Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  She went around to the front of the house, padding happily through the dewy grass with her bare feet, her transparent cotton nightgown blowing around her body as she walked. They had no neighbors and the chance of any cars passing by at this hour was almost nil. Anyway, in California, nobody cared how you dressed. She often sunbathed naked in the garden and her body was a deep brown after the summer. Back East she had always been careful to stay out of the sun, but if you weren’t brown in California people assumed that you were either ill or too poor to take a holiday.

  The newspaper was lying in the front driveway, folded and bound by a rubber band. She opened it up and glanced at the headlines as she walked slowly back around the house. Nixon and Kennedy had their pictures on the front page and they were promising everybody everything. She mourned briefly for Adlai Stevenson and wondered if it was morally right for somebody as young and as good looking as John Fitzgerald Kennedy to run for the Presidency. “Charm boy,” Colin called him, but Colin had charm thrown at him every day by actors and its effect on him was almost invariably negative.

  She reminded herself to make sure to apply for absentee ballots for herself and Colin, because they were going to be in New York in November and every vote against Nixon was going to be precious. Although now that she no longer wrote for magazines she didn’t get too worked up about politics. The McCarthy period had disillusioned her with the value of private righteousness and alarmed public utterance. Her love for Colin, whose politics were, to say the least, capricious, had led her to abandon old attitudes along with old friends. Colin described himself at various times as a socialist without hope, a nihilist, a single-taxer, and a monarchist, depending upon whom he was arguing with at the moment, although he usually wound up voting for Democrats. Neither he nor Gretchen was involved in the passionate political activities of the movie colony, the feting of candidates, the signing of advertisements, the fund-raising cocktail parties. In fact, they hardly went to any parties at all. Colin didn’t like to drink much and he found the boozy, aimless conversation of the usual Hollywood gatherings intolerable. He never flirted, so the presence of battalions of pretty ladies available at the functions of the rich and famous had no attraction for him. After the loose, gregarious years with Willie, Gretchen welcomed the domestic days and quiet nights with her second husband.

  Colin’s refusal to “go public,” as he phrased it, had not damaged his career. As he said, “Only people without talent have to play the Hollywood game.” He had asserted his talent with his first picture, confirmed it with his second, and now, with his third picture in five years in the final cutting and mixing stage, was established as one of the most gifted directors of his generation. His only failure had come when he had gone back to New York, after completing his first picture, to put on a play that closed after only eight performances. He had disappeared for three weeks after that. When he returned he was morose and silent and it had been months before he felt he was ready to go to work again. He was not a man designed for failure and he had made Gretchen suffer along with him. It had not helped, either, that Gretchen had told him in advance that she didn’t think the play was ready for production. Still, he always asked for her opinions on every aspect of his work and demanded absolute frankness, which she gave him. Right now she was troubled by a sequence in his new film, which they had seen together in rough cut at the studio the night before. Only Colin, she, and Sam Corey, the cutter, had seen it. She had felt there was something wrong, but couldn’t give coherent reasons why. She hadn’t said anything after the running, but she knew he would question her at breakfast. As she went back into the bedroom, where Colin was still sleeping in his important position, she tried to remember the sequence of the film, frame by frame, so that she could make sense when she spoke about it.

  She looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was still too early to wake Colin. She put on a robe and went into the living room. The desk in the corner of the room was strewn with books and manuscripts and reviews of novels torn out of the Sunday Times Book Review section and Publisher’s Weekly and the London newspapers. The house was not a large one and there was no other place for the never-diminishing pile of print that they both attacked methodically, searching for possible ideas for films.

  Gretchen took a pair of glasses off the desk and sat down to finish the newspaper. They were Colin’s glasses, but they fitted her well enough so that she didn’t bother to go back into the bedroom to get her own. Matched imperfections.

  On the theater page there was a review from New York of a new play that had just opened, with a rave for a young actor whom nobody had ever heard of before and she made a note to get tickets for the play for herself and Colin as soon as she got into the city. In the listing of movies for Beverly Hills she saw that Colin’s first picture was being revived over the weekend and she neatly tore out the listing to show it to him. It would make him less savage at breakfast.

  She turned to the sports section to see what horses were running at Hollywood Park that afternoon. Colin loved the races and was a not inconsiderable gambler and they went as often as they could. The last time they had gone he had won enough to buy her a lovely spray brooch. There didn’t seem to be any jewelry on today’s card and she was about to put the paper down when she saw a photograph of two boxers sparring in training. Oh, God, she thought, there he is again. She read the caption under the photograph. “Henry Quayles with Sparmate Tommy Jordache at Las Vegas in workout for middleweight fight next week.”

  She hadn’t seen or heard from her brother since that one night in New York and she knew almost nothing about boxing, but she knew enough to understand that if he was working as somebody’s sparring partner Thomas had gone downhill since the winning bout in Queens. She folded the paper neatly, hoping that Colin would overlook the photograph. She had told him about Thomas, as she told him about everything, but she didn’t want Colin’s curiosity to be aroused and perhaps insisting on meeting Thomas and seeing him fight.

  There were sounds from the kitchen now and she went into Billy’s room to wake him. He was sitting cross-legged in his pajamas on the bed, silently fingering chords on his guitar. Pure blond hair, grave, thoughtful eyes, fuzzed pink cheeks, nose too big for the undeveloped face, skinny, young boy’s neck, long, coltish legs, concentrated, unsmiling, dear.

  His valise, with the lid up, was on the chair, packed. Neatly packed. Somehow Billy, despite his parents, or perhaps because of his parents, had grown up with a passion for order.

  She kissed the top of his head. No reaction. No hostility, but no love. He fingered a final chord.

  “You all ready?” she asked.

  “Uhuh.” He uncurled the long legs, slid off the bed. His pajama top was open. Skinny, long torso, ribs countable, close to the skin, skin California summer color, days on the beach, body-surfing, girls and boys together on the hot sand, salt and guitars. As far as she knew he was still a virgin. Nothing had been said.

  “You all ready?” he asked.

  “Bags all packed,” she said. “All I have to do is lock them.” Billy had an almost pathological fear of being late for anything, school, trains, planes, parties. She had learned to be well in advance for anything she had to do with him.

  “What do you want for breakfast?” she asked, prepared to feast him.

  “Orange juice.”

  “That all?”

  “I better not eat. I puke on planes.”

  “Remember to take your Dramamine.”

  “Yeah.” He stripped off the top of his pajamas and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. After she had moved in with Colin, Billy had suddenly refused to be seen naked in front of her. Two theories about that. She knew that Billy admired Colin, but she also knew that the boy admired her less for having lived with Colin before they were married. The strict, painful conventions of childhood.

  She went to wake Colin. He was talking in his sleep and moving uneasily on the bed. “All that blood,” he said.

  War? Cellul
oid? It was impossible to tell with a movie director.

  She woke him with a kiss under his ear. He lay still, staring blackly up at the ceiling. “Christ,” he said, “it’s the middle of the night.”

  She kissed him again. “Okay,” he said, “morning.” He rumpled her hair. She was sorry she had gone in to see Billy. One morning, on a national or religious holiday perhaps, Colin would finally make love to her. This might have been the morning. Non-coordinated rhythms of desire.

  With a groan he tried to lift himself from the bed, fell back. He extended his hand. “Give a poor old man a lift,” he said. “Out of the depths.”

  She grasped his hand and pulled. He sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his eye with the back of his hand, regretting daylight.

  “Say,” Colin stopped rubbing his eye and looked at her alertly, “last night, at the running, in the next to the last reel, there was something you thought was lousy …”

  He didn’t even wait for breakfast, she thought. “I didn’t say anything,” she said.

  “You don’t have to say anything. All you have to do is breathe.”

  “Don’t be sure a naked nerve,” she said, stalling for time. “Especially before you’ve had your coffee.”

  “Come on.”

  “All right,” she said. “There was something I didn’t like, but I didn’t figure out why I didn’t like it.”

  “And now?”

  “I think I know.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, the sequence after he gets the news and he believes it’s his fault …”

  “Yes,” Colin said impatiently. “It’s one of the key scenes in the picture.”

  “You have him going around the house, looking at himself in one mirror after another, in the bathroom, in the full-length mirror on the closet wall, in the dark mirror in the living room, in the magnifying shaving mirror, at his own reflection in the puddle on the front porch …”

  “The idea’s simple enough,” Colin said irritably, defensively. “He’s examining himself—okay, let’s be corny—he’s looking into his soul in various lights, from different angles, to discover … Okay, what do you think is wrong about it?”

  “Two things,” she said calmly. Now she realized she had been gnawing at the problem subconsciously ever since she had come out of the projection room—in bed before falling asleep, on the terrace looking out over the smoggy city, while going through the newspaper in the living room. “Two things. First, the tempo. Everything in the whole picture has moved fast up to then, it’s the style of the whole work, and then, suddenly, as though to show the audience that a Big Moment has arrived, you slow it down to a drag. It’s too obvious.”

  “That’s me,” he said, biting his words. “Obvious.”

  “If you’re going to get angry, I’ll shut up.”

  “I’m already angry and don’t shut up. You said two things. What’s the other thing?”

  “You have all those big close-ups of him, going on forever and I’m supposed to be seeing that he’s tortured, doubtful, confused.”

  “Well, at least you got that, for Christ’s sake …”

  “Do you want me to go on or should we go in and have breakfast?”

  “The next dame I marry,” he said, “is not going to be so goddamn smart. Go on.”

  “Well, you may think that he’s showing that he’s tortured and doubtful and confused,” she said, “and he may think he’s showing that he’s tortured and doubtful and confused, but all I get out of it is a handsome young man admiring himself in a mirror and wondering if the lighting is doing all it can for his eyes.”

  “Shit,” he said, “you are a bitch. We worked four days on that sequence.”

  “I’d cut it if I were you,” she said.

  “The next picture,” he said, “you go on the set and I’ll stay home and do the cooking.”

  “You asked me,” she said.

  “I’ll never learn.” He jumped up off the bed. “I’ll be ready for breakfast in five minutes.” He stumped off toward the bathroom. He slept without the tops of his pajamas and the sheets had made pink ridges on the skin of his neatly muscled, lean back, small welts after the night’s faint flogging. At the door, he turned. “Every other dame I ever knew thought everything I did was glorious,” he said, “and I had to go and marry you.”

  “They didn’t think,” she said sweetly. “They said.”

  She went over to him and he kissed her. “I’m going to miss you,” he whispered. “Hideously.” He pushed her away roughly. “Now go see that the coffee’s black.”

  He was humming as he went in to shave, an unusually merry thing for him to be doing at that time of day. She knew that he had been worried by the sequence, too, and was relieved now that he believed he knew what was wrong with it and that in the cutting room that morning he was going to have the exquisite pleasure of throwing away four days’ hard work, representing forty thousand dollars of the studio’s money.

  They reached the airport early and the lines of worry on Billy’s forehead vanished as he saw his and his mother’s bags disappear across the counter. He was dressed in a gray-tweed suit and buttoned-down pink shirt, with a blue tie, for traveling, and his hair was neatly brushed and there were no adolescent pimples on his chin. Gretchen thought he looked very grown-up and handsome, much more than his fourteen years. He was already as tall as she, taller than Colin, who had driven them to the airport and was making an admirable effort to hide his impatience to get to the studio and back to work. Gretchen had had to control herself on the trip to the airport, because Colin’s driving made her nervous. It was the one thing she thought he did badly, sometimes mooning along slowly, thinking about other things, then suddenly becoming fiercely competitive and cursing out other drivers as he spurted ahead of them or tried to prevent them from passing him. When she couldn’t resist from warning him about near-misses, he would snarl at her, “Don’t be the All-American wife.” He was convinced he drove superbly. As he pointed out to her, he had never had an accident, although he had been caught several times for speeding, incidents that had been discreetly kept off his record by the studio fixers, those valuable, doubtful gentlemen.

  As other passengers came up to the counter with their bags, Colin said, “We’ve got lots of time. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

  Gretchen knew that Billy would have preferred to go stand at the gate so that he could be the first to board the plane. “Look, Colin,” she said, “you don’t have to wait. Good-byes’re such a bore anyway …”

  “Let’s get a cup of coffee,” Colin said. “I’m still not awake yet.”

  They walked across the hall toward the restaurant, Gretchen between her husband and her son, conscious of their beauty and her own, and happy about it as she caught people staring at the three of them. Pride, she thought, that delicious sin.

  In the restaurant, she and Colin had coffee and Billy had a Coca-Cola, with which he washed down his dose of Dramamine.

  “I used to puke on buses until I was eighteen,” Colin said, watching the boy swallow the pills. “Then I had my first girl and I stopped puking.”

  There was a quick, judging flick of Billy’s eyes. Colin spoke in front of Billy as he did to any grown-up. Sometimes Gretchen wondered if it was altogether wise. She didn’t know whether the boy loved his stepfather, merely endured him, or hated him. Billy was not one to volunteer information about his emotions. Colin did not seem to make any extra effort to win the boy over. He was sometimes brusque with him, sometimes deeply interested and helpful with his work at school, sometimes playful and charming, sometimes distant. Colin made no concessions to his audience, but what was admirable in his work, Gretchen thought, was not necessarily healthy in the case of a withdrawn only child living with a mother who had left his father for a temperamental and difficult lover. She and Colin had had their fights, but never on the subject of Billy, and Colin was paying for the boy’s education because Willie Abbott had fallen upon hard times and could n
ot afford to. Colin had forbidden Gretchen to tell the boy where the money was coming from, but Gretchen was sure Billy guessed.

  “When I was just your age,” Colin was saying, “I was sent off to school. I cried the first week. The first year I hated school. The second year I endured it. The third year I edited the school newspaper and I had my first taste of the pleasures of power and although I didn’t admit it to anybody, even to myself, I liked it. My last year I wept because I had to leave.”

  “I don’t mind going,” Billy said.

  “Good,” Colin said. “It’s a good school, if any school these days can be said to be good, and at the very worst you’ll come out of it knowing how to write a simple declarative sentence in the English language. Here.” He produced an envelope and gave it to the boy. “Take this and never tell your mother what’s in it.”

  “Thank you,” Billy said. He put the envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at his watch. “Don’t you think we’d better be going?”

  They walked three abreast toward the gate, Billy carrying his guitar. Briefly, Gretchen worried about how the school, which was old New England Presbyterian Respectable, would react to the guitar. Probably no reaction at all. By this time they must be prepared for anything from fourteen-year-old boys.

  The plane was just beginning to load when they reached the gate. “Go ahead on board, Billy,” Gretchen said. “I want to say good-bye to Colin.”

  Colin shook Billy’s hand and said. “If there’s anything you need, call me. Collect.”

  Gretchen searched his face as he spoke to her son. The tenderness and caring were real on the sharp, thin features, and the dangerous eyes under the heavy black brows were gentle and loving. I didn’t make a mistake, she thought, I didn’t.

  Billy smiled gravely, en route from father to father, disturbing journey, and went aboard, guitar held like an infantryman’s gun on patrol.