He paused, just long enough. She said, “That’s open to negotiation.”
“In that case, I’d like to see it.”
“Can you come at night? I work during the day.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“Sure, fine. Say around eight o’clock?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Would you mind giving me your name?” she said. “So I’ll know it’s you. I like to know who I’m letting in.”
“My name is Jason Webster.”
His first lie. It was an unwritten rule in journalism, Thou Shalt Not Lie. Ethically, a reporter should always identify himself fully to anyone who might find himself quoted in a story. After that, the source is fair game, and anything he says may be published and used against him. A rule of Hoyle, made up by people who never had to play the game.
He made his second call.
A man answered and Walker went through the routine again. He gave the same name, and the man told him to come by tomorrow after work. Five o’clock. Again the asking price was forty-five grand. And again, when Walker paused, the man said he was open to a deal.
Gregory Peck flashed on the Sony screen. Walker wondered if Gregory Peck had ever lied in the performance of his job. Right now Gregory Peck was talking about Roxy, who had opened Radio City almost fifty years ago. The camera panned the splendor of the lobby, while Gregory Peck went on and on about how grand it was. On came the Rockettes. Walker drew up close and peered at the seven-inch screen to watch the girls making up at the dressing room mirrors, laughing and talking to each other just like real people. The incredible world of Diana Yoder, Amish girl.
He looked for her as the camera found the faces of the Rockettes in a series of close-ups. Few were beautiful, but all were nice-looking, white and worked into the regiment by rigid limitations of height and weight. The all-American gals, pure apple pie. But Diana Yoder wasn’t among them, at least not for NBC and the nation. The camera finished its probe of the famous line of high-kickers, and each girl said her name. And for nearly an hour Dalton Michael Walker escaped his solitary, slightly bitter world and became a kid again. It reminded him slightly of the old Mickey Mouse Club.
Annette!
Slight curtsy.
Darleen!
Small tilt of head.
Doreen!
Doreen had always been his favorite. His crush on her had lasted two years. In his adolescent fantasies he had imagined her nude. A full twenty years later she surfaced in the buff in a
Gallery Magazine
spread. He hadn’t even bought the magazine. Somehow it seemed like an invasion of
his
privacy.
He watched for Diana, just as he had watched for Doreen in the old days. When she wasn’t there, he was disappointed but hardly surprised.
Gregory Peck told him what it was like being a Rockette, and Ann-Margret and Beverly Sills sat in the empty rotunda and sang some songs. Ann-Margret told Beverly Sills how great she was, and Beverly Sills looked humble and very regular. Beverly Sills laughed a lot. She had always been one of Walker’s favorite people.
In the morning Walker took a bus into New York and caught the early show at Radio City. They were reshowing
Fantasia.
He watched it all the way through, trying to rekindle those childlike feelings that had started the night before.
Then the stage show started, and Jesus, it was a spectacle. He never came to Radio City Music Hall without being awed, without realizing what a national tragedy it would be if they closed it. At the same time he knew the inevitability of its closing. It was a lovely dinosaur, a palace in an age when smallness and cheapness were virtues, when people were packed like tuna into mini-theaters and heard more of the marital arguments in the row behind them than they heard of the performance. He estimated the audience at around twelve hundred, and the place was one-fifth full.
But never mind. On came the Rockettes, doing a toy soldier routine that had something to do with the changing seasons. The line formed and did its eye-level high dance. Some inspired bastard backstage, some genius whose mind Walker couldn’t begin to cope with, had guided, molded and maybe bullied these girls into line. He didn’t know how it had been done, only that it had, and it was dying out to a new kind of entertainment that depended, as Count Basie had said, more on electronics than artists. The goddamn electrician was the most important man in today’s big band.
Walker tried to spot Diana Yoder in the line, but couldn’t be sure. Afterward, he couldn’t help himself. He went around to the Fiftieth Street stage door and told the guard he was a reporter, there to see one of the girls. He flashed his press pass and in a moment someone came to show him in. An elevator took them down to the stage, now draped and beginning the Disney flick again. He walked behind the screen, across the blue floor, where great machines could move sections of the stage up or down. He waited, and eventually some of the girls came along, dressed for the street. Finally Diana Yoder came too.
She was surprised, and maybe a little angry. “Mr. Walker,” she said. Her cheeks were red as she came forward.
“I saw your show. I wanted to tell you how great it was.”
“Thank you.” She stopped about ten feet away and kept watching him suspiciously.
“And to ask you one more time if you’ll let me take you somewhere for lunch.”
“Mr. Walker …”
“Don’t say no yet. Afterward I’ll take you to Radio City Music Hall, to see the world-famous Rockettes. Eighth wonder of the world. How can you keep turning me down?”
She smiled, giving him a little hope. She came closer and looked at him for what seemed a long time. “I’ll tell you,” she said at last. “You may take me to lunch, Mr. Walker. Buy me a salad and a glass of tea, and I’ll tell you why I won’t go out with you.”
“Look, what is it with you women?” Walker said over lunch. “Do you work all the time, or do you get Saturdays and Sundays off?”
“We work in shifts. We rotate. Three weeks on, then one week off. When we’re on, we work very very hard.”
“And when you’re off, what then? Do you relax just as hard?”
“We do whatever we want.”
“When are you off again?”
“Next week. And I’m ready for it.”
They had gone to a small place in Rockefeller Center, a restaurant under the street, in a marble mall above subway level. She seemed to know the waiter, who brought her a chef’s salad and a glass of iced tea.
“I missed you last night,” Walker said.
She looked confused.
“On NBC.”
“Oh, that. I had an awful time getting out of that.”
“When you weren’t there, I thought I’d better check you out, make sure you’re still alive.”
“Mr. Walker, when will you people learn that I don’t want to be checked out?”
“Just kidding.” He held up both hands in a mock truce.
She smiled. “You probably think I take myself awfully seriously.”
He shrugged. “Everybody does that.”
“It’s just that the things that man…your editor…wanted me to talk about were very painful to me. Still are. And some of them haven’t been resolved yet. I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Can you understand that?”
“Listen, I wrote the book on that”
“Really? Then maybe you do understand. When two forces are tearing at you, pulling in directions that not only are opposites, but are mortal enemies with each other. And you love and hate each almost equally…I really don’t want to go into it, didn’t mean to say even this much. It’s just that I want you to understand. When I tell you no, I’m not rejecting you. All I’m telling you is I’ve got enough problems in my life right now. You seem like a kind and decent man…”
“And gracious. Don’t forget gracious.”
She laughed. “That too.”
“And you think going out with me would be just another problem.”
“It could be. And I don’t need that. Mr. Walker, I don’t even need the possibility of that.”
“Don’t you date anybody?”
Her extended silence let him know that the question was out of line.
Levity returned. He felt her slipping away from him, and suddenly it was important that she not do that. “The nation missed you last night.”
“I doubt that.”
“Ann-Margret missed you.”
“I’m sure.”
“Beverly Sills missed you.”
She laughed again.
“Even weathered old Gregory Peck missed you. Did you watch it?”
“Sure. I wouldn’t have missed it. I saw it the first time too.”
“Didn’t you think they all looked lonely in that big empty palace?”
“Being lonely doesn’t have anything to do with a particular place, Mr. Walker, or how many people are around you.”
“Amen to that. Are you lonely?”
Again he had come too close. For a long time she didn’t say anything. When she did she was very direct. She looked at him when she talked and said what she felt. “I like you, and the trouble is, I don’t want to do that. Why else do people date but to get close to each other? And if you don’t want to get close to anyone, what future is there in it but pain and regret?”
“There are other reasons.”
“Answer that for me in a way I like and who knows, maybe I’ll go out with you.”
“You remember Scott Fitzgerald’s line about it always being three o’clock in the morning, deep down in the bottom of the soul?”
“Yes, I read it.”
“Sometimes people date just to help each other push back the dark.”
The sun had dropped low over the Jersey sprawl. Walker sat in his car and waited for five o’clock. He listened to the radio and occasionally looked at the paper she had given him at the stage door. It had
Diana
and her home phone number on it. A Manhattan circuit.
At exactly five o’clock he pulled up in front of the Gunther house. The green-and-white Ford was parked in the driveway, and the living room curtains were drawn back to reveal part of a room, an archway leading back into the house and a piece of refrigerator against a far wall. The man answered his ring. He introduced himself as Hal Gunther. A moment later a woman he called Barbara came out. Walker expected the wife to be the strange Melinda Baker, but this woman wasn’t even a good imitation. She was blond, attractive enough in her own way, but clearly didn’t try too hard. She was plump, about thirty. Her husband was older by several years, a huge man, bearded and prematurely graying. Streaks of gray were shot through his beard and hair, and his hands bore the hard skin of a working man.
Gunther’s face started Walker thinking. It wasn’t an old face. Only the regular touches of gray made Gunther look old beyond his years. They went through the house quickly. It was small, two bedrooms, a full bath and an unfinished basement. Walker saw everything, from the color of the telephone to the books on Gunther’s shelves. Most of the books were philosophy, which didn’t quite go with the hard hands and the slightly stooped shoulders.
He asked to use their bathroom. He turned on the water to cover any noise, then opened the medicine cabinet and looked inside. Nothing unusual. In a corner, set into a wall near the sink, was a linen closet. There were a few things pushed far back, behind the towels: a shoeshine kit, a box of black keys and a small bottle of hair dye, about half full.
He took off the cap. It was gray.
He replaced everything and turned off the water. The Gunthers were waiting in the living room when he came out.
“Well, what’d you think?” Gunther looked nervous, almost like a cat ready to pounce.
Walker sat and faced them. “I was kinda looking for something a little cheaper.”
Gunther gave a mirthless little laugh. “God, fella, if you find anything cheaper around here, you’ll be in the slum landlord business.”
“Still…”
“All right, all right.” Gunther was impatient, edgy. “How cheap is cheap?”
“Thirty. Thirty-five tops.”
“Oh, man, you’re wasting our time. We told you on the phone what the price was.”
Mrs. Gunther put her hand on her husband’s arm.
“Well, it bothers me when people waste my time.”
“If it bothers you, then I’ll leave,” Walker said.
“He didn’t mean that,” the woman said.
Gunther looked at her, then nodded his head.” She’s right, Mr….Webb, is it?”
“Webster.”
“Yeah, I don’t mean it. We’re in a bind right now. We need to sell it pretty quick and get out to the coast, before I lose something pretty important. You know how that is.”
“Sure.”
“Still, I won’t be shafted. Hell, I paid thirty for it.”
“Then you won’t be losing anything.”
“The hell I won’t. What do you think inflation is, a working man’s picnic? Where do you think I’m gonna get the cash for those inflated houses in L.A. if I let you stick it to me like this?”
“Mister, I haven’t even offered thirty yet. This is a pretty small place.”
Gunther stood and suddenly, in the deepening shadows of the living room, he looked menacing.
“What are you, some fucking joker?”
“Hal…” Mrs. Gunther reached for his arm, but he jerked it away.
“I don’t have time for shit like this,” Gunther said.
Walker got up too, but slowly, carefully. Gunther was a good four inches taller, and outweighed him by fifty pounds. But it wasn’t so much size as the look in Gunther’s eyes that bothered him. Gunther’s look had something that Walker could only describe as primitive. Savage. Here, he decided, was a man not to fool with.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunther. No offense meant.”
Neither of the Gunthers said anything. Their eyes followed him to the door and out. At the sidewalk he turned and saw Mrs. Gunther drawing the curtains. Their eyes locked for a second, then Gunther drew her away.
The scene later at Melinda Baker’s house was different. He worried for a while that the Gunthers might tell the Baker woman about him, so he started by telling her himself. She seemed disinterested, as if she had no connection with the Gunthers, or with their house. Nervous, extremely jumpy as she talked, she paced and chain-smoked, moving occasionally to the window in the front door, peeling back the curtain an inch or so to peep out into the dark street.
His first impression was that she looked familiar somehow. Her face, finely carved, smooth, almost babyish, reflected first an intense interest, then boredom in the same breath. Her eyes were like buckets of water behind the thick glass of her bifocals. She talked, as she looked, nervously. And Walker had a hunch, when he had been in the house less than five minutes, that she wanted to unload it at any price and simply disappear.