She hesitated a moment, looking up and down the street.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not going to get soaking wet to be a gentleman.”
She held her packages tighter and ran for the open door. “Thank you very much.”
She straightened her hat, wiped the splashes from her cheeks with a handkerchief. The cab filled with her faint musky perfume.
She was very well dressed, he decided, in a conservative way. She wore almost no make-up, almost no jewelry. Just small gold earrings, and a large gold watch. The best quiet taste. But still, there was something. …
The rain-slicked streets were jammed with traffic. The taxi moved slowly. He kept perfectly still, not even moving his feet. Perfectly still and perfectly silent. Waiting.
“I hope I’m not taking you out of your way,” she said.
“No,” he said. “And I wouldn’t mind being late for work.”
“There’s my corner, the next one.” She turned and looked straight at him, large eyes under thick black brows. “My father will be ready to leave, I hope. If all the old ladies with rheumatism have finished complaining to him.”
She opened the door and dashed for the entrance. Overhead a painted sign said: “Marine Life Building.”
It was a long dull rainy afternoon for Robert. First the books with Lamotta. Then with the Old Man to an appointment at the Roosevelt Hotel. He was buying some Long Island real estate.
She’ll be home by now. What was the name of that perfume? He could remember every single word she’d said in the car. He even counted them: thirty-seven.
The Old Man was chewing his underlip slowly. Robert thought that he might be just a bit nervous—no, not nervous, anxious. Whatever this was, he wanted it very much.
Well, Robert thought, he always got what he wanted. …
This time Robert would wait for the Old Man in the lobby. That was all. Just wait.
The long arched space was almost empty—late afternoon. Through the glass doors at either end he could see the rain still falling. A cruising prostitute, small, discreet, saw him; he shook his head. God, no. He really wanted to go to the Turkish bath—but the Old Man hadn’t said how long he’d be. … Robert sauntered past the florist’s counter. Look at the colors, he thought, look at them. Just because women liked flowers, and there was always some guy buying them. …
He took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, and signaled a bellboy. “That’s for a two-block walk,” Robert said. “Find me a name. I think he’s a doctor. I know he’s got an office in the Marine Life Building. He took the afternoon off today, and he’s got a good-looking daughter with a Spanish accent.”
The bellboy nodded.
“And another twenty for hurrying.”
Robert felt the familiar tight clutch of excitement at his chest. You are beginning to be an operator, he told himself. He settled next to a potted palm where he could see the entire lobby, and lit a cigarette. The Old Man did not come for two hours. His message came in fifteen minutes. He glanced at the slip of paper, handed over the second twenty. Not one word; everything was done, the bellboy disappeared. There was only the slight rustle of paper in his pocket.
He walked back to the florist’s counter. “I want one rose a day delivered here for the next four weeks. No card.”
Riding home with the Old Man on that rainy September evening, Robert felt proud of himself for thinking of the flowers. It was a nice touch.
That night, last thing, with Anna next to him already fast asleep, breathing her deep regular contented swells, he thought: Maybe tomorrow I’ll call Betty again.
A MONTH later he telephoned the dark-haired girl at home. “Did you like the flowers?”
A very small pause. “Are you always so extravagant?”
“Only when the situation requires.”
“What else does it require?”
“I’ll leave that to your imagination.”
She laughed and this time he heard her nervousness. He felt a familiar tug in his throat and twitch in his stomach. She would. His hunter’s instinct had been right.
HER NAME was Aline Gonzales and he met her almost every week for the next year. She had a perfect olive body and large, high, widely separated breasts. They stare in opposite directions, he thought.
It was a fine year with Aline Gonzales. A wonderful year. … Because of her he built a two-room fishing camp on Bayou Courville. He needed a place to meet her—a safe place because she was a respectable woman who would go to none of the usual boardinghouses. His camp was an hour’s drive from town—when the roads were dry. Even she felt safe there.
He liked that high sandy hardwood country. He’d seen bear signs and deer, but he’d never shot anything. He’d seen fish in his bayou but he didn’t own a rod. He made sure that the bed was new and very comfortable, and that was all.
It was there, one sun-spotted afternoon, that Aline said: “I’m getting married.”
“That’s great.” He was relieved. God, how he was relieved. “I’m very happy for you.”
“You might be a little sad to hear it.”
“Honey, I know any woman wants to get married. Is he nice?”
“I hope so.”
Still the note of hesitation in her voice. Got to stop that, he thought. “A house, and kids, you’ll be great at that. Sorry I can’t meet the lucky guy.”
“I’ll send you an invitation.”
The hesitation was gone. Good. Voice was firm and determined. She’d settled.
“You know I can’t come.”
She twisted her mouth and made no answer.
Well, he thought, that was that. Found her in a taxicab and left her in a fishing camp. Started in the rain and ended at the altar. … He’d remember those funny-shaped breasts and have no regrets. It was time to end it. He’d gotten out of it pretty well, he thought. Took as much skill to get rid of a girl as to get one. He was learning how to do both.
OF ALL his women, Robert thought, he only remembered two vividly—Aline Gonzales and Betty. He never heard from Aline after her marriage. And he’d lost track of Betty after a few more years. He supposed that he’d gotten too busy to call her, that their meetings were less and less frequent, until she dropped from his schedule altogether. But he could close his eyes and see her. And Aline. But not the others. Occasionally, very occasionally, he remembered silly things they did. Like the one who’d brought two pots of pink geraniums to his camp. For months they flourished; and he saw the bayou between stiff flower spikes. Eventually the geraniums disappeared and the clay pots filled with air-borne grasses and small wild flowers. They thrived and died, seeded themselves and returned in their seasons.
He began selecting girls who were free to spend weekends with him, discarding the ones who could not. Keeping only a few of the most exceptionally beautiful for afternoon turns in boardinghouse bedrooms.
And he had trouble with none of them. I got this down to a science, he thought; pick them carefully and they behave right. …
Even if they hadn’t, he thought, Anna would not have noticed. She was too busy remodeling the old hotel at Port Bella. She was doing the whole thing herself, without architects. “It has to be perfect,” she explained eagerly. “I’ve got lots of time and I can do it right.”
“It’s going to take years,” Robert said.
“I know. But we’ve got our whole life to live there, so it doesn’t matter.”
Robert thought, now and then, plunging in and out of slimy red membranes, drowning in flesh, dreaming of breasts hanging in their perfect beauty from clouds, fingering sea shells: I am alive, I am here, I leave tracks on the sheets. Do I wear channels into the membranes? Do I break myself where I fall?
THEN MARGARET. Two days after she finished high school, she eloped with Harold Edwards to a justice of the peace in Gretna. The Old Man took the bridal suite in the Roosevelt Hotel for them. “Flowers,” Margaret said afterward, “the whole place was full of lilies. I kept waking up wondering who’d died.�
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Harold Norton Edwards had a round smooth face and round smooth blue eyes. His family were shocked by his hasty marriage and intrigued by rumors of her wealth. At their ritual once-a-week dinners, Margaret deliberately horrified them with tales of Sicilian vengeance and the Black Hand. Actually, she did not even like Harold Edwards. She married him simply because he loved her. It was marvelous, she discovered, to have someone in love with you. … Their marriage lasted eight months. One cold February morning Margaret moved back to her father’s house. For two days Harold Edwards sat in their small honeymoon apartment (waiting to hear from her, answering all phone calls on the first ring, just in case); then he took a handful of sleeping pills and five minutes later called his sister-in-law Anna. He was completely unconscious by the time she and Robert half-dragged, half-carried him into the hospital.
“Well,” Anna said, sniffing the cold soggy winter morning, “well, well.” It was seven o’clock and the passing cars still had their headlights on. “We were at the wedding, and we were almost at the funeral.”
Robert had never liked Harold Edwards and hadn’t been in the least worried about him. He yawned.
“I called Margaret to tell her he was going to be all right and do you know what she said?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Being a widow is easier than getting a divorce.”
Robert stared down the oak-lined street. “That was pretty cold-blooded.”
“She says things like that, Robert.” Anna tugged him along to their car. “Let’s go home.”
“Is she going back to him? After all this display of love?”
“Ask her,” Anna said. “I’ve done my bit. I’m going over to Port Bella soon as I’ve had a little nap. The roofers were supposed to begin yesterday.”
“The roofers? Haven’t you got beyond that?”
“We had to wait for the slate,” Anna said. “There is one kind of English slate that is perfect—”
“And nothing else will do.” Robert interrupted her. “I don’t think that house will ever be finished.”
“It takes time,” Anna said. “Oh, by the way, I’m not pregnant after all.”
“Well,” Robert said quietly, “we haven’t been married that long. …” Anna wanted a child so badly. Perhaps it was his fault. Perhaps he was spending his seed too prodigally to fertilize his wife. He would wait another year, and then, he promised himself, he would sleep with no other woman until his wife conceived. … (Sometimes he dreamed about a baby, no bigger than his hand, looking exactly like him, wearing a diaper and a mustache.)
Robert left work early. He was too sleepy to do anything. “Go home,” the Old Man said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
Well, now he had all afternoon, and nothing to do. He found a bowl of tangerines, took one into the living room, and peeled it slowly, sniffing the sharp pleasant oil that spurted into the air. He dropped the peel into the ashtray, put his feet on the coffee table, and ate the sections one by one.
Until Margaret walked in. “Why are you here?” she said. “Where’s Anna?”
“Anna’s at Port Bella. I came home early because I was kind of sleepy.”
“Who isn’t.” She slumped down in a chair, not bothering to take off her camel’s-hair coat. “Sorry my ex-husband kept you up all night.”
“Well,” Robert said, “well.”
“He wanted to be saved.”
“He damn near wasn’t.”
“Oh, Anna always does things right. That’s why he called her, instead of his own family.”
He went back to his tangerine sections. “Lucky for him.”
“Robert, look, will you come over to the apartment with me? I want to pack a few dresses while they’re pumping Harold out.”
“I don’t think they’re doing that any more.”
“Well, whatever. Come help me for a few hours now; then we can go on to Papa’s for dinner.”
He got to his feet slowly, started to pick up the tangerine skin, then decided to leave it where it was.
THE SUN never really came out. Now and then the light got stronger, sometimes even bright enough to make metal objects give off a feeble reflection. And sometimes the shape of the sun hung like a yellow moon in the sky for a few minutes before it disappeared. But fog clung everywhere, wrapped around houses as if it were growing out of them, hung among tree branches like moss. The wet air smelled strongly of burning peat, a sharp, ageless smell.
“I bet the world smelled like that right after the creation.” Margaret wrinkled her nose and sneezed.
“February is always like this,” Robert said reasonably.
“Fine weather for killing yourself. I can see what Harold had in mind.”
“Stop being funny,” Robert said. “Anyway, you’re not being funny.”
She turned sidewise on the car’s seat. “Robert,” she said so quietly that he almost didn’t hear, “I don’t know any other way to do it.”
He wanted to stop and hug her, but he kept looking straight ahead. “It’s all right, cutie,” he was surprised how tender his voice was; “it’s rough on you and everybody knows it.”
“You know what Papa said? When I moved back with him?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He laughed. You figure that. Not a lecture. Not: Your duty is to your husband or anything like that. Not even: I’m disappointed in you.”
“Maybe he didn’t think there was anything to say.”
“When he got through chuckling—with me feeling stupider and stupider where I’d felt dramatic and heroic before—you know what he said? ‘You don’t like him; I’m not going to tell you to live with him.’”
“What’s wrong with that?”
They pulled up in front of the small yellow stucco apartment building.
“I can’t think of anything wrong with it,” Margaret said.
They hurried through the smoky fog, up the blue tile steps, wet and very slippery underfoot, and into the apartment.
It was as cold there as it was outside. Harold had left three or four windows wide open.
“Do you suppose he was planning to jump out?” Margaret turned on all the heat and then lit the kitchen oven too, leaving the door ajar.
“It will warm pretty fast,” Robert said. “The rooms are small.”
He got down her suitcases and she began folding clothes into them. After half an hour, there were three filled suitcases and the apartment was passably warm. They both took off their overcoats.
“Any more?”
“I’ll send somebody over tomorrow.” Margaret walked up and down the apartment, trailing her fingers over the dusty surfaces of the furniture. “When I was thinking of leaving, those last days, I marked everything.” She held up a silver lamp. On the bottom was a clear red nail-polish mark. “See.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I sorted everything, all day long. I put the presents from his side of the family into the dining room. All of mine went in the living room and the bedroom. If I couldn’t move it, I marked it with nail polish or chalk.” Abruptly she flipped a chair upside down: a large chalk M. “And do you know something, Robert? I don’t care a damn about any of this stuff. It just gave me something to do.”
Robert said: “You are as methodical as Anna. And just as foolish.”
They both laughed over that, laughed far more than they needed to; the kitchen oven was blowing heat into their faces, and the windows were covered with frost. Then they were in bed—a big double bed that had not been made, whose pillows still held the imprint of Harold’s head, whose covers were still on the floor where he had left them.
My God, he thought, it’s Harold’s skin I’m smelling. With a sweep of his arm he knocked all pillows to the floor.
They were both silent, hardly breathing. Then the body-twisting spasm, in silence too. He distinctly heard a joint crack, some cartilage rub raspingly together. Whose, he thought, mine or hers? He couldn’t tell. There seemed to be only one. The
familiar lights were in his eyes, and the familiar colors—he knew them all, and knew them very well. He thought: I’ve gone deaf, it can’t be like this; I’d hear a heartbeat, or the air going through my own trachea.
His body arched and twisted, pulling away, to hide, to run. Her body twisted too, following him. Fastened, eternally demanding. He twisted all the way to his back, arms flying wide. She lay on top of him, riding successfully. Present. And requiring.
A roaring. She was breathing directly into his ear. It tickled. He pulled his head away, and she lay stretched on top of him. Still in place.
THEY WENT to the Old Man’s for dinner. Margaret looked no different, and Robert hoped he looked only as upset as a man who has rescued his brother-in-law from suicide.
They played poker after dinner—the Old Man hated bridge—and the time slipped away pleasantly enough. Anna called from Port Bella to say that the weather slowed the roofing work considerably. Robert went home very early. The mist was worse now; street lights had yellow strips of fog wrapped tightly around them, and his headlights seemed to bend and turn back toward him.
He sighed and settled back against the seat. Jesus, he thought. My balls hurt.
THE DEPRESSION DEEPENED, 1933 became 1934. Robert could smell poverty all around him in the streets; he turned away from beggars, holding his wallet tightly.
What do you want? Don’t look at me.
Afraid all the time. Hiding it carefully. From Anna. From the Old Man. The world’s coming apart, the Communists are taking over behind machine guns. There’s Huey Long, Share the Wealth. … Take from the rich, give to the poor. There’re so many poor; soup lines, and WPA leaning on shovels and staring into the sky.
Don’t take mine; you can’t have it. I’d kill you for it.
Day after day, he followed the Old Man around, trying to learn his confidence, his skill. “Lower things go,” the Old Man said, “the better for me.”
Robert was amazed at the complexity of the Old Man’s affairs, bewildered by Lamotta’s never-ending reports. All the different businesses, the different companies. Now there seemed to be a lot of oil—land and leases. The Old Man said: “Would you believe I bought some of that land as a dairy farm for my mother?”
The Condor Passes Page 21