She shook her head. “We’ll sort it out later. For now, you’d better go out and deal with your public. You go ahead. I’m going to tidy up a bit.” She went into the bathroom and I took a deep breath and went back down the hallway toward the sound of the flute and the chatter of the crowd.
Tony Chalmers came over to me with two glasses of champagne. “One for you, one for me,” he said. “To you, my dear. A wonderful evening! Your work is simply unforgettable—I congratulate. You may turn out to be the famous Ruffian!” He chuckled professionally.
“I’m no Ruffian—”
“Of course you are, you and Sally. Whether you like it or not.”
“What are you doing down in New York again so soon?”
“I couldn’t miss this. Are you mad? I’m serious about your being a Ruffian—this is yet another Ruffian night, second one of the summer. After what I might call too many dry years? Yes, I think I might.”
“Are you still expecting the top to come off the old boys? You were thinking dark thoughts, as I recall.”
“All of life is the light and the dark, isn’t it? So there’s always the chance of the abyss opening and swallowing us, just like that.”
“I’m sorry I asked.”
“Don’t be. It shows you understand more about the Ruffians than most. In any case, all seems well tonight, and I’m just a timorous man as I succumb to middle age at last.”
We were winding down mainly to the old bunch. The little jazz group was still playing and the room was taking on that lonely quality. Empty bottles of champagne, glasses, plates with the remains of canapés, caterers busily trying to keep up with the accumulating refuse. I wandered around checking out the sold stickers, amazed at the response, afraid to guess at the money involved. None of that seemed to have anything to do with me at the moment. I just didn’t want any more scenes with anyone at all for the next couple of decades.
Mike and Hacker were draining a bottle of champagne and laughing about something. Mike wandered over, weaving slightly, and worked hard at focusing his eyes on me. They swam behind the thick round lenses. “May I escort you home?” he said, desperately sober.
“I’ve already asked her that question, old lad,” Hacker said. “I have in fact beaten you to it. She’s coming with me.
“A bold-faced lie,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he said, nodding. “Perhaps.”
“You’ll come with me, won’t you?” Mike was very solemn.
“Over my dead body.” Hacker wore that bemused smile.
“That can be arranged.” Mike covered his mouth to muffle a bit of a belch.
“I am going home alone. You are both at liberty.” I couldn’t face the idea of bantering. I wanted to collapse in the arms of the man I loved. But I didn’t seem to love anyone.
Eventually they drifted away. We were all exhausted by the heat and the champagne and the gathering humidity. Beyond the front windows I saw the frequent flashes of heat lightning like strobes on a set.
Everyone was finally gone.
The caterers slowed the pace. Carlyle Leverett stood before me, smoking a cigarette in a holder, looking smug. “We’ll go over the accounts later. Tomorrow if you like. But we, my darling, have made rather a lot of money tonight. You have created a very influential market.” He suddenly knelt in front of me and kissed my nose. “Now you’ll have to get back to work and do a great many more canvases in the same vein. … You have started something here tonight and I congratulate you, Belinda.” He just looked at me for a while and the ash fell off his cigarette.
When I next noticed anyone, having sat in a daze while Leverett fussed in the debris, it was Harry. I’d thought he must have left but there he was waving to me from the shadows beneath one of trees in the street. He was sitting at a table, leaning back, looking at me through the window. When he beckoned to me I went out. A breeze flapped at the awnings and the rain smelled closer yet, the dark night sky pregnant with it, waiting and overdue.
“Where’s Sal?” I stood at the curb taking a deep breath, looking up and down the street. A few tourists were watching the tables being taken inside, wondering what had been going on, what they had missed. I felt Harry take my hand and start swinging it.
“Went off somewhere. In a cab. With … I don’t know with whom. Said she wasn’t feeling all that well. Maybe alone. And I just found myself sitting here watching you sitting by yourself. End of report.”
“Was she all right? I mean, okay?”
“I suppose. People usually are, no matter what they say.”
“I’d have said just the opposite. They say they’re all right but they’re aren’t.”
“You’re too deep for me.” He sighed. “God, I’m tired. Feels like the final event of Prize Day is over … when I was at school, there was this nightmare called Prize Day. Christ, it was such a relief to get it over. …”
“This is your day for reminiscing,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“Sure.”
“According to your theory, that means you’re not.”
“Let’s not debate the point.” I turned and smiled at him. “Harry?”
“Belle?”
“I’m going home. You want to walk me?”
He groaned at the effort and stood up. “I’m your man.” He stretched and yawned. “Let’s go.”
We walked arm in arm the few blocks. We didn’t talk. A fine mist made haloes around the streetlamps as we stood below the loft’s windows.
“Quite a summer we’ve had,” he said, “you and I.” He looked very weary.
I laughed softly and hugged him.
“Sleep well,” he whispered. “You’ve earned a rest.”
I watched him walk away. At the corner he flagged down a cab and was gone.
I could still taste the blood in my mouth.
III
Death and the Ruffians
Chapter Twenty-three
NOT SURPRISINGLY, I SLEPT BADLY and woke up in the familiar thick gray heat and humidity of early morning. I was still wound up from the pressure of the opening, its apparent success, and its violent climax. My jaw was stiff and my tongue kept seeking out the lacerations in my mouth. I tottered gingerly out of bed, my stomach in knots, put on a tape of the Excuses—loud—and stood under a cold shower.
I wanted the music to drown out thought, but it didn’t work. Everything kept coming back.
He’s after you, sweetheart, the bastard really is after you. …
I suppose I was near hating Jack as I stood peering at my pale green eyes, now murky and bloodshot, in the streaked mirror. Damn him, he’d put the years on my face and I could see every one of them frowning back at me. And in the end he’d finally hit me. What kind of people were we, anyway? The woman looking back at me from the mirror seemed normal enough, if slightly the worse for wear, yet she and her husband had been threatening to kill each other not so long ago … and then last night the ante had been raised. From words of violence to acts of violence. What next?
I finished the waking-up process and went to make coffee. While waiting for it to drip through the Krups I wiggled my jaw to make sure it was still properly attached. Jack was really a prime bastard. And maybe worse, maybe he really had slipped off the edge. After he attacked Venables at the Grangers’ party he’d seemed so chagrined, so apologetic, I’d thought the shock of his own behavior might have turned him around. I’d been wrong again, as usual, and this morning his state of mind seemed even more alarming than it had last night.
But he was right about one thing.
He sure had Peter Venables’ number. I didn’t know what in the world his speech in Leverett’s office had meant, but when I’d come charging foolishly out of the john, I’d seen the effect it had had on Venables. Jack had this guy figured out, and why, I wondered, was he the only one who did? What set Jack apart from the other Ruffians?
I didn’t want to believe it was just that he was crazy.
A little later that mo
rning, working on my second cup of coffee and listening to music, I sat cross-legged on the couch and began noodling on a sketchpad with an ordinary Dixon No. 2 pencil, not really thinking about what I was doing, just letting my thoughts wander, lulled by the sound the pencil made on the rough paper. An unsettling thought was working its way around my head and I knew I’d have to deal with it. It had nothing, thankfully, to do with all the complicated personal interactions which were suddenly so prominent. It had to do with my work. Carlyle Leverett had said something about my having to get back to work doing more of the huge self-portraits, more Belindas. And with a chilling shock of recognition I knew that that was impossible. No way could I go back to shutting out everything else but bits and pieces of me. I could foresee the argument I was going to get; ironically, the more they sold, the more determined Leverett was going to be. But it wasn’t a question of artistic judgment on my part: it was pure emotion. Seeing them all on the walls of the gallery, watching the people almost inhaling them, I’d realized that it was over—absolutely over. I was almost literally repelled by them … I’d put too much into them, had seen my life turned inside out while I was painting them. I simply had to put them behind me, go on, do something else. …
The pencil kept moving, scratching in the stillness now that the tape had run out, and my mind was turning into a kind of theater. Hacker Welles, a riddle, a free-floating spirit in a rumpled jacket, looking at the world from behind his barricades. The shrine Harry had described and the shotgun standing in the corner and the stacks of Jack’s manuscript so jealously guarded. The snapshot of Venables’ daughter, with her black hair shining like pieces of polished coal. Jack’s fist flashing and the blood dripping on Venables’ dress shirt. Jack on the couch with his head in his hands. Hacker wanting to make me the murderer in his novel. Tony Chalmers beneath his gray Afro waiting for the top to blow off the Ruffians. The thorn on the bed scratching my thigh. The wheel-of-fortune slowly revolving and Venables grinning at me, asking if he should be bold. The actors onstage doing their slow, infinitely sad soft-shoe as the curtain rang down. Harry’s harsh laughter across the water. Sally’s shoulders slumping …
Hacker’s voice.
I see Jack’s fist land on Peter’s nose and I see your face freeze into a kind of death mask and I can begin to see the whole story rather than just the instant.
I stood up and stretched, went to the window, searched the sky for anything resembling a cloud. Nothing. Nothing but the sun beating down, the stillness of the sticky air, the whirring of the fan in its losing battle. I went back to the couch, stood looking down at the pad, chewed on the wooden pencil feeling old teeth marks with my tongue. I picked up the pad to look more closely at what I’d just done.
The lake in Central Park. Two people in a rowboat, a man with the oars, the woman leaning up on one elbow. On the bank, beneath the heavy tree limbs, well in the foreground, a man and a woman undergoing a tense confrontation over something. What? Between them a sheet of paper lay on the grass.
It was nothing more than an illustration. Could I make it more than that? I stood looking at the clumsily sketched figures, the lack of detail. Well, I could try.
I kept thinking about what Hacker had said. There had to be a story behind all those paintings of people boating and having picnics, and if you look at them just right, with your mind in the right place, you can almost see the whole story, all the relationships, in the moment the painter has chosen to capture. …
I gnawed at the pencil, threw it down on the couch, gave the wheel-of-fortune an impatient yank, and walked away before it had stopped spinning.
I was back looking at the sketchpad, staring at it almost angrily, trying to look at it just right, when the phone scared me out of my wits.
“Belinda … something terrible has happened, just terrible.” It took me a second or two to recognize Harry’s voice, and right away I thought of Sally, something had happened to Sally. Harry’s voice wasn’t shaking but it sounded weak, like a signal from a very distant station, dying as it reached me. “It must have happened last night, I don’t know, early this morning—anyway, he’s dead and I’d like you to … to come over, Sal’s gonna need you, she found him—”
“Who? Who’s dead, Harry?”
“Oh …” He sounded surprised, as if he thought he’d already made that clear. “Venables. Peter Venables is dead. Sal went to the door and there he was …” He sighed deeply. “It’s funny, we were just talking, you and I, about the old question: Which Ruffian would be the first to go?” I heard him swallow. “Well, now we know.” He laughed thinly. “It’s pretty awful, Belle …”
I had taken the phone back across the room and numbly lowered myself onto the couch. We weren’t kids anymore, but death was still a stranger to our group and the result was that rubber-legged shock, the dig to the solar plexus. I won’t lie and say that I was sorrow-stricken, but the shock was physical. “What was it? Did he have a bad heart?” It was all I could think of.
“What? Oh, no, no, Christ no, he was shot.”
I wasn’t being dense, I just wasn’t getting it. “A mugger? Robbery? What, tell me what happened!”
“Look, we’re not sure what happened exactly and the police are here, they’re talking to Sally right now and she’s a wreck. Dr. Schein is here, too—Sal’s been vomiting and she was hysterical and … Look, can you get over here?”
“Of course,” I said. “Just tell me where this all happened …”
He sighed again like a man struggling to the end of a very long climb. He was speaking slowly. “All we know is that he must have gone to answer the door, the front door, inside the vestibule. He must have just been standing there and … I mean, it’s really a mess. Belle, there’s nothing left of his head. … I’m not kidding. Nothing. …”
Chapter Twenty-four
MY MIND SEEMED TO BE fumbling and tripping over itself in a kind of frenzy, but I felt as if I were moving very slowly, in a fog. Getting dressed, getting a cab, everything taking forever. Who knew? Had the Ruffians been notified of the decrease in their numbers? Mike in his office at Rockefeller Center, Hacker waking sluggishly in his sublet, Jack hollow-eyed after a night of trashing himself with recriminations—all getting the news that Peter Venables was dead. What kind of gun blows a man’s head off? All I could think of was Dirty Harry movies and whatever those cannons were called, Magnums, I guess, like the name of the TV detective with the mustache. So who carries guns like that? Who rings the doorbell and blazes away in Turtle Bay? I was thinking breathlessly, like someone with a carbohydrate rush.
Then I remembered the dream I’d had the night before Harry’s show had opened, the yawning black holes of barrels like the guns of Navarone swinging around to point directly into my face, hands steadying the gun, the finger squeezing, the roar and flash in my face. …
That must have been what Peter saw, the gun going off in his face. I wanted to throw open the door of the cab and go outside, breathe deeply and calm down, walk before the United Nations Building, which was glaring in the sunshine.
But I didn’t. I sat sweating in the back seat, remembering the dream, remembering that it had been Jack’s shotgun in it.
We got snarled in traffic in the Forties and I tried to control myself, willed myself not to fidget. I still had a clear picture of the last instant in which I had seen Peter Venables’ face. His face. Cracking open in the barrage of Jack’s accusations, features fragmenting, the dark eyes staring wildly at Jack, then at me, fear overflowing, something like panic, then the attempt to draw himself together in the failure of that abrupt departure.
I know why you’re here, I know all about you. I know what you’ve always been. …
I could hear Jack’s voice, the hoarse whisper that meant he was near the edge.
You were a thief then and you’re a thief now. I caught you at it once and by God you’re not gonna steal anything from me this time. …
The driver was honking his horn. Clouds of dust rose from
a street-repair gang. There were lots of horns and people shouting.
I know what you came back for, don’t I? I mean, I would know … wouldn’t I, old pal, old chum, old sock?
It meant nothing to me. Absolutely nothing.
There were two uniformed policemen outside the front door and a chubby plainclothesman leaning with his elbows on the windowbox, his round face tilted toward the sun. There were a couple of police blue-and-whites, too, and a small knot of onlookers staring discreetly from across the street. Something was going on, all right, but they didn’t know what. The sunbather had been given my name. He moved away from the lavish splashes of red and yellow and white flowers and took me inside.
The entryway was roped off, the doors from the foyer to the entrance hall stood open, and there was no preparation for the dark blue canvas sheet covering the body of Peter Venables. His right hand was flung out, the long thin fingers I’d noticed that day at the bar protruding from beneath the sheet as if he were waving, trying to get our attention or maybe just saying good-bye.
I smelled the blood. I saw the mess sprayed along one wall of the entry, streaks of pinkish blood and clumps of matter on the formal wallpaper. My stomach turned involuntarily, a sudden nauseated surge, and I looked away, ignoring everything as best I could. A couple of men were on their knees in the circular foyer where we’d danced on opening night. They were sweeping bits of God-only-knew-what from the parquet squares into baggies.
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