Trust (29 page)

“How was the trip?” he said. “It’s really been a long time since I’ve seen you. Much too long, in fact.” The Mercedes moved quietly in the travel lane of the Connecticut Turnpike, north through Stamford and Norwalk,
traveling at a steady fifty miles per hour, being overtaken and passed by every driver who cared to.

She exhaled loudly. “Oh,” she said, “it was all right, I guess.”

“Meaning that it wasn’t?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I was putting too much on the line. Expecting too much of it. I went to a lot of work, planning it. Drove the travel agent
crazy
. The dinner reservations at Tour d’Argent, and I made sure they’d light the Tower. The suite at the Georges Cinq, right on the Seine. The week at the Beaulieu Sur Mer, at this lovely hotel.”

“La Réserve,” he said.

“That’s the place,” she said. “I should’ve taken you. Then down to Florence. It was all just so perfect. And all Barry could think about was what was going on back home. He was on the phone, three, four times a day. Getting up at six or seven, allowing for the time change. Working himself into absolute rages when the operators didn’t speak Texan. Yelling at people in his office for forgetting to tell him things that he asked them about yesterday. What a romantic way to greet the morning. Sunlight streaming through your windows off the Mediterranean, fresh coffee and croissants on a tray outside your door, with fresh orange juice and the morning paper, and your husband screaming like a banshee on the phone because some poor filing clerk in the office back home didn’t remember to do something he asked the day before. He doesn’t know how to relax. I guess he never did. I just never noticed it till now. Or else I did, and I was so busy, doing other things, it didn’t bother me.”

“Now it does, though,” Cooke said.

“Now, it does,” she said. She looked directly at him. “You sound like you’re familiar with it,” she said. “Same thing with Caroline?”

He shrugged. “Same only different,” he said. “We’ve been married almost twelve years now. Known each other, thirteen. She’s a very impatient lady. Always has been, always will be. Craves action, all the time. It’s like her ego’s on the line, every single day. If something happens, and she didn’t make it happen, she feels left out of things. Where I’m just the opposite. Probably about seven, eight years ago, I woke up one morning, it was during the week, and I thought: ‘Well hell, I don’t feel like going in today. And I don’t think I will.’ So I called in and said I wouldn’t be there. And my secretary naturally assumed I was sick, said: ‘Hope you feel better tomorrow.’ And I didn’t correct her, just thanked her. I spent the first part of the morning in my study, first with the papers and then with some new charts I’d bought, probably a month before, and never even unwrapped, of the Intracoastal Waterway. Just going over again in my mind the route we’d be taking down, jotting down notes here and there, and that’s what I was doing when Caroline finally figured out I hadn’t gone to work. She sleeps until about ten, ten thirty—she’s a night bird and she doesn’t really start to function until close to noon. So she came in and found me sitting there in my robe, and she assumed I was sick, too, and I said no, I was just having a day to myself. ‘My clients have
all
their days to themselves,’ I said. ‘They have lunch at Côte Basque and they have lunch at La Grenouille. They have lunch at Sparks’ Steak House and they have lunch at Périgord. The ladies go out shopping and the gentlemen retire
to their usual positions at the Athletic Club. Then when the cocktail hour comes, they go home and have a drink. Freshen up and go to dinner and then go hear Bobby Short. Well, how can they do all these wonderful things? Why don’t they lose all their money? Because their obedient servant, me, is watching over their lives. Coast Guard Cooke: “Semper paratus, numquam dormio.” Well, knock out the “numquam,” ’cause today is “dormio,” least as far’s the job’s concerned. You wanna screw?”

“Did she?” Nora said.

“More or less,” he said. “I’ll give Caroline that: she’s never turned me down. If she’s around, and I get horny, her pants hit the deck. But she’s like everybody else. Sometimes she feels like it herself, and sometimes she does it purely to oblige me. This was one of those kind of times. She looked at her watch when I asked her, and said it’d have to be quick, because she was meeting Frieda down at Christ Cella for lunch. Well, that was all right, so I banged her, and she went flying out the door in a rush, and I finished what I’d been doing, took a shower, had a shave, got myself dressed, and went over to the Yacht Club for a sandwich and a drink or three. Another thing I never do. Father and my uncle went through all kinds of hell to make sure I’d get in there, and so naturally, as a result, I almost never use it. ’Bout the only contact I have with the place, one end of the year to the other, ’S when the bills for the dues come in, and I tell Maurice to pay them. So nobody paid any attention to me, and I browsed in the library after lunch and some coffee, started walking back home around six, and that night Caroline and I did the same thing we always do, which
is go out to some dinner we promptly forget, with people we see all the time, then come home and get into bed. And the next day I went to the office, told everyone who asked me—which was not that many; it’s a big shop, and everyone’s very busy, and one guy being out doesn’t make a big stir—that I felt much better, thanks.

“And you know what’d happened as a result of my being out? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The same brokers who’d called me the day before to try to talk me into churning my clients’ trust assets into some hot new issue, called me again the day I was back, most likely with some newer, hotter issue. And I told them the same thing I would’ve told them the day before, if I’d been there: ‘Thanks very much, Joe,’ or Harry, or Tom, or Dick, or whoever, ‘but I think everyone’s pretty content right now. I think it’s time to stand pat.’

“Well,” he said, “that day taught me something. First, a little humility. I’m as full of myself as the next man, but it sort of brings you up short when you play hooky and nobody notices. Just how important are you, if they don’t know when you’re not there? How do you tell when a trust management lawyer isn’t at his desk? He doesn’t make any noise when he is. He doesn’t take his phone calls? What are secretaries for, if not to screen the phone calls that their busy bosses get while they’re studying the markets, clipping coupons for their clients, and weighing proxy statements with care and thoughtful judgment. But the second thing was pleasanter, and the third was quite exciting. The second thing was that if they didn’t notice I was out, every now and then, then every now and then I could stay out with no one caring and do anything I liked. So long
as it didn’t involve one of the three or four clubs or restaurants where my partners invariably go for the same lunch and the same iced tea every damned day of the year, and nobody actually saw me, I wouldn’t have to explain anything to anybody. Chances are if they
had
seen me, I still wouldn’t’ve had to, either—they just would’ve assumed whatever I was doing must have something to do with firm business. We trust lawyers, you know, we’re very secretive. No point in asking us lots of sharp questions; we most likely can’t answer anyway. ‘Ethics, you know. Sorry, old boy. Client’s trust is inviolable.’ They get embarrassed they asked.

“See, Nora,” he said, “I know what I am. I guess that I always have. What I am is vanilla. Just plain vanilla. My mother called it ‘old-headed.’ I never broke a bone when I was a kid. I was never in a fight. I was never on academic probation in school, nor was I in college, and if you searched the dean’s list or the honors list, whatever, you’d find I wasn’t on them, either. While the big, muscular lads were out on the practice field, preparing to show Yale a few things, I was marching with the band, playing clarinet. Second clarinet. When the scholarship kids with the glittering eyes were up all night at the
Crimson
, I was attending coming-out parties, eating buffets at the Ritz. The first girl that I asked to be my wife said: ‘No thanks,’ and you know the reason she gave me? She said that her parents said I was ‘steady,’ and really liked me a lot, and she knew that that meant if she married me, I’d drive her nuts in a month.”

Nora Langley squeezed his right bicep. “I don’t know,” she said, “you seem pretty exciting to me.”

“Well, thank you,” he said, “but that’s because after
that first day, I discovered the third thing I mentioned. When you get to be thirty-six, thirty-seven, and you’ve been dull all your life, people expect nothing else. Every time they see you again, you can watch them placing your name, sorting the cards through their memory banks: ‘Category: Boring. Subclass: Very Boring. Occupation, Line of Work: Something Extremely Boring. Now what the hell’s his name?’ You know the one thing that most of my college classmates remember about me? In the summer between our junior and senior years, my roommate and I shipped out for the Orient. He signed on as able seaman, on a tramp freighter from New York. I went aboard in San Francisco, the
Princess of Asia
. He spent the summer wearing jeans and getting sunburned, scraping rust all the way through the Panama Canal, then across the wide Pacific. I spent my nights in a white dinner jacket, in the first-class lounge, playing clarinet for people who thought wild abandon was when they began the beguine, and my days playing canasta with old ladies in the sun. Ron got VD in Singapore, and beaten up in Brisbane. One old, addled gentleman was going to cane me for my attentions to his wife, who was over seventy—the bandleader smoothed it over and the barman watered both their drinks till they got off in Hong Kong. My father paid my airfare on Pan Am out of Manila so I’d have a couple weeks to rest before the school year started. Ron got in a fight in a bar in Subic Bay—when classes reconvened in September, Ronald was in jail. In the Philippines. My souvenir of the summer was a locket that a shy girl gave to me with a lock of her hair in it, sort of a mousy brown. That was in lieu of screwing me—she thought her aunt would
mind. Ronnie’s was a blue panther, tattooed on his left arm, and a real, fire-breathing dragon, green and gold, tattooed on his right.

“Nobody was surprised,” he said, “when I graduated, or when Ronnie didn’t. Nobody was surprised, either, when I joined the Coast Guard Reserve, and Ronnie got drafted right off. For me it meant two weekends a month, and two weeks more every summer, but with all but ironclad assurance that my orderly progression first through the UVA Law School, and then through the ranks of Arnold, Cooke, would not be interrupted by some inconvenient war. And no one was surprised at all when things worked out that way, without the slightest hitch. The second girl that I proposed to, on a moonlit Vineyard beach—she had long gold hair, like yours—thought about it for a minute and said: ‘What the hell, I guess so.’ I went around to pick her up for lunch and a sail the next day, and her mother told me that Pamela’d left on the earliest ferry that morning: ‘Her best friend from Chapel Hill called her up at three. She tried to kill herself last night. Pam simply had to go.’ I never saw her again. And that surprised no one, either.”

He laughed. “The only thing I ever did,” he said, “the only time in my whole life that people were surprised, was when I brought Caroline up to New York for the weekend, and introduced her around. When Eddie Fisher brought Elizabeth Taylor down the aisle at the Academy Awards—this was right after he left Debbie Reynolds for her—one of the other partners saw it. Said his wife always insisted on watching the damned thing, of course, lest we think it was his vulgar taste—you’re not supposed to enjoy anything, and only
approve of good taste—and came in the next day laughing like hell. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘when I saw that Fisher boy with that high-stepper, all I could think of was some fifteen-year-old kid, just found the keys to Dad’s Ferrari. “Okay, now I got this thing—what the hell do I do now?” ’ Well, that’s exactly the same train of thought that was going through the minds of the people she met, that weekend. They looked at her, and then looked at me, made sure it really was me, with this magical creature on my arm. And then back at her, in complete disbelief. Breathing like goldfishes do. If they hadn’t had country-club lockjaw, plus good manners of the finest whalebone, they would’ve said: ‘
God
, you’ve got to be daffy, miss, this man’s the dullest around. He’ll make you wear glasses, hair in a bun, corsets and sensible shoes. Neil Cooke thinks that oatmeal’s exciting, especially if it’s getting cold. You should be here with a sultan, a pirate or maybe a Bogart’d do.’ I tell you, Nora, whatever little disappointments Caroline may have brought me since then, I’ve enjoyed very few weekends as much as I relished that one. And I’ll thank her for the rest of my life.”

Nora shifted away from him to lean against the door. The Mercedes hummed on through Connecticut. “So why me, then?” she said. “Why are we doing this, then?”

“Why,” he said, “precisely because of those little disappointments. It only occurred to me recently, well, right after I found out that a man with a secure reputation for dullness can get away with quite a lot, if he’s careful, and discreet, but when it did occur to me, I was rather shocked. There’ve been quite a number of those little disappointments, when you sit down and
add them up. A rather large number indeed. I don’t mean that she’s ceased to keep her end of the bargain. Not at all. But unfortunately she’s discovered, or thinks she has, at least, that she can keep me in a state that she perceives as contentment, with her left hand, as it were. Leaving her right hand free for more, shall we say,
interesting
matters.”

“You think she’s having affairs,” Nora said. “I know she used to do that. Had quite a few of them.”

“Did Barry tell you that?” he said. “That son of a bitch. What is it about being a Democrat that nullifies every gentlemanly instinct in a man?” She laughed. “I mean it,” he said. “I say what happened before two people met is just that: it’s the past. If they want to reveal it to each other, then that should be their business. It should not be the commerce of their earlier lovers to trade in their mistakes.”