Ride a Cockhorse (17 page)

Mrs. Fitzgibbons lurched forward in her chair and gave a shout of laughter. Bruce Clayton and his partner chimed in at once, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons's sexual liaison with the tall, sandy-haired high schooler was known to both of them.

“He could lead it with his pecker out!” she said.

“Now, you're being shocking!” Bruce spoke up with delight.

“You two would never be the same. You've never seen anything like it in your life. It's a work of art. You couldn't dent it with a hammer.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons had been suppressing her urge to mouth an obscenity all day. “They could start a whole new universe with it. Put on some music,” she said. “If I'm going to process a mortgage for you two lovebirds, I might as well keep you hopping. What kind of soup have you made?”

“It's mushroom barley,” said Matthew, “with vegetable stock, garlic, and a world of basil.”

“I love it. It's going to be a wonderful success. Bruce, shut off the VCR. We'll watch it again later. I'm starving. Where's my napkin? Let's have dinner.”

While Bruce stood at her side and unfolded her starched napkin, she called through the door to Matthew in the kitchen. “Bring the tureen to the table. And some café-grind pepper, if you have it. You're both wonderful. I love you both. I need people I can trust.”

Leaning, Bruce extended Mrs. Fitzgibbons's napkin across her lap. His infatuation was marked. “I'd do anything for you.”

“And well you may,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, looking hungrily at the big blue bowl of steaming soup that Matthew was transporting ceremoniously to the table. “I'll tell you what you're going to do.” She apprised Bruce of her desires without detaching her gaze from the tureen in Matthew's hands. “You're going to dig up some dirt for me. You're going to do some local research. On enemies of mine. People who would like nothing better than to see me brought down.”

“Enemies?” Bruce stepped in front of Matthew, took up the china ladle, and began to serve Mrs. Fitzgibbons her soup. “You haven't an enemy on earth.”

“I,” she said, “shall be the judge of that. What effect do you think today's coup has had on my rivals?”

“But Mr. Zabac appointed you.”

“An appointment is nothing.”

“She means,” Matthew suggested helpfully, “that other officers coveted the post also and are probably resentful.”

“Exactly.”

“I never thought of that.” Caught in the dilemma of wanting to be innocent in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's eyes while keeping Matthew in his place, Bruce's eyes twinkled in frustration.

“The real struggle,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons stated with authority, “is just beginning. You can't be a bleeding heart. That's where others go wrong, by being sweet and grateful and trusting, while some treacherous little heel with big ideas is sneaking up behind you with a knife in his hand. That's not going to happen to me.”

“Maybe,” Matthew Dean suggested, “they'll more or less accept the new arrangement, now that it's done, though.”

“They won't.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons tasted her soup, as her hosts sat down on either side of the table, Bruce to her left, Matthew to her right. “But I have the power. They don't. I can make things happen. My options are real. I can terminate people. I can demote them, transfer them, reduce their wages, or eliminate them altogether. While they're skulking around in the dark, I can operate in the open. That's what my appointment means. Nothing more and nothing less. All I need is a little dirt to make my job easy. You'll find it for me, too. Worms leave a trail.”

“She's right about that!” Matthew said gleefully.

“I'll try,” said Bruce.

“You'll do more than try, darling. Every person in this world is either a liar, a crook, or some kind of lecher or cheat or drunkard — or gambler or drug addict, or just some twenty-five-cent fink who beats up his mother.” She waved her soup spoon. “Look at the two of you,” she said.

Surprised momentarily by her allusion to their own relationship, Bruce and Matthew reacted with laughter.

“Bruce was right,” Matthew said. “You're wonderful, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

“I'll smear them, if I have to,” she continued. “The public wants to believe the worst about people, anyhow.”

While dining, Mrs. Fitzgibbons explained to her two young men something of the cold-blooded nature of human affairs on the executive plane. “You will never know what it was like in there. If I hadn't had murder in my heart all day, I'd be in ruins now. I'd be at the mercy of tyrannical little underlings like Elizabeth Wilson, who makes her girls show her their fingernails. Disgusting creatures who want to get you under their heel. I'd be a basket case. I'd be dead. If I had faltered for a second, just once — if I had shown weakness — I wouldn't be here tonight. I wouldn't be on television, I wouldn't be the new chief, I wouldn't be a thing. My future wouldn't be worth a penny. You only see the surface,” she explained. “You see the little chairman standing behind me on the six o'clock news and assume it had to be that way. It didn't.”

“I'm sure she's right,” said Matthew.

“I've learned to be hard in a crisis,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons boasted. “I have more courage than other people. I take the fight to them. I did it today.” She was sitting up in the candlelight. She moved her hand in a lateral gesture. “I won total authority. And I'm going to keep it. I'm not going to dribble it away. They'll never get me out! Not Hooton, or Wilson, or Brouillette, or any of them. I have them in my hands. Now,” she promised, “you'll see what cowards they are.”

If Mrs. Fitzgibbons's warlike egoism struck Bruce or Matthew as excessive, neither one showed it.

“You're right to consolidate your position,” Matthew concurred.

“Of course, I am.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was empyreal on that point. She turned to Bruce with a simpering expression of exaggerated tolerance on her face, as though disabusing a child of infantile notions.

“I didn't disagree.” Bruce protested feebly the sudden unfair concert of criticism leveled at him.

“Machiavelli said, ‘All men are vulgar,' ” Matthew was pleased to point out.

“They are.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was directing herself regularly now to Matthew, as though he were the man of the house, the more practical and worldly of the two. She was aware, too, that Matthew was stealing looks at the fullness of her breasts, swelling and ebbing behind the soft silk of her dress, and at her makeup and hair. Despite his efforts to emulate Bruce's artistic sensibility and more sophisticated mannerisms and outlook, Matthew seemed the coarser and more masculine of the two.

“Everyone fears a strong hand,” said Matthew. “Keep them guessing.”

“Exactly.”

“I think you should treat your enemies with great suspicion,” Matthew added.

“I think you should shut your mouth!” Bruce exploded in a paroxysm of anger that astonished both Mrs. Fitzgibbons and Matthew. He was shouting at Matthew. He was very pale and shaking. “What do you know about business? You're just a clerk! You're nothing but somebody's little gofer. Didn't I warn you an hour ago to keep your mouth shut? Mrs. Fitzgibbons came as my dinner guest, not to be lectured at by some three-hundred-dollar-a-week, city-employee ass kisser. Talking about Machiavelli!” Bruce's eyes flashed with menace. “What in heaven's name do you know about someone like that? You were quoting me,” Bruce shouted. “I told
you
that. The night you came crybabying home from Mount Tom with your tail between your legs. And
I
took you in.” For an instant, Bruce mastered his embarrassing outburst, as he looked down in consternation at his plate, then to the left and past the gladiola, with his lips together. Then he lost control again.

“You shit,” he cried. “You presumptuous, two-faced, penny-pinching shit.” Bruce turned in desperation to Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “He begged me to let him make dinner tonight. He knew how important it was to me. He knew it meant everything to me.” Bruce's voice cracked with these words, and he cast up his napkin. “Now, it's all spoiled.”

“Nothing is spoiled.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was instantly affected by Bruce's distress.

“Well, it is,” he said, and got up from the table. “For me, it's spoiled.”

Bruce stood stock-still behind his place at the table. His features were distorted. Then, dreading the humiliation of actually shedding tears, he hurried from the room.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was appalled by the sudden sequence of events. She had never seen such a furious altercation erupt over such insignificant cause. She got up from her chair and followed him. She went out through the draperied doorway into the foyer; but Bruce was nowhere to be seen. Without knocking, Mrs. Fitzgibbons opened a door nearby and let herself into the adjacent room. It was shadowy inside. The room was dominated by a canopied bed of luxurious proportions, a wonderwork of gauzy materials floating down from the ceiling. Bruce was in the room. She could barely make him out. He was leaning against the wall, with his fingers to his lips.

He was crying quietly. “I knew he would do that.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons closed the door behind her. “It wasn't serious,” she remarked softly.

“To me it was.” He spoke in a troubled whisper.

The sight of the young man standing pale before her, leaning against the wall with his head averted, aroused Mrs. Fitzgibbons's sincerest sympathy. She felt a surge of affection for him. “You're too sensitive, darling,” she said.

Bruce shook his head and made as if to speak, but no words came.

“Matthew is not like you,” she added in a tender voice. She touched him on the shoulder. “You're different, Bruce. You're not like everyone else. You're special.”

At these last words, Bruce stifled a choking sound and put his hand over his face. The look of him, with his cuff links and neat dotted necktie, put her in mind of a troubled schoolboy she had once known in grammar school, a delicate boy named Howard Ellert, who was the butt of much childhood malice. Impulsively, Mrs. Fitzgibbons reached and put her arms around him. Her own heart was drumming. “Being different,” she counseled him softly, “takes courage.”

Bruce replied under his breath, after a moment elapsed. “I know.”

“That's why I'm surprised.”

“I was jealous. Now, I've spoiled everything.”

She felt the warmth of his flesh through his shirt, and placed her hand behind his head. “I love you, Bruce.”

His shoulders trembled as the feelings welled up in him; Mrs. Fitzgibbons divined readily the much deeper reservoir of unhappiness that underlay this reaction. She kept talking while holding him.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“I want you to.” She spoke earnestly to him, their voices conspiratorial in the darkened room. “You're my right hand.... You're my good luck.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons uttered words that she had spoken long ago to Larry. A phrase came back to her. “You're my brightness,” she said.

They stood thus, in the shadowy room, for an extended length of time. His collapse, she knew, was of a general nature, deeper than the moment, like waters forcing a rupture in cellar walls. Nor was she surprised later, after insisting on taking him out to dinner, to hear Bruce reproaching his friend in the dining room in rather violent terms. Looking in, she saw Matthew sitting stonily behind the table, exactly as they had left him, his face as white as the linen. “You can eat your own dinner!” Bruce was saying, while buttoning his double-breasted suit jacket and arranging his polka-dotted pocket square with elegant flourishes. “Your own little masterpiece. You're not fit for civilized company. I hope you choke on it.”

“But, Bruce —” the other began.

“Shut your mouth!” Bruce snapped hotly. “Don't speak to me. Mrs. Fitzgibbons and I are going to the Hofbrau House. I'll settle my differences with you when I come back. Why, you're nothing but a little Tartuffe. A little snake in the grass. Come on,” he said, and snapped his fingers rudely. “The car keys.”

During the ride downtown in Matthew Dean's Buick, Bruce continued to deplore his friend's behavior as “unmannerly,” “boorish,” “simpleminded,” and as a want of good breeding in “a working-class stiff.” While stopped at a light on High Street, he begged Mrs. Fitzgibbons to forgive the unintended insult. “What made me think that a common rowdy, a city clerk who hasn't read six books in his life, wouldn't revert to barbarism, I can't say.”

By now, however, Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt that her friend behind the wheel had salved his feeling sufficiently to be treated once again the way he enjoyed being treated.

“The light is green, Bruce. Let's step on it. I don't want to hear about your dirty linens. Save your smut for the beauty parlor. Drive me to Ann Taylor. The mall is still open. I want to look at some clothes. And remind me to watch the eleven o'clock news tonight. I'll be on again, you know.”

“I'll remember.” Bruce was now very much himself, a picture once more of the efficient aide-de-camp.

“That's what I pay you for,” she said playfully. “To keep me happy.”

“I won't forget.”

“Where did you two deviants get that big bed?” she said, suddenly. “I'd like to use that myself sometime.”

“You'd be welcome to,” he exclaimed.

“It looks like something from a Persian whorehouse.”

With Bruce Clayton as consultant and as an earnest advocate of her acquiring a more dramatic wardrobe, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was fitted at the women's fashion store for a smart pin-striped peplum suit, a black and silver-lamé cocktail dress, and a rather spectacular winter cape that tied at the throat. She wore the cape and lamé dress out to the car. Bruce hurried along at her side, marveling at the ease with which Mrs. Fitzgibbons had plunked down more than two thousand dollars in twenty-five minutes, and was impressed, if not actually intimidated, by the way she had ordered the saleslady about. The more manic and overbearing Mrs. Fitzgibbons got, the more Bruce appeared to adulate her. By ten o'clock, when they entered the restaurant, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was on her high horse. She even complimented Bruce for the way he interceded with the maitre d', an elderly white-haired man named Liebeck, to instruct him in the importance of showing Mrs. Fitzgibbons to the choicest, most visible table. If the lady standing by the reservations desk, drawing considerable attention to herself in her cape and silver-and-black dress, did not fit Mr. Liebeck's conception of a banker, she certainly suited his notion of what a celebrity should look like. The stately manner in which the white-haired man led the two of them to a central table resembled that of an impresario leading a renowned performer and her accompanist onto the stage.