Voices rustled like taffeta coming up the stairs, women on their way to use the john. He wasn’t being a decent house guest hanging around up here. He should go back to the party.
The telephone on the nightstand riveted him with its little red snake’s-eye of a button that was always on, maybe part of a security system. He stared at the illuminated dial and at the luminous digits.
Chad thought how easy it would be to pick up, call his father, get the money that way. Get twice the money. His father would like nothing better than to get an SOS from Chad, to have the opportunity to pull Chad’s chestnuts out of the fire, to act as savior, at the same time giving him some Polonius advice on lending and borrowing and honesty. Or worse, to become, in this little deception of Maud, Chad’s confrere, compadre—such compadre-ism most certainly to include Velda, later on.
He could hear it: “The kid just seemed to ‘forget’ that extra zero—isn’t that too much, Vel, isn’t that rich?” Chad could picture them over one of their little champagne-and-oyster midnight dinners, bubbling like the wine over the kid’s putting one over on his mother.
He picked up the phone and got the operator. He told her he had to reverse the charges; no, he didn’t have a phone card.
She let the number ring eight, nine, twelve times before coming back on the line to tell him the party didn’t answer, sir.
He hung up.
Hadn’t he known the party wouldn’t answer? He knew she was down on the end of the pier watching that house across the lake.
At least, he thought, lighting a cigarette, I tried.
Liar.
• • •
Without his realizing it, Bethanne had woken, for now she had gotten up from the bed and was stepping into her French-cut silk panties, unsteady on her feet. One thin brown hand gripped the post of the tester bed. Skirt jacked up, one leg in, as if the left and right sides of her body hadn’t jigsawed properly. The gold cube dangled from her arm, its chain caught in the bend of her elbow, swinging as she kept trying and missing the panties with the other foot.
For the first time since they’d come into the room, he felt like making a grab for her and pulling her down on the bed. Because for now she’d dropped the act in this woozy concentration on getting the clothes on instead of off. Such an intensity about her.
But he didn’t; it would have started the whole thing up again, taken too much time—though time from what, he didn’t know.
Bethanne stumbled and swore at some furs (“fucking ermine,” “goddamshitty buncha mink”) that must have got in the way of her heels—mumbling at them and kicking as if they’d still been on the backs of the slaughtered animals.
• • •
Chad still lay on the bed, telling himself to go downstairs again. He did not like this party, he didn’t like big parties, and since Zero was the only one he really knew, he felt shy.
He must have dozed off. The next thing he knew was that someone had opened the door of the dark room and thrown another coat on the pile. If he didn’t move the coats, the women would be collecting them until dawn.
Half a dozen fur coats. Slippery satin linings, soft mink and sable. And the white one: was it possible for a woman to wear the fur of a snow leopard?
Why are you being so self-righteous? he asked himself as he walked down the hall to the room where he thought he’d seen the maid depositing a carpet of coats. The door was slightly ajar and he went in with his bundle. He stopped dead.
Before the window in a pool of moonlight, the only light in the otherwise dark room, Eva Bond stood bare to the waist.
The Englishman sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed. Chad heard his indrawn breath, felt his anger at the interruption. Chad did not want to look up from the stack of clothes; he wanted only to manage to leave the room with his head cast down, his eyes on the floor.
He backed out, closing the door on the Brit’s expletives.
“Wrong room.”
• • •
Downstairs there were another hundred or more strangers. The movement and heat of bodies, the clink and ring of glasses and bottles . . . how many cases of champagne had he seen in the kitchen? Where had all of these people come from?
This afternoon, Zero’s car hadn’t passed another house since the outskirts of Belle Harbor, and that was five miles away. And he doubted any of these people called Belle Harbor beautiful, much less called it home.
He had stopped on the landing. Stairs swept down in an arc on either side to the foyer, which was a huge black-and-white tiled room in itself. There was a teardrop chandelier that turned some of the guests into kaleidoscope bits.
From this height, as if he were standing on a balcony, he thought again of a theater. This was as theatrical as his first view of them on the wide, white steps of the big house early this afternoon, when Zero had parked the Porsche in the drive. His family had not “gathered” on the steps. They looked “arranged” by a slick magazine photographer, or even by some French or Italian director, who wanted to make a point, wanted to let the audience glimpse their inner lives. (Why French or Italian he didn’t know, except he thought they were more aware of, or more accepting of, a lack of possibilities.) The Bonds were miles apart just as they were steps apart. The mother stood with her hands locked before her, the glimmer from the noonday sun striking the striped dress she wore and haloing her pale, pale blond hair. Mr. Bond stood on the second step, Mrs. Bond on the other side, and farther up stood Zero’s sister. They might have been waiting, frozen there, for the director to call for action.
For a bewildering few seconds, there was no action. And then suddenly Zero’s father stepped down with a wide smile and a loud greeting, threw his arm around Zero’s shoulders at the same time he was shaking Chad’s hand.
Zero had disengaged himself smoothly from the wrap of his father’s arm, had made a playful pass at his younger sister, Casey, had acknowledged his mother’s presence only by nodding and speaking her name:
“Eva.”
• • •
Now she was at the bottom of the winding staircase, talking to the Englishman as if they had met, casually, just here, a hostess engaged in small talk with one of her guests. Her gray satin gown slid straight from its thin straps to her ankles; her silvery blond hair had the metallic look of Zero’s Porsche lighter, a razor cut that dipped from the nape of her neck to her chin. She stood perfectly still. Even the tulip champagne glass seemed an extension of her hand. She was a beautiful, smooth woman who seemed to husband her energy. When Zero had introduced them earlier, her tapered fingers had slid into his hand in a soundless greeting. No clicks, no clumsiness; simply a cool pose on the wide steps.
He wished that he could retreat, move back up the stairs and come down some other way, but now she had seen him. She looked straight at him, dispassionately. Then the man looked up with a remorseless smile.
Chad kept on walking down the staircase, didn’t smile as he passed them, and stopped when he heard the man say, “Come on back, sport—I’d like a word.”
“Sport”? The guy was really pushing his luck.
Chad turned and saw that the Brit was still smiling; a master smiler, Chad bet, a real scumbag. Chad didn’t return the smile.
Mrs. Bond’s “companion” reached out his hand to Chad and said, “I’m Maurice Brett. And you’re Chad. Oh, come on. Shake.”
Perhaps it was a reflex action to an outstretched hand; Chad shook hands, and when he drew his back, he saw the bills.
Said Maurice Brett, “ ‘Money.’ That’s the word.” And he held to that infernal lopsided smile.
Three bills. Chad stared. Three hundred dollars.
Eva Bond looked at Maurice Brett. Blood rose from her smooth shoulders to her face, such a strong current it painted a sunset blush across the rim of the silvery gown. Apparently, she didn’t agree that “money” was the word, that it wasn’t always balm for a seared conscience or a Band-Aid you could slap across a gushing artery.
Like the a
utomatic handshake, Chad’s initial thought of deliverance from part of the remaining five-hundred-dollar debt had been automatic. That made him even angrier. He folded the bills into a small square and jammed them into Maurice Brett’s vest pocket.
“You don’t have to buy my silence. Who would I tell here, anyway? Mr. Bond? The guests? I don’t even know them.”
Maurice Brett rolled his cigar slightly between his lips. “Billy.”
“Zero?” He looked from one to the other. Eva Bond had gone back to her glacial pose and was lighting a cigarette without even glancing at Chad. “My God. he’s my best friend. You think I’d pulverize my best friend with the information his mother is—?”
Eva Bond’s words stopped Chad dead. “I really don’t think you need to worry about pulverizing Billy.” She was as placid as the lake beyond the terrace.
“I’m a guest in this house, and what you do is none of my business. But are you telling me you don’t think Zero would care?”
She turned eyes of flint on him.
I really don’t think you need to worry . . . It was almost worse than the bedroom scene. “You don’t have to worry about me telling him, Mrs. Bond.”
He pushed through champagne glasses, caterers, brittle laughter, gowns and tuxedos. A woman whose breasts seemed to be oozing over the top of her cream satin gown grabbed at his arm and wondered why they hadn’t been introduced. “I’m Brie Sardinia and you’re Billy’s friend,” she managed to say between sips of champagne as her hand ran down his arm until it was grasping his own hand. The name “Brie” was well chosen, since she looked like a soft, ripe cheese. “My husband spends all night in there”—she looked over her shoulder toward the game room—“playing poker. Care to dance?” They were being crushed against the wall by other gowns and dinner jackets, and Chad used this as an excuse. Too crowded to dance . . . maybe later . . . nice to meet you . . .
“But we could go out by the pool,” she called after him.
He pretended not to hear and made his way toward one of the several French doors to go out for some air. He passed the billiard room, where Mr. Bond and four other men were concentrating on their poker game. He recognized a doctor and a man named Brandon whom he’d met and assumed the tall, saturnine one must be the woman’s husband, Sardinia. The fifth one looked too cagey and flashy to have hooked up with Brie. His cards were so close to his chest he’d have to dislocate his neck to get a peek at them.
Chad crossed the wide, leaf-blown steps to the section of lawn that was as smooth as a golf course and into which the free-form pool had been set to glisten like an opal in the lights from the house. The surround sound of the Bonds’ elaborate stereo system reached out here. Tight little groups had gathered to talk and drink, and the grass was smooth enough to dance on. Zero danced drunk and alone. His arms were outstretched; he snapped his fingers slowly, swaying in time to some old jazz rendition of “After You’ve Gone.”
Then it was Casey, trying to imitate her brother as a sax burned up “Who’s Sorry Now?” Slow, easy, hypnotic. Casey was the one member of the family Zero seemed to like having around. She was wearing a figure-hugging black dress much too old for her, with a low neckline and bat-wing sleeves. When Zero saw her in it he said, “Charles Addams would’ve loved you.”
“Mother said I could wear it,” she’d whined. Deliberately playing the little-sister role, Chad had thought.
“When did mother ever tell you you couldn’t wear anything?”
Zero had been big-brothering Casey, but he was right: Chad wondered if Eva Bond ever restrained her daughter. The father sure as hell didn’t. He obviously adored her. The feeling didn’t appear to be returned, Casey preferring instead her unapproachable mother. Perhaps people were like that—the person on the other side of the lake, the one so far off you could only call to, would be the one that you would, finally, make the fatal error of swimming to.
• • •
Chad reached the old boat house on the edge of that lake and a dock jutting out from it, whose planks were springy, half-rotten. In the boat house were two rowboats that looked bereft of attention over the past years. They swayed gently with the rise and fall of water. The shelter smelled musty, unused. The paint was peeling from the boats, and one of the oars was broken. He sat on a wooden bench, lit a cigarette, and leaned back against the damp wall.
He wondered about the boat house—why it wasn’t used, why the Bonds didn’t have some speedboat or catamaran moored here. And hadn’t Zero made a perfectly straight-faced reference to a “yacht broker”?
Bilge water lapped at the edge of the planks, and the boats bobbed on the waves churned up by a boat rushing by to nowhere.
Did William Bond know that jerk was screwing his wife?
A poem came back to him: I dressed my father in his little clothes . . .
He rested his head in his hands and tried to recall what came after that. I asked him where the running water goes.
He couldn’t remember the next lines and got up impatiently, thrust his hands in his pockets, and stared down at the little boats. Down to the sea in ships, set them afloat! In the poem the father was the son. He was dressing his father instead of the other way around. Yet at the end the fantasy breaks down and the roles are again reversed. Chad wished he could remember the rest.
• • •
Water slapped around the boats. Chad looked at it for a while and then climbed down into one of the rowboats, holding on to the planks for support. Even moored safely within the boat house it felt insecure, a thing to be borne away by the smallest wave or the slightest breeze. He lit a cigarette and rested his elbows on his knees, smoking and swaying slightly with the motion of the boat.
Steps came down the gravel. He turned and could tell it was Zero only because of the white silk scarf. Then came the sound of running feet, and the moon slipped out from its cloud cover to shine on Casey’s pale face as she ran down the path behind Zero, the long, pleated sleeves sweeping behind her.
“You bored? Right.” Zero said it as if boredom were Belle Harbor’s specialty. He stepped into the boat, calling for Casey to hurry up. When she too had clambered in, Zero pulled the oars from their locks.
“What in hell are we doing? You’re not rowing this hulk out on the lake, are you?” Chad looked around wildly.
“No. I thought I’d take it up on the highway for a spin.” He was not an oarsman; he spun the boat so that it hit the dock with a thud.
Casey just sat there, elbows on her knees. “No one can find us,” she said with satisfaction.
“There’s water at my feet now,” Chad said.
Relentlessly, Zero kept on pulling at the oars. “You know how to swim.”
Chad sat there wishing he’d got hold of his mother. Why? Was she supposed to come running with life jackets?
Why they seemed headed for the middle of the lake he couldn’t imagine. Zero hadn’t taken off the white scarf, or his dinner jacket, or loosened his tie, as if he were suddenly in a hurry to make a break for it.
Zero released one of the oars and brought out a silver flask and tossed it to Chad.
Chad took a drink and said, “I thought you had a yacht. You said you had a yacht.”
“We do. It’s around here somewhere,” he said without interest.
“You make it sound like you misplaced a pair of cufflinks.”
Behind him, Casey was humming; it was that old song about a blackbird. They were about a hundred feet from the dock when Zero finally pulled in the oars from water as black and pleated as Casey’s dress.
While Zero was lighting up, Chad said, “So you do this all the time? Do a few dances and then row out to the middle of the lake in a leaky boat? Look, the water’s definitely up to our ankles, dude.”
“Stop worrying. We’re just trying to save you from Bethanne. There’s a life jacket right behind you, on the bottom.”
Casey stopped the blackbird song and laughed. “She’s a nympho, didn’t you know?” Back to the song:
“ ‘Where my sweetie waits for me—’ ”
“ ‘Sugar’s sweet, so is she,’ ” Zero sang. “Come on, everybody knows that song!”
Chad said, “You sit here in the middle of the lake in a sinking boat singing ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird.’ ” It wasn’t a question, since that was exactly what they were doing.
Suddenly Casey stood up. The boat lurched. “ ‘No one here can love or understand me—’ ”
“Sit down!” Chad yelled.
“ ‘Oh, the hard-luck stories they all hand me.’ ” Zero was leaning back, legs half-covered with water.
Said Chad, “This boat is sinking.”
“ ‘. . . light the light.’ ”
“ ‘I’ll be home late tonight.’ ”
The rowboat was sinking in an oddly balanced way, taking the three of them down as if it were one of those fake cardboard cutouts in a musical that moves across the stage on permanent, painted waves. The painted boat would sink behind the painted waves, and the audience would applaud their little number. It was a sedate, an almost patient sinking, almost as if it were waiting for the last line to be belted out:
“ ‘Black-BIRD . . . Bye-ah-BYE-EYE-EYE!’ ” The water went up to their shoulders now.
Chad was looking across the dark water with rising hysteria. He was wearing the life jacket, sure. But what about little Casey?
Little Casey was lying on her back, floating.
Zero said, “Well, I guess this calls for some sort of plan. Cigarette?” His legs churning water and one arm out, he brought out his silver case, drew up his legs, and lay there floating and smoking, the boat now probably on the bottom of the lake.
“No, thanks,” said Chad. “I’m trying to quit.” He spat out water, shook his head to get his hair out of his eyes, held the Rolex to his ear. Were they waterproof? “We’ve had the warm-up-—what do we do now?”
Casey was splashing around, dipping under, coming up, shaking the water from her eyes.
“For god’s sake!” Chad tried to rip off the life jacket to give to her; after all, he was a decent swimmer.
The End of the Pier Page 15