Blind Date (31 page)

“What pretext would you find for me?” she asked, challenging.

“To come have a drink. To learn how a lonely bachelor can work, live, and entertain a lady all in two rooms.” He smiled.

She took his arm. “A perfect pretext,” she said as they crossed the street.

In his apartment, she admired how economically he had used the space. He pointed out the
Amerykanka,
his convertible sofa, which he kept in his office room as a souvenir, and told her about the predicament that the prospect of opening it had once presented. He jokingly wondered how she would react.

She laughed and said that anything mechanical made her nervous.

He looked at her. Her face was round, unmarred by a single wrinkle. She had a narrow nose, delicately outlined lips, and wide-set blue eyes, which gave her an innocent expression. Levanter suggested that they go for a ride in his car. There was little traffic, and in minutes they had passed the lights of the George Washington Bridge and were climbing up the steep, dark lanes of Fort Tryon Park to the Cloisters, a millionaire's whim brought
from another time and another place. Levanter drove her back downtown through Harlem, which Madeleine had never seen before.

As he stopped the car in front of her building, Madeleine said, “Mrs. Kirkland or I will phone you about that dinner.” She hesitated. “Meanwhile,” she said, reaching into her jacket pocket, “I stole this from your apartment. A memento.” She opened her hand, but he could not see in the dark. “It's a turnstile token. To enter one of the Alpine cable cars, no doubt,” she exclaimed.

The metal caught the light. “It's a New York subway token,” he said, laughing. “There's nothing like it in Mrs. Kirkland's collection.”

She leaned toward him and quickly kissed him on the cheek, then ran to the building's entrance. A doorman rushed to open the door for her.

Two days later, he received a card from Mrs. Kirkland. She apologized for missing him the other evening and invited him to dine with her and a few friends on Saturday. A delicate postscript indicated black tie, and Levanter promptly sent his old tuxedo to be pressed.

The maid showed him to the library. Madeleine Saxon left a group of guests and came to greet him. Levanter asked whether Mrs. Kirkland was again not well enough to come down. Before Madeleine could answer, the butler offered a tray of drinks and she stepped aside.

One of the guests turned to talk to Levanter, politely asking how long he had known Mary-Jane. Levanter was about to tell him he hadn't met her yet when Madeleine introduced another couple.

“I enjoyed reading your piece in
Investor's Quarterly
,” the man said. “Mary-Jane sent it to me. First-class work.”

Levanter bowed slightly. “I have been looking forward to talking to Mrs. Kirkland tonight,” he exclaimed. “I hope she will be well enough to dine with us.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Well enough? Why? Isn't she well?” He turned to Madeleine Saxon, who was talking with some
guests nearby. “What's wrong, my dear?” Madeleine turned around. “Mr. Levanter wonders whether you're feeling all right? How do you feel, Mary-Jane?” He took her hand and kissed her fingers with the fondness of an old friend. She moved closer and stood between him and Levanter.

“How nice of you to worry about me, George,” she said, patting Levanter on the arm. “Ever since we met, George has been worried about my age. Haven't you, George?”

Levanter was speechless and felt he was blushing.

Dinner was announced. In the dining room, the round table was set for twelve. Levanter was seated at Mary-Jane's right. She kept glancing at him, laughing quietly, letting him know how pleased she was with her practical joke. In a pale pink evening gown, which masked her large hips and accentuated her slim waist and sloping shoulders, and with a simple square-cut diamond on a fine silvery chain hanging between her small breasts, she looked almost beautiful.

During dinner, as he talked to the other guests, he felt Mary-Jane's eyes upon him. When he chatted with her and she leaned close to him, he could tell that her friends were scrutinizing him and the butler and waitresses were exchanging anxious glances.

Occasionally, he found himself staring at the paintings that covered the walls, trying to sort out his discomfort: he was unable to determine whether he resented seeing such masterpieces in a private home, where the public could not share them, or whether he was simply envious that he did not own them himself.

After dinner, as coffee and liqueurs were being served in the living room, Mary-Jane took Levanter aside. “When I said I was with Mrs. Kirkland, I merely added the ‘with,'” she whispered. “Saxon was my maiden name. Madeleine was a name I used as a child with my pen pals! I hope you're not angry.”

Levanter had gotten over the embarrassment of being tricked. He smiled at her. “You look stunning tonight,” he said softly.

She studied him for a moment. “I benefit from the Kirkland setting,” she murmured, bowing her head.

At midnight, Levanter was leaving with the last of the guests.

Mary-Jane stopped him. “If I were a Russian actress, I would ask you to come see the rest of my apartment,” she said. “This would be a pretext to get you to stay for a drink.”

“What pretext could you find as Mrs. Kirkland?”

“To stay and see how a widow can live all alone in an old Park Avenue triplex.”

After the others had left, Mary-Jane showed him through the maze of rooms with obvious pride. The third floor of the triplex was her personal domain: her bedroom all in pink taffeta, two dressing rooms, a bathroom with gold-plated fixtures, and a small pink-marble swimming pool.

Levanter studied the photograph of William Kirkland on the night table while Mary-Jane went into a dressing room. She came back wearing a long purple silk robe that made her look taller and more stately. She phoned downstairs for tea and sandwiches.

“Mr. Kirkland was so much older than you,” he remarked.

“Bill was in his early seventies when we met,” she said.

She sat down at the edge of her bed and kicked off her shoes. Levanter was sitting on a small bench at the foot of the bed.

“I had just started working for the advertising department,” she said, “and he came in to approve some copy. The attraction was instantaneous — and mutual.”

“How do you explain it?” asked Levanter.

“For Bill, it was my youth,” she reflected, “and, in spite of it, my maturity.” She smiled. “For me, it was his power. We began meeting secretly. We wrote to each other every day, and used outside messengers to deliver the letters.”

She stared at the photograph, then turned to Levanter.

“When we met, Bill was married and had two grown sons, both in their forties, both on the board of Kirkland Industries. Within a year, Bill divorced his wife — with the largest settlement anyone had ever heard of. By the next year, we were married.”

The maid brought the tea tray.

“As a husband and as a corporate executive, Bill was always a very proud man,” Mary-Jane continued. “He saw himself as
guardian of Kirkland Industries, not its master, and as master of his family, not its guardian.”

She glanced at the photograph.

“One day, his sons made some insulting remarks about me. Bill summoned the corporate secretary and a sworn-in stenographer and asked his sons to repeat the remarks they had made to the Chairman of the Board of Kirkland Industries. These men, both about twice my age then, told their father, ‘You made a fool of yourself when you married that child whore!' Bill immediately assembled the rest of the board, and his proposal that the two of them be dismissed passed unanimously. Bill's sons were sure their father would reverse the decision, so they didn't take any legal action or look for jobs with a competitor. Both apologized to me, and I begged Bill to put them back on the payroll. He asked me never to mention their names again.”

She stopped, apparently upset by her memories.

“Shortly before that final board meeting, I took a chance and summoned them. I hardly recognized them — they both looked aged and haggard, and one was half drunk. I told Bill his sons had come to see him. ‘I have no sons,' he said. ‘My company has no business with those it has fired.' He waved me away. When I told the sons, the two aging men, they wept in front of me.”

In another room a clock began to chime. Levanter looked at his watch. Mary-Jane lay back against the pillows, her legs thrust forward, her knees spread. There was an aura of gentle sensuality about her, and he was reluctant to leave.

He stood up, breaking the mood.

“Can't you stay?” she asked.

He slowly focused on the opulence of the surroundings. The thought of making love to her had never quite taken shape in his mind. Becoming her lover would be simple; yet he was afraid of overstepping his limits.

“I want to stay,” said Levanter. “But I can't help wondering whether I would want to stay if you were Madeleine Saxon.”

“I will never be Madeleine Saxon.”

“Would I stay without the benefit of this setting?” he asked.

“You'll never know,” she said quietly.

He did not move or change his expression as he stood examining his emotions. She was open to him, all frontiers gone, waiting for a sign or a word.

Mary-Jane suggested they get married. As soon as she said it, Levanter felt almost fearful that marrying her would be a step toward creating their own fate. A superstition lingered in him that if they did so chance might turn from a benefactor to the ultimate terrorist, punishing both of them for trying to control their own lives, trying to create a life plot. This fear, he thought, must be a remnant from his childhood, when he had read one sentimental novel after another, assuming that if novels reflected life and he could easily detect their plots without even reading each incident, then life must also have a plot that could be detected.

They were on
The Night Flight
on their way back to New York from a vacation in Mexico. Mary-Jane said that if he agreed, they ought to marry in a city that did not require a license and blood test in advance, as she did not want the press and gossip columnists alerted. They should marry soon, she felt, because she was tired of hiding the fact that they lived together and of taking separate suites when they traveled — all to preserve the dignity of the Kirkland name.

She went to the galley to check on lunch. Levanter looked down through the window. If chance were going to punish him for marrying Mary-Jane, he wondered, wouldn't it have punished him already for living with her for almost two years? Why should he try to guess his future, when the outcome of the imminent moment was often uncertain?

He recalled a morning when he was feeling most confident about his image in the home of his wealthy mistress. He was shaving, naked, in Mary-Jane's bathroom. He dropped the razor blade and it got stuck between the marble counter and the wall. He couldn't reach it from above, so he crawled under the wash basin, headfirst, but still couldn't find it. To get a better look, he turned onto his
back, raised his legs, and pressed his feet against the underside of the basin to push his head as far up behind it as he could. He found the blade. But he couldn't get out. He had squeezed himself in so tightly that his legs were jammed against the underside of the basin. He needed someone to pull his feet from another angle. Mary-Jane had already left for an early appointment. He shouted for the butler, but from under the basin his voice did not carry well. Mary-Jane's personal maid, an elderly Frenchwoman, came to the bathroom. The instant she saw his bare body, she exclaimed, “Pardon, Monsieur,” and disappeared. He screamed again, but no one came. He had the feeling that the maid had gone off to warn the other members of the household staff that Madame's beau was performing some formidable exercise in the nude and ought not to be disturbed. He was folded up under the basin for hours. Only at midday, when Mary-Jane returned, was he rescued.

He phoned the pilot, asking him to radio for information on the nearest city on their route that had a jetport and permitted marriage without prior application. In a few minutes, the pilot had an answer: Birmingham, Alabama, less than two hours away.

Lunch was served. Levanter told Mary-Jane they could get married in Birmingham. She summoned the pilot to land in Birmingham.

Mary-Jane and Levanter went to visit an old friend of Bill Kirkland's, a successful businessman who had recently retired to the privacy of his sumptuous Long Island estate, Blackjack.

They traveled by helicopter and landed on a grass-covered pad. Their host came out to greet them and to show his atomic shelter to Mary-Jane and her foreign-born husband. As the helicopter took off, clearing the pad, the man pressed a button in a small electronic device hooked onto the belt of his trousers and a steel plate under the pad slid sideways, revealing the entrance to an underground passage. As they walked down the stairs, the plate automatically sealed above them, activating equipment to purify the air and guard against the transmission of radioactive dust.

Descending the staircase, they passed through an elaborate systern
of doors and compartments. The host explained that he could enter his shelter through several such entrances in the house and elsewhere on the property.

Levanter was expecting something similar to the bomb shelters he had spent so many days in as a child in Eastern Europe at the outset of World War II. Instead, he and Mary-Jane and their host entered a faithful replica of one of Manhattan's most fashionable restaurants, complete with bar, rows of round tables, high-backed chairs with red leather seats, wall mirrors — even the tablecloths and cutlery were duplicated to the tiniest detail.

The host pressed a button, and part of the wall slid sideways, revealing another staircase. The lower level, he explained, consisted of several bedrooms, bathrooms, a library, a dining room, and a kitchen. A generator constantly supplied fresh air, instruments monitored radioactivity levels within a twenty-mile radius, and a series of radio and TV monitors and transmitters maintained contact with the world outside and provided a means of communication within the shelter.