“We’re married,” he said.
An inferno ignited inside her skull. “That’s one for the books,” she said lightly. “You and Roy.”
The doorman was buzzing for the elevator.
“Althea,” Gerry said quietly, “there’ve been quite a few extracurriculars.”
“No need for confessions. I’m not your priest.”
“So my being hitched to Roy does make a difference,” he said.
She’d slept with many married men, experiencing no envy toward or guilt about the deceived wives. So what if she and Roy had shared a few inextricable years at Beverly High? Why should she feel this rush of hot jealousy, this panicky shame, this hurt?
The bronze-and-Lalique-crystal elevator doors slid open.
As they ascended swiftly, noiselessly, she put her arms around Gerry’s waist, pressing her wind-flushed cheek to his stubbled cheek. “Yes, it matters,” she whispered. “But there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”
On the other side of the drawn white linen curtains, wind drummed hailstones on glass, but the room was warm, and a log fire sent its rosy glow across the dimness. Althea moved closer to Gerry, curling her naked leg over his. It was six o’clock, and they had been in the gilded bed for five hours.
Gerry stubbed out his cigarette, turning to put both arms around her. “Would you think I was laying it on too thick if I said nothing in my life has been as right as being with you this afternoon?”
“I believe you,” she said. The boundless confidence he had always given her allowed her to admit: “I’m glad it’s not as good for you with Roy.”
“Want me to tell you about her?”
“We should get it over with, yes.”
“It was a mistake, marrying her.” He sighed. “She’s a good kid, decent, loyal as they come, and I’m a complete shit to her. I can’t help it. She’s always so damn humble, know what I mean? Looking at me in this simpy, adoring way, asking my opinion about her work, her clothes. ‘You’re so much smarter than me,’ she keeps saying. ‘You have such a wonderful eye.’”
“That sort of inferiority thing drives me up a wall.”
“Yeah, right. And then there’s the house—we bought one in a tract just south of Beverly Hills.”
“You? A tract? You mean like Levittown?”
“That’s it. Really Roy bought it. She used her own dough. Tracts have sprung up all over the city. This one has pretensions. Not Beverly Hills, but trying to be. Beverlywood it’s called. She picked the model with the attached garage, and before we moved in she hired some joker to fix it up with a skylight and windows. A studio for me. The only damn problem is, I can’t work there. I can’t breathe in there.”
Althea stroked his naked shoulder. “Poor Gerry,” she said with abstract sympathy.
“Christ!” he said. “Me, on a street where every fifth dump is the same as ours! Ahh, what the hell am I complaining about? If the house pleases her, I’m glad. Christ knows, nothing else about the marriage has been any good for her. Since we’ve been hitched, I can only work in fits and starts—I junk most of the stuff. She never complains, ever. She calls me a genius and thinks everything I do is a masterpiece—and I should sell it to buy a new car, a new sofa, a new this or that. Shit. Every word I say about her sounds rotten. And Roy’s the best. It’s me. I’m a prick of a guy to live with.”
“Is she unhappy too?”
“That’s the crazy part. I’d swear she’s not. I’m the miserable one. She works her tail off at Patricia’s and then comes home singing. God, the ways she thinks she’s pleasing me. Maple furniture with a fake cobbler’s bench, recipes from some women’s magazine. All for me. I try to say the right things, compliment her until I can’t stand my phoniness anymore.”
“And then you hit out below the belt,” Althea said.
“Hit hard. You understand this, don’t you?”
“I lived it with Aubrey Wimborne for three years.”
“After I explode, she goes in the other bedroom and bawls all night, then drags around looking like a whipped pup for a few days. It tears me apart, but when I try to apologize, I can’t. You haven’t any idea what a shit it makes me feel.”
“Aubrey was always laying himself out for me. At first I thought he was trying to please me, but then I realized his efforts were really a psychological probe. He was testing how far I would go. He needed me to play sadist to his masochist. Finally, when I couldn’t bear myself anymore, I left him.”
“I feel sorrier for Roy than I ever felt for anyone, but I can’t change myself. Or her.” He sighed again. “And then there’s this business about having a kid.”
Althea shifted her long, smooth leg from his hairy one. “You have a child?”
“No. Another thing to feel rotten about. Something’s wrong, the doctors don’t know which one of us it is. Before the war, when I didn’t want ’em, I could have kids.” He paused. “Maybe something happened to me when I was wounded at Salerno.”
Althea held her breath and said nothing.
“We’ve gone to three different specialists. The last one sat us down in his office—it was filled with off-tone van Gogh prints. Folding his fat hands over his fat belly, he doled out advice. He told Roy her work at Patricia’s was too much for her. ‘You should act like a woman. That generally does the trick,’ the fat turd said. Roy stared at me with this horrible, pleading, hopeful little smile. And I said, ‘I’m not about to get a job at some asshole cookie factory, so we damn well need your paycheck!’ She began to cry in front of that fat doctor, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. I felt so sorry for her that I was ready to puke. There was nothing to do but get the hell out of that damn office with fake van Goghs. I didn’t go home for a week. Most of the time I was drunk and getting laid to forget how much I hated myself.”
“What about a divorce?”
The hail had momentarily stopped, and a hush surrounded the question.
“The one time I suggested it, she went off the deep end. She’s not much of a drinker, but she got totally soused. She lay on the floor trying to kiss my shoes.” A shudder passed through Gerry’s naked body. “I think she would’ve killed herself if I hadn’t backed down.”
“Aubrey hinted at guns and pills. Instead, he remarried.”
“There’s no ditching out of this one, ever. Roy and me are stuck together. Once she dragged me to this play, No Exit—”
“Sartre.”
“Yeah. The exit-entialist play.”
Althea, laughing at his pun, kissed his neck. “You’re not such a Neanderthal as you pretend.”
“Hell is three people trapped forever in one room and not one of the poor sons of bitches getting what they want. Well, except for there being only two of us, that’s Mr. and Mrs. Gerry Horak. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She clasped him tighter and they kissed a long, tender minute.
The rat-tat of hail began again, and there were only whispers and murmurs of their delight. She rose up, her pale, loosened hair trailing down his scarred chest. As he caressed her body, for some reason she determined to hold back her orgasm until he came. An exquisite torment. When, finally, he began to ride her, she collapsed against the mattress, shrieking at the top of her lungs because every cell of her body was bursting to form another more perfect entity in some far-off, fantastic land of sheer joy.
48
They had agreed to meet at Langley’s at eleven. The gallery was on Madison Avenue a few blocks from her apartment, so she walked. The previous night’s storm had passed, the only reminder of it a slush of papers in gutters. It was very cold, and the sky a brilliant blue. Clean-washed windows of shops displayed tempting luxuries, and pots of brilliant chrysanthemums spilled onto sidewalks from florists’ stores.
New York smiled on Althea, and she smiled back.
She turned into a flawlessly tended old brick house. Affixed to the ebony-painted front door was a brass plate:
LANGLEY GALLERIES
M
ODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Her heels clicked over the parquet foyer and she glanced into the exhibition rooms: Gerry wasn’t here yet. She signed the large leather guest book: the receptionist, a burly man who probably doubled as guard, handed her a slick, handsomely printed catalog with “HORAK” on the cover in Gerry’s bold, black signature.
The thick carpeting hushed the footsteps of the pairs of affluent women who whispered as they solemnly examined the enormous, near-monochromatic paintings. Althea folded her arms, staring at a canvas with more square footage than many a room. On the fawn background, a huge, featureless umber globe was bisected by a brown line. A minuscule crimson dot in the lower-right corner signified that this work was sold.
A salesman limped over to her. “Horak has grown nicely since his last showing,” he said in a middle-European accent that she could not quite place. “Nowadays he’s considered an excellent investment, in the same class as Pollock or de Kooning, but more accessibly priced.”
“Just browsing,” she said.
“If I may be of service,” he said, backing away courteously.
She had reached the rear room when Gerry came in. Here, among the reverential matrons and earnest salesmen, in his faded Levi’s and black leather jacket, he was a cocky aberration. Raising his hand in greeting, he strode toward her.
“What’s the verdict?” he asked, disturbing the chapel stillness. A nearby couple turned reproachfully.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.” She tilted her head at a vast painting. “Life is flat and colorless?”
“Beats me,” he said. “After I got out of the ward, I avoided anything representational.”
“What happened to the portraits of me, Gerry?”
“Burt had kept ’em for me, but they hurt to look at, so I slashed ’em. How about sitting for me again?”
“If you’ll let me try my hand at you.”
“Have you been working?” he asked.
“No, but I’d like to start.”
“Yeah, what the hell! Why not? We’ll be a whole damn portrait movement.” He laughed again.
The salesman reappeared. “Ahh, madam, I see you’ve met our artist.”
“Yes, he’s convincing me to take this one.”
“You’re off your nut if you do,” Gerry said.
The salesman’s jaw quivered as he managed a half-smile. “I must say that an artist is the last person to judge the value of his own work.”
While the purchase was transacted, Gerry kept up a running repartee to the effect that if she had all her marbles she’d never pay this kind of dough for a gigantic brown blob that made no sense to her.
The salesman sniffed anxiously until she signed the check.
She and Gerry emerged from the gallery laughing like naughty children. The place Gerry was staying in was a long distance off, but they decided to walk. After a half-hour out in the chill, they were ravenous, so they ducked into a narrow delicatessen where conversation blared and fat waitresses squeezed around tightly packed Formica tables balancing plates on their arms. Althea and Gerry wolfed down thick sandwiches of fragrant, juicy pastrami on fresh, yellow-crusted rye.
If anybody saw me here they wouldn’t believe their eyes, she thought. Althea Coyne Cunningham Firelli Wimborne, who comported herself with remote dignity, sitting in a noisy deli wedged between two pairs of gesticulating merchants, laughing as she mopped a water-sogged paper napkin at the long dribble of mustard on her silk blouse.
With Gerry she felt miraculously freed of striving and etiquette. She could be possessed by pleasure, laugh as loudly as an overexcited child, indulge her salivary glands and her impulses. She could be her own true self. Leaning across the narrow strip of Formica, she pressed a pickle-scented kiss on his cheek.
Replete, they resumed their walk, laughing and holding hands all the way to south Houston Street. A friend, currently painting in North Africa, had left him the keys to his loft. Most of the building was rented to rag-trade small-timers, and open doors revealed steamy workshops where Puerto Rican women sweated over their sewing machines or ironing boards while radios blared a cacophonous variety of Latin beats.
The loft smelled of gesso, turpentine, jute canvas, oil paints, acrylic paints, dust. Gerry closed the door. Taking her hand, he held it flat against his chest. His heart was pounding erratically.
“That’s what happens when old fogies climb stairs,” she said, but her teasing voice faded to a whisper. “Ahh, Gerry . . .”
They fell onto the mattress.
* * *
The loft became their meeting place.
Althea would have Gordon, her butler-chauffeur, drop her off around ten. She would find Gerry already at work in a faded khaki Army shirt that was splotched with paint. They didn’t talk much. He painted her, she drew him, her charcoals scratching away. Her renderings of Gerry, though lacking in technical skill, possessed a force, a significance that pleased her. My dream wasn’t so idiotic after all, she would think.
He was painting a series of three-by-fives of her, working with almost photographic realism, a spacious style reminiscent of Hopper that marvelously conveyed both her high-voltage, irrepressible sexuality and the haunting aura of solitude that surrounded her.
Around four he knocked off work. They would eat in one of the nearby cheap, ethnic cafés, then return to the loft to make love.
They seldom went to her apartment. This had nothing to do with discretion: her cook and maid had rooms on the second floor, and Gordon went home every night to Harlem. But the whimsically elegant, priceless arrangements of the flat had been intended as mute testimony that Althea Wimborne was the best of the best. Now she had no need to prove anything.
Those weeks she canceled the minutiae: nine dinner invitations, numerous lunch dates and cocktail parties, a meeting of the board of a children’s home, two charity dances, a fund-raiser for André—she had kissed the senator off—a dog show and a big private bash for the opening of the Coyne Archaeological Museum, endowed by the Coyne Foundation.
Let people gossip about her absences. If voyeurs desired to find out about her affair with Gerry Horak, son of a drunken factory hand, let them. The rules of her world, recently so crucial to her, had become meaningless.
Althea also found that in her new, simpler way, her feelings about Roy had altered. After that initial mangling of jealousy and shame, she found herself seeing Roy not as a rival but simply as an old friend confined in the prison of an unhappy marriage. Someone once close but now unconnected to her.
By the fifteenth of December, Althea decided she could no longer put off her Christmas shopping. After the stores closed, she met Gerry at the Russian Tea Room. It was too late for the dinner mob and too early for the post-concert cadre, so the long, narrow restaurant was fairly empty. They had a large booth. Gerry, who usually sat close to her, stationed himself at a distance, ordering three bourbons in rapid succession. In her other life, Althea would have inwardly cringed at his rejection while outwardly manifesting an upper-crust indifference. Tonight, though, she ate her dinner, accepting that Gerry was upset and would presently tell her about it.
“Today I got two letters,” he said finally. “One from Roy.”
Althea looked up from her blinis. “I thought she wrote often.”
“Yeah, she does, but this one’s different.”
“Different? How?”
He raised his body, fishing two envelopes from his pants pocket, handing her the pale blue one, which held the warmth and curve of his body.
She scanned the once-familiar writing:
Darling,
You have to forgive me for writing like this, but you have been gone for an eternity. I do understand how important it is for you to be around during the showing—but you said it would only be two weeks. And now it is over six weeks. Darling, I am not complaining. You and your career have always come first with me, you know that. But the house is so terribly empty without you, and at night all kinds of
tormenting thoughts run through my mind.
Have you found a girl?
You know I’ve always understood that a man like you, a magnificent artist, can’t be expected to be strictly monogamous. If you’re having a fling, I can handle it. Darling, whatever it is keeping you in New York, I will understand. But I have to know.
I am positive there is another woman—a wife can always tell, so you don’t have to keep it a secret.
The one thing I cannot bear is feeling cut off from you.
I went to Dr. Dash again, and he suggested a specialist who has a new kind of treatment. I’m going tomorrow. Darling, how I long to give you a child! Always remember, you are my everything, I am nothing without you, I worship you with my whole heart, and I ache to have you home.
If only you were inside me,
I adore you.
Roy
Althea felt a wave of queasiness. If this were anybody but Gerry Horak, she would be retreating from the misery in his face, from the sad, horrible love letter, from the dark underside of so disastrous a relationship. But this was Gerry, Gerry, whose clenched knuckles rapped on the white tablecloth.
She returned the letter. “It’s sick, Gerry.”
He raised his shoulders. “She only throws emotional bazookas about one thing. Me.”
“She used to be cheerful, unsubservient. Maybe she was sozzled when she wrote it. You said she drank.”
“Only that one time when I suggested we split. I’m a bastard to let you see it, but when she acts like this, it gets to me.”
“God, no wonder. From my experience with Aubrey, I’d say it’s a typical masochist’s game.”
“No, it’s the real thing.” Sighing, he pulled the paper from the other envelope, handing it to her.
Dear Gerry,
I reckon I am butting in, but poor Roy’s been looking ill and dreadful for weeks now and I am sick with worry. She drags around and never says one word of complaint, but she’s been seeing all kinds of doctors.
She would have a fit if she knew I was writing to you, but I reckon you have a right to know when your wife needs you. No art showing is as important as that. Remember how Marylin got herself released from The Lost Sabrina when Joshua had his heart attack?
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