Seventh Avenue (53 page)

“
God, Sports, it’s so exciting, so quick.”

“
Well, you knew I was serious. I mean you
interduced
me to your
ex as the fiancé. Look, you’re free, white, and twenty-one.”

“
Yes, yes.” She felt exalted as the wind blew into her face and the
car moved out of the traffic and onto the open highway. “We’ll stop
by the apartment and I’ll pick up a few things and a suitcase.”

“
Haven’t got time, if we want to get to Philly for
the night
game.
I’ll buy
yuh
everything new. So stop worrying about incidentals.
You’re terrific, Rho, a terrific item. We’re gonna have ourselves a
marriage that’ll be fun from morning till
night.
”

“
I need to have fun. I do. I get so blue at times when I think of
what I’ve been through with Jay that I think I ought to end it all . . .”

“
Nothing but laughs . . .”

“
And Neal tying me down. Somebody who’ll put me first. I’ll be
the most important thing
in
his
life . . .”

“
In the winter we got football and basketball. We’ll travel around
the country with all the teams. Maybe I can make a
connection
,
and
we can do some business with the players. They can win the game,
but we get ‘em to shave a few points off . . .”

“
Neal will just have to get used to the idea. I can’t live on my
own forever, I mean what’s he expect of me? I’m still a young
woman. Flesh and blood. I’ve got
feelings
,
and I can’t ignore them
just ‘cause I’ve got a son from another marriage. He can’t expect me
to lay down my life for him, can he?”

“
Who’re you talking about?”

“
Neal,” she said anxiously. “You’ll make an effort to get along
with him.”

“
I got him in my pocket
awready
. Just give him a few
bucks
,
and
he’s happy.”

“
He ought to respect you. It’s important. He doesn’t respect anybody or anything. He’s got to learn respect.”

“
He won’t butt in. Take my word for it, Rho. I’ll charm
him
,
and
we’ll be friends. He’s not a bad kid, but he better not burn any more
suits. I won’t be so forgiving next time. After all, what can he do? He’s
only a kid. You don’t have to account to him.”

She got very angry and heatedly agreed:

“
Why should I account to him? I’m his mother. It should be the
other way around. He owes me explanations. Why should I justify
myself to him? Didn’t I go through hell with Jay for his
sake?
Living
with a man I didn’t love, who mistreated me for no reason. I mean it
was his fault that I started taking my pills. He brought on my
condition. I was perfectly all right when I was younger.”

“
If the pills help, then who am I to say no?” Sports
averred,
as he
pressed down on the accelerator. “I don’t mind a pill myself, now and
again, when I’m feeling a little tired or depressed.
Peps
you up and
you’re
winging
.”

“
So what if I get a little high? It’s my business, isn’t it? Who can
judge me? It’s certainly healthier than drinking myself into the ground
like Jay. He polishes off a bottle a day. I’d call that alcoholic, wouldn’t
you, Sports?”

“
High intake of booze, most definitely. Although
,
on occasions
,
I
indulge
myself.”

“
Well, with you it’s
different .
. . jolly and laughs. At least you’re
not a hypocrite.”

“
Sure, live and let live. What I say is the other guy goes to his
church
,
and I go to mine.”

“
And with us it’s love. We accept each other as we are. Angels live
in heaven.”

“
Where they belong. In
life
,
there’s good and bad.”

“
Exactly. Maybe in a few days we can drive up to camp and surprise Neal. Tell him the good news and give him time to get used to
the idea.”

“
Fine by me. Never been to Connecticut. It’s a state without a team.
Not at all athletic-minded till you hit Boston.”

Sports pulled into a service station and told the
pump man
to fill
it up. He got some change and informed Rhoda that he had to make a
telephone call to his bookmaker, so that he could have a bit of action
on the baseball game. In the car, she fished in her
handbag
and found
her bottle of pills. She chewed a
Benzedrine
,
and when Sports hopped
back into the car, she had a satisfied beam on her face.

“
The color of the car suits you,” she said.

“
You really think so?”

“
It does. It’s a happy color.”

“
That’s what I thought when I got it. A lucky color too. A man
driving a car like this can’t be a
loser,
that’s what I said to myself.”

“
I’m so happy . . .
so very, very, happy.”

“
We’ll follow the sun. That’s the way to
live
.” He leaned over and
kissed her on the
mouth
,
and she put her arms around his neck with a
passion she had long ago forgotten. It had been born and died over
the course of a single winter with Jay, and a woman deserved more
than a single winter of passion
to carry
her through a lifetime. She
wanted to ask Sports to stop at a motel along the Jersey Turnpike, so
that they could have a quiet hour in bed, but he was determined to
get to Philadelphia in case the game was a sellout.

“
Well, it’s happened at last,” Terry said with a mixture of relief and
despair. They had driven down to Southampton the following day.
“I’m out of my cage, or are we both in a cage together? It’s hard to
be sure.”

“
Does it matter?” Jay was still in a state of shock. “I always seem to
be in strange hotel rooms.
It
’s the story of my life.”

“
You can back out if you like.”

He shrugged his shoulders apathetically and took a pull from the
bottle of scotch he had picked up on the way up. “Don’t be a fool. It’s
only that I want to know when it’s all gonna end. Living like a bum
and behaving like a pig. I’m not, you know.”

“
Oh, Jay darling, of
course
,
you’re not. I am! After
all
,
I’m the one
who walked out on her husband and children. People will make excuses for a man, but I’d hate to hear what they’ll say about me. And
they’ll be right. But life’s too short to waste on a guilty conscience.
You do what you have to, and if it works out
,
then
you’ve done the
right thing.”

“
And if it doesn’t work out?”

“
Well, you’ve got the satisfaction of knowing that
you
made the
decision
,
and you didn’t just drift along.”

“
You’ll miss your children, the way I do Neal.”

“
This will probably upset you, but the truth of the matter is that
you’re more important to me than they are.”

She seemed incredibly lovely to him. He reached out, pulled her
on his lap, and fondled her face. The nape of her neck was white
and soft, and her skin had the texture of velvet. The swell of her
breasts rested on the arm he had wrapped around her, and she turned
to him with a sad distrait expression in her eyes, which made him uncomfortable and guilt-ridden, for he realized that there was something
mercenary and almost depressing in achieving what he had wanted.
He had wanted love, and he had got it from her, he had wanted to
love her, and he did, and his disgust for himself stemmed from the
consciousness of having achieved his ends.

“
You’ve got a sense of responsibility,” she said.

“
Is that what I’ve got?”

“
Enough for the two of us. If we both had it, I’m sure it would be
sudden death.”

“
That’s a funny thing to say. How can I have any sense of responsibility?”

“
You’re living your
life
,
and that’s everything. You’re bothered and
worried by the way you’re living your
life
,
and you’ve got a tremendous amount of contempt for yourself because of it, but you shouldn’t
have. There’s nothing to believe in, Jay, except another human
being
,
I
believe in you. I know that essentially you’re good and that I exist
when I’m with you. We’re supposed to be immoral people, but we’re
not. We may have
done
things that other people consider to be immoral, but we’ve been moral with each other.”

“
You sound like you’re apologizing to someone who isn’t here.”

“
I’m not,” she was insistent, “because I don’t exist with other people. A woman who looks like me, who wears my clothes, who talks
like me, and uses my name - a woman who impersonates me - gives
people the impression that they know me. It’s a kind of confusion
which I’m responsible for.”

“
Who is the other woman?”

“
Nobody. She never
lived
,
and she never died. She just wasn’t
there.”

“
Will Mitch give you a divorce?”

“
Does it matter? If you’d like me to try, I will.”

“
Wouldn’t you like to marry me?”

“
I am married to you.”

It began to rain, a thin, summer drizzle, and Jay got up to close
the window. He looked out of the window at the jagged-shaped harbor, and the boats moored to the pier. He liked the aspect and the
sound of the wind, which was canalized by other buildings close to the
hotel, forming an alleyway
that
led to the bay. It was late and except for a party breaking up on one of the boats, the square in front
of the harbor was deserted. For a
moment
,
he expected a squad of
Russian officers to come out of
a tavern
and begin to
cat-whistle
at the
closed darkened shutters, but he smiled to himself. He knew that it
was a dream, a silly old dream, which he should have forgotten.
But he supposed it would come back to him from time to time, just
as his fuzzy memories of Vienna sometimes did.

He turned from the
window
,
and she was under the covers; two bare
white arms were stretched out over the blue blankets.

“
I’ve got a thing about water and boats,” he said.
“I
thought I came
out to Southampton to see Eva, but she doesn’t seem very important
now. I suppose
I
hoped I was going to explain things to her. We
ought to have a boat.”

“
Not an ocean liner like my father had. Something private that
sleeps only two.”

“
I don’t know the first thing about boats, but I like them.”

He got under the covers with
her
,
and he lit a cigarette.

“
I didn’t pull the curtains, do you mind?”