Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  Virginia Calderwood hadn’t helped matters either. Old man Calderwood had followed Rudolph’s advice about allowing his daughter to come down to New York and live alone and take a secretarial course. But if she was learning typing and stenography, Virginia must have done it at very odd hours indeed, because almost every time Rudolph went to his New York apartment, he would spot her, lurking in a doorway across the street or pretending just to be walking by. She would telephone in the middle of the night, sometimes three or four times, to say, “Rudy, I love you, I love you. I want you to fuck me.”

  To avoid her, he took to staying in different hotels when he came to New York, but for some prudish reason, Jean refused to visit him in a hotel and even the pleasures of the bed were denied him. Jean still wouldn’t let him call for her at her apartment and he had never seen the place where she lived or met her roommate.

  Virginia sent him long letters, horrifyingly explicit about her sensual longings for him, the language straight out of Henry Miller, whom Virginia must have studied assiduously. The letters were sent to his home at Whitby, to his apartment, to the main office at the store, and all it would take would be for one careless secretary to open any one of them and he doubted if old man Calderwood would ever talk to him again.

  When he told Jean about Virginia, she just laughed and said, “Oh, you poor attractive man.” Mischievously, one night, when they came back late to his apartment and he spotted Virginia in the shadows across the street, Jean wanted to go over and invite the girl up for a drink.

  His work suffered and he found that he had to read simple reports over three and four times before they registered on his brain. He slept restlessly and awoke weary. For the first time in his life he had a rash of pimples on his chin.

  At a party in New York he met a bosomy blonde lady who seemed to have three men around her at all times during the evening, but who made it plain to him that she wanted to go home with him. He took her to her apartment in the East Eighties, off Fifth Avenue, learned that she was rich, that she was divorced, that she was lonely, that she was tired of the men who pursued her around New York, that she found him ravishingly sexy (he wished she had found another style of expressing herself). They went to bed together after one drink and he was impotent and he left on a volley of coarse laughter from the useless bed.

  “The unluckiest day of my life,” he told Jean, “was the day you came up to Port Philip to take those pictures.”

  Nothing that happened made him stop loving her or wanting to marry her and live with her for the rest of his life.

  He had called her all day, ten times, a dozen times, but there never was any answer. One more time, he decided, sitting disconsolately in the living room of his apartment, I’ll try one more goddamn time and if she’s not home I will go out and get roaring drunk and pick up girls and fight in bars and if Virginia Calderwood is outside the door when I come home I will bring her up here and screw her and then call the men with the straitjacket and tell them to come and take us both away.

  The phone rang and rang and he was just about to put it down when it was picked up and Jean said, “Hello,” in the hushed, childish little way she had.

  “Has your phone been out of order?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been out all day.”

  “Are you going to be out all night?”

  There was a pause. “No,” she said.

  “Do we meet?” He was ready to slam the phone down if she said no. He had once told her that he only had two alternating emotions about her—rage and ecstasy.

  “Do you want to meet?”

  “Eight o’clock?” he said. “I’ll give you a drink here.” He had looked out the window and had not spotted Virginia Calderwood.

  “I have to take a bath,” she said, “and I don’t feel like hurrying. Why don’t you come down here and I’ll give you a drink.”

  “I hear the sound of cymbals and trumpets,” he said.

  “Stop trying to sound educated,” she said, but she chuckled.

  “What floor?”

  “Fourth,” she said. “No elevator. Be careful of your heart.” She hung up.

  He went in and showered and shaved. His hand wasn’t steady and he cut himself badly on the chin. The cut wouldn’t stop bleeding for a long time and he didn’t ring the bell of her apartment on East Fortieth Street until five minutes past eight.

  The door was opened by a girl in blue jeans and a sweater whom he had never seen before, who said, “Hi, I’m Florence,” and then called, “Jeanny, the man’s here.”

  “Come in, Rudy.” Jean’s voice floated out of an open door leading off the foyer. “I’m making up.”

  “Thanks, Florence,” Rudolph said and went into Jean’s room. She was seated naked at a table in front of a small mirror putting mascara on her eyelashes. He hadn’t realized before that she used mascara. But he didn’t say anything about the mascara. Or her being naked. He was too busy looking around the room. Almost every inch of wall space was taken up with photographs of himself, smiling, frowning, squinting, writing on the clip board. Some of the photographs were small, others were immense blowups. All of them were flattering. It’s over, he thought gratefully, it’s all over. She’s decided.

  “I know that man from somewhere,” he said.

  “I thought you’d recognize him,” Jean said. Pink, firm, and dainty, she went on putting on mascara.

  Over dinner, they talked about the wedding. By the time dessert came, they nearly called it off.

  “What I like,” Rudolph said bitterly, “is a girl who knows her own mind.”

  “Well, I know mine,” Jean said. She had grown sullen as Rudolph had argued with her. “I think I know what I’m going to do with my weekend,” she said. “I’m going to stay home and tear down every one of those photographs and whitewash the walls.”

  To begin with, she was grimly devoted to secrecy. He wanted to let everybody know immediately, but she shook her head. “No announcements,” she said.

  “I have a sister and a mother,” Rudolph said. “Actually, I have a brother, too.”

  “That’s the whole idea. I’ve got a father and a brother. And I can’t stand either of them. If they find out that you told your family and I didn’t tell them, there’ll be thunder from the West for ten years. And after we’re married I don’t want to have anything to do with your family and I don’t want you to have anything to do with mine. Families’re out. Thanksgiving dinners at the old homestead. Christ!”

  Rudolph had given in on that without too much of a fight. His wedding couldn’t be a gloriously happy occasion for Gretchen, with Colin dead just a few months. And the thought of his mother blubbering away in some horrible concoction of a church-going dress was not an appealing one. He could also easily do without the scene Virginia Calderwood would make upon hearing the news. But not telling Johnny Heath or Calderwood or Brad Knight would lead to complications around the office, especially if he wanted to leave immediately after the wedding on the honeymoon. The points that Jean and he had agreed upon were that there was to be no party, that they would get out of New York promptly, that they would not be married in church, and that they would go to Europe on the honeymoon.

  They had not agreed upon what they would do when they returned from Europe. Jean refused to stop working and she refused to live in Whitby.

  “Damn it,” Rudolph said, “here we’re not even married yet and you’ve got me down as a part-time husband.”

  “I’m not domestic,” Jean had said stubbornly. “I don’t like small towns. I’m on my way up in this city. I’m not going to give it all up just because a man wants to marry me.”

  “Jean …” Rudolph said warningly.

  “All right,” she said. “Just because I want to marry a man.”

  “That’s better,” he said.

  “You’ve said yourself, the office rightly ought to be in New York.”

  “Only it’s not in New York,” he said.

 
“You’ll like me better if you don’t see me all the time.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Well, I’ll like you better.”

  He had given in on that, too. But without grace. “That’s my last surrender,” he said.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, mock demurely, fluttering her eyelashes. She stroked his hand exaggeratedly on the table. “I do admire a man who knows how to assert himself.”

  Then they had both laughed and everything was all right and Rudolph said, “There’s one sonofabitch that’s going to get an announcement and that’s that slimy photographer and if he wants to come to the wedding tell him he’s welcome, but he’s got to shave.”

  “Fair enough,” Jean said, “if I can send an announcement to Virginia Calderwood.”

  Cruel and happy, hand in hand, they left the restaurant and went into bar after bar on Third Avenue secretly and lovingly and finally, drunkenly, to toast the years ahead of them.

  The next day he bought a diamond engagement ring at Tiffany’s, but she made him take it back. “I hate the trappings of wealth,” she said. “Just make sure to show up at City Hall on the day with a nice simple gold band.”

  It was impossible, finally, not to tell Calderwood and Brad and Johnny Heath that he was going to be away for at least a month and why. Jean conceded the point, but on condition that he swear them to secrecy, which he did.

  Calderwood was mournful. Rudolph couldn’t tell whether it was because of his daughter or because he didn’t like the idea of Rudolph being away from the business for a month. “I hope you’re not being rash,” Calderwood said. “I remember the girl. She seemed like a poor little thing to me. I’ll bet she doesn’t have a dime.”

  “She works,” Rudolph said defensively.

  “I don’t approve of wives working,” Calderwood said. He shook his head. “Ah, Rudy—and you could have had everything.”

  Everything, Rudolph thought. Including crazy Virginia Calderwood and her pornographic letters.

  Neither Brad nor Johnny Heath was wildly enthusiastic, but he wasn’t marrying to please them. Enthusiastic or not, they both came to the wedding at City Hall and drove out to the airport with the bride and groom and Florence.

  Rudolph’s first husbandly moment came when they checked in and Jean’s luggage was nearly a hundred pounds overweight. “Good Lord,” he said, “what have you got in there?”

  “A change of clothes,” Jean said. “You don’t want your wife to walk around naked in front of all those Frenchmen, do you?”

  “For a girl who doesn’t like the trappings of luxury,” he said, as he wrote out the check for the overweight, “you sure carry around a lot of supplies.” He tried to make it sound light, but he had a moment of foreboding. The long years of having to pinch pennies had made him fitfully careful about money. Extravagant wives had ruined men many times wealthier than he. Unworthy fear. I’ll handle her, if necessary, he thought. Today he felt he could handle anything. He took her hand and led the way toward the bar.

  They had time for two bottles of champagne before they took off and Johnny Heath promised to call Gretchen and Rudolph’s mother and tell them the news once the plane was off the ground.

  The days grew warmer. They lazed in the sun. They became dark brown and Jean’s hair turned almost blond, bleached by the sun and salt water. She gave him tennis lessons on the courts of the hotel and said that he had talent for the game. She was very serious about the lessons and spoke sharply to him when he didn’t hit out correctly. She taught him how to water ski. She kept amazing him with the number of things she could do well.

  They had lunch brought to them at their cabana overlooking the speed-boat mooring. They ate cold langouste and drank white wine and after lunch they went up to their rooms to make love, with the windows shuttered against the afternoon sun.

  He didn’t look at any of the girls lying almost naked around the hotel pool and on the rocks next to the diving board, although two or three of the girls well deserved to be looked at.

  “You’re unnatural,” Jean said to him.

  “Why am I unnatural?”

  “Because you don’t ogle.”

  “I ogle you.”

  “Keep it up,” she said.

  They found new restaurants and ate bouillabaisse on the terrasse of Chez Felix, where you could look through the arch of the rampart at the boats in the harbor of Antibes. When they made love later they both smelled of garlic and wine, but they didn’t mind.

  They took excursions to the hill towns and visited the Matisse chapel and the pottery works at Vallauris and ate lunch on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or at St.-Paul-de-Vence, in the white flutter of doves’ wings. They learned with regret that the flock was kept white because the white doves drove off pigeons of any other color. When occasionally the doves did tolerate their impure fellows, the proprietor killed them off himself.

  Wherever they went, Jean took her cameras along, and took innumerable pictures of him against backgrounds of masts, ramparts, palms, waves. “I am going to make you into the wallpaper for our bedroom in New York,” she said.

  He no longer bothered to put on a shirt when he came out of the water. Jean said she liked the hair on his chest and the fuzz on his shoulders.

  They planned a trip to Italy when they got tired of the Cap d’Antibes. They got out a map and circled the towns of Menton, San Remo, Milano for the Last Supper, Rap-pallo, Santa Margherita, Firenze, for Michelangelo and the Botticellis, Bologna, Siena, Assisi, Rome. The names were like little bells chiming in sunshine. Jean had been everywhere. Other summers. It would be a long time before he learned everything about her.

  They didn’t get tired of the Cap d’Antibes.

  One day, he took a set from her in tennis. She fought off set point three times, but he finally won. She was furious. For two minutes.

  They sent a cable to Calderwood to say that they weren’t coming back for awhile.

  They didn’t speak to anyone at the hotel except an Italian movie actress who was so beautiful that you had to speak to her. Jean spent a morning taking photographs of the Italian movie actress and sent them to Vogue in New York. Vogue cabled back that they were going to run a set in their September issue.

  Nothing could go wrong that month.

  Although they still were not tired of the Cap d’Antibes, they got into the car and started driving south to visit the towns they had circled on the map. They were disappointed nowhere.

  They sat in the cobbled square of Portofino and ate chocolate ice cream, the best chocolate ice cream in the world. They watched the women selling postcards and lace and embroidered tablecloths from their stands to tourists and they eyed the yachts moored in the harbor.

  There was one slender, white yacht, about fifty feet long, with racy, clean Italian lines and Rudolph said, “That’s what machinery is all about. When it comes out like that.”

  “Would you like to own it?” Jean asked, scooping up her chocolate ice cream.

  “Who wouldn’t like to own it?” he said.

  “I’ll buy it for you,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “And how about a Ferrari and a mink-lined overcoat and a forty-room house on the Cap d’Antibes, too, while you’re at it?”

  “No,” she said, still eating her ice cream. “I really mean it. If you really want it.”

  He examined her closely. She was calm and serious. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Vogue isn’t paying you that much for those pictures.”

  “I don’t depend on Vogue,” she said. “I’m awfully rich. When my mother died she left me an obscene amount of stocks and bonds. Her father owned one of the biggest drug companies in the United States.”

  “What’s the name of the company?” Rudolph asked suspiciously.

  Jean told him the name of the company.

  Rudolph whistled softly and put down his spoon.

  “It’s all in a trust fund that my father and brother control until I’m twenty-five,” Jean said, “but even
now my income is at least three times the size of yours. I hope I haven’t spoiled your day.”

  Rudolph burst into a roar of laughter. “Christ,” he said. “What a honeymoon!”

  She didn’t buy him a yacht that afternoon, but as a compromise, she bought him a shocking-pink shirt in a faggy shop alongside the harbor.

  Later on, when he asked why she hadn’t told him before, she was evasive. “I hate talking about money,” she said. “That’s all they ever talked about in my family. By the time I was fifteen I came to the belief that money degrades the soul if you think about it all the time. I never went home a single summer after the age of fifteen. Since I got out of college I never used a cent of the money my mother left me. I let my father and brother put it back into the business. They want me to let them keep using the income when the trust expires, but they’re in for a big surprise. They’ll cheat me if they can and I’m not out to be cheated. Especially not by them.”

  “Well, what are you going to do with it?”

  “You’re going to handle it for me,” she said. “I’m sorry. For us. Do whatever you think best. Just don’t talk to me about it. And don’t use it to make us lead soggy, fancy, useless lives.”

  “We’ve been leading pretty fancy lives these past few weeks,” Rudolph said.

  “We’ve been spending your money and you worked for it,” Jean said. “Anyway, this is a honeymoon. It isn’t for real.”

  When they got to the hotel in Rome there was a cable waiting for Rudolph. It was from Bradford Knight and it read, “Your mother in hospital Stop Doctor fears end is near Stop Believe you should return soonest.”

  Rudolph handed the cable to Jean. They were still in the lobby and had just handed over their passports to the clerk at the desk. Jean read the cable silently, gave it back to him. “I suppose we ought to see if there’s a plane out tonight,” she said. It had been nearly five o’clock in the afternoon when they drove up to the hotel.