by Irwin Shaw
“He’ll be all right,” Colin said as the boy went through the gate and out onto the tarmac where the big jet waited.
“I hope so,” Gretchen said. “There was money in that envelope, wasn’t there?”
“A few bucks,” Colin said carelessly. “Buffer money. Ease the pain. There are moments when a boy can’t survive education without an extra milkshake or the latest issue of Playboy. Willie meeting you at Idlewild?”
“Yes.”
“You taking the kid up to the school together?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Colin said flatly. “Parents should be present in twos at the ceremonies of adolescents.” He looked away from her, staring at the passengers going through the gate. “Every time I see one of those ads for airlines with pictures of people smiling broadly as they climb the steps getting onto a plane, I realize what a lying society we inhabit. Nobody’s happy getting onto a plane. Are you going to sleep with ex-husband Willie tonight?”
“Colin!”
“Ladies have been known to. Divorce, the final aphrodisiac.”
“Goddamn you,” she said. She started toward the gate.
He put out his hand and held her back, gripping her arm.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I am a dark, self-destructive, happiness-doubting, unforgivable man.” He smiled, sadly, pleadingly. “Just one thing—don’t talk to Willie about me.”
“I won’t.” She had already forgiven him and was facing him, close to him. He kissed her lightly. The public address system was announcing the last call for the flight.
“See you in New York in two weeks,” Colin said. “Don’t enjoy the city until I get there.”
“Not to worry,” she said. She brushed his cheek with her lips and he turned abruptly and strode away, walking, as always, in a way that made her smile secretly to herself, as though he were on his way to a dangerous encounter from which he was determined to emerge the victor.
She watched him for a moment, then went through the gate.
Despite the Dramamine, Billy threw up as they were approaching Idlewild for the landing. He did it neatly and apologetically into the bag provided for the purpose, but the sweat stood out on his forehead and his shoulders heaved uncontrollably. Gretchen stroked the back of Billy’s neck, helplessly, knowing that it wasn’t serious, but racked, just the same, by her inability at such a moment to stand between her son and pain. The irrationality of mothering.
When he had finished retching, Billy neatly closed the bag and went down the aisle to the toilet to dispose of the bag and rinse out his mouth. He was still white when he came back. He had wiped the sweat off his face and seemed composed, but as he seated himself next to Gretchen, he said, bitterly, “Goddamn, I’m such a baby.”
Willie was wearing sunglasses as he stood in the small crowd that awaited the passengers from Los Angeles. The day was gray and humid and even before she was close enough to say hello to him, Gretchen knew that he had been drinking the night before and that the sunglasses were meant to hide the evidence of bloodshot eyes from her and his son. At least one night, just before he greets a son he hasn’t seen for months, she thought, he might have kept sober. She fought down her annoyance. Friendliness and serenity between divorced parents in the presence of offspring. The necessary hypocrisy of divided love.
Billy saw his father and hurried through the lines of debarking passengers toward him. He put his arms around his father and kissed his cheek. Gretchen purposely walked more slowly, not to interfere. Together, father and son were plainly linked. Although Billy was taller than his father and better looking than Willie ever could have been, their blood connection was absolutely clear. Once again, Gretchen felt her old irritation that her contribution to the genetic make-up of the child was nowhere in evidence.
Willie was smiling widely (fatuously?) at his son’s demonstration of affection, as Gretchen finally approached him. He kept his arm around Billy’s shoulder and said, “Hello, dear,” to Gretchen and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. Two similar kisses, on the same day, on two sides of the continent, departing and arriving. Willie had been wonderful about the divorce and about Billy, and she couldn’t deny him the “dear” or the rueful kiss. She didn’t say anything about the dark glasses or the unmistakable aroma of alcohol on Willie’s breath. He was dressed neatly, soberly proper, just the costume for taking a son to introduce him to the headmaster of a good New England school. Somehow, she would keep him from drinking when they drove up to the school the next day.
She sat alone in the small living room of the hotel suite, the lights of evening New York outside the windows, the growl of the city, familiar and exciting, rising from the avenues. Foolishly, she had expected Billy to stay with her that night, but in the rented car driving into the city from Idlewild, Willie had said to Billy, “I hope you don’t mind sleeping on the couch. I’ve only got one room, but there’s a couch. A couple of springs’re busted, but at your age I imagine you’ll sleep all right.”
“That’s great,” Billy said, and there was no mistaking his tone. He hadn’t even turned around to look questioningly at his mother. Even if he had appealed to her, what could she have said?
When Willie had asked her where she was staying, and she had told him, “The Algonquin,” he had raised his eyebrows sardonically.
“Colin likes it,” she said defensively. “It’s near the theater district and it saves him a lot of time being able to walk to rehearsals and to the office.”
When Willie stopped the car in front of the Algonquin to let her out, he said, not looking either at her or at Billy, “I once bought a girl a bottle of champagne in this hotel.”
“Call me in the morning, please,” Gretchen said. “As soon as you wake up. We ought to get to the school before lunch.”
Billy was on the far side of the front seat as she got out on the sidewalk and the porter took her bags, so she didn’t get to kiss him good-bye and it was just with a little wave of her hand that she had sent him off to dinner with his father and the broken couch for the night in his father’s single room.
There had been a message waiting for her at the desk when she registered. She had wired Rudolph that she was arriving in New York and had asked him to have dinner with her. The message had been from Rudolph, saying that he couldn’t meet her that night, but would call her in the morning.
She went up to the suite, unpacked, took a bath, and then hesitated about what to wear. Finally she just threw on a robe, because she didn’t know what she was going to do with the evening. All the people she knew in New York were Willie’s friends, or her ex-lovers, or people she had met briefly with Colin when she had been in the city three years ago for the play that was a disaster, and she wasn’t going to call any of them. She wanted a drink badly, but she couldn’t go down to the bar and sit there by herself and get drunk. That miserable Rudolph, she thought, as she stood at the window, looking down at the traffic on Forty-fourth Street below her, can’t even spare one night from his gainful activities for his sister. Rudolph had come out to Los Angeles twice during the years on business and she had shepherded him around every free minute. Wait till he gets out there again, she promised herself. There’ll be a hot message waiting for him at his hotel when he arrives.
She almost picked up the telephone to call Willie. She could pretend that she wanted to find out if Billy was feeling all right after his sickness on the plane and perhaps Willie would ask her to have dinner with them. She even went over to the phone, but with her hand reaching out to pick it up, she halted herself. Keep female tricks to an absolute minimum. Her son deserved at least one complete, unemotional evening with his father, unwatched by mother’s jealous eye.
She prowled back and forth in the small, old-fashioned room. How happy she had been once to arrive in New York, how wide open and inviting the city had seemed to her. When she was young, poor, and alone, it had welcomed her, and she had moved about its streets freely and without fear. Now, wiser, older,
richer, she felt a prisoner in the room. A husband three thousand miles away, a son a few blocks away, put invisible restrictions on her behavior. Well, at least she could go downstairs and have dinner in the hotel’s dining room. Another lonely lady, with her half-bottle of wine, sitting at a small table, trying not to hear the conversation of other diners, growing slightly tipsy, talking too much and too brightly to the headwaiter. Christ, what a bore it was sometimes to be a woman.
She went into the bedroom and pulled out her plainest dress, a black concoction that had cost too much and that she knew Colin didn’t like, and started to dress. She was careless with her make-up and hardly bothered to brush her hair and was just going out the door when the telephone rang.
She almost ran back into the room. If it’s Willie, she thought, no matter what, I’ll have dinner with them.
But it wasn’t Willie. It was Johnny Heath. “Hi,” Johnny said. “Rudolph said you’d be here and I was just passing by and I thought I’d take a chance …”
Liar, she thought, nobody just is passing by the Algonquin at a quarter to nine in the evening. But she said, happily, “Johnny! What a nice surprise.”
“I’m downstairs,” Johnny said, echoes of other years in his voice, “and if you haven’t eaten yet …”
“Well,” she said, sounding reluctant, and despising herself for the ruse, “I’m not dressed and I was just about to order dinner up here. I’m exhausted from the flight and I have to get up early tomorrow and …”
“I’ll be in the bar,” Johnny said, and hung up.
Smooth, confident Wall Street sonofabitch, she thought. Then she went in and changed her dress. But she made him wait twenty full minutes before she went down to the bar.
“Rudolph was heartbroken that he couldn’t come down and see you tonight,” Johnny Heath was saying, across the table from her.
“I bet,” Gretchen said.
“He was. Honestly. I could tell over the phone that he was really upset. He made a special point of calling me to ask me to fill in for him and explain why …”
“May I have some more wine, please,” Gretchen said.
Johnny signaled to the waiter, who refilled the glass. They were eating in a small French restaurant in the fifties. It was almost empty. Discreet, Gretchen thought. The sort of place you were not likely to meet anyone you knew. Good for dining out with married ladies you were having an affair with. Johnny probably had a long list of similar places. The Quiet Philanderer’s Guide for Dining in New York. Put it between covers and you’d probably have a big best-seller. The headwaiter had smiled warmly when they had come in and had placed them at a table in a corner, where nobody could overhear what they were saying.
“If he possibly could have made it,” Johnny persisted, excellent go-between in times of stress for friends, enemies, lovers, blood relations, “he’d have come. He’s deeply attached to you,” said Johnny, who had never been deeply attached to anyone. “He admires you more than any woman he’s ever met. He told me so.”
“Don’t you boys have anything better to chat about on the long winter nights?” Gretchen took a sip from her glass. At least she was getting a good bottle of wine out of the evening. Maybe she would get drunk tonight. Make sure she’d get some sleep before tomorrow’s ordeal. She wondered if Willie and her son were also dining in a discreet restaurant. Do you hide a son, too, with whom you had once lived?
“In fact,” Johnny said, “I think it’s a lot your fault that Rudy’s never been married. He admires you and he hasn’t found anybody yet who lives up to his idea of you and …”
“He admires me so much,” Gretchen said, “that after not seeing me for nearly a year he can’t take a night off to come and see me.”
“He’s opening a new center at Port Philip next week,” Johnny Heath said. “One of the biggest so far. Didn’t he write you?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I didn’t pay attention to the date.”
“There’s a million last-minute things he has to do. He’s working twenty hours a day. It was just physically impossible. You know how he is when it comes to work.”
“I know,” Gretchen said. “Work now, live later. He’s demented.”
“What about your husband? Burke?” Johnny demanded. “Doesn’t he work? I imagine he admires you, too, but I don’t notice that he took time off to come to New York with you.”
“He’s arriving in two weeks. Anyway, it’s a different kind of work.”
“I see,” Johnny said. “Making movies is a sacred enterprise and a woman is ennobled when she’s sacrificed to it. While running a big business is sordid and crass and a man ought to be delighted to get away from all that filth and run down to New York to meet his lonely, innocent, purifying sister at the plane and buy her dinner.”
“You’re not defending Rudolph,” Gretchen said. “You’re defending yourself.”
“Both,” Johnny said. “Both of us. And I don’t feel I have to defend anybody. If an artist wants to feel that he’s the only worthwhile creature spewed up by modern civilization, that’s his business. But to expect poor, money-soiled slobs like myself to agree with him is idiotic. It’s a great line with the girls and it gets a lot of half-baked painters and would-be Tolstoys into some pretty fair beds, but it doesn’t wash with me. I bet that if I worked in a garret in Greenwich Village instead of in an air-conditioned office in Wall Street, you’d have married me long before you ever met Colin Burke.”
“Guess again, brother,” Gretchen said. “I’d like some more wine.” She extended her glass.
Johnny poured the wine, almost filling her glass, then signaled to the waiter, who was out of earshot, for another bottle. He sat in silence, immobile, brooding. Gretchen was surprised at his outburst. It wasn’t like Johnny at all. Even when they had been making love, he had seemed cool, detached, as technically expert at that as he was at everything he undertook. By now, the last roughnesses, physical and mental, seemed to have been planed away from the man. He was like a highly polished, enormous, rounded stone, an elegant weapon, siege ammunition.
“I was a fool,” he said, finally, his voice low, without timbre. “I should have asked you to marry me.”
“I was married at the time. Remember?”
“You were married at the time you met Colin Burke, too. Remember?”
Gretchen shrugged. “It was in a different year,” she said. “And he was a different man.”
“I’ve seen some of his pictures,” Johnny said. “They’re pretty good.”
“They’re a lot more than that.”
“The eyes of love,” Johnny said, pretending to smile.
“What’re you trying to do, Johnny?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Ah, hell. I guess what I’m doing is being bitchy because I made such poor use of my time. Unmanly fellow. I now brighten up and ask polite questions of my guest, ex-wife of one of my best friends. I suppose you’re happy.”
“Very.”
“Good answer.” Johnny nodded approvingly. “Very good answer. Lady found fulfillment, long denied, in fulfilling second marriage to short but active artist of the silver screen.”
“You’re still being bitchy. If you want, I’ll get up and leave.”
“There’s dessert coming.” He put out his hand and touched hers. Smooth, fleshed, round fingers, soft palm. “Don’t leave. I have other questions. A girl like you, so New York, so busy with a life of your own—what the hell do you do with yourself day after day in that goddamn place?”
“Most of the time,” she said, “I spend thanking God I’m no longer in New York.”
“And the rest of the time? Don’t tell me you like just sitting there and being a housewife, waiting for Daddy to come home from the studio and tell you what Sam Gold-wyn said at lunch.”
“If you must know,” she said, stung, “I do very little just sitting around, as you put it. I’m part of the life of a man I admire and can help, and it’s a lot better than what I had here, being important and
snotty, secretly screwing, and getting my name in magazines and living with a man who had to be dragged up from the bottom of a bottle three times a week.”
“Ah—the new female revolution—” Johnny said. “Church, children, kitchen. Jesus, you were the last woman in the world I’d’ve thought …”
“Leave out the church,” Gretchen said, “and you’ve got a perfect description of my life, okay?” She stood up. “And I’ll skip dessert. Those short, active artists of the silver screen like their women skinny.”
“Gretchen,” he called after her, as she strode out of the restaurant. His voice had the ring of innocent surprise. Something had just happened to him that had never happened before, that was unimaginable within the rules of the nicely regulated games he played. Gretchen didn’t look back, and she went out the door before any of the flunkeys in the restaurant had time to push it open for her.
She walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, then slackened her pace as her anger cooled. She was silly to have become so upset, she decided. Why should she care what Johnny Heath thought about what she was doing with her life? He pretended he liked what he considered free women because that meant he could be free with them. He had been turned away from the banquet and he was trying to make her pay for it. What could he know of what it was like for her to wake up in the morning and see Colin lying beside her? She wasn’t free of her husband and he wasn’t free of her and they were both better and more joyous human beings because of it. What crap people believed freedom to be.
She hurried to the hotel and went up to her room and picked up the phone and asked the operator for her own number in Beverly Hills. It was eight o’clock in California and Colin ought to be home by now. She had to hear his voice, even though he detested talking on the phone and was most often sour and brusque on it, even with her, when she called him. But there was no answer and when she called the studio and asked them to ring the cutting room, she was told that Mr. Burke had left for the night.