Music for Chameleons (6 page)

His lack of humor asserted itself: “That’s a damn strange thing to say. What do you mean, he wouldn’t give me a table?”

“Just what I said. One look at you and he’d know you had hairy heels. There are
some
people who won’t serve people with hairy heels. He’s one of them.”

Dr. Bentsen was familiar with her habit of introducing unfamiliar lingo, and he had learned to pretend he knew what it signified; he was as ignorant of her ambience as she was of his, but the shifting instability of his character would not allow him to admit it.

“Well, then,” he said, “is Friday all right? Around five?”

She said: “No, thank you.” He was tying his tie and stopped; she was still lying on the bed, uncovered, naked; Fred was singing “By Myself.” “No, thank you, darling Dr. B. I don’t think we’ll be meeting here any more.”

She could see he was startled. Of course he would miss her—she was beautiful, she was considerate, it never bothered her when he asked her for money. He knelt beside the bed and
fondled her breast. She noticed an icy mustache of sweat on his upper lip. “What is this? Drugs? Drink?”

She laughed and said: “All I drink is white wine, and not much of that. No, my friend. It’s simply that you have hairy heels.”

Like many analysts, Dr. Bentsen was quite literal-minded; just for a second she thought he was going to strip off his socks and examine his feet. Churlishly, like a child, he said: “I
don’t
have hairy heels.”

“Oh, yes you do. Just like a horse. All ordinary horses have hairy heels. Thoroughbreds don’t. The heels of a well-bred horse are flat and glistening. Give my love to Thelma.”

“Smart-ass. Friday?”

The Astaire record ended. She swallowed the last of the wine.

“Maybe. I’ll call you,” she said.

As it happened, she never called, and she never saw him again—except once, a year later, when she sat on a banquette next to him at La Grenouille; he was lunching with Mary Rhinelander, and she was amused to see that Mrs. Rhinelander signed the check.

THE PROMISED SNOW HAD ARRIVED
by the time she returned, again on foot, to the house on Beekman Place. The front door was painted pale yellow and had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s claw. Anna, one of four Irishwomen who staffed the house, answered the door and reported that the children, exhausted from an afternoon of ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, had already had their supper and been put to bed.

Thank God. Now she wouldn’t have to undergo the half-hour of playtime and tale-telling and kiss-goodnight that customarily concluded her children’s day; she may not have been
an affectionate mother, but she was a dutiful one—just as her own mother had been. It was seven o’clock, and her husband had phoned to say he would be home at seven-thirty; at eight they were supposed to go to a dinner party with the Sylvester Hales, friends from San Francisco. She bathed, scented herself to remove memories of Dr. Bentsen, remodeled her makeup, of which she wore the most modest quantity, and changed into a grey silk caftan and grey silk slippers with pearl buckles.

She was posing by the fireplace in the library on the second floor when she heard her husband’s footsteps on the stairs. It was a graceful pose, inviting as the room itself, an unusual octagonal room with cinnamon lacquered walls, a yellow lacquered floor, brass bookshelves (a notion borrowed from Billy Baldwin), two huge bushes of brown orchids ensconced in yellow Chinese vases, a Marino Marini horse standing in a corner, a South Seas Gauguin over the mantel, and a delicate fire fluttering in the fireplace. French windows offered a view of a darkened garden, drifting snow, and lighted tugboats floating like lanterns on the East River. A voluptuous couch, upholstered in mocha velvet, faced the fireplace, and in front of it, on a table lacquered the yellow of the floor, rested an ice-filled silver bucket; embedded in the bucket was a carafe brimming with pepper-flavored red Russian vodka.

Her husband hesitated in the doorway, and nodded at her approvingly: he was one of those men who truly noticed a woman’s appearance, gathered at a glance the total atmosphere. He was worth dressing for, and it was one of her lesser reasons for loving him. A more important reason was that he resembled her father, a man who had been, and forever would be, the man in her life; her father had shot himself, though no one ever knew why, for he was a gentleman of almost abnormal discretion. Before this happened, she had terminated three engagements, but two months after her father’s death she met George, and
married him because in both looks and manners he approximated her great lost love.

She moved across the room to meet her husband halfway. She kissed his cheek, and the flesh against her lips felt as cold as the snowflakes at the window. He was a large man, Irish, black-haired and green-eyed, handsome even though he had lately accumulated considerable poundage and had gotten a bit jowly, too. He projected a superficial vitality; both men and women were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause.

She said: “It’s such a rotten night out, and you look so tired. Let’s stay home and have supper by the fire.”

“Really, darling—you wouldn’t mind? It seems a mean thing to do to the Haleses. Even if she is a cunt.”

“
George!
Don’t use that word. You know I hate it.”

“Sorry,” he said; he was, too. He was always careful not to offend her, just as she took the same care with him: a consequence of the quiet that simultaneously kept them together and apart.

“I’ll call and say you’re coming down with a cold.”

“Well, it won’t be a lie. I think I am.”

WHILE SHE CALLED THE HALESES
, and arranged with Anna for a soup and soufflé supper to be served in an hour’s time, he chugalugged a dazzling dose of the scarlet vodka and felt it light a fire in his stomach; before his wife returned, he poured himself a respectable shot and stretched full length on the couch. She knelt on the floor and removed his shoes and began to massage his feet: God knows,
he
didn’t have hairy heels. He groaned.

“Hmm. That feels good.”

“I love you, George.”

“I love you, too.”

She thought of putting on a record, but no, the sound of the fire was all the room needed.

“George?”

“Yes, darling.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“A woman named Ivory Hunter.”

“You really know somebody named Ivory Hunter?”

“Well. That was her stage name. She’d been a burlesque dancer.”

She laughed. “What is this, some part of your college adventures?”

“I never knew her. I only heard about her once. It was the summer after I left Yale.”

He closed his eyes and drained his vodka. “The summer I hitchhiked out to New Mexico and California. Remember? That’s how I got my nose broke. In a bar fight in Needles, California.” She liked his broken nose, it offset the extreme gentleness of his face; he had once spoken of having it re-broken and reset, but she had talked him out of it. “It was early September, and that’s always the hottest time of the year in Southern California; over a hundred almost every day. I ought to have treated myself to a bus ride, at least across the desert. But there I was like a fool, deep in the Mojave, hauling a fifty-pound knapsack and sweating until there was no sweat in me. I swear it was a hundred and fifty in the shade. Except there wasn’t any shade. Nothing but sand and mesquite and this boiling blue sky. Once a big truck drove by, but it wouldn’t stop for me. All it did was kill a rattlesnake that was crawling across the road.

“I kept thinking something was bound to turn up somewhere. A garage. Now and then cars passed, but I might as well have been invisible. I began to feel sorry for myself, to understand
what it means to be helpless, and to understand why it’s a good thing that Buddhists send out their young monks to beg. It’s chastening. It rips off that last layer of baby fat.

“And then I met Mr. Schmidt. I thought maybe it was a mirage. An old white-haired man about a quarter mile up the highway. He was standing by the road with heat waves rippling around him. As I got closer I saw that he carried a cane and wore pitch-black glasses, and he was dressed as if headed for church—white suit, white shirt, black tie, black shoes.

“Without looking at me, and while some distance away, he called out: ‘My name is George Schmidt.’

“I said: ‘Yes. Good afternoon, sir.’

“He said: ‘
Is
it afternoon?’

“ ‘After three.’

“ ‘Then I must have been standing here two hours or more. Would you mind telling me where I am?’

“ ‘In the Mojave Desert. About eighteen miles west of Needles.’

“ ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘Leaving a seventy-year-old blind man stranded alone in the desert. Ten dollars in my pocket, and not another rag to my name. Women are like flies: they settle on sugar or shit. I’m not saying I’m sugar, but she’s sure settled for shit now. My name is George Schmidt.’

“I said: ‘Yes, sir, you told me. I’m George Whitelaw.’ He wanted to know where I was going, what I was up to, and when I said I was hitchhiking, heading for New York, he asked if I would take his hand and help him along a bit, maybe until we could catch a ride. I forgot to mention that he had a German accent and was extremely stout, almost fat; he looked as if he’d been lying in a hammock all his life. But when I held his hand I felt the roughness, the immense strength of it. You wouldn’t have wanted a pair of hands like that around your throat. He said: ‘Yes, I have strong hands. I’ve worked as a masseur for fifty
years, the last twelve in Palm Springs. You got any water?’ I gave him my canteen, which was still half full. And he said: ‘She left me here without even a drop of water. The whole thing took me by surprise. Though I can’t say it should have, knowing Ivory good as I did. That’s my wife. Ivory Hunter, she was. A stripper; she played the Chicago World’s Fair, 1932, and she would have been a star if it hadn’t been for that Sally Rand. Ivory invented this fan-dance thing and that Rand woman stole it off her. So Ivory said. Probably just more of her bullshit. Uh-oh, watch out for that rattler, he’s over there someplace, I can hear him really singing. There’s two things I’m scared of. Snakes and women. They have a lot in common. One thing they have in common is: the last thing that dies is their tail.’

“A couple of cars passed and I stuck out my thumb and the old man tried to flag them down with his stick, but we must have looked too peculiar—a dirty kid in dungarees and a blind fat man dressed in his city best. I guess we’d still be out there if it hadn’t been for this truckdriver. A Mexican. He was parked by the road fixing a flat. He could speak about five words of Tex-Mex, all of them four-letter, but I still remembered a lot of Spanish from the summer with Uncle Alvin in Cuba. So the Mexican told me he was on his way to El Paso, and if that was our direction, we were welcome aboard.

“But Mr. Schmidt wasn’t too keen. I had practically to drag him into the caboose. ‘I hate Mexicans. Never met a Mexican I liked. If it wasn’t for a Mexican … Him only nineteen and her I’d say from the touch of her skin, I’d say Ivory was a woman way past sixty. When I married her a couple of years ago, she said she was fifty-two. See, I was living in this trailer camp out on Route 111. One of those trailer camps halfway between Palm Springs and Cathedral City. Cathedral City! Some name for a dump that’s nothing but honky-tonks and pool halls and fag bars. The only thing you can say about it is Bing Crosby lives there. If that’s
saying something. Anyway, living next to me in this other trailer is my friend Hulga. Ever since my wife died—she died the same day Hitler died—Hulga had been driving me to work; she works as a waitress at this Jew club where I’m the masseur. All the waiters and waitresses at the club are big blond Germans. The Jews like that; they really keep them stepping. So one day Hulga tells me she has a cousin coming to visit. Ivory Hunter. I forget her legal name, it was on the marriage certificate, but I forget. She had about three husbands before; she probably didn’t remember the name she was born with. Anyway, Hulga tells me that this cousin of hers, Ivory, used to be a famous dancer, but now she’s just come out of the hospital and she’s lost her last husband on account of she’s spent a year in the hospital with TB. That’s why Hulga asked her out to Palm Springs. Because of the air. Also, she didn’t have any place else to go. The first night she was there, Hulga invited me over, and I liked her cousin right away; we didn’t talk much, we listened to the radio mostly, but I liked Ivory. She had a real nice voice, real slow and gentle, she sounded like nurses ought to sound; she said she didn’t smoke or drink and she was a member of the Church of God, same as me. After that, I was over at Hulga’s almost every night.’ ”

GEORGE LIT A CIGARETTE, AND
his wife tilted out a jigger more of the pepper vodka for him. To her surprise, she poured one for herself. A number of things about her husband’s narrative had accelerated her ever-present but usually Librium-subdued anxiety; she couldn’t imagine where his memoir was leading, but she knew there was some destination, for George seldom rambled. He had graduated third in his class at Yale Law School, never practiced law but had gone on to top his class at Harvard Business School; within the past decade he had been offered a presidential Cabinet post, and an ambassadorship
to England or France or wherever he wanted. However, what had made her feel the need for red vodka, a ruby bauble burning in the firelight, was the disquieting manner in which George Whitelaw had become Mr. Schmidt; her husband was an exceptional mimic. He could imitate certain of their friends with infuriating accuracy. But this was not casual mimicry; he seemed entranced, a man fixed in another man’s mind.

“ ‘I had an old Chevy nobody had driven since my wife died. But Ivory got it tuned up, and pretty soon it wasn’t Hulga driving me to work and bringing me home, but Ivory. Looking back, I can see it was all a plot between Hulga and Ivory, but I didn’t put it together then. Everybody around the trailer park, and everybody that met her, all they said was what a lovely woman she was, big blue eyes and pretty legs. I figured it was just good-heartedness, the Church of God—I figured that was why she was spending her evenings cooking dinner and keeping house for an old blind man. One night we were listening to the
Hit Parade
on the radio, and she kissed me and rubbed her hand along my leg. Pretty soon we were doing it twice a day—once before breakfast and once after dinner, and me a man of sixty-nine. But it seemed like she was as crazy about my cock as I was about her cunt—’ ”