Making Love (33 page)

“If only Mel had that kind of passion.”
 

“He did, remember?”
 

“It just happened to be tempered by the profit motive,” Conlon said ruefully.
 

“Sonny didn't get a job—I couldn't get it for him—and look at me.”
 

On her third day of recovery, Jane had observed a certain looseness in the hollow of her cheek which stopped after a thorough gargle; a wisdom tooth jangled in the sink basin.
 

“What do I do now, stick it under my pillow and wait for the fairies to bring me a dime?”
 

“The hurt you feel,” Conlon explained, “is the hurt you gave.”
 

“As a spiritual counselor, Conlon, you're a bust-out.”
 

On the fourth night she cried herself to a sleep that never came. Filled with regrets, and numbed by the onset of a quaking unsilent desire for Sonny, she thought she'd never survive the night. The morning brought only more soreness, a sign of recovery for which she expressed no gratitude as she took her breakfast through a straw, a thinned-out yoghurt mixture fit only for health fanatics. Articulating, her face muscles hurt so much that when she was forced to speak, everything came out sour. On the sixth day, her outrage disappeared with her first solid food—mashed filet of flounder in a milk gravy.
 

“What do you think I should do?”
 

“Make up with him, Jane. I would.”
 

“I haven't got your sense.” She knew she had more. Running her fingertips along her cheek, she noted the sensation, life tingling in the bone marrow. “Why would he hit me, of all people?”
 

On the ninth day, simple lust overcame common sense, and with Conlon as the fixer she agreed to meet him at Casey's in the Village. She arrived half an hour before the scheduled meeting, placed herself in a dark corner, and drank a few bull shots. He arrived punctually at the appointed time dressed in a gray sharkskin suit, white shirt, black woolen tie, trustworthy attire for a parley. She watched him and Conlon talking. He spoke with the regularity of a halt, a long pause, his natural link in conversation, as if the world and its words would never cease to baffle him. While he listened his mouth opened partially. He was incapable of doing more than punctuate thought. Bead by bead, a chain of sweat accumulated, until a necklace appeared above his lip, which he erased with his index finger. The lust was still there, but she couldn't express it, wary of danger. Having loved, it was a dishonor to survive it.
 

She decided not to show. Their mutual suffering had reached a new stage of development: anguish. He left, fearful of being late for work, and Jane crept out of her corner.
 

“Were you here all along?” Conlon asked. “Jane, what's happening to you?”
 

“I couldn't move. I swear. I wanted to, but I couldn't.”
 

“He's suicidal.” She didn't believe he had the character to take his life; he was far too comfortable with failure. “He'll do anything you want. He proposed to you by proxy.”
 

“What did he say?”
 

“Would I ask if you'd marry him. He's spent a week tearing his apartment apart, and last night he found his final divorce decree from Joy-Sue, which he claims he has to present to get a marriage license.”
 

Having lined her stomach with bull shots, Jane switched to vodka martinis.
 

“This is building to something very ugly,” Conlon said. “And I don't want to be around for the finale. Look, I've been through it. Mine was a phony, yours isn't. Don't waste it.”
 

“That's my family tradition.”
 

“He pulled Wesley out of school midterm and stuck him out in New Jersey with his relatives. He's afraid of what he might do.”
 

Something vaguely troubled her about Conlon's ferocious activity on her behalf. She'd come to suspect selfless behavior.
 

“It's just incredible. When we decided to leave school, we both had such visions ... of the fun we'd have, the freedom.... This stinks and you know it.”
 

“Is there the remotest possibility I could've gotten him the job? God, look who I'm asking.”
 

Conlon gave a short brittle laugh, almost involuntary, like a kneejerk. By a remarkable act of will, calling on some untapped vein of character. Conlon managed to hold back, to refrain from breaking the friendship, although she'd found the perfect moment of severance. The resources of experience were never very pretty displayed in public.
 

“You're lucky,” she said, “that I do care about you.”
 

“It's stopped mattering.”
 

“I don't believe you.”
 

“Believe what you like.”
 

“You've been drinking on an empty stomach. Come on, let's go home.”
 

“My face stopped hurting.”
 

“It'll start again. I've got a steak tartare for you. If you chew on the other side, you'll be able to eat it. Get yourself together, will you!”
 

“I don't think I really like myself and that's what it's come to.”
 

“You know, Jane, I'm honestly starting to believe that you're a bad influence on me. Listen, I don't like the eye we're getting from all these guys. If we stay any longer somebody's going to try to pick us up, and I don't feel like a hassle.”
 

“You admitted that you liked making it with two men, so what's wrong now?”
 

“Jane, drop dead.”
 

“I'm sorry.”
 

Jane laughed, breaking some imaginary ice between them, then stopped abruptly, frozen in an expression of pain. Sonny's memento reminded her that there was nothing to be happy about; laughing was a sacrilege. She had Charles Luckmunn in her future.
 

 

* * * *

 

Familiar territory, the Hotel Carlyle, formerly one of Nancy's favorite drinking places. Nobody asked questions, and it had a discreet worldy charm that didn't overpower. It attracted old money. Luckmunn learned quickly. The Bemelmen's Bar had some soft-spoken lushes in the room whom Jane recognized from Southhampton and Palm Beach. They all looked alike. The maître d' took her to Luckmunn's table, where a bottle of DOM waited. Also a note. Apologies for lateness. Business. He'd be down shortly. She asked if he lived at the hotel and was told that he maintained a suite. Nothing more. Braving light—the bar provided perfect camouflage for a gentle hand on the knee and black eyes—Jane left the table and decided to go upstairs. The elevator operator told her which suite. She got the impression that she was expected.
 

She knocked on the door and it was opened by a small blonde wearing a low-cut dress, exposing an acre of cleavage. She had on a fall lacquered to a solid state.
 

“Luckmunn?” Jane asked. The door opened wider to admit her.
 

“He's busy for the minute.”
 

An angular redhead sat on a corner love seat, spitting recklessly into a mascara kit. She'd practically blinded herself, stenciling an aqua eye shadow in fronds.
 

“He's always in a rush,” the redhead griped. “You know these winners?” Jane was asked.
 

“Only Luckmunn.”
 

“The world's champion,” the blonde said admiringly.
 

The door to the adjoining room was partially opened and Jane heard some coughing, men saying “yes, yes,” and the booming voice of a man.
 

“I've got a dream, too,” the man said. “You don't have to be black to have one. I want to provide houses for people, so that kids can grow up in the country. Houses with central heating, bathrooms, near schools which will have to be built because of the influx of people. Let's move them out of ghettos, give them clean air to breathe, and it can be done for nineteen-nine per unit. If I had it in my power I'd make New Jersey one huge estate of houses.”
 

“Looks like you already have,” someone said.
 

“I've just scratched the surface with Jersey. When I get through, ten million people will be living, praying and dying there.” He paused, then added: “And you'll all get rich in the process.”
 

Two more girls came into the room and greeted each other. Jane limply shook hands with a girl wearing a slippery black wig. Both had the same nose and doubtless the same surgeon.
 

“What a salesman,” the redhead said, looking Jane over, now that she'd completed eyelash transplants. “He could sell a clap.”
 

“Sounds like they're breaking up,” someone noted when she heard chairs moving.
 

Jane edged into a corner by the drapes, out of the main line of fire. Four men came out, all sizes, ages, and shapes. The only things they had in common, Jane noticed, were their thin gold wedding bands—a fraternity of married cheaters, vice on their minds, liquor on their breath, and wives' and children's photographs in their wallets. Deliriously happy with what they saw, and temporarily shorn of respectability, they inspected the goods like slave peddlers.
 

The redhead stirred herself and took over the introductions, like the head counselor on the first day of camp, making sure that every camper got the right trunk from Railway Express. All she was missing was a whistle. Two other men, brandishing cigars, highballs, and anxiety, came through the doorway.
 

At last, Luckmunn appeared, the model of business sobriety, his hand grasping a black Mark Cross attaché case, an eye on his watch. He hadn't yet seen Jane and took the redhead aside, slipped some crisp hundreds into her handbag and said:
 

“Don't rush them, they're business associates. I want them to leave smiling.”
 

“I'm surprised you have to say a thing like that to me.” The redhead turned to Jane, aggrieved. “I've never let you down.”
 

Jane nodded at Luckmunn. Surprised to see her, he still managed to maintain a semblance of poise. He motioned her to the doorway, his face a mask of calm as befitted an organizer of orgies and handler of disagreeable women.
 

“Let's go,” he said. He held the door for her, almost forcing her outside into the corridor, this witness of his business practices.
 

In Luckmunn she had found the perfect instrument of destruction. Worthless in her estimate, she thought that Luckmunn was of less value than even she, and she was determined to waste herself. A grateful audience, one and all called good-bye, wished him well and sounded a note, of regret at his loss.
 

“We're with you all the way, Charles,” one man called to his retreating back.
 

On the way down, he continued to stare at her, as if waiting for a clue in a mind-reading act from a forgetful partner. His suit was banker's gray, and he fussed with his vest as if to close some imaginary credibility gap; but he still looked untrustworthy.
 

“They're all dentists,” he said.
 

“Oh.”
 

“Does that surprise you?”
 

“I suppose it does.”
 

“They're my finance angels.” It seemed a peculiar arrangement, she told him. “They've all got green, which is exactly what I need. This is a tight-money market, in case you haven't heard. So I said to myself,
Charles, who's going to provide? Who isn't Mafia, legitimate, in a cash business, and greedy?
I went through all the professions and decided on dentists. I put an ad in their journal and the response was overwhelming. I offered tax shelters and profits. Who could possibly turn me down? Do you know which dentists make the most?”
 

“No, I never thought about it.”
 

“Orthodontists. Their work is on term basis, and most of it quite honestly is unnecessary.” He bared his teeth. They were as regular as sugar cubes. “My mother was advised to get my teeth straightened when I was a kid.”
 

“Did you?”
 

“We couldn't afford it. Show these guys a set of teeth and before you can close your mouth they've wired you. Nobody walking the face of the earth has a perfect bite, that's their gimmick; and after two years or three, unless you've started with a neanderthal jaw—in which case the change is dramatic—you still haven't got straight teeth.
 

“The other thing that's beautiful about their speciality is that the profits are high because the materials they use are dirt cheap. I ask you, how much does wire cost and rubber bands? Usually they're too greedy to even farm their work out to a technician. They themselves do all the mechanical work, unless of course they have a brother-in-law who's a failure and they train him. And who hasn't got a brother-in-law who's tried everything? You love your sister, but even a loving brother gets tired of supporting her. So you get this bum to work for you. In a year he's making two hundred fifty to three hundred dollars a week and your sister kisses your feet, he kisses your feet. Everybody is kissing you. I've studied the field....” They were in front of a gray chauffeured Caddy.
 

With the exception of Charles Luckmunn, she'd never known anyone to get high by discussing dental practices. He opened the door to the limo, let her in, and stood on the pavement still talking.
 

“Root-canal guys I avoid like the plague. They're the prima donnas of the profession. Guys with microscopic chisels, making holes in your teeth, have got to be highly strung, nervous individuals. Most dentists don't want to bother with that kind of work because it means time, effort, and involves saving teeth. They're your true dentists. But they need special handling. I admire them but I haven't got the time for them.” He had the singular quality of making an almanac seem superficial. He entered the car. The chauffeur waited for instructions.