Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (38 page)

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘just a thing.’

‘Don’t they run the club well?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think this Board of Governors is the only board that can do that. I just got tired of coming around to the annual meetings year after year and being handed a slip of paper containing nine names and being asked to vote for nine men. Why don’t we have twenty-one names or even fourteen and vote for nine of them? You know how long this Board’s been in office? Ten years. A lot of damned old fossils who creak and groan their way around and never step on the golf course. They ought to go off somewhere and die. We need new blood …’

A waiter brought the drinks. I didn’t look at Margaret. I knew what she’d have in her face by now. But Jonah knew that if he stopped talking, Margaret might louse up the works.

‘And I’m not running for office, either,’ Jonah said, laughing. He lifted his glass informally. ‘Happy days …’ he said.

‘And a new Board,’ Martha said.

‘And a new Board,’ Jonah said.

We all drank to that, and a man in a linen coat and gray flannel trousers, about thirty-five and bronzed, slapped Jonah on the back and held out his hand and said in a jovial voice: ‘Gimme! Lay fifty fish right in the palm of that meat hook. …’

‘Hi, Jack,’ Jonah said. ‘You know these people. …’

‘Sure. Hi,’ Jack said.

‘This is Paul Murphy. Jack Casey. Toughest eight man in the world.’

‘Hi,’ Casey said to me, shaking hands. Then he turned back to Jonah. ‘Fifty fish,’ he said. ‘You didn’t show today.’ To the rest of us, he said, ‘I leave it to you. I take him for fifty clams a day. Today he doesn’t show. Does he or doesn’t he owe me?’

Jonah laughed again. ‘I was very busy today. Conference with the old man. …’

‘My God!’ Casey said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to have to go to work?’

‘This was about something else. …’

‘Well that’s a relief,’ Casey said. ‘I count on you to pay the nurse and the gardener. And something else, just to prove that I don’t love you exclusively for your money.’ He pulled out a mimeographed petition. ‘Sixty signatures already. …’

‘That’s swell, Jack,’ Jonah said, taking the paper and looking at it. ‘I hope you explained to all these men that signing this automatically makes them outlaws?’

‘You’re telling me. One of our arthritic directors passed me in the locker-room today. He was taking the only walk our directors ever take – you know, from the card-room to the – er – thing, the johnny. He didn’t even speak to me.’

‘We’ve got ’em worried. …’

‘Yes, sir. I hear Ravenswood is going to resign.’

‘Don’t count on that,’ Jonah said. ‘When a nonenity gets in power he doesn’t give it up until it’s taken away from him.’ He folded the paper and handed it back to him. ‘Keep up the good work. …’

Casey put the paper in his pocket. ‘See you later,’ he said to Jonah. ‘See you later,’ he said to us.

‘Not too soon, I hope,’ Martha said quietly.

‘I agree,’ Margaret said. ‘After all, Jonah, this is hardly the place or the time to hold a committee meeting.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jonah said. ‘That’s why I didn’t invite him to have a drink. I was trying to get rid of him. …’

‘And very hard you were trying, too,’ Margaret said. She made a sound with her lips, a sound of irritation, and Jonah looked at her steadily and then to Martha: ‘Why don’t you and Paul dance?’

Martha took the cue, nodding. ‘Would you?’ she asked me.

‘I’d love it,’ I said, getting up.

I helped her out of her chair and we went down the corridor.

‘Are you a schoolmate of Jonah’s?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m a friend of Margaret’s,’ I said.

‘Oh!’ she said.

‘I noted that,’ I said. ‘But you did your best. …’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

We started dancing. The number was ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,’ and a tenor was singing the chorus, trying to imitate Morton Downey. Martha was not too good a dancer, like all women athletes she was unrelaxed on the dance floor, but she was nice and pleasant and looked swell in her clothes and she knew everybody on the dance floor too, which helped put me at ease.

‘You’re a marvellous dancer,’ she said,

‘I’m rusty,’ I said. ‘I used to work at dancing the way Jonah works at golf.’

‘Do you know how Jonah works at golf?’

‘Well, maybe not that hard,’ I said, smiling. ‘But I did work at it.’

‘It shows too. Are you Margaret’s house guest?’

‘Well sort of,’ I said. ‘My father was a friend of her father’s – in the old days.’

‘Here or in Washington?’

‘In Washington.’

I had to start building a background sooner or later. …

‘Are you staying long?’ she asked.

‘Permanently, I think.’

She lifted her head and showed her teeth. She had had just enough to drink to put a flush in her cheeks and become aware that she had very attractive breasts. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘We’ll see more of you then. Was Washington your home?’

‘Maryland,’ I said.

‘I knew it was the South.’

‘My damned accent.’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Yes.’

Son-of-a-bitch, this is for me, I thought. Gay people, nice people, everybody friendly and charming this was the world for me. Oedipus is dead. As the son-in-law of Ezra Dobson I would have instantaneous prestige, with none of that tedious struggle to rise above the level of mediocrity, at once I would be somebody. What did it matter if Margaret was regarded as a curiosity? I would cure that. Where was the risk then? As her husband there would be photographs and publicity, but with a mustache and Ezra Dobson for a father-in-law I would have enough disguises. What a jump this would be! Why, nobody in the history of the world had ever made such a jump

‘… don’t think too hard,’ Martha was saying.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘That song reminds me ...’

‘Did she break your heart?’

‘Nothing that romantic. It reminds me of Mississippi.’

‘Mississippi? Where’s Mississippi?’

‘I know where it is,’ I said. ‘I can find it in the dark. I spent a summer down there doing some construction work. …’

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Jonah. Martha and I stopped dancing.

‘I thought I could snap her out of it,’ he said. ‘You’d better talk to her,’ he said to me.

‘Is anything serious the matter?’ I asked.

‘She’s bored, that’s all. Wants to go.’

‘But I thought she wanted to come here,’ I said.

‘She did, but she’s changed her mind. Talk to her.’

‘Maybe I’d better speak to her,’ Martha said.

‘No,’ Jonah said quickly. ‘Let Paul.’

‘Sure. …’ I said.

I went back to the table. Margaret didn’t look up. I sat down beside her.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said.

Now she turned her head, looking at me. ‘Don’t try to cajole me,’ she said.

‘I’m not trying to cajole you,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to give you an antidote for what you think is a dull party. Why don’t you have a drink … ?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Well, let’s dance then. This is a good party if you’ll let yourself go. Listen …’ The orchestra had just gone into ‘I Surrender, Dear.’

‘ “I Surrender, Dear” ’ I said. ‘Good tune. Come on …’

I got up and pulled a little on her chair, gently, to coax her and she finally got up and I took her arm and we went back down the corridor to the ballroom.

‘Do you realize that we haven’t had a minute alone since we left the house?’ she asked.

“I know that,’ I said. ‘But what’s the rush? We’ve got left all the moments from now till the end of time. …’

She looked at me expectantly. ‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ she said. ‘What did Father say?’

‘I can’t go into all of that now,’ I said. ‘Later…’

I took her in my arms and we stepped off and then I got a surprise that I could put right at the top of a long list of surprises that had happened to me in my life. She was a fine dancer, the finest I’d ever danced with. I could feel the beat coming through her, the beat from even this uninspired music, and she had a subtle mobility that was amazing. I had never associated her with dancing.

‘You ever do any ballet?’ I asked.

‘Some…’

‘I can tell,’ I said. ‘Do you still do it?’

‘No.’

‘You’re going to take it up again,’ I said.

I let it go at that I didn’t want to tell her how good she was. She wouldn’t have believed that I was sincere anyway.

‘What did Father say?’

‘Not here…’

She slowed me down before an open French door and dropped the beat.

‘Oh, let’s dance,’ I said. ‘That was pretty good. …’

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘But you’re a good dancer,’ I said. ‘No crap. You’re good.’

The music’ll be here all night,’ she said.

I pushed the screen door open to the sky. Off in the distance I could see the lights of the city, far, far away farther away than that and I had a quick thought of Holiday and the others who were waiting. … Yes, I could make this work. Holiday and Jinx, I would have to kill to eliminate the threat of blackmail, and perhaps Mason and his brother-in-law. Mandon, I could handle. Webber and Reece, I had nailed to the cross. If any of them wanted to play at being recalcitrant, there was always that fascinating acetylene torch and its twenty-three hundred degrees of blue flame that could melt you down into a little puddle of fat. There always is some debris when you move into a new house. …

We walked down the stone steps and across the floodlighted practise putting green where several men were putting, and down a gravelled walk, bordered with zinnias, and across the back of the first tee. There was a bench on the tee.

‘There’s a bench,’ I said. ‘We can talk there.’

‘I know a better place,’ she said.

‘Before dinner, even?’ I said.

‘It’s buffet, you know. The food’ll be there all night, too. …’

The walk sloped downwards as it left the tee and the border of zinnias, and now a plumbago hedge began, drooping its tendrils so far out over the walk that we had to push them aside. The hedge badly needed trimming, but the greens chairman here, like greens chairmen at almost all other golf clubs probably knew more about selling cement than he did about being greens chairman.

‘Where is this better place?’ I asked.

‘Down here. We’ve got time …’

Well, I thought…

She put her arm around my waist and we went on, down a grassy declivity flattened out, and she led me across a small footbridge into another fairway, a parallel fairway, separated from the one we had just left by a small dry ditch. This, I thought is a water hazard. You can lay out with a one-shot penalty. … It was getting darker as we moved away from the glow, and the music and the wonderful party sounds were barely audible. …

We walked on. …

There was very little glow left now, and I could hear the wonderful party noises only when a sound wave dipped. We had gone a long way. This must be a par five we were playing maybe a par six. Was there such a thing as a par six? Maybe in the old country… Somewhere ahead I heard the sounds of a sprinkler, the whining ph-z-z-z-z-z-z-z of the pressurized stream and then the jerky plop-plop-plop-plop-plop as a brass flange flipped up and oscillated in the path of the stream making a coarse spray, a very ingenious invention and then I was vaguely aware that something was wrong with this, and after a few more steps I realized what it was: there was no smell of wetness here. There should be a smell of wetness here and there was none. I told myself that this was impossible, this was contrary to natural law, there was a smell of wetness there all right, but I just didn’t choose to smell it. I told myself that I had just been looking for a reason to scare myself into going back, and that this was it. But why should I try to scare myself into going back? What kind of intellect was that?

But there wasn’t any smell of wetness here. I wasn’t hypnotizing myself. I wasn’t trying to scare myself, goddamn it, there just wasn’t any smell of wetness.

I stopped.

‘Let’s go back,’ I said.

‘There’s a lake just ahead – and an oak tree,’ she said.

‘Let’s not get ourselves into another of those morbid moods tonight,’ I said.

‘Are you frightened?’

‘Frightened? No, I’m not frightened.’

‘Then why are you carrying a pistol? That is a pistol, isn’t it?’

She had her hand on the gun in my hip pocket.

‘Yes,’ I said. That’s a pistol!’

‘Why are you carrying it?’

‘It’s legal. I have a permit.’

‘Why?’

‘Protection.’

‘Against what?’

‘Hold-ups. I generally carry a lot of money with me.’

‘That’s not the only reason, is it?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘How long have you been carrying a pistol?’

‘Only a couple of days …’

That was a lie – and it jolted me. Not the lie – the implication. Not the implication the fact. I had been carrying pistols of some kind ever since I had been in school, and now, for the first time, I knew why. So that was why. The syllogism was very simple, but that meant nothing now. That was part of the dross that had been burned away.

She looked at me and I saw her eyes and her lips and the whiteness of her face and the blackness of her hair, which I had not seen inside, in the light, but which I saw now, out here, in the dark; I saw that and more. I had been seeing that and more ever since I had met her, a little more every time I had thought of her; and I smelted the
Huele de Noche
again and I knew this was why I had not smelled the wetness when there was wetness there – not smelled anything then: the house was being made ready for new occupants – digging, digging, this ceaseless digging; how far could you dig before you had to stop? What else was there to uncover?

She took my hand and led me on into the blackness, the somnambulistic blackness, into a grove of beeches: and this I had done before too, my hand in the little old lady’s, trembling at every step with the ridiculous fear of a child, past the apple tree that, in the blustery wind of a winter night, swayed against the stormy sulphurous sky, looking like a trampling elephant; past the smokehouse from the roof of which my younger brother had accidentally fallen to his death (of not even that accident could I be sure now, we were playing on the slanting roof, playing…); past the chicken-house with its unearthly wing-rustling, and finally to the little cloaca with its open door in which the outlines of three stars had been cut through; and then I saw it, looming in front of me there in that grove of beeches, the cloaca with the open door and the three stars, and my heart dipped like a silken sail in a hurricane and spilled the old wind into my lungs; but my intellect and my logic told me that this could not be, this was like the wetness that was there but that I could not smell, this was not here, but I saw. This was a hallucination, an embryonic figment, I was too susceptible this night, the conscious and the unconscious were too parallel, like the fairways, there was no intersection of the two, no scission; this was a symbol, a dream phantasy and I put out my hand to touch it and it was wood
This was where the whole thing had started, at the cloaca. I was one and a half years old, maybe two years old, and I had gone with my grandmother, only then I thought she was my mother; I did not then know what had happened to my father and mother. My grandmother always wore a great and capacious black skirt that dragged the ground, the hem of which was always dirty (that skirt is my earliest memory): and this night, while waiting outside the cloaca for her, I heard a loud commotion in the stable near by, whinnying and bellowing and then the sudden splintering of the wooden railings and I screamed, falling to the ground in fright, and the next thing I knew I was covered completely with that great capacious black dress as she sought to protect me
…
this started innocently enough, but it got to be a game with us, and then I began to depend on it to hide from my grandfather when he tried to find me to punish me because never would he look for me here, never would he suspect her of concealing me
…
and all the time I was growing up and getting bigger and wondering about things, but I never found out until one day when I was six or seven years old why animals sometimes whinny and bellow and break down fences, and then I saw my grandfather and the animal doctor castrate a ram
…
and other things I began to see too and then that day, that awful day when my grandmother took me on a picnic, letting me ride on the other side of the side-saddle, and we had our picnic and when she got up to go to the spring I screamed, pretending that I was terrified. I started moving towards her on all fours, screaming all the time, and she ran back and I crawled under and hid and finally started exploring her legs and she snatched the dress from over me and said angrily: Your grandfather shall punish you for this; he will beat you, he will do to you what he did to the ram; and I was genuinely terrified now and when she kept threatening me, I pushed her and she fell down, and when she shouted at me that I would be fixed good, I picked up a big rock and hit her, not to kill her, just to keep her from telling my grandfather and having him do to me what he did to the ram
…
I ran all the way home. She is dead, I said, she is dead. She fell off the horse, I said, she fell off the horse. The horse bolted and she fell off, I said, and I stuck to that. And nobody ever knew but I
and I felt it; it was wood and it was there.