Other people

by Sol Stein

  "Maybe it would. And you'd find out by taking the guy aboard."

  "Yes I would."

  "Endangering fifteen people maybe. Maybe drowning them."

  "I'm civilized."

  "To whom, the fifteen already aboard the boat?"

  "What would you do?"

  "Save the people in the boat."

  "By shoving off the fellow trying to get in?"

  "If necessary, yes. A bad means to a good end."

  "I suppose it'd be easy for you."

  A flash of anger reddened his face. He let it pass, then said, "It's a matter of experience. It gets easier to make realistic decisions. Even tough ones."

  "You're saying it's easy for you to use a kid like Lefkowitz to twist the D.A.'s—"

  "On your account!" he interrupted.

  "— after a lifetime of using courtroom tricks."

  "I haven't lived a lifetime," he said.

  Thomassy was what, fortyish? How few years ago I used to think of that as an age beyond the divide of us and them, over the hill, old people. We move the borderline of acceptability away from us as the years slip. I haven't lived a lifetime, says the vital man.

  He continued in a different voice, the mentor trying to be patient with a slow pupil.

  "I bet your best teachers in school taught by tricks. I can give you half a dozen examples from my own…"

  "Yes?"

  "Tricks. Bad means to good ends."

  "Not blackmail."

  "You want to be a bishop, says the cardinal, you do as I say. I don't know of any area of life where blackmail doesn't get used. It's just we feel more comfortable being hypocritical about it. Why are you laughing?"

  I had to tell him what I'd spent the day doing.

  "Well," he said, "nice girl spends day cooking up hypocrisy examples to use hypocritically. Bad boy spends day twisting the D.A.'s arm to prosecute a crime."

  "What if I said it offended me to have blackmail used for me?"

  "I'd say don't get caught doing anything for the rest of your life and you'll be okay. And drop this case."

  The gulf I was getting to know was the one between two lawyers, this man and my father. My father lived by the protections afforded by propriety, forms, the sure knowledge that the right people will continue to pretend. Thomassy was man with the mask off, cutting through the bullshit my father thought of as those things that made people civil. Had the barbarians come? The barbarians have always been here. The Widmers were a permanent minority, dwindling as mobile classes cottoned onto the rules the world was governed by.

  "You haven't said a thing in two minutes," said Thomassy.

  "I've been thinking."

  "That disqualifies you from a lot of occupations."

  "You think," I said.

  "Yes I do."

  "Not enough," I said.

  "Some things don't have to be rethought every week. Some people learn from experience."

  "I thought you were inviting me to dinner tonight."

  "I am."

  "The Annapolis?"

  "I had in mind a place that makes a very interesting light meal."

  "Has it got ambience?"

  "You'll see."

  He took me to his house.

  Dear Father, this is one of those open letters I never send. You recommended him as a lawyer who could shepherd my anger through the courts. Now I'm involved with the shepherd. If you knew, it'd make you angrier than the fact of my rape.

  Thomassy's house was on a street with six or seven houses, not too close to each other, each set back a hundred feet from the road, enough space for a lawn with a single specimen tree. In the middle of the block, between two of the houses, there seemed to be a house missing. There was only a gravel driveway going back more than a hundred yards into a wooded area. You had to go most of the way before you saw the small house nestled among the trees. In the middle of civilization, Thomassy had gotten himself a forest home, seclusion in the suburbs, invisible to strangers.

  "Like it?" he asked.

  "A hermit's keep."

  "Let's go inside."

  Inside, the place was a surprise, a den of opulence, walnut walls, expensive furniture, lots of places to sit comfortably or lounge, bookshelves floor to ceiling on one long wall, a carpet that looked authentic Turkish, swirls of blue-grey against a background of burnt umber and a subdued maroon. Over the couch, lit by a recessed ceiling light of its own, was a single painting of a long-necked woman.

  He was looking at me as I looked at the Modigliani.

  "Cost a fortune?" I asked.

  "Half. I bought it quite some time ago."

  "It's beautiful."

  "Yes," he said, then looked away from me.

  "This isn't the kind of bachelor pad one expects," I said.

  "What did you expect? First, let me get you a drink."

  "Anything. With soda."

  He busied himself.

  "I guess I expected something that looked like a couple of furnished rooms."

  "A man without a woman equals poor taste."

  "Right."

  He handed me the drink. "Well, there's a lot of chauvinism around on both sides," he said. "You are the first female visitor I've had who'd know who painted that picture."

  "Maybe you've gotten into the habit of fucking down."

  "What does that mean?"

  One second I feel I can say anything to Thomassy the way I would to a close girl friend, the next it's like this, trapped on the giving end of something that startled him.

  "You choose the women you go with."

  "Sure I do."

  "And they're like Jane what's-her-name?"

  "More or less."

  "Less. Maybe you fuck down because it minimizes the whole procedure."

  I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He was avoiding looking directly at me. Uncharacteristic. I felt cruel joy. Thomassy was vulnerable. He was a human being, just like the rest of us.

  The dinner he prepared was an avocado with a choice of lemon or vinaigrette, a Basque omelet that may have been the best omelet of any kind I had ever had, an endive salad made with walnut oil and an unlabeled vinegar he said he bought privately. The coffee had a touch of chocolate and was served with whipped cream.

  We ate in the short leg of the L that connected the living room and the kitchen. In the corner where the walls met there was an arrangement of plants, a three-foot dracaena in a tub on the floor, and three or four hanging pots with ivies and ferns. In the center of the long wall hung a large painting, perhaps four feet wide, of a grain field in a high wind, done with thousands of small strokes. It was very close to abstraction, yet one knew it was a field ready for harvest and that the velocity of the wind was a danger to the high stalks.

  "Who?" I asked.

  "Hyde Solomon."

  "A newcomer?"

  "No. He started making it in the fifties I guess. He's got bad eyes. Very nearly blind."

  "He's got good eyes," I said.

  "What's left of them. I was introduced to him at an opening after I bought that. He's a tall man, stammers, painfully shy, knows his work is good that's all. In one respect I envy him."

  I tried to guess, unsuccessfully.

  "When he's finished, some of his work, maybe just a few, will survive. Nothing I do survives. A lawyer is a member of the performing arts, though not even movies are taken to preserve the act."

  He was right, of course. Cocksure success, master of his profession, winner, finds life wanting. Wanting posterity. Denied Dr. Koch, denied doctors, lawyers, teachers, except for the innovating genius, the legend. Art, if it survives, lingers. The rest of us head for the dustbin. I'm surprised artists aren't hated more by the transients.

  "I'm a salesman," he said. "I sell cases to juries. Or to punk D.A.s. Get that look off your face," he said to me, "I'm not fishing for sympathy. It's just that sometimes I wish I made something that might last. I cook up an act that vanishes as fast as this meal."

  "It was very
good." I touched my napkin to my lips.

  "You expected a TV dinner."

  "Sort of."

  "You're a treasury of prejudices," he said.

  "So it seems."

  "Attractively packaged."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "With a good mind."

  "That surprises me," I said.

  "That you have a good mind?"

  "That you think I do. I know I have."

  "I know you know you have."

  "Two modest folks," I said. "I thought opposites attract."

  At ten o'clock George snapped on the TV for the news.

  "Good news or bad?" I asked.

  "Always bad," he said. "People watch to be sure others are worse off."

  "Why watch?"

  Out of habit, I'd run the sink water and started cleaning off the few dinner dishes.

  "I'm not," he said.

  I turned around. He was watching me. Suddenly he was on his feet. "I'll do those," he said.

  He came up behind me. The front of his body was touching the back of mine. I felt his lips on the lobe of my right ear, just for a second.

  "It's all right," I said. "A woman doesn't want to be admired just for her mind."

  He put his arms around me and took the dish I was rinsing carefully out of my hands and put it aside.

  "I'll do those later," he said.

  "I should be going soon."

  He turned me toward him.

  "My hands are wet," I said.

  He took my head in both his hands and touched his lips to mine, a skim for a split second.

  I kept my wet hands wide apart as he kissed me again, this time mouth to mouth.

  I broke away. "My hands are wet," I said, breathless.

  "I don't care."

  And then I put my wet hands around him as our mouths met. I could feel his body's warmth and my own heart pound. And suddenly he was kissing the side of my neck, then below and behind my ear, I could feel his tongue flicker, and then our mouths were together again until, to breathe, I pulled away, feeling the blood in my face, and I was quickly drying my hands on the dish towel when he pulled me into his arms again and I knew we both knew it was no use fighting it any more and we were holding each other tightly and desperately, and then we were moving each other to the couch, not wanting to let go, but we had to, to open the couch, and then it was kissing again, and clothes coming off, his and mine, and we were lying clasped, kissing lips, faces, shoulders, then holding on, sealed against each other, until he raised his head and realized there were tears in my eyes and his bewildered look was begging for an explanation.

  I could hear the thud of my heart.

  "What's the matter?" he whispered.

  I couldn't find my voice.

  "Tell me," he said.

  It was like the anxiety attacks I would get in the middle of the night when insomnia stole my sleeping hours, a fear that my heart would burst from the thudding.

  "It's like driving the first time after an accident," I said.

  We lay side by side for a while. I tried not to think of Koslak. The harder I tried, the more I thought of it, detail by detail.

  "I want to get drunk," I said.

  "I wouldn't recommend it. Do you get drunk often?"

  "No. Not in ten years."

  When I was in my last year in high school, I had gone on a triple date, the jocks enjoying their own company. We girls felt dragged along, I wanted to leave, I didn't want to be a spoilsport, I drank too much of whatever we were all drinking, and I was sick all over the ladies' room and wretched all night and the day afterwards.

  "I am not a drinker," I said.

  George smiled. "I know that."

  He got up, naked and unashamed, and went somewhere, returning with two elegant glasses filled halfway with something I didn't recognize.

  "Madeira," he said. "Rainwater." He took a sip. "Magic," he said, and handed me my glass. "It's a one-drink drink. Safe."

  I looked at the glass skeptically.

  "It's okay," he said. "Try it."

  I took a sip.

  "Lovely," I said, licking it from my lips.

  "Don't do that," he said.

  "What?" I took another sip. He leaned over and licked my lower lip. No one had ever done that. He slid onto the bed, holding his glass upright as if it were a gyroscope. Then he tipped it slightly and let a few drops splash onto my breasts.

  "Don't move," he said, and gave me his glass to hold. There I was, helplessly holding one glass in each hand, unable to move, and he licked the Madeira from each breast and from the valley between.

  He borrowed his glass back, tipped it lower down, then handed it back, my handcuff. I looked at the two glasses, at the ceiling, then at the soft hair of his head as he licked the drops of Madeira from below my navel and from the inside of my thighs. I concentrated on the two glasses, trying not to think of the tongue that was now moving in a way that I felt down the stems of my legs and upwards to my chest, as my breathing gasped again and again until I felt a sudden thick shudder of release, eros flooding, I clasped his head with my thighs like a vise, hoping I wasn't hurting him, and then he was suddenly alongside me, taking the glasses away, putting them on the floor, and clasping me with the full length of his body as the waves slowly waned and I was at peace.

  "Was the Madeira good?" I asked.

  "Delicious," he said.

  I turned my attentions to him, hoping I could make love to him with half the skill he had, and when we both seemed ready for our first joining, I turned him over onto me, and saw the surprise in his eyes as he was suddenly, terribly impotent.

  "It's because I was raped," I said.

  "No, no," he said. "I swear. It makes no difference."

  "Then what is it?"

  "I don't know."

  I felt at fault and desperate. I tried to arouse him in every way I remembered. The harder I tried, the less his response. It was no use. Finally, I collapsed back in defeat.

  I took his offer of a lit cigarette.

  "I thought you have a lot of women," I said.

  "I have had."

  "This happen often?"

  "Not for years."

  "Why single me out?" Then quickly, "I didn't mean it to sound that way." I kissed him, but he was not there to receive it.

  Finally he said, "We can come up with a lot of suppositions, but we'd never know if we were right, so let's not."

  "Next time," I said.

  "We don't know," he said.

  We must have both slept for a bit. At least I did. When I opened my eyes, he was propped up against two pillows, staring into space.

  He had seemed to me a man who could do anything.

  Nineteen

  Thomassy

  A professional is someone you can count on to deliver. Up in Oswego you don't get to see much in the way of real baseball. When I was growing up, we had radio not television, and baseball is something you have to see. So when I finally emigrated south to the suburbs of New York City, I made up for all those years in Oswego by going to Yankee Stadium two, three times a month. Box seats weren't expensive, and you could bloat yourself and a woman on hot dogs and beer without going broke.

  One day — I think the Yanks were up against Minnesota, but I wouldn't swear to it — we sat next to a yeller. You know, one of those guys who screams encouragement and instructions to the side he's rooting for and abuse at the other players and the umpires. The yeller was popping up and down in his seat, "Show 'em, Joe," "We need a hit," "You're blind as a bat!" It was the rookie year of a young slugger who'd just come up from the minors. The Yanks had used him as a pinch hitter and on account of somebody or other's injury this particular game was the first that he was on the starting lineup, in fifth place. The first two batters struck out and then one of those things happened, the third popped one up to center field, an easy one, but the sun must have blinded the center fielder one crucial second because he reached for the ball like a blind man. It actually hit le
ather, but he couldn't hold on to it, and so with twenty or thirty thousand people watching him, he chased the ball, got it, hobbled it, and by the time he threw it, it had to go to short because the runner was on second. The yeller went crazy, popped a paper bag, screamed as if he'd been knifed. The Yanks had a man on with two out.

  For a minute, I thought they were going to walk the fourth batter, which didn't make sense, but it was just the Minnesota pitcher being nervous. The third pitch went right down the middle, no curve, no chance at the corners, and the batter, served up this piece of insurance, put his back and shoulders into his swing and clouted a line drive past the infield that put himself on second and the runner on third. I thought I'd go deaf before the yeller lost his voice.

  My heart went out to the rookie as he stepped up to the plate. Men on second and third, two away. He had yet to hit his first home run in the majors. A single would do it. I felt myself inside his head, eyeing the ball as it came in. It cut the outside corner low for a called strike. You could feel the tension in the park. The kid sort of backed out of the batter's box, calling time, and played around with the bat, glanced toward the Yankee dugout as if he expected a miracle in the form of instruction, blew on his left hand, then his right, then stepped back into the box and took his stance.

  The second pitch was a change of pace, and the rookie watched it as if he were just hoping it wouldn't cross the plate, which it did for a second called strike. The yeller leaned into my ear and said to me, "That fucker better hit that ball."

  The third pitch was wild and I could feel the rookie's relief as the catcher collected it quickly and the runners returned to their bases. I wanted that rookie to hit that ball more than I had wanted anything ever at a ball game.

  The fourth pitch was a fast ball, perfect for a slugger, and he stepped into it, swung. Instead of the crack of bat against a ball headed for the outfield, the sound was barely audible, the ball hitting the bat near the handle, rolling just in front of the plate, a perfect bunt — who needed it? — and the catcher was on top of it at once. The rookie, like a trooper, ran like hell for first. The catcher threw the ball to first with disdain, and the side was retired. What an ignominious moment for the rookie! The yeller was joined by half the ball park crying its derision.