Three-Martini Lunch (8 page)

Her brooding eyes bored holes into my own.
Yes
was the true answer: I was afraid to go. I was also afraid
not
to go.

“I know this will upset our plans a bit . . . It will take us a little longer to save up for a place of our own, but it's something I have to do.”

She closed her eyelids as though they were suddenly very heavy, and
briefly lifted a hand to her temple. Then she dropped the hand and opened her eyes again. “All right,” she said in a meek voice, shrugging and shaking her head. “If it's something you have to do.”

“I think this will help us in the long run,” I said, reaching across the table to touch her hand where it had fallen. “I think once I've done this, I'll be ready . . . for the next steps to come.” I did not say
marriage
, but of course marriage was what I meant, and Janet knew it, too. She looked up, and smiled meekly.

“Then I guess I ought to wish you good luck.”

I squeezed her hand and leaned across the table to give her a grateful peck of a kiss. This move was only moderately successful. Her lips were cold and waxy, and smelled a bit like the peculiar clay used in ladies' lipstick. She smiled, though, and I smiled back, already feeling guilty for the slight shimmer of relief I felt upon having resolved to go to California after all.

T
he money my mother had given me was a start, but if I was going to make it all the way out to California, I'd have to scrimp as best I could. Summer loomed closer, and I graduated from Columbia. My mother attended the ceremony with a mixture of pride and dread on her face as she fanned herself in the humid sun, for graduation also meant the end of my life in the dormitory, and that meant I was coming home to stay under the same roof as Wendell.

For income, I had my part-time job as a bicycle messenger. The pay was modest, but I was having little luck finding much else—college degree be damned—so I asked the messenger service to increase my hours to as many as they would allow. I was paid weekly, and every Friday I added to the roll of bills I kept hidden in an old boot in the corner of my closet, but the saving was slow going.

One morning, however, the heavyset dispatcher sent me on a delivery that changed my fortune in a rather unexpected manner. It was—I realize
looking back on it now—the second time within the space of a month that someone handed me a key and altered my prospects.

“Be careful with this one,” the dispatcher advised me, chewing on a toothpick and handing me a slip with an address scribbled on it. “Character named Augustus Minton, but likes for his help to call him ‘Mister Gus.' He's a grumpy sonofabitch, but he's richer than God. He writes a whole heap of them dime-store books under some other name—for kicks, I suppose—but he comes from important family, so we're under orders not to rattle his cage. The old fart doesn't get around too good, so if he doesn't hear you buzzing, you're to go around to the side entrance and use this key to let yourself in.”

He handed me a house key and an envelope, eyeing me over from head to toe. “Hmph. I know you're one of those book-smart Negroes and all, but I don't expect you've ever been anywhere that compares to his house. Try to behave yourself. With any luck, you can leave the package downstairs and you won't have to talk to him face-to-face.” He paused and rubbed his chin. “Now that I think about it . . . maybe I'll phone over and warn him. Wouldn't want the codger to be surprised by seeing a Negro in his house and have himself a heart attack.”

The dispatcher shuffled away. The top flap of the envelope was open, and a quick peek inside revealed the package contained a slender manuscript written under a curiously quaint nom de plume, “François Reynard.” I had seen this name before, on bookshop shelves and even, sometimes, at the drugstore. He was the author of short, noir-style mysteries, the type of fare popular in the 1930s and more often than not snatched up by Hollywood and turned into movies.

I memorized the address; it was on the Upper East Side. I tucked the key into my vest pocket and pedalled off on my bicycle. Messenger-boys were indispensable to publishing houses in those days. It seemed an endless stream of copies wanted dispatching all over the island of Manhattan
and occasionally across the Brooklyn Bridge. Memos, typed carbons, and signed contracts whizzed between skyscrapers, brownstones, and mansions alike. A great many authors lived in New York at that time and quite often correspondences between writers and editors were ferried directly back and forth by messenger.

I rode uptown and found the townhouse more or less as I had imagined it: a rather large, stately brownstone on East Seventy-eighth Street near the park. It was a corner building, the kind with a servants' entrance around the side. After two attempts at the bell, I went to the side entry and tried the key. Once inside, I found myself in a narrow hallway. I followed it blindly into a foyer where my shoes echoed loudly on the pure white marble floor. A package wrapped in brown parchment was laid out on a small console table. I assumed it was intended for me, or rather for the publishing house that employed me, and I moved to collect it.

“Who's that? Who's there?” came a voice. I froze.

“My name is Miles Tillman, sir,” I called back. “I'm a messenger. Torchon and Lyle sent me.”

“You're not the regular boy,” the voice said. The timbre of it sounded tight, full of tension, as though he were holding back a wheezing cough. I was sure he was lying down and had been napping. I could hear him catching his breath from some remote back bedroom and I understood I had clearly woken him by ringing the bell and upset his regular routine. “Well?” the voice demanded. “Come on up here.”

“Sir?”

“You're here in my house, I need to get a look at you!” he snapped. “Don't dawdle. I'm not getting any younger.”

I set the package down, put a hand on the cold marble banister, and looked upwards in the direction of the voice. There was nothing to do but go. I reached the top of the stairs and was met with a hallway that extended in both directions. I hesitated, considering which way to turn.

“Faster, boy!” he snapped. “You lack confidence. I can hear your mincing little step on the rug.”

I moved in the direction of the voice, and found my way to the most cavernous, sumptuous, bizarre-looking bedroom I have ever seen. It was a veritable sultan's palace. Every inch of the place was covered in velvets and silks. Cushions were piled in heaps amid animal skins stretched out all around the floor. I looked up and noticed there was no visible ceiling, just billowing swags of ruby-colored silk ascending, tentlike, to an apex from which dangled a strange-looking glass chandelier. Aesthetically speaking, the room charged headlong towards a state of gaudiness and then veered away at the last second. Until that day, I had never realized there existed people wealthy enough to bring the entire museum home with them.

Sure enough, as I looked around, I saw several objects that very likely had, on some occasion, once been exhibited in an actual museum. Marble sculptures perched on ionic pedestals. Baroque figurines were arranged in clusters here and there on a fireplace mantel. Dark, jewel-toned Renaissance paintings hung on the walls, the ripples of muscular human and animal flesh so real and vivid, they threatened to topple right out of their gilded frames.

“They're copies,” Mister Gus said, catching me gazing at the paintings. “But quite accurate, I assure you. That's a Titian.” I nodded absent-mindedly. “Don't nod as if you know who that is,” he snapped in a petulant voice. “You don't know who that is.” My eyes sought out the source of the voice. The room was big, dim, and ornate, and it took me some seconds before my gaze landed on a small face frowning at me over a mound of bedcovers.

His brittle visage hovered over the bed, and I was struck by how it was possible he could appear paler than the white bedsheets. He was very much how I expected him to look, only smaller. He had sunken-in, skull-like features, the kind wherein the cheekbones and jawbones encircle
each side of one's face like two angular, upside-down trapezoids. His chin was very pointy, his eyes were a faded blue, his skin bore a mottled map of age spots. His lips had thinned to the point of becoming a taut line. You could see, though, from the dark pepper still present in his wiry eyebrows and in the dark fringe of his lower lashes, that once upon a time he had perhaps reminded people of Errol Flynn and had been something approaching handsome. Now he glared at me, waiting for me to speak.

“That's a Caravaggio,” I said, pointing to another painting in a far corner. This was a lucky observation. Once, when I was fifteen, I found a large book that had been abandoned under a bench in Central Park. Inside the book was a series of translucent envelopes filled with glossy black-and-white photographs of the great paintings of Western Civilization. I took the book home, extracted the photographs, and pasted them up all over my bedroom walls with Scotch tape. They gave me great pleasure to look at, and they hung there until two years later, when my stepfather ripped them down in a routine fit of drunken irritation with me. The Caravaggio had been one of my favorites; I had taped it to the ceiling over my bed and memorized its shapes and lines, but I had never seen it in color and hadn't understood all that I was missing. I stared at it with fascination now. It was like seeing a friend you thought you knew and realizing there were still a great many secrets you had yet to discover about each other.

“Hmph,” he said. “When they telephoned to warn me you were coming, they said you were an educated Negro. I didn't know how to picture that until just now.” He pointed to another painting over his shoulder, on the wall to the right of his bed. “Do you know that one?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I admitted. He smiled instantly, a smug, gratified smile.

“Then I guess there's still some difference between us after all,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don't
agree
with that, boy!” he snapped. “I just insulted you. Never agree with a man who insults you.”

“Yes, sir.”

He huffed and rolled his eyes. “Oh, I can see you are going to be trouble already,” he scolded. “Don't you know enough not to abide a man who insults you?”

“With all due respect, sir,” I said, “insults are relative. They depend on what a man aspires—or
doesn't
aspire—to be.” Mister Gus looked at me a long time, his left eye squinting a tiny bit more than his right.

“I believe,” he said finally, “that
you
just insulted
me
.” Only as he said this did I realize how brazen I had been. I thought about my job and swallowed, waiting for him to speak again, my pulse thundering in my ears. It would not take much for him to telephone the publishing company and have me fired. “Hmph,” he said. “Well. At least I can see you're not going to be boring. Come here; let me get a look at you.”

I drew closer to the bed. He must've been one of those old people who is perpetually cold; the blankets were tucked up to his chin. All of his body remained concealed beneath and only his long, spindly fingers curled over the folded edges of the cool white sheet. His eyes studied me, and I got the impression he was calculating a long and complicated math equation.

“Your name again?”

“Miles Tillman, sir.”

“Hmm, well. I suppose I'm stuck with you instead of the regular boy, so you'll have to do. I assume you read the paper from time to time?”

“Yes.”

“Don't say ‘yes' so quickly, you dunce,” he snapped. “You don't even know which paper I mean!”

“I assumed you mean do I read the
Times
,” I replied.

“Of course you did. But there are lots of papers these days. You shouldn't assume. Only fools assume,” he said emphatically. “Are you a fool?”

“No, sir,” I replied. He fumbled for a scrap of paper on the nightstand and handed it to me.

“Well, if you read the paper occasionally that means you
ought
to be able to find your way to the newsstand. Now,” he said, “there's the list of all the papers I want.”

I blinked at the scrap of paper, slowly comprehending I was being sent on an errand for him. The chicken-scratch handwriting revealed a long list of newspapers. It occurred to me it might be easier to bring him the whole newsstand, wooden booth and all, but I didn't say so.

“And here,” Mister Gus continued, huffing as he reached back to the nightstand to retrieve a glass. In it were a couple of bills and a few nickels and dimes. I realized he had been waiting to assign someone this task and must have counted out the money sometime earlier, perhaps even the night before. I wondered if the previous messenger-boy had been routinely sent on this errand. He dumped the contents into my palm. “And don't go thinking you can pocket some of this for yourself; I know the cost, and I've counted out exact change. When you return, you'll get your proper tip, but not before then.”

I made no move to go and simply stood there, dumbstruck.

“Well? Go, boy!” Mister Gus shouted. “Hurry up, now.”

“Don't you”—I hesitated—“have some live-in help?”

“Hmph!” he grunted.
“Greta,”
he grumbled, grinding teeth that I could only presume were dentures. “Useless! Gone out. Grocery shopping, she says, but she dawdles and takes her time . . . hiding from me, that's what she's doing. Do you know, she's taken to bringing my meals while I'm asleep. Puts the tray on the bed and then rings a little bell
after
she's hurried out of the room so I won't have a chance to complain about her awful cooking. Hmph. Thinks that's crafty!”

I wasn't sure what to say to this. As Mister Gus glared at me, I began to sympathize with his housemaid's strategy.

“Well?” he said with irritation. “Go already!”

I unfroze, went downstairs and around the corner—making sure I took the key with me—and bought the newspapers. The newsstand attendant
appeared to be familiar with my laundry list; he took one look at it and stacked the papers in a neat pile without checking twice and confirmed my suspicion that I was not the first messenger-boy Mister Gus had sent on this errand. When I returned, the old man had propped himself up on the pillows and was waiting.

“Set them here, boy,” Mister Gus said, patting the bed beside him, and I did as instructed. He pulled one of the papers into his lap, squinting with milky eyes to make out the headlines. “Your tip is on the nightstand,” he said, not glancing up from his reading. I looked, and in my absence an envelope had appeared—extracted, I assumed, from the nightstand drawer, where it had likely been pre-counted, ready and waiting. I was surprised to see it was an envelope, for that meant paper, not coin.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Felston was the regular boy they sent here,” he said. “I trusted Felston.”

I didn't know what to say to this idle remark, so I remained silent.

“But I understand he quit recently.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, for this was true. Bill Felston was a very handsome messenger-boy who had recently quit to marry a girl in New Jersey and take over her family's gas station.