Three-Martini Lunch (44 page)

I fumbled for the front door and once I got it open I charged through it and didn't look back. The plan had been to wait there and I had been looking forward to the look on My Old Man's face when he arrived and saw that I knew all about Dolores and about his crummy double-life, and I thought maybe if he realized the cat was out of the bag he'd see what a rotten father he'd been and have some decency and sympathy and do right by me about the publishing contract.

But seeing Dolores, seeing her boldness and her vitriol, had convinced
me I was on a fool's errand. My Old Man was a rat, and that was the truth of it. He wasn't going to come to his senses and defend me, and if I wanted to fight ratty-ness with ratty-ness, there was only one thing to do now. I'd be damned if I was going to give up this book contract quietly.

I went to look for Rusty.

76

Y
ou ought to give your notice, Eden,” Mr. Nelson said.

A week had passed since the anonymous tip about Cliff's plagiarism. I knew this was coming, but it still shocked and saddened me. I looked at Mr. Nelson, dismayed.

“I'm telling you this out of courtesy,” he said. “Because of the appearance of nepotism—not to mention the possible plagiarism—they've asked me to resign quietly, and I doubt this will be a good place for you to stay on, given . . . everything.”

I nodded. We were sitting in his office. It was Monday morning, and he'd pulled me in for a quiet conference before the workday got under way. Mr. Nelson had dark eggplant-hued circles under his eyes. Now he sighed, got up, and poured two glasses of scotch. He handed one to me, and I accepted it.

The scotch tasted like peat moss, and a little like licking a frog.

Mr. Nelson got up and gazed out the window at the sea of high-rises. It was something he did when he was troubled.

“He's managed to buy out the contract and move the book to another house,” he said, meaning Cliff.

“I know.”

“This other house, they're willing to take the risk. Some character named Rusty Morrisdale arranged it. Some no-good beatnik friend of Cliff's, I imagine.”

“I heard that, too.” I hadn't spoken to Cliff directly; to my knowledge, he hadn't come home to our apartment a single time that week. Eventually, we'd have to cross paths. It would only be a matter of time before I'd have to find someone to draw up divorce papers.

“I'm outraged, if you want to know the truth,” Mr. Nelson said. “If it's plagiarism, and there's proof, it
will
catch up with him, sooner or later. He's getting off with far too little consequence at present.”

“What would you prefer?” I asked Mr. Nelson.

He shrugged and looked down into his scotch glass. “I don't know.” He turned around to face me. For a moment his eyes watered. Uncomfortable, I stood up and smoothed my skirt. Sensing my impending exit, Mr. Nelson asked me the only question he really wanted to ask me.

“Do you think he did it?” he asked. I paused and held him in my gaze, steady and flat and obvious.

“I don't know,” I said. At this, Mr. Nelson looked crushed, and I realized he'd been counting on me to say something definite. It was funny to see that it mattered to Mr. Nelson, that he was hoping for the best but still expecting the worst from Cliff. For the first time, it dawned on me that Mr. Nelson's prickly attitude towards Cliff derived from something other than simple disdain. However, their relationship had already caused enough damage to them both, and to the people around them. It was no longer my concern.

“If it's all the same to you, I don't think I want to give two weeks,” I said. “I'd like to start looking right away.” Mr. Nelson gazed at me with a startled expression. “Shall I telephone for a temporary girl?”

He gathered himself. “Please do,” he answered.

I set down the empty glass on his desk and turned to go.

“I'll write you a letter of recommendation,” he said in a generous voice. “I can have my girl make several copies of it, in case you need to hunt around a bit to find something.”

My girl,
he had said. I'd been “his girl,” but as of that moment I was no longer. It was a simple phrase—loads of editors used it—but it revealed exactly how interchangeable I'd always been.

“I only want one copy,” I said. “Make it out to Ms. Mavis Singer of Farbman and Company.”

“All right,” Mr. Nelson said in a weary voice.

“And, sir?”

“Yes?”

“Make it out in the name of ‘Eden Katz.'”

Mr. Nelson blinked. “I'm not sure I understand . . .” he said, frowning.

“Eden Katz,” I repeated, and spelled it for him. “That's my name. It always was.”

77

O
nce I left the shore of the Hudson River, the reality of the nightmare began to set in and take its toll, and while I am not a doctor, I believe I entered a sort of fugue state. I have a vague recollection of lifting my bicycle in anger and heaving it into the Hudson . . . watching the icy chunks floating on the river's surface bob like ice cubes.

After that, I must've sought out an appropriately wretched bar, for the next thing I remembered was waking up in my bedroom at my mother's apartment with a fat lip and a swollen eye, the taste of terrible cheap sour mash on my breath. I have no memory of the man—or men, perhaps—who left the souvenirs I discovered on my face.

There was only one monster, as far as I was concerned. And if I wanted to find him, all I had to do was look in the mirror.

But I didn't look in the mirror. I hardly wanted to see this new, fresh set of bruises, much less the more grotesque countenance I knew lurked beneath them. I stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling as the golden light of morning transformed itself, the window became a study of blues, and the
light finally turned to ash. I passed the better part of a week like this, watching the same cycle repeat itself.

When my mother came in to scold me, prodding me to get up, I gave her such a look, she did not press the issue, nor did she attempt to prod again. Instead, she seemed to understand my distress, even if she couldn't see its source. She took a gentler tack and began bringing me trays of food—trays I did not touch, that she later cleared away.

It occurred to me I had fallen into a similar state once before, just after Rusty attacked me on Cliff and Eden's roof. But that was nothing compared this. I remembered what it had been like to heal, to board that Greyhound bus, trying not to notice people staring with curiosity at my beaten-up face, bruises swimming to the surface of my skin like yellow and purple jellyfish.

How foolish I was, I realize now, to latch onto that image of Cob's cicada molting.
I am molting,
I had thought at the time. I had identified with the insect, but I see now I was wrong. If I am anything in this metaphor, I am the molted shell the cicada leaves clinging to the branch. San Francisco. Those days with Joey on the houseboat. I had lived and left all the living I'd done in that strange, perfectly sculpted yet empty echo of my life.

Days passed, then weeks.

A letter arrived, tucked neatly beside a bowl of soup on one of the trays my mother brought in. Its existence sent an electric shock through me, and yet, I knew who it was from immediately. He must have written it in his hotel room, just before. Four times, I attempted to open it, but failed. Whatever it said, it was everything I had left. Every time I touched the paper, my hand trembled, certain that its contents could only seal my passage to hell.

•   •   •

I
was staring at the unopened envelope one day when my mother poked her head into my room.

“Janet come to see you,” she announced. “I still don' know what all this about, but she got a right to know where you been at least.”

It was understood this meant my mother was going to send Janet in, whether I wanted her to or not. I shoved the envelope into my bathrobe pocket and sat up on the edge of the bed, and my mother retreated to fetch my visitor.

Janet entered the room trembling.

“Miles . . .” came her soft voice. She perched on the bed next to me. “I've been trying to reach you.”

I should've felt apologetic but I didn't, couldn't. My hands were still in my pockets and I could feel the envelope crinkled up in a ball there. For the first time in two weeks, I detected the alien tickle of emotion begin to pierce the veil of the numbing fog that surrounded me. Tears began to fill my eyes. The timing was terrible.

“Miles . . . ?” Janet murmured upon reading the small ripple of tiny earthquakes that was passing over the surface of my face. Her reaction, her expression of concern . . . these were enough to loose the storm. I felt my face crumple and I reached for her and buried my face in her chest, just as the mad heaving began to take over.

“Miles!” I heard her voice shout softly, as if from far away. I understood she was alarmed. Why shouldn't she be? But I could not help it. I allowed the shaking to take me over.

“Miles!” she shouted again.

This crack in my mask, she would have none of it.

“Miles, please . . .” Janet begged me now. “Miles, I have news.”

•   •   •

T
here was something in her voice. I sat up, wiped my face until I could hold her gaze like the steady, solid man I was supposed to be. I waited for her to
continue.

March 30, 1980

I
was dying and I was stuck in the lousiest hospital I had ever been in. When you are yellow from liver disease you might as well paint jail stripes on yourself because that is how they are going to treat you. They figure you did this to yourself and consequently you don't deserve to take up space in the good beds or talk to the good doctors and you don't really deserve to get better because you'll only go out and make yourself sick again. It's the nurses that are the worst because in the really bad hospitals they are washed-up old prudes who can't wait to judge you. They purse their hard little mouths at you and either barely touch you when it's time for your sponge-bath, leaving you dirty and depressed, or else they scrub you so raw you wind up with red patches on your already-swollen belly.

I wouldn't have picked this hospital but I didn't have any choice because the guy driving the ambulance did all the choosing. The morning I was admitted had started out peaceful enough; we were living in Scarsdale just then and I'd been reading the newspaper and drinking some coffee with a little Irish in it while my wife, Carolyn, did some ironing. Carolyn
wasn't like Eden at all. She wasn't a career gal and she was happy enough to do all the little things like iron her fella's shirt and fix him a nice stiff drink every afternoon when cocktail hour rolled around. Even though she wanted children and we hadn't been able to have them we still made the best of things and got along like a house on fire, mostly because Carolyn was solid as the earth and always knew when to look the other way, and never once forgot about cocktail hour. In any case, the trouble didn't start during cocktail hour but rather in the morning that day. I had an upset stomach and that was common enough but when I went to the bathroom I started throwing up and when I saw it was blood I called for Carolyn and she began to get pretty hysterical the way most women do and she called for an ambulance and reported my condition before I could stop her.

Once Carolyn called the ambulance I was stuck. The doctors told me later I'd had some kind of hemorrhage in my esophagus and that my damaged liver meant my blood wouldn't clot and that was why there had been so much blood. They had put me under for a little surgery and had given me a transfusion and for a little while I was feeling better but in the end it was no good because I began to hemorrhage in other places. The way the doctor explained it to me, my body is like a bullet-ridden warship springing leak after leak. I don't know if I buy it, because I'd had problems before but no one had ever called an ambulance and things had always turned out fine and after I'd had a chance to dry out for a day or two I always felt as good as new.

Anyway that wasn't what had happened this time around. What had happened was I was trapped in the lousy hospital with the lousy doctors and their lousy prognosis and if they were right I was facing the inevitable very soon. I'd only had a few regrets in life and I'd asked Carolyn to fetch one of them out of our safety-deposit box down at the bank. She did and brought it to the hospital, along with a manila envelope. I sealed it up and
asked Carolyn to look up the address for Eden Katz at Farbman & Company and put the whole business in the mail. Carolyn knew about my marriage to Eden and also how it had been annulled and all that jazz and if it ever bothered her she had the good calm practical sense not to let it show. She found the address and brought it to me scribbled in her very lovely and very neat handwriting on the back of a grocery receipt. Next I asked her to bring Rusty Morrisdale to the hospital during visiting hours, and he agreed to come, although the rat-fink made me wait a few days on account of his busy schedule. What kind of asshole makes a dying man wait? But I knew all about Rusty and his character and the only reason I wanted to see him was to settle a matter of unfinished business from twenty-two years ago.

Rusty was my agent but he had only ever represented me in one deal that we'd done when we moved my novel from Bonwright to another house and Rusty had really put the screws to me with that deal because he'd made sure that while the deal was decent enough for me, he made out with more than twice the commission a regular agent would have taken. It was very sneaky of him but at the time there was nothing to be done about it, because Rusty knew a certain secret about my book and Lord knows the rat-fink wasn't above blackmail.

Now, after all these years, Rusty finally was standing in the doorway of my hospital room, his beady eyes taking in the whole scene. His hair had turned a dirty iron-gray since I last saw him but the rest of him still looked the same and he still had that slouchy posture that made him look like a teenage girl with a bad attitude. I had never known him to need an invitation but nonetheless I waved him in and he came in and said a sheepish hello. I guess he could see I was really dying.

“You know why I asked for you here, Rusty,” I said, “and it's about those things we did all those years ago.”

Carolyn had already come and gone for visiting hours and there was no
point in beating around the bush but I could see Rusty was unnerved that I was being so frank because he glanced around nervously. My room was not private because in the lousy hospitals they never are and Rusty looked at the other beds in the room to see if anyone was listening to us. Even now, all these years later, there was still a minor swirl of controversy surrounding my book. Rusty had been able to get the book over the transom at Torchon & Lyle, but the publishing world is a very small place after all and he wasn't able to keep the rumors at bay indefinitely. Everyone knew about the big literary prize the novel had won but they also knew how the jury had later gone and taken the prize back due to the insinuations swirling around about the book being plagiarized. I was never formally charged and nothing was ever proven—not in a court of law, anyway—but those slobs took the prize back all the same. This in turn had the ironic effect of igniting people's interest even more and so the joke was really on that prize jury, because after that the book sold like hotcakes for a good long while. Rusty was naturally cagey about the rumors and I knew this was not necessarily for my sake but because the book was his bread and butter, too. At the same time rumors were good for business, a confirmation of these rumors would kill it. With his racket of a crooked commission, Rusty had done rather well in the end, and I could see he didn't want this prosperous run to end, and he certainly didn't want to be sued or have to repay the money to anybody.

“You should know I think of you as the devil, Rusty,” I said now, leveling an unfriendly look his way. “A dirty, rotten bastard of a devil in elbow patches.”

“C'mon, cut it out with that stuff, old buddy. Things worked out all right. You got your deal, didn't you? Best to focus on that,” Rusty said in an encouraging voice. It was almost as if he were trying to cheer me up.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. There had been newspaper clippings in that safety-deposit box along with the composition book. I had mailed
the book but not the clippings and I pushed them towards Rusty now, across the little hospital table over my bed.

“Do what? Help you move the book to a new publisher?”

I pointed to the article about a young man under investigation with the State Department who had committed suicide in a New York City hotel. “This wasn't part of our plan. You didn't have to do it.” I tapped the headline and when Rusty looked at it his eyes went wide.

“Cliff, I didn't do that,” he said. I looked at him and he could see I didn't believe him.

“It was your big idea . . . the tip off. You said one anonymous phone call was all it would take.”

“I didn't call anybody, I swear.”

“All right, Rusty. Have it your way,” I said, irritated. There was no getting anywhere with this guy and it was plain he would never accept any blame for anything he had ever done. I looked at him. Here we were, a couple of forty-seven-year-old men, and he was still trying to play me.

“Get out, Rusty,” I said, suddenly exhausted and overwhelmed. “I'm through talking.”

“Is there anything I can do for you, Cliff?”

“Get out!” I yelled more forcefully.

“We ought to discuss the future, Cliff, and your estate—”

At this, I picked up the water pitcher on the nightstand beside me and threw it at Rusty's head. I missed but I'd made my point anyway and Rusty scurried out on his little rat legs. A couple of nurses came in to scold me.

It was in that moment as I sat there watching the nurses waddling around with their fat posteriors, cleaning up the mess and clucking at me, that my brain began to work things over and consider possibilities I hadn't considered before. It bothered me that Rusty had denied having anything to do with phoning in the tip to the State Department. After all, it was his idea in the first place and it was certainly something he would do. It
bugged me that he'd played it so cool and acted so dumb just now. I assumed Rusty had phoned in the tip, and I had assumed Miles had mailed the anonymous letter to Bonwright.

•   •   •

B
ut now it dawned on me that these assumptions had been just that: assumptions. There were other possibilities, too, that I had never bothered to see.

•   •   •

I
had already addressed the envelope to Farbman & Company and had put Eden's name on it and it was on its way to her right this very second.
Eden
. How could I have been so blind? It was right there before me, for decades, and I had never suspected. They say dying men see things more clearly and as I sat there in my lousy dump of a hospital room I thought about what a shame it was to finally see it all so clearly and to not be able to do a damn thing about it.