Escape the Night (26 page)

“I'm selling you Van Dreelen and Carey, on terms to be negotiated.” The voice turned steely. “The first is that you meet with me, alone.”

“Peter was fine,” Ruth finished, “and then he started talking about his father. That was when he turned on Phil.”

Levy raised an eyebrow, watching her. “It seems to have made an impression.”

Ruth looked down at her glass. “I thought Peter was going to kill him.”

“And then?”

“It passed. Just like that.”

Levy nodded. “He seems under terrible pressure—the more I ask him to remember, the more fearful he becomes. No doubt it's coincidence, but whoever called could hardly have chosen a better time to make him explode at Barth, or a better way of doing it.” He sighed. “I should have helped when he was young.”

Ruth frowned. “From what little you've just told me, Phil didn't exactly give you an engraved invitation.”

“No, he didn't.” Levy felt a surge of anger; at whom, he was not sure. “I think now
you'd
better tell me about that photograph.”

She gave him a quick, perceptive glance. “What are you up to, Bill? I thought you listened to patients, not spied on them.”

“
You
sent him, Ruthie.” Levy paused, defensive. “There's something he's not telling me, or perhaps doesn't realize himself. I have reason to think that you can help.”

For a moment, Ruth looked trapped; Levy sensed that they had both been fencing. “Then pour me another glass of wine,” she parried.

Levy hesitated. For a while, after Charles's death, she had drunk too much. Then, abruptly, she stopped drinking altogether: the next week she left the Village forever and moved to the airy walk-up on West 65th where they sat now, after dinner. As time passed, she permitted herself lovers and an occasional glass of wine; she had neither married, nor ever again been drunk. “Pour,” she insisted.

Levy poured.

“All right, Bill.” Glass in hand, Ruth leaned back, face troubled and reflective. “It's quite complex,” she began reluctantly, “and it starts with a bad time for me, the weeks after Charles died. Phillip had hated him, of course—that old piss-mire Black Jack Carey had kept them both dangling on a string too long. After the accident he should have been delighted.” Ruth's smile was sour. “But Peter was the old man's final trick: Phillip found out that by saving him, he'd lost the firm. For months thereafter, he looked ghastly.

“More than that, he was
peculiar
. For days on end, he would stare into Charles's empty office: finally, in a frenzy, he ordered the office manager to get rid of everything that reminded him of Charles. There were rumors that Phil had even burnt all the pictures of him around …”

She stopped, sipped her wine, and looked down at the floor. “You know how I was then: drunk and crying, night after night. I hated Phil for how he acted, just as I hated him for inviting Charles to Greenwich. Thinking about it made me crazy: part of me didn't, couldn't, accept that Charles's death was an accident. I began to wonder, even, if somehow Phil had planned it.” She looked up, half embarrassed. “I mean, he was dead sober on a dry road—
Charles Carey
, the best driver I had ever seen …”

Looking into his wineglass, Levy felt their years of silence. Tenderly, he said, “You never told me.”

Ruth shook her head. “I couldn't, Bill—thinking it was hard enough. Finally, I had to tell myself that I hadn't come to terms with losing Charles. After all, Phillip
had
saved Peter—even if he didn't know what he was doing to himself.” Quickly, she drank more wine, and her tone returned to normal. “In any case, there was Phil, stuck with a child who would grow up to succeed him. Their relationship never took. I'm sure Phil prayed for years that Peter would sell him his fifty-one percent; instead, Peter walked in at the ripe age of twenty and demanded a job. They weren't drafting people anymore, he told me later, and he'd gotten bored at Harvard. It was still later before I saw there was more to it …”

“When, exactly?”

She lit another cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled. “When I saw what he did with the picture.”

Levy sensed her touchiness. Sniffing at the curl of smoke, he griped, “When will you quit smoking?”

“When you get tall.” She gave him a sardonic look: he had first asked that question, and received that answer, her sophomore year in college.

Levy smiled. “Then tell me how you came to give it to him.”

“I hadn't meant to, really—for a long time I avoided him. I had to go home the first time I saw his face.” Lightly, she brushed her skirt with the tips of her fingers, as if cleaning imagined lint. “It was two days before I could come back to work. I was honestly thinking about changing jobs when he knocked on my door and asked if I could show him where his father's office had been. I could feel my stomach knot: he was giving me that peculiar sideways look Charles gave to people he was sizing up, and I began to feel he was playing some game—that perhaps he
knew
somehow, that maybe he'd adored his mother and was taunting me. But there was no way he
could
have known: Charles was so careful. Finally, I answered, ‘Why are you asking me?'

“He just shrugged. ‘Because I didn't want to ask Phillip.'

“Suddenly I felt sorry for him. I
knew
how Phillip still was about Charles—there was no portrait or even plaque there to say Charles Carey had ever existed—and I recalled the stories that Phil had burned every picture of Charles that he could find. Plus, I'd
seen
how he acted toward Peter …”

“How was that?”

“Creepy, yet craven—the full Freudian repertoire of ambivalent behavior. I've always thought if you gave Phil a Rorschach test he'd say everything looked like a crucifix shaped from two dildos.”

Levy winced. “No wonder Peter searched you out.”

“No, whatever it is, that's not it—he's edgy with me, too.” She frowned. “I sometimes think the way he feels about Phillip frightens him.”

Levy wondered why, in his more protective moments, he forgot Ruth's uncanny sensitivity. He examined her closely. “That's quite acute.”

She looked away. “I guess I've come to understand him a little—not that he makes it easy. No, what finally drew me was that I didn't think he saw how Phil let him twist slowly in the wind. Instead of throwing Peter into the mailroom, as Black Jack Carey would have done, he waited four months and made him subsidiary-rights director. Phil's always been a clever bastard—in addition to handling book clubs, and sometimes even foreign and movie rights, the sub-rights person auctions paperback rights to everything we publish, sometimes for millions on a single book, and how we do frequently depends on how good he is. At its toughest, the job requires split-second timing and the guts of a cat burglar. It was years over Peter's head: Phillip wanted to humiliate him into quitting.”

“Or,” Levy suggested, “give him an opportunity.”

Ruth jabbed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Yes, and Hitler was into birth control.”

“It just seems to me,” Levy offered mildly, “that Phillip's motives are open to interpretation. If he's that terrible, Ruthie, why did he keep you on?”

“Because I'm
good
.” Ruth scowled at him. “Whatever else, Phil's not a fool. In any event, I took Peter to the office Charles had before he quit. The man who had it then was at lunch. Peter thanked me—and then went inside, closing the door behind him.”

“And that's
his
office now?”

Ruth nodded. “One day he just quietly moved in—I suppose it touched me. I began thinking more about what he was up against …” Once more, she hesitated.

“Is that all?” Levy asked quietly.

“No, not all.” Ruth reached for the pack of cigarettes, tapping it in the palm of her hand. “I began thinking about the last night I'd spent with Charles.”

Oh God, Ruthie
, Levy thought. But he said nothing.

“Charles had just …” Ruth's eyes closed. “We'd had a rather serious talk. We made love—for the last time, as it turned out—and then I asked him about Peter.” She opened her eyes, giving the barest hint of a smile, still looking away. “Until that night I could never really bring myself to ask him, and suddenly it was very important that I know how Peter looked—

“I felt Charles's arms tighten around me. ‘Like me,' he said, very softly in the dark. ‘I look at Peter, and see myself again. But it's a different thing from vanity. What I'm feeling then is that he's a new start, my chance to change those things that made the Careys what we are. There's such sweetness in him—'

“
And in you
, I remember thinking.
Though you do your best to hide it
. But then Charles got dressed and left, and I never saw him again.” Her face twisted. “I suppose I came to feel that if anyone there was to be Peter's friend, it should be me. That's when I took Charles's picture from the drawer.

“I'd taken it at the end of the Wharton Street pier on an early summer evening, with a new camera I was learning to use. You know how bad I am at pictures, and this one came out with no detail in the background—I suppose the light was too dim.

“What I got was Charles's face. He'd just reminded me to push the button, and began laughing because I couldn't find it. Then I did, and by total accident captured that smile I loved so much, the one which went with a tilt of the head, so that for a second or two his face looked utterly, carelessly happy, and I could see the boy he had been. It was so much Charles that I remembered the old superstition that a photograph could steal your soul …

“But that was the point. I remembered Charles as clearly as that picture. Peter needed it more than I.

“I decided to give it to him.

“After all, there was no way of telling where the picture had been taken, or by whom. So I knocked on his door and told him that I'd found it in his father's office shortly after he died, and then forgotten it, and now that his coming had reminded me of Charles, I thought it should be his.

“For a moment he just looked at me. Then, without saying anything, he stepped from behind his desk and took the picture from my hands. He stared down into his father's face as I watched the recognition growing in his eyes. When he finally looked back up at me I knew that he'd seen exactly what I did, that—except for coloring—he and Charles were identical. I almost shivered—I was that sure he was thinking the second thing that struck me when he'd looked up again: that Phillip saw it, too.

“But all he did was smile faintly, and then murmur, ‘Thank you, Ruthie, very much.' It was the first time he'd called me anything at all.

“I left with nothing more being said.

“For a long time I didn't see the picture, and I guessed perhaps it was too painful for him to live with. I really had no idea what he'd do with it until the first big clash with Phillip, when he was supposed to sell paperback rights to
The End of the Tunnel
.

“That was a year or so after Phil had put him in the sub-rights job. I've never seen anyone work harder to learn a business—some days he looked so tired that I began to wonder about insomnia, some reason he missed sleeping through the night. He never even took time to decorate Charles's office—it was bare as a transient's room, as though he didn't expect to last. I'm sure Phillip made the connection—he kept taunting Peter about his office: ‘Looks like a handball court, Prince Charming. You're a menace to our property values.' I'm sure it was Phil's slimy way of suggesting that Peter sell him his interest, on the way to some line of work for which he was more suited. But Peter gave no sign that he even heard him.

“Fortunately, Peter got through his first year without embarrassing himself. And then he passed over one hundred thousand dollars for
The End of the Tunnel
, and gave Phil a chance to force him out.

“
Tunnel
was Larry Santini's first novel. Santini was a Vietnam veteran who'd been wounded during the Tet offensive, and decided to title his novel after the ‘light at the end of the tunnel' Westmoreland used to promise them. But Santini's tunnel was the progressive brutalization of a company of soldiers, ending in their destruction of an entire village and everyone who lived there. It was so harrowing that when the manuscript came in I wondered whether anyone else could stand to read it.

“Phillip didn't think the book would sell, and didn't like it either—he and Charles always used to hassle about his Fascist politics. What made this book even tougher was that Santini's agent wanted thirty-five thousand—pretty steep for a first novel—and at that price our money people were siding with Phil.

“I was sponsoring editor: I
wanted
this book, and it was my job at the board meeting to try and persuade Phillip, our treasurer, and the marketing people to pay that kind of money. I argued that we
should
publish
Tunnel
, problems or no, and then bust our asses to put it across.

“Only Peter agreed with me.

“He hadn't given me a clue he'd even read the copy I'd sent him until he spoke up and said people were
ready
for a Vietnam book if it was written by a veteran. ‘It's nearly the
bicentennial
, Peter,' Phillip answered in his smoothest voice. ‘Not even
Charles
would have published this thing.'

“Peter turned white: it's strange, sometimes that's the only way you can tell he's angry—just like Charles. But all he said was, ‘Is your objection politics, or money?'

“I could see Phil mentally picking the safer ground. ‘Money …'

“‘If that's all,' Peter interrupted, ‘let me talk to some paperback people and see what interest there is in buying rights. I can let you know by the next meeting.'