We heard Caro’s voice. “What c-c-can I say? What is it you want from me?”
“Why, not a thing, I don’t want nothin’ from you, lovely lady. Unless you can give me back those eight years of my life—now come to think of it, that’s what I want, yeah, that’s it, by God, eight years. Maybe your hubby can help me out … by the way, you gettin’ much these days, juicy lady? He worth anything at all in the sack? My, but I got me a lot of lovin’ those eight years in the joint, no doubt about that … but I just don’t think you’d like hearing about it very much. Things you ain’t never dreamed of. Well, I do hope you’re gettin’ plenty, honey. I surely do. Is he there, that big old hubby of yours?”
“Yes, he’s here … look, please stop calling … I’m sorry for what you went through, I’m sorry, what do you want me to say?”
“My, my, you gonna give your hubby some sweet pussy tonight? Nice and juicy. He like the way you taste? Maybe I should ask him in person … he could tell me all about the way you taste—”
“Oh no, don’t say that, oh God, please … do you want money? What? What can we do?”
“Money? I don’t want money, dear lady. There ain’t enough money, not for what I went through. No. Maybe I’ll take it out in trade, you’d like that, I know you would, just like your sister you’d beg for more … Say, why don’t you come over to the window, let me say goodnight … you come over, then I’ll be on my way and you can go to bed with that lucky husband of yours …”
That was it.
Victor stared at me. “Christ, can you believe this guy? He’s an argument for the death penalty.” He paced to the window and looked out at the spot where Varada had stood so recently, taunting Caro. “You know,” he said, his back to me, “he’d be delighted to know we haven’t made love since he showed up.”
“It’s not surprising,” I said. “So what are we going to do?”
He slowly turned toward me. He looked exhausted. “We might as well just go to bed.” He smiled halfheartedly. “I’m glad you’re here, sport. We’ll think of something …”
“Is Caro all right?”
“I’m worried about her. Normally she’s sound as a dollar, no bad effects from her bit of bother—hell, it was a long time ago. But with this kind of pressure—well, I worry. It’s getting to her. She tries not to show it. I’m counting on you to perk her up, get her mind on other things. What did you think of her, Charlie?”
“She’s beautiful and …”
“And?”
“And I liked her. There’s something about her—”
“You’re damn right there is. That’s just it. There’s something about Caro.”
TWO
There was indeed something about Caro Saberdene.
But I was determined either to fight it or ignore it because she was Victor’s wife. He wasn’t making it easy for me. After all, the thought of my real reaction to her must never have crossed his mind. I was his friend. You had to trust your friends. And even if you couldn’t always trust your friends, they sure as hell wouldn’t betray you when you were down and needed their help. So he didn’t make it easy for me. He kept thinking what a good idea it was to throw us together with the aim, of course, of perking her up, as he put it. Why my company might serve to take her mind off being stalked through Manhattan by a man with all the charm and style of an axe murderer escaped me but I wasn’t going to argue. Being with her, floating in a bubble of her beauty and vulnerability and fear, was a remarkable test of friendship. I was determined to pass the test.
In the morning, after a solitary breakfast in the garden served by the Filipino woman, who clucked knowingly at my feeble observations regarding the shopping habits of Mrs. Marcos, I looked over my copy of the Times and there she was coming out the French doors wearing a sleeveless white linen dress. In the early sunshine through the trees her skin tones seemed to have darkened perceptibly, to a soft buttery tan. She wore the same earrings, which, I was to learn, were seldom changed. She wore the very large Baroque pearl ring set in gold. She carried a soft bag that matched the color of her arms. “You know what they say,” she said softly, her voice almost musical, lilting. “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Have you been to Ralph Lauren’s new shop at Seventy-second and Madison?” I shook my head. “It’s the most beautiful store in New York. Get cracking, Charlie. There’s money to be spent.”
You won’t believe this because another woman saying the same words would immediately strike one as crass and offensively materialistic. But it seemed to me just then that Caro Saberdene was being brave, almost brave enough to make my eyes tear up. Call me a foolish romantic.
She was right about Lauren’s store. It lay within an old mansion, rooms cascading one after another, cluttered with countless antiques, a set dresser’s hope of heaven, a uniquely clever backdrop for the clothing, the hats and shoes and shirts and ties and blankets and sheets and pillowcases which buttoned up around the pillows. The clerks all looked as if they’d posed for Polo ads. Caro was showing me the place, as if it were a gallery or museum, and I bought a couple of ties, one green, one brown, with men playing cricket on them. On the third floor she saw a pair of spectator pumps which had caught my eye at once. Like Caro herself there was just something about them. The brown leather matched her bag and her arms, glowed with a supple sensuality. She put them on, modeled them for me, and was smiling as if she hadn’t a care in the world when she wore them out of the shop.
“Perfect,” she said. She put her arm through mine as we walked toward the park. Sitting on a bench in the shade, heat waves shimmering up from the toy boat pond, she insisted I put on one of my new ties. The green one. She said she thought I looked positively swell in my cricket-man tie.
Half an hour later she’d led the way to the Marlborough Galleries on the second floor at 40 West Fifty-seventh. There was a new show of Alex Katz’s recent paintings, which I had never seen, recent or otherwise, except as color reproductions in magazines. In real life they were, of course, much larger. That was the only difference that mattered. Countless paintings of his wife, dark-haired, a prominent slightly beaky nose. Caro pondered one, taking in the flat, bright colors, shook her head. “Can you imagine having this terrible, irrefutable record of your youth going, middle age arriving? All carefully recorded by your husband and then trotted out for public display? I wonder if she ever wishes he would die … then maybe she’d stop growing older. He’s like a clock ticking her life away.” She cocked her head at me. “Yes, I’m sure there are times she’d like to kill him herself. Victor told me that you insist on believing a wife of yours once tried to shoot you—”
“That’s right. I do and she did.”
“Well,” she laughed, “you like living right on the edge.”
“Hardly. It wasn’t my idea.”
The paintings began to gang up on me. All the flat, empty faces, bereft of shadings like a vista of yuppie masks. Were there people inside those two-dimensional skulls? Occasionally I saw past the surface into the haunted eyes.
“You look unhappy,” she said.
“No offense but these people remind me of your dinner party.”
She giggled softly. She seemed only to make soft, sometimes slightly teasing sounds. “Didn’t take you long to figure us out. I was thinking the same thing …”
“I look at the pictures and I begin to make up stories about the subjects’ lives,” I said. “And the stories aren’t very happy.”
“The writer’s impulse,” she said.
“Is there some writer chronicling their lives? Do these people have their own John Marquand or O’Hara? Or is Katz their man?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in The New Yorker. Actually they seem to be covered pretty thoroughly in nonfiction terms. New York magazine, Vanity Fair … Vanity Fair is doing a piece on Victor. Should I commission Katz to do a portrait of Victor?”
“What a gruesome idea!”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Just thin
king I’d be a better subject. Victor has too much character in his face.”
“Is that what you call it? I thought he just had those bags—steamer trunks, really—under his eyes. Strain. I’m not sure Victor has all that much character. He’s such a pragmatist and pragmatism doesn’t make for character—”
“Being pragmatic is a strain. Gives you character.”
“Well, you must not be all that pragmatic then. Your face is unsullied by care and strain.”
“That’s what I meant. I never know what’s good for me, I blunder into things and men can’t figure out what’s going on. This show,” I swept it with my eyes, “is unsettling to a man with a Katz face. A face like mine. I always find myself sliding along the surface, not making commitments to anything other than my work and the occasional irresistible impulse—”
“The truth is, you have the face of an innocent.”
“Like a kind of idiot, I suppose,” I said and she grinned and walked away, looking at more of the paintings. I watched her from across the large room, marveling at the aura of control she exuded. She was so taut, right down to the tapping of her snappy new shoes. Her face was so fine and regular that she might have posed successfully for Katz: he might have found the emptiness he seemed to love in the smooth planes of her face, in the direct gaze, but he’d have foundered when he tried to capture the feeling in her eyes. But maybe he wouldn’t have seen it. I was the Katz man; but not Victor. I was the one who’d told Victor all about the importance of love, and Victor had paid attention. It was on me that my message seemed to have been lost. I had not found my own Caro, my own anima.
I found her standing before an atypical, darkly colored canvas called Twilight. It was large, an ominously dark night, a cityscape, black buildings outlined against the sky, windows yellow and empty, like eyes staring at the huge face of a WASPy pale girl whose face filled the foreground. She is almost on top of you and she is afraid, you can see it, the fear curdling, blotting what in another painting would have been the customary vacuous face. She is being pursued. By the night itself, by the eyes watching her. You can hear the footsteps on the pavement behind her, you can hear the raspy breathing of the danger, of the man she can’t seem to escape.
She turned to me and the jauntiness of the morning was gone. Her lower lip was trembling and her eyes searched my face. The painting seemed to have gone through her like a spear, pinning her to the reality of her own situation. She was an actress and her performance that day had been first-rate but the performance was over now.
“Let’s get out of here,” she whispered.
She was asking me to get her out of the darkness of Twilight and back into the summer sunshine, back to safety.
THREE
It was just past two o’clock and the luncheon crowd at the Sea Grill in Rockefeller Center had begun to thin out. We got an umbrella table outdoors with the fountain splashing beneath Golden Boy. The sunshine and the bright colors and the music from the outdoor speakers and the relentless crowds all seemed to restore her spirits. She laughed and drank a funny drink with a paper hat on a stick in it and told me about New York. Her New York, which was of course largely a reflection of Victor’s New York. Dinners for Victor’s clients at Mortimer’s, something that sounded like “lollipop condos” which apparently referred to a trendy inclination to build one condo building on top of another, all the skullduggery of insider trading on Wall Street which resulted in the indictment of one of Victor’s brokers, a new singer at the Algonquin and a house they were thinking of buying on Shelter Island and all the new plays she made a point of seeing, usually by herself since Victor was so busy and didn’t much care for the world of make-believe.
“Do you ever wish you’d stayed an actress?”
“Oh, I wasn’t much of an actress. I sort of fell into it. It was something to do in college and then I was involved with a guy who was a director in Boston and we hung around with the theater crowd there. And the bunch who worked on The Phoenix, sort of Boston’s Village Voice … I wasn’t much of an actress. The boyfriend always said I saved my best performances for real life—”
“Like most people,” I said.
She went on talking while we ate, then stopped when she saw my face freeze in a double take. “What’s the matter? What did I say?”
I shook my head. “We’ve got a friend …”
Carl Varada was standing at the bar, in the shade, having a drink, watching us across the sea of tables with their flapping umbrellas. He was wearing a tan Haspel suit and a straw hat, a white shirt, a striped tie, dark glasses. He nodded to us, a kind of exaggerated gesture, lifting his glass. I heard Caro’s small gasp, saw her stiffen. Varada slid away from the bar and was ambling toward us. He was holding his glass, and a cheroot was stuck in the corner of his mouth. He stood beside the table, looking down at her.
“And how are you today, dear lady? Enjoying your little outing? Lovely, sunny weather … and you, pal, who might you be?”
“Well, I might be almost anyone, Mr. Varada …”
“Let’s say you’re a friend of the family and leave it at that.” He turned to Caro: “Did you enjoy those paintings, by the way? You know what they made me think of? I knew a guy in the joint, looked just like one of those Katz fellas, prep school boy, all the advantages, I got to know him pretty well.” He put his drink down, leaned forward with both hands on our table, and paused, smoke curling from his cigar. “You think those Katz men look empty and wasted? Well, I put a look in this young fella’s eyes, a look like you never seen in all your born days … a look he ain’t never gonna get rid of, lovely lady. He won’t soon forget Mr. Varada. He’ll string himself up from a shower nozzle before he forgets me. I’ll be the last thing he sees before his lights go out for good.” He chuckled softly as if in wonderment at the effect he had on people. “I gotta tell you, folks, I love, just love puttin’ that look in people’s eyes … it’s a kind of I’d-rather-be-dead look, you know what I’m sayin’—”
“Pack it up,” I said. “Fuck off.”
He looked at me, the hooded eyes barely open way below the arch of his eyebrows. “Well, well, the little man is heard. Vox populi.” He grinned or leered, did something with his mouth. “Voice of the people. You learn all sorts of useless things when you’re inside. You look pretty useless yourself, sport.”
“Leave us alone, please, just get away from us.” Caro’s face was bleached of color, her eyes peeled in terror or hatred. “My husband won’t stand for this—”
“Oh no! But don’t threaten me. I hate being threatened. Shrink in the joint said I have a tendency to go all unstable when I’m threatened … and you’d better believe me when I tell you we wouldn’t want that.” He smiled, looking down the long nose with the break in it.
I stood up, deciding there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do to me in the Sea Grill. “Shove off, Varada. You’re looking for a kind of trouble you can’t even begin to imagine—”
“You don’t say! Well, now I am well and truly scared, little man. So I surely will shove off. Never been one to hang on where he wasn’t wanted.” He smiled as if we were all old friends. I’m six feet tall and I had a good view of his chin. He casually put his hands up, palms toward my chest, as if he were calming me down or fending me off in a joking manner. “I’ll be seeing you, though. You can depend on that, lovely lady. My goodness, but you’re such a pretty thing … I can take your clothes off with my eyes. I know, what you smell like and taste like. Fella develops his imagination when he’s inside—don’t move a muscle, pardner,” he said, looking at her, talking to me, “unless you want me to tear you another asshole.” He smiled again. “Well, I’m on my way.” He saluted from the brim of that damn straw hat. “Give my regards to your husband, dear lady. Tell him to keep an eye out for me. Just when you least expect me”—he snapped his fingers—“there I’ll be.”
I was shaking while I watched him walk away, past the bar, then slowly up the stairs to the street level, where the sun
glared brightly.
Caro’s mouth was compressed in a tight red line, and a tiny muscle was leaping along her jaw. I sat back down and tried to keep my knees still. “Jesus,” I sighed after a while.
She sat absolutely still. She should have gotten an Oscar right on the spot. I put my hand over hers.
“I’m all right,” she said. She lit a cigarette with a steady hand. It was like watching a little girl show off. She exhaled and looked at me. Her color was coming back. “He won’t stop, you know.”
“Then he’ll have to be stopped.”
“That scares me more than he does,” she said.
Chapter Five
ONE
I WAS IN THE BACK end of the library with the bay window looking out over the garden. The fountain was splashing and squirrels were enjoying a cocktail hour of sorts in what must have been one of the tonier venues of squirreldom. The chair in which I sat was a blood-colored leather wing back and the paintings on the walls depicted old English hunting scenes, riders in their muddied pinks receiving stirrup cups from pretty serving wenches, foxhounds scampering anxiously around the horses’ hooves. The Purdey rested in a rack over the fireplace as if it, and the other guns in the rack, took precedence among the room’s artworks. Books, drinks tables, an elaborate brass-bound camp desk, a couple of decorative gout stools. I remembered one of Victor’s triumphant moments in Harvard Square, running across me one bleak November day outside the Bick. “Well, I’ve done it!” he cried. “I’ve just come from the doctor and my heritage is confirmed—”
“I thought your dancing master had confirmed that long ago—”
“No! And none of your cheek, boy-o. This is serious business. I have now been shown to have an excessive amount of uric acid in my system!”
“Well, this is good news!”
“Do you understand what this means?”
“Actually … no.”
“I’m a cinch to develop gout in my later years! The Curse of the Saberdenes! I’ll inherit my father’s collection of gout stools, just as he inherited his father’s, and so on through the centuries. Really, Charlie, it’s quite a family tradition.”
The Saberdene Variations Page 5
