by Jon Cleary
“What?”
“Something. Another book, magazine articles. Something. You will go to work tomorrow morning. I’m not going to let you sit around and be sorry for yourself.”
“I’ve never felt sorry for myself.” But he had; immediately after he had left Cleo in the café in Rockefeller Center. But that was all behind him. “What are we going to do between now and tomorrow morning?”
“Go to bed and make thrifty love. Then tonight you can take me to dinner at Chasen’s.”
“They don’t have thrifty prices there.”
“It will be our last fling. Tomorrow I start being a very thrifty French housewife.”
He did not start another book; he discovered he did not have another book in him, not then. He called Gus Green, who wasted no time on sympathy over losing the script job but got him a commission for two pieces for Playboy. He wrote them and Playboy paid for them but didn’t ask for any more from him. He did a couple of pieces for the Los Angeles Times, but he was writing mechanically and he knew it and he got no pleasure at all from it. If he was going to write for newspapers he wanted to be back in the atmosphere of a newspaper office. But he could not bring himself to ask for a job on the Times, not while he was supposed to be a highly successful novelist. The Guns of Chance was still on the bestseller list. Reporters on the Times would not welcome another reporter whose royalty cheques made their weekly pay envelopes look like food stamps.
When the lease ran out they left for Paris, stopping over for a few days in Missouri, where Tom’s parents almost smothered Simone in their delight with her. Simone asked them to come visit her and Tom when they were settled in Paris and they said they would, which surprised Tom. All his life his father had said there was no point in travelling when you could get everything in Missouri or, if you were really stuck, next door in Kansas.
But Tom and Simone did not settle down in Paris. He was suddenly restless, the old drifter again. His British publishers were bringing out the paperback edition of his novel; they asked him to come to Britain to promote it and he accepted. They mentioned that it was about to be published in Australia and New Zealand and on the spur of the moment he asked would they like him to go out there and promote it. So he and Simone went to Australia, where Tom sought some of the essence of Cleo and found none. He saw Senator Spearfield’s name in a newspaper and the name Spearfield was like a stab in his breast. His publishers’ Australian office overwhelmed him with hospitality, but it also worked him into exhaustion and he was glad to leave Australia for New Zealand. There the pattern was repeated and he boarded the Air New Zealand flight for Tahiti with relief.
“You were looking for something, weren’t you?” said Simone. “What?”
He shrugged. He really didn’t know, unless he had been looking for the ghost of a girl who had long since fled her homeland. “What would you think about staying in Tahiti for six months?”
“Gauguin wrote a book when he lived there. Perhaps you can, too.” She wanted him to be a writer, thinking that was what he wanted.
But Tahiti produced no book. At the end of six months they moved on, drifting. Tom said he wanted to see all the places he had read about: they went to South America, to Machu Pichu, then to Rio de Janeiro. At last Simone put her foot down. Or said she wanted to, in Paris.
“I have had enough of all this, chéri. All we are doing is spending money. Neither of us is enjoying himself.”
He agreed. “Okay, we’ll go back to Paris and settle down. I’ve got an idea for a novel, I think. It’s a love story.”
“You and me?” She was only half-joking: she wanted to be in a book written by him.
“Maybe. I’ll see how it works out.” He was half-afraid to write it. The story was still only vague in his mind, but the wrong girl kept coming into his mind as the heroine. “It’ll be set in Paris, about a rich American and a young French girl.”
“It is you and me. Oh chérì—” She took him to bed and made thrifty love.
Two weeks later they flew to Paris. Their drifting, each of them hoped without saying anything to the other, was over.
Paris in October, Tom always thought, was the perfect marriage of time and place. Paris in the spring had its moments but autumn had always been his favourite season, no matter where he was. They rented an apartment on the Left Bank with a view of the Seine. Simone screamed bleu merde at the rent and beat the landlord down ten per cent, something no foreigner could ever have done. What would I do without her? Tom wondered. And had no answer.
Then he settled down to write a novel about the love-hate relationship between a young French girl and a much older rich American, told from the viewpoint of a young artist waiting, with mixed feelings, in the background.
II
Cleo had started work at the Courier on the day that Richard Nixon vacated the White House. It was an awkward day for a foreigner to move into an American newsroom. Somehow Cleo felt a sense of shame, as if she should have known better than to choose today to start.
“You’ll be on police rounds, Miss Spearfield.”
Jake Lintas looked more like a banker than the stereotype of a newspaperman. He was stout, always impeccably dressed, wore a homburg to the office, never had a hair out of place on his sleek head; he did not wear his jacket in his office, but he never rolled up his sleeves and protected his cuffs with old-fashioned paper cuffs which he ordered by the dozen pairs from somewhere in Vermont. He tried to give the impression that news should not happen till he was ready for it, but never showed any fluster if the news did break too fast.
“I’ve never been a crime reporter, Mr. Lintas.”
“You’ll learn. If you want to write about this city, you’ll get all the education you want down in the police shack. Here is our style book. You will notice that all women are referred to as Mrs. or Miss. I don’t allow words in this newspaper that can’t be pronounced.”
“You mean Ms.?”
“Exactly.” He had let her know at once that he had no time for Women’s Liberation and their aberrations. She was unsure just how much time he had for her personally, but he had made no attempt to welcome her.
She presented herself to the city editor, Carl Fishburg. A once lean reporter, he had become fat and sour at his desk; he envied the men who were able to get out and about. More importantly, with his promotion he had lost his by-line, the seal that every newspaperman worked for. He was better paid and he had authority, but he was now anonymous.
“Hal Rainer will show you the ropes.” Carl Fishburg also did not sound welcoming.
Hal Rainer, thin-nosed and bald-headed, looked like a studious city-bred eagle. He was fifty years old, came from Denver, Colorado, and hated New York but could never leave it.
“It’s like some girl you fall for. You know she’s a whore, but because she’s giving you a free lay you think she loves you.” He talked to all the women on the Courier, of whom there were not too many, as if they were men; a newspaper was a man’s world, or should be, and he made no concessions. “I came here like Lochinvar out of the West, got a job on the Brooklyn Eagle and I thought I had it made. I was gonna be the new Heywood Broun, the new Ring Lardner. Those names mean anything to you?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“You sound doubtful. Never sound like that in front of a New York newspaperman. They are gods in our pantheon.”
“What happened to you? Did they pull you up at the pantheon door?”
“I never got within sight of it. I found out I was a facts man, not an ideas man. I had a skull full of fancy phrases, but my typewriter refused to use them. I became a police reporter and I got a life sentence. I never write a word unless I got to and I’ve worn out three re-write men. All I console myself with is that I know more about crime than even the Mafia. I believe you knew Tom Border?”
The question so surprised her she thought there was something behind it. “Yes. We were kidnapped together.”
“Yeah, I know. He was a nice guy, Tom. Pity h
e wrote a book, he’ll never write anything decent again.” Then he seemed to put Tom out of his mind. “Well, this is the shack. A little seedy, but it’s our home away from home.”
The police shack was two rooms above a bail bond store on a narrow street at the back of Police Headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Tattered and yellowed sheets torn from newspapers were stuck to the walls, New York tapestries, stories of major crimes long forgotten: criminals fade almost as fast from memory as their victims. An embittered newspaper reporter had scrawled a message for history on a wall: TV news is for the eyes and ears of idiots. There were other less caustic messages, some of them yellowed and torn, some of them dated: on 11/3/48 Nita wanted Hal Rainer to call her urgently.
“Did you ever call her?” Cleo asked.
“I can’t remember who she was.”
The grimy windows were open to give the inmates a choice of suffocating from the pollution outside or the smoky fug inside. The half dozen other reporters in the rooms seemed to have dressed down to their surroundings; Hal Rainer himself looked as if he had come from a welfare handout. American crime, Cleo decided, must be scruffy. She had had little experience of British crime and none at all of Australian.
Over the next few months she began to widen her American education, beginning at the bottom of the moral scale. She found more cynicism than she had ever known back in Britain or Australia; but she had moved in different circles there, where the cynicism had been more refined and therefore to be taken for sophisticated wisdom. She was still appalled, however, at some of the stories she had to write.
“Don’t waste your sympathy,” said Hal Rainer. “Most of the time all we are writing about is the shit of human nature.”
“You should be teaching philosophy at Yale or Harvard.”
“Two posts I’ve applied for over the years.”
The two of them, the sleek once-successful girl and the scruffy middle-aged man who had never made it, had reached a compatibility where they could kid each other without offence. He never made a pass at her, not even in a joking word, never complimented her on how she might look; he treated her as he might another man. Which, she realized, was his way of complimenting her.
But she knew she was on probation as far as the paper was concerned. The Courier had obtained a working visa for her but it was valid only for so long as she continued to work for the paper. She soon realized that Jake Lintas saw no reason why she should be working for the paper at all; but The Empress had sent down instructions and he had obeyed them. But giving Cleo a job did not mean he had to treat her with any favouritism; he had a certain autonomy and he jealously guarded it. Cleo was just one of the reporters and if she wanted to rise higher she would have to prove she had something more than the others.
“How are you making out?” said Alain.
She went out with him once a week, never on the same night, rationing him as well as herself. He wanted to spend all his free time with her; he was in love with her and she knew it, but so far he had not told her so. She went to bed with him but not on a regular weekly basis; she was trying, in not very subtle ways, to let him know that she was not to be taken for granted. He accepted the situation because, the more he came to know her, the more he came to know that she had an ambition that might override any other inclination she might have. He was not absolutely sure that that would occur, but it scared him and so he held back and settled for what she was willing to give him. He had never before been involved with a really ambitious woman.
“I’m getting impatient. Every time I try to give a lift to anything I’ve written, the guys on the copy desk wipe it out. You were right—the Courier really is a stuffy sheet.”
“That’s Jake Lintas. But Mother and the board would never get rid of him. They’re afraid they’d get someone who’d turn it into another Daily News.”
“That formula works.”
“Not for the Courier. Not while Mother runs the board.”
She went home with him to his apartment on the floor below his mother’s penthouse. They made love under his mother’s feet. There was humpin’ with bumpin’ and no restraint: it is an acoustical fact that the squeak of bedsprings does not travel upwards. Cleo did cry out in ecstasy but no one heard her: the inventor of double-glazed windows was not a man afraid of the cold but one who had a wife given to knock-off-siren whoops of joy. Afterwards Cleo went into the bathroom and showered, then looked at herself in the wall-length mirror.
“Perfect,” said Alain, naked, leaning against the door-jamb. When he leaned on the proper side his crippled leg was not apparent. “Girls with a body like yours should never be allowed to dress.”
Outside, though it was only November, sleet was falling. “Just the weather for getting around like that. My nipples would stand out like six-inch spikes.”
“What a wonderful way to be stabbed to death.” He put his hand to his bare chest.
I wish he’d grow up all the way, she thought. She looked at herself again in the mirror. She did mild exercises every morning, walked to and from the office every day, watched her diet: it all paid off, there was no sign yet of any erosion. She looked at her hair, still worn short and with bangs. “I may change my hair style.”
“No,” he said emphatically. “It’s you. Cleo Spearfield.”
“Being me isn’t amounting to much. Jake Lintas still hasn’t given me my by-line.”
“Changing your hair style won’t get you a by-line. It’ll come.” He wished it wouldn’t. He would like her to fail, give up all ambition and be his wife, take up the by-line of Mrs. Alain Roux.
“It had better happen soon. I think Jake is just letting me work out my visa time.”
Christmas came and went. She spent it at Souillac with Alain and his mother and Roger and Louise Brisson; which was a mistake. It suggested she was family, or almost; and Claudine, without being rude, made it clear that the family, like Fort Knox, was not easily broken into. Presents were exchanged on Christmas morning and Cleo was discreet enough to make her gifts to Alain and Claudine modest ones.
Claudine recognized the discretion and wondered whether Cleo was shrewd or was not seriously interested in Alain. She was disturbed by the gift Alain gave Cleo, an expensive gold bracelet, but she said nothing. Then she and Cleo exchanged looks above the gift when the latter opened the velvet box, and she was reassured. The girl also thought the gift was too expensive.
Alain, for his part, enthused about Cleo’s gift to him, a Mark Cross wallet, as if it were a five-piece set of Vuitton luggage. Do restrain yourself, his mother told him silently, or soon you’ll be on your knees before her.
Cleo had tried to call her father before leaving Manhattan, but all the lines to Australia had been busy. With Claudine’s permission she called him from Souillac on Christmas night.
“How are you, Dad?”
The belly-laugh floated across the world, sounding in her ears as sweet as bell-song. “Sweetheart, you know better than to ask.”
Then she remembered his old advice: never ask an Aussie how he is because he’ll bloody well tell you, at great length.
“Righto, what sort of Christmas did you have?”
“We had dinner up at Perry’s,” he said, his voice coming and going on the wire. “Roast turkey, plum pudding, all the English stuff. We were in our cossies beside the pool—it was bloody hot. We should have our heads read, all this sticking to tradition.”
Cossie: she hadn’t heard the word in ages. Nobody even used bathing costume any more; but Sylvester still put on his cossie to go for a swim. Suddenly she wanted to weep, loving him so much that she actually felt a physical pain in her chest; but she knew, too, that she wanted to weep for the child she had once been, when her mother had been alive and all the family had been together, unspoiled by ambition, careless of possessions, just happy in the traditional Christmas spirit.
“How are things down in Canberra?”
“The bloom has worn off, Cleo. We’re beginning to stumble around lik
e a lot of blind chooks—” Chooks: chickens. Oh Dad, go on speaking Australian to me! “Gough’s still in charge, but he’s got a few no-hopers he should sack. We’ve got more trendies in Canberra than you’d find in an arcade of boutiques—” His voice died away, lost across the snows of America, the winds of the Pacific; or just lost in the bitter climate of himself? Then he came back, laughing the old belly-laugh: “Don’t worry. I’ll still be here when all the trendy professors are back in their universities. Nobody will remember them, but I’ll bet Sylvester Spearfield will be. What do you reckon?”
He sounded pathetic, wanting reassurance from her. “I’ll bet on it.”
“Hooroo, sweetheart. Take care.”
“Hooroo, Dad.” She did weep then. “Have a happy 1975.”
That evening she heard on the news that a cyclone, the worst in Australian memory, had hit Darwin in the far north. She hoped that it was not an omen for her father and the old-timers in the Labour Party.
Alain drove her back to Manhattan late that night. In the morning when she went downstairs to the delicatessen to buy milk, the owner, Mr. Kugel, brought out a dozen red roses.
“They came Christmas Eve, just after you left. No note, nothing. I kept them in water for you.” He was thin, looked as if he had been boned, had a blotchy complexion like sliced salami; but he was kind and friendly and believed red roses from anonymous admirers should be kept from dying. “They must of cost a fortune, this time of year.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kugel.” She took the roses, knowing that the man who had sent them could well afford them. It did not occur to her that Alain might have sent them: they smelled of Jack Cruze. “Did you have a nice Christmas?”
“I’m Jewish, what’s to celebrate?” But he smiled. He liked pretty girls, even Christian ones. “May the roses last. They become you.”
She went upstairs, wrapped the roses in brown paper, put on her topcoat and went for a walk. She passed an old black woman, stopped and gave her the roses. The old woman looked at her first with suspicion, then with surprise, then with puzzlement. But Cleo had already left her and walked on. She wondered how Jack had discovered her address and thought that she would immediately have to look for a new apartment. Then she realized that he would know she worked for the Courier and it would not matter where she lived. She passed a Catholic church, paused, then went in and prayed that Jack would not follow up the signal of the red roses. She came out feeling guilty: she only talked to God when she wanted a favour of Him.
