“Not what you’d consider glory.”
“Perhaps not. But I had a suspicion that without me to nag you you might develop more naturally. That you’d become a—”
“A tycoon?”
“I suppose so. Anyway, I don’t think I’m quite prepared for this new Bob Service.”
“You prefer me the other way?”
“No, no, it’s not that.” She shrugged uneasily. “It’s just as I say, that I’m not ready.”
“You don’t trust my conversion?”
“I don’t know, Bob!” she exclaimed, shaking her head in sudden pique. “I had told myself that I had been too prim and fussy. That, after all, you had never done anything actually wrong. That the world was a hundred times more your world than it was mine. That I had better face a few facts. And then I thought that if I was humble it would be all right for me to live alone with my own standards and ideas. And perhaps one day with John and his.”
“I’ll do all I can to prevent it!” I cried. “It means everything to me to have another chance with you. Even if I have to appeal to your sense of duty and what you owe the children.”
“Oh, don’t!”
“Because it wouldn’t work?”
“No, because it might.”
I paused for a second, suppressing something like a sob. “Do you dislike me so much?”
“No, no. In fact, I’ve never really gotten you out of my system. That’s what to some extent has blocked me with John. But how can I go back to that former life, knowing it’s only a matter of time before the old Bob reasserts himself?” She turned from the little flame with a kind of desperation in her eyes. “Why must I go through all this torment again?”
“Because this time it’s going to be different.”
“I’m sure you believe that. But can’t you see it’s hard for me to?”
“Yes.”
Alice allowed me to take her out for dinner, and, away from the too haunting and familiar scene of our old apartment, in the green coolness and elegance of the Amboise, she relaxed and drank three cocktails in fairly rapid succession.
“Haven’t you rather stepped up your quota?” I inquired, as she ordered the last one.
“No. In fact, I’d almost given them up. I’m afraid of solitary drinking. But tonight is exceptional, and I’m behaving exceptionally.”
We talked about the girls at considerable length; we talked about her parents and mine; we even talked about Sylvia, and, finally, about John Cross.
“I am going to go to see him tomorrow,” I announced.
“John? My God, why?”
“I’m going to present my case to him. You tell me he is a man of honor, of sensitivity. Well, I plan to approach him as such. I shall bare my life to him. I shall even give him some pages of my journal to read, about you and me. I shall propose that he decide whether he thinks I have the right to ask you to come back to me.”
Alice stared as if I had presented her with a new and utterly unexpected side of Robert Service.
“Poor John! Would you really put him through that?”
“Why not? When I took up with Sylvia I left you free. He had every right to enter your life. It is only fair that I should advise him that I intend to evict him if I can.”
“You sound so legal. What do you suppose John’s and my relationship to be?”
“I don’t even want to ask. All I know is that he has acquired a place in your confidence that is a substitute for mine.”
Alice brooded about this for a moment. “Well, he’s certainly heard enough about you,” she said at last. “He’ll probably be fascinated to meet you. And, of course, as a writer he’ll want to burrow his nose into that famous journal. He works as a consultant to Scribner’s. You may even get a contract offer!”
Alice was certainly in a funny mood that night. She drank a good deal of wine, in addition to her cocktails, and talked to me about her authors, something which she had never done in the past. I began to have hopes as to how the evening might terminate.
And indeed I ended, as I should have, back in my wife’s bed. But there was something different about it. Alice was less personal, more interested in the act than the lover. She even seemed a bit desperate in her need for it; she acted like a woman long deprived. Although she was not quite the Alice I remembered and longed to have back, I derived consolation from the thought that she had probably not been sleeping with Cross.
In the morning, however, when I asked if I could now move my things back to the apartment, she shook her head.
“Not yet, dear. Not quite yet.”
19
JOHN CROSS looked at me in our booth in the New Galway Bar as if I were some uncanny animal that would probably behave itself but that just might spit or strike. He had a Scotch and soda that he nursed while I consumed three. I was nervous and did not care if I showed it. He was a small, rather dumpy man with a strangely boyish face for his at least forty years and small, twinkling, sympathetic dark eyes under a high brow and a shock of black hair. I say that his eyes were “sympathetic” because they struck me as being so, even to myself. Cross’s self-confidence, I deduced, must have been based on some estimate of his own good character; it could hardly have drawn much support from his bodily physique or worldly success. But I could see why Alice liked him, and this made me tense.
“What we both should be thinking of is Alice,” I said firmly. “That is, what is best for her.”
“You mean which of us is best for her.”
“All right, that’s a good way to put it.”
“Only I’m not sure it is. Am I really entitled to put it that way? Alice has never said she would consider marrying me, even if she were free. And, regardless of what you may suspect, we have not been lovers.”
“Really?” My heart was like that singing bird Alice and I used to quote. “I assume that is not because you have not suggested it.”
“Oh, no. I have been bold enough to offer even so poor a thing as myself. You can’t object to that, can you?” His smile presumed my agreement, but a small gleam in his eye betrayed that he was still aware of the unpredictable beast before him. “I love Alice. I make no bones about that. But I tell you frankly that she does not return my love. I think perhaps she would like to, but, there you are, she doesn’t.”
“Why do you suppose she doesn’t?”
“I’m afraid that’s your fault, old boy. She hasn’t been able to dispose of her feeling for you.”
“John, I have subjected you to the tedium of reading my journal for nothing!” I exclaimed. “I apologize.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? If Alice still loves me and doesn’t love you, you’re too much of a gentleman to remain in the lists.”
“You are quite wrong, my friend. It is just what I might do. And it may be that I have not read those engrossing yellow pages that you left with my doorman this morning in vain. For the question is more than ever a valid one: which of us is the better man for Alice?”
“But if she doesn’t love you, John!”
“Love isn’t everything. The question is what your love—if that’s the right word for it—will do to Alice. Consider what it’s already done to her.”
“What?”
John was silent for a moment, as if debating how much a jungle cat could take. “I don’t suppose you asked me here tonight to talk in platitudes. Very well, then, here goes. You have driven her to the verge of a kind of moral bankruptcy. Year after year she has watched you, like one hypnotized, stalking your goals relentlessly. And she’s never once been able to convince you that you were wrong!”
“Doesn’t that suggest I was not?”
“Yes! That is precisely what it does. And that’s what she has found so difficult to live with. The idea that it was, after all, your world and not hers.”
“And couldn’t it be?”
“No!” John’s now fiery eyes challenged me to strike if I wanted. “It cannot be like that! You are wr
ong, Robert Service, just as wrong as you can be. The man in your journal—he can’t totally be you, can he?—is a kind of monster. What do you really want Alice for? What do you really need her for? Is she some kind of hostage to take with you through life so that the angels dare not strike you down?”
I suppose at this point I became a bit hysterical, for I don’t recall with just what words I formed my answer. I am sure I told him that I had loved Alice since our college days, that she was both the rudder and the anchor of my life, that I felt exposed and hideously vulnerable without her, that I really did not know how I should live if I could not get her back. I must have ranted on for fifteen minutes.
“I imagine she keeps you from seeing yourself,” I remember his retorting bitterly in the end. “But why in the name of all that’s holy do you insist on keeping that terrible journal?”
“I’ll give it up if you’ll give her back!” I cried. “I’ll let her be my journal!”
In the end poor John himself seemed about to collapse. He ordered a double Scotch and drank it neat.
“I’m beginning to wonder what I’m doing in all this,” he muttered glumly. “You and Alice. Talk about two scorpions in a bottle! It’s all very well to ask what’s best for her, but what about what’s best for you? Suppose you’re a damned soul that only she can save? If she took the job on, perhaps she ought to finish it. As long, anyway, as she doesn’t want to take me on.”
After we had walked, rather unsteadily, at least on my part, back to my building, I asked John if he would try to persuade Alice to let me come back.
“No, I won’t do that,” he responded wearily. “But I’ll certainly leave her alone. To make up her own mind.”
And with that he left me.
20
AT MY OFFICE on Monday morning I found a desk covered with angry pink telephone slips, a secretary torn between indignation and relief at the sight of me and my exasperated partner Douglas, alerted to my arrival by the receptionist, looming in the doorway with expectant, probing eyes. But his first announcement forestalled further questions and explanations.
“A Mrs. Ethelinda Low has been on my telephone since nine o’clock, Bob. She wants you to go to her at once. She says it’s a matter of life and death.”
With hardly another word I left the office. Twenty minutes later I was seated with Ethelinda in her library before the bust of the Pompadour. Ethelinda was in a sorry state of nerves.
“I don’t know where to turn, Robert, or whom to trust. I don’t even know if I can trust you. But there’s something in your face that always makes me think I can. Or is it only that Sylvia has been badmouthing you so? Oh, Robert, it’s all too terrible. Gil Arnheim says that girl has been trying to get her hands on my estate. He claims she’s been a designing minx from the very beginning. And I, who thought I knew what such people were! I, to fall for an old ruse like that!”
I made mental note of the fact that when the aged begin to deteriorate, even the strong aged, they go fast. This intrepid woman had seemed an impregnable fort, her drawbridge raised, her gates bolted, her standard proudly flying, her machicolated battlements manned by archers. And now, suddenly, the enemy was over the walls, in the courtyard, despoiling the corpses of her guard. She had been betrayed from within, alone and helpless in a world of plunderers.
“Why does Gil suddenly think that Sylvia is mercenary?” I asked.
“Because he says that the idea of the charitable trust was all hers. That she wasn’t crude enough or obvious enough to ask me for a direct bequest. That what she wanted was the power of running the trust and paying herself huge commissions in the Surrogate’s Court.”
“But surely he was drafting your will. Why didn’t he suggest that you use a foundation instead of a trust?”
“He says that until last week he had taken for granted that I knew exactly what I wanted. And that there was nothing innately wrong with the idea of a charitable trust. But when he found out it was Sylvia’s idea … Oh, Robert, help me—I don’t know whom to believe!”
As always in a crisis I thought fast. Gil must have realized, as soon as Sylvia had told him of our breach, that he would have to choose between us. He must have then quickly weighed the value to him of the merger of our firms as opposed to an alliance with an angry and frustrated female public relations officer. The choice, once made, was followed immediately by the decision to destroy Sylvia in his client’s eyes. Gil, quite sensibly, would hang on to Ethelinda and me. Who could blame him?
“Here is what I advise you to do, Ethelinda,” I said firmly. “Set up your foundation. Now. Right away. Put on its board of governors half a dozen men and women of known public spirit and character, and of independent means. Provide that they will serve at nominal compensation, but with a salaried director and staff. Then give them some money and see how they do with it. If the thing works, you can leave your estate to it. Otherwise you can go back to your old idea of leaving it outright to charity.”
“Oh, Robert, that sounds so sensible. Why do I have to go to anyone but you? Will you set up the foundation for me?”
“Gil’s your lawyer, Ethelinda. And a very competent one. He can set up a foundation at the drop of a hat.”
“But I want you to be associated with it somehow. I want you to help me.”
“Don’t you worry. I’ll always be here to help you. You can call me any time, day or night. And do you know something, Ethelinda? I feel closer to you right now than I do to my own mother.”
The old girl looked startled for a moment, and I wondered if I had gone too far. But then she seized my hand in both of her old brown ones.
“Oh, Robert, I want to believe you. I really do.”
And why should she not have? What I had said was nothing but the truth. I loved Ethelinda for herself and for what she could do for me. I loved her more than I loved my own mother, who had such little faith in me. I loved her more than I had ever loved Sylvia, who might have killed me had her aim with that glass been better. I think at that moment I loved Ethelinda better than anyone in the world except Alice. What do people think that “real” love is made of?
I returned to the office and called Alice to ask if I could come home that night. After a long pause she said she had no food for supper.
“I’ll take you out!” I cried exultantly. “I’ll take you to the most expensive restaurant in town.”
21
IN THE NEXT SIX WEEKS the merger talks were resumed between my firm and Gil Arnheim’s. They were largely conducted between the two principal partners. Gil and I seemed to understand each other as much in what we didn’t say as in what we did. When he asked me if I would be willing to serve on the board of Ethelinda’s new foundation, I said that he, as her lawyer, would be a more suitable choice, and when he told me that she had suggested I look over his draft of her new will, I insisted that I had no desire to interfere with his practice. He then agreed to “Arnheim, Buttrick & Service” as the name of the new firm and accorded me a percentage of the net profits equal to his own. A floor in his building directly over the Arnheim offices became available, and we promptly optioned it. The gods themselves seemed in favor of our merger, physical as well as legal.
It appeared, in fact, that my only difficulty would be in telling Alice. Our reconciliation had so far been easy and comfortable, and our daughters were sublimely happy over it. But what would happen when Alice discovered that the merger, which I had assured her had been abandoned, was now about to be achieved, and at the cost of the resignation of two of my partners, one of whom, Peter Stubbs, enjoyed her particular admiration?
I decided to use Douglas Hyde as my ambassador to Alice.
“She’ll have heard bad things about Arnheim,” I warned him.
“From whom? Peter?”
“Perhaps. And from me, too. That first day I went to see her and ask for a reconciliation I’m afraid I really shot my mouth off. She’s going to think I never meant it when I said she’d be my conscience. But, honestly,
Doug, I did!”
“I’m sure you meant it, Bob. For that hour, anyway. What do you want me to tell her?”
“Tell her I have to do this thing for the sake of my partners.”
“Including Peter and Oz Burley?”
“Well, Peter’s rich and can afford to be picky. And Oz is a screwball. Even Alice ought to be able to see that. Tell her what this will mean financially to the others. Break it down to dollars and cents. Tell her what it will mean to you, to your wife and six kids. Hell, it isn’t as if we were signing up with crooks. These men are rated AVS in Martindale’s!”
Douglas agreed at last, reluctantly, to give it a try, and he came home with me tonight to have a drink with Alice. He is in the living room with her right now, deciding my fate as I am writing this in the den.
And now I come to a final matter. I think I am going to discontinue this journal. I believe that to some extent it has constituted a kind of muffled dialogue between myself and Alice. I have written down all the things I couldn’t tell her or that she couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. My yellow pages have formed a useful catharsis for all my resentment of her persistent unfairness to me. But now that I am faced with the prospect, or at least the hope, of our permanent accord, I have begun to wonder if I may not be doing myself some actual harm by so carefully recording my acts and then attributing motives to them. Am I trying to be my own god? My own creator? I feel that I know what sort of a being Robert Service is until he becomes a character on the page before me. And then he seems to take on a different personality. Is it because I have drawn him too well or too ill?
At the end of Marius Pater arranges a semiconversion to Christianity to give his hero a final solution in his search of philosophies. But as Pater never quite believed in anything but beautiful words and artifacts, he could not bear to bring Marius all the way to God, and he allowed him a death by disease as opposed to a threatened martyrdom. What would he have done for me?
Diary of a Yuppie Page 15