Making Love

by Norman Bogner

  “Is there a work stoppage?” Luckmunn asked suspiciously. “I'll get the union down here.”

  “It's lunch hour, Mr. L.,” a burly man replied.

  “Jane, I want you to meet Mike Delaney, my foreman.”

  Greetings were exchanged, and Luckmunn, still on the plank, insisted on a tour.

  “It's pretty muddy.”

  “Can we drive?”

  “You might not get your car out.”

  He looked at the skies, a supplicant.

  “The rains.”

  “No,” Delaney said, “it's been real clear. But we're working in swamp.”

  A short redheaded man, highly excited, spittle oozing from the corners of his mouth, rushed toward them and began to shout.

  “Calm,” the builder demanded. “There's a lady present. You're a master carpenter.”

  Boards were extended on the ground, forming a pathway. The carpenter led the group to a model house, caught at an early stage, a shuddering frame, racked by the winds.

  “This is Mr. Ryan,” Luckmunn told Jane. “One of our nation's great carpenters.”

  “What's this supposed to be?” Jane asked.

  “A model home!”

  “Well, you might ask,” Ryan piped in.

  “There was supposed to be a model ready two weeks ago.”

  “Mr. Luckmunn,” Ryan began, his hands shaking with grief, “I've worked with all kinds of material. Poor, good, mediocre, but this wood is the worst. It shanks, splits, shrinks, and won't even burn.”

  “It's fireproof?” Luckmunn asked. Maybe this was a new discovery.

  “It's almost not wood,” Delaney interjected.

  “I'll admit it's a bit on the youthful side.”

  “It's an infant,” Ryan continued, speaking in a holler. “Look at that grain.”

  “I will, if you moderate your tone. This is supposed to be the living room,” Luckmunn informed Jane. “Stone fireplace, eventually.”

  “Look at the grain,” Ryan said a bit softer. Luckmunn saw strange octagonal knots. “Ever see wood with leukemia?”

  “Of course not I don't know what you're taking about.”

  “You're looking at it. This stuff a forest ranger or even Smoky the Bear would pray got caught in a fire.”

  “People screwing me on every side,” Luckmunn protested. “I'm trying to build a better world and you talk to me of lumber.”

  “It's sick wood,” Delaney insisted. “We got woodpeckers refusing to land on the roof, running for their lives, and men out with skin rashes.”

  He turned to Jane, his eyes downcast, forlorn. His mission to impress her doomed....

  “These things happen,” she said. He was close to tears.

  “Jane, I appreciate that remark.”

  Gusts of cyclonic force railed against the frail structure. The elements of nature had risen in consort to defeat him. The moment was rudely broken by Delaney.

  “And the shingles, Mr. L. We got an ad out that says we use Manville asbestos. This stuff is leftovers from linoleum, and flammable.”

  “I ordered asbestos. The best!”

  “It won't even take glue, which the wood repels in the first place.”

  “This is a nightmare.” He made a desperate effort to regain his wits. “Are we selling?”

  “Fifty deposits.”

  “That's better. All we need now are houses.”

  The group was joined by a third man who wore thick gloves and mud-splashed glasses. It was evident that he was either in cement or the victim of a highway accident.

  “I want houses provided, and that's final.”

  “So do we,” the cement man said, removing his gloves. “But the foundations are sinking into the swamps. Last week, only, I almost lost two men in quicksand. One of ‘em the plasterer, and he refused to come back.”

  “Where's the union?” Luckmunn growled.

  A tall reed of an individual came forth, reeling a bit drunkenly as he walked the plank.

  “Henry, what in God's name is going on out here?”

  “We've had the plumber die on this job, Mr. L.,” the union representative said mournfully. “And there's no heights involved. I mean if it was a bridge or somethin’ I could justify it. The secretary-treasurer is shoutin’ for my head.”

  “Is he still on salary, the dead man?”

  “I forgot to take him off,” Delaney answered.

  “Take him off the payroll. I got enough zombies here bleeding me without having to support dead people. I take it we're insured.”

  “Yes, the family'll get compensation.”

  He fluttered his hand weakly, dismissing them, and stood ghostlike staring at the wall-less shell. “Jane, what do you think?”

  “You're in trouble.”

  “What could have gone wrong?”

  * * * *

  Luckmunn sat silently on the endless drive back to the city, the specters of lawsuits haunting him, New Jersey, words never to be uttered in his presence. He cursed it, a Mafia-ridden land mass. Yet another sinister plan to decimate the Jews.

  “What are you going to do?” Jane asked.

  “Close down. I never should've left Long Island. I'll go back to Huntington or maybe even further. I've got a nice-size parcel in Suffolk. They'll appreciate me out there.”

  Luckmunn Ville, he thought disconsolately—knowing for sure that his extraterrestrial development must have been exactly what Neil Armstrong saw on the moon—a community of the future, fine for spider farming and not much else.

  He was too distressed even to notice that she'd stopped disparaging this grandoise monument to himself, his creative spirit, a venture, so he'd told his investors, that found its historical equivalent in Rome.

  “I even had the architect knock off a development that Saarinen built in Sweden,” he muttered. “That's what I had in mind for Monmouth, not cheeseboxes.”

  A victim of his own chicanery, she discovered he could be silenced, subdued by loss or profit. All this to impress her. What a waste. She'd hoped from her mother's lover for a revelation, some depth, an image that he'd project from the past that would enlighten her. Guidance he might provide only on a profit-and-loss statement. She needed direction, not financial advice. And yet in spite of himself, she liked him for what he was, an honest true model of corruption, the visionary who saw only himself.

  He'd report to his investors that La Cosa Nostra had done him in, and he'd been faced with the choice of getting hit or pulling up stakes. After all, he couldn't be a hero everytime. Some top builders also got kicked in the balls, took losses—he who runs away lives to build another day. Jane had been right. The site looked like an Indian village after a massacre. In the meantime he was still on the threshold of love and the chaos that her fortune inspired.

  “Jane, how about dinner? The least I can do is try to make this up to you.”

  “I might have to see somebody.”

  “You still have to eat.”

  “It's been an unforgettable experience as it is, Charles.”

  “I appreciate that—your calling me Charles. Who do you have to see?”

  “You're really not so bad.”

  “I don't think of myself quite that way. What do you say?” Visions of country dining amid gracious surroundings sprang into his mind, followed by serpentine leg wrappings and practical applications of Human Sexual Response, which for ten dollars had been a remarkably cheap method of gleaning inner truth.

  She could see how he could be attractive, the pestering tenacity of his approach as habit-forming as chocolates. He was beginning to wear her down. His heart on his sleeve, kick him in the teeth, he pleaded, then bite the leg off. She wondered how long Nancy had survived these tactics. Possibly fifteen minutes and two martinis, before he moved in, established a claim to her wayward affections. He clung, accumulated like dust. Impossible to get rid of, until he decided to leave, when all the time he pretended to be a satellite helplessly evolving around a greater sun.

  A refu
sal and he would moan and cajole, so she stalled him.

  “Can you call me later this evening?”

  He could not live with suspense, and he endeavored to reduce such moments to an absolute minimum or else stomach knots occurred, hampering clear thought.

  “I have fifty-seven numbers I could call, and any one of them would answer with a smile, pleased to accept my invitation. But Jane, and this is a big but, I don't want to phone them. I want to be with you. There, I've put it on the line and I feel better, even though I'm at a disadvantage,” Luckmunn stated, an octave of hope fluttering in his voice.

  “It's impossible to hate you.”

  “That's a nice positive approach if I've ever heard one.”

  He remembered having read somewhere that in the Orient, suitors faced with romantic defalcation employed the cunning trick of wearing the lady down by always turning up whenever she went outside. The foxy oriental sent candy (or the equivalent), flowers, kimonos, statuary, paintings, hard-to-get Kabuki tickets, privately printed haiku, until the girl finally yielded; then when the man had her, he really laced into her, put her on rice three times a day, hit her with a thin cherry-blossom stick until she knew the true meaning of submission and had paid him back for every free kumkwat she'd ever consumed.

  Such a plan Luckmunn had in mind. Executing it was the only problem he faced. Somehow or other he didn't think the five-pound Barricini assortment would faze Jane one bit, or tickets to Coco, or even use of his box at Shea for Jets games. He was hitting his head against the wall of another generation. Maybe drugs? Unfortuately, he had no idea where to purchase them in volume. He'd been holding on to half a marijuana cigarette for a year, secreted in his sock drawer. He'd smoked half, but failed to inhale, preferring his own smooth Havanas, three thousand of which were under lock and key at his humidor vault in Dunhill's.

  “How are you for clothes?” he inquired. “I've got some really outstanding wholesale connections if you're interested.”

  She revealed the see-through body hugger under the rabbit coat.

  “That's pretty terrific. Can I ask you were you bought it?”

  “In Paris last summer. I'm not sure. Saint Laurent or Courrèges. One of them.”

  “What do they get for a dress like that?”

  “Six or seven hundred. I'm not sure.”

  “That's a pretty penny.”

  “I didn't know you were interested in dress prices.”

  “Me, I'm interested in everything that pertains to you.”

  He remembered with great relief that she didn't need furs and diamonds. They arrived at her apartment house.

  “Jane, just say the word and Bob will tool down here for you.” There, he was talking like a Hell's Angel already, establishing a line of communication. “Or would you like me to come up with you now?”

  “No.”

  “You've got a very great directness about you, Jane. I'll call you at six, all right? And thanks for coming with me. I'd hoped, well ... forget it. Blot it out of your mind. Two hundred thousand dollars of my investors’ money down the drain. It's not a pretty sight.”

  * * * *

  She didn't see him at first; he'd stationed himself on the staircase behind her. But when she did, she felt an explosive quake inside her, the Angst of loss, a hotness in regions concealed, shortness of breath, the onset of heartburn, a buzzing in the middle ear as though an insect had flown inside and was attempting a solo to her brain. A gray film formed over her eyes, him, her life, blurred. He staggered toward her, reeking of drink.

  “Jane, could I come in for a minute?”

  “Sure, Sonny.”

  He pressed his palm against the wall for support, then blinked when the looping afterglow of late sun hit his eyes. The living room appeared larger than he remembered it, and he moved uncertainly.

  “You've started kind of early,” Jane said, as he fell into a chair. It had been a month since she'd last spoken to him, and small guilty sorrows tethered her like a harness, which only confirmed the fact that being right was a dismal consolation. “How've you been?”

  “Great, just great.”

  She sat down opposite him to avoid the sunlight, and removed her glasses.

  “Christ, it's still discolored.”

  “I'm on the mend.”

  “Well, I'm glad to hear that ... I dint mean to hit you.”

  “I know.”

  “Just frustration, Jane. Have you got anythin’ to drink?”

  “Everything but gin.”

  “Whatever you grab first is okay by me. Just straight. Got so that I can't stand ice or soda. Makes me nauseous.” He laughed self-consciously, uneasy. “An’ I always been a highball man.”

  He didn't understand. The blow meant nothing. Anger, a reflex. Infantile; she dismissed it. The collusion was unforgiveable. He had motives, thinly disguised, but she'd failed to recognize them. She'd been the more deceived, for the treachery of his actions overwhelmed her. Luckmunn at least admitted the truth, paid his money on the line. No sanctimony. A standard way to close a business deal Gratitude expressed with somebody else's body. Nothing wrong with it really so long as the ground rules were established. That was the trouble all along with everyone—her parents, Alan, Sonny; they made up the game as they went along, insisting all the time that she play on her honor.

  She brought over two glasses and a bottle of White Horse. Unable to wait, he picked up his glass, tortured by the suspicion that more talk would precede the drink. He didn't say when until the glass was half full, still concerned about impressions, but she watched him tip it back without a grimace, a sign she'd seen many times before with Nancy after she'd been drinking nonstop. The drink steadied him and he managed to look friendly and unconcerned.

  “We been outa touch too long, far as I'm concerned,” he said. “I'm sorry, honest. Could you forgive me, like it dint happen? What I said....”

  “I have,” she said, knowing that any hesitancy would merely increase his suffering.

  “That makes me feel real good. I was worried, you know. How should I explain? I got a little confused, that's all. It was too hard to take, Pudge stabbin’ me like that. Tryin’ to break us up.”

  “Who do you believe now?” she asked.

  “You, naturally,” he replied quickly, with a total lack of conviction, avoiding her eyes. The inconstancy of friendship, a hazard he could never quite accept, nor that his judgment could sustain such serious error and he himself had been the passenger of a delusion. “Left a sour taste....”

  “It's bound to.”

  He poured himself another drink, tinkled his glass pointlessly against hers even though she hadn't raised it. There was little to toast and she was afraid that the past might vanish if she moved a muscle, since magic worked only in negative ways for her.

  “Best times of my life nullified. Like I run for a TD ninety-eight yards, which I never done, but I thought about the feelin’ a lot, then to have the ref call it back ‘cause somebody got caught clippin'. If you study the game as I have, whenever a player makes a great play and there's a penalty, it's always against his team. He sighed and moved out of the sun's range. Unilluminated, his face had a pastiness and hung slack as if some microcircuit in the control center had shorted. “I sure feel better that you're not sore. It's been hell to live without you.”

  “For me, too,” she admitted, fearing contradiction would make him crumble into dust, and she'd remain with the dismembered limbs of a dream, memory a puzzle with many parts missing. She didn't feel sure of herself, or confident, and couldn't understand why she of all people should attract the weak. Could they see something she couldn't?

  “It makes everythin’ worthwhile, you forgivin’ me. I had a few problems, but now I want to celebrate. Dance or somethin'.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Nothin’ important that I can't handle,” he assured her.

  “Come on, tell me.”

  “Aw, Jane, don’ make me.”

  �
�Please.”

  “You can wheedle anythin’ outa me. It's no good for a man when he can't keep secrets from a woman.”

  He yielded before her firmness, the intensity of realized drive a weapon he could not overcome, be it instructions, a hard look, printed rules, or perseverance.

  “I got locked outa my place. A little late with rent, that's no crime. I went down to see the landlord, but he's in Florida and they got a company of snot-nosed kids with lousy college degrees who just push people aroun'. I'm sick of it.”

  “What about Wesley?”

  “He's fine. Seen him last week an’ he asked about you. He's in Jersey with my cousins. Plenty of ground for him to play, an’ the school's damn good. It's better that he's away from the West Side, ‘specially where he was, which is filled to capacity with junkies and rough trade. The fags is worse than the hookers, cause they're usin’ the park across the street for their pickups. The girls at least wait for a car to steer in. I mean it's not like a great home that he give up which he couldn't wait to get to after school. Kids aroun’ the corner are shootin’ horse on their stoops an’ there are so many of ‘em the cops can't even take pride in a bust. All in all a bad scene. So Jersey's a lifesaver. An’ he's twenty minutes away from the ocean. The place my cousin's got really comes into its own in the summer.”

  She knew he hated the separation, having lost his only friend, but this was an unacceptable conclusion. Living with the boy, looking after him, kept him straight. Now the reason had been geographically removed. He'd emptied half the bottle so casually that she hardly noticed.

  “What else?” she asked.

  “Oh, here we go again? I packed in my lousy job. Asked for a raise an’ the boss tole me to tell my story walkin', which I'm not sorry about. You give people loyalty and you get booted in the can. In the time I was there I never beat him for a nickel. Even drinks—sometimes I bought for the house—I paid half. I'm lookin’ for the right situation now. When I find it, I'll be able to ask you to marry me.”

  Unprepared for the kicker, she gulped air down the wrong pipe. He got up and patted her back.

  “Fish bone, huh?”

  “Sort of.”