“I am anti-church. What I’m talking about is reality, something you can see and touch.” Linderman scowled.
Indeed, Jack could see Elsie’s fair face and body very clearly now. He could draw her exactly from memory. He recalled her face when she had spoken to him in her apartment, the moisture in her eyes when she had begged him to get Linderman off her back. “The girl has the right not to be lectured to, though, don’t you think? She’s not your daughter. She feels very strongly about this.”
Ralph Linderman looked miserable at Jack’s lack of understanding. “What does she know about life at twenty? She’s on the way to ruining her life now. I say that and I stand by it!”
Jack noticed a male passerby glancing at Linderman, who had spoken forcefully. Jack looked toward home, at the corner of Grove Street behind him and to his right. How to wind this up? “May I say I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere talking to her the way you do. You might even make things worse. Have you thought—”
“But who else is going to talk to her? Her family’s not here in New York. She’s a girl all alone!”
Jack wanted to say that Elsie was on the brink of going to the police about Linderman, but he thought that might be unwise. Linderman’s extremism was something deep and unchangeable. Suddenly Jack felt disgust, a hatred of Linderman’s fixed stare, which struck Jack as obtuse. “Well—she’s not the only girl alone in New York, you know,” Jack said, ready to walk away.
“Are you protecting her now?”
Jack smiled. “No, and I don’t think she needs protection. So long, Mr Linderman.”
“Mr Sutherland!” Linderman sprinted forward and buttonholed Jack, almost literally, seizing a lapel of his jacket.
“Hey, cut it out!” Jack jerked back, and bumped into a girl who was crossing the street with a shopping trolley. The girl might have fallen, if Jack hadn’t grabbed her elbow. “I am sorry. Excuse me.” Jack saw the girl glance at him, annoyed.
“I haven’t yet explained myself,” Linderman said.
“You have. Just cool it, would you?” Jack realized that he clenched his teeth as Elsie had done, that his free hand was now a fist.
“It’s not easy talking on the street,” Linderman said more gently. “My place, my apartment’s here a few steps away. If you’d be willing to come up for just two or three minutes—”
The idea was depressing, but would it be worse to show unfriendliness? Maybe Linderman fed on opposition. Jack gave a short nod. “Okay. Fine. Maybe I can make myself clearer too.”
Two or three minutes later, Jack was climbing the stairs—four storeys of them—to Linderman’s apartment, through darkish halls full of old cooking smells, dusty carpets. The dog looked at Jack with his apologetic smile, maybe with curiosity, as Linderman unlocked his apartment door.
13
At Linderman’s cordial gesture, Jack preceded him into a smallish living-room that seemed crammed with bookshelves and tables. It was all neat, worn out, and old. Two windows gave onto the backyard or open area between the old apartment building and the back of the houses beyond. Linderman was hanging his dog’s leash somewhere. A kitchenette had been installed in the back left corner, and there was a half-open door on the right, which might lead to Linderman’s bedroom, since the couch in the living-room hadn’t the look of being slept on.
“Please sit down, Mr Sutherland,” said Linderman, gesturing toward his only armchair.
The dark blue plush-covered armchair also suggested the 1950s and though faded looked hardly used. The center of activity seemed to be a long wooden table near the back windows on which lay notebooks, pens and pencils, rulers and a couple of books from the public library.
“Not fancy here, but it’s home—to me. Has been for more than ten years now.” Linderman spoke with satisfaction and pride, as he pulled a straight chair from his wooden table so he could sit facing Jack.
“Nice place,” said Jack pleasantly. He was now in the armchair. “Has Elsie been here?”
“Certainly not,” Linderman said, shaking his head. “No, I never invited her. She’s always in a terrible hurry, anyway.” He smiled, almost chuckled.
Jack supposed Linderman seldom, if ever, had a guest. He watched Linderman wrestling with something he wanted to say.
“Is it you Elsie’s visiting lately? Is that why you told me not to speak with her any more?”
“Me?” Jack gave a laugh and shook his head. “She helped me carry some groceries in once. Must’ve been the time you saw her—coming in or going out, because it’s the one time she’s been to our place.” Had Linderman seen her going in and waited to see how long she stayed?
“How did you meet her?” Linderman asked.
“Um-m. Yes. I went into the coffee shop where she works. Several weeks ago. Rainy night, I remember.—I remember you were there too with your dog. I saw you talking to Elsie. So—when she served me coffee, I asked her how she knew you, and I told her you’d found my wallet. She said she’d heard about that.”
“You started talking with her.”
“Don’t know who began,” Jack said with a smile, remembering Elsie’s first words to him when he was standing, unable to get a stool, that he looked as if it were raining outside.
Linderman crossed his arms. “And you made a date with her?”
“No, indeed! Didn’t see her again till the day one of my grocery bags was breaking at the bottom, and Elsie happened to be on Grove—and she carried a sack in for me. That’s when you saw her come into my house—or go out.”
Linderman’s gaze might have been the same, if he had not believed a word of what Jack had said. “Do you realize, Mr Sutherland, that she is a little—ideal? Like a—”
“Ideal?”
“Young and perfect. She is a beauty just now.”
Jack waited.
“She is what some people call ‘a dream girl’. You must realize that.”
Jack said, “She’s very pretty, yes.”
“And she’s alive. She’s not a statue.”
“Very true.”
“Consequently she runs a risk.”
Of losing her virginity, Jack supposed. “Of what?”
“She is a temptation to others.”
Jack smiled. “Like all pretty girls.” He loosened the muffler around his neck, but hitched forward as if he would soon leave.
“Such a female is dangerous,” Linderman went on. “Such a girl leads to unhappiness, to—destruction of others and of herself.” He frowned and bit his underlip. “But I’m more interested in protecting Elsie than the men and young boys who may lust after her.”
Jack thought of saying that Elsie preferred girls just now, but again decided not to. “Well, sir, I don’t know what I can do to help Elsie. She has a job and she looks quite healthy.—I believe in live and let live.”
“But she could be destructive to you. If you allow it. If you see her again a few more times.”
“No, sir—I’ve no particular intention of seeing her again.” He picked up the grocery bag he had set on the floor. The dog had begun sniffing it, but at a firm “No, God!” from Linderman, the dog went back to where he had been before, an empty area of carpet near the door, where Jack saw him lie down again with chin on paws, listening.
“Such small and simple encounters can ruin marriages,” Linderman continued, “and you’re a respectable married man, Mr Sutherland.”
Jack said amiably, “Happily married too. I’m not interested in other women.” He felt naive saying it, as if he had made the old guy a gift of something.
“But don’t you see how she flirts with everyone?”
“No. I don’t. Matter of fact I don’t think she flirts at all. She’s unusually straightforward, says what she thinks and that’s that.—I saw her giving fellows the brush-off in the coffee shop that night. And no mistake about it.”
Linderman’s face wrinkled with displeasure. “You should hear some of the things men say to Elsie in that coffee shop. That scum rea
ching out to grab her!”
Jack stood up. “Why take it so seriously, Mr Linderman? Elsie can take care of herself.” But he knew why Linderman took it seriously, because in his sick and mystic way, Linderman was in love with Elsie. Yes, mystic, Jack thought, because Linderman had said Elsie was an ideal, a dream girl.
Linderman’s frowning eyes stayed on Jack. “Because Elsie does not realize what we’re talking about—now—doesn’t realize her power. That is what is dangerous. Elsie has this power simply by being pretty, even beautiful. Then our society makes it worse by—by urging girls to wear make-up, anything eye-catching, high heels. The more ornamental and helpless they look, the sexier. Reached a peak maybe with the Chinese foot-binding in the old days, women were just sex objects that men carried to bed because they couldn’t walk properly. Now it’s hair over one eye sometimes, so women can’t see where they’re going. Sexy. It’s conditioning.—Do you realize that, Mr Sutherland?” Linderman bent forward, dark eyes straining with more to come.
“When I’ve seen Elsie, she was wearing sneakers.”
“I even think it’s in women’s genes,” said Linderman, as if he hadn’t heard the remark about sneakers. “And society and advertising—don’t forget that—add to it! Nail polish—”
“Girls like to look nice.”
“Who tells them what’s nice?” Linderman retorted as if he had Jack now, pinned to the floor, defeated.
Yes, the old question, did women dress for themselves or for men? Jack couldn’t go on with it. He turned in a circle, and noticed a blue-and-green flower design that someone, maybe Linderman, had painted in a clumsy manner on a white lamp base, and noticed also a photograph of a woman’s head in profile in a round frame that stood on Linderman’s bookshelf top. The woman had an old-fashioned bun and was young. Linderman’s mother?
“You’ve been married, Mr Linderman?” Jack asked, not knowing what on earth to expect as an answer.
“Once, yes. My wife deserted me for another man—oh, twenty or more years ago.—Typical. Women are fickle. Fond of their powers. Don’t you think so, Mr Sutherland?”
Jack was silent. And men were fond of falling in love with girls with those powers. Had Linderman been badly burnt? It was hard to imagine Linderman young, attractive to a girl. Just what was Linderman’s problem? Impotence, maybe?
“That photograph you were looking at,” Linderman went on. “It’s not my wife, it’s my mother. She died a few weeks ago.” His tone was matter-of-fact.
“Oh? Sorry to hear that.—Where is your wife now?” Jack was curious.
“California? Florida? I don’t know or care. I have no contact with her. We had no children.” Linderman said the last sentence with an air of smug satisfaction.
It crossed Jack’s mind, again, that maybe Linderman had never made it in bed.
“Too many children in the world,” Linderman said. “Just look at the Pope. Anti-birth control! How can he be? He’s even seen these shanty towns in South America—teeming, hungry people and kids, and he says, ‘Bless you! Keep it up!’ Flies back to Rome in a luxury jet.”
“Yes, they say—” Jack forced words out to be congenial, “—he’s a Third World Pope. Catholics in the Western World practise birth control if they want to.”
“Thank goodness,” Linderman said.
Jack took a breath. “What was your wife like?”
Linderman’s eyes grew more alert, his mouth turned down at the corners. “How should I describe her?—Empty-headed. We were both about twenty-four when we married. Too young. She talked about being a writer. Fiction. But no discipline. She never got anywhere with her short stories—or a book she never finished.” Linderman chuckled bitterly. “Normal for a wife not to have to work, I didn’t mind that, but she couldn’t even run a household. Frivolous, you know? Thought she was pretty. Well, she was sort of pretty. So she met another idiot who fell in love with her and she just flitted off. Like that! Like a butterfly. No loss to me, I assure you.” Linderman waved a hand, then ran a thumb under the waistband of his trousers. His waistline was rather flat.
Jack waited for more that didn’t come. Linderman’s underlip was firmly set now, as if buttoned. “And your mother? She was living in New York?”
“No. New Hampshire. My family’s from up there.”
New Hampshire people were said to be stubborn and conservative, Jack had heard. He sought for some compliment to pay Linderman before he left. “I see a lot of serious books on your shelves here. Engineering stuff.”
“Ah—yes.” Linderman smiled. “I suppose I’m a failed engineer. I wanted to be an inventor. But an inventor doesn’t amount to anything unless he’s patented something. I’m scooped half the time. Haven’t got the training or the equipment to make proper models.—I dropped out of college, because I had to support my mother. Then I—I tried the furniture business, custom made stuff. Couldn’t make enough money at it. This was when I was married. Well—I’m a security guard now, lots of night work which I prefer. I try to protect buildings and people and their money from the evil that’s walking the streets. A thankless task and a hopeless one. Most people will steal, given the opportunity.—Finding a wallet with a name in it, and not returning it, I consider—” Linderman sought for words of opprobrium.
“Yes.” Jack was glad to thank Linderman once more. “I don’t forget that, sir, never will.” He moved toward the door, and noticed a framed picture on the wall. This was a reproduction of a pre-Raphaelite painting, but it had no color. It showed a pale young woman with long dark hair, wearing a long white gown. One of her hands rested on a rock, and she was barefoot, like a sleepwalker. Jack had the feeling that this was Linderman’s ideal, the dreamy sylvan beauty that never was, that nobody ever talked to or went to bed with. Jack did not gaze long, lest Linderman start a conversation about it. “I’m probably keeping you from sleeping. Thanks for asking me up, Mr Linderman.”
“Sleeping?” Linderman got to his feet in a surprisingly agile way. “I don’t have to sleep till about eight o’clock. We must get together again. I’m not sure I made myself clear about the complicated things we were talking about, girls and women. Ha-ha!” The laugh was light, but still a real laugh. “I can’t express myself properly in a few words—so what I said may have sounded lopsided.”
“No, indeed. I’ll think about what you said.” Jack made himself grasp Linderman’s extended hand. Linderman hung on, shaking and shaking, as he had the evening he returned the wallet.
At last Jack was descending the stairs, picking up speed as he went. Best to be on cordial terms, he reminded himself, better than sulking, better than pretending not to see Linderman on the street. Next time, on the street, he’d nod to Linderman.
Back at home, Jack felt that he saw Linderman in a clearer light. His hunch had been right: Linderman in an odd way was enamored of Elsie, and consequently resented all rivals. Linderman saw Elsie as a symbol of young womanhood, purity, so he had to protect her. She was both attractive and dangerous because of her charms, yet plainly an object of fascination to Linderman, maybe obsession. All women in one. Jack had read about such things in mythology.
He drifted toward his worktable, steering his mind back toward the yak, its longhaired ears, its overall shagginess that suggested gloom as well as friendliness. Jack dipped his crow quill into India ink and tested it, then hovered over the blank illustration board. He was thinking that it was odd Linderman had made Elsie Tyler into an abstract, a symbol of all women, and thereby erased her as a real girl aged twenty. All this maybe because he couldn’t get her. This was the opposite of what men in love usually did with objects of their affection, believe that their girl or woman was the one and only in the world, an individual alive and tangible. No doubt Freud had described Linderman’s type in detail somewhere, but Jack hadn’t read every word of Freud. Natalia probably had. He might tell Natalia about Linderman’s attitude toward Elsie some time. It might amuse her. Jack brought his pen down to the paper.
14
“Gad, what a way to hold a meeting!” Natalia said two minutes after she was home, having deposited her boots and also Amelia’s on newspaper inside the apartment door.
Jack had been delighted to escape the downpour and also the parents’ meeting—he had forgotten the name of the organization—but he listened to what Natalia had to say about it. Elaine Armstrong had been there with son Jason, but not Max, and the chairperson, a Mrs Cova of whom Jack had heard before, had tried to get the kids to vote separately, then along with their parents on the question of a gym room versus a table-and-chair room for the second room in an apartment on Bank Street. This apartment, two rooms in it, was to be a parking place for kids in the afternoon interim between school closing and when their parents got home from work. Supervision was to be voluntary and rotary, and no parent could use the facility unless he or she offered supervisory service one afternoon in ten, or one afternoon in however many kids would be accommodated.
“This Madeleine Cova,” Natalia said, coming back into the living-room, having changed her slacks for pajama pants, “is sick-makingly sweet, listening to everybody, never making decisions, oh no. That’s why these damn things take so long.”
“A scotch, madame,” said Jack, handing Natalia a Glenfiddich.
“Oh, thanks, Jack. Well, I know, I won’t face being a chairperson myself. ‘S matter with a chairman, I’d like to know.” She sipped and laughed. “But here it is nearly half-past eight!”
“Wah!” Amelia took a run and hurled herself face down on the sofa, then looked at her parents, grinning. “Yackety-yack!”
“And what’ve you been doing while I was representing parenthood?” Natalia brushed her hair back from her face.
The rain had made darkish stripes in her hair, giving her a savage look that Jack had seen before, and he liked it, liked watching her hair fade back to its normal color which was indescribable, something like gold with a rough surface, unpolished. “I wrote to Uncle Roger,” Jack said. “Told him about the yak book and—the Dreams book coming out for Christmas. They’re hurrying it and I should get some copies in a couple of days.”
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