas, weekends are pretty well gone into October! Belinda, it’s a big hit! God, what a relief! Harry’s talking about a Los Angeles company for Thanksgiving. Who’d have thought anybody would give a damn about the Ruffians? And Hacker Welles! Suddenly he’s a genius! He’s going to do the Today show next week! Hacker … Well, it’s incredible. Peter just can’t believe it—he keeps wandering around saying: ‘What if I hadn’t come? What if I’d missed this?’ For that matter, what if any of us had missed it?”
Happy as I was for Sally, I had to work hard to share her mood of exuberance. So I faked it and was too hearty and happy. Normally Sally would have picked up on the act, but not today. Today there was no stopping her and it didn’t take her long to get around to the Grangers’ house-guest. I listened and felt everything slipping out of my hands, the way you watch a vase slip from your grasp and are helpless as it floats toward the floor and then shatters and there’s no getting that vase back.
Peter Venables, it turned out, had made all the difference in Sal’s mood. He was a joy!
Peter was in the habit of getting up early, unlike Harry, and the two of them had taken to having breakfast in the garden with the birds twittering and the sprinklers going and the squirrels skittering in the trees.
“Sounds like a Walt Disney picture,” I said.
“Laugh at me,” she giggled, “I’m having fun. There’s no law that says I can’t have an innocent little breakfast with an eligible man … there we are in our robes and Sarah bringing the orange juice and the toast in a rack and the coffee. We sit there and feel the day coming to life and feel the morning breeze in the trees.” She laughed to herself, her eyes flashing at me. I
t could have been twenty years before. She could have been describing a new boyfriend. She looked at me from beneath raised eyebrows, so black against her forehead, as if to say, Why not? “Well, what do you think? He’s a kind of dream, Belinda—”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure he is. A kind of dream. Just so you don’t get carried away—”
“I’m not a child to be lectured, Belinda. I know what I’m doing.”
“Just so you do,” I said.
“Darling, you find yourself in a singularly weak position if you start lecturing me about how to succeed at marriage.”
“Oops, score one for Sally!”
“Well, really! I’m just having a good time at breakfast—I’m not … blowing him. …” She dissolved in laughter “Though I’m not saying the thought hasn’t crossed my mind. …” She had to put her glass down. We were both laughing. She swallowed hard, waved her hand at me. “No, no, I’m just kidding! But you looked so censorious—”
“I’m just so surprised at your flights of romance—”
“Well, seriously, Peter is a wonderful houseguest. Of course, he always did have the most wonderful manners. You remember, Belinda. He never had that hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie the Ruffians specialized in … that was always what I liked about him. He was so intense, serious, you remember—”
“You know me, Sal,” I said. “I don’t remember much about him.” I shrugged. No way I was going to get to tell my ugly little story.
“Anyway, Peter’s a very sweet guy. Sort of lonely, I think. Full of interesting stories about all the places he’s been, I mean everywhere in the world, but based in London. His parents lived there, I guess. And he has a daughter, Delilah. Such an exotic name … Delilah Venables. He’s crazy about her, carries all these pictures of her—look, he gave me one.” She fumbled in her bag and brought out a snapshot and handed it to me. “She’s quite the stunner, isn’t she?”
The girl was strikingly beautiful. Her thick black hair was cut short, her skin was dark, the brown eyes huge and radiant, the nose short and saucy, tilted slightly. “Indeed, she is,” I said. “How old is she?”
“Eighteen,” Sally said.
“He should have brought her with him, let her have a peek into his youth, show her off to all his old friends—”
“Maybe he would have, but he just went through her wedding! Married at eighteen! Whew! And you know where she is right now?”
“I can’t imagine—”
“In Africa, honeymooning on a safari! Taking pictures. Her husband is a French photographer, they met on a shoot in Brittany. Delilah was a model and they fell in love.” She got a misty look and touched my hand. “Think of it, she has all her life ahead of her. Doesn’t it make you want to reach out to her, sit down and talk to her, tell her about love …”
“I wish somebody would tell me about love.” I smiled at her.
“God, I don’t know what’s gotten into me—I guess it’s hearing Peter talking so proudly about his daughter. To say nothing of this concentration on the old days in the show. God, Belinda, I’ve done nothing but blab! Turn me off please.”
“So where is the lovely Mrs. Venables?”
“A tender point. The late Mrs. Venables. She died a long time ago. He raised Delilah on his own.”
“I wonder who he married? It must have been right after we graduated.”
“I haven’t probed. Look, he speaks very fondly of you, Belinda. Even if you don’t remember him. I know he’d like to see you. Lunch maybe. But he’s shy … he doesn’t want to call you. He’s afraid you wouldn’t have time for him. I told him he was being silly. …”
“Speaking of tender points,” I said, “Peter must have had something to say about his little encounter with Jack at the party.”
Sally made a face. “Peter said that so far as he could tell, Jack still had a pretty good right cross. I mean he took it with good grace, says he knows how tough it must be on Jack and you to have your marriage go bad …”
“How magnanimous,” I said. “Almost saintly. Have you seen Jack or talked to him since then?”
“Not me. Harry may have. Peter did say something else—he’s worried about you if Jack’s violent streak is coming out again—”
“Again? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sally shrugged. “Beats me. Ruffian lore, I suppose. None of our business.”
“You’re right, I suppose. I’d rather not know. But you tell Peter not to worry his little head about me, okay?”
Walking back to the loft, I had the slightly tawdry sensation that I had become a character in a soap opera. I’d heard people observe that life was, indeed, like a soap opera, but I’d never quite known what they meant. It occurred to me that just possibly I was learning.
Because I left the meeting with Sally feeling that what I’d just witnessed was a woman, however foolishly, falling in love. The components seemed to fit. The husband who was fanatically wrapped up in his own project, which—God help us!—virtually forced him to reconsider his happy youth. The gathering of old friends. The wife convinced that the husband had taken a lover. And the arrival on the scene of an old friend with an exotic life and a full complement of good memories. Breakfast in the garden. Squirrels in the trees …
It was perfect. How could Sal have resisted?
But there was one grotesque problem.
Peter Venables was a son of a bitch. Maybe crazy. Certainly sick—at least by my standards.
But I was apparently the only one who knew the truth. To everyone else he was one of the Ruffians returned from afar. Hell of a guy. One of the best. Salt of the earth. One of us.
But I knew.
And maybe Jack, too. But Jack was halfway around the bend himself.
A soap opera, for God’s sake …
Chapter Eighteen
THEY CAME THE NEXT DAY to crate the paintings. Carlyle Leverett supervised the operation, nervously adjusting a frame here and a bit of padding there, patting his bony forehead with a handkerchief. He came over and stood beside me at the kitchen counter.
I looked at the canvases being swathed in wadding. “My babies,” I murmured.
He smiled tolerantly. “Don’t be disgusting, dear girl. Far more valuable than babies. Anyone can make a baby, after all.”
I watched until they’d finished with the last canvas and lowered two of the largest through the window. Three canvases had necessitated removal from the stretchers and rolling. I felt as if I were watching a triple-bypass operation. And then they were gone and the loft was quiet; sunshine streaming in on the emptiness. The walls stood naked. The paintings were gone, had begun the perilous trek into the art world where fanged creatures waited to rip and tear.
I felt like an infant whose playpen had been taken away. I was lost and didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. I couldn’t get out of my mind what had been the Peter Venables question and was now the Peter/Sally question. It came down to the fact that I was still carrying the unhealthy burden of truth about him: I hadn’t been able to tell the one person I could tell. Yet, somehow, I kept thinking I had to warn her.
Or did I? He couldn’t stay forever. Maybe it would just burn itself out in her mind, and once he was gone, everything would be back to normal.
Why didn’t I have any confidence in that scenario?
In that frame of mind I went back to thinking about the paintings that had just been removed and suddenly I felt a kind of hatred for them. And I got to thinking that I would probably never paint another picture. Certainly not a self-portrait. The very thought nearly nauseated me. I’d had enough of the whole thing. Three years of painting Belinda …
How had I stood it? And why, so abruptly, did I hate the idea and want no more of it?
Soap opera.
I was listening to a tape I’d made of Zoot Sims, stretched out on the long wicker couch, reading a Josephine Tey mystery, when the buzzer from the lobby rang. I debated for a moment, then decided it might be workmen or Leverett or
… Maybe anybody would do, just some company.
I pushed the buzzer and released the elevator door.
He came in, still rumpled, wearing sunglasses, chinos, a venerable blue blazer slung over his shoulder, badly scuffed white bucks. He stood in front of me grinning broadly. “I’m afraid to say anything. You might start kicking me again.”
“You’re not awfully neat,” I said, “but you are clean. Very clean.”
Hacker looked at me, nodded. “I’ve always been very diligent in matters of personal hygiene. My sainted mother was very clean, as well. Look, for the sake of argument, let’s say we’re both clean. And you’re neat. I’ve hardly ever seen anyone so neat and clean as you. I wonder how you do it.”
“Early to bed, early to rise … And I’m glad to see you. They’ve just carted all my paintings away. To the gallery. It’s very lonely without them all around me.”
He was mooching around the loft, inspecting the books, the bits and pieces of my life, as if he had some right to do so. “Zoot Sims,” he said. “‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ Always makes me think of Bogart and Hepburn in Sabrina.” He stopped at the wheel-of-fortune. “Wow,” he said respectfully, touching it, not spinning it. “I had a wife at one time who read the tarot. Talk about a scary woman.” When he put his fingers on something he seemed to soak up the essence, claiming it somehow.
He looked at me quizzically, once he returned to where I was standing. “You and Jack live here a long time?”
“Ever since we got married. Now I live here alone.”
“Come have lunch,” he said. “Far from SoHo. Get some distance between you and this place.”
“That sounds good, Welles.”
“I’ve got something to tell you, Belinda. My little secret. Don’t ask why, I just want to tell you.”
We got a table outside beneath the red-white-and-blue awnings at the St. Moritz on Central Park South. The horses pulling the carriages slowly through the moist heat clopped on the hot pavement. Beyond the shade of the awning the sunlight was a glaring blindness. He leaned back with a gin-and-tonic and surveyed me with the ingenuous eyes which seemed perpetually amused, as if life were a very good comedy and he’d managed to get his hands on front-row seats.
Guilty Parties Page 10
