She stopped abruptly, running out of breath and material at the same time; the line hummed expectantly between us, waiting for an answer which must at least match so glorious a burst of generosity. I used to find this sort of thing sad, because behind every such call must be a girl backed into a contemporary corner of hell, trying to scrape a living from the forlorn barrel of life; now it was just a damned nuisance, a scuffling sound from someone else’s trap.
‘I’m a seasoned performer,’ I said at length.
‘Pardon me?’
‘I don’t want a dancing lesson. I don’t need one.’
But I had pressed the wrong button; now she was off again, at the same romping pace. ‘So many people think that way, but it is not so.’ I could almost hear a fresh piece of paper, labelled ‘Sales Resistance’, being shuffled to the top of the pack. ‘Our files contain countless testimonials from so-called expert dancers who have been absolutely amazed at what the Steps of Heaven Dancing School was able to do for them. In many cases it transformed their entire lives. Modern ballroom dancing is the key to social success, and social success has no ceiling. There is absolutely no limit–’
I was now fully dressed; I was thirsty; this had therefore gone on long enough. I could have cut her off by abandoning the telephone, but I always did my small best to discourage such intrusion. Obviously she could only be stopped by a shout, and so I shouted.
‘What was that awful noise?’ she asked, after a startled moment of silence.
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said. ‘I was changing a record.’
‘A record?’
‘You people really must bring your files up to date,’ I said coldly. ‘If you knew anything at all about dancing, you would know that I have been a senior instructor at Arthur Murray’s for fifteen years.’
Childish Steele, I thought, clamping down the receiver; silly Steele, baby Steele … But I felt better, all the same; a blow for Steele was a blow for liberty. I was ready for that drink, ready for Segovia, ready for my difficult and darling wife. I shot my cuffs, like any other ham actor, and went blithely down the stairs to the daytime section of our apartment.
It was an elegant mess of a room. A New York decorator with a schizophrenic taste for wrought-iron grilles and long silk tassels had done his worst; and then Kate had moved in and tried to civilise the joint. The result had been a draw. There was still enough deep-pile, oyster-coloured, wall-to-wall carpeting to defeat the average power-mower, and the vast zebra-striped sofa had that come-on look usually associated with old film stars’ beds; but there were also some elements of taste and reason – a bookcase with actual books, a set of Hepplewhite chairs which could be sat in, a modest Modigliani – enough to show that we were just folks after all.
Kate had wanted a London drawing-room, I had wanted a show-off springboard for parties. We had compromised, with a room which we both liked well enough to leave alone – and that, I suppose, was life. It was certainly marriage. I worked across the hall, anyway, in a north-facing, functional office which didn’t pretend to be anything else, and which caused peeping visitors to murmur: ‘So dedicated … They say he actually writes five hundred words every day!’
It was true enough, if you counted cheques.
Segovia signed off, with a generous shower of grace-notes, as I came in, to be succeeded by the wailing signal which daily reminded New Yorkers that the world of togetherness was still fissionable. Twelve o’clock … I passed close to Kate on my way to the bar, but she did not look up; she was still listening to private echoes of the guitar, she knew I was alive. Two ounces of vodka, three ice cubes, top up with orange juice – the restorative screwdriver took shape and, after a moment, taste. It was excellent, proving once again that the wage-earning man did appreciate a good breakfast. On the road back to health, I turned to look at her.
You do not see a woman, even the most beautiful, after a couple of years of her company; like a stolen picture, a missing limb, you see her if she is not there. I had not really seen Kate, nor she me, for a long time; six years had taken its customary toll, misting the eye, blunting the many edges of appetite; the only important thing about this was not to be surprised by it. Of course, she was beautiful – and she was beautiful now, lying back on the sofa, dressed in a pale grey Cashmir sweater and the kind of black tailored slacks presumably designed for homework only. The competition from the zebra stripes was formidable, but Kate still emerged as the glowing winner.
She was slim, she was lovely, she was impeccably groomed; we had been married for six years. Today’s face, though beautiful, was sad, to match the music; and at the moment it was a face many miles away from me. She had gone into mourning again, and I knew by now that I was no longer the man to bring her out of it.
Children die, and it is more moving than grown-ups; but it is only death, after all – the Fell Sergeant catching up with his statistics. I had mourned our son, bitterly and briefly, and then put him out of mind; if it was heartless, that was because I
was
heartless – the small fingers had not had time to entwine, the grown-up spirit could not become forever bound, in the space of eighteen months. I had work to do instead, and I had done it.
Kate had been different, and she still was; for her, those eighteen months had fashioned a beloved individual, and now a mordant memory. She had blamed herself – ‘Any cow can have a baby,’ she had said, in brutal self-contempt: ‘you have to be smart, smart and loving, to keep it.’ Of course, none of it had been her fault; it was just one of those things, the kind which made you feel, if you were an on-and-off believer, that God after all was barbarous, or asleep, or dead; but she had kept this conviction of guilt locked within her, for more than three years. Sometimes she took it out and looked at it, as she was doing today.
That made it a good time to be somewhere else, to miss the big big scene. The man who could not help was the world’s most superfluous object.
It was not only the child, anyway.
The guitar music started again, soft, insistent, plucking at more than the strings. This time, it was Castelnuovo-Tedesco – I knew all these records by heart, in the catalogue sense, though once again the heart itself was absent. I took another nourishing sip of my drink, and gave Kate a civil good morning.
She looked up at me at last, smiling the faint disengaged smile of wives between breakfast and lunch. She waited for a phrase of the music to finish and then said: ‘You were late.’
I came forward, to sit on the arm of the sofa. ‘I had to break off for an hour, to do the show. Then we kept on having one more round. Dealer’s choice. Then I couldn’t get a taxi, so I walked home.’
‘You’ll get held up, one of these days.’
‘They wouldn’t have got much out of me.’
She nodded to herself, as if recognising a cue. ‘How did we do?’ she asked. The ‘we’ was because, by tradition, she got ten per cent of my poker winnings, and was thus entitled to the stockholders’ report.
‘We didn’t do so well.’
‘How much did we lose?’
‘We lost two thousand, one hundred, and eighty dollars.’
‘Oh, Johnny!’ She was startled, as I had known she would be. ‘You can’t afford that.’
‘That’s a very fair statement.’
‘Who won?’
‘Hobart.’
‘Good God!’ Hobart Mackay was my esteemed publisher. ‘Hasn’t he made enough money out of you already?’
‘Not recently … It was mostly one hand, damn it. Four jacks bumping four kings. Very expensive.’
‘Why don’t you give it up for a bit?’
‘Never.’
She frowned, but as usual she did not try to follow up. Though she disapproved of my poker-playing, which most years took steady toll of all the spare money I had, she had never fought it or nagged about it. I didn’t like some of the things she did, but I didn’t try to alter them either. It was a fair exchange, a truce to mutual abrasion, and if it made two people grow a little apart, then a little apart was where they ought to be.
I finished off my drink, went back to the bar, and poured another one. Kate was watching me, without saying anything. She had never struck an attitude about drinking, either.
When I was within her orbit again, she said: ‘How smart you look … What’s this lunch?’
‘Jack Taggart, and a man called Erwin Orwin.’
‘Who he?’
‘He produces musicals.’
‘Oh, that one … What are you and your agent doing, lunching with the likes of Erwin Orwin?’
‘I don’t know. Jack set it up.’
‘He must have said why.’
It was too early, for all sorts of reasons, to give her any details. ‘Just that Erwin Orwin had an idea.’
‘Good for him.’
I reacted to the tone. ‘Oh, come on, Kate! He can’t help being called Erwin Orwin.’
‘Didn’t he do that awful Napoleon thing?’
‘That awful Napoleon thing is still running, after two years.’
‘So is Lassie.’
I wasn’t going to be irritated, or have the lunch spoiled, or even the current drink. ‘She’s got all those feet,’ I said. ‘Unfair to people.’
But Kate, for a change, was not to be side-tracked; poker, and Erwin Orwin, and a sense of exclusion, had triggered something important. ‘I don’t know what you and Jack Taggart are cooking up,’ she said, with sudden energy. ‘But if you want the advice of an older woman, keep out of it.’ Her voice told me she was not fooling, in spite of the fooling words. ‘Don’t let them tie you up again, Johnny … Don’t get involved in writing the script for a musical.
Don’t
sign on for any more TV.
Don’t
make a speech at the Academy Awards.
Don’t
go back to Hollywood.
Don’t
take off for London.’ She had rehearsed all this, I thought, or lived with it for too long a time; her words were too ready, even for Kate; and the next slice of expensive dialogue supplied the key. ‘You’re halfway through a novel, and you’re a writer. The best I know, in spite of all the nonsense. Do us a favour, Steele. Finish your book. Think about it. Concentrate on it. Polish it up. Write it all over again, if you have to. But finish it. It’s the only thing worth your while.’
I took the next-to-last sip of my drink, considered the idea of pouring another one, and decided to have it somewhere else. Like many another day, this was not my day for arguing. I knew what I was doing, and I was ready to climb over all the broken bricks and crumbling concrete, all the rubbish-tip of other people’s ideas, to do it. If Kate, as part of the current drama, were in mourning for my life as well as her own, it wasn’t going to be contagious.
‘And in the meantime?’ I said.
She knew what I meant; this was even older ground, fought over, abandoned, recovered a dozen times; littered with tiny gravestones captioned in red ink. She listened for another moment to the music, the dying music of someone else’s sad story; and then: ‘All right,’ she said flatly. ‘End of exercise. Go away and make some money.’
I had to admire a text-book withdrawal. It was just what I planned to do.
Downstairs, Joe the doorman, an imperfectly feudal retainer, said ‘Hi there, Mr Steele!’ and then, braided cap in hand, saw me out through the swing door into 77th Street. The sun was still trying to shine, but the contrast between eighty-degree steam heat and forty-degree fresh air was too marked for comfort. I stood under the red-striped canopy, buttoning up my top coat, while Joe looked towards Park Avenue in search of a cruising taxi. Waiting, we exchanged some traditional dialogue.
‘Saw you on TV last night, Mr Steele.’
‘Did you? I hope you enjoyed the show.’
‘That’s one we always watch. But my wife keeps asking, what’s he really like.’
As usual, I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Bastards don’t come any bigger,’ and answered: ‘Oh, he’s quite a character, once you get to know him.’
‘That’s what we thought. I liked the bit when he mixed up the commercial.’
A taxi, answering Joe’s raised hand, drew up alongside. As I got in, Joe put on his cap, gave a windmill salute, and said: ‘Take it easy, now.’
The master-and-servant charade was over; the one that followed it, loosely labelled ‘All New York Cab Drivers are Characters,’ now took its place. Sometimes the credit-title was true, and on a long run, say from Kennedy Airport into town, one could really enjoy a salty monologue on the state of the nation; more often than not, nature’s lovable cab drivers turned out to be just another New York myth, and the reality was crude and disobliging, preoccupied with a radio tuned to the most raucous local station of all, which was raucous indeed. This morning, I had drawn a candidate from the majority, a surly spitting man who spent a full half-minute filling in his timesheet before throwing over his shoulder the words: ‘Where to?’
Though I knew the omens were not promising, I felt like getting my money’s worth for the ride. Why should cab drivers be the only people licensed to behave like barbarians? Just as if it were normal, I answered: ‘The Court of the Sixteen Satraps.’
His head on its thick furry neck came round a fraction. ‘How’s that?’
‘Don’t you know a restaurant called The Court of the Sixteen Satraps?’
‘Jesus!’ He spat out of the side window, which should have been closed and was letting in a frigid draught. ‘What are they going to call ’em next?’
‘Thirty-eighth Street,’ I told him. ‘Between Madison and Fifth. You’re meant to know that sort of thing.’
He braked roughly to a halt for the first traffic lights, hawked and spat once more, looked at himself in the mirror, and asked: ‘What was that name again?’
‘The Court of the Sixteen Satraps. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s been open about a year.’
‘If I had to remember every nutty joint in town, I wouldn’t be driving a hack. I’d be out of my skull.’
After that, he only spoke once more, when we were stopped by the lights at 60th Street, and he jerked his head at a policeman standing on the corner. ‘See that lousy cop?’ he growled, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘He’s the meanest bastard in town.’