Seventh Avenue (48 page)

Jay rushed to Neal’s bedroom. Neal had crawled under the blankets and was squirming underneath.

“
Neal,” Jay said softly. “I’m sorry.”

The child’s head came out of the
blanket,
and he looked from
Jay to Rhoda with an expression of long-suppressed rage, of frustration, and such loathing that Jay shrank back.

“
I wish you were dead,” he said.

Jay backed out of the room like a hyena in retreat, discovering that the carrion is still alive. “I’ll get you for this, Rhoda. You’ll go down on your knees to me before I finish with you,” he said.

“I
want him
more than anything,” Jay said, pacing in the long
living room, which was a tribute to all the antique shops on Third
Avenue: Meissen, Louis Quinze, Directoire, Chippendale, and
Dresden - about eighty thousand dollars’ worth of bric-à-brac, none
of which Jay admired, appreciated or understood - populated the
room in the form of tables, vases, lamp bases, chairs, sofas and figurines. “He’s so goddamned unhappy.”

“And you can make him happy, I suppose?” Eva asked.

“I can try. At least he won’t be neglected. The conditions he’s living in make me sick.”

“But Rhoda says no, so that finishes it.” She was relieved to end
the discussion on that final note. Jay had returned at four in the morning. She had suspected that he had been on the town with a woman,
but he hadn’t been
drinking,
and he had woken her to explain the
condition in which he had discovered Neal. She had been grateful to
Neal for keeping Jay off the streets for the night. The child was all
that prevented Jay from falling apart. Neal had made Jay respectable. It was a sickening truth that she had difficulty in facing at ten
o’clock in the morning.

“I’ve got to get him back.”

“You can’t,” she said sullenly.

“I can make life pretty tough for Rhoda.”

“Neal won’t thank you for it. And anyway it’s against your nature
to force little people out of business. You wouldn’t get any pleasure
from it.”

“I’d get my son back.”

“For a smart man, you’re acting foolish. Have patience. If she
marries this character, she’ll want to get rid of Neal. He doesn’t sound
the kind of guy who needs a kid around his neck. She’ll be grateful
for your offer.

“So I keep quiet and sweat it out.”

“I’ll help you. Don’t forget I’m an expert in patience and sweating, and jumping through hoops of fire. I could do a circus act.”

He swallowed his coffee and embraced her with affection. There
was still something left of the old feeling - it hadn’t all been left in
other people’s beds. He let her go. She smiled wistfully at him as
though reading his mind.

“If you decide to let Lorna come and live
with us,
it could be
great. You and Lorna, me and Neal. It would be a family for once.
I want a family.”

She turned sulky at the mention of Lorna’s name,
and she poured
herself another cup of coffee. She raised the cup to her lips, then put
it down absentmindedly on the drum table. Her hair hung down to
her waist, a red flame
that
was reflected against the black satin
quilt of her robe.

“Think it over, Eva.”

“I don’t like reproaches walking on two feet in my house.”

“Well . . .”

He forced her down on his lap. She had a bed
smell commingled
with the
faint faded odor of Sortilege.

“It’s dangerous doing business with you,” she said. “I should take
a lesson from all the others who’ve had their throats cut while you
were helping them on with their coats.”

“I’m not so bad, am I?” He slipped his hand inside her robe, and
her breasts were warm and soft. The nipples hardened under his
hand, but she got up abruptly.

“It’s not fair to make a pass at me before I’ve been to the hairdresser.” She laughed to herself bitterly. “I look a wreck .
. . I
would, when you decide to . . .”

“I didn’t think a husband could make a ‘pass’ at his own wife.”

“Well, that’s what makes you different from all other husbands.
You make passes. And I’ll tell you something, you
bastard, that’s
part of the reason I’m still in love with you.”

“Go to the hairdresser.”

“And what’re you going to do, sit around and mope?”

“Dunno. Thought maybe I’d see Harry.”

“He plays golf every Saturday at Park Knoll.”

“Yeah, I know. He keeps asking me to have lunch with him there.
Maybe I will. Who knows, it might be fun to join.”

“Join?” She put her hands over her eyes and cackled. “You join a country club? Christ, what next? Become a joiner, Jay Blackman.
And be like everyone else? Enjoy life. Meet new people, go to parties, be part of society.”

“Okay, I’ll join, if that’s what you want.”

“I’ve only been asking you to do it for ages. Doesn’t it strike you
as peculiar that we’ve been out here for almost two
years, and we
don’t even know our next-door neighbor? I’ve given up hope.”

“Well, things’ll change. Look, I’ll ring Harry, and you drive out
when you’re finished at the hairdresser. We’ll all have lunch.”

“Yes, sir.” She came over and kissed him on the cheek. “You need
a shave, baby.” She rubbed her hand through the bristles of his beard.
“It’s getting a little gray. The boy wonder grows old and gray.”

“I’m not through living yet.”

“God, I hope not. Who knows, I may be able to stop taking my
medicine.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice? To have you sober for a full day.”

“I can stop whenever I like,” she said adamantly. “I’ve only been
waiting for a chance to prove it.” She was about to leave when she
added in a quiet voice: “Jay, I’ve been faithful to you.”

“Yeah, sure, don’t worry about it.”

“You do though. When I was with Marty, nothing happened.”

“I don’t want to hear
any more,” he said, rising angrily.

“Please listen, nothing happened. We lived together as brother and
sister. He
can’t!
But he made me swear that I’d never tell you. I guess
I must love you more than I ever realized, ‘cause I never expected
to break my promise.” She closed the door
softly,
and he fell back into
the settee. It was uncomfortable, made for a museum, not for a man
to sit in. He’d have to get a comfortable chair. They’d start to live in
the house.

Neal! Neal! Neal! The name, the child, haunted him like a vision of
paradise. The luminous green eyes, the snubbed nose, the dark wavy
hair, the agony of a child torn apart, remained with him. He admitted no judges but himself, and by his own standards his life had
been a failure and could only ascend to success if Neal were happy.
In some strange, illogical way, every action, beneficent and despicable, every experience, could be justified if Neal turned out all right.
He realized as he drove up the winding country road to Park Knoll
that his life depended on Neal, that he was the captive of his own
eidetic image. Neal, the new self, must supersede the old one. He
had a wild, buoyant sense of hope when he thought of Eva. He could
redeem the overdue pledge he had given her. It still might be possible. His existence resembled a pawnbroker’s attic in which little
bits of himself lay strewn on the ground, dusty and
dessicated
, tarnished, visions, images, actions, experience, flung into a pervasive
desuetude, so that he had nothing more to give, no more credit to
demand - the only remaining course was to claim what had formerly
been his and use it, use it well this time.

Jay had a foreigner’s contempt for the large, grandiose lobby. A
composite of knotty pine walls, spineless furniture
that
looked like
a gypsy’s idea of arts and crafts, chichi bamboo room dividers, modern paintings
that
would have been sensational as wallpaper patterns for the toilet, and a pack of
be-slacked,
tweed-dripping matrons
done up in Fifth Avenue’s idea of English gentry. Jay wondered if
these women knew that the
tweeds
they flaunted had been soaked in
prime Scottish urine in order to give them the right texture. About
six of them gave him frantic stares.
A tall blonde standing by
a leather-topped desk with a small illegible sign that he gathered was a reception, gave him a fine
clinical smile. She looked like a failed air hostess, or perhaps a successful one.

“You’re not a member?” The question was couched in a shrill
reproachful tone.

“Nothing to be ashamed of, is it?”

She looked up from her horn-rims
and decided that he was a gate
crasher.

“I’m
sorry, this is for members only.”

“I’m a guest.”

“Oooh!” - entirely different tone
– “some confusion?”

“My fault,” he said gallantly. “I have no manners.”

“You must have to say that.”

He gave her Harry’s name,
and she did a few “oh-
ahs
” and said:
“Is he on the links?”

“On the balls of his ass most likely.”

“Pardon?”

“Try the bar.”

She had Harry paged by a superannuated bellhop who shuffled through the lobby carrying a blackboard
with Harry’s name printed
on it, groaning
sotto voce:
“Mr. Harry Lee.”

Harry emerged from a glazed door that
had “Venetian Bar”
written on it. He got a bit tangled in his tattersall plus fours as he
strode up to Jay. Now that he had touched seventy, a melodramatic
sanguinity peeped through the stiff-as-leather bronze
that
had become his natural color; little armies of crisscrossing capillaries ran like
squirming worms under his skin.

“So, I’ve got you here at last,” he said, tapping Jay on the shoulder.

“Would you sign, please?” the blonde demanded.

Jay made an X on the book, and she glared after him.

Roughly a hundred people were jammed into the Venetian Bar.
Gondolas on the wall displayed fat ladies with too much rouge on
their cheeks sitting idly back to admire the azure sky of Venice.

“Well, what do you think of the place, Jay?”

“It’s like a
mikvah,
and you look like the lifeguard in your costume. Why not a dress?”

“You wear these for golf. Plus fours are traditional.”

“Give me a jockstrap with luminous nailheads any day.”

“You’re still impossible. I guess you’ll never get used to the better
things in life. Have a drink.”

“Okay, you twisted my arm. Eva’s gonna meet us here at one.”

“Terrific. You two straightened yourselves out?”

“Maybe.”

“Aren’t you sure?” He sounded aggrieved. Jay knew that he was
particularly fond of Eva, and disturbed by the course their marriage
had taken. It was as though he had a personal stake in their lives.

“Yeah. It’ll probably be all right. It’s my kid who’s worrying me
to death.”

“Since when?”

“Since the day I split up with Rhoda. She’s got herself some zombie now who’s planning to marry her bank account, and the kid’s
all upset. He’s neglected and pushed
around,
and it kills me that I
can’t do anything to stop it. I mean to
say” - he
spoke in a loud voice,
and the bartender wondered if he had too much after only one drink – “my kid, getting the short end of the stick. I could give him everything.”

“What about Eva? How does she feel?”

“She wants to have him if we can get him.”

“What’s the guy do?”

“I think he’s a gambler or half-assed bookie, or both.”

“Then you sit back and wait. They’ll run out of money, and she’ll want to make a touch, and then you’ve got them by the balls.”

“That’s what Eva thinks. But in the meantime, Neal’s running wild and getting drunk.”