Seventh Avenue (30 page)

“I’ll show you your room first. It faces the bay, so you’ll get a nice breeze,” Terry said.

He followed her inside and crossed the living room, which was furnished in the style of a farmhouse; unvarnished wooden chairs and a scrub table stood off to the side in a dining alcove. A portable cane bar was set up against the wall, and there were half a dozen cane easy chairs with colorful printed cushions. He liked the easy informality and comfort of the room, and the gossamer curtains that floated lazily in the breeze as though attuned to a melody he could not hear. She waved her arm airily and took him upstairs. The servants’ quarters were on the top floor, she explained. His room was painted eggshell and was larger than the living room at home. The bed had a canopy, and he laughed when he noticed it.

“Very sexy,” Terry said. “I’ve always wanted to be seduced in an eighteenth-century bed.”

“Is that an invitation or are you just passing the time of day?”

“God, you mustn’t take anything I say seriously. I’m completely nuts.”

“
Glad you warned me.”

“I’m spoken for, or at least I think I am, if I decide to be,” she said, giggling.

“
Aren’t you sure?”

She pressed her hand against her breast and in a melodramatic voice said:

“Ah, how can one be sure of anything at twenty . . . ta-dum. Let me guess your age. Forty-one?”

“I’ve dropped people in their tracks for less than that,” Jay replied.

She stuck out her jaw, and he feinted with his left and threw his right in the air, pulling it up short before it could make contact, but she jumped back nervously to avoid the blow.

“
Hey! Were you really going to
sock
me?”

“
I might have.”

Her green eyes were confused, and she moved closer to him and flicked some sweat off his forehead. He held her arm firmly and forced her closer to him, and she began to tremble; her mouth opened slightly in alarm and she was relieved to see him laugh.

“
Don’t tease me,” he said. “I’m too tired to be teased.”

She did not answer and walked out onto the circular balcony, which had a table and beach chair on it and which overlooked the front of the house. The view was very fine, and he could see the irregular shape of the coastline of the bay, and beyond the bay there was the warm Atlantic, limpid and flat, and people the size of ants zig-zagging on the salt-white beach.

“It’s a good view,” he said, and then quickly: “Why’d your father ask me here? We don’t exactly speak the same language, and I can see that your mother doesn’t much like me.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong. Mother’s a little formal with people she doesn’t know, that’s all. And my father didn’t tell me why he invited you. He thinks you’re a brilliant businessman, and I guess he considers you a friend.”

“Do many people stay with you?”

“Not as a rule. Mitch came for a week in September . . . God, it rained every day.”

“Who’s he?”

“The one I’m supposed to marry when I graduate in June. I think I’d rather go to Europe for a year though, than get married right away. I’d like to be able to breathe. I mean, what kind of life is it really? School from five to twenty, then married for ever and ever.” She threw her head back as though gasping for air. “I want to fly a little or try at any rate.”

“What’s he do?”

“Mitch?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Doctor. He’s been practicing for a year or so.”

“Loads of money?”

“Enough.”

“Sounds like a good match.”

She gripped the wrought-iron rail and began to squeeze it, and Jay saw her fingers turn white and the muscles of her arms strain to maintain the pressure. When she released the rail, she examined her fingers.

“Christ, they’re numb. I must be mixed up . . . that’s why I act like an idiot.”

“C’mon, let’s go,” Jay said, taking her hands in his and pulling her into the room.

They decided to go for a swim before returning to the island. Terry had an old woollen blanket in the trunk of the car, and they lay on the blanket to dry. Jay stared up at the pale blue sky, and the glare hurt his eyes. The water had exhausted him. He made an effort to think about Rhoda and the new life they would have together when he returned, but he knew that the problem defeated reason, for reason is governed by instinct, and his instinct told him that the marriage had died, been stillborn. All that held them together was the tenuous string of a child, a child he loved with a passion that was almost maniacal, and whose life he had almost destroyed. Rhoda’s instability was a prime source of concern to him, and he sensed that Neal would suffer if he left her. She loved Neal, but she could not cope with him, just as she could not cope with Jay. Bile welled up in the back of his throat; the sun had made him nauseous. Rhoda’s life revolved around her pills: she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning until she had taken a Benzedrine tablet, and although in his own mind he did not disclaim responsibility for having created her condition, he did disavow the weakness that made her rely on them. Whether Rhoda wanted to face it or not, she had become addicted to drugs.

A hand pressed against Jay’s shoulder, and he opened his eyes in a daze.

“You’ve been asleep for an hour. Is that how my company affects you?” Terry said.

“
You’re joking. Asleep?” He looked at his watch.

“
You’ve got a burn too.”

The skin on his back was hot and drawn tightly on his shoulders.

“
I can take a lot of
sun
,” he said.

“
They all say that, but try sleeping tonight.”

“
You going to show me around this evening?”

“
Would you like me to?”

His manner became brusque and impatient.

“Listen, kid. I don’t ask people to do things if I’m not interested in them. I’m a big boy now. I’ve been through a sausage grinder, so don’t put on the coquette act. Either yes or no.”

“
All right, take it easy.”

They drove back and crossed to the island in silence. Jay wondered if he had frightened her off. She made him feel awkward, and he could only conceal this by aggression. What he could not understand he tended to dominate, as though ignorance was a weapon rather than a weakness. The cool blue sky and the yawls tipping sideways, the islands with their concealed homes, were part of a design as fabled as anything he had seen in the movies when he was a boy. He wanted to belong to it all, but he didn’t see how he could fit in. Money had done little to alter the cringing insecurity at the back of his mind; before, he had been nothing, his existence a gray, legal fact, but he had had a set of roots, he belonged to an environment, a tradition. Now he was like a table without legs, an object that was functionless. He did not know how he could communicate his emotional barrenness to the girl, nor was he sure he should. As with all true sufferers, the pure malaise, the actual suffering, was something that defied classification or description. In its virulent, unisolated, unidentifiable state, it haunted Jay; although introspection terrified him, he realized that one day he must examine and face his nightmare.

“You look saturnine.”

Jay shrugged his shoulders.

“What do you mean?”

“Sort of sad and morose. You’ve got everything.”

“That’s the joke. I don’t know what I’ve got. Just a bunch of mistakes weighing me down. And I’m afraid to add one more to the load.”

She walked with him into his room and sat down on the terrace.

“Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

“Frankly, I’m dirt, and I don’t belong with decent people.”

“What brought that on?”

“Maybe we’d better forget about tonight. I don’t think your mother or for that matter your father would be crazy about us going out . . . Especially as I’m married, and you’ve got the doctor on ice.”

“That sounds very prudish,” she said with a hint of irony in her voice.

“No, just realistic.”

“Well, it’s up to you.”

“I wish it were, honey. I guess I’m tired as well, so put it down to that.”

He had insisted on having dinner alone in his room. He skimmed through a few magazines and then slipped into bed. His back felt raw, and he struggled to sleep on his side. The ringing telephone bell jarred him as he dozed fitfully.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir. But there’s a call from New York for you . . . your wife. “He recognized the butler’s voice.

“Put it through.”

“Whoa, very impressive, like you were king or something,” Rhoda said.

“Is that what you called to tell me?”

There was a silence, then he heard a rasping cry.

“Jay, we need you . . . Neal and me.”

The appeal sickened him because it was untrue.

“I thought you asked me to think about it.”

“Come home, please.”

“At the end of the week.”

“
Tomorrow.”

“
I just can’t walk out, Rhoda. I’m exhausted. I need a rest.”

“Neal’s impossible without you. I can’t control him. Jay, what’s gonna be with us? I’m here all by myself, and I’m cracking up.”

“Look, get a good night’s sleep and I’ll call you tomorrow and talk to Neal.” He didn’t wait for her to answer but abruptly said: “Good night,” and replaced the receiver. He climbed out of bed and strolled around the room, then flopped down in a chair on the terrace. The air was heavy and oppressive. He switched on an overhead light and flicked through a magazine, but he was unable to read; the page of print stared back at him, meaningless. He would have liked a drink; he remembered that he had bought a bottle of scotch at the airport before leaving and he fished through his bag for it He found a glass in the bathroom, let the cold water run a full five minutes, until an icy sweat formed on the faucet, and mixed himself a highball. He filled a second glass with iced water and carried it and the bottle of scotch out to the terrace. The drink made him even hotter, and his back throbbed violently; a million stinging nettles had entered his skin. The third drink made his head spin, and reduced the pain. Behind him, he heard breathing, and he jumped out of his chair. Terry stood at the entrance of the terrace with a questioning, slightly puzzled expression on her face.

“
You frightened the life out of me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I heard you talking on the phone, and then you turned the light on, so I thought you were having trouble sleeping.” She held out a bottle of colorless liquid. “Vinegar . . . it’s the best soother for a burn. It’ll take the sting out.” She opened the bottle. “Ugh. It smells, but believe me . . .” She lifted up his pajama top. “Looks painful. Best if you lie on your stomach so I can put some on.”

He went inside and stretched out on the bed. The harsh, acerbic smell reminded him of when his mother used to prepare pickling juice, and he had a vision of her stuffing nobbly cucumbers into a bottle and then pouring the vinegar and herbs in. Her lined face caught the light that came through the single window, a collage of filthy oilskin, rotting boards, and rusted nails. He could see the room with its chipped wooden table that teetered and had worn a lateral gash into the wall that supported it, the hissing potbellied stove never hot enough because there was never enough coal. He could smell the lime smell of the sweating walls, where a portrait of his paternal grandfather hung crookedly - the man black-bearded and glowering at a vernal scene in some nameless, forgotten Russian garden. His memory for smell was supernatural, and it was the wine-like smell of sweat commingled with atrophying slabs of salted
Kubchunka
that hung from a trestle in the larder that he remembered from that wet afternoon, and not the wood smoke or the trilling birds in the high grass as he had lain in the field. It had not been the Slivovitz he had drunk at the mill with Pyotr Markevitch that had made him vomit, but the odor of his room . . . and his mother’s hands soothing him, washing him down with the faint scent of bay leaf and tarragon clinging to her stained apron where she hurriedly dried her hands.

“
Does it hurt?” Terry asked.

“
Nothing hurts
anymore
.”

She had dampened a large piece of cotton that was still fluffy, and she skated gently over his blood-red back. He lifted his head and twisted it over his shoulder so that he could see her.

“
Lie still, I haven’t finished.”

“
It’s starting to cool off.”

The light from the terrace illuminated half her face and she seemed to resemble some half-mysterious goddess whose photograph he had once stumbled across in a magazine. Her tar-black hair was long and fine and straight and made a swishing sound as she moved her hand over his back. She patted him on the behind, and he rolled over on his side and supported his head in the hollow of his arm.

“
I’m going to wash my hands.”

He lay on the bed and although his back felt as though it had been systematically lacerated, the sting of the burn had subsided. She came back, walking softly, and he did not realize she was there until the corner of the bed sagged under her weight.

“
You’re a nice sweet kid,” Jay said.

“Praise from Jay is praise from Caesar. Are you going back to your wife?”

Her question startled him, and he became evasive, but she pursued him, until he was forced to answer.

“
I’m not sure.”

“I don’t think I want to be a doctor’s wife . . . or to go to Europe. I want to live!”

“
Isn’t that good enough, exciting?”

“A deadly bore. It’ll be skipping through life singing
‘Alouette.’
People ought to trip over, get mud in their face.” She touched his hand.