by Susan Isaacs
Nicholas sighed again. She decided it was charisma. Her brother, who was far more handsome than Nicholas, attracted attention, evoked desire, but unlike Nicholas, if Rhodes decided to run for office, he’d get few votes. The other handsome man she knew, her father-in-law, was so cold he might be encased in a block of ice. Only the bravest or the neediest would dare approach James without an invitation.
But Jane realized that besides good looks, Nicholas had an air of power and confidence. Even a trace of discomfort crossing his features seemed terribly wrong. People didn’t like to see him upset, and they’d cater to him, trying to alleviate his discomfort. They wanted him strong. They wanted to acknowledge his power and receive his approval. She recognized that she felt that way about him and had observed that so did his brothers and sisters. But it was the same with strangers, too. Once, in the supermarket, she’d wheeled the cart into the aisle where Nicholas had been waiting for the clerk to help him select and weigh tomatoes; he looked annoyed at waiting, confounded by the piles of vegetables. But by the time she’d covered the thirty feet to join him, two middle-aged women and an elderly man were helping him, the man holding a bag, the women squeezing and rejecting tomatoes for him, all three shyly returning his smile.
“Tell me what the problem is,” Jane said.
“I hate to say it.”
“Say it anyway. We’re discussing Harding Claybourne, not Nicholas Cobleigh. You can say the most evil, awful thing in the world and then say, ‘That’s not what I think. It’s the character I’m playing.’”
“The problem goes beyond the character. The problem is the play itself. I really thought it was good. I mean, there’s this big, juicy scene at the end where Harding sits back and watches the mother and daughter destroy each other. Remember? You read it. At the end they have no money, no love, no self-respect, no man. The mother grabs the tails of his jacket as he’s leaving and begs him ‘Can you give me a reason to live?’ and he looks at her—through her, really—and just says: ‘No.’ Just ‘No,’ and then he exits. I thought that was great at the beginning. A great bastard role. But I didn’t read it right. The play says nothing about him. Why does he want to destroy them? Who is he? I have no idea where he was born, what his life was like. All I know is his name and that he went to Yale Law School. Oh, and that he plays squash. In the first act he says ‘I’m off to play squash.’ That’s what the author thinks is an upperclass thing to say.”
“It’s not?”
“Jane, be serious. I can’t walk out onstage pretending to be the personification of some economic class. That’s pathetic.”
“That’s boring.”
“Then help me. Come on. Play the sweet, sympathetic wife.”
“I’m off to play squash.”
“The day you play squash…”
“Are you insinuating I’m not a magnificent athlete?”
“Jane, come on. Help me.”
“Okay.” Without realizing it, they both edged down to the end of the bed and sat with their feet on the floor, their serious-business posture. “I’m assuming you’re the only one who finds Harding a cipher.”
“Well, Gina, the actress who plays the mother, says she can’t figure him out, but I don’t think she’s staying up nights worrying about it. And all anyone else will say is to play it like I went to all the right schools and am rotten as hell.”
“Typecasting. Oh, come on, Nick, don’t look so gloopy. Let’s work on it. Let’s psych out Harding Claybourne. Now, he’s old shoe or white shoe or whatever you call it. Top drawer. Where was he born?”
“Obviously not in Cincinnati.”
Two hours later, when they’d finished constructing a biography of the character he was to play, Nicholas began making love to Jane. He turned her onto her stomach and slowly ran his tongue over the backs of her legs, up her spine, and under her arms, moving with a lazy sensuousness foreign to him. When he finally entered her, he was lying on her back, licking her ear and cheek. He had never done anything remotely like it before, but then she wasn’t quite sure who was doing it: Nicholas Cobleigh or Harding Claybourne.
Jane’s cooking was so bad it would have been funny, except Nicholas had to eat it. Trying to obscure the inexpensive origins of the meat they bought, she’d veil it in a sauce made from undiluted Campbell’s Cream of Celery soup. It left a white coating on his tongue and mouth that even her extra-sweet gelatin molds—she used a half cup less water than the directions suggested to make the molds firmer—could not penetrate. He’d been used to terrible food at Trowbridge and Brown, but at least that had been terrible and plain: scrambled eggs made from dehydrated powder, green ham, half-dead carrots.
But Jane could not leave food alone. A hot dog had to be stuffed with cheese and rolled in bacon. Canned fruit cocktail was mixed with cream cheese and sugar, broiled, and served hot and cloyingly sweet. Nothing remained unembellished.
But he loved how she looked when she cooked. Home from Deb, she’d take off her clothes and put on a bathrobe, claiming she was saving thousands on dry cleaning and that, by six, her bra straps were slicing into her shoulders. To keep her hair out of the food, she tucked her long ponytail into the back of the bathrobe so, for a change, the swinging shine of dark hair did not distract him from her strong features and her incredible eyes. Sometimes he’d set the table, and as he took the dishes from the cabinet he’d glance at the V made by the lapels of the bathrobe, hoping for a glimpse of breast. He was never completely unrewarded; at the least he’d see the dark gold skin of her chest glowing against the white of the robe.
He probed Jane for details of her day, because he loved to hear her talk. She interested him thoroughly. Her observations about the women at Deb, their alternatingly hilarious and tragic search for husbands, her recapitulations of what she’d read in the paper or seen on her walk to the office were so fresh and insightful he felt privileged to be her audience. She made him feel more intelligent than he’d thought he was. She’d even awakened a sense of humor he’d never known he’d possessed. Compared to Jane, all the girls he’d gone with were, at best, nice. Nice, but he would have been so bored. He wondered if he would have known he was bored or if he would not have thought about it, believing that that was what life felt like. He could not imagine wanting to watch Diana dice celery.
“Do you realize,” she said, “that a week from tonight theater history will be made? I’m serious. When they list your credits, Last Will and Testament will be first and people will pay hundreds for the program. I’m going to save a lot of them. Make a killing.” Her midwestern accent comforted him; it made whatever she said as accessible as the Miracle Whip she was mixing into her tuna and chopped pickle salad. If she had possessed the cold champagne voice of the New York girls he’d known, she would have been too much for him.
Still, her cooking was so awful it made him dread dinner. He’d made a few casual suggestions, that she stop using miniature marshmallows in salad, that he preferred a simple baked potato to the thing she stuffed with cheese and sliced olives, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her that the only thing she made decently was chocolate pudding.
When the phone rang he was watching her shell hard-boiled eggs. “Could you get it?” Jane asked. “It’s probably Hollywood.” When he got off the phone, he sat at the table. He stared down at a plate in the middle of the table. The eggs were deviled, the yolks polka-dotted with pimiento. “Nick? Who was it?”
“My father.”
“Is everything okay?”
“He asked us out for dinner a week from tonight.”
“You’re kidding.”
“He wants to take us out to an early Christmas dinner.”
“A week from tonight is only—”
“He’s going to spend Christmas in Paris.”
“He wouldn’t! How could he?”
“He said…”
“What? Nick, tell me.”
“My mother threw him out.”
James Cobleigh told the wine steward what
type of champagne he wanted to go with the oysters, and during the few minutes before he lifted his first glass, Jane realized he was already drunk. His eyes seemed floating in a bloodshot red pool, and they did not stay on her but swam off in his son’s direction.
“A toast!” he blasted, hoisting his glass, as if toasting a noisy party of three hundred. “To your loving mother.” People at the other tables in L’Huître glanced toward their table and quickly glanced away, for the expression on his face was not at all jolly. In repose, Nicholas appeared aloof; his father, hard. But animated, holding up his glass and addressing his son, James looked mean. Every feature was transformed: eyes narrowed, nostrils dilated, mouth tightened.
“Merry Christmas, Dad,” Nicholas said.
“Merry Christmas,” Jane added. Unlike his wife, who had asked to be called Winifred, James had never made it clear how he wanted to be addressed, so she never called him anything. If she called him “Mr. Cobleigh,” she sensed he wouldn’t say “Call me Jim,” and then she’d be stuck with that formality, forever underscoring her position as an outsider.
But if she felt like an outsider with Nicholas’s big-toothed, redheaded family, so must he, marrying into the Tuttle clan with their old money and their old schools and their old furniture. Nicholas had said his father came from a poor family, was estranged from them, refused to discuss them. Nicholas didn’t even know whether his father’s parents were alive.
James lifted a shell to his mouth and sucked an oyster out of it with the loud slurp of a suddenly unclogged drain. She guessed that must be the way it was done and tentatively touched one of the shells before her, trying to ignore the slimy sheen of the raw seafood, but then she noticed Nicholas eating his with the tiny pitchfork the waiter had put down. Her father-in-law finished six oysters in less than a minute and then stared perplexed at the insides of the shells as though someone had sneaked off with his food. She bet that, like her, he had never seen an oyster until he got married.
“Um,” she said to James, “how are you…how have you been?”
“How the hell do you think I’ve been?” he exploded. This time, the other diners did not look toward their table. Like Jane, they just flinched. “One night she says she’s had enough, and the next night I come home and there are five suitcases in the front hall and her mother’s goddamn nigger driver is standing there. ‘You wants de Plaza, Mr. C?’ She wasn’t even home. She was at her mother’s. Had the maid pack my bags.”
“Dad, please,” Nicholas said softly. “Stop it.”
“Shut up!” The headwaiter started toward the table but then changed his mind and hurried toward the front of the restaurant. “You feel sorry for her, don’t you? Don’t you? She gets whatever she wants. All these years. Six kids? Who the hell wants six kids. New apartment? New apartment. You think I bought all that jewelry? You think I give a damn about Chinese screens? You think I even know what she has? All the brokerage statements went right to her father’s office and then, when he died, right to her brother’s. Dragging me out every goddamn night to some new black-tie bullshit.”
“Are you still using your client’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers?” Nicholas asked softly.
Jane peered about and saw the waiter. As unobtrusively as she could, she pointed to her plate, indicating that she was ready to have it taken away. He began a slow walk to the table, but James’s voice stopped him.
“I’d be on top of the CIA today, but her father queered it for me,” James said. “You know that, don’t you? That old bastard pulled every string to ruin my life. He hated my guts. He thought the only reason I married her was for her money, and right after the war, when I could have—”
“Dad,” Nicholas said. “You really ought to tell Jane about some of your experiences in the OSS.” Nicholas turned to her. She moved her head slightly, signaling the front of the restaurant—escape—but Nicholas just continued. “Dad was undercover, posing as a French baker, in Pas-de-Calais. His accent is so perfect that—”
“It’s the psychiatrist. He’s the one pushing her, taking a weak woman and making her a hundred times worse. She doesn’t need a psychiatrist.”
“From what Nick said—” Jane was cut off by Nicholas’s kick, which landed sharply on her ankle. Nicholas had his elbow on the table and was gazing squarely at his father. She could not believe he was pretending they were having a normal family dinner. She could not believe he was allowing his father to rant on as if it were a conventional conversation. The entire restaurant was under James’s control. The door of the kitchen was opened a crack and an eye observed the siege.
“The psychiatrist and the old lady. Both of them. They work her over until she’s so confused she doesn’t know if she’s coming or going. And before that her father. They all jumped on her from the day we met. ‘He’s no good. Not good enough for you.’ And in the back of her mind, she was never a hundred percent sure they weren’t wrong.” Suddenly he stopped talking. He sat back, an abstracted look on his face, as if he were adding up a long column of figures. The waiter approached the table cautiously, paused for an instant, then rapidly took the three oyster plates and hurried away. James did not seem to see him. Nor did he see Jane’s lips form Let’s go. Nicholas saw her but gave no sign. He broke off a piece of his roll and buttered it with exquisite slowness.
The waiter returned with their dinners, muttered “Hot plates,” and rushed off. James remained in his silence. Nicholas picked up his knife and fork, began to eat, and signaled Jane to do the same. She knew she was eating something with veal that James had ordered for her, but she couldn’t taste it. The stillness, with its implicit violence, oppressed the entire restaurant. At other tables, men raised their fingers or made scribbling motions in the air, demanding their checks.
“Well,” she said, as if talking, contact, might soothe James’s anger. But her voice sounded strident. “Well,” she said again, nearly whispering, “this is a big month. Christmas and your son’s first professional appearance. You know, the play was mentioned in an article in—” Nicholas shook his head, warning her to be silent. It was too late. Her father-in-law moved forward. She sank back. Nicholas looked away from them both.
James leaned over the table. His tie billowed, suspended less than an inch away from the reddish sauce that blanketed his meat. “This one’s an actor. The other one’s going to be a minister. The only two with brains. Two sons with brains but no guts!” He slammed his fist onto the table. His teaspoon jumped and fell to the floor. “Real men wouldn’t take those jobs.”
“Dad,” Nicholas said. His voice was so calm and hushed he might have been talking in church. “You know what I was thinking about the other day? The time the two of us went up to the cabin and—”
“Olivia can’t get into a decent four-year college. And the others…” He sat back, but the abstracted look Jane expected did not return. She sighed, then turned her attention to her meal, eating as much as she could, although she was beginning to feel sick. When she glanced up, she saw that Nicholas had hardly touched his food. He was twirling his water glass slowly, by its stem. His composed expression was gone. He looked exhausted, like someone who had been experiencing great pain for a long time.
And then she looked at James. He sat erect, almost aggressively tall in his seat, but he was staring at Nicholas with an embarrassing intensity, devouring the face of his son. When he began to speak, she had to strain to hear him. “I called them all at school.” Tears began to pour from his eyes, but he let them wash down his face. He did not seem to know he was crying. Jane looked away. “I asked them all to come tonight. You’re the only one—” He cleared his throat, but it did not help. In an almost voiceless rasp he added, “C’est la vie.”
This couldn’t be stage fright. It was far more awful than he could have guessed. No friendly, familiar symptoms: no pounding heart, sweats, shakes, stomachache.
Nicholas was suspended between two worlds, a time-space traveler who’d pushed the wrong button and doomed him
self to eternal isolation, a cosmic Match Girl looking onto warm scenes behind impenetrable cold glass. He was caught between the play and the audience, unable to enter either.
“Mr. Claybourne! It’s so kind of you…” As he had at least fifty times during rehearsals, he heard Gina Hollander’s voice quiver, then fade, as he made his entrance. She brought the tips of her fingers to her lips and delicately cleared her throat, giving precisely the impression she was supposed to: a wealthy, well-bred, middle-aged widow suddenly awakened and confounded by desire. She patted her stiff coiffeur and tried to hide behind cordiality, but the quivering of her lips twisted her smile into a grimace. “It’s so good of you to come. I’m afraid—I was—I just couldn’t face a visit to a law office.”
He’d done it fifty times before. He set down the attaché case he was carrying and, with the calculated insouciance of a call girl, slowly unbuttoned his topcoat and eased it off. Exactly as they rehearsed it, she ran behind him and grabbed it just before it would have dropped to the floor. “Forgive my bad manners, Mr. Claybourne,” she trilled. “Let me take your coat.” She was doing everything she had done before. She folded his coat over her arm and, with seeming unconsciousness, began to stroke it. The second actress, who played the daughter, entered, crossed the stage, and stood, as she was supposed to, audaciously close to him, flaunting her young beauty. But her mascara had smeared horribly, making one of her eyes appear lost in its socket. “Julie, dear, this is Mr. Claybourne. The executor of Daddy’s will.”
He was not part of the play. He was a critic. The mother was very good. The daughter—her eye facing the audience so she must look more like the Phantom of the Opera than a love-starved teenager—spoke in the southern accent the director had been trying to stifle for three weeks. “It’s Harding Claybourne, isn’t it?” she drawled. He could write the review: Jennifer Bowman, who plays Julie Donaldson, sounded like a refugee from a Tennessee Williams first draft instead of the Upper East Side adolescent she was portraying.