Late in the Season (23 page)

“It’s some deal the two of you worked up,” Jonathan suddenly said, and as suddenly believed it.

“Me and your teenager?” Dan seemed amused. “When? When did we have the chance to?”

“I don’t know when.” Jonathan cast his thoughts back. Hadn’t she awakened him for Dan’s call last night? They could have talked then.

“What about when she picked up the phone?”

“Last night?” Dan said, sincerity galore.

Now Jonathan was convinced of it. “Sure, last night. I can just hear you two. I can hear you operating on her, she’d be half asleep, half frightened of you anyway.”

Dan lifted his coffee cup and tossed down the dregs grandly. “Do you think I actually
expected
to find some girl answering our phone? All but six words we exchanged were an attempt to establish the fact that I hadn’t reached a wrong number.” He stood up. “Want a coffee? It clears up muddy thinking, you know.”

Jonathan felt defeated by Dan’s reasoning, which made far more sense than his own rather foolish accusation. Of course that must have happened. At first. But that still didn’t mean Dan hadn’t the opportunity to browbeat Stevie. Unless she got away as fast as she realized who was calling? Which made sense too.

“Well?” Dan asked. “Coffee?”

Jonathan looked around at the plastic tables and sordid customers. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be having this conversation either.

“Let’s go.”

When they had ascended to the street, Jonathan felt the oppressive warmth and incredible humidity. The air was so thick and heavy you could reach out and grab it—grab it, that is, if you wanted to get dirty, oily. Every car or bus that passed them on Eighth Avenue sent out exhaust fumes that were instantly assimilated into the already semigelatinous air, making him gag. This same weather had been a yellow fog at Sea Mist, so cool he and Stevie had to put on windbreakers at the train station only a few hours ago. It seemed so long ago, suddenly. In such another place.

Dan found them an air-conditioned cab and they rode in silence up to their apartment. Passersby seemed stunned by the heat, moving slowly, purposelessly, as though they were zombies. At the end of the ride, the cabbie and Dan spoke about the heat wave that had uncharacteristically struck the city in late September. For the first time since he’d returned, Dan’s speech had all of the British inflection Jonathan had heard increasingly in their telephone conversations. Even the driver thought so. When they got out and Dan paid him, the cabbie asked if they were Australian.

The apartment looked small—of course it would, after being in the outdoors for months, with the ocean and the bay’s seven miles to the horizon on either side, as the real walls to life in Sea Mist. Big as the apartment was, it seemed small, dark, oppressive.

Dan immediately went around turning on the air-conditioning outlets in each room; their soft humming filled up the place. Jonathan looked up the Lockes’ phone number in their address book, but only found the one for their Sea Mist home listed. He felt defeated again. He flipped the pages of the address book, hopping from page to page, trying to remember the names of some of their other neighbors. All he could recall was their former neighbor, Cass, who recently sold her house to a South American couple who had visited it once in July.

Dan was back in the living room by the time Jonathan had begun to dial.

“Why don’t you try the Sea Mist fire department? They must have all the residents’ phone numbers, no?”

Jonathan followed that suggestion. But he reached a recording that only gave him an emergency number. No one was at the fire house. It was a volunteer unit anyway, drawn by an elaborate fire alarm system in the community. Another little defeat. So, he dialed the police station, which also gave him an emergency number, plus the phone number of the main police force station on the mainland. No sense trying them.

It was dark outside when he tried to reach Cass for the third time without any success. Daniel was in the kitchen when Jonathan finally hung up the phone. He must have been talking to someone in London—his producer at the BBC. Daniel was being calm, firm, vaguely explanatory.

“What do we have to eat?” Jonathan brushed past where Dan sat astride a tall stool.

Dan said “Ta” and hung up. “Nothing, unless you can whip something gourmet out of ketchup, a box of poppers, and dead tonic water.”

Jonathan closed the refrigerator door. As he walked out of the kitchen, Dan spun on the stool and grabbed him around the waist. “Hey, babe, I’m sorry.”

Jonathan flinched at Dan’s touch, and Dan’s arms fell away. Embarrassment hung in the room between them as though it were tangible. Jonathan felt the first pang of guilt since he’d met Dan at the train station. He broke the silence first. “What did they say in London?”

“Nothing.” His advances rejected, Dan’s voice sounded chastened. “I’m to take however much time is needed, they told me. But no more than three days, or they’ll have my ass in court.”

“Three days for what?” And, as Dan didn’t answer, “You might as well go back tonight.”

“I want to take you back with me,” Dan said.

“What for? As proof that you aren’t just taking a sudden temperamental vacation?”

“I don’t need proof,” Dan said, with an edge of impatience, the first sign of any kind of crack in his role so far. He must have noticed it too, because he stood up and went to the bar. “How about a drink?”

“The tonic water is flat.”

“We’ll drink it neat. We could both use one.” He fixed them two vodkas and added ice cubes. They didn’t look at each other as they sipped. The strong liquor coursed through Jonathan’s chest and stomach. But it did calm him.

“So you’re just going to hang around for three days?”

‘‘I suppose.”

“What do you hope to accomplish?”

“Do you really want to know?” Dan asked.

Jonathan wasn’t completely certain he did want to know. “Sure,” he said.

“You’re expecting me to say that I’m staying here three days until you come to your senses, at which point, I’ll sweep you away on the Concorde.”

“Something like that,” Jonathan admitted.

“Well, that’s what I thought too, at first. But I see it’s not going to work. It’ll take longer before you come to your senses. You’re a mess, Jonathan, a seething, confused, emotional mess.”

“Thanks for the encouragement. I thought you were going to play Dr. Kildare, not the doctor in
The Snake Pit.
”

“The three days,” Dan went on, ignoring that statement, “are to give you time enough to contact your little teenager and to get your act straightened out between the two of you. With that settled, I’ll leave satisfied.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you get hold of her, and she confirms what she told me at Penn Station.”

“Or she doesn’t confirm it.”

“Whatever,” Dan said airily.

“And you want to wait around for that?” Jonathan asked. “Even if you are missing three days of shooting?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Dan said smugly.

“You planned this. I don’t know how. But you did.”

“Wrong! For once, Jonathan, it’s your show. I’m just the audience. Now let’s be civilized and go have dinner somewhere. I’m starving what with all the suspense of boy meets girl, boys loses girl, and all that running around Penn Station.”

It was as though Dan had struck his face, and thrown the glove down at Jonathan’s feet.

“Don’t be so sure of yourself,” he warned, “or you may go back to London a very unhappy man.”

“I’m unhappy now!”

“I’m going to take a shower,” Jonathan announced. “The air here is like an oil slick.”

In the shower, he turned on the massage nozzle to full blast and basked under its ministrations, letting it batter away the tension that knotted his neck and back. At one point, with his palms flat up against the tile wall he leaned against, he suddenly felt so released, he let out a grunt, a sigh, and what he thought might be a sob. He stifled it. But he knew he felt frustrated: angry at Dan, at Stevie, at himself. He turned around, dialed the massage for a softer setting, and rubbed his skin hard with the loofah.

Drying off, he had an idea. If he called the Lockes’ number at Sea Mist, the operator there might be able to give him their Manhattan number. He wrapped a towel around himself, and went to the bedroom to try it.

“Certainly, sir,” the operator said. “The number in Manhattan is…”

He couldn’t believe his luck. He hung up, and dialed the number. Busy.

Buoyed up by this, he got dressed. When he reached Stevie, he would immediately ask her out to dinner, not discuss anything on the phone. She’d been upset when she saw Dan. Right now she was probably crying her eyes out for letting herself be bamboozled by him. Either that, or during the train trip, as he’d slept, she’d reached some absurd conclusion, and decided to nobly abandon him to Dan, à la Sidney Carton ascending the stairs to the guillotine in
A Tale of Two Cities—
“It’s a far, far better thing than I have ever done…”

Dressed, Jonathan tried the number again. This time a machine answered: Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Locke. Of course, that was Lord Bracknell’s name! No mention of Stevie on the tape. Did she have her own unlisted phone? Didn’t most teenagers who still lived at home? He couldn’t really leave a message on this line. What if she hadn’t told her parents about him? Would she? If not, they might think he was calling about some emergency situation concerning their house in Sea Mist. Even worse, what if he did leave his name for Stevie, and she didn’t answer? What if she were sitting by the machine right now, waiting for his call, a call she would never respond to? No. She must be out with her parents, reconciling. The busy signal before must have been another incoming call being answered by the machine. He would call back in an hour or two.

“Ready?” Jonathan asked brightly when he emerged from the bedroom. Half scowling, Dan led them out of the apartment.

They descended and had gone two blocks along Central Park West before Jonathan asked where they were going.

“Balzac’s,” Dan answered. “It’s a new restaurant Ronnie and Dorian opened up on Columbus Avenue. I promised we’d drop in and try it out.”

Jonathan hadn’t even heard of Ronnie and Dorian before.

Balzac’s was two large storefronts on the ground level with the walls between them taken down, revealing six large supporting pillars. Story-and-a-half glass windows fronted the street, with doors on either side. One of these led to a raised platform with a semicircular bar enclosing a waiting area. A balcony swept up along the longest side, the rear wall of the restaurant, covered with dark cloth and lucite-framed watercolors. Chrome railings ran along the balcony, up and down the pillars, around other built-in furniture, and all around the room in one form or another—accenting the industrial carpeting, subdued colors, and dark, practical fabrics. The tables were lacquered black, as were the small, dim lamps on the table. Even the bud vases—some holding an orchid, some a calla lily—were lacquered or burnished metal. Every touch attested that Balzac’s was the very latest in what Dan called “haute fag” decor, which had begun in discos and tiny apartments years before, and had since swept the city. Because it was located on the Upper West Side, Balzac’s clientele was more mixed than if it were in the Village. Still, it was mostly peopled tonight by young male couples in the Lacoste shirt, blue Levi’s jeans outfit of the New York gay man. The waiters, though more casually dressed, seemed equally gay. The maître d’ might have come right off the pages of the latest
Gentleman’s Quarterly,
and must have at least been an unemployed actor. He checked Dan’s reservation—made, Jonathan supposed, only a short while ago, when he was in the shower—pointed to the table on the balcony they would have, and asked them to wait in the lounge.

It was clear Dan chose Balzac’s not because he’d promised the owners he’d come: Balzac’s didn’t seem to be lacking business. No, he’d done it, and gotten a table where they would be seen so Jonathan would behave himself, not throw a scene, under risk of social ostracism, or at least instant widespread gossip emanating from the half dozen acquaintances he’d nodded to since they’d entered. That was fine with Jonathan. He had no intention of arguing with Dan—here or anywhere else. But he was surprised by how little Dan trusted him tonight. Unless, of course, Dan knew he would come out the loser in any argument they had.

“My treat,” Dan announced, as they were seated.

Jonathan sipped his vodka and perused the menu. Evidently the restaurant’s name derived from the selection of courses offered—all French, although more on the level of the Brasserie than La Céte Basque.

The waiter was cute and perfectly built, this emphasized by the close-fitting chinos and T-shirt. Jonathan had seen so many of this type before in the city, he wondered if they were genetically manufactured somewhere in the Midwest, exclusively to be shipped at the age of twenty-one to New York to be waiters in smartly decorated restaurants. They were all so alike, so alert, efficient, indifferent. They took orders easily, remembered with ease long lists of daily altering special dishes of bewildering complexity. They even sometimes smiled at jokes. They almost seemed human.

“Believe me, there are few young men like that in London,” Dan sighed after the waiter had taken their menus.