“Call a woman I don’t even know?”
She gave a little laugh. “It would sound rather peculiar, wouldn’t it? ‘Excuse me. You don’t know me but am I right in understanding from my wife…?’ ”
She broke off. Her lips started to tremble, her lashes were quivering. Suddenly she was crying. “Oh, Andy, Andy dear …”
Demons, thought Andrew, can perhaps be exorcised by tears, for at that moment when the whole world had seemed plunged into Stygian darkness to him, everything quite simply was all right again. He put his arms around her. He kissed her cheek, her hair, her mouth. She clung to him, kissing him back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Oh, Andy …”
“I thought jealousy was just something in Othello.”
She drew away, looking up at him, the tears glistening on her cheeks. She giggled. “And Desdemona doesn’t even have a handkerchief.”
Andrew took the handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to her. She had been calling Gloria Leyden. She had spent the afternoon helping Bill Stanton. She had lied about Rosemary only to spare him from himself. Of course she had.
Hadn’t she?
She had dried her eyes and was pushing the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Come on home, darling. We’ve had enough of this party.”
In the taxi she said, “Andy, about Ned.”
Ned had been so far from Andrew’s thoughts that it was a wrench to get back to him.
“I’ve been thinking all evening,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be all right.”
At any other time, that would have astonished him.
“Yes,” she said. “After all, that Da Costa thing did only happen once and we’ll never know the true story. Maybe he’s tired of chasing around with all those glamour babes. Maybe he is honestly trying to settle down. He could be, couldn’t he?”
Andrew thought of the five thousand dollars. “Maybe.”
“And then there’s Rosemary. I can be more realistic about her than her parents. She’s a nice girl, but after all, whoever she gets to marry her, that money’s bound to figure, isn’t it? All things considered, she might do a lot worse than Ned. We’ll call him when we get home and …”
“No,” said Andrew. “Not tonight.”
Suddenly it was of vital importance to him that they should be alone. The climate was finally right. He could tell her about the anonymous letter, about the myriad doubts and indecisions. At last they could get back to where they had been.
She shot him a quick glance. “But, darling, do be sensible. It’s still early and we’ve simply got to talk to him so we’ll know where we stand with Rosemary at lunch tomorrow.”
“No,” he said.
She slipped her arm through his. “All right, dear,” she said.
When they got back to the apartment, the sound of dance music was seeping faintly through the door.
“That’s funny,” said Maureen. “We didn’t leave the phonograph or the radio on, did we?”
They went in. A single light was burning in the living room and the phonograph was whispering cha-cha-cha. A girl Andrew had never seen before, a sleazy, disarrayed blonde with a pony tail and a lot of flesh bursting out of a red dress, was sprawled on the couch. Ned was sitting on the floor at her feet, his head resting against her hip.
When he saw his brother and sister-in-law, he tried to get up. He didn’t do it very well. He tried again and came unsteadily toward them. The white straw of his hair was mussed. He was smiling a vague, drunk smile. He looked about sixteen, a muddled, friendly, drunk sixteen.
“Hi,” he said. “Lovely to see you lovely people. You know Shirley, of course. Shirley … Shirley … Shirley … No, don’t tell me. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
THREE
The invasion was so barefaced that Maureen and Andrew simply stood there in the hall. Luckily, the blonde, belying her appearance, was as embarrassed as they. She jumped off the couch, grabbed up her arsenic-green coat from a chair and was out of the apartment before anyone had said anything at all.
Maureen recovered first. “Well,” she said, her eyes flashing ominously, “so much for me and my mellow reflections. How in heaven’s name did he get in here anyway?”
Andrew had figured out that much. During their summer vacation Ned had come into town when his own apartment was sublet. Andrew had left a key for him and had never thought of asking for it back.
Ned was watching him, the hair falling over his forehead, still smiling the bemused, friendly smile. “So,” he said. “No more Shirley.”
“Too bad,” said Maureen. “I’m sure I’d have adored her. I’m sure Rosemary would have too. She’d probably have invited her to be one of the bridesmaids.”
Ned’s grin went.
Andrew said, “Your girl friend was here this evening drooling over your dream excursion from island to island. That’s one romance you’ve certainly loused up, isn’t it?”
“To a fare-thee-well,” said Maureen. “Merely speaking, of course, as the narrow-minded cousin of your intended.”
“Maybe you planned it that way,” Andrew said. “Method Twenty-three for shedding unwanted fiancées.”
“But, Drew …” Ned’s hand went out to his brother. “You don’t understand …”
“That you love her?” suggested Maureen. “That in Cousin Rosemary you’ve finally found the girl of your dreams?”
The phone rang. Maureen answered it.
“Hello … Oh, yes.” She listened, her profile getting progressively grimmer. “Saturday? Well, I mean … Yes, yes, we’ll be there … Look, I’m terribly sorry but I can’t really talk now. I’ll call you in the morning … All right. Good night.”
She put down the receiver.
“That,” she said, “was Aunt Margaret. You’ll be delighted to hear that Rosemary’s told them her great news and both she and Uncle Jim are thrilled. They’ve invited us to a little family gathering on Saturday to celebrate the engagement.”
She glared at Ned and then at her husband.
“I’m sorry, Andy, but from here on, this is your problem. I have nothing whatsoever to say to your darling baby brother, but, so far as I can see, I’ll have a great deal to say to Rosemary tomorrow. Good night, Ned, and while you’re about it you might as well say good-bye to an approximate eight million bucks as well.”
She went in the bedroom and slammed the door.
Ned took a step after her and stumbled into a chair. Andrew could never remember being so mad with him before. He longed to kick him out of the apartment and forget him. But he knew that someone had to pick up the pieces, and someone, in Ned’s life had always meant him. He made some instant coffee in the kitchen, and when he came out with it, his brother was sitting on the couch, solemnly folding a page he’d torn off a theater program into a paper dart. Ever since their childhood, whenever he’d been caught out in something, Ned had always fiddled around making paper darts while he drifted off into some secret inner world of his own.
“Here,” said Andrew. “Drink this.”
Ned had finished making the paper dart. He dropped it on the coffee table and looked up. To Andrew he seemed completely sober again. It didn’t take much to make Ned drunk and he could snap out of it. His eyes were as clear and vivid as the Caribbean sky, the dark tanned skin of his face was glowing with health. It was his looks and his good nature which made him everybody’s darling. Not his brain and certainly not his character. No one, let alone Andrew, expected Ned to shine in either of those categories.
Ned took the cup and sipped from it. “Is she going to tell Rosemary?”
“Why not?”
“About Las Vegas too?”
“What’s to stop her?”
“But she can’t. Rosemary’s just a kid. She’s never done anything, never got involved. Rosemary’s not going to understand.”
“You should have thought of that before Shirley.”
“Shirley?” Ned picked up the dart again, studied it thoughtf
ully and then, crushing it into a ball, tossed it across the room. “But, Drew, she wasn’t anything. I was in some crummy bar, waiting for Rosemary to call. I was all tensed up. It wasn’t just her telling her parents; it was you too. I knew she’d been here earlier. I’d made her swear not to say anything, but I was sure she would. I know Rosemary. She can’t keep anything to herself, not when she’s happy. I was sitting there thinking: ‘My God, Rosemary’s going to blurt it all out and Maureen’s going to be bitchy and bring up Las Vegas and everything’s going to be loused up.’ I waited and waited. Rosemary didn’t call. I was drinking and that blonde—Shirley—was sitting there on a stool, tossing back stingers because her dinner date hadn’t showed. ‘Stood up,’ she kept saying. ‘Stood up again by a lousy wire salesman from Harrisburg.’ She was a mess. And then, at last, Rosemary did call and it was okay, okay with you, okay with the Thatchers. Boy, the relief. I was on top of the world.”
He broke off, running his finger around the rim of the coffee cup.
“And there was that poor, sad blonde slobbering into her stingers, ‘I’m through. When you’re stood up by a lousy wire salesman from Harrisburg, you’re through.’ And she clung to my arm and kept saying, ‘Don’t leave me. For God’s sake, don’t everyone leave me.’ And I could imagine her night after night, slopping around the bars, getting the brush-off, and I thought: ‘What the hell. If she needs a little warmth, if it’d give her morale a boost to have someone show a little interest—what the hell.’ ” He looked up at Andrew again with the earnest expression his brother knew so well, his “Drew-will-understand” look. “I couldn’t take her to my place. I’ve got a friend there sleeping off a hangover on the couch. So I figured, since you’d left word you’d be out late … Gee, Drew, under the circumstances anyone would have done the same thing. You’ve got to see that.”
The exasperating part for Andrew was that he did see. After all the years he’d put in, he was an expert on his brother’s screwy personal vision. Giving a beat-up blonde what he thought she wanted, just because he was happy and she wasn’t, was as natural to him as giving a buck to a phony beggar. Understanding didn’t make Andrew any less mad, but as always with Ned, the issue became blurred.
Andrew sat down next to him on the couch. “You expect Maureen to fall for this Good Samaritan angle?”
“No.”
“Or Rosemary?”
“No,” he said. “That’s why you’ve got to stop Maureen.”
That was all Andrew needed—that bland assumption that he would take his brother’s side against his own wife, that there was nothing at stake anyway except a minor point of protocol.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “the Thatchers are her family. It’s Rosemary she’s thinking of.”
“And that’s thinking of Rosemary? To louse everything up for her when we love each other?”
Ned turned to him and, to Andrew’s astonishment, his brother’s face was transfigured. It was the same sudden brightening which had come to Rosemary’s face at the mention of Ned’s name, the spontaneous glow which had obliterated almost all her homeliness.
“Drew, that’s what you’ve got to see. It’s something I never thought would happen. I always figured about me—well, I don’t know. But from the first moment I saw Rosemary sitting there at the races, that funny, homely little girl with the great big glasses as if she was hiding behind them because everything outside was so much more wonderful and exciting than she was …”
He got up, lit a cigarette and started walking back and forth.
“Times come,” he said, “when you see, when suddenly you’re not you, you’re outside looking in. I sat down next to her and started to talk, the same old crap I always talk—Venice, Hollywood, countesses, lousy Portuguese playboys. And I listened to myself and I thought: ‘What are you trying to prove? That everyone’s crazy about you? That you’re IN? In—what?’ The lousy rat-race that Mother used to be in? Remember? Postcards from Antibes, cables from some jerk’s castle in the Arlberg? Happy birthday, darling Neddy. Too bad I can’t be there. Love, Mother? Was that it? Was I as much of a goon as that, just dashing around trying to catch up with Mother?”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“And there was Rosemary, sitting, listening, eating up all that crap as if I was the seventh wonder of the world, and I thought: ‘The poor little rich creep, she doesn’t have a chance. Any phony plastered with suntan oil on the Lido beach could gobble her up in a second.’ And then I thought: ‘Well, what chance have you got either—being dear little Neddy-boy all over the globe? In a couple of years your hair’ll start falling out or you’ll lose your waistline or they’ll find themselves another boy, and there you’ll be, slobbing around the bars, being stood up by some old cow of a Brazilian widow and … ’ And I knew then that Rosemary needed me and I needed her. Two babes in the lousy, stinking wood.”
He came back to the couch and sat down by his brother, gripping his arm.
“Drew, I mean it. She’s my chance. I love her. I’ve got to marry her.”
With that incoherent, freakish explanation sounding in his ears, Andrew looked at his brother, feeling that, for all their intimacy, this was perhaps the first time in their lives that Ned had ever really tried to communicate. And, for the first time too, he felt he could see behind his brother’s glamorous irresponsibility to a legacy of loneliness and insecurity which, after all, wasn’t so different from his own. For Andrew this was such a totally novel way of looking at Ned that he was taken off his guard. He was touched and, against everything he and Maureen had assumed, he honestly believed that Ned was in love with Rosemary Thatcher.
“Drew,” Ned was saying. “Please. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to stop Maureen.”
It was then, when Andrew was on the verge of succumbing, that he thought of his visit to the Plaza. He said, “What about the five thousand bucks and Mother?”
For a moment Ned looked baffled. Then the quick, familiar grin came. “Poor old Ma. So she went gabbing to you. I figured she would.”
“What did you want it for?”
Ned shrugged. “Oh, we don’t have to go into that now.”
Andrew could feel him sliding away from him. “Oh yes we do,” he said. “Was it for that yacht which wafted Rosemary and you through the Lesser Antilles?”
“The yacht?” Ned echoed. “Oh no, it was Rudi Marsatti’s yacht. I borrowed it.”
“Then why did you need five thousand bucks badly enough to try to squeeze it out of Mother?”
Ned picked up the coffee cup in both hands and swallowed the contents, which must by then have been stone-cold. “What did I want it for? Oh, expenses. You can’t expect me to let Rosemary pick up all the tabs.”
“But you’ve got your own money.”
Ned put the cup down and shot his brother a quick, almost crafty glance from the corner of his eye. “If I tell you something, you won’t blow your top. Promise?”
“What is it?”
“I guess I’ll have to sooner or later. Any day now the executors of the trust fund will be calling you. In Florida I was palling around with the Entragas. They’re crazy about the horses. Maria got a real hot tip—right from the owner. An outsider—forty-to-one. It couldn’t fail. I was kind of low on funds. There was this guy who pals around with the Entragas—some kind of fancy gangster, I guess. I borrowed the dough from him. Ten thousand. Put it on the horse to win. The goddam horse fell and broke a leg. This guy—well, he got kind of tough. His ten thousand bucks—or else. There wasn’t anything to do. He dragged in some shyster lawyer. I bound over to him the next two years of my income. Drew, I’m sorry. I know I was an idiot. But it was a sure thing, Maria said. A one hundred percent sure thing.”
For a moment Andrew couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Then he asked, “All this happened before you met Rosemary, or after?”
“Oh, just a couple of days before, I guess.”
Andrew got up. He said, “Well, you certainly had me goi
ng for a while, didn’t you?”
“But, Drew, you don’t understand. It didn’t have anything to do with me and Rosemary.”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, maybe it did. Maybe it—it was just something else to make me see what a blind alley I was in. But Rosemary and me, that’s something quite different. It’s love. I love her. Cross my bloody …”
“Get out of here,” said Andrew.
“But, Drew, if Maureen tells her … if you don’t stop Maureen …”
“Get out, I said.”
Ned got up. He stood looking at his brother. “You mean it, don’t you?”
“You know I mean it.”
Ned gave a little resigned shrug. “Well, that’s the way it goes, I guess.” He patted his brother’s shoulder. “Okay. Be mad. I don’t blame you. You’ll get over it.”
He smiled a brief, affectionate smile. He went into the hall, put on his coat and left.
Andrew stood looking at the bedroom door, his exasperation against his brother growing in intensity. If it hadn’t been for Ned, by now he would have dissolved the barrier between him and his wife. But, after all this, would the climate still be right? Would he be able to…? Suddenly he could hear the familiar, dreaded voice once more.
Maid? Are you renting her out these days for a little light housekeeping? … Oh, Bill, look, there’s Gloria … You’ve found it? Thank God, I was going out of my mind … You are the only one in New York who doesn’t know about your wife …
Andrew Jordan went into the bedroom.
FOUR
Maureen was in bed, sitting up against the pillows with the radio playing softly. She switched it off.
“He’s gone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She patted the bed beside her. Andrew sat down. She put her hand in his.
“Well, darling, let’s have it.”
He told her the whole ridiculous and shabby story.
“So,” she said. “The little monster. Then I suppose we’ll have to disillusion poor Rosemary, won’t we?”
“I suppose so.”
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 3