“I’ll clear the table,” Natalia said, “so go back to work if you feel like it.—Got anything for the cleaners? I’m going in a while.”
Jack had a pair of gray flannels to go, and got them.
Natalia said she would pick up Amelia at 4, too.
Some time later, the telephone rang. Jack was in the middle of a blue wash and went on with it, vaguely thinking Natalia was back and would answer. He continued covering the area he wanted to cover, because he couldn’t add to it once it was dry. On the eighth or ninth ring, he moved.
The house seemed to be empty. He picked up the telephone in the living-room.
“Hello, Jack. This is Marion.”
“Oh, Marion. Hi. If you want Natalia, she’s doing errands just now.”
“I didn’t want to speak with her particularly, I wanted to speak with you,” Marion said in her soft, precise voice. “It’s about Elsie.”
“Yes?” Jack anticipated a mild warning which he was supposed to pass on to Natalia, perhaps that Natalia might do well to keep her distance.
“I’m sure you know since Saturday night that Natalia’s rather stuck on her. Maybe it’s mutual just now.” Marion gave the faintest of laughs. “Hope it doesn’t bother you.”
“No.—Not at all.”
“Good. Because it doesn’t bother me either. Nobody owns Elsie, not me, not anybody. That’s part of her charm.”
Jack smiled at the half-open window in front of him. “I know. I agree.”
“Elsie picks people up and drops them—fast. So—”
“So?”
“That’s the way to take her. Be braced for this being dropped, and enjoy her while it lasts. Since we’re all seeing each other now and then, I wanted to make myself clear. No hard feelings on my part. Natalia knows that.”
“Very nice of you. To say that.”
Marion laughed a little, as if at his politeness.
Jack hoped that Marion wasn’t being dropped. “Any message for Natalia? Want her to call you?”
“No. Oh yes! There’s sort of a party at the Gay Nighties Friday night. I’ll be playing for about fifteen minutes. Lots of other people performing. You’re both invited. Remind Natalia.”
“Where is it?”
“Down on Wooster. I gave Natalia the address.”
Jack felt both jangled and a bit better as he returned to his workroom. So there was something rather real going on between Natalia and Elsie, or Marion wouldn’t have troubled to make this call.
What did girls do? Jack’s mouth twitched with a nervous smile. Natalia and Elsie had both had a little experience in the past, he mustn’t forget that. An affair, he thought. Affairs were short by definition, with a few exceptions. Affairs weren’t like marriages. Say nothing, play it cool, he told himself. That was not only civilized and polite, it was safe. He’d pretend not to see anything, or if he saw something because it was so obvious he couldn’t possibly miss it, he would pretend not to care much or at all. And maybe his not-caring would be real.
After all, yes, he did want Elsie to enjoy life, to be happy. Hadn’t he said that to old Linderman? It was Linderman who couldn’t understand that. Jack didn’t want to resemble Linderman in the least.
When Natalia came in a few minutes later, Jack gave her Marion’s message about Friday. He and Natalia were going to the theater Friday evening, and Jack didn’t have to remind her about that. Natalia said she supposed they could just as well look in at the place after the theater, if they felt like it, because the Gay Nighties show would go on until late, and Marion simply wanted them to put in an appearance to increase the crowd. It was the “opening” of the Gay Nighties.
“I’m going to try to reach Bob at the office,” Natalia said. “I should’ve done it before.—Imagine going to the office today.”
But Jack knew, they both knew that Bob Campbell had, for today at least, the day of the cremation, to carry on with a life-as-usual attitude or crack up. Jack had told Natalia about the cremation at 6 somewhere on Long Island, and she had been sure Bob wanted to go alone. Jack lingered, thinking it would be friendly if he said a word to Bob too.
“I see, thank you…No, no message.” Natalia said to Jack, “Bob’s left. I’ll try to call him later tonight.” Natalia had a pained expression, and was in one of her frequent states of vague unease. “I’d better call my mother. I’ve been putting it off.”
To tell her about Louis, Jack knew. Natalia’s mother Lily had always been fond of Louis. “I’ll go pick up Amelia.—No, really I’d like a walk,” Jack said, when Natalia offered to do it. He went out.
27
Natalia took a dress and shoes in a shopping bag when she went off to the Katz Gallery Thursday noon. The gallery was closed all day until the opening at 6 p.m., because today she and Isabel and a boy called Dan, who helped out, had to hang the pictures. Natalia departed in old dungarees and sandals.
Yesterday she had had lunch with Bob, who had told her about the cremation. Bob had waited for more than an hour on a marble bench in a tomblike building somewhere in Long Island, until Louis’ ashes were brought out in a box. Then he had taken a Staten Island ferry, and opened the box over the rail, and a man had come up to him and said, did he have to contaminate the city’s waters further by emptying his lunchbox garbage into them? Natalia had told Jack that a few of Bob’s and Louis’ friends, one of them called Stew whom Jack vaguely remembered meeting, knew of Louis’ death by now. Bob had the idea that the death would be less of a shock to people, if they learned about it two weeks or a month later. Bob had gone to Philadelphia to see about Louis’ apartment there, and somehow the Inquirer had found out and printed an article about Louis and his real estate work, his saving of old buildings from the wrecker’s ball and his efforts to keep small neighborhood shops in business. Natalia had a photostat of the article.
Jack arrived at the Katz Gallery before 7. The wide, white-walled rooms were already rather crowded, and the hum of conversation reminded Jack of a well-functioning beehive, though the wisps of cigarette smoke dispelled the bucolic. Some people had drinks in hand. He looked for Natalia and didn’t see her, and glanced around also for Elsie.
“Hello! You’re John Sutherland?” asked a smiling man of about forty with round, friendly eyes.
“Yes.” Jack took the hand the man was extending.
“Just wanted to say how much I admired your work in—in the ‘Dreams’ book. Lovely and different. Natalia tells me you don’t use a pencil.”
“Not when I can avoid it,” Jack replied. The man still gripped his hand.
“I’m with Battersea Press. Harold Vinson’s my name. Art director. Natalia knows me.” He released Jack’s hand. “May I telephone you if we have some work you might do?”
Jack smiled. “Yes, sure.”
The man waved goodbye and drifted off, and his alert eyes lingered on Jack till he had to look where he was going.
Jack went into the big room and saw Natalia being the pleasant hostess far to Jack’s left, laughing now, and the laugh was inaudible in the buzz. And the paintings? Jack could hardly see them. The ones he saw part of, their top corners, were full of dark squares of different colors, suggesting careless Mondrians. There was another of dusty yellow fragments coiled like a snail’s shell, and this perhaps had made Natalia think of Hundertwasser. Sylvester’s work would sell, Jack thought, because it had an elegance about it. The colors had style. He could not judge one single picture, because none was visible in its entirety.
And Elsie? He looked for her blond head and couldn’t find it.
Jack went back to the foyer just as an elevator door opened and among five or six people, there was Elsie in a white sleeveless dress with a pale blue hat like a bellhop’s cap on her head, a raincoat over her arm, and Jack’s heart jumped. “Elsie!”
She had seen him at once too. “Hello, Jack!” She gave him her hand, pressed his, looked at him for an instant, then turned her eyes to the surroundings.
“Where’s Ma
rion?”
“Not coming,” Elsie said. “She’s got work just now.”
“You look good this evening.” Other people thought so too, Jack saw from the heads that turned toward Elsie. “Glass of wine or something? The drinks’re here.” He meant the table at the back of the foyer.
“No, not now.”
“Want to go in? Natalia’s in there—on the left.”
They went into the main room, which bent around the corner of the building to the right. Now Natalia wasn’t where she had been. Elsie wore black patent leather pumps and carried a black patent leather bag. Best of all, Jack noticed, was that her make-up had improved, the lipstick was the right red, the mascara was just enough to set off the blue of her eyes. And she looked utterly sure of herself, years older in her poise than at that first party at Louis’, for instance. Jack saw her eyes light up and her lips part before she said:
“There’s Natalia.”
They moved through the crowd toward Natalia, Elsie preceding him. “Were you working today, Elsie?”
“Yes. And I don’t own this dress!” Elsie replied over her shoulder.
Natalia’s soft greeting to Elsie was “Hi, sweetie,” that maybe no one but Elsie heard, that Jack heard only by lip-reading. Had Natalia’s heart jumped as his had? Absurd for him, Jack told himself. He could recall five or six girls who had made his heart jump in the past, and where were they now? Faces and names half-forgotten or completely forgotten. But Natalia could still do it to him, often.
Elsie moved away from Natalia and tried to look at the paintings. She bent, she stretched to see them. Jack avoided being introduced to Sylvester, a young man with a reddish moustache, sturdy, shy, and looking as if he had put on his Sunday best for this occasion.
Isabel came over. “Hello, Jack!—Have you seen Louis yet? I invited them both.”
“N-no, I haven’t,” Jack replied, and felt for an instant awful, as if he were personally guilty of a deception. Was Bob here even? “Excuse me, Isabel, I’ll check with Natalia.” Checking with Natalia could mean anything, checking if Natalia had seen Bob, for instance.
Natalia told Jack that she ought to stay on another half hour. It was nearly 8.
Jack couldn’t bring himself to warn Natalia that Isabel had asked was Louis here. “I thought Elsie might like to have dinner with us—out somewhere,” Jack said. Elsie was a few feet away then, but quite out of hearing. “Or maybe you and she want to have dinner together? In which case, I’ll take off, I think.”
“Together? No.—Sure, Jack, I’ll ask her,” Natalia said.
But Natalia was busy and Jack asked Elsie, who somewhat ungraciously reflected, then said, “I could, if it doesn’t get too late. I have to be somewhere at nine tomorrow morning.”
Jack went and told Natalia that he and Elsie were going down for a drink at the bar around the corner, a bar Natalia knew, and they would wait for her there.
The bar was quiet and darkish, and so full they had to stand at the counter. Jack ordered a Jack Daniel’s and Elsie said she would have the same. A man gave Elsie his stool to sit on. Jack, keeping a certain distance from Elsie, though very little because of the press of people, lifted his glass to her before he drank, but Elsie didn’t see it. In fact, Elsie seemed to avoid his eyes, might have been having her drink alone, Jack thought. The yellowish light from behind the bar fell on the crisp white band that crossed her shoulder, on her bare arm below, an arm not yet suntanned—could Elsie acquire a tan?—rounded but not at all plump. A question occurred to Jack: Did it annoy you that I said I love you? It was the kind of question a teenaged boy asked a girl, hoping like mad that his declaration had annoyed her, upset her, delighted her. If he had asked the question, Elsie would probably have replied casually, No, why should it? with maybe a glance at him, maybe a blink of her perfectly mascaraed eyes.
Jack saw the eyes of the barman, who was polishing glasses, lingering dreamily on Elsie. Jack cleared his throat and said, “What’re you doing tomorrow morning at nine?”
Elsie looked at him with attention. “It’s what the professor calls a midterm exam. Like in high school. It’s an hour-and-a-half exam on English and American literature.”
“Oh!” Jack laughed. “I was thinking you had a modeling job! Are you worried?”
“Yes. Plenty.” She was still looking at him. “I can write on and on, sure. I know what I want to say about those books, but is it right? Is it what the professor wants?—I want to pass that course.”
“What books, for instance?”
“Dostoievsky’s The Idiot is one.—Natalia helps me a lot. She’s read all this stuff. I know what I want to say, that it’s all emotion and very sincere but a little bit naive. The Idiot, I mean. And Natalia made me laugh Sunday—” Elsie sat straight, tipped her blue-capped head back and continued, facing Jack. “She said last Sunday, for all of us, was like the characters in The Idiot, when nobody goes to bed, and Prince Myshkin goes visiting everywhere in the small hours, and it’s still light almost, because it’s summer, and they have these long conversations sitting on benches out in somebody’s garden! Ha-ha!” Elsie shook with mirth.
Jack grinned, happy, ecstatic, and not knowing why. He too remembered the innocent and half-dotty Myshkin, hung up on a girl who wouldn’t have him, talking, talking. “I love you, like an idiot—like Myshkin, I think,” Jack said, just loudly enough for her to hear. “Nothing to worry about. And I’m sure you’re not worried.”
This made her laugh again, a little shyly, though she seemed quite at ease, not afraid to look at him, genuinely unaffected by what he had said.
It was odd to feel so elated, happy in her company, Jack thought, when there were absolutely no sexual currents flowing from her toward him. He might feel some in himself. Or did he? But from her, nothing. She might have confided her exam anxiety in the same manner to an old uncle, another girl, or to her brother.
Elsie’s loquacious mood continued at dinner, but it was focused on Natalia. From the instant Natalia had walked into the bar, she and Elsie had had something to talk about, the exam, then a photographer Elsie had posed for today. Natalia wore sandals with her black dress, having this morning put high-heeled shoes that weren’t mates into the shopping bag to take to the gallery.
They went to a Hungarian restaurant up on Second Avenue, where the food was good but the service slow. Jack didn’t mind. He listened. Elsie sat next to him, Natalia opposite them, her back to the center of the restaurant. Natalia preferred to face people she was talking to. Goulasch with noodles finally arrived, and cool rose. Elsie ate with her usual gusto, which Jack found attractive, maybe because it was healthy. Back to Elsie’s exam tomorrow. Elsie did not like Hemingway.
“Why not?” asked Jack.
“He isn’t thick like the others,” replied Elsie with a glance at Jack.
Jack knew what she meant. Hemingway was not full of details. He noticed Natalia’s amused face.
“For instance,” said Natalia.
“When he says in—For Whom the Bell Tolls that the hero puts his hand on the woman’s stomach because she’s pregnant—he says something silly to the woman. Like a little boy. And it’s supposed to be serious. It just made me laugh.”
Natalia leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Just write that you think Hemingway’s a lightweight and tell them why.”
“Should I?” Elsie’s confidence seemed to come with the question. “I will. A lightweight. That’s the way I feel.”
Natalia exchanged a glance with Jack.
Jack had to get up and hunt for the waiter to bring the bill, and when he returned—having insisted that the waiter come with him—Natalia and Elsie were in lively conversation, both leaning across the table.
They took a taxi downtown, and went to Elsie’s first. Jack wanted to see her to her door, and said so. He was thinking both of the possibly lurking Linderman and of Elsie’s getting some sleep tonight, though he mentioned neither. Elsie’s and Marion’s place was in a large dark buildin
g on the east side of Greene Street, four or five storeys high. Elsie had a key, and Jack, on the sidewalk, watched her push open a tall, heavy-looking door.
As he got back into the taxi, Jack vowed to himself not to make a comment in the next days or weeks about Natalia’s fondness for Elsie, but to let Natalia say something, if she cared to, and if she didn’t, so be it. “Now we go to Grove Street, please,” he said to the driver. “Go up Bedford and stop at the corner, if you will.”
The taxi moved off and made a left turn into West Houston.
“Isn’t she coming along!” Natalia said.
Jack smiled. “By leaps and bounds. Even the way she talks—She doesn’t slur things any more. Maybe Marion’s influence. Marion practices—”
“I told Elsie to say introduce instead of innerduce,” Natalia interrupted. “Doesn’t take much effort to put a ‘t’ in things.”
When they got home, it was still early enough for Susanne to catch a bus up to Riverside. Susanne had been reading at the white table, an empty coffee cup stood beside her book. All was well.
Natalia got under the shower, and Jack after her. He much wanted to make love to her tonight, but doubted that she’d be in the mood after a day like today. Jack was wrong. In bed, he kissed her good night on her cheek, her lips, and held one of her breasts gently as he often did, and things went on from there. And Jack was proud of his performance, giving Natalia two climaxes to his one. Did Elsie excite them both? Jack didn’t think so, at least not in regard to himself. Natalia was real and solid, he knew the slight roughness of the skin on her hips, and loved it. They had created a child together. Natalia was not unexplored territory, not a young larva that might or might not turn into a beautiful butterfly.
“You’re my bread,” Jack said softly, as Natalia lit a cigarette.
“What d’you mean?” she asked through a laugh.
Jack lay on his back with his hands behind his head. “Real.” He turned his head, then his body toward her but he did not touch her. “Staff of life, you know?”