Jade in Aries (11 page)

Leo Ross had not returned with Henry Koberberg. Stewart Remington was no longer in sight. I caught a quick glimpse of Cary Lane, blond hair gleaming as he pirouetted in the middle of a conversational group at the far end of the room, but then people moved in the intervening space and I lost him again. David Poumon and Bruce Maundy were supposed to be here as well, but I didn’t see either of them.

There was steady traffic in both directions through the doorway that both Ross and Remington had pointed out to me, so after a minute or two I headed in that direction, skirting along the edge of the room and getting only a couple of questioning glances from people I passed. Most of the partygoers were deeply involved in their conversations or in one another or simply in their own reactions to things.

I got to the doorway finally, started through, and bumped into Bruce Maundy, who was coming out, carrying two highball glasses with iced drinks. He was in a blue turtleneck sweater tonight, black trousers, and a wide glittering silvery belt that looked like an outsized wristwatch expansion band.

His reaction was immediate; he glared at me, glared at the drinks in his hands as though they were the only things keeping him from throwing himself at my throat, glared at me again, and leaned close to my face to snarl at me through clenched teeth, saying, “I told you to stay away from me.”

“I was invited here,” I said. I preferred not to have a scene in public, it would complicate the work I had to do.

“You won’t follow me around any more,” he said, and brushed by me with more than the necessary roughness.

I watched him, hoping to see who the other drink was for, but I lost sight of him midway through the room. Also, I was blocking the doorway for other drinkers, so I continued on through into a fairly small room with yellow-and-white wallpaper, antique-looking white sideboard and hutch, and a long table against one wall covered with glasses and bottles and a couple of ice buckets. Half a dozen guests were grouped at the table, and it seemed as though every time one left with a replenished drink, another one would take his place. But none of them the people I was interested in.

I moved on, and in the kitchen I found Jerry Weissman washing glasses. Up to his elbows in dishwater. He grinned at me and called, “Hi! You just get here?”

“A few minutes ago.” The noise level was way down in the kitchen, making it possible to speak in normal tones.

Jerry Weissman held his soapy hands up for me to see, saying with humorous resignation, “Isn’t it always the way? People drink a drink halfway, put their glass down, forget where they put it, and go make another drink in another glass. So you’ve got to keep on washing glasses all the time. You could wind up with dishpan hands.”

Since he had undoubtedly volunteered for the job, and since in all likelihood it was unnecessary—there had seemed to be plenty of clean glasses still on the table in the other room—I didn’t waste time sympathizing with him, but said, “I don’t seem to be finding the people I want.”

“Really?” He frowned, puzzled. “I think they’re all here.”

“I saw Remington, and Bruce Maundy. And I caught a glimpse of Cary Lane.”

“The others are here. David is always nearby to Cary. And Leo and Henry have to be around someplace.”

“Leo was the one who let me in. Actually, Henry Koberberg is the only one I’m not sure of. I don’t know what he looks like.”

“Do you want me to come point him out?”

“If you would, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure.” He shook suds from his hands and reached for a towel, then stopped and said, “Hey, I know where he is. Upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

“Up in the library. He doesn’t really like parties, he comes because of Leo. But then he heads for whatever room has books.”

“And that would be upstairs?”

“You know the door you came in? Not the outer door, the one to the living room.”

“Yes.”

“Right next to it there’s another door. That leads to the stairs. The library’s to the back.”

“Second floor?”

“Yeah, we’ve only got the two. Stew rents out the top two.”

“Thank you.” I started for the door.

“He has a beard,” Weissman said.

“Thanks.”

I
INTERRUPTED A COUPLE
necking on the stairs. They weren’t embarrassed, and in fact both made jokes about it while I stepped over them, suddenly all knees. And one of them was so completely in female drag that I was past them before it occurred to me that both were men.

I thought,
I should feel disgusted,
but I didn’t, I felt nothing about it at all. I had as much reaction as I would have to seeing an automobile go by in the street. But then, as I neared the top of the stairs, I finally did have a reaction of sorts: surprise. At myself. I had always thought that in eighteen years on the New York police force, I had seen just about everything there was to see, but I had never before in my life seen two homosexuals kiss. And now that I had, the only reaction I could dredge up was surprise at never having seen it happen before.

At the head of the stairs I was distracted by the sounds of voices. They weren’t screaming, but they were harsh; two men were in an argument together, and there was just something about the voices that sounded as though it was a longterm argument, one that had started long ago and would not be settled now, not here, not tonight.

They were in the direction I’d been told to go. I went through a doorway, across a rather ordinary bedroom—particularly considering the rooms I’d been seeing the last few days—dominated by a king-size bed with a white spread and several heart-shaped red pillows on it, and opened a door on the other side.

It was the library. The man standing was Leo Ross, and the man seated in the maroon leather chair, bearded, stout, pedantic-looking, would surely be Henry Koberberg.

I hadn’t been able to make out any of the words through the closed door, but as I came through the doorway Ross was saying, “—never want to face up to—” at which point he became aware of me, grew very flustered, and stopped his pacing, his speech and his gestures all in mid-flow.

I said, “Excuse me. Jerry Weissman said I might find Mr. Koberberg in the library.”

Koberberg looked at me with obvious dislike that he was obviously trying to hide. “I am Henry Koberberg,” he said. He had a surprisingly light frail voice for his size and appearance.

Leo Ross had the nervousness of someone who wants to maintain the social appearances and is afraid the situation has gone beyond his control. “Henry,” he said now, with false cheeriness, “this is Mitch Tobin.”

“I know who he is,” Koberberg said. He wasn’t interested in social appearances, not really, which was why he couldn’t hide his dislike for me.

“If you’d prefer to talk with me another time,” I said, leaving the sentence up in the air, letting it tell him I intended us to have a conversation sooner or later, and waited for his response.

He considered me without pleasure, and finally nodded. “We might as well talk now. You won’t need Leo, I suppose.”

It didn’t matter to me one way or the other, since I’d already talked with Ross when I first came in. If Koberberg preferred to converse with me without his partner being present, I didn’t mind at all.

But Leo did. He took his dismissal poorly, giving Koberberg an angry look before saying to me, silkily, “I’ll probably see you downstairs later.”

“Fine,” I said.

Ross left, and a little silence settled down between Koberberg and me, mostly because Koberberg didn’t meet my eye, but sat gazing thoughtfully at the door Ross had just shut behind him. Finally he said, “This is a bad time to be a black man, of course. The first generation with dignity has the most trouble.” He offered me a wintry smile, saying, “Don’t you think so?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Until very recently,” he explained pedantically, “it was impossible for a black man to fail, because nobody expected him to succeed at anything. While the rest of us had the three choices of success or the status quo or failure, the black man only had the choices of success or status quo. Now, very suddenly, that has changed. The black man is
expected
to join the struggle for success today; success is no longer a bolt from heaven. Since he is expected to struggle, it now becomes possible for him to fail. The first generation to greet the possibility of failure, which means the possibility of success, which means dignity, has the most difficulty of adjustment.”

I wasn’t sure his reasoning was entirely seamless, but I saw no point in getting lost in a discussion that wasn’t what I was here for, so I angled the topic back by saying, “Is that why Ross was angry just now?”

“It’s at the seat, I believe,” he said, “of most of his displays of temper. He is a very petulant boy, really. I would dismiss most of what he says, were I you.”

I said, “And Jamie Dearborn? Did he suffer from the same thing?”

Koberberg’s smile hinted at reminiscence, but what he said was, “Not at all. Jamie was a success, and he knew it. The question had been answered, which is to say the transition was complete.”

I said, “Who hated him?”

Koberberg beamed, a big happy face. “Almost everybody,” he said.

“Including you?”

“He frequently irritated me. His manner was abrasive. The first generation has the most trouble assimilating success, as well. He was a poor winner.”

“What did he do to you?”

Koberberg stopped smiling, and looked down at his rather large stomach. “Do? He didn’t
do
anything. Nothing you could measure, or describe, or copy down in shorthand. He simply contrasted us for his pleasure and my embarrassment.” He raised eyes that looked as though they would have shown pain if they had shown anything. But they didn’t show anything.

The door behind me opened. I turned my head, and Cary Lane came in, his expression guileless and happy.
His
expression? How could you tell what his expression was, ever? How could you tell anything about Cary Lane, ever, by looking at the face he’d bought?

Lane said, “Am I interrupting?” He said it as though he knew he was, didn’t much care, and didn’t believe anyone would take an interruption from
him
seriously anyway.

Koberberg said, “Come in, Cary. We were talking about what a pleasant disposition Jamie had.”

“Oh, you.” Lane went—“flounced” isn’t quite the word—over to the bookshelves and pretended to read the spines.

“Now, as to Cary,” Koberberg said, “he
does
have a pleasant disposition. Don’t you, Cary?”

“I’m sweet clear through,” Lane told him, and turned his head to wink at me.

“No, he really is,” Koberberg insisted. “Because he has everything he wants. Don’t you, Cary?”

“I have my David,” Lane said, this time keeping his back to us and pretending deep absorption in book spines.

“Yes, you have,” Koberberg said pleasantly. “And you have your career. And you have your good looks.”

I found myself wondering if Lane’s face would age like an ordinary face, or if it would remain smooth and plastic and unlined forever, while the body around it gradually aged and finally died and eventually rotted. And a graverobber a thousand years from now would find bones and dust and a perfect seamless sunny smiling face.

I said to Koberberg, “Ross tells me he went to a novena Monday night.”

Koberberg nodded, pursing his lips. “He tells me the same.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.”

Lane faced us again, saying, “Oh, I
am
interrupting.”

“Not at all,” I said to him. “Did Jamie Dearborn ever do anything unkind to you?”

“To me?” The perfect face expressed astonishment. “Good heavens, what for?”

“Weren’t you competitors?”

“No no no! Because we’re both models? But our styles are entirely different! They would
never
have sent Jamie out on an assignment that would be right for me.”

“And vice versa?”

The perfect face went blank. “I beg your pardon?” He reminded me then of Carol Channing.

“Would they send you out on an assignment,” I explained, “that would be right for Jamie?”

“How could they? Do I look like a token black man?”

Koberberg barked with laughter, clapping his hands together. “Well spoken, Cary! Very good!”

I said to Lane, “Did Jamie ever go to the ballet with you?”

“Oh, no. I told you, I prefer to go alone.”

“Would you say you and Jamie were friends?”

“Oh, yes!” The face was still guileless, for whatever that was worth.

Koberberg said, dryly, “You may leave us now, Cary. If we say anything about David, I will let you know.”

Lane looked flustered. “I was just looking for a book,” he said.

Koberberg shook his head. “Cary, what on earth would you do with a book?”

Now Lane did show that he was stung. “Oh, you,” he said, “you think you’re the only one in the world with brains.”

“Not the only one,” Koberberg said. “But one of the very few.” He gave Lane his wintry smile, and waited.

Lane couldn’t figure out an exit. He made uncompleted gestures toward the bookshelves, then shrugged awkwardly and said, “Well, I’ll come back later, then. Sorry if I interrupted.” The last said with heavy sarcastic overtones.

“Maybe we can talk later,” I said to him as he went by me.

He gave me a surprised smile. “I’d like that,” he said, sounding as though he really would, and left.

Koberberg, looking at the door, said, “And that’s why Cary’s still alive and Jamie’s dead.”

“Personality?”

“Of course.”

“What was Jamie’s personality?”

“I understand he was an Aries, but I would say he had the personality of a scorpion. Not Scorpio, scorpion.”

“Are you involved in astrology, too?”

“We all are, to an extent. The complexities of the modern world, you know. The search for the authoritarian father figure becomes steadily more baroque. Our Father, Who art in Heaven. Yes? In the heavens, then, in the stars. And He will tell us what to do; all we have to do is listen closely to the music of the celestial spheres.”