Three-Martini Lunch (40 page)

69

C
liff's novel was being hurried into print with what was, for publishing, breakneck speed. Mr. Nelson had made good on his word to make me a reader, Cliff was finally getting the recognition he so needed, and we even had less trouble with money, thanks to the $15,000 advance Cliff had received.

Cliff and I had even made plans to reveal the secret of our marriage, once and for all, to his family. (We would, we decided, eventually make a trip to Indiana to relay the same tidings to my parents in person.) The idea was—according to Cliff—we'd come out with the news during the book launch party, when his father was likely to be full of gin and happy about the novel they'd just published together.

“He'll be in one of his mercurial moods,” Cliff said. “We can tell him just about anything then.”

This was actually a decent plan, for I'd witnessed Roger Nelson's good moods when one of his authors turned out to be the talk of the town. He usually puffed up, happy to take credit for the book's success. There was
every reason to believe Cliff's novel would be the toast of New York, and if this happened, there would be no better time to reveal the secret of our marriage. Mr. Nelson had given strict instructions to limit the number of galleys and to keep the publishing of Cliff's novel somewhat secretive in order to build anticipation, but those few critics who'd received an advance copy were already praising the manuscript. It was touching—albeit perhaps a little egomaniacal—to see Mr. Nelson strutting around the office whenever someone paid the book a compliment.

“Good to know the boy soaked up something from his old man,” Mr. Nelson would say, taking credit for Cliff's writing talent in his usual bombastic-yet-charismatic manner.

Once we'd hatched our plan to reveal our marriage to his parents, it suddenly felt more real. I was excited to finally be able to announce our union and be inducted as a real member of the Nelson family, but I was nervous, too, I suppose. Cliff and I decided to celebrate. I came home that day to find an atypically polite note from Cliff on the card table, saying he had gone to run some errands (I inferred this meant have a beer with Swish), but that he promised to be home for dinner no later than seven o'clock.
Excellent!
I thought.
I'll dash out to pick up some groceries and make a real, bona fide meal!
It would be just the thing to show Cliff how much I cared.

I made a quick round of the shops and returned home in a little less than half an hour. I'd gotten steak—Cliff's favorite—and had designs to sear it in a pan over the hot plate, something my
Modern Gal's Cookbook
promised me was possible. The trick was to get the timing right so the steak would be nice and hot around the time Cliff walked in the door. So I set about boiling the potatoes and mashing them, and then boiled up some spinach, too. Just as I finished the spinach, it dawned on me that part of a meal was the ambience, and that the apartment could do with a good scrub.

I tidied up our clothes; Cliff's were generally strewn all over the floor. I
found a clean floral sheet and draped it over the card table. We had a few empty wine bottles with candles melted into their necks (left over from a brief period when Cliff and I had gotten into a tight spot and failed to pay the electric bill) and I put those out on the table, planning to light them right before Cliff was expected home. I looked at the clock and saw I still had an awful lot of time on my hands, so I thought to quickly scrub the floor. Once that was done, I would fix myself up and set the table.

The floor of our apartment was made of ancient wood, badly in need of refinishing. The porous wood attracted dirt into every tiny groove in its grain, and it took a great deal of elbow grease to get it even remotely clean. I put on my rubber dish-gloves, and got down on my hands and knees. Just as I was making headway with a particularly grimy plank, it suddenly sprang up, completely free. Stunned, I lifted it to find a hollow cavity just below.

In the dim light of the overhead bulb, I could see there was something down there. Carefully, I reached in and felt around. My hand hit something—something paper—and I pulled it out.

It was a composition book. When I opened it up, I recognized the sentences instantly; I had been intimately familiar with these sentences over the last few weeks. They were handwritten, not typed, and the handwriting was definitely not Cliff's. I flipped to the inside cover of the notebook and saw the owner had printed his name in the top left-hand corner: MILES TILLMAN.

My heart sank with the cold chill of dread.

I sat there, not moving, just taking in the sight of my absurd rubber-gloved hands holding the composition book. Its existence repelled me, I realized, but it didn't surprise me. That was the worst part: realizing I wasn't the least bit surprised. Subconsciously, I had always known. I had known the day Miles had stopped by the apartment; I'd read the look on Miles's face. I had seen Cliff's black eye when I came home later that night. I had known and I had chosen not to know.

Very slowly, I put the notebook back into its hiding spot, and slid the floorboard back into place. Then I sat there for several minutes, frozen, just staring at the wooden floor, my brain unable to come up with a single thought. I looked at the clock, then I got up, changed my clothes, brushed my bangs, slicked on some lipstick, and lit the candles on the card table. I used the flame to light a cigarette, and then smoked a second one after that. My hand trembled as I smoked. It was abnormally silent in the apartment as I sat and waited for Cliff to come home.

70

T
hings were going along more swimmingly than ever until, all at once, there was a Great Unraveling. The Great Unraveling started one afternoon when Eden came home from work in the middle of a Tuesday. I knew something was wrong when I heard her key turn in the lock of the apartment door.

“Are you sick again?” I asked her as she came in, because to look at her you might think this was the case. She was so pale her skin bordered on blue, like watered-down milk. I couldn't figure out why she would come home in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon—except, to tell the truth, I
could
figure out why, and there were only two options: either she was sick or else she had very bad news. She looked at me now with her big, dark eyes and shook her head at my question.

“No,” she said. “Not sick. Mr. Nelson—I mean, your father—he gave me the afternoon off. He . . .” She hesitated. “He asked me to have you telephone him as soon as possible.”

I must've shot her a hell of a surprised look, because we hadn't told My
Old Man yet about the precise details of our relationship together, much less that we'd eloped months ago. She rushed to put my mind at ease—at least, on this score.

“He figured, since I mentioned I knew you through some mutual acquaintances, I could find you to deliver the message.”

“Oh,” I said. “But where's the fire? I'm supposed to meet with him down at ol' Bonwright in two days. What does he want to talk about that's so urgent?”

“He didn't say,” Eden replied. She looked at me and I looked at her and all of a sudden my stomach gave a deep and terrible lurch. I was possessed with the thought that this wasn't going to be good news. If it was bad news . . . I knew exactly what it was My Old Man must've found out and why he might want to talk to me. I wasn't ready to face whatever was bound to come next and I certainly wasn't ready to ask Eden about what she did or didn't know. If I thought she knew more than she was letting on, well, then I wouldn't be able to look at her face. It would kill me. Eden was a nice enough gal but she was a little like my goddamned conscience, too, and I couldn't bear to think of the way she would look at me if she knew.

“All right,” I said, forcing a casual voice. I'd been sitting around the apartment in my boxer shorts and now I reached for a pair of pants. “I'll just run around the corner to McSorley's.”

Eden frowned. She did not like McSorley's. There were two joints—both Irish bars—within walking distance that sometimes let us use the telephone and even occasionally took down messages for us, but of the two, Eden infinitely preferred the other one. This was because, strictly speaking, she had never been to McSorley's; the bar still held a long-standing tradition of not allowing women on the premises.

I would be lying if I didn't say that's why I chose it now. My pulse was racing and I was feeling that god-awful sense of manic terror. I was in
some
kind of state, and I didn't want Eden to be able to come with me to
make the phone call or follow me and listen in or any of that nonsense, and by going to McSorley's at least I could be sure she would have to stay away.

But despite her frown she didn't protest my proposal and that got under my skin even more. She had no intention of following me, which meant she knew the news was bad. Her reaction only revealed the fact she'd been lying when I'd asked her what My Old Man wanted to talk about and she told me:
He didn't say.
It was plain he
did
say and that she was goddamned lying about it and playing dumb.

In less than three minutes I had my shoes on and was stamping down the stairs of the tenement, shouting good-bye to Eden over my shoulder.

Maybe it's nothing,
I tried to tell myself as I pushed through the front door and stumbled out onto the sidewalk in the direction of McSorley's.
Maybe he wants to change the pub date, or the crummy typeface or the jacket or something. Lord knows the book has become awful important to him and maybe the Old Man just wants to go over this-or-that detail of the publishing process.
There was no way in hell the Old Man was going to pull it, I told myself. That simply wouldn't make any sense. We had all come too far and galleys had already been printed besides.

The thing about McSorley's was that somewhere early on in its establishment someone had gotten the genius idea that the bar should never change. I walked past the sagging barrels that lined the sidewalk outside and through the saloon doors that had seen more coats of paint than a battle-weary navy ship, and asked for the telephone at the bar. The bartender, Woody, recognized me. He nodded, reached under the counter, and slid the telephone across the ancient bar.

“Better make that collect if it ain't local,” he warned. “We ain't in the business of making charitable donations to Ma Bell, you know . . .”

“It's local.”

He let me alone and I dialed.

“Hello?” my father answered after the fourth ring.

“It's Cliff,” I said. “Eden told me you wanted to talk to me.” I shifted nervously. It was perpetually dim and gritty in old McSorley's. There were peanut shells on the floor and I could feel some of them pressing into the worn-out leather soles of my shoes. I heard My Old Man sigh on the other end of the line and thought I heard the clink of the crystal decanter from his bar set touch the rim of a glass.

“You should know, Clifford, we're canceling the contract.”

A surge of acid filled my throat. I didn't say anything and neither did My Old Man and for a moment I thought maybe he'd gone and hung up.

“Clifford?” his voice came through the wire finally. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

“About what?” I blurted out. While I had been filled with dread on the walk over to the bar, nonetheless it had shocked me to hear it aloud. I could not have been more short of breath if someone had sucker-punched me in the gut and knocked all the wind out of me. As though from a far distance, I heard My Old Man let out another sigh over the tinny wire of the telephone.

“Fine,” he said. “You're going to play dumb. And why should I expect anything else from you?”

“Play dumb about what, Pops?” I needed to hear him say it.

“We received a letter yesterday. An anonymous tip. It took me all afternoon yesterday and all evening to figure out what to do about this information. But when I woke up this morning, Clifford, I knew exactly what I needed to do. And before you blame me, it turns out I haven't any choice, anyway: the tipper sent a copy of the letter to Harry, so even if I wanted to protect you—which, quite frankly, I don't—it's out of my hands.”

I knew “Harry” meant Harrison Tanley, the publisher who sat at the top of the pecking order at Bonwright, and My Old Man's boss.

“You're lucky, Clifford, that no one is bringing a lawsuit against you. At least, I haven't heard of any yet.”

“But . . . but . . .” I started to say. All of my sentences were only half-formed and I couldn't get my lousy brain to work.

“But what?”

“But . . . just like that? Some anonymous chump sends a letter and makes a claim against me, and you cancel the book? It's crazy. I haven't done anything wrong! What did this tipper say I did, and what proof did he have?”

“I think, Clifford, you already know what I'm going to tell you.
He said the book isn't yours
, that you didn't write it, and that he can produce a copy of the manuscript written out in longhand if he needs to! The fucking humiliation of it all . . .”

Miles,
I thought, recalling the intense look of hatred on Miles's face when he burst into my apartment and roughed me up. What a lousy, rotten, jealous bastard. I'd let him get his licks in, and hadn't even struggled, but evidently that wasn't enough to satisfy him. He was after blood. No, scratch that. He was after my family, my
reputation
. My brain raced to the thought of Miles's journal, and where I had stashed it in my studio. If that was the longhand copy he meant to threaten me with, he certainly wasn't getting his hands on it anytime soon. If he meant his father's journal, well . . . it would be my word against a Negro's.

“Say, that's awfully flimsy stuff,” I countered. “Anyone could write out a copy of the manuscript in longhand and go around pretending it's his!”

Again, that terrible sigh came over the line. “I don't think so, Clifford,” My Old Man said, sounding tired. “I was quite guarded about that manuscript . . . Eden was guarded . . . Very few people have ever seen it . . . Galleys only went to print last week.”

“How do we even know this copy exists? You don't sound as though you even want to look into it,” I said. There was no use beating around the bush and I figured I might as well make the accusation plain. My Old Man had always been lousy when it came to looking out for my best interests, and this instance was shaping up to be no exception.

“I don't need to look into it, Clifford.” His voice was stern and solemn and maybe a little drunk, too; when you listened closely you could hear the vague undertow of gin.

I don't need to look into it, Clifford.
There, he had done it again: knocked the wind out of me, cold. It wasn't as though I could honestly claim I was surprised to hear those words . . . it was only that he was so firm in delivering them. His lack of belief in me was a foregone conclusion and I'd been an idiot to think he could ever be proud of me and behave like the true father I'd always wanted.

I started to bring up Brooklyn. It was time to tell My Old Man I'd known all along what a lousy crook he'd been to me and to my mother. I'd suffered in silence all this time and said
nothing
. Now it was time to tell My Old Man and let it blow him over sideways, as it damn well should. But before I could figure out how to really stick it to him, he took the upper hand and ended the call.

“Our lawyers will mail you the paperwork, Clifford,” he said, just before hanging up. “I recommend we handle this as quietly as possible, for everyone's sake.” And then I heard a
click
.

•   •   •

“
E
verything fine?” Woody asked, seeing me holding the phone in front of my face, staring at the mouthpiece like some kind of goddamned cryptic puzzle covered in hieroglyphics.

“Just dandy,” I answered, after I'd had a chance to shake myself and pull it together. I put the receiver back in its cradle and slid the phone back across the bar. “Say, though . . . I'll take a whiskey—I don't care; whatever you got in the well—neat.”

Woody tucked the telephone back under the counter and poured me the drink. “Looks like you need this pretty bad,” he said. “On the house. But don't go using us as your regular phone-booth, hear?”

It was a hollow warning and I'd hardly heard what he said but I nodded
anyway. I was hopped up on a rush of emotions and higher than if I'd swallowed a whole handful of bennies and chased them with a bucket of Swish's cowboy coffee. My legs were quivering and my armpits were cold as hell with an icy, ticklish sweat. I couldn't believe My Old Man had found me out and I couldn't think of any way out of the whole mess. It would only be a matter of time before Eden knew, too, if she didn't know already, and the thought of this made my stomach turn sour all over again.

I was finally able to calm myself down with one thought—one question, really:
What had I done that was so terrible, after all?

It was true that the original inspiration for my novel came from Miles and his stories about his old man, but that didn't mean it wasn't really
my
manuscript, because after all I'd made some pretty significant changes and what is writing anyway but art imitating life and you have to start with
some
kind of original seed. It's what you do with it after that that matters. That's what Miles's composition book was: a seedling that I had the good eye to know could be nursed into something greater.

I could only think Miles had written that letter, even after the threat I'd hinted at about phoning in a tip of my own to the State Department about his lover. I was good and steamed. At first I thought there was nothing I wanted to do more than charge over to his house as he had charged over to mine and rough him up something awful.

But then another thought occurred to me, and I decided to go looking for Rusty instead.