Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  “I’m not so sure. Maybe the moment’s passed. It happens sometimes. You’ve been with Max a long time. That makes a difference.”

  “You’re telling me you’re the last of the honorable men?” She pouted slightly, nervously. Pouting wasn’t her style.

  “We’re a dying breed. Like the bison. Time has passed us by.”

  “I want you inside me. My knees are shaking, I’m shaking all over. I feel like I’m going to boil over. I mean it, Lew. I haven’t had anything, not anything, with Max in almost a year. He says he just can’t and I don’t blame him, he can’t help it … but he won’t let me go. Do you understand? He won’t. He said he’d kill anyone else … and he means it. Oh, Lew, what am I going to do about everything?”

  “Why ask me? Leave Max, take your chances. Then?” He shrugged. “I’m still in the book.”

  “Why are you treating me this way? Do you hate me, Lew?”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Of Max?”

  “Anyone in his right mind is afraid of Max. But, no, I meant I’m afraid of you.”

  “I don’t believe you’re a coward, Lew.”

  “I’m getting older. I no longer think I’ll live forever. But that’s another story. I am afraid … of what I might feel for you. When you’re not being a smart-mouth.”

  “Look, if it matters to you, I don’t feel like a whore anymore.”

  “Must be all this enforced celibacy.”

  “Maybe you are just a bastard! But maybe I’m crazy … come on, will you fuck me? Please? Right here, on the steps, nobody would—”

  “You’re right. You are crazy.”

  “And you call yourself a sport!”

  “I don’t recall ever calling myself anything of the kind.”

  “Can I come to your place? Next week? I’ll make you forget the last time.”

  “I don’t think so, Cindy.” He smiled into her eyes. “I don’t want to forget the last time.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want me?”

  “I want you way too much—”

  “Do you mind if I persist?”

  “I admire a woman who knows her own mind. Anyway, it’s your nickel, Cindy.”

  He put his gloves and hat on and reached for the doorknob. He had his stick under his arm like a man reviewing the troops. He could smell the same perfume. She never changed anything.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “I’m going home now.”

  “Lew?”

  “Yes, Cindy?”

  “Kiss me once.”

  He did.

  About a month later Terry left a scrawled note on Cassidy’s desk. He wanted him back at the office at ten o’clock for an important meeting with a client. It was a brutal night, early February, snow crunching underfoot and the wind damp and cutting. Cassidy had dinner alone at Keen’s and was back at the office going through a stack of photographs taken of a wife making nice-nice at a Jersey roadhouse with some lug who was doubtless a lot of things but definitely not her husband. He was rescued from this impoverished pursuit by Terry’s arrival. He slung his polo coat over a client’s chair, wiped a smudge of lipstick—he always called them “campaign ribbons”—from the corner of his mouth, and lit a cigar.

  Max Bauman came in at 10:10. He was with a stranger, a man in his late forties, gray hair, expensive gray suit with a faint red thread in it, a little overweight, paunchy. Small feet. He’d be fast, a good dancer. He looked like a lawyer. Max introduced him as an “associate,” which could have meant just about anything. His name was Bob Erickson and he said he’d wait in the outer office for them to conclude their business. When they closed the door he was thumbing through the morning’s Wall Street Journal.

  Max was wearing his tuxedo, just like the gangsters in the movies, the same gangsters who always owned a nightclub. He took off his soft slouch black hat and he looked very different. He was wearing another pound of salt-and-pepper hair. Looked like the rug on his swarthy scalp cost as much as the big Persian in his study at home. He settled himself in the chair as if he were looking to come clean. He looked distracted. And different. Somehow. Maybe it was the new hair that made Cassidy see him fresh. His Levantine features—lips, nostrils, eyebrows—seemed thicker, larger. There were deep ridges etched in the corners of his mouth. His ears seemed heavier, with droopy lobes close to his skull. The skin of his face was dark and leathery and, uncharacteristically, the collar of his shirt was loose. His face was thinner. He looked older. He’d lost the stocky solidness, which could have meant a lot of things. Maybe he’d gone into training. Lost some weight, glued the new piece onto his dome so he’d look cute for Miss Cindy Squires …

  Maybe he figured it would make up for not being such a hot lover anymore. The more Cassidy looked at him, the more he thought Max was a man with woman trouble, but maybe that was only because he knew Max had all the woman trouble in the world, the only kind that mattered, whether he knew it or not. And then Max began talking about it.

  “This isn’t easy for me, boys, so let me go about it my own way.” He crossed his legs, lit a cigar about eight inches long. “It’s about Miss Squires. That is, Cindy.” He blinked as if he expected an argument. Terry just nodded and told him to go on.

  “You know how I feel about this girl. It’s like my feelings for you, Terry—deep, abiding. You’re like a son to me, Terry. You introduced me to Cindy. You were the matchmaker, you son of a gun.” He smiled briefly, in a fatherly way. “Well, Cindy’s a very complicated woman. And she’s a lot younger than I am. And the fact is that I’m dependent on her in certain ways. You’re intelligent boys, men of the world; I can speak openly here. She is my mistress, yes. But she’s also like a daughter, a youthful friend. She’s my lease on my own youth. She keeps me young. She keeps my illusions intact—don’t laugh, even I have some illusions. A man must have an illusion or two. She makes me feel good, better than I have since I was a young man kicking around Harvard Square. My illusion is that the girl loves me. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. But the illusion is what keeps me going. My son dead, my wife dead …” He puffed his cigar, eyes flickering from Terry to Cassidy.

  Terry said, “Max, you love her?”

  Max waved his hand, the smoke moving slowly, like the music at Toscanini’s command. “Love, love, what is love? Love, love, hooray for love! But what is it? It’s a recent arrival on the scene of Western culture. But I’ve told you I need her, I derive many benefits from her presence in my life. You may think it odd, you being young men, but I don’t even have to touch her flesh … I can just watch the miracle of her naked body as she moves through a Sunday afternoon, every minute, sipping her coffee, reading the Times, looking out at the water … I can just sit and watch her naked as the day she was born. And then I feel as if all this utter, total shit of life is all worthwhile. It is a miracle, you understand? I sometimes look at her fanny or her toes or the muscles in her thighs, and I wonder is there any point in life without her? Is there any point in ever thinking of anything else in all of life? So, you ask me, is that love? If it is, then I love her … oh, yes, I do love her. And she makes all the sewers overflowing around me worth living through. Do you get my drift, boys? The hounds of hell are nipping at my heels, boys. I’m up to my ass in hounds, in fact, and I don’t mean Mr. J. Edgar Hoover … he’s a puppy compared to my fucking hounds—”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Traitors, Terry. Nameless, faceless traitors!” Max’s face was going an unhealthy scarlet, eyes bulging with the effort to control his temper. “You boys don’t know about this and you shouldn’t be burdened … Hoover’s trying to stick some insane war profiteering crap on me. Me! Max Bauman! A gold-star father with a son dead in the fucking Pacific! Some counterfeit gas stamps, planted in the Chrysler, the Feds tipped off … My lawyers can outtalk his dumb bastards any day, but it’s the principle here. Somebody’s trying to put me under! Christ, I was set up, somebody had the guts to set me up! Max Bauman! Just li
ke that mess at Giuseppe’s over in Jersey back in ’42 … somebody tipped that off, too—and I still don’t know who the hell the triggermen were!” He sank back into the chair, shriveling in his tuxedo, looking almost vulnerable. Almost. “It’s all shit, boys. And that little girl … I’m telling you, she keeps me going … without her I don’t know what I’d do. If she went, boys, I might lose my grip on things, on everything … oh, hell yes, I love her, need her, give it any name you want. But I will not lose her …”

  Terry sighed and slid an inch of ash into an ashtray set into a small version of a tractor tire. “Max, I don’t know about this Hoover thing, but it sounds like you’re getting all worked up over nothing. She’s nice to you, you’re nice to her. She’s got a world-class fanny and you’re rich as Croesus. Everything sounds top hole to me, Max. We should all be so lucky. So why muddy the waters? Why come to us—and why have you come to us? I don’t get it—”

  “Ah, Terry, Terry. Try to understand me. All is not well in this earthly Eden. A serpent—call it jealousy. Or more to the point, call it another man. Yes, let’s call it another man … I’m afraid she’s seeing another man.”

  “Every man fears that the woman who happens to be the answer, his own personal answer, is just possibly unfaithful.” Cassidy shook his head sadly at Max. “Hell, Max,” he said, “everybody’s afraid of that.”

  “I watch her. She pines, for God’s sake. She’s pensive, wistful, sad. She’s pining for someone. Give me some credit—I’m not a total novice when it comes to women. She leaves the house or the apartment. She goes to the library, she goes to the movies, she goes to bookstores, she walks the streets aimlessly—you understand? That’s what she says she’s doing … but all the time I know goddamn well she’s … she’s thinking of him. Goddamn him! She walks for hours in this city. I even tried to follow her once … she went to Washington Square and sat on a bench like she was waiting for someone who didn’t show up.” He shook his sleek head and ran his palm across the hairpiece, puzzled. Cassidy swallowed hard and acted like he was taking notes. Washington Square. “Then she walked all the way up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan. I thought I’d keel over! And then she looks at pictures for four hours. Now, that’s an art lover, boys! Or a woman thinking damn long thoughts.”

  Terry said, “So you caught her at it. Going for a long walk and looking at pictures. Forgive my saying so, Max, but this is not a problem. This is not a woman to worry about.” He looked at Cassidy for confirmation. Cassidy said it all looked pretty innocent to him. He knew damn well what Terry was thinking. Washington Square.

  Max nodded impatiently. “Look, boys, I didn’t come here for a debate. I need a tail on the young lady. I want to find out who the guy is. I want a name. That’s all.”

  “We’re not going to find anybody. She’s clean, Max.”

  “Terry, Terry, you’re having trouble with this concept. If you’re right, think how relieved I’ll be. Cheap at twice the price. But … there is a guy. I know that. Sometimes I just know things.” Listening to him was like looking at a blueprint of his mind working. He wasn’t giving her sex so he was sure she was getting sex somewhere else. It was like a geometric proof. It allowed no other possibilities. Cassidy didn’t say anything about the job Max was proposing. Terry already thought the mystery guest was Cassidy and the fact was Cassidy didn’t even want to imagine her with another man, though the odds said she was. The odds said Max was right. She’d told him what she was, even if she wasn’t so sure anymore. She was the kind of woman who’d always have a guy stashed somewhere in case of emergency, when the itch got too bad and she couldn’t control herself, when she had to have a nobody, an anybody, a nothing at work between her legs. Cassidy knew her, too.

  “I want this gentleman,” Max said calmly.

  “And what if we come up empty?” Terry asked.

  “You won’t, son. You won’t come up empty. Trust me. Just do your job and when I have his name and some proof, there’s a bonus. Ten thousand dollars.”

  “What are you gonna do when you have the name?” Terry looked at Cassidy from the corner of his eye, through the fog of cigar smoke. He was sure Cassidy was the name; they’d need a sacrificial lamb, a patsy. The wheels were spinning, the gears meshing. Next there’d be smoke coming out of Terry’s ears.

  “I’ll tell the gentleman to take a long walk on a short pier—”

  “Not to be indelicate, Max … but no cement galoshes, okay?”

  Max frowned at him as if such loose talk were unworthy of comment.

  “And what about Cindy?” Cassidy said.

  “She’ll know nothing about any of it.”

  “You want to marry her?” Terry asked.

  “You want the truth?” Max puffed gently, squinting at them, the obsidian eyes gleaming beneath the heavy lids. The leathery jowls made him look infinitely old just then, a tribesman contemplating eternity beyond the endless sand and sky. “Let me tell you the truth. It’s hard to believe but believe it. I’ve asked her to marry me. How old you think I am?”

  “Fifty, fifty-five,” Terry suggested.

  Max smiled. “Sixty-five. I was born in 1878. In Constantinople. A Turkish-Polish Jew. I don’t even remember the name I was born with. I’ve had six names, think of that. But I’ve had aspirations. It’s damn near impossible to stop me getting what I want. I wanted America. I got it. I helped that punk Luciano … He could be my son! I wanted Harvard. I wanted money and power. I wanted to marry a woman of breeding. I got it all. And now at the end of my life I want this beautiful blond girl … and I work up the nerve to ask her … and she tells me no, she won’t marry me. But … you’ll never guess why, not in a million years. She says she’d rather show me how much she cares for me without a piece of paper, without any legal claims. She says if she married me I’d finally get to wondering if she married me for my money. This is the kind of woman she is. Do you doubt I want her? This way she says I’ll always know she’s with me because she cares. This is an extraordinary woman …”

  “Then why not just trust her?”

  He shrugged. “Never trust a woman.”

  “Max, you amaze me,” Terry said.

  “I probably do,” he said.

  “Look, Max,” Cassidy said, “have you thought she might simply be lonely for friends her own age? Quite innocently, I mean—”

  “You’re a nice boy, Lew. But there’s nothing innocent about this girl. She’s the daughter of Time. She’s a thousand years older than I’ll ever be. She, like Evil, is. She is all of it, this woman. She is goodness and kindness, she is depravity and wickedness, the Whore of Babylon, yet she is an angel. She is cruel and dark as the pit. And she is my joy. Try to understand. I’m not raving. She is everything a woman can be. She’d be willing to die to protect her children … then devour them without a second thought. Do you wonder I love such a creature? So just do it, do what I ask, leave the rest to me.

  He stood up and slipped back into his overcoat. He put on the slouch hat.

  “Be careful,” he said. “She’s the spirit of the light and the dark. Both of you, watch yourselves.”

  When he and Bob Erickson were gone and the sound of the elevator grinding downward reached back into the office, Terry looked up and shrugged. “Well, he was wrong. He was raving.”

  Cassidy stared back at him, wondering. “Seems to me he just told us what love is. Exactly what love is.”

  “If,” Terry observed, “love’s a fatal disease.” He stood looking out the window into the night, staring down at Grand Central. “Somebody tipped Max to the boyfriend. Somebody tipped Harry Madrid to the meeting in Jersey. Somebody planted those stamps in the Chrysler … You know what, Lew? Max must have offended a god or two, because the gods sure as hell are fucking with Max’s life …”

  Chapter Thirteen

  SOMETHING—CALL IT HUMAN NATURE, call it a tip from a friend—something had taken Max’s mind, had diverted it from the idea that Terry had sold him out and set up the ambush at
the Jersey shore. One obsession had been replaced by another: his certainty that Cindy Squires was unfaithful to him. In a way Cassidy found it all baffling but, looked at another way, it struck him as part of the inevitable illogicality of life.

  Lucky Luciano was still in prison, Dewey was governor, and Max Bauman was still a free man. Harry Madrid and J. Edgar Hoover had gone to a lot of trouble to get Max and then when they’d had trouble making it stick, it had all sort of petered out …

  Cindy Squires. Cassidy had fallen in love with her for no better reason than people ever fall in love, then his wife had been lost beneath the RAF bombs and Cindy had evaporated. But she’d come back for one passionate evening, like a reward … and the joy of having her had exploded with Cassidy nearly killing Bennie and she’d slipped away again, leaving only a Christmas card … But the thing was, nothing was ever over. The story was always in progress, which was, of course, what set life apart from art. Life just kept on going, running over you again and again to make sure you got the point, and you couldn’t make it stop and nothing would stay the same. Once you had all that figured out, you’d look up feeling a little better and all of a sudden the long black shadow fell across your path and all you could do was duck and cover your path and pray.

  Cindy Squires was a story being told, ever shifting and changing as time went by, never quite what you thought she was. It was true of all of them. Max. Bennie. Harry. Terry. Lew Cassidy …

  Only the dead were complete.

  The rest of them were all still flailing away. Coming and going. Trying to figure it out. Trying to know whom you could trust. Changing. Caught in the whirlwind.

  Somebody had tipped Harry about Jersey. Somebody had planted the gas stamps in Max’s car. Bennie had had Lew dead to rights on Cindy—and suddenly the slate of his memory had been wiped clean. Cassidy had a briefcase full of funny money stashed under his bed and had no idea what to do with it. He had a cane with a sword in it and memories of a dead wife and he had a pain in his belly called Cindy and somehow he’d managed not to betray Terry Leary …