The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  In this respect I had some unexpected help from Starkie.

  Overnight, he’d developed a stomachache. No fever, maybe something he ate, but no foolin’, Dad, it really hurts. Toward noon, he threw up, and then fell sound asleep. I decided to let him sleep and went for a walk, alone. It was mid-afternoon by the time he woke up, a little pale but seemingly recovered. Only then did he, his sister, and I hit the road.

  It was already dark when I deposited the Aries in the garage near West Street and walked the few blocks to my brownstone. My one room was dark as well, and empty, small, uninviting. I had no answering machine, no way of knowing if she’d been calling me.

  All the way home from Connecticut, I’d rehearsed what I would say. Now, telephone in hand, the words I’d committed to memory seemed suddenly flat, wrong. Yet I had myself believing that my future with Kitty, if I still had a chance for one, would hang on what I said and how she heard it.

  I took a deep breath and punched out the number.

  And got her answering machine.

  “This is Kitty Goldmark speaking …”

  The familiar sound of her voice—or was it the fact that she wasn’t home?—shook me so that, having heard the beep, I let the message space on the tape run through without being able to utter a word.

  All right, where was she if she wasn’t home? I myself was late, that was true. I’d said I’d be home by four-thirty, five. Was she really not there? Or could she not be answering in order to punish me?

  I waited some time—an hour, less. There was nothing in the house to eat but I decided I wasn’t hungry enough to go out. Besides, if I went out, I might miss her call.

  But the phone didn’t ring.

  I punched her number again, got the answering machine again. This time I’d prepared an amusing message, something along the lines of “Do you happen to know a lovelorn lad named Tommy? If you do, he’d be delighted to hear from you.” But at the last minute I scratched it and simply said: “It’s Tommy. Eight o’clock, Sunday. I’m home. Please call.”

  This was just the first of many such messages those next few days: Tommy at four o’clock, Tommy at noon, Tommy at midnight, Tommy round the clock. Of course, I remembered that she sometimes left the answering machine on when she was home—and why. But this realization only sent all those other emotions I’d maundered over the weekend long—lust, anger, dread, whatever—flying out the door, chased by a now rampant and biting jealousy. It was this that sent me to her building the next night, where her doorman turned me away because there was no answer on the intercom, and to her office the day after, where a startled receptionist tried to convince me—legitimately in this instance—that Ms. Goldmark was out.

  But she hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. And I knew it by the next afternoon.

  9

  The payoff.

  It came in an envelope marked “Personal & Confidential,” delivered by messenger Tuesday while I was out to lunch. The messenger apparently had been Ms. Goldmark herself. The payoff was in the form of a promissory note payable to yours truly upon the distribution of the Estate of Edgar Chalmers Sprague. As I calculated, the amount represented exactly twenty percent of the estate’s gain through the acquisition and sale of Manderling stock.

  No letter, no message, nothing except the financial instrument itself.

  I put it back in the envelope. More than once that dismal afternoon I took it out again. It occurred to me to frame it and hang it on my wall, like those first dollar bills you sometimes see hanging in grocery stores and bars. Instead I cut it into pieces, neatly with a scissors, which pieces I put into a fresh envelope addressed to Katherine Goldmark and marked “Personal & Confidential,” which envelope I personally delivered to Central Park South that evening.

  No letter, no message.

  Done.

  It was the beginning of May. The city had come alive with the sounds and smells and colors of spring, but in the midst of it, I felt as though somebody had died, and furthermore that the somebody was myself. And no amount of analysis of what had happened, or hadn’t, or how could it have gone wrong so fast, or why, or whose fault, could assuage my chagrin.

  And then my phone rang at home, early Thursday morning. It was Kitty. Her voice low and choky.

  “This phone call may be the biggest mistake of my life,” she began without preamble, “but I want to see you.”

  She’d caught me in the midst of shaving. I was standing naked, the receiver in my hand.

  “I think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding,” I said back. “I—”

  “I don’t,” Kitty interrupted tersely. Then, her voice softening: “But I’d like us to talk about it.”

  She said she was free for dinner that night if I was. Yes, I was free. (Free, I remember thinking, for the rest of my life.) I suggested we go to La Banquette. She rejected that idea. She suggested an Italian place down off Grand Street. I didn’t know it, but what difference did that make? Did she want me to pick her up? No, she would rather meet me at the restaurant. At what time, I asked. Seven-thirty? Seven-thirty it was.

  And that was that. No time for me to ask why she’d felt compelled to insult me with the promissory note. Or to tell her I’d missed her sorely in spite of everything. Or for her to reply in kind.

  Just soap dried on my face.

  I tried to cut that day short by going home early from the office. I was too keyed up to work, too keyed up to do anything. I remember showering again, shaving again, and worrying about what to wear. I admit to changing, at least once. I ended up settling for the same suit I’d worn the day of the Christmas party, midnight blue, with suspenders, tie, and matching handkerchief. For luck? Yes, for luck. And deciding to walk to the restaurant so as to clear my head, then deciding against it lest I be late, and hailing a taxi. And so arriving early.

  No, Signora Goldmark hadn’t yet arrived, but I was la Signora’s guest? Yes, then, by all means, they would seat me at la Signora’s table.

  For Little Italy, where the gastronomic decor ranges from Neapolitan modern to Sicilian garish, the restaurant had an understated, even sedate elegance. I was led downstairs to a table near the kitchen, where, it turned out, favored diners were seated and served not off the menu but from the chef’s suggestions. In cuisine and style, with its brick arches and white damask napery, gleaming cutlery and crystal, it seemed to have been lifted in toto from one of the northern Italian cities, and the service matched—friendly yet unobtrusive and consummately professional.

  Leave it to Kitten, I thought. To judge from the flurry at her entrance, she was a well-known client.

  She was late. I was already halfway through a bottle of Gattinari when I saw her surging toward me among the tables, talking breathlessly even as I rose, in a spate of apology and frustration, something about having been detained at the office and then she hadn’t been able to find a taxi. All breathless, as I’ve said, and she could barely manage to kiss me on the cheek.

  “Sit down, Kitten,” I said, smiling and holding the back of her chair. “It’s okay now.”

  She looked different to me. She wore silk as usual, but not black, instead a print, predominantly red and pink, with huge, vaguely oriental flowers splashed across it in black outlines, high-necked, and a black-lined jacket of the same outer material. She wore the cuffs of her jacket sleeves casually turned up and rather less jewelry than usual. The overall effect was to make her seem older and younger at once, older perhaps in that the outfit was more daring and high-style than her habitual look, younger in the carefree touch of the rolled-up sleeves and the fact, too, that she had on less makeup than usual. Younger too in the look she gave me at the words I said when she sat down, a wide-eyed glance as though to say: Is it really okay now, Tommy? But how do you know?

  I was dazzled by her, I admit, and if I’ve dwelled on the older-younger idea, it is because I experienced two Kittens that night, neither of them precisely new except in combination. The one was as firm and direct as
ever in saying what she wanted—out of me, herself, us, life—but beneath her forthrightness ran an undercurrent of … what should I call it?… The ingenue? The schoolgirl? It was as though, underneath, she needed someone to approve of her. Is it really okay? Please tell me it is. This came out less in her words than in a glance, a pause, a hesitation.

  As for me, I’d never found it easy to tell a woman exactly what I was thinking, but with Kitty, that night, I tried. I had missed her terribly. The week since I’d last seen her had been a torture to me. Up till then, I probably hadn’t let on to myself how much I needed her. If the experience had taught me one thing, though, it was that, whatever happened or didn’t between us, I couldn’t stand her avoiding me.

  “It’s true,” she said, eyeing me. “I have been avoiding you. I didn’t want to see you. But do you understand why?”

  “Not really. I assumed you were upset. I think you also may have felt a little guilty.”

  “Guilty? Over what?”

  “Over the fact that you actually did use me.”

  Her eyes widened. She stared at me a moment, then shook her head angrily, her dark hair flying.

  “Then you really don’t understand,” she said. “Not anything.”

  “Then maybe you’d better explain,” I said softly.

  “I don’t know if I can, or where to begin. But I’ll tell you this much. All this talk about being used, that’s just the professional in you, the Wasp lawyer who’s scared to death of getting his hands dirty. Where’s the real you in it? Where’s Tommy?”

  Not knowing how or what to answer, I said nothing.

  “How dare you say I used you?” she went on. “To the extent that I did, I could have used any lawyer in town. And for every item, every single transaction in the estate, I covered you in writing. But is that all I am to you, another one of your widows who’s using you?”

  “You know that’s not true, Kitty.”

  “Well, that’s what it sounds like. For the rest of it, what am I to you other than a piece of meat? I know, I know, you say you need me. But do you know what that need feels like in here? It feels like it’s you who’s using me, like I’m just somebody you’re fucking on the side—no mess, no fuss. And above all, no responsibility.”

  “You know that’s not true,” I repeated.

  “Come on, Tommy, why won’t you just admit it?” she said. “It’s not such a terrible thing, using somebody for sex. People do it all the time. Besides, we’re good at it.”

  I knew somehow, out of some instinct, that if I agreed with her, I’d never hold her in my arms again. Anyway, I wasn’t using her. Maybe it was true with other women, yes, but not with Kitty. And I told her so.

  “Then how on earth could you have accused me of being a criminal?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Oh, come on, Tommy. If we’re going to end up nowhere, at least let’s be honest with each other.”

  “What the hell do you think I’m trying to be?”

  “Look,” she said, smiling faintly, “let’s suppose I did break some stupid law. I’m not saying I did, but if I did, and if I made some money by doing it, and you went along innocently, not knowing, with a paper trail to prove you were only carrying out instructions anyway … then what’s the big deal?”

  What came to mind immediately was that I was still, at least in theory, an “officer of the court.” But to say so would have acknowledged her point about uptight Wasp lawyers. And to bring up her attempted payoff would, I suppose, only have corroborated it.

  “Jesus,” I said, feeling trapped. “What do you want of me, Kitty?”

  “I think I told you that already, my dear, maybe even the first time we met.” She looked at me firmly, head on. “I want a partner. I don’t want a lawyer—I can buy that anywhere. Or sex either—I imagine I could buy that, too, if I had to. But the feeling that somebody’s in it with you, no matter what. And that means somebody who’s not going to head for the hills at the first sign of trouble.”

  Underneath the directness of her words was that suppliant tone again, an element of plea. Or what I took for plea.

  “That sounds like a proposition,” I said, half in jest.

  “It’s not,” she answered, shaking her head. “What you want in life and what you get aren’t always the same.”

  “Meaning that I’ve already failed the test?”

  “Meaning that …”

  But she stopped, head slightly tilted in that appraising, examining way she had.

  “Look, Tommy,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something you may really not want to hear, but if that’s so, so be it. I once married a man who chased me for years before I accepted. I was Gar’s secretary—I told you that—and he wanted me so badly, it was like a joke. He said he’d do anything, I could have whatever I wanted, et cetera, et cetera. I always said no—as nicely as I could because I thought he was a nice man. And then, one day …” Here she hesitated, and her eyes flicked away, as though she was reminded of something else. “And then, one day, I found myself saying, ‘Why not?’ I won’t go into all the reasons, I’m not sure I understood them myself. I said, ‘Okay, he loves me, I’ll do it.’ I think he was even more surprised than I was. So we got married—went downtown, took out a license, and some minister friend of Gar’s said the right words, and that was that.

  “Well”—with a heavy sigh—“I think it took me a week or two—no more—to realize that I’d married a dead man. Dying, as good as dead, dead. Not physically—in those days he even enjoyed sex, on occasion, and the heavy drinking came later—but in every other way. I lived with him all those years, but it was like living with a corpse.”

  “Why are you telling me all this now? Are you saying I’m like him?”

  “No.” Then she smiled at me. “You’re a lot cuter, for one thing.”

  “But …?”

  “But,” she agreed, eyeing me directly. “My point is that I see too much of him in you. There are ways in which you are dead, Tommy, with your life only half over. You don’t need me to tell you. Your career, the way it’s worked out, is pretty much going nowhere. One failed marriage, children you don’t particularly care about. Not enough money, I’d guess, though you try to hide that. Already you drink too much. It’s not that you don’t have any fun—you’re witty, lively, sexy—but it’s all dabbling. You dabble with women, for instance. You even dabble with me.”

  “I wouldn’t call that—” I began.

  “Call it what you will,” she said, cutting me off. “It’s dabbling. No risk, no responsibility, no ambitions. It’s as though you’d already given up—dead in that sense—even before you started.”

  Up to this point, I felt no great pain. After all, I’d long since been giving my “buried alive” speech to pretty much anyone who listened, and if it hurt a little to hear it from Kitty’s lips, I couldn’t argue with the appraisal. Except in one respect.

  “There’s one thing you’re leaving out,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “That I’m hopelessly in love with you.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “For that matter, I’m in love with you too, Tommy.”

  “Then …?”

  “But that’s only dabbling, too.”

  “It’s not dabbling as far as I’m concerned,” I blurted out, feeling myself go hot under the skin. “For God’s sake, Kitten, what do you want from me? Do you want me on bended knee?”

  “Not now,” she said, smiling with her eyes. “Not that it’s a bad idea …”

  “I’m sorry, Kitty, but I’m serious!”

  “Stop shouting, Tommy”—still smiling. “I’m serious too.”

  “I won’t stop shouting if I’m shouting. What the hell do you want from me?”

  “It’s not what I want from you. It’s what you want for yourself.”

  “That’s too easy, damn it! Too facile by far! I don’t want anything for myself, I
want you. For God’s sake, are you telling me I have to earn you?”

  Again she had that ability to bring me to the point of explosion, as though everything inside me was about to burst through, spill over, the dam giving way, or the crust of the earth or the membrane of air that holds the thundercloud together. Nobody had ever had that power over me before. I see myself standing in the restaurant, raging down at her. In my imagination, the place is empty, except for Kitty—empty chairs with bare white tablecloths and crystal gleaming in the blazing light and all staff gone. And Kitty, eyes alight, skin flushed a deep and dusky red, the red of her lips and the red of her nails around a wineglass, the smile still there but trembling now, as though the emotion I’d let loose had kindled her, too …

  But no, not at least in her tone. I remember she said it mildly:

  “Yes, if that’s the way you want to put it. Yes, Tommy, I want you to earn me.”

  “Then for God’s sake tell me how!”

  And so, in due course, she did.

  There was more to it, of course, and if I’ve tried to give it the coherence of a single-threaded argument, in order to illustrate my conquest of Kitty and Kitty’s of me, there were sub-arguments too, in the restaurant and after. One, I recall, was over the check and who should pay it. (Kitty prevailed.) And the “payoff” came up, too. Why had she sent me the promissory note? (To compromise me? No, to close the books on me.) And why had I sent it back in pieces? (Because I felt compromised? No, because I’d felt the jilted lover.) I mention these only to point out the weird emotional climate of that night, when the merest spark could ignite us instantly and, by contrast, the most horrendous accusations could go unchallenged. We talked, we fought, we walked, we rode, we made love. Maybe there was a full moon. We must have eaten in the restaurant, but I’ve no recollection of it. All this, I should say, was Kitty’s triumph, for if she was in her element, I was, in an emotional sense, clearly out of mine.

  I do remember quite vividly how it ended.

  We were making love on her living room rug, Kitty astride me, her hair falling over both our heads, like a curtain.