Ambition
Page 27
‘DAVID!’
‘I’ll call for you at home – sorry, at your house; it hasn’t been a home for a long time – at nine sharp tonight. I’d prefer it if you were packed and ready.’
‘But Matthew . . .’
‘You left Matthew years ago. Quite frankly – and I don’t mean this in a negative way – he’ll be glad to see the back of you at last.’
‘He will not!’
‘He will so. I know it for fact. The night you were making an old man’s last minutes happy, I called Matthew on impulse and we had dinner. I wanted to get to the bottom of you – I thought it would help me get you out of my system. Well, we got juiced and talked about pretty well everything. And Matthew took it pretty easy. He’s got a girl, you know, a nurse; very pretty girl, blonde, a little overweight but she wears it well. He’s very proud of her – showed me a photograph. Told me he carries it everywhere. If you cared about him, you’d have found it. He said that. He’s a smart guy.’
‘Why, that two-faced—’
‘Susan!’
She laughed, feeling light-headed – feeling all-conquering, and therefore all-forgiving. Then she looked at him thoughtfully. ‘But your father . . . aren’t you angry with me?’
He crossed the room and stood in front of her ‘Look at me, Susan. Look at me for once without thinking about who my father was. What do I look like?’
She looked at his waving black hair, his dark eyes, his brown skin. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What race do you think I belong to?’ he asked, impatiently, imploringly.
‘You’re Jewish. Well, half. Your mother . . .’
He laughed. ‘Susan, to a WASP everyone the wrong side of beige looks the same. Yes, I am Jewish, half. But the half that isn’t isn’t white. Because my father was black. Well, half. Susan, Tobias X. Pope wasn’t my father. And it was the worry while she was pregnant that drove my mother crazy.’
‘But your father – Pope—’
‘Pope was such a crazed egotist that he never even noticed; like you, he thought Jews were coloured – marry one and your son and heir’s bound to come out with a touch of the tar brush. Or maybe he did know – maybe that’s why he treated her the way he did. But anyway, my real father is a light-skinned mulatto who was a servant at our place in Connecticut. I’ve known for the past ten years, and I’ve been doing all I can to support him. He’s a wonderful man – everything Pope wasn’t, including poor. Now I can really do something for him. And my mother – who knows? Now at last maybe she’ll have the nerve to come out of that place.’ He looked down at her. ‘Stand up.’
She did so, and he put his hands on her shoulders.
‘Susan, I have no illusions about you. You are the most amoral and unprincipled human being I have ever had the misfortune to tangle with, and that includes the late Tobias X. But you are also the most sexually desirable and the most singular, and maybe these two sides of you are not unconnected. Anyway, you’ve made me see the light: that lust is just love with the gloves off, and that I don’t want some pure ideal any more. By way of a fringe benefit you’ve also killed a man I’ve hated all my life, thereby making my poor demented mother as happy as she’ll ever be. You’ve given me an empire. The least I can do is give you a job.’ He put his arms around her.
She looked searchingly into his face; his beautiful, familiar, strange face. Something in her stare made him pull back and narrow his eyes. ‘But I warn you, I have a heart of US Steel!’
She hugged him tight, laughing.
How she loved him!
And he had an empire . . .
And she’d be an editor!
And they’d be married . . .
Loving him with all her heart, she couldn’t help but wonder what proportion of healthy young men died on their honeymoons from coronary collapse.
And when they kissed, his eyes were closed. But hers were open, staring out through the window and up at the sky – the bright blue Big Top under which so many opportunities just lay, waiting to be taken.
Staring onwards and upwards; staring up, up and away.
THE END