The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  Loren met us at the train station in Southampton. He was driving an old MG; the top was down in the brilliant sunlight, the flowery, tingly heat. He drove us through town, gesturing expansively, pointing out the sights—which were mainly the walls, gates, and high hedges behind which lived either Famous People or Good Families. Joan liked Loren immediately; she responded to the romance of his faded wealth, his delicate, wounded good looks. For my part, perched in the back of the car, I was very grateful he had agreed to see me and had invited us to the beach, but I was having to cope with the sight of what he had become. I could not imagine him living with my mother, nor could I reconcile this man with the pictures of him as a virtuous Woody Guthrie clone I’d seen in Hootenanny Heaven or in Mark Halifax’s spotty but useful A Musical History of the Sixties. He was still handsome, trim; he was even tan. But there was an air of degeneracy about him. The love of easy money and leisure of every sort was all over him—in his strange little smile, his cloudy eyes, his perfectly cut silver hair. He smelled as if he’d just splashed on a generous amount of cologne before coming to get us. There was a kind of hysteria in his devotion to living well.

  “You know who would hate it here?” Loren said, turning back to me. We were on a narrow beach road now and he drove it without looking.

  “My mother?”

  “Exactly. It would really offend her.”

  “I think It’s beautiful,” said Joan. She breathed deeply. “The air. The light. The architecture. Everything.”

  “Oh, I do, too, I absolutely do,” said Loren. He smiled expensively at Joan. “But Esther is another matter altogether. She hates wealth, luxury, the whole nine yards. She’s terribly pure; her judgment is your basic swift sword.”

  “God,” said Joan, shaking her head, as if the scandal of my mother’s high principles had been kept secret from her.

  “You know that phrase,” said Loren, “—the whole nine yards—? Do you know what it means?”

  “Something about football, I guess,” said Joan. “A first down.”

  “Well, actually, you need ten yards for a first down,” said Loren. “I just read this, so I’m very, very excited. The old machine guns? The belts with the bullets on them, that you’d feed through the machine gun? They were nine yards long.”

  “Ah,” said Joan.

  “Isn’t that great?” said Loren. “Isn’t that instantly one of your favorite things of life?”

  He turned the car into a sandy driveway, the gate to which was open wide. We drove past sweet-smelling honeysuckle hedges, on our way toward his house, a salt-stained, vaguely Gothic old house, on a rise of reinforced dune. I was cramped; he was flirting with my girlfriend. But I kept it to myself. Soon, we were in the house, seated in wicker chairs on his back porch, with its glimpse of roiling gray ocean, and the famished, hysterical gulls wheeling overhead. The housekeeper gave us gin-and-tonics and Loren directed his attention toward me.

  “You look just like your mother,” he said. “You have her eyes. And her hair, of course. You should let it grow.”

  “I don’t see where he looks that much like Luke Fairchild,” said Joan.

  Loren squinted at me, as if I were some ship on the distant horizon. Then he shrugged, let it go at that. He took a long swallow of his gin, coughed softly into the back of his hand.

  “How long did you live with my mother?” I asked.

  “Not very long. That’s the weird tiling. What did she say? Does she even remember me?” He laughed, pasting a brittle hearty veneer over a bit of sentimentality. “Oh, maybe we were together four months. Five? But she was so central. I’ve never forgotten her, even now, after all these years. She was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known. Say, Joan. The word ‘together’? Take it apart and you—”

  “In your letter to the editor—” I said, interrupting him.

  “Oh, I know, I know. I made it seem as if she just walked out on me. I shouldn’t have written that. Fact is, no one’s walked out on me. I… I have a way with women.”

  Yeah, right. I glanced at Joan, to see if she was taking this in.

  She fished the lime out of her drink with her baby fingernail.

  “How long after meeting Luke did my mother move in with him?” I asked.

  “How long?” Loren asked, quizzically, almost peevishly, as if by asking this I had completely changed the subject of conversation. “I don’t really know. A while.” And then, softly, rather sadly, he added, “Things were ending with us anyhow.”

  My heart had somehow sneaked away from me and attached itself to Loren’s; I don’t know why it would do such a thing, but it sank as his did. I felt the kinship of ruined lives.

  A bright red Saab pulled alongside the house. A dark-haired woman in a linen dress and sleeveless blouse got out of the car and waved up at Loren. If you had just arrived from Sri Lanka you would have still easily guessed she was a real estate agent.

  “Yoohoo, Loren,” she called. “I’ve got the Persigs to see the house.”

  “Bring them right in and sell them the fucking place, and then take your six percent and shove it up your twat,” Loren said softly, all the time waving and smiling and making the OK sign with his fingers. A moment later, a couple in their twenties, somehow rich enough to buy the Nelson house, emerged from the Saab.

  Joan stared at them with undisguised envy. “They’re going to buy your house?”

  “God willing.”

  “That’s awful,” she said. “It must feel terrible to have strangers looking over something so personal and full of family feeling.”

  “Yeah, well nothing that four and a half million dollars won’t cure.”

  The real estate agent led the Persigs in, gesturing toward the Atlantic, the sky, the cedar plank walkways, the empty, vine-choked swimming pool. The Persigs nodded, poker- faced—they were already used to having dough, knew that it put them in charge over every transaction this side of a mugging.

  “You know, Billy,” Loren said, finishing his drink, “your mother was one of the most important people in the Village those days. I mean, people tell the story as if she was so lucky to win Luke, but the truth is, he was the lucky one.”

  “Important how?” I asked.

  “Well, in order to answer that we’d have to go back. The fifties were over, thank God.”

  Loren’s housekeeper, a stout, vigorous, middle-aged Hispanic woman in jeans and a San Diego Padres T-shirt, came in with fresh gin-and-tonics. She placed them down and went back into the house.

  “Mercedes loves to see me smashed,” said Loren, picking up the new glass. “It makes her day.”

  “I hope she’ll like seeing me loaded, too,” said Joan.

  “Oh, she will, she will,” said Loren. “Anyhow. Your mother.” He sighed, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. “Your mother was, above and beyond any other tiling, a political person.”

  “Would you say she was a Communist?” I asked.

  “She was a big Communist. Sandy Golden was a Communist, and half the people around the Folklore Village were Reds, too,” said Loren. “Those people Esther worked for at Lift Ev’ry Voice, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, the whole lot of them. Woody Guthrie, of course. Do these names mean anything at all to you?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “Not that you had to be a Communist to be a folk singer. I wasn’t a Communist. I really liked the old English ballads—I liked Richard Dyer-Bennet, people like that. To me, folk music was about purity, and prettiness, and the old-fashioned life. To Esther, it was protest music, but we got along. Everyone in the Village folk scene got along, basically. There was always a party, always a new club opening. On weekends, the Village was mobbed. People came from all over. Squares who wanted to rub shoulders with the harmless beatniks, and kids who wanted to break out and be free. They had to close the streets in the summer. Cars couldn’t even get through. It was astonishing. Folk music. It was a craze, a goddamned fad. Folk singing was huge back then, it was everywhere. There wer
e folk music hits on the radio, for crying out loud. There was plenty of work for everybody. I knew early on that I wasn’t very special, but I loved performing. I played the basket clubs.”

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Clubs where you wouldn’t get paid, but they passed around a little wicker basket and people gave what they pleased. Usually you wouldn’t make more than three or four bucks, but it was enough for a couple of beers for you and a girl.”

  Loren went silent. He drank his gin and then put it down and rubbed his eyes.

  “I can still see the light in those places,” Loren said. “And the coffee—oh man, the coffee! Thick as mud. And bitter?” He laughed. “As bitter as I sometimes feel.”

  “Esther still remembers you very fondly,” I said, softly. I guess I was trying to cheer him up, for by now he was starting to slump in his chair. He had taken off his loafers; his feet were bare, sunburned; each bony toe had a tuft of hair on top of it.

  “Really?” he said, hopefully.

  “It’s hard to get her to talk about these things. But a while ago, at Thanksgiving, your name came up.”

  “My name came up?”

  “She was talking about you. Very fondly.”

  “You said that already, Billy,” said Joan. I gave her a “later for you” look.

  “I’d sort of like to know what she was saying,” Loren said.

  “That you had a beautiful voice.”

  “I had a serviceable voice. What else did she say?”

  “I remember her saying she was crazy about you,” I said, though I remembered no such thing. What was I doing? Pimping my mom to make the interview go smoothly?

  “Crazy about me?” said Loren. He smiled, shook his head. I wondered when I would come to that time of life, when I would believe anything if it made me feel better. But then I realized I had always more or less been at that time of life.

  “She was something,” said Loren. “She was a trip.”

  “Do you think Loren would recognize her now?” Joan asked.

  “Of course he would,” I answered, making no attempt to disguise my annoyance. Joan was trying to imply that the years, as they say, had not been kind to Esther—when, in fact, she was still quite beautiful.

  Loren was visibly disturbed by the sudden tension between Joan and me. Living alone, as he did, he no longer had any tolerance for discord. He drank the rest of his G&T and then quickly stood up.

  “Let’s take a walk on the beach and soak up some negative ions,” he said.

  We walked for miles, for the most part silently, letting the hypnotic seething of the ocean and the ever-changing light stand in for conversation. Joan picked up shells, carrying a handful in one hand and her shoes in the other. She seemed truly content. She scampered away from the tide, like a long and lovely child. As we got further and further away from Loren’s house, a realignment of our walking order took place. In the beginning, we were walking three abreast; then it was Joan in front, followed by me and then Loren. But soon it was Loren and Joan, more or less side by side, with me falling increasingly in the rear. By the time the afternoon shadows began to lengthen and the tide had gone out, leaving a litter of broken scallop shells and the prehistoric husks of skate fish, they were walking a full ten paces in front of me. I deliberately slowed down, to see if they’d notice, or be embarrassed enough to wait for me to catch up. At one point, Joan even pulled Loren’s shirt collar and dropped a couple of shells down his back; the sound of the ocean rolled over their laughter.

  Back at the house, the housekeeper served us supper on the deck. The green canvas awning flapped mightily in the wind; down below, in the sand, several white paper napkins were entwined in the beach grass. You could picture them blowing off the deck and the “oh, well” look on Loren’s face. We ate pork chops, which I don’t normally give a second thought to, but somehow this time I wondered if the depths of my Jewishness might be being plumbed, if Loren, in his ever-mounting inebriation and the sense of recklessness and moral exhaustion it engendered, wasn’t sticking the oar of his Waspiness into my genetic pool. It wasn’t just the pork chops—which were, incidentally, delicious, and sparked a mini-orgy of pig meat that lasted six months—but a sudden flurry of Old Boy references, to his prep school (St. Andrew—s), the funny thing that Fuddy Van Fart said at the New York Athletic Club, the shocking state of disrepair of his uncle’s Newport cottage, that made me suspect that in Loren’s desultory desperation he had settled into a kind of low-grade anti-Semitism.

  Indeed, after dinner, as we drank brandy out of smudgy snifters, and the candles guttered in their pewter sticks, casting their last frantic flickerings on our faces, and the sound of the ocean out there in the darkness was like some strange mixture of Eternity and a pack of vicious dogs, Loren held forth on Luke.

  “The thing I could never get over,” he said, “was Luke didn’t even like folk music. He cared as much about tradition, for God’s sake, as he did about—oh, I don’t know—Shaker furniture. Oh, he knew a great many songs, and, really, he sang them creditably. Considering. You know, his voice, and all. But he had no real … connection to the songs. Take me.” Loren paused, smiled, and gestured for our indulgence. “I sang English ballads, Welsh mining songs. But my family, for God’s sake, is English. You see what I mean?”

  “Well, the Jews of St. Louis didn’t write that many folk songs,” I said.

  “Exactly my point! He didn’t necessarily have that tradition to draw on. It’s no one’s fault, obviously. The Clancy Brothers can sing Irish songs, but they’re Irish. And Doc Watson can sing Appalachian music, but that’s who he is. All I’m saying is, if you don’t have a tradition, then don’t pretend you do, and don—t, whatever you do, just willy-nilly adopt someone else’s tradition and tell the world It’s your own. It’s not very nice, and in the end no one’s going to believe you. You’ll be exposed as a goddamned liar.”

  He finished his brandy, poured some more. It was from California, Christian Brothers; I was sure he’d rather be drinking cognac.

  “Then how did he make such a name for himself?” I asked. I leaned back in my chair. For a moment, I imagined slipping back, toppling over, landing on my back. I quickly came forward, rested my hands on the table. Loren poured some more brandy into Joan’s snifter. “No one ever accused him of having a good voice. He didn’t like folk music. He had no tradition. What put him over?”

  “Who was the audience?” said Loren, pouncing on it. “That’s what you have to ask yourself. The audience wasn’t a jury of folk music purists from the Smithsonian. No. The audience didn’t really like folk music, either. They thought they did, because folk music was a thing. But they didn’t really like folk music any more than Luke did. And the audience was just a bunch of mutts, too—college kids, leftists, and a whole lot of bridge-and-tunnel traffic. They weren’t people with traditions, or people who even cared that much about tradition. And you know what? They weren’t particularly musical, either. What they were interested in, it turned out, was self-expression, of all things. And who would be a more fitting avatar for the Age of Self-Expression than our very own Luke?” Loren stopped himself, if only for a moment. He watched as I wrote down everything I could in the red spiral notebook I had brought along.

  “You know, Billy,” he said, “maybe not being raised by Luke Fairchild was the luckiest thing that ever happened to you.”

  I shrugged. It wasn’t as if it had never occurred to me. Even as a young boy with a child’s tender heart, even as I lay those long and nervous New York nights in my bed and literally prayed for him, prayed for him to find me, to claim me, to come down from the clouds like an angel out of Blake, even then it crossed and double-crossed my mind that I might be better off without him. My mother told me as much, gently; my grandparents told me, too, and not so gently, not so gently at all.

  It was late, and Loren was too drunk to carry the conversation any further. He showed Joan and me to an unkempt and musty little guest room, with two met
al-framed single beds on either side of it. “Not exactly the Carlyle,” he said, retreating with a smile.

  Joan and I lay in our beds, like ornery siblings, sick of each other. The light switch was under her control, on the wall next to her bed, and as soon as I started to make conversation she flicked the switch. I was certain it was me she wanted to turn off, as well as the bare light bulb overhead. The sheets were clammy and the white nubby cotton bedspread wasn’t nearly warm enough for the suddenly chilly night. I really wanted to be next to Joan. I didn’t even care about making love with her, I just wanted to spoon next to her, to feel her warmth, and maybe take a little comfort in the simple fact of her. These trips in search of Luke always left me feeling a little bruised, as if my soul, far heavier than I realized, had lunged at a shadow and fallen flat.

  “Joan?” I whispered, but she was silent. I heard her breathing and then the ocean and then her breathing again. I closed my eyes, feeling abandoned and a little wild with insomniac longings. But soon I dropped off to sleep, and when I awoke—was accidentally awakened—the moon had traveled the sky to the point where it shone in the room’s only window, leaving a reflection of window frame on the wall and part of the ceiling.

  Loren had crept back into the room, dressed in his robe, holding a bottle of something. He was leaning over Joan’s bed. The ocean seemed to have disappeared. All I could hear was Loren’s sodden breath.

  “Joan?” he whispered, in a voice humbled, urgent, a little ashamed of itself.

  I pretended to sleep, wondering what she would do.

  She made a sleeper’s noise and turned over. Loren crouched down, unstably, stuck the bottle down on the floor for extra balance, and, with his other hand, patted Joan’s long, wavy brown hair.

  I was no longer even blinking; my eyes were drier than the moon. But the instinct to do something finally overcame me and I propped myself up on one elbow and said, “What in the fuck are you doing?”

  He scuttled out of the room like a land crab, closing the door so hard behind him that Joan awakened.