Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (9 page)

She tittered. “Is that a plus or a minus for the apartment?”

“I would say a plus. There’s a touch of intimacy about it, a kind of long-distance greeting. Friendly, in a way. Neighborly. I’ve never seen him.”

“How do you know it’s a him.”

“My dear girl, no female could possibly unleash such a thunderclap.”

“I don’t know. I imagine Gertrude Stein, for instance, sneezed like a donkey.”

“Possibly. But she wasn’t really a gender, was she?”

“Apparently not. Did you find a shade for your bedroom window? I can’t imagine you with cretonne curtains.”

“I can’t imagine me with cretonne curtains either. Yeah, I did what you told me to, bought a cedar-toned bamboo blind. It looks nice.”

“What do you mean, I told you to? I suggested it, that was all.”

“I knew you’d be right, so I did it.”

She laughed. “Do I seem infallible to you?”

He studied her. “In a way, yes. I think I’d take your advice about almost anything.”

“I’ll have to be careful what I say, then.”

“Oh, please don’t. Anyway, yes, that matter’s taken care of, and some progress in other directions, though storage space is high on the list of necessaries. I’ll have to take some action soon. I have a tendency to think too much and do too little.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I doubt Rodney puts off what he wants done. He seems a determined sort.”

“The English are like that, I find. No flies on them, they forge ahead regardless. Has he tried to get in touch with you?”

“As yet, no. Will he?”

“Yes, I imagine. Right now he’s too taken with his new toy to need bulwarks. He’s happy as a clam. But I suppose he’ll get your number from new listings and hit you with an invitation to survey his castle. He keeps saying, if it weren’t for Jack …”

“Nice to be someone’s savior. How do you happen to know him, Christine?”

“His parents are friends. I’ve known them quite a few years, met them on one of my trips abroad. He’s here only for a year or thereabouts. I’ve enjoyed having him on the scene. It’s given me kind of a boost.”

“Did you need a boost?”

“Yes, I guess I did.”

“Why?”

“The usual. Everything sameish. This must be Sunday because there’s no mail. That kind of thing, that’s about all.”

“I know what you mean. Particularly since I’m not dashing out to an office in the morning. The days don’t have a specific meaning. It looks as if you’re ready for another drink, so am I.”

“Yes, I guess I am. I wonder if we could have some of that garlic bread with it?”

“Absolutely.” He half rose from his seat, drew the attention of their waiter. “Two of the same, please, and may we have some garlic bread too?”

Their seconds arrived shortly, along with a napkin-covered basket of bread, its redolence steaming the air. A crock of sweet butter. “That’s a-nice,” Christine said contentedly.

“Yes, that is a-nice,” Jack agreed. “A lot of garlic bread simply pretends, but Mario doesn’t stint on the garlic, as you’ve noticed. I sometimes come here and order a big bowl of minestrone and this bread. It’s one of the best lunches in town.”

“I could go for that today.”

“So could I, except that they have Calamari fritti on Thursdays, and today’s Thursday. Or don’t you dig it?”

“I’d kill for it. Not very many places have it on the menu. Man, oh man. The minestrone will have to wait for another day.”

He got up. “Be right back.”

When he returned he looked satisfied. “It occurred to me that the well might run dry,” he told her. “I was afraid the Calamari’d be gone when we got around to ordering. Mario just laughed. He said, hell, Jack, you know I wouldn’t let you down, especially with such a lovely lady, you think I’d cut your throat?”

“So we’re safe.”

“We’re safe. Lord, this is great. Talking to a real live human being. Not going to an office means you can’t unload a lot of stuff. You don’t yammer with this person and that person, and after a while your voice gets rusty. Or it feels like that, as if it’s drying up inside you. What you really want to do is cover up that threatening typewriter and go out for a whole day’s walk, like maybe over to Brooklyn or somewhere. Or take in half a dozen movies. Escape. You try not to give into it, though, so you sit there with that blank sheet of paper in the machine. There’s that dumb sheet of paper, blank as a wall, and you’re not a Sunday writer anymore, but a working one, a seven-day-a-week one, and you type a few lines and it laughs back at you. I remember a
New Yorker
cartoon picturing just such a situation. This harried-looking author sitting at a portable. There’s a piece of paper in the typewriter with one line, his beginning line.”

He lit a cigarette. She waited. He was smiling faintly. “What was it?” she asked expectantly.

“‘Call me Ishmael…’”

“Oh, marvelous! I guess every author in the city thumbtacked it on his wall. How about you, Jack? Ever find yourself starting with something like, ‘Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather … ’?”

“Not yet,” he admitted. “But it would be a damned, natural thing to do. Melville or Joyce or any of them. Their opening sentences are graven on your mind, so much so that you have to be always pushing them out of the way to find your own.”

He regarded her. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the Joyce sentence isn’t, to be perfectly truthful, graven on my mind with the same exactitude it appears to be on yours. I’m a little abashed. Now I’m trying to remember the rest of it. ‘… bearing a bowl of lather …’”

“ ‘… on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’”

“Yes, of course.” He leaned back. “You’re full of surprises, Christine.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“What do you think?”

“We were looking for your opinion, Jack. Now. About the last sentence. Do I remember that with such exactitude. As I recall it, it’s forty-odd pages long.”

“It’s the last few words everyone knows.”

“Of course. Your turn now, Jack. I started the book, you finish it.”

“ ‘… and yes I said yes I will Yes.’ Some words for a guy to say, Molly Bloom’s thoughts in the darkness.”

“It must be fantastic to write something deathless.”

“Even
Ulysses
will probably wither in the dust of time. Sad to say.” He smiled. “Yours truly isn’t aspiring to immortality, I’m quick to add. Just a little honesty and originality.”

He had a voice that fitted him, Christine reflected. A deep-based voice that seemed to have a long way to travel, like the rumble of a train in the far distance, a dark voice, smooth and dark and subterranean in a way. It made her think of a handed-down record of her mother’s, Chaliapin singing “The Volga Boatman.” I like his voice, she thought, I like to listen to him talk.

“Do you ever have any doubts about having left your job?” she asked him. “Becoming self-employed.”

“No,” he said positively. “There was ample aforethought, it was no hasty decision. I wanted to write this book. It won’t be an easy one to turn out, I may be overextending myself. I told you I’d done some yeoman work, half a dozen suspense novels which, very gratifyingly, and much to my surprise, netted more than the advance, which was modest in the extreme, admittedly. Foreign sales, two of them reprinted, unexpected money in the till. I’m not a raw novice, like these cab drivers who tell you they have a story, boy have they got a story, it’s all there in their head, all they have to do is get it on paper.”

“Do they do that? Cab drivers always discuss politics with me. They have very strong opinions, mostly fascistic.”

“I like cab drivers, though.”

“So do I. It’s bus drivers I’m not fond of. Of course they have a hard row to hoe, but they’re so often mean to old people. Did your publishing house try to persuade you to stay when you said you were quitting?”

“Let’s say they didn’t twist my arm. It was a quid pro quo thing, one of those uncomfortable circumstances where the options had to be up to me. I was covering for a lush of a senior editor, a real baddie who was dumping the work load on me, I saved his hide a hundred thousand times. I never ratted on him, but everyone knew the state of affairs anyway, including management, who assured me on the Q.T., that the situation would be rectified, that this guy would be eased out and I’d get his title.
And
that corner office. It was an open and shut case, I was given to understand. Yeah, man. Okay, they dumped him, sure, and I waited. I wasn’t about to dance a tarantella on the body of a dead man, rush in and say when, guys, when? So I went on with my double work load, meanwhile mentally moving into the corner office, I’d get a corn plant and at last have some decent working space and good, bright light. Okay?”

He crushed out his cigarette. “Do I need to go on with the saga?”

“You mean they replaced him with someone else?”

“Damn right they did. Jack, you can be a star, they’d been telling me, tacitly, but it seemed explicit enough. Many thanks, Jack, we want you to know how much we appreciate … a real crock. Yeah, someone else moved into that corner office, a guy from S and S, with a longer track record than mine, and there I stayed in my cubbyhole, smilin’ through my tears.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I sound like an injustice collector. If I were hearing this it’s what I’d think, this guy’s a sorehead. It ain’t so, and I’m not rationalizing. Taking some things lying down’s bad for the old ego, but it can be just as bad for the old rep. If you don’t hype yourself nobody’s going to do it for you. I didn’t truckle in the trade. You’d be surprised, word gets around that you’re no schlemiel, it’s a kind of advertisement in your favor. Of course I’ll be in the business again. Some day. When I knock off this little masterpiece, start my
oeuvre
, I’ll go back. If the book’s any kind of success, that will sew it up.”

He put an elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand. “Christ. Why do I always dither about myself and my times when I’m with you?”

“It’s only the second time we’ve been together, Jack.”

“That’s right. It seems like more than that.”

“I think I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You can. You most assuredly can. You must be starved. And bored. With my self-centered mewling.”

“I’m far from bored. I’m having a lovely time. I like the place and the company. If we come here again it’s my treat next. All right, let’s do our ordering. I want some Calamari and I want it fast. I’m famished just thinking about it.”

“They generally serve sautéed escarole with it, great stuff. Grated parmesan. Hello, there — ah, he sees me. This lady’s famished,” he told the waiter. “Calamari for us both. And I know we’re disgusting, but may we have some more of the garlic bread.”

“Coming up right away,” the man said, and was back in no time at all with their meal, a fresh basket of bread, and a brisk
“Buon appetito.”

• • •

It was almost four when they left Anthony’s. Mario had sent over a liqueur, Strega in tall, slender-slim goblets. “That was nice of him,” Christine said, pleased.

“He’s a nice guy. What are you going to do when we leave here?”

“Walk home. Do some food shopping on the way, rather a lot, the larder’s dangerously low.”

“I’d ask you up to my place, as a matter of fact I’d very much like to. I’m afraid, though, there’s no place to sit down. I know it sounds wacko, but the thing is my sofa’s out for reupholstering and hasn’t come back yet, though it was promised for early this week.”

“You don’t have any chairs?”

“Junked the two I had. You can see I was very cavalier with my few possessions, but the truth is they were crummy specimens, I couldn’t see hanging on to them.”

“Where are you sitting in your spare time, on the toilet seat?”

“Not quite reduced to that, babe.” He snickered. “No, I have my desk chair. I cart it around. Down to the bare essentials, that’s me, no excess baggage. The simple life, of course primitive’s more the word.”

“Better call your place that’s doing over your sofa and light a fire under them.”

“I’ve been calling every day. To no avail, alack.”

“At least you’ve got a roof over your head.”

“And one that doesn’t leak, praise the Lord.” He rapped the table top. “Knock wood on that one.”

On the way out she thanked Mario for the Strega. “And the squid was delicious, I never had better.”

“Come again, please.”

On the street Jack said, “Why don’t I walk you home?”

“Why don’t you go back and work? Don’t you think you’ve wasted enough time today?”

“Wasted? Are you kidding?”

“Furthermore, I don’t want you to see where I live. I’m ashamed of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a dumb place, a bourgeois bummer, it wasn’t my choice.”

“Now you have me all curious. The Excelsior? The Sovereign?”

“No, the Colonnade, you probably know it and laugh up your sleeve at it.”

“Oh, that one, I don’t think it’s too outré, not like Le Galleria, which I’m sure has a golden calf in its lobby.”

“Come on, I’ll leave you at your street and then you get going starting on your
oeuvre
.”

“A heart like a stone.”

“Not at all. I don’t intend to be a bad influence.”

She held out a hand when they came to Sixty first Street. “So long, Jack, and thanks very much for the lunch.”

“Thank
you
, Christine. All right if I call you when that elusive sofa arrives, lay an invite on you for a modest housewarming? You and Rodney.”

“Sounds great.”

“Well, then. Take care.”

“You too.”

It was Rodney, she thought, continuing on up along Lex. Rodney’s coming here had somehow picked things up for her. Nothing had changed, yet in a way everything had changed, for one thing her attitude. She felt light as a feather, buoyant, with her lips turned up in a faint smile. New people, that was what you needed, and Jack Allerton was a most attractive and interesting guy. She couldn’t remember when she had liked someone so much, and she hoped the “elusive sofa” would make its appearance before too long.

In fact it was the following Monday when Rodney phoned to inform her that the chap who’d put him on to his flat had rung him up. “Jack Allerton, I was so pleased to hear from him. I had thought of asking info for his number, as I owe him a great deal, but I had some reservations due to his writing style of life, I presume he may not want to be disturbed in his battles with the Muse. But we had a very agreeable chat.”