Tiffany Street (17 page)

I think it suddenly seemed more than a dart of innocent fun, even though Seb may have intended it to be no more than that, because it came out of experience. Or rather, I’d had the experience with which to check it out. Forty years of it I hope, Seb had said, being nice to me hasn’t been a matter of regret to you?

“No, it hasn’t,” I said. “There are times when you are irritating, and maybe there have been more of those times than I would have liked, but on the whole, no. You have not been a matter of regret to me.”

“Good,” Seb said. “Will’s in ten minutes?”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

It had been Will’s in ten minutes for many years. Seb had put me up for membership soon after I was admitted to the bar. I walked around to 48th Street and climbed the linoleum-covered stairs that sagged. Those stairs always brought to mind that moment during the war when, in a practice exercise at that staging area in Kent before D-day, I had been forced for the first time in my life to climb a rope ladder.

Seb was sitting at the large round table up near the windows that look out on 48th. His forefinger and thumb twirled the stem of his martini glass as he smiled at Dr. Claude Pfeiffer. The N.Y.U. professor, who had lost most of his hair since I had first joined Will’s, was telling the group around the table the story about Willie Maugham and the Internal Revenue Service. Coming down the long room toward the performance, I suddenly had a revelation about the core of Sebastian Roon’s charm.

Seb must have heard that story, over the years, dozens of times. Even I, who came to the club far less often than he, had heard it more times than I could with any sense of accuracy count. And yet Seb was listening with a smile of eager anticipation.

He had the true actor’s gift. Making it seem, night after night, performance after performance, that this was the first time he had ever uttered the lines. Or heard the other actor utter his.

Seb saw me, changed the smile, and waved me toward one of the smaller tables at the back of the room, under the Howard Chandler Christy painting of Robert Benchley. Walking toward it, I saw Seb rise. On his way to join me, he paused at the bar and said something in a low voice to the stern-face, white-haired old lady in black bombazine. She nodded severely and started to mix my drink. I knew it would be a martini, even though I disliked martinis. The first day I came to Will’s I ordered Cutty Sark on the rocks and the Madame Defarge at the bar had made me a martini. After all these years I still did not want a martini, but if I wanted a drink at Will’s that was what I was going to get.

“I say,” Sebastian Roon said as he plopped down into the chair facing me. “What sort of horrors have you been involved in?”

The remark annoyed me. He sounded exactly like Miss Bienstock saying she could always tell when something troublesome was going through my mind.

“I’ve just been mugged,” I said.

Sebastian Roon’s glass, on its way to his mouth, did not falter. He took his sip. He is a Stanislavsky man.

“You mean mugged as in all those stories on page two of the New York
Daily News?
” he said.

“Page three,” I said. “Page two is fading Hollywood stars who take overdoses of sleeping pills.”

I gave him the details.

“Bad show, Benjamin,” Sebastian Roon said. “Bad show indeed. Have you been to see a man?”

“It’s too late in the day,” I said. “I’ll call Artie Steinberg in the morning.”

“Any pain now?” Seb said.

“Nothing a drink won’t fix.” How I wished it was not a martini.

“Well, here it is, old boy.”

The grim-faced old lady in bombazine set the drink in front of me.

“Take a good long pull,” Seb said. I did. “Better?”

“Much,” I said.

It wasn’t. But I didn’t mind that. If you can’t lie to a friend, what’s friendship all about?

“Now tell me about Dr. McCarran,” Seb said.

I did.

“Do you think it will work?” Seb said.

“You ought to know,” I said. “McCarran said you got him to do it for several of your actor friends during the war.”

“Quite,” Seb said. “And it did work for them, but this is a different war.”

“I know,” I said. “But the chemistry of the human body that leads to bed-wetting can’t have changed much since the Persian wars and earlier. I’m not too worried about that. McCarran struck me as a man who knows his stuff.”

“But you’re worried about something,” Seb said. “I can tell.”

“How would you like to have facing you the job of breaking this to Elizabeth Ann?” I said.

Seb twirled the stem of his glass for a few moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “I see your point.”

I thought he would. He had known Elizabeth Ann before I met her. In fact, Seb had introduced us.

“Anyway,” I said, “don’t you worry about it.”

“It’s not Jack and the draft board I’m worrying about,” Seb said. “I’m sure McCarran has wrapped that up okay. And it’s not your breaking it to Elizabeth Ann that worries me, either. You’ve been breaking things to her for thirty years. You’ll pull this one off, too.”

“So it must be something involving you,” I said.

Sebastian Roon did quite a bit of worrying about things involving himself.

“Yes,” he said, “and even raising the subject with you at a time like this makes me feel a bit of a stinker.”

Sebastian Roon had been deploring for forty years that he felt a bit of a stinker. But the feeling had never even slowed him down in the process of asking his friends to immerse themselves up to their navels in his affairs. My experience with them was that Seb’s affairs were never silly. Preposterous? Possibly. Outlandish? On occasion. But silly? Never. Was it silly for Columbus to tell Isabella he could reach India by sailing west?

The average citizen, when he comes to see a lawyer, wants a will written. Or a real-estate deal closed. Or a divorce arranged.

Not Seb. He had at war within him the instincts of a high spirited but thoroughly inept adventurer and the innocence of an enthusiastic schoolboy. He could drive you crazy, but he could never bore you. Not Benny Kramer, anyway. I felt about him the way my mother had felt about him. I loved the irritating son of a gun.

“Let’s skip the clipped ‘Oh, dear’ malarkey,” I said. “You’re not at the Lyceum in a revival of
The Last of Mrs. Cheney.
You’re at Will’s with your dopey old friend Benny Kramer from Tiffany Street. And actually, now that Benny is here, he’s glad he is here. My head hurts, but you soothe me. Tell me slowly all about your current problem.”

Seb stared down into his glass. He seemed troubled. As with all actors pushing sixty, especially good actors, when Sebastian Roon seems troubled your heart leaps. Being troubled seems right. It makes you both bigger men. Seb looked like Abraham Lincoln staring down from that marble armchair in the memorial on the Potomac.

“My problem,” Seb said quietly. “My problem,” he repeated. He sighed. “My problem, Benjamin, is that I’m suffering from an incurable disease.”

My gut jumped. During the past eight months two friends had gone. My barber, and the man who had sat beside me in Bills & Notes at N.Y.U. Law School. The big C. I knew people who hated this euphemism for cancer. I just hated cancer.

“That’s rough,” I said as calmly as I could manage to enunciate the words. “Are you sure it’s incurable?”

Seb’s glance came slowly away from his glass. What was he doing in Will’s? That profile belonged on Mt. Rushmore.

“Absolutely certain,” Seb said.

The place where my head had hit the cab door was suddenly throbbing.

“What have you got?” I said. “Or don’t you want to talk about it?”

“Of course I want to talk about it,” Seb said. “If I didn’t would I have raised the subject?”

Probably not I thought. But not very clearly. My head was going like a metronome.

“All right” I said. “Once on Tiffany Street we were small boys. Comparatively speaking. Now we’re big boys. Undeniably. If you can face telling me, I can face hearing it. Seb, for God’s sake, what damned incurable disease have you got?”

“It has a curious name,” he said. Pause. “It’s called Being Fifty-nine Years Old.”

I wanted to laugh. But I didn’t. My experience with wits is that it is a mistake to encourage them in setting up jokes. They think they’ve done it all themselves. And they continue.

“You’re not fifty-nine,” I said. “The fact that we are exactly the same age was established in 1930 on Tiffany Street in the Bronx, and I am fifty-eight.”

“Four months past sunset and evening star,” Sebastian Roon said. “You’re on your way to fifty-nine, old boy, as surely as Leander was on his way to Hero when he dove into the Hellespont. Fifty-nine, Benjamin. Fifty-nine.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Fifty-eight.”

“You like looking backward more than you like looking forward,” Seb said.

I gave that a moment of thought. It was not easy, with my head going like Man O’ War breaking away from the barrier, but it was rewarding. Things suddenly came clear.

“Yes,” I said, “I do. Looking forward is for young people. Mariners. Olympic shot-putters. Pot smokers. Wampus baby stars. Black welterweights. Groupies. Professional football players. Vasco da Gama. Battling Siki. Charlie Paddock. Toby Wing. Mick Jagger. Jerry Rubin. Kids with years to waste. That’s what those years are for. To be wasted. That’s what being young is all about. You know that. We were young together. On Tiffany Street. At fifty-nine—no, damnit—at fifty-eight the view changes. It’s a matter of simple arithmetic. You don’t know my barber. A rare human being. Truly rare. Came to this country from Salerno about the time my father came from Austria. He had finally earned, after forty years of saving, he had in the bank the dough to nail down the title to his shop in the basement of the Crawford Hotel. I handled the closing for him. You would have thought he had been knighted. God, what a performance. Nothing beats pure joy. I wanted to sit there and watch him for the rest of the day. But Miss Bienstock would have disapproved. I wouldn’t take a fee, so he gave me a free haircut. Three weeks later the poor bastard was dead.”

I closed my eyes and counted four throbs inside my head. They came steadily, at carefully spaced intervals. I thought of the day Jack had been born. Elizabeth Ann had waited until the pains were steady, coming at regularly spaced intervals, before she would let me call a taxi and she rang up Artie Steinberg. What a wife. Sorry, I mean what a life. But I’m going to let it stand. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had both. I opened my eyes.

“Looking forward is great when you’re twenty,” I said. “It’s pointless when you’re sixty. You know what’s going to happen. Like everybody else, you know you’re trapped by the numbers. You know people are going to die. Including you. Meaning me. So why not look back? To the time when we were all going to live forever.”

“That’s what Jim Mennen said at lunch today,” Seb said.

“Jim who?” I said.

He gave it the eye spread he had used as Captain Hook in the Ina Claire revival of
Peter Pan
when he brought down the house with his malevolent pronunciation of the words: “Rrrrrich—dampppp—cake!”

“Do you mean to sit there, one of the most successful barristers in the Mecca of the Western World, and tell me you don’t know James V. Mennen?”

“What’s the V for?” I said.

I learned how to parry from Professor Simeon Tompkins who taught Evidence at N.Y.U. Law School. He also taught me his one joke: “Parry in haste, repeal at leisure.”

“Victor,” Sebastian Roon said. “James Victor Mennen is the president of the Anglo-British TV network.”

“Oh, him,” I said.

“What does that remark mean?” Seb said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t. So I concentrated. It helped. “Yes, I do know,” I said. “He’s always in those Broadway columns that Elizabeth Ann reads and quotes from every morning while we’re having coffee.”

“That’s right,” Seb said. “But he’s more famous for having boosted the ABTV common stock from forty-two, when he took over the presidency of the network three years ago, to one hundred and eight today when he took your chum Sebastian Roon to lunch.”

“Where?” I said.

“What?” Seb said.

“Where did Mr. Mennen take you to lunch?”

“Now what the hell difference does that make?”

“None,” I said. “Unless he took you to Shane’s on West Twenty-third Street.”

Seb laughed. “You are a silly ass,” he said. “Shane’s burned down the day Franklin Roosevelt closed the banks.”

“I know,” I said. “I just thought it would be nice if Mr. Mennen had not been aware of that, and wanted to take you to the place formerly frequented by Graham McNamee and Julius Tannen.”

“Jim Mennen probably doesn’t even know who Julius Tannen was,” Seb said. “He took me to lunch at The Huffing Hickey.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“A restaurant without lights on East Forty-sixth,” Seb said. “Where people go to discuss business deals if they don’t want to be seen doing it.”

“If they don’t want to be seen doing it, why do they go to restaurants?” I said.

“Where do
you
go?” Seb said.

“I don’t,” I said. “I ask the party of the second party to come to my office.”

“Ah, yes, you would,” Seb said. “Thus taking all the fun and games out of it. The idea is to go to a place that is known as a rendezvous for people who don’t want to be seen rendezvousing. Then you can issue indignant denials or demand retractions from gossip columnists who print that they saw you there.”

“Have you demanded any retractions?” I said.

“Not yet,” Seb said. “But I may.”

I could almost see inside his head. I could chart the course of his mind. He liked to talk about his affairs, or rather he liked to talk around them, but he hated to come to the point about them. Decisions frightened him. He had started to tell me whatever it was he had started to tell me, but now he was beginning to shy away. He wanted more time. Well, today he was not going to get it. Not from me. Not with my head throbbing.

“I’ve got to leave in a few minutes,” I said. “Tell me about this Jim Mennen thing, or call me tomorrow.” I waved to Madame Defarge. She came over, moving majestically, like the vessel that carried Charles Dana for two years before the mast. I handed her the martini. “Please take this damn thing away,” I said, “and bring me some Cutty Sark on the rocks.”