Manny rubbed his nose. 'I don't know whether that's the right approach, Ivor. Most of the people you get in juries these days are so poor that stealing apples from the A. & P. is nothing. They do it themselves, all the time.'
The door chime rang. Ivor went across and opened it, and in came Esmeralda, piled high with marketing bags and with a long French loaf tucked under her arm. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
'Hi, pa. Hi, Manny. Tonight, we eat French. Clams gratines, baby lamb with fresh beans, and hot garlic bread.'
Manny, rising up from his chair, dropped a pile of papers on to the carpet. 'I'm afraid I can't eat garlic,' he blushed. 'It gives me heartburn.'
Ivor came over and patted him on the back. 'That's okay, Manny. You're not invited to dinner anyway.'
Esmeralda walked through the sitting-room and into the kitchen. She dumped her parcels and her loaf of bread, and came back in. 'He can stay if he wants to. I bought enough for three.'
Ivor sucked his cigar and shook his head. 'I've had enough of attorneys for one day. I would just like to spend an evening in the quiet and charming company of my daughter.'
'It's quite okay,' Manny said. 'My sister is coming around tonight, and she cooks a beautiful fish pie.'
'That's wonderful for you. Es — do you want a drink? I'll just show Manny out.'
'Brandy-soda,' called Esmeralda, disappearing into one of the bedrooms, 'I'm just going to change into something more comfortable. See you soon, Manny. Come for dinner next time.'
Ivor showed Manny to the door.
'There's just one thing,' said Manny, laying his hand on Ivor's sleeve. 'When we go in there tomorrow, I want you to understand that you mustn't show any signs of bitterness, or revenge. I want you to act magnanimous. Like, Forward's made a mistake, but you're willing to forgive and forget — provided he drops his claim to the process. If you're all sour grapes and spit, the jury won't like you. Will you do that for me?'
Ivor stared at him, poker-faced.
'Please?' said Manny.
Ivor nodded. 'Okay. Tomorrow, it's all sweetness and light. Do you want me to wear the wings, and the halo?'
Manny shook his head. 'A smile should be quite enough.'
'Okay.'
Without another word, Manny turned on his heel and made off towards the elevator. Ivor thoughtfully shut the door, and walked back into the sitting-room to fix himself another Scotch, and a brandy-soda for Esmeralda. He sat down with a heavy sigh, and wondered if all men of fifty-two felt as old and used-up as he did. Esmeralda came back in, dressed in a long turquoise silk negligee. It had a wide, floppy collar, pleated sleeves, and yards and yards of floating train. She was a tall, pale girl, with an exquisitely beautiful face; the kind of haunting eyes that fin-de-siecle artists gave to their decadent dryads. Her hair was long and curly and very black, and she wore a thin turquoise headband. As she walked past the windows that made up two walls of the high, rectangular room, the pearly afternoon light shone through the silk of her negligee and gave her stepfather a shadowy outline of high pointed breasts and flat stomach.
'Bad day at Black Rock?' she asked, picking up her drink, and sipping it.
He shrugged. 'Courts were made for lawyers, not people. This is the fifth day, and so far we haven't got any place at all.'
She sat down, in a cloud of turquoise, in the opposite chair.
'Never mind. It will soon be over. You'll see.' He swallowed Scotch. 'That's why I love you. You're such an optimist.'
There was a short silence. Esmeralda looked at him over the rim of her glass.
'My optimism?' she said. 'Or my body?'
Ivor grunted in amusement. 'I guess it's both. Seems like, these days, I've had more of the former than the latter.'
'Are you saying that man cannot live by optimism alone?'
'I don't want to force you. I don't want to make you feel obliged.'
She gave him a calm, almost supercilious smile. 'No man ever could. You know that.'
'I hope so,' he said, crossing his legs. 'I mean, the gallery, and this place — you mustn't feel you have to pay me back.'
She didn't look up. She was twisting a gold and cornelian ring around her finger. 'I feel grateful,' she said. 'You can never stop me feeling that. You know, I looked around the gallery today, and it's so perfect, and it's all because of you. You're a very beautiful man, pa. I mean that.'
He pulled a face. 'Your mother didn't think so.'
'My mother didn't know shit from sauerkraut.'
He laughed, despite himself. 'Don't say that. That's my former wife you're talking about.'
Esmeralda stood up, and walked around the apartment with her bluey-green train floating around her. She wore gold rings on her toes, which Ivor always thought was incredibly erotic.
'Do you think this place is too sombre?' she asked.
He looked around. The sitting-room was decorated in creams and grape colors, with muted abstract paintings on the two inner walls. The furniture was all mirrors and maple.
'It has to be sombre,' he said. 'When you pay $185,000 for seven rooms, and $ 1,100 a month carrying charges — that's sombre.'
She came over and looked at him. Then she knelt down beside his chair, holding her brandy in one hand, and stroked the back of his wrist with one finger. He looked back at her, expressionless, seeking some kind of emotional flicker. She smiled.
'I'd like to say thank you,' she said softly.
'You don't have to.'
'But I would.'
She took his hand, and stood up. 'Come on,' she said, tugging him.
He thought for a moment. Then, without a word, he laid down his drink, and followed her. They walked across the soft, silent carpet to the main bedroom.
On the wide, tapestry-covered bed, she sat him down and undressed him. First his shoes, then his short black silk socks. He started to loosen his own necktie, but she wouldn't let him, and picked at the knot herself with her long dark-red fingernails.
Soon he was naked. His body was white and plump. There was gray wiry hair around his nipples, and his legs were thin and stick-like. He lay there, bald and old and unprepossessing, with his eyes closed. He knew what he looked like, but he also knew that when his eyes were shut, and the reality of age and unfitness were blocked out, there was a warm world of fantasy waiting that was more than nourished by Esmeralda's arousing treats.
Like a great blue-green moth, she mounted him. Her hand sought his hardened penis, and guided it up between her wide-parted thighs. She eased herself back on him, and she sighed a distant, muted sigh, as strange as the cry of some satisfied bird. Ivor kept his eyes tight shut, and said nothing.
Time passed. The apartment was quiet, except for the smooth rustle of Esmeralda's negligee, and their tense and excited breathing. Then Esmeralda started to tremble and shake. She sat in her stepfather's lap with her hands clenched tight against her breasts, feeling the deep, dark ripples of her own orgasm.
They lay side by side in silence for nearly half-an-hour. Ivor felt himself drifting into a curious sleep, and awoke after five minutes with a headache, and a metallic taste in his mouth. He sat up, and reached for his black silk bathrobe.
Esmeralda, her negligee spread romantically around her, opened her dark eyes and grinned.
'We're a strange pair, you and I,' she said, as Ivor walked across to the mirror.
He raised his head and examined her for a few moments in the glass. Somehow, she seemed less beautiful when her face was transposed by a mirror. But that didn't make him love her any the less. He loved her more than any possession he had ever had. Almost as much as his work, and far more than her mother. To fuck a daughter after fucking her mother is like buying your first new car, after you've had second-hand models all your life.
He brushed his few curls flat, splashed on some aftershave, and turned back to his stepdaughter with a serious face.
'I guess we are. Strange, I mean. Sometimes I can't believe it's really happening.'
&nb
sp; 'Isn't that the way with everything wonderful?'
Ivor nodded. 'It is. But it's the same with terrible things, too. When something truly terrible happens, you can never believe it's for real. You keep smacking yourself and hoping that you'll wake up.'
Esmeralda stretched luxuriously. 'Pa,' she said. 'What in the whole world could possibly happen to us that's terrible?'
On the floor above, in apartment 110, a tall man of sixty years old sat in a large Victorian spoonback chair, in almost total darkness. The heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, and the condominium was rank with cigarette smoke. The man had a handsome but heavily-wrinkled face, a white mane of leonine hair, and he was dressed in a light blue nylon jersey jumpsuit that was absurdly young for his age. He held his cigarette in a long ivory holder, and the ribbon of blue smoke rose rapidly up to the ceiling.
He had been watching home movies. An expensive projector on the small inlaid table beside him had just run through, and the stray end of the film was still flicking against the spool. On the far wall of the sitting-room was a blank movie screen — an incongruously modern intrusion in an apartment that was crowded with antiques.
The man seemed to be paralyzed, or frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance, and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips. His name was Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood's hottest new property.
If you ever saw The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you'd remember the face. Or at least a smoother and younger version of it — a version that remained confident, and open, and bright. Herbert Gaines had just been watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.
The door from the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles, came padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.
The young man looked at the blank screen. 'Have you finished sulking yet?' he asked. 'Or are you going to watch the other one as well?'
Herbert Gaines didn't answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention was no longer fixed on the faded memories of 1936, but on the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.
The young man came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines dosed his eyes.
'I don't know why you're sulking,' said Nicholas. 'I never said anything unpleasant.'
Gaines opened his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.
'You're so sensitive,' Nicholas went on. 'This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship. Least, that's what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old movies of yours.'
Gaines' mouth turned down at the corners in bitterness. But he still refrained from answering.
'I sometimes think you want to fight,' said Nicholas. 'I sometimes think you take umbrage on purpose, just to get me upset. Well, it won't work, Herbert. It won't. I'm not the vicious kind. But damn it all, I'm the kind that gets tired of fights.'
Herbert Gaines listened to this, and then took the burned-out cigarette from his ivory holder and replaced it with a fresh one. He lit up, watching Nicholas with one limpid eye.
'When you're tired of fighting me, Nick,' he said, in a rich, hoarse, cancerous voice, 'then you're tired of loving me.'
Nicholas finished rubbing his hair and threw his towel on the floor. Herbert Gaines smoked listlessly, with his holder clenched between his teeth.
Nicholas paced from one end of the room to the other. Then he stopped beside Gaines' chair — tense and exasperated.
'You won't understand, will you? You're too busy wallowing in forty-year-old memories and uneasy nostalgia. Why don't you try looking outside yourself for a change? Open up the drapes, and realize what year it is? Christ, Herbert, I wasn't even born when you made those movies!'
Herbert Gaines looked up. 'You were there though,' he said, in his throaty voice.
Nicholas was about to say something else, but he stopped and looked quizzical. 'What do you mean?'
'Precisely what I say. You were there. Haven't you seen yourself?'
'Seen myself? I don't — '
Herbert Gaines put down the cigarette holder and laboriously got out of his chair. Nicholas watched him uneasily as he walked across to the bookshelves, and took down a large Film Pictorial Annual for 1938. The old man put the book on his desk, and opened it out. Then he beckoned Nicholas over.
'Look,' he said, pointing with his pale, elegant finger to a large black-and-white photograph. 'Who does that remind you off?'
Nicholas took a cursory glance. 'It's you. It says so, underneath. 'Herbert Gaines plays young Captain Dash-foot in Incident at Vicksburg'.'
'Cretin,' said Herbert Gaines. He gripped Nicholas by the back of the neck, and forced him over to the large gilt Victorian pub mirror that hung on the wall beside the desk. Then he lifted the open book and held it up beside Nicholas' face.
'Well,' said Nicholas. 'I guess there's a kind of passing resemblance. But we're not exactly the Wrigley Double-mint twins, are we?'
Herbert Gaines let him go, and tossed the annual back on the desk.
'You don't think so? You don't even know. The first time I saw you, down in the Village, I felt a sensation like I'd never felt before. At first, I couldn't understand it. I stared and stared at you, and still I couldn't grasp what it was that made me stare. Then I saw myself in a bookstore window. I saw myself. And I realized what it was about you that attracted me so much. You, Nicholas, are the spitting image of me, when I was in movies.'
Nicholas looked uncertain. 'That's not why you like me, though, is it? I mean — that's not the only reason?' Herbert Gaines walked carefully back to his chair, and sat down. It looked as if his jumpsuit was filled with nothing more substantial than bent coat-hangers and odd bones. When he was comfortable, he fixed his gaze on Nicholas again — those deep, disturbing eyes — and he spoke in grave, sonorous tones. 'Nicholas,' he said, 'I love you.'
Nicholas scratched the back of his neck in embarrassment. 'I know that, Herbert, but — '
'But nothing,' said Herbert. 'I love you. Does it matter why?'
Nicholas lowered his eyes. 'I guess not. It was just that I wondered if you loved me because I was me, or because, well… '
'Because what?'
'Well, because I was you. I mean — is it me you love, or your old self?'
There was an uncomfortable silence. Then, unexpectedly, Herbert Gaines nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'It is me that I love. You are the personification of what I once was, and what I could be once more, if they would give me a chance. That, and that alone, is why I love you.'
Nicholas stood there, biting his lip. He watched Herbert Gaines for a while, but Herbert didn't look back. The old actor sat in his Victorian chair, smoking steadily and staring at the floor.
'Well, fuck you,' said Nicholas.
Herbert Gaines said nothing.
'Do you think I can take that?' said Nicholas, his eyes filling with tears. 'Do you think I can just stand here and take that? What do you think I am? Just one of your goddamned celluloid images? Just one of your old movies? Well, fuck you, Herbert Gaines!'
Gaines shrugged. 'Please yourself, dear boy.'
Nicholas wiped his eyes with his arm. 'Oh, that's great, that is. That's just too fucking neat for words. You spend your whole time sulking and moping like an over-age Shirley Temple, and when I tell you the truth about it, you come out with a charmer like that. Well, I can tell you here and now — I'm packing.'
'Packing?' said Gaines. 'What for?'
Nicholas bent forward and hissed the words at him. 'To leave you, my withered darling, that's what for.'
Herbert caught his wrist. His mouth twitched for a moment as he searched for the words. 'You leave me, you young bastard, and I'll break your neck.'
Nicholas pulled himself away. 'You might have been a muscle boy in 1936, but there's not much chunk left on the old bones now, is there, Herbert?'
He turned and walked towards the bedroom. Herbert Gaines, with a curiously intense expression on his face, heaved himself out of his chair and went after him. Hobbling as quickly as he could, he caught up with Nicholas in the doorway, and snatched at his arm.
Nicholas shook himself free. 'Herbert, it's no fucking use!'
Herbert clutched his young lover again. 'You're not leaving, Nicky. Not really.'
Nicholas turned away. 'What do you want me to do? Stay here and listen to your ramblings about the good old days for the rest of my life, and how fucking wonderful I am because I look just like you used to look, in one of those two dreary old pictures of yours? Jesus, Herbert, I don't know which is more boring — you or your second-rate movies.'
Herbert slapped him, quite hard, across the face. Nicholas stared at him, more in surprise than in pain. A red bruise spread across his left cheek. He lifted his hand and dabbed it.
Without a word, Nicholas punched Herbert in the stomach. Herbert gasped, and collided with the door-jamb. Nicholas hit him again, with his open hand, and he fell to the floor with his nose bleeding.
Herbert didn't cry out, didn't even raise a hand to protect himself. Viciously and systematically, Nicholas punched him in the face and chest, lifting him up each time he dropped to the floor by tugging his pale blue jumpsuit. There were speckles and splashes of blood down the front, and Herbert's face was a mass of bruises.
Finally, with his rage exhausted, Nicholas let him fall on to the pink Wilton carpet, and stumbled unsteadily into the bedroom. He collapsed on to the bed, and lay there panting and sobbing, his legs curled up in a foetal crouch.
After a few minutes, he became aware that Herbert was standing at his bedside, his white hair awry, his Jumpsuit dark with blood. Herbert reached out with a wrinkled and trembling hand and touched his bare shoulder. Nicholas recoiled.
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