Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (21 page)

This was bad. If she started comparing him with Frank Lacy he might not survive the night. He got out of bed and put on the terry-cloth robe she had bought him for Christmas, and the feel of the robe alone was enough to brighten him. “Let’s change the subject,” he said. “In fact let’s not talk about anything at all. Let’s sing.”

“Sing?”

“Sure. If there’s one thing I know better than old-time movies it’s old-time songs. Didn’t I ever tell you that? Wait. We’ve got to do this right.” At the bathroom mirror he doused and combed his hair and made sure the lapels of the robe were straight, and then he was ready. “You ready?” he called. “Turn on the light, then, and get this.” Only when he’d heard the click of the light switch did he throw open the bathroom door and advance on her with a tricky little dance step, in full song:

“But that’s
marvelous
,” she said when she’d finished laughing and clapping her hands. Throughout the performance she had sat
up in bed and hugged her knees like a little girl, and now her face was radiant. “You even sing well. I mean you don’t just carry a tune, you really
sing
.”

“Sure.” At least she wasn’t close enough to feel the rapid beating of his heart. “I wasn’t a choirboy for nothing.”

“Sort of a light, funny Eddie Fisher,” she said, “or a heavier Fred Astaire. Listen. Go back in there and come out again. Sing me another.”

“Nope. The secret of any entertainer is knowing when to stop. Anyway it’s time to – you know. Go home.”

“Oh, please. Will you promise to sing another one next time?”

“Sure. I got a million of ’em.”

He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, staring at his empty shoes, and the shape of his back must have been eloquent because her arms came tenderly around him from behind and her fingers played with the hair of his chest.

“Poor baby,” she said. “I know you’re feeling terrible about your boy.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just – hell, you know. Going home, is all.” Because going home meant riding for miles on the IRT with the city’s lost and beaten night people, with nothing to do but remember nights long ago when a plain, pleasant girl named Janice Brady had said she loved the Brooklyn Bridge and the Staten Island Ferry, and because “Columbus Discovered America” was the best of the many, many songs that had helped win Janice Brady’s heart.

He did begin to spend more time at home – he told Janice he would cut down to two or three AA meetings a week, instead of five – and though it meant less time with Pamela it made him feel like a responsible father. Twice he left work early to take
Tommy to ball games (wasn’t that the kind of thing responsible fathers did?), and both times, nursing an after-game beer in some clamorous eating place near the stadium, he tried to draw him out.

“How’s summer school going, Tom?”

“I don’t know; all right, I guess.”

“Think you’ll do a little better next year?”

“I don’t know.”

Once he asked him about the psychiatrist – ”You getting along all right with Dr. Goldman?” – before he realized that this was an invasion of privacy, and he amended it quickly: “I mean, you know, you don’t have to tell me about that if you don’t want to,” while Tommy soberly chewed his hot dog and kept his own counsel.

“Does he ever talk to you about the psychiatrist?” he asked Janice.

“Not a word – and I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one. What do you think?”

Seeing Pamela only two or three nights a week did make a difference: every time, it seemed, she was full of news that had nothing to do with him.

“I had lunch with Chester Pratt today,” she said one night, “or rather I had lunch with Jerry and he brought Chester Pratt along. He’s really very nice when he’s sober.”

“Oh?”

“Jerry made something of an ass of himself, as you can imagine – trying to hog the conversation, calling him ‘Chet’ all the time – but when Pratt did get a word in edgewise I thought he was charming. Very intelligent and witty and – well, charming, that’s all.”

“He writing another book now?”

“No, that’s the sad part. He says he can’t afford to start a new
book yet; he has too many debts. He owes money to his ex-wife, and he owes back taxes and I don’t know what-all. He’ll have to get some kind of job; it seems an awful shame.”

“Why? Most people work for a living.”

“I know; I just meant –
you
know. It’s a shame because he’s so terrifically talented. Of course you haven’t read the book; you wouldn’t understand.”

“Well, if he’s going to hold down a steady job he’d better go easy on the booze.”

“Oh, that’s silly; just because he was drunk at Julian’s party that time doesn’t mean – besides, you drink a lot, and you hold down a job.”

“What kind of job is he looking for?”

“He said he might go back into public relations – he’s done that before – or he might look for work in Hollywood. He said both prospects were equally bleak.”

But Chester Pratt settled for neither of those things. Two or three weeks later Wilder was waiting in Dr. Brink’s outer office, flipping through a copy of
Newsweek
, when he came across this item on the “Periscope” page:

Justice Department

After months of searching, the Attorney General has found a new speechwriter. He is 37-year-old novelist Chester Pratt
(Burn All Your Cities)
, who was recommended for the job by Harvard critic T. J. Whitehead, a Kennedy intimate.

“I know,” Pamela said that night. “Jerry told me. Jerry said Pratt says he’ll be the only man in the New Frontier who’s in it for the money.”

That was the first of several nights when she failed to respond to the urgency of his lovemaking – ”I’m sorry, John, I guess I can’t
tonight” – and the following week she called him at the office to say she wasn’t feeling well; she was coming down with the flu or something; she would call again as soon as she was better.

He could taste the end of the affair like bile as he went about his business routine and endured his time at home, and he tortured himself with wondering where he’d gone wrong. It now seemed clear that things had never been quite the same since his breakdown at Marlowe – and was that so surprising, after all? How could any healthy girl be expected to care for a mentally unbalanced man?

On two or three nights he really did go to AA meetings; other nights he drifted from bar to bar, or sat with Janice and did his level best to hold up his end of the endless conversation about their son. One night Tommy was so expansive at the dinner table, telling the plot of a television comedy he’d liked and interrupting himself with laughter, that Janice was heartened.

“… Oh, I
am
beginning to see daylight in all this, aren’t you?”

But the next night she was in darkness again: the first report card from summer school had come in, and Tommy was still failing the same two subjects.

When Pamela was well again her voice on the phone was more polite than eager, but even so the knowledge that he would see her tonight was bracing; it helped him sit quietly through a dinner with the Borgs.

“… Maybe
you
could have a talk with him, Paul,” Janice said the minute Tommy’s door was shut for the night.

“Why me?”

“Because he loves and admires you so; he’s always thought of you as a kind of uncle, ever since he was tiny.”

“Well, that’s nice to hear, Janice, but I think you’re exaggerating. In any case I don’t see much value in ‘having a
talk’; I agree with John there. Seems to me you’re doing all you can; the only thing now is to wait and hope for the best.”

“Paul’s wonderful with children,” Natalie Borg said. “I’ve always said he would’ve made a wonderful father, if only …”

There was nothing she relished more than a chance to talk about her youthful hysterectomy; and Wilder sat through it all sipping coffee and congratulating himself on his patience.

“If you people will excuse me,” he said at last, “I have a meeting to attend.”

All the way uptown he tried to decide what song he would sing tonight. He’d used up “You’re the Top” and “I Get a Kick Out of You” and some of the other standards; besides, they weren’t so effective because Pamela knew all the words. Only when he was in the elevator did the perfect song occur to him: an old and little-known Al Jolson number called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” He almost giggled to himself, picturing the way he’d deliver it in the terry-cloth robe.

“There’s something we have to discuss,” she said, and from the way she said it he knew it wouldn’t be a discussion at all. She had something to tell him – something he wouldn’t like – and he had better shut up and sit down and listen. He did, nursing his whiskey as if it were the last drink in the world, while she walked around and around the room in her working clothes with her arms folded across her chest. “I’m moving,” she said. “I’m quitting the job and I’m giving up the apartment and I’m leaving New York, probably for good. It does mean the end of things between you and me, and I’m sorry, but we always knew it couldn’t go on forever, didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” he said, surprised that his voice was low and calm. “Yeah, I guess we always did know that.” He wanted to spring to his feet in fury and say “Who’s the man?” or to go down on
his knees and throw his arms around her thighs and beg her to stay, but he did neither of those things because it seemed important to play the scene her way. And one small, irrational part of his mind suggested that if he did this well, if he was “civilized” and kept his emotions under control, she’d be so impressed that she might still change her mind. He took a careful sip of whiskey before he spoke again. “Where you going?”

“To Washington.” She was sitting down now, tapping the ash from her cigarette, and she was clearly so relieved to have the worst of it over that she told a little too much. “I have a friend there who thinks I might qualify for a job in the Justice Department, and it’s too good an opportunity to—”

“Wait a second. It’s Chester Pratt.”

“What if it is?”

The hell with being civilized; the hell with everything. He was on his feet and bearing down on her in a jealous rage. “How long have you been sleeping with that bastard? Huh? I asked you a simple question: how long?”

“John, I don’t see any point in losing your temper. There’s really—”

“How
long
, God damn it. Answer me!”

“It’s not a question that deserves an answer.”

And suddenly he passed from anger to an agony of selfabasement and pleading: “Oh, baby, don’t go.” He touched her shoulder with one hand. “Please don’t go. I need you; I need you….” He had done both the things he’d sworn not to do – he had shouted and he’d begged – and there was nothing left.

“I knew this would be difficult,” she said, “but you can’t bring back something that’s over. We had some good times together, but it’s – well, it’s over, that’s all.”

All that mattered now was to get out of here before she asked him to leave, and he managed it in a kind of stupor that might
have passed for dignity. “Okay,” he said, moving for the door, and he stood with one hand on the knob for ten beats of his heart, giving her every chance to call him back, before he said “So long” and let himself out.

Then he was in the Irish bar with the tall picture of President Kennedy on the wall (and maybe Bobby was shorter, but it couldn’t be denied that there was something very tall about all the Kennedys and all their men, and all their women). He was drinking double bourbons and staring into the mirror at his Alan Ladd haircut and his painfully familiar Mickey Rooney face, wondering how it would be possible to go on living.

He had no one to confide in but Brink.

“There’s been a big change, doctor. I’ve lost my girl. She’s gone to live with Bobby Kennedy’s speechwriter.”

“Well, that’s upsetting, of course,” the doctor said, writing quickly in his file folder. “Still, if nothing else it means your life is a good deal less complicated now, right? Look on the bright side.”

There wasn’t much to see on the bright side.

He was glad when Tommy labored through summer school with passing marks and rejoined his class in the seventh grade, and when his talk at dinner seemed to indicate that he did have friends, but he couldn’t share in Janice’s sense of triumph. If Tommy was a stranger to them now it was only the beginning: he was sure to grow more and more inscrutable as he moved into adolescence. Thirteen, fifteen, seventeen – they wouldn’t be able to relax until he was twenty-one and getting out of college, and by then he’d be a man with little if any allegiance to home.

It was clear now that Julian would probably never finish the picture – when he tried to call him once the operator said his number was no longer in service – but it wasn’t hard to put the whole thing out of his mind. It seemed preposterous that he had ever entertained the idea of producing a movie; with Pamela
gone there was no longer any point in it, and he let it all drift away.

Early in the fall he had an affair with a girl who worked for one of his accounts, but she didn’t please him because she wasn’t at all like Pamela. She laughed all the time and talked through her laughter; her skin was rough and there were wrinkles in the backs of her thighs. She diverted him for three or four nights on Varick Street; after that he stopped calling her up.

He did very well at his job – before the end of the year he brought two new European car advertisers into the magazine; his earnings were almost twice those of any other salesman, and George Taylor called him “indispensable” – but it gave him no pleasure.