Making Love

by Norman Bogner

  He got to know a lot of people through her, but had reached the point of diminishing returns, and had substantially contributed to her last breakout by suggesting that their relationship be restricted to tennis and things platonic, inasmuch as he found it impossible to contain himself in their physical dealings. Without spelling it out, he hinted that someone Italianate, a hairdresser, or both, should be awarded the contract, someone who knew the meaning of lento and could convert it into action. Still, he considered it an accomplishment to have been Nancy's partner. Nancy had offered him money to continue the arrangement, but Luckmunn considered the scheme worthy of the Nazis. His race had known humiliation, but a Jewish gigolo was infamy. He was, however, tempted to ask how much, for curiosity died hard. Would it be by the inch or the hour? A flat fee would be unthinkable. His uncle, unfortunately, had not covered this aspect of trade. Nobody he knew, and certainly no one he'd grown up with, had banged so high in the social register, a real five-star affair that would grow golden as time passed, memory receded, and blood traveled slower to the brain.

  He wasn't in the Times except as an ad. Actually there was no reason for him to be there. Twice his social-relations man had got him to buy drawings anonymously for a museum, then broken the story that it was C.B. Luckmunn, Mr. Anonymous, and all for fifteen thousand dollars net. Luckmunn got loads of invitations after that—gallery shows, first nights, Lincoln Center, the ballet. He could curse Clive Barnes with the best of them now.

  He thought lovingly of Jane, never having had his appetite for the fundamentals, money and sex, so well spiked in a lifetime of easy lays. She'd inherit the hundred-acre property. He wondered if it was zoned for building. He made a quick sketch of it from memory. With any luck he could squeeze in four hundred of his custom-built cheeseboxes. He took an Equinol to calm himself down. Madness, Luckmunn in love. It had never happened before, the master builder shafted by a twenty-year-old. Love at first sight? He grumbled pisher on his way to the review-reading room. Love or gas? He couldn't be sure, he was in pain.

  Luckmunn's job-visiting day always came at different times. Construction gangs and foremen could never be sure when their employer would turn up to see who was goofing off, trying to screw him on supplies, fixing the time clock; and they maintained a constant crow's-nest watch for the gray Caddy. On hiring, Luckmunn always had the union representative present, sipping whisky out of a coffee container, the thousand in small bills that he'd been bribed with safely tucked away in the Christmas Club.

  “Now if you look to fuck me, remember one thing, start with somebody who you're smarter than,” Luckmunn would inform the trembling foreman.

  “Mr. Luckmunn's a fair man. If you're honest, he'll look after you,” the voice of labor would add by way of corroboration.

  At ten punctually, Luckmunn appeared at the curb where Bob was waiting with the door open.

  “Bob, change of plan today. I'm not going to the office but to New Jersey to check up on things. I expect to have a guest.”

  He picked up the car phone, got through to Jane's number, and said:

  “Good morning, Jane. This is Charles Luckmunn. Did I wake you? Good. I'm going to pick you up in twenty minutes to take you on an outing. Will you—hold on, I want to check traffic conditions with Bob. Bob, what's midtown like? Heavy, Jane. Make it thirty minutes. Will you please come? It's important. That's fine. I thought about you all night. If you haven't already had breakfast Bob can get you a Danish and coffee which you can have on the way.”

  There was a long silence. An expensive call, Luckmunn wanted to remind her, but he held off, on the upgrade of a love affair, he dare not reveal his concerns for virtue and parsimony. He waited, whispered to the chauffeur studying his daily-double selections:

  “I'm peaking, Bob.”

  “Muddy track,” came the reply.

  Jane broke in with a yawn. The sound, Luckmunn estimated, worked out at about a dollar seventy-five.

  “Have you got my address?” she asked.

  “I've got the second mortgage on your building. For your information, my dear, you're living in a tax loss.”

  “I knew something was wrong.”

  The phone went dead. She had this habit of being succinct at his expense. Plain rudeness. He'd break her of it—eventually.

  Jane stirred herself, noted an improvement in her cheek color (bistre), and realized that without Conlon another empty day confronted her. Turning on, dazed strolls through boutiques, buying nothing (for she could afford everything, and few events depressed her more than giving presents to herself). There was nobody, and Luckmunn was at least better than her personal vacuum. Occupying space, that's what he was good for. She put on a mauve form-fitting see-through dress. A perfect contrast to her cheek. Her nipples pushed against the flimsy material and spread out in a sunflower design. That should destroy him, give him something to salivate about. In a lifetime of indifferent people the crazy idea that he actually cared for her increased her self-loathing, drove her to irritated flights of moodiness.

  Luckmunn leaned over the partition to talk to the chauffeur.

  “Bob, this may be it for me,” he confided. “Keep your fingers crossed. My quest is over. What do you think?”

  “Upside down they're all the same, ... twat,” Bob observed sagaciously, thwarting Luckmunn—for he had great respect for the chauffeur, who managed like a multi-seesaw four bigamous marriages, found time to drive for Luckmunn, and had now entered into yet another illicit liaison with a Bridgeport woman.

  Luckmunn always imagined marrying someone—when he thought of it—with a name, family connections, well-fixed financially, with background. Serene while people were killing one another, rioting, he had early made the supreme decision to enter into holy wedlock with the profit motive. Sooner or later the dissidents would try to catch up with him, but he'd be too far ahead.

  “I wish they'd stop with the goddamn war news and give us a market report. That's all anybody's really interested in.”

  His heart beat rapidly, and he pressed the window switch for air, open spaces. Except for purposes of special pleading, he refused to regard himself as a representative sufferer of his race, a man whose genes had been formed by tragedy before Christ. She'd fall before him, another conquest of the empire builder. Someone who could prophesy the growth of the air pollution industry in the seventies; a “friend” of Lincoln Center (why for God's sake, he'd shaken hands with Leonard Bernstein a month before); been to a cotillion dance at the Plaza for debutantes (his first); such a man could not be outwitted so easily.

  “Bob, if you took the human body apart, melted it down to its elements, do you know what it would be worth if you tried to sell it? Ninety-eight cents. That's what we're talking about,” he gabbled on, “Ninety-eight cents, and goddamn it, I will not be reduced to a quivering bunch of nerve ends by something worth less than a buck.”

  “I think I'll take the Drive downtown, Mr. Luckmunn.”

  “Do as you see fit,” Luckmunn said. He didn't believe in telling people how to do their jobs. “We'll have to stop for Danish and coffee before we pick her up. I don't even know how she likes it. Black with sugar? Milk or half-and-half? No sugar? This is ridiculous. Why should I worry about such things? For my part she can starve. She's probably on a diet. We all are, aren't we?”

  Turning onto Third Avenue, he ordered Bob to stop at a coffee shop.

  “Bob, maybe you better get a container of juice as well. She might like that before her coffee. And don't take yesterday's Danish. Ask if it's fresh today. Get some sugar, and saccharine to be on the safe side.” He watched Bob dash in. “If she disappoints me, so help me, I'll demolish her building, raze it to the ground, and she won't have any place to live. The city's got enough people living in rent-control buildings. God damn it, I'm talking to myself.”

  She was waiting, and Luckmunn sprang out of the car. No, it hadn't been a mirage the evening before. Palpitations from many sources made his breathing sound like the reports from
a shotgun.

  “Jane, good morning.” She nodded warily. Maybe this wasn't such a sensational idea. “I like the color of your cheek much better.”

  “It's improving,” she said, without enthusiasm.

  “I could have my man look at it and give you his opinion,” She hesitated. This much activity and fire in the morning? “Don't worry about his fee.”

  “I'm not.”

  “Of course, I forgot.” Bob pulled away from the curb. “We don't worry about money. You're living in a fine building. The property hereabouts is priceless. People hand down brownstones from father to son.” He knew this from personal experience, for once, in an attempt to drive people out, he'd hired a West Indian steel band. “How's your apartment? Are you happy with it? The super's breath is lethal, that I can tell you.”

  “It's a sublet.”

  “Bob, will you pass the coffee back?” Luckmunn pulled down a flap and spread out the container and Danish. “Like an airline, huh? Listen, if the apartment is causing you any concern or inconvenience, I can make a few calls and we can see what's on the market. Needless to say, everything's going co-op, but there may be a little place waiting for you. Who can tell?”

  “I'm happy where I am.”

  “That settles that.”

  “Shit, it's cheese.” She swallowed fretfully, a child forced to take medicine.

  “Bob, why cheese?” Luckmunn demanded.

  “That was the freshest they had.”

  “I didn't want you to get stuck with a p.m. We could make another stop.”

  “Never mind. I'm getting fat.”

  “I wouldn't say that.”

  “Forget it.”

  He leaned over to determine what was fat. Nothing that could be detected by the naked eye. As someone who had witnessed many forms of perversion (and partaken in not a few himself), Luckmunn naturally had strong feelings about, indeed a marked aversion to, bad language. The fact that someone was a necrophiliac or sodomist did not give him the right to be so free and easy with swear words. He wanted to mention this to Jane, but checked himself and instead adjusted the climate-control switch. She needed an older man to control her, somebody she could look up to and he regarded himself as the perfect candidate. As they approached the Pulaski Skyway, Jane said:

  “My God, we're in New Jersey.”

  “That's right. It's a fine state. It has character.”

  “Where're we going?”

  “That's my little surprise. In a sense you're going to enter the future.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  He had a small problem: After their jaunt to Monmouth, a drive to Bedford, New York, where he planned dinner, was an activity that even a Greyhound passenger would grumble about. Luckmunn prided himself on restaurant finding, small out-of-the-way places with superb cuisine where his name was magic and his tips astronomical. As married women were his usual prey, there was also a practical aspect to these discoveries. He'd never dined in New Jersey, except reluctantly at various char pits with the atmosphere of garages, outsize sirloins flanking the plate. Luckmunn was big on atmosphere, flickering candles and French-speaking waiters his choice. He'd work it out.

  “Bob, can we get anything on the radio?”

  Boat signals and ham operators created a medley of deafening static, and Luckmunn glumly pointed to an armada of dirty gray turrets and chimneys projecting from a mass of factories resembling scorched battleship remnants that had been brought back from Pearl Harbor.

  “They're causing interference.”

  “I knew they were good for something. Would you object to WNEW-FM?”

  “No, of course not”

  Janis Joplin came over loud, panting, and clear. Bob hummed along gaily. She knew she had a friend for life in the front seat.

  She gave Luckmunn a brief physical. He was attractive, well proportioned, much smaller than Sonny, but his face had a muted forced delicacy because part of his nose had been lopped off and was the size of a peach pit, with a wide gully underneath. It was like a nicely designed compact car, twin-cam nostrils, and an overhead aluminum shaft. He seemed to breathe by means of fuel injection. It didn't go with the face.

  “What about this place, Jane?”

  She saw wasteland, desolate swamps, the air in the car a combination of the Passaic River and Monsanto chemicals to the right of them, discharging pus from steel geysers.

  “It's potential,” he continued idealistically. “It needs work, admittedly, but it's got greatness within it.”

  For a moment she thought she was being abducted by a madman who got his inspiration from the sores and pock marks of the earth. He waited for an answer, approval, but she had to admit she didn't understand what point he was trying to make.

  “Reclaiming land, filling in swamps, creating communities for people of all races and religions.”

  “Christmas is in the air. Good will toward men.”

  “I mean it,” he protested.

  “Charles, you're pitching me. I won't invest.”

  “You're not getting my point.”

  “Which is that you're a speculator, building houses, so that you can get the most profit.”

  He laughed, caught out.

  “Jane, I wouldn't take that from anyone, but you know what, you're right. You've seen through me.”

  “It's like looking through a pane of glass.”

  “That's hurtful. You didn't mean it.”

  “Why?” He was unprepared for a dialectical argument. “Admit it to yourself.”

  “Well, a buck's a buck.”

  “True enough.”

  “I'm a self-made millionaire.”

  “Go to the head of the class.”

  “You're a smart young lady. My judgment of you was right. You've got intelligence.”

  Nancy drifted to the surface of his mind, disembodied, a summer illusion, extending to November. He banished her.

  The end of his shopping tour for a mate was in sight. The interest that accrued on her fortune made him giddy as he made some swift calculations. He wondered if there were any legal precedent for taking her surname, joining it to his in a resounding double barrel? Luckmunn-Siddley? Siddley-Luckmunn came out, a breach-birth, but decidedly masculine. Maybe he'd keep her for a while, housebreak her. He'd never had such an arrangement, since his sexual adventures were swift and unpredictable, subject to change without notice. The unutterable mazel of his situation buoyed him, then came up stillborn. How would she react to such a suggestion? Spit in his eye, no doubt. Destroy him with a look. Apart from her fortune, another consideration loomed ahead, not entirely peripheral either: Jane would be the ultimate sexual experience, the de profudis ass-on-the-table message for which no answer would be required. His invasion plans were suddenly disrupted by aggression from the territory he'd mentally conquered.

  “You know something, Luckmunn, I feel like Joan Crawford riding with Sidney Greenstreet in the back of a late movie.”

  “Why do you keep calling me Luckmunn?” he barked.

  “Because I know you don't like it.”

  “You want to upset me?” he asked, horrified.

  She closed her eyes, disdaining a reply. The steady heating had made her drowsy, and she drifted off to sleep, leaving Luckmunn the task of gathering up the coffee containers and generally policing the back seat. Nervous aggravation made him hungry, and he nibbled surreptitiously on the Danish. This was definitely not going according to plan. He wondered why she wasn't relating (his favorite word for situations involving human intercourse). Sleeping, she appeared vulnerable, innocent, marriageable. Awake, a tough customer. A real puzzle. His eyes ravenously coasted over her form. How could he find an edge to close her? Rejection he could accept with grace, but ridicule he found unbearable. Fine lover, he'd put his quarry to sleep.

  The specter of Monmouth Heights loomed in the distance. He nudged Jane, preferring other means to waken her, but contented that he'd got a knuckle in the profile of her breasts. Another time, another
place, for the showdown.

  “I don't want you to miss a thing.”

  “Where are we?”

  Her question was superfluous. They turned down a side road, pebbles caroming musically off the windshield. The sign announced luckmunn ville, a community of the future. This statement was enforced by a huge billboard, showing a blowup of Apollo 11 and a smiling Neil Armstrong in his astronaut gear, the builder's personal emissary, pointing his finger at a message from the moon for all mankind. Take left fork two miles ahead, and see the future, $19,999 Armstrong assured everybody.

  “Is this legal?” Jane asked. “Or is he endorsing your homes?”

  “He's endorsing them. But it's not quite legal. If he comes out here, I'll take the board down and no hard feelings.”

  “Why didn't you get George Wallace?”

  “You know something, Jane, that's not a bad idea. You've got a business mind. A flair.”

  Lake Luckmunn, the rear end of a swampy morass with bogs for tributaries, lay just ahead. Despite the bone-chilling temperature, it stubbornly resisted freezing.

  “Someday soon, sailboats will be sailing here.”

  “The Luckmunn Regatta.”

  “Keep coining with the ideas.”

  Luckmunn Wood, a place for lovers to spoon and families to picnic beyond the lake, would no doubt be so employed by the year 2000.

  “It's got everything,” Luckmunn noted. “When I'm through, there will be five hundred homes in this area.”

  Bob negotiated the car past some fallen trees and into a clearing on the left, which spoke well for Armstrong's navigational abilities. There were a number of tents.

  “It looks like an Apache village, destroyed,” Jane said.

  “I know now how you got your eye black and blue.”

  The car stopped at a hut and Luckmunn walked out on a plank to avoid the mud. Three men in overalls greeted him.