I Come as a Theif (14 page)

"And Norry? Would it be fair to him?"

"Oh, honey, you'll make Norry a tremendous wife!"

She walked over to him now slowly and then suddenly put her hands on his shoulders. "Will you teach me how?" She was utterly serious. "I know I look experienced, but I'm not. Not a bit!"

"You don't look as experienced as you think," he said with a chuckle. "But we can have the first lesson right now."

"Oh, darling, don't joke about it!"

"It's the only way, Joan. Believe me."

She hugged him desperately and put her head against his chest. "I don't know what I think. I guess I'd better not think at all. I guess I'd better just leave it to you."

***

During the first month of Tony's affair with Joan he met Lee Bogardus. As he saw Joan only on the nights that he visited the apartment of the Lanes, who were still in Florida, he seemed perfectly unattached in the eyes of his acquaintance. And in truth he was. There was little sentiment in his feeling for Joan. On her side there might have been more, but she was a woman of unusual will power, and she stuck to her implied bargain. Besides, the plan was working. The confidence that she drew from sex made her easier and more relaxed with Norris, who was already thoroughly ashamed of his suspicion of her mercenary motives. He had even gone so far as to propose, and Joan now had her revenge by keeping
him
dangling.

Tony had been immediately drawn to Lee. Her impassioned account of the rejected short story in the little garden behind their host's brownstone had intrigued him. She had seemed hardly aware of him as a man as she told it, but as soon as his sympathy came through to her, she forgot all about her problems as a writer. Afterward, when he took her out, he was amused by the conflict between her rather quaint, old-fashioned reserve and her obvious need for a much warmer relationship. It was as if she might have been taught by her mother that "nice" girls had to prove hard to get and yet was speculating that if she didn't move a bit faster, she might lose this new beau altogether. And this was something that she very clearly did not want to let happen.

One night he insisted on coming up to the apartment, rather than waiting for her in the lobby, so that he might meet her parents. Tony loved to meet parents. Mr. and Mrs. Bogardus, a wonderfully handsome couple, he very gray and tall and distinguished, she, brilliant if falsely blonde, treated him with a formal but intense politeness. He felt immediately that he was being considered as a serious suitor and that he had already passed the first round.

"Where do your parents live, Mr. Lowder?" Lee's mother asked, after her father had shown himself perfectly satisfied with Tony's law credentials.

"They live on the West Side, Mummie," Lee interrupted rudely. "You may as well know right away that they don't have a fashionable address."

"Lee, dear child," Mrs. Bogardus breathed, in the manner of a parent quite accustomed to such ferocities, "there's nothing wrong with the West Side. I lived there myself as a child."

"Yes, but below Fifty-ninth Street. That was quite all right. I know your little rules. But Tony's family are on Central Park West."

"You don't have to defend my family's address, Lee," Tony interposed with a laugh. "We've never had any claim to being fashionable. Quite the reverse. On Daddy's side we were Jewish at the wrong time, and on Mother's Catholic. We're always out of step."

"You mean you're not Catholic now?" Mrs. Bogardus asked, with what her daughter undoubtedly construed as relief.

"No, we're nothing. We're Episcopalians."

Mr. and Mrs. Bogardus exchanged undecipherable glances. He, smiling, now resumed the questioning. "Didn't your mother's family object to such apostasy?"

"Not really. To the Irish religion is essentially politics. So long as we remain loyal to the tribe..." Tony shrugged. "Well, nobody much cared."

Lee was obviously a bit shocked, but Tony had the feeling that her parents were not. There was a bleak little communion between him and the Bogarduses. It was only Lee who cared for things past.

She was certainly ready for marriage. Ready and more than ready. It must have been bad enough for her to know this herself, without having it made quite so obvious that her parents knew it too. Tony could sense in the Bogarduses' wlecome of him their willingness to waive all requirements of residence and genealogy in the interest of getting off their hands into those of any decently respectable male a daughter who was probably moody and violent behind the scenes. Let us
do
something, their worried eyes seemed to plead, before she goes off with the elevator boy!

Of course, they were unjust to her. He quite saw that. They knew nothing about girls. Far from being about to go off with the elevator boy, poor Lee did not dare even show him the inclination that she obviously did feel. When he took her home after an evening she would almost scramble out of the taxi in her effort not to look as if she were waiting for a good night kiss. He let her go, but sometimes, later in the same night, when he made love to Joan, he would think of Lee.

Lee seemed to suspect something. He could see that she was troubled by his slowness in making advances. Was he involved with another girl? Was he queer?

"You listen so well," she told him in a bar after a Saturday afternoon concert. "You listen to music the way you listen to people. You really hear."

"Is that rare?"

"I think it is. It makes me feel I can ask you something without your taking it wrong. Without your thinking..." She paused, much embarrassed.

"Thinking what?"

"Well, that I'm throwing myself at you," she said almost defiantly. "I couldn't bear that."

"I promise not to think it, then. What did you want to ask me?"

There was another rather breathless pause. "I wanted to ask you if you think it's funny that a girl my age—twenty-three—has never, well never..."

"Had an affair? Funny? You mean, do I think it's unusual? No."

Lee was taken aback by his casualness. "How did you know I was going to ask that?"

"Wasn't it obvious?"

"That I was so ... pure?"

"No, no. That it was on your mind."

"Well, I've heard that a man has to be experienced that way before he's married or else he'll be a terrible fumbler. Mightn't it be true of a woman, too?"

Tony laughed. "Those things aren't difficult to learn. You'll find it will come very easily."

Lee jumped up at this and hurried to the ladies' room. When she came back, it was evident that she had been weeping.

"You
do
think I've thrown myself at you. I've never been so humiliated in my life. Please take me home."

"May I tell you something first?"

"No. Please. I'll just start crying again."

"Let me say one thing."

"Tony, I want to go!"

"All right." He signaled to the waiter. "But you'll have to have dinner with me tomorrow night. I don't for a minute think that you're throwing yourself at me. It's still possible, however, that I may want to throw myself at you. And I think you should give me the chance."

***

Later that night, as Joan and Tony were lying, smoking cigarettes, on her mother's bed, which they used because it was larger than her own, and the room more comfortable than hers, he asked her about Norry.

"When are you going to give him his answer?"

"Soon, I suppose. I've wanted to prolong our 'idyll.' Oh, Tony, do you think we mustn't meet afterward?"

"Not for a time, anyway. You have to give him a chance. He'll probably be a marvelous lover."

"But I'll be thinking of you when he makes love to me."

"No, you won't. Not after a time."

"And you'll be after some other girl."

"Naturally."

"Someone you'll want to marry?"

"I hope so."

"Damn you, Tony!"

"Now don't get excited."

"You don't know anything about women!"

"We agreed this was an experiment. It wasn't guaranteed to work."

"But you were a bastard to try such an experiment."

"Oh, that's for sure."

"And that's what helps me. Would I really want to be married to such a bastard?"

"And would I want to be married to a girl who two-times her boy friend?"

"Ah, there you are!" Joan laughed a bit wildly. "I guess you are a bit of a genius, lover. You've made me accept something no woman would accept. No decent woman, that is."

Just then the telephone rang sharply in Tony's ear. Joan reached across him to pick it up, and he listened to her conversation with Norris, the cord stretched tight against his jugular vein. Norris, who had obviously been drinking, sounded loud and angry.

"What are you doing?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing? I've gone to bed, that's what I'm doing. What the hell are
you
doing, calling at this hour?"

"It's only eleven."

"Oh, is that all? Well, anyway, I was asleep, and it's horrid to be wakened up when you've just gone to sleep. Particularly by rude drunks."

"I'm sorry, Joanie darling." Norris's voice dropped to a whine. "I'm not drunk. I had a few at the club because somebody told me you were going out with Tony again."

"I
am
going out with Tony again. Have I ever made a secret of it?"

"Ah, honey, don't you know what that does to me? It kills me, that's all."

"There's no reason it should kill you. Tony's a very dear friend of mine. Any man I marry is going to have to get used to Tony. If you think, Norris Conway, that I'm the kind of woman you can lock up in a harem guarded by some eunuch, you have another think coming."

Norris's voice became very excited at this. "Oh, honey, does that mean you
might
marry me? You could have everything the way you want it. Honest! I don't mind you having friends—that is, if they are friends."

"If you're going to insult me now..."

"Please, honey, no! Tell me I have just a chance, and I'll hang right up."

"You have just a chance."

"Oh, darling! Let me come up. Let me come up just for one minute and give you just one kiss, that's all, and I swear on a million bibles 111 go straight home, the happiest man in the world!"

"I tell you, I'm in bed, Norris!" Joan sounded scandalized.

"Get up and put your wrapper on. You won't have to do more than open the door. I'll take one kiss and go."

"My parents are away!"

"I tell you what then. I'll make the elevator man wait. How's that?"

Joan hesitated. "Where are you?"

"At the drugstore on the corner."

"All right, but remember. One kiss. And the elevator man waits."

Tony replaced the receiver th^t she silently handed to him. She switched on the light, hurried to the bureau and sat down to comb her hair in short, sharp strokes. Then she put on a nightgown and a silk wrapper, firmly tying the cord.

"What do I do?" he demanded. "Get under the bed?"

"You stay right where you are," she snapped. "The door will be closed."

"Suppose he comes in to look?"

"Then he's not a man I care to marry." She cast an almost contemptuous look at him. "Are you afraid?"

Tony laughed. "Not unless he has a gun!"

The front door buzzer sounded, and Joan went out, switching the light off as she did so. Tony jumped out of bed and stood by the bedroom door which she had closed. On the other side was the living room, which opened directly into the hall foyer.

"You see, the elevator man is waiting." Norris's voice came to him. "I promise to be a good boy. One kiss, and I'm gone." Tony heard the kiss.

"All right, Norry, that's enough."

"And you
may
marry me?"

"Yes, I think I really may."

"You mean you
will
marry me?"

"I'll tell you tomorrow."

"Oh, Joan! You darling!"

"Good night, Norry." Her tone was cool, sure, almost domestic.

There was the sound of another kiss, and then of a closing door. Joan opened the bedroom door and stood there, silhouetted against the living room light. He came up, naked, to embrace her.

"You're a remarkable woman!"

She pushed him away. "And I suppose you think you're a remarkable man." Her voice was dry and flat. "Maybe you are. But not a man to marry. Oh, I see that now! Clear out of here, will you? And go down the stairs and out the back way."

"You think he may be waiting?"

"No. He's a gentleman. Something I'm afraid you know very little about. I don't want the elevator man to see you. I could never face him!"

***

The next night, at seven o'clock, Tony waited for Lee downstairs in the lobby. When he saw her coming from the elevator down the long corridor he moved forward to meet her. She stopped, and he kissed her. As he did so, he had the faint sensation of Inez Feldman's sticky, gum-droppy kiss in the conservatory of her father's mansion on Riverside Drive when he had paid up for his immunity in the theft of the dolls' house divan. But when he drew his head back and saw Lee's eyes, scared, questioning, as if dreading some brutal hurt, he kissed her again, more searchingly, and there were no gum drops. Then he kissed her a third time, right in front of the old doorman, who had come in from the street and whom she had known from childhood. That Lee, transparently the kind of girl who should object to such a witness, did not object, went far toward convincing Tony how utterly he was at last committed.

Lee's parents went to bed very early, and Pieter Bogardus was already asleep when Tony called. As soon as he began to make out the extraordinary nature of his son-in-law's communication and heard the terms "Regional Director" and "S.E.C." he shut him right up and told him to come downtown the next day for lunch. Then he went back to sleep. Pieter was a man who could do this.

He had a private metaphor to describe life—his own life, anyway (it might or might not describe the life of others)—which he had never disclosed to anyone, not even to Lee's mother. To him it was a dusty, drafty tunnel with nothing at the end but the source of all the dust and drafts. Yet it was a happy paradox that this seemingly bleak philosophy never depressed him. Pieter had always been willing to decorate his tunnel with rugs and draperies, with chandeliers and tapestries, to convert its turnings into Turkish corners, its dust into gold dust. The secret, he had discovered early, was to cover over every square inch of floor or wall and to keep them covered. The process, to be sure, was endless, for every least relaxation was followed by a peeling, a stripping, a blast of dirty wind, and even such necessary refreshment as a night's sleep was bound to be paid for by anxious periods of needed and busy repair. But to the careful and industrious there could come moments of reward, moments of near ecstasy, moments indeed when life was almost bare of apprehension.