Seventh Avenue

by Norman Bogner

  “Wrong apartment?” he said.

  “Who’d you want?”

  “Uh, Terry Fredericks.”

  “Well, enter our sanctum, oh, beautiful one.”

  Jay stared at her, then broke into a smile.

  “Bring the champagne,” she said, when she saw him hesitate.

  “You on junk, or just being natural?”

  “My high spirits, which my good breeding has done little to stifle.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see.” He came into a small foyer that had a bookcase with more books than he’d ever seen. “Going into business?”

  “Required reading . . . You must be Jay.”

  “I’m wearing a sign on my back or something?”

  “I’ve heard all about you. Ter,” she shouted through a closed door. “A visitor.”

  “You live here with Terry?” he asked, wishing to get the bad news over with at once.

  “Didn’t she mention me at all?” the blonde said, screwing up her nose into what was supposed to pass for disappointment.

  “Not a word.”

  “The rat! God, what a gorgeous color you are, and poor little me, all white and pale as a lily. I’m Caroline Reed, Terry’s roommate.”

  “You see your folks lately?” Jay asked.

  “No. That’s a funny question to ask.”

  He put his hand in his pocket, fished out a bill.

  “Here’s a yard. Why don’t you catch the next plane and see them for the weekend?”

  “You want to get rid of me?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “But I’m so discreet, so utterly discreet. You can count on me!” She took the champagne from Jay. “I’ll cool them a bit, shall I?”

  “Florida, then? You get yourself a quick tan, have a wild weekend.”

  “Ugh, you rich people.”

  “I thought the same thing when I was on Relief.”

  “Don’t kid me. You probably inherited a fortune.”

  “The only thing I inherited was flat feet, a small mole on my behind, and fifty-seven starving relatives.”

  “Would you like to take off your coat, I’ll hang it up.”

  “You can sell it if you like and travel on the proceeds.”

  She rubbed the coat on her cheek.

  “Ummm, cashmere. Where’d you get it?”

  “I met this goat on Fifth Avenue, who needed two hundred dollars. Where’s Terry?”

  “In the bath. Why, don’t you like talking to me?”

  “I could live without it.”

  “God, I can see why Terry’s insane about you. So direct, so vital; up from the people. The blood and guts of democracy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no insulting you, is there?”

  “It’s your defense mechanism speaking, not you.”

  “I think I like you,” he said.

  She kissed him on the cheek then hopped over to the davenport and did a few pirouettes.

  “You’re giving free samples?”

  “I’m irresistible.”

  Terry came out of the bathroom, with a towel wrapped round her head and blushed through her suntan when she caught sight of Jay.

  “Just the way I pictured you,” he said.

  “Oh, Jay. Aren’t you awful. No call or anything.” She rushed up to him and kissed him.

  “Your cold cream’s delicious,” he said.

  “Oooooooo, isn’t it wonderful,” Caroline moaned ecstatically. “Can I stay and watch?”

  “Caroline’s going to open the champagne, and then she’s flying to New York,” Jay said.

  “I am not. I’m going to be with you every minute of the day and night.”

  “We don’t need a scorekeeper.”

  She roared with laughter and danced into the kitchen.

  “She’s really great,” Terry said.

  “Yeah, she seems a ball.”

  “Are you going to take me out to dinner, sir?”

  “Durgin Park?”

  “Oh, I’d love that. I’ll be able to show you off to everyone I know. It’ll get back to my father.”

  “I’m going to see him on Monday.”

  “Then you’ve told your wife?”

  “No, she wasn’t home. And I couldn’t hang around waiting. I got so edgy that I had to shoot up here to see you.”

  “I’ll just get dressed. Give me a few minutes.”

  From the kitchen Caroline called out in a high, trilling voice:

  “Isn’t it wonderful - two men fighting for you? Jay and Mitch. It’s drama.”

  She brought in a tray with glasses; the champagne swaddled in a wooden cheese box with cubes around its base. She had some saltine biscuits on a plate and a tube of something, the label of which he could not read.

  “Look what I found in my little nook.”

  “The suspense is killing . . .” Jay said.

  “S.S. Pierce’s very own caviar.” She squeezed a bit out on a biscuit and offered it to him. He moved away with the champagne bottle. He was fighting a losing battle with the cork.

  “What is it shoe polish?”

  “Is it shoe polish?” A guffaw from Caroline.

  “I think they shot this cork on with a pistol. I better get the chauffeur to open it.”

  “The limit, the last word,” Caroline exclaimed. “The noble savage in cashmere. What a find you are . . .” She pulled the bottle away and popped the cork.

  “I’ve always had other people to do this sort of thing.”

  “Yes, I can tell, you’re definitely to the manner born.”

  “In the old country when we found a champagne bottle, know what we did with it?”

  “No, I’d love to hear.”

  “Peed in it.”

  “Peed?”

  “That’s right. Fill them with pee, and drop them off the tops of buildings on the police - the Russian police. They exploded like bombs.”

  “God, you must have been mad!”

  “You’ve never seen a squad of Russian police operate in a small Polish town, a border town. It’s a gap in your education. Fifteen or twenty of them would have taken turns with you in one night. Then they would’ve knocked your teeth out so that you could be even more accommodating in the future. If you were Jewish, whatever they did to you was considered a public service by the rest of the town. Ask your history teacher about that. He’ll probably tell you it wasn’t very important to history, and there aren’t any dates to memorize.”

  She poured the champagne, and Terry emerged from the bedroom wearing a black wool dress with a turtleneck collar. The dress was skin tight, and the contours of her body shaped it. She looked like a statue to Jay.

  “You’ve lost him to me, Ter. It’s love at first sight.”

  “I swear she’s a nut case. Well, you going away for the weekend?”

  “Oh Jay, she can’t,” Terry said with an edge in her voice.

  “I could spend the weekend with June. Her roommate’s gone home.”

  He detected a stiffening in Terry, and he wondered if he had gone too far. The mood of the girls and the atmosphere of a college town - Cambridge was, above all, a college town - made him decidedly uncomfortable. He wasn’t accustomed to the banter, the manners of students, and somehow whenever he spoke, it sounded like someone else talking, desperately acting a part that he was peculiarly unsuited to play. The easy familiarity of the girls, and their private jokes reminded him of the fact that he was a coarse, ignorant, inferior being who had dragged himself out of a slum, the smell and the commonalty of the slum still clung, was a constituent element of his skin, which he sensed was very thin indeed. He had the moral sensitivity to be embarrassed by himself and the constructive awareness not to regard this membrane of ignorance as a protective shield that he could brandish complacently to those with less money. A projection of Neal’s face danced across the screen of his mind, and he hoped that when Neal had absorbed all of the advantages that money could provide, he would not abandon J
ay precisely for having provided the advantages. He felt better when he realized that the girls were not superior, merely different, and he was tempted to invite Caroline to join them for dinner, but he wanted to be alone with Terry on the first night.

  “Hey, look, if you’re not busy tomorrow night, why don’t you come out with us?” he said.

  “Oh, you are a sweetie,” she said. “But I wouldn’t think . . .”

  “Bullshit. Get yourself a date, and we’ll tear a red streak through Boston.”

  “Please, Caroline. He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t want you to come.”

  “Well, I suppose I could.”

  “Settled.”

  “See you, kid. You can polish off the other bottle of champagne if you can open it.”

  Terry rested her head on his shoulder in the back of the car as the strange lights of Boston flashed past Jay’s line of vision. He kissed her affectionately on the cheek.

  “Baby, it’s so good to be close to you. I couldn’t even concentrate on business when I was in New York. Spent four hours in the office then zoomed to the airport. Florida was like a dream: meeting you, a business offer from your old man. I’ve never been so on top of the world in my life. All this is happening to me, Jay Blackman.”

  “Darling, I love you so much. What a nice surprise for me.”

  “I didn’t offend Caroline?”

  “No, don’t be an idiot. I’m glad you asked her to come tomorrow.” She looked at his face and ran her fingers under his chin. “We can’t go back to the apartment tonight though,” she added reluctantly.

  “I guessed as much.”

  “So it’ll have to be your hotel.”

  “My hotel!” He was incredulous.

  “You’re not going to be a prig, Jay?”

  “It looks so bad. You’ll get a reputation . . .”

  She laughed sardonically.

  “You’re my reputation. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.”

  The car turned into the driveway, and the chauffeur opened the door.

  “I’ll be a couple of hours, so if you want to get lost somewhere, it’s okay.”

  The chauffeur tipped his hat and smiled.

  As Jay had predicted, the headwaiter did have a nice corner table for Mr. Hamilton.

  “You’re very pleased with yourself,” Terry said.

  “Private joke. The chauffeur said I couldn’t get a table. Whenever people say you can’t do, or get something, what they mean is, they can’t. I thought I was going to hate Boston.”

  He examined the menu that the headwaiter had, with a flourish and practiced sycophancy, handed to him. He was about to make suggestions, but Jay cut him short as he did all headwaiters, assuming a naïveté that might have been touching if it hadn’t been quite so bellicose that headwaiters always had these special suggestions on hand for people who didn’t belong and would be likely to order the wrong things. He hated to be patronized and often reacted violently when people were only trying to be helpful, for he was unable to distinguish between the two.

  He ordered a martini for Terry and a triple scotch for himself. She gave him that peculiarly intense and concerned stare that young girls in love and in heat develop. It is a look of pure candescence and innocence, a look belonging to one of the few times in the span of a lifetime when the division between mind and heart disappears. At thirty-five, it becomes nostalgia, and at forty, sentimentality. At twenty, it is one of the few virtues that even an ugly girl possesses. Terry could not keep her hands off him. Even when she held the menu in one hand, she managed with the other to touch him under the table.

  “Why are you having a lot to drink? Something bothering you?”

  “I told my little boy I was going to leave.”

  “You did what?”

  His hand shook, and he flipped the glass back and downed the drink in one gulp. The waiter waited, and Jay ordered the same again.

  “I couldn’t let my wife get in first. This sort of thing can cripple a kid for life. I had to try to explain that I wasn’t some kind of monster.”

  “And she would have said you were?”

  “She’d have reason to. We’ve been incompatible from the beginning.”

  “Is that all that’s bothering you?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” he said truculently.

  “All right, you don’t have to lose your temper with me.”

  “He’s a sick child with a sad expression on his face all the time. Born that way, as though something is missing from his life. I’ve given him everything - not just money - love, affection. I’m mad about him. I can’t explain about him, but he’s in my guts. I never stop thinking about him. You wouldn’t think I’m the kind of man who worries about a kid all the time, would you?”

  “I like you better for it.”

  “I married his mother because she was pregnant, and we tried to get rid of him. It’s on my back all the time. So when he opens his eyes and wants to say something that he can’t find words for, I get the feeling that he knows what I’ve done, and won’t or can’t let me off the hook. I’m always trying to make it up to him. So when I told him - not about us - but that I’d have to move out, I almost lost heart in the middle. There he was caught in the middle of two people - two people who have nothing to give each other - in a trap. Helpless. He doesn’t get along with his mother very well and there he was stretching out his hand to me, and I ran. I ran like hell as fast as I could. And he had this look on his face . . . I can’t describe the look, but I see it all the time. When someone you love picks up a knife and says he’s going to cut your throat. I’ve got a crazy idea that he wanted to say: ‘Don’t go, not because of me, but for your own sake.’ He couldn’t have said anything like that, could he? He’s only five.”

  “Jay, calm down, you’re losing control.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He waved his empty glass at the waiter, who asked if they were ready to order. “Don’t rush me.” The man retreated to the bar.

  “He wasn’t rushing you, Jay. Honey, take it easy.”

  “I’m depressing you.”

  “Of course you’re not. If you’ve got problems, then I have them also.”

  “Nothing to do with you. Must keep you out.”

  “It’s not possible. I’m committed to you.”

  “You’re involved with me, not committed. There’s a big difference.”

  “What difference? I’m going to marry you. Neal will be like my own child. I’ll treat him just as I would our own children when we have them.”

  Something jarred Jay sharply in the way she described how she would treat Neal. The prospect of more children terrified him. For him, Neal was enough; he couldn’t imagine introducing him to strange children and complicating his life even more. Neal would be forced to occupy that ill-defined, soul-destroying, incomparably hopeless position of the child who belongs to no one and is finally opted into a family where he is treated “just as though he were their own.” Jay refrained from assaulting the idealistic state of affairs Terry had constructed. She didn’t understand how he felt, nor would she ever understand, and he could not bring himself to explain why and how the child, seemingly passive, had established such a strong hold over him. He imagined he saw Neal’s face at the bottom of the convex whiskey glass which was empty again. And he saw the look, a look so staggeringly malevolent and demoniac that he shrank back. Had Neal come between him and Terry, would he always come between Jay and every other woman?

  “Honey, let’s order something. You’re glassy-eyed.”

  “You order,” he said, at last.

  “Trust me?”

  “With my life.”

  She picked up his hand and kissed it.

  “I’ll make everything up to you. I’ve got so much love to give you.”

  “You should save it for someone who deserves it.”

  “Jay? Honestly, I don’t know what I have to do to convince you . . .”

  “Just convince Neal. I’m sold on you.”

/>   Her smile cracked just a bit, enough for him to notice and not to comment on.

  They were both tipsy when they got back to his hotel suite. He had slipped the elevator man five dollars, just to be on the safe side. He threw his coat carelessly on a chair and opened a bottle of whiskey.

  “All you seem to do is drink,” she said, standing on the bed. She began to jump on it as though it were a trampoline, and her head narrowly missed the ceiling.

  “You passing judgment?”

  “No, commenting.”

  “I wish you’d stop that jumping. I’m getting dizzy watching you.”

  He took a long drink, then sat down on a chair and took his shoes off.

  “Romantic beast, aren’t you? God, I hate rooms painted green. All hotels have green rooms, the smell of carbolic acid on the bedspread, and maroon drapes with little hanging balls.”

  “It was your idea, not mine.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like a reproach.”

  “I’m tired. Everything aches.”

  “Are we going to . . . ?”

  “What?” he said.

  She gave him a sharp little smile that had a hint of menace in it. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the pupils dilated.

  “Fuck, of course.”

  He lifted his head up from the floor.

  “I don’t think you should use language like that.”

  “You are joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You use it all the time.”

  “Never with you.”

  “I’m not honored. Don’t people use words like that in a bedroom?”

  “Occasionally . . . when they’re nice women who want to be treated like whores. The way you could never treat a whore. Yeah, the nastier kind of woman likes that.”

  She took off her shoes and started to open the clasp of her suspender belt to release her stockings. “Treat me like a whore.”

  “It wouldn’t work.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It wouldn’t work for me.” She came over and sat on his lap, and pushed his hand under her dress. “It’s a wonder to me that a nice girl should behave like a pig.”

  “I thought of you as though you were one enormous prick, fucking me to death. A machine, pushing in deeper and deeper and deeper until I’m dead.”