Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (8 page)

The lake was crowded today – people from neighboring bungalows out for a last chance at summer – and that made him less conspicuous as he hung back to fuss over the careful arrangement of blanket and towels and shoes and wristwatches while his wife and son struck out for the white raft that always seemed an impossible distance away. Nobody in a crowd this thick was likely to notice that he waded up to his nostrils before starting to tread water and only then began the desperate flailing and kicking, with tightly held breath, that enabled him at last to reach out and grasp one of the wet chains securing the raft to the steel drums beneath it. Once he had that chain he was all right; he could rest, maneuver for purchase and heave himself up, shedding water and whipping back his hair with a gasp of relief that might have been a victorious athlete’s sigh.

“Hi,” Janice said as she and Tommy made room for him. There was no way of telling whether they’d watched his journey out here.

“It’s a little chilly, don’t you think?” she said. “Look, I’m all goose pimples.” He looked, and she was. She lowered her voice. “And it’s so
crowded
. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many people here before, have you?”

No; he hadn’t.

Nor had he ever seen anything quite so lovely as the slim young girl who walked alone among the huddled bodies on the raft at that moment, murmuring “Excuse me” as they moved aside for her. She wore her bikini with a sweet combination of shyness and pride, and when she stood erect at the base of the diving board she seemed unaware of anyone watching. She took three gracefully measured steps, then both arms and one splendid thigh rose up, the thigh came down, the board shuddered under
her powerful spring and she was airborne, parting the water with almost no splash at all.

He expected a pair of heavily muscled arms to reach out and help her back to the raft, but none did: she was alone. She climbed back herself and sat shaking out her long black hair, talking to nobody. Except for a young couple absorbed in each other, the raft was filled either with children or with adults of middle-and post-middle age: bald heads and sagging flesh and varicose veins.

“Let’s go back in,” Janice said. “I want to put on some clothes and get warm, don’t you?”

“Okay. You two go on ahead. I’ll be along in a minute.”

He watched their precise four-beat crawl to the shore, watched them gather up their things and disappear into the bushes; then he gave his whole attention to the girl, who had stood up in readiness for another dive. When she came back from this one he would speak to her. He wouldn’t try to help her onto the raft – that might spoil everything – but it would certainly be easy to sit beside her as she dried off (if they were sitting, she wouldn’t see how short he was; then later when they stood up it might turn out that she wasn’t really very tall), and now as she gravely advanced to the board he allowed his mind to fill with a happy rehearsal of their talk.

“You know, you’re really very good at that.”

“Oh?” (Shaking her hair, not quite meeting his eyes.) “Well; thank you.”

“Live around here?”

“No; I’m visiting my parents. They have a little …”

“You in school?”

“No; I graduated from Holyoke last June; now I work for an ad agency in the city.”

“Which one? Thing is, you see, I’m in the same business.”

“Really? Well, it’s …”

She had executed her three dancer’s steps now, performed her wonderful thigh-flexing and her leap, and his secret dialogue raced ahead.

“… Maybe we could meet for lunch sometime.”

“Well, actually, I – yes, that might be nice.”

And later: “Oh, this has been such fun, John; I mean I’d
heard
of expense-account lunches, but I’ve never really …”

And later still, after their first brandy-flavored kiss in the taxicab downtown: “
What
street? Varick Street? Is that where you live?”

“Well, not exactly; just a little place I think you might like …”

The bubbles had long vanished from her splash, and he waited for the water to break again with her surfacing, but it didn’t. He stood up (Who cared how short he was?) and watched for her on all sides of the raft like an alert, conscientious lifeguard. Only after what seemed a full minute did he see her moving far away, her slender arms stroking as smoothly as Janice’s as she made for the shoreline and the trees, going home. And then, sitting hunched until his heart had slowed down and the ache of disappointment in his clenched jaws relaxed, there was nothing to do but slide into the cold water and fight his way home himself.

One good thing: there was plenty of bourbon on the kitchen shelf. As soon as he was dressed he got out the ice and made himself a double that was more like a triple.

“Feel like a drink?” he asked Janice.

“No thanks.” She was sitting on a tall kitchen stool in her slacks with a colander in her lap, snapping string beans for dinner, and didn’t look up. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”

“Seems late enough to me.”

And not until he’d gone outdoors for the first few greedy swallows did he figure out why he was so angry. It wasn’t because of the girl on the raft (the hell with the girl on the raft), or because Janice had asked if it wasn’t a little early, or because her crisp little snap-snap of string beans had always been an irritating sound; it was because the stool she sat on, with her tennis shoes hooked over its middle rung, was exactly like the cop’s stool at the door in Bellevue.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered aloud, and his free hand made a trembling fist in his pocket as he walked around the yard. “Son of a bitch.” Because this was the funny part, the neurotic part, the crazy part: he was still furious. Wasn’t it supposed to be true that if you could isolate the cause of an irrational anger it would go away? Didn’t everybody know that? Then why wasn’t it working? All he wanted now was to go back into the kitchen and say “Janice, get off that stool.”

“What, dear?”

“You heard me. Get your ass off that fucking
stool
.”

She’d look as astonished as if she’d been slapped; the colander might fall from her lap and if it didn’t he’d grab it up and send it clattering against the wall, spraying string beans.

“I swear to Christ if you don’t get off I’ll
knock
you off ! Is that
clear
?”

“John,” she’d say, standing up and backing away in fright, “John, what’s the – John, are you—?”

He’d get the stool then, swing it high and bring it down in so mighty a crash that its splintered legs and rungs would skate across the floor, and as she cowered against the wall the very sight of her would enrich his voice with a thunderous rage: “Whaddya think you are, some cop? Some cop in a mad-house? Huh? You think you’re some broad-assed, bull-dyke cop keeping the lunatics in line? Huh? Huh?”

By this time Tommy would be crying in the kitchen doorway, helplessly clutching the fly of his pants (as the ancient man had clutched his shrunken genitals in Bellevue and caused Spivack to say “Hey there, sexpot”), and in the momentum of his fury he would turn on Tommy too. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; you better take a good look, kid, and don’t forget it. Wise up. I’m your father. This is your mother. I’m a certified lunatic and she’s a cop, do you understand that? A
cop
! A
cop
!”

None of that happened, but only because he stood whispering it all to himself, breathing hard, with one arm tight around the trunk of a tall rustling tree in the silence of the yard.

The next morning was bright but too cool for the lake, so he did what he’d said on the highway would sure feel great: he lay on a blanket in the grass.

Well before noon he was getting up to stretch every twenty minutes or so, aiming a congenial smile at Janice in case she happened to look up from the garden, and going inside to pour a quick, deep shot of whiskey which he downed like medicine at the kitchen sink. Several times, when the drone of Tommy’s transistor radio in another room seemed to guarantee that he wouldn’t be seen, he had two or three.

After lunch he took a nap; when he awoke very late in the afternoon he struggled heavily up to sit on the edge of the bed and called Janice, and she came to sit beside him.

“Look,” he said. “I know you were planning to spend a few more days up here, but I want to go home tomorrow. The thing is I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘got to,’ dear,” she said. “George Taylor can wait.”

“Of course he can wait. It’s not him, it’s me. I just think the sooner I get back into a normal working routine the better I’ll be, that’s all.”

He knew he couldn’t expect her to say “You know best,” or anything like that, but at least she didn’t argue. She studied the leaf-mottled rectangles of sunset on the floorboards for a while; then she patted his knee and said “All right.”

He was in the kitchen, fixing the first of what he vowed would be his only two drinks before dinner, when he heard her announcing the change of plans to Tommy. “Dear, Daddy and I’ve decided to go home tomorrow. You won’t mind that very much, will you?”

And Tommy said he didn’t know; he didn’t care.

“Well, hey, stranger,” George Taylor said, lumbering around his big desk with his hand held out. “Janice said you might be laid up another week.”

“Yeah, well, you know how the flu is; sometimes it hangs on, sometimes not.” And Wilder allowed his knuckles to be crushed in welcome back to work.

“You did a great job in Chicago; got some good reports on that.”

“Well, that’s – fine.” But it was strange, too: he could remember almost nothing of Chicago.

“Like to go over some of that stuff with you today; then there’s a couple new things coming up. You free for lunch?” He was back behind the desk now, punching one of the many buttons on his complicated telephone. “Honey,” he said, “Mr. Wilder ‘n’ I’ll be wanting a table for two at Rattazzi’s, twelve thirty. Right.”

And so at twelve thirty they presented themselves to the headwaiter in the upstairs room, who called them “Gentlemen” like Charlie in Bellevue. The martinis here came in stemmed glasses, but the stems were only an inch high and the glasses as deep as tumblers. Well before George Taylor had finished his
first it was clear that he’d grown bored with going over the Chicago stuff and the new things coming up: as his voice trailed away in incomplete sentences and his eyes wistfully roved the crowded tables he seemed bored with the very idea of
The American Scientist
, with advertising, with business and with money itself – and who could blame him for that?

He was fifty-six and burly, with a healthy crop of red hair just beginning to turn grey. As vice-president in charge of advertising sales he had risen as high as he ever would in the corporate structure. His excellent salary and stockholder’s dividends accounted for less than half his income; the rest came from shrewd investments. He lived in an exclusive Rockland County village; all his children were grown and he was a grandfather of three. Another man might have turned obsessively to golf or sailing or collecting antique shotguns, but George Taylor’s avocation was young girls. More than a few of his lunches with Wilder in the past had featured stories of girls who found it impossible to leave him alone, who hounded him and begged for him and fought for his favors, of how at least one had wept in his arms all night after her formal engagement to some recent graduate of Harvard Law.

“Hell, I’m about ready for another one, aren’t you, John?” he said now, raising his empty glass.

“Yeah; I’m ready.”

And the second round launched him into a confessional monologue. “… Jesus, if you only knew what’s been going on with Sandy. I mean talk about a sweet little package of trouble; talk about a sweet little nest of rattlesnakes.” Sandy was a laughing, full-breasted girl who’d been his secretary for six months. “Bad enough when she worked for me, but it’s been even worse since I got her outa there. Told you I got her a job up at Drake and Cornfield, didn’t I? This new agency up on
Fifty-ninth? You know, one of these swinging little shops where everybody says ‘creative’ all the time; they’ve got girls running around the office barefoot; got a lotta bright young studs on the make; I figured she’d fit in there. But son of a bitch, John, she can’t quit. Worst part of it is I can’t quit. Three, four evenings a week, half my vacation – Jesus. Crazy child. Twenty-two years old and all sex. All sex. Says she can’t stand boys her own age. Says I fulfill her. Last week my wife said ‘Pajamas? What’re you wearing pajamas for?’ And you know why I was wearing pajamas? Because my back was all raw welts from where Sandy’d clawed me. Crazy, crazy child. Couldn’t stand her apartment. Had this apartment with another girl, didn’t like it because she didn’t have enough privacy with me, so I got her a new one by herself – oh, she pays the rent and everything – she’s very strict about that – but now if I don’t show up there damn near every afternoon she’s calling me on the
phone
. Then about a month ago she said ‘Drive me to Philadelphia.’ I said ‘Why should I drive you to Philadelphia?’ She said ‘Because I want to blow you while you’re doing eighty miles an hour on the Jersey Turnpike.’ ”

“And did she?”

“Damn right she did, buddy. Eighty miles an hour. Jesus.”

There was a third round of drinks and finally some food, which grew cold before they began to pick at it; then there were gulps of coffee and the promise of a long and dismal afternoon. Taylor grumbled about having to arrange the God damn December Issue Sales Conference; Wilder’s desk held an indecipherable batch of expense-account vouchers from Chicago that would somehow have to be put in order, and after that he’d be on the phone trying to set up a week’s worth of calls.

The office was better than Bellevue. Its walls were white and its lights indirect; it contained women as well as men; everybody wore clothes and nobody pleaded to be saved or screamed or
masturbated or kicked at windows – even so, there were signs of mounting desperation in every face as the day wore on, and the arrival of five o’clock was like the cop’s signal to unlock the big front door.