He looks grim. “Remember True Grit? When was the last respectable Western book on the bestseller list? It’s a sad thing, you know, but there’s a generation out there all the way up into their twenties who think the American myth has something to do with automobiles. They’ve never heard of Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp or Cochise.”
A man’s voice startles her from behind her shoulder. “Doyle, there’s a bloody story in that.”
It’s the customer in the khaki suit. He has a book in his hand. “This any good?”
Doyle Stevens takes it in his hand. “The Journal of Lieutenant Thomas W. Sweeny. Westernlore.” It brings out of him a reminiscent smile. “An absolute delight. Sweeny founded Fort Yuma, you know. Remarkable stories about the Indians down there. They had paddlewheel steamboats on the Colorado River in his day, did you know that?”
She remembers her brief stroll. “You could hardly float a toothpick on it now.”
The customer sizes her up. “That’s the bloody dam builders. You know a hundred and fifty years ago before it got overgrazed and before they bottomed out the bloody water table with too many deep wells, a good part of what’s now the Arizona desert used to be grassland. Green and lush.”
“It’s a shame,” she says with a polite little smile, wishing he would go away.
Doyle Stevens says, “Mrs. Hartman—Graeme Goldsmith.”
She shakes his hand. His eyes smile at her with more intimacy than she likes. He’s odd looking, especially up close where his astonishingly pale blue eyes take effect. It’s been too long since he’s been to the barber; he has a thatch of brown hair just starting to go thin at the front and she thinks she detects a pasty hint under the camouflaging tan: likely he drinks more than he ought to.
“That’s G-r-a-e-m-e,” he says. “Nobody can spell it. My mother fancied the bloody name.”
Time has faded the accent but he is distinctly Australian.
Doyle Stevens, about to burst, says, “Looks as though Mrs. Hartman’s going to be our new business partner.”
“That so?”
She says, “If Mrs. Stevens approves.”
“Well well. Good-oh. We’ll have to give it a proper write-up in the Trib.”
An alarm jangles through her.
Doyle Stevens says, “Graeme’s a reporter on the Valley Tribune.”
“Not to mention I’m a stringer for the UPI newswire,” Goldsmith says quickly.
She hatches a smile and hopes it is properly gentle. “I’d rather you didn’t print anything about this. It’s sort of a silent partnership.”
“Any particular reason.”
“I don’t want publicity. A woman living alone—you know how it is. It’s the same reason I have my phone unlisted.”
“Okay, Mrs. Hartman. I can buy that.” But she has seen it when he latched onto the statement that she lives alone.
Doyle Stevens says, “You want to pay for that book or were you just going to walk out with it?”
Graeme Goldsmith still has his blue eyes fixed on her face. “How much?”
She tries to keep her glance friendly when it intersects with the Australian’s but after he pays for the book she is glad to see the back of him.
A reporter, she thinks. That’s just what I need.
18 Every day she visits the mailbox of the dummy apartment in hope there’ll be something to collect.
By July 25 nothing has appeared except junk mail and Dorothy Holder’s Social Security card: it comes from the forwarding service in Las Vegas.
Taking a break from her on-the-job training in the retail bookselling business and from the flying lessons that take up a good part of every third afternoon she drives to Carson City where she applies for a Nevada driver’s license in the name of Dorothy (NMI) Holder.
In these towns you don’t go into the good restaurants and eat alone; some of them won’t seat you at all and the others assume you’re looking for a pickup. You eat instead in chain diners and coffee shops where your palate has become exceedingly bored with oversteamed vegetables and bland American provincial cooking.
By now she has memorized DuPar’s menus and those of the House of Pancakes. She has had one too many Open Face Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches With Brown Gravy. Walking into this particular Holiday Inn restaurant she is dreaming wistfully of Guido Tusco’s fettucine al pesto, of Henri’s Dover sole amandine, of the Manhattan chowder that Marjorie Quirini used to make from clams her husband had dug out of the Great South Bay that very day.
It is in that frame of mind, walking in and waiting to be seated, that she sees Bert and recognizes him.
Terror roots her to the spot.
It can’t possibly be—can it?
He sits at the bar with his back to her, the muscles pulling his jacket tight across the wide lean shoulders, and his big long close-cropped dark head is cocked a bit to one side as he stirs the drink in front of him. He sits hipshot on the bar-stool with one leg dangling and the other propped stiff against the floor—his habitual posture.
Standing bolt still she tries to fight the panic.
What in the hell is he doing here?
Come on. Jesus. Get a grip … just sidle on out of here … move.
She’s paralyzed. Pinpricks of fear burst out on her skin.
Her mesmerized stare is fastened to the back of his head.
Unwillingly her eyes crawl up to the mirror beyond him, the mirror behind the bar. He’s looking right at her.
For a moment it doesn’t register. All she knows is that he’s staring at her.
Then she sees his face—it was there all the time, a pinched dewlappy face she has never seen before.
A stranger.
It’s not Bert after all.
Relief is so powerful that when the hostess comes toward her with a menu she beams a radiant smile upon the bewildered woman. But by the time she slides into the Naugahyde booth she’s gone faint and weak and she orders a double martini, extra dry, and sits shaking in all her joints until it arrives.
Not him at all. But what an uncanny resemblance from the back. The shape of his head, the cant of the wide slabby shoulders—even the waist-nipped cut of the light tweed jacket.
It’s so easy to be fooled …
He was just like that, she recalls, the very first time she saw him. Propped tall against a bar stool with his back to her.
It was in—what was the name of the place? One of those tony discos in the Hamptons. Filled with groupers, of whom she was one that summer: two weeks of sharing a dumpy cottage in Sag Harbor with five other girls.
He was in lime sherbet slacks and a madras jacket. She danced with him. He was long-boned and awkward: a graceless dancer, but he had an attractive way of laughing at his own clumsiness. And his hard lean musculature made the other men in the place look like marshmallows.
The hoarse rasp of his voice intrigued her. He had a quick sense of humor.
“Your name’s Matty, isn’t it?”
“How did you know that?”
“Matty Sevrin, right? I asked your girlfriend over there. When you went to the Ladies’. What’s it short for? Matilda?”
“Madeleine.”
“Pretty name.”
He said his name was Al. She asked if it was short for Alfred. No; his name was Albert.
“Then I’ll call you Bert.”
“Why?”
“So it will belong to me,” she said. “It’ll be my special name for you and we won’t share it with anybody.”
She was just kidding along at the time. Flirting with him. Harmless. It meant nothing.
He seemed an outsider here, a bit older than most of them, amused by the swirling racket. He bought her a drink and said he’d seen her in a magazine spread, modeling fashions. She was pleased to be recognized.
(Weeks later he admitted the falsehood. He hadn’t recognized her from ads. He’d pumped her girl friend at the bar. By then they were an item and she forgave him the white lie.)
They danced again;
he asked her where she was staying.
It was getting late and the disco noise was starting to get to her. By then she’d fended off half a dozen young men and maybe she was just tired of it or maybe she was impressed by his hard body and his good-natured mature self-assurance and the way he didn’t come at her head-on with all guns blazing. She decided she liked him enough to give him the phone number of the cottage.
He didn’t offer to drive her home; he didn’t make a pass or even imply one and she found this refreshing and disappointing at once. But she thought about him constantly.
Two days later he drove up in a white Seville with his friends, a married couple he’d collected at the L.I.R.R. station—Jack and Diane Sertic; thirty-fiveish, all of them. Bert made introductions and she got in beside him, carrying her racquet and wearing her whites. The Sertics were in Ralph Lauren purple and Bert called them snobs.
She sips the second martini and it all floods through her recollection as if it has just taken place an hour ago. She remembers how they chatted on the twenty-minute ride about the idiotic tribal rituals of the Hamptons and the lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes for which you had to pay a scandalous $18 a pound that summer.
The road seemed to have been reserved for use by Rollses and Cadillacs, with the occasional BMW for levity. And then Bert drove them into the sinuous pebbled driveway of the eight-acre Stanford White estate he was renting. It had sixteen rooms; pillars and a porte-cochere and a fountain on the lawn that sloped down to the shore. She noted a red two-seater Mercedes sports car and an Audi sedan parked in the four-car garage.
Jack Sertic was impressed. “What do you have to pay for it?”
“Forty thousand for the season.”
“Not bad.”
She tried not to gape. Bert said, “Used to belong to one of the owners of the 21 club. See the dock down there? They ran liquor in from here during Prohibition.”
“Nothing changes all that much, does it. Now it’s coke and Acapulco gold.” Jack Sertic grinned at Bert.
They played two sets of mixed doubles. The Sertics were good; she and Bert were better. Enjoying the victory they went on to lunch at the beach club.
They swam in the afternoon. A foursome of Bert’s friends came by, played a raucous game of croquet, drank planter’s punch and departed.
She flowed with it all, in a pink silky haze: it seemed so Gatsbyesque. A little high on rum she drowsed in the shade and listened to the others talk about Studio 54 and about a thoroughbred stallion that was being syndicated for a million five and about an Arthur Ashe–Jimmy Connors match that had taken place a week ago. Bert told a rambling story about two gangs of screw-ups, one employed by the CIA and the other by the Mafia, who he swore had actually gone to open warfare several years earlier, the battleground being Port-au-Prince where rattletrap Second World War bombers piloted by CIA dipsticks had tried to bomb Papa Doc’s palace, only to have their aim thrown off by unanticipated antiaircraft fire from the palace roof.
“Papa Doc made a deal with Lansky to get him ack-ack guns in return for some beachfront gambling concessions he gave Lansky. All the bombs exploded in the harbor. One of the planes got nicked. No casualties. End of war. It’s all true, you know. I got it from that skip-tracer over in Newark, what’s his name? Seale. One of the people in his office used to work for the CIA before they fired him for laughing too hard or something.”
She was pleased but not surprised when he insisted she accompany them to dinner. Philip Quirini, who worked for Bert, drove her home and waited outside in the car while she changed; and when she got back in the car she said, “Have you worked here long?”
“Four years. Or you mean the house. No, ma’am. It’s just rented for July and August.”
“I guess this is going to sound like a strange question,” she said, “but what does your boss do for a living?”
She caught Quirini’s eye in the mirror. He had a hard face—jowls, a round heavy jaw, tough dark eyes, hair getting thin and grey. He seemed amused. “You heard of AJL Construction, ma’am? That’s us.”
She’d seen the big signs all over New York on building sites.
Pushing things she said, “I suppose he’s married.”
A sharp look in the mirror; then a brief smile. “No. He was married once I guess. Before I came to work. I think it was annulled.”
He brought her back to the manor where Bert handed her a wine spritzer and studied her best low-cut designer job. “You pass inspection,” he said drily.
The Sertics were there; they went on to one of the restaurants—she doesn’t remember now if it was Shippy’s or Balzarini’s or the Palm; whichever, Bert knew the maitre d’ and there was no trouble about a table even though they hadn’t had a reservation.
She remembers the relaxed savor of the evening: the way they included her, now and then going out of their way to explain a private point of reference, generally seeming to take it for granted she was grown up and sophisticated.
Not like what she was used to: a world that appeared to believe she couldn’t possibly have more than two brain cells to rub together.
It was the curse of the smooth skin and big eyes and the Goddamned bone structure that earned success for her as a model: often she’d be taken for twenty or twenty-one.
She’d learned there wasn’t much to the men who went for girls barely out of their teens. One of them, suntanned and Nautilus-muscled and trying his best to look like a high-school jock, had propositioned her just two days earlier—in that same disco where she’d met Bert—and she’d been so bored with it all that she’d just looked the jock in the eye and said in her deepest go-to-hell baritone, “What do you think we’d have to talk about after the first four minutes?”
“Four minutes?” The jock feigned indignation. “I’m good for at least an hour and a half.” He might as well have been flexing his muscles. “Come on. What do you want to talk about. Name it.”
“How about Kierkegaard?”
He’d edged away from her.
Not that she was out for the presidency of U.S. Steel. She made good money modeling and spent it on rent and clothes and amusements; there was nothing ambitious or far-seeing about her life. She had no plans beyond the date she’d made to spend the Labor Day weekend with the parents of a girlfriend from the agency up in a cabin on one of the Finger Lakes.
This one now, this Bert—she couldn’t fathom him. She’d catch him looking her up and down with a quick frank smile of appreciation but he didn’t stare down at her boobs or shove a figurative elbow into her ribs with clumsy fatuous attempts to be sly and lascivious. He’d spent the whole day with her but every minute seemed to have been carefully chaperoned: they hadn’t been alone at all. That did not seem to be an accident. Was he afraid of something?
He liked talking to her. He watched her face while they spoke. He laughed at the right points; he listened.
She watched his profile beside her at the dinner table as he talked with forceful confidence and made lavish gestures with his big hands. He caught her looking at him; he stopped in midsentence and smiled. It illuminated his face: it was an overflowing smile that demanded a response in kind.
She can remember vividly the startling beauty of his smile—especially now because of the irony it engenders. She remembers the life to which he introduced her: hard young capitalists on the make, a jet-propelled world of expensive toys, midnight conference calls, ringside seats, luxury condominiums, show-business evenings, sudden trips cushioned by limousines and hotel penthouses and VIP lounges.
By then they were married. She remembers the way he phrased his proposal. At the time she wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to its subtext. What he said was, “I want you to be the mother of my children.”
19 The weather cools a bit. Finally on August 1 the California license arrives and she spends two days going from bank to bank in Long Beach and Inglewood and Culver City, breaking one or two of the thousand-dollar bills at each stop.
Then she return
s to the Valley and opens a checking account with eight hundred dollars in cash—not enough to draw attention—and applies for a credit card, listing herself as a divorcee with a monthly alimony income of $2,500. On the application she attests to numerous lies. As her residence she lists the dummy apartment. For a reference she gives the name of a fictitious company president at the address of the Las Vegas mail-forwarding service. For a second reference she gives Doyle Stevens.
At various post offices she mails $500 money orders to herself; when these arrive she uses them to open an account in a savings-and-loan where they give you a year’s free rent on a safety-deposit box for opening a new account. She puts the diamonds and most of the rest of the cash in the box.
Examining the driver’s license for the ’steenth time she studies the color photograph of herself: slightly blurred (she must have moved her head a bit), unsmiling. Points of reflected light on the lenses of the glasses obscure the color of her eyes.
The cropped hair and glasses serve to harden her appearance: in the picture she looks—what’s the best word? Efficient.
Actually she has always been efficient; it is only that until recently she hasn’t had very much need to prove it.
She showers away a day’s grit and wipes the towel across the bathroom mirror so she can scrutinize herself.
The body isn’t bad for an old broad of thirty-one. Too bony if your taste runs toward Rubens nudes but she could still pose in a bikini if she wanted to and nothing sags perceptibly; the stretch marks aren’t pronounced.
The face, absent the phony glasses and with the wet hair matted down, looks fragile and vulnerable—all eyes and bones and angles as if she’d posed for one of those child-girls on black velvet. Ironic that she looks so young: she is thinking, I don’t feel a day over ninety-three.
There is a hint of haggard gauntness in that image. With a detachment that feels almost academic she wonders how long you can go on living on your nerve endings before you begin to disintegrate.
In the mirror the unmade-up lips are definitely too thin and wide; no rosebud here. She’s always had trouble with the look of her mouth; it took years of experiment to find a proper way to paint it for modeling. It is a big mouth made for smiling; it doesn’t take naturally to the expression that photographers seem to want: distant chill with a contradictory hint of seductiveness. That is one of the reasons (there are others, God knows) why she never became a top model—she only came as near as perhaps the upper section of the second class.
Necessity Page 5
