“You’re not ready,” she said immediately. “I understand that.” She reached for her wine and quaffed it, her first overtly nervous gesture. “But when you are, you are. We’re on our way to the twenty-first century, Sandy. There are no proprieties left about this kind of thing. Not everyone goes nerve-dead in mourning.”
He was not sure what he’d say if she gave him the chance. Certainly it would not do to explain his circumstances to Helen, that like a vampire he had been out ravishing when he was supposed to be dead, while now he had been laid into his crypt with a stake right through the heart. Fortunately, however, explanation did not appear necessary. This was, Stern sensed, well scripted, and Helen had assigned herself all the lines. She had a missionary role. She was going to heal Stern, sell him on himself. In a second she would be telling him that he was still attractive. He had known Helen for decades now and recognized this forwardness as uncharacteristic. This was not Helen’s true nature, but rather the new and improved model, head-shrunk and reorganized. So much of this seemed self-consciously political. The formerly colonized nations should engage in self-determination. Speak your mind. Admit your desires. You were equal and entitled. He was less hopeful than she about the virtues of this revolution. But, for tonight, it was just as well. He would play his part. Here sits Mr. Alejandro Stern, history’s first bald coquette.
“You’re quite an attractive man, Sandy.”
He could not suppress his smile. Again, she misunderstood.
“Do you think that the only thing women find attractive is a twenty-year-old body?”
Here was one of the five or six highest-order mysteries of life. What did women find attractive? Attention. That he knew. Strength of one kind or another, he had long supposed. But the physical element entered somewhere as well.
“Whatever that might be, Helen, I think I lack some of the essential ingredients.”
“I don’t think so. I think you have all the essential ingredients. Maybe some of the inessentials—” Her hand trailed off in space and they both laughed merrily.
God knows, there was no sense in pretending he did not enjoy this. He did. Given the frame of mind with which he had started the evening, her honesty, affection, her excitement in his presence seemed a heartening miracle. He took her hand.
“Helen, this is a charming offer. I am sure it will obsess me.” As usual, he enjoyed being elusive. He was back to his essential aspect, the foreigner, unknown and hard to figure. His ambiguous look was apparently too much for her. She shrank back and shook her head.
“God, I’ve made a hash of this.”
“Nonsense.”
“Oh, Sandy.” She covered her face with both hands. “I’m drunk. I can’t believe this.” She sat, eyes closed, suddenly flushed, suffering intensely. The sight of dear, honest Helen so humiliated moved him terribly. He was beginning to take on the emotional lability of an adolescent. For now, no matter. He stood at once and from behind her chair wrapped his arms around her.
“Helen,” he said.
“I’m drunk,” she repeated. “I let myself come on like a lush sitting at a bar.”
“You appeared the true, kind soul you are. I am positively alight with flattered pride. And.” he said, “I am enormously interested.”
“You are?” She craned her neck straight back, so that she was looking at him upside down, a cute maneuver somehow befitting a person half her age. Her smile, too, was girlish.
“I am,” said Mr. Alejandro Stern. He cared for her much too much not to embrace her. He leaned down to meet her, full of kind intentions and wholly unprepared for the spectacular jolt that lit him from the first contact. Helen, too, felt this and actually groaned. He came around the chair, took her in his arms. He touched both her breasts.
“Upstairs,” she said, after a moment. She took him by the hand and led him to her bedroom. There he opened Helen’s dress, pulled down the bodice, and helped her remove her brassiere. Her breasts were wide-set and flattened somewhat by age and the toils of female experience, but the sight, to Stern, remained deeply exciting. She left him to begin turning down the spread. Helen had loosened his tie and he pulled it from his collar.
It was then that he remembered Peter’s caution. Stern remained stock-still. He was without indispensable equipment. This would be terrible.
“Helen,” he said. She looked at him, but his mouth seemed merely to grope. “Helen, I find this most embarrassing—”
“Ohhh,” said Helen. “Aren’t you contemporary?” She pointed across the bed to a nightstand. “The top drawer.”
Amid the pantyhose there was a package of condoms. He tried not to start. Helen, who had slipped her arms back into the top of her dress, so that it was languorously draped, smiled faintly.
“I’m not offended, if you’re not. To tell you the truth, it’s a necessity.” He did not understand. “Birth control,” she said.
“Why, Helen,” said Stern. This news, somehow, pleased him.
“Don’t get too excited,” she said and tossed aside the bedcover. “I’m in menopause. Like everyone else. Just not as far along.”
Stern fingered the package. The economy size. Twenty-four and most of them gone. Dear Lord, modern life was disconcerting. Helen had come back around the bed to him. She pushed her arms free of each sleeve.
“Where were we?” she asked.
Afterwards, he lay with Helen in her bed. Somehow, tonight, he had been less adept. He had fumbled with that stupid latex thing, and their nervousness expressed itself as an almost comic courtesy. ‘Is that all right?’ ‘Oh yes, yes, please.’ Nonetheless, they lay here, quiet and adhering to one another, fully content. At some point, he thought, he was supposed to leave. But not just now. In an idle way, it occurred to him that he was a truly vile creature, one of those sly, conscienceless rapscallions out of some French bedroom farce, vowing chastity and then throwing himself on the first woman that passed into sight. What was wrong with him?
But he did not feel vile—or wrong. He had supposed from listening to TV and the movies and cocktail talk—from wherever it was these ideas came—that these couplings, called casual, were supposed to be loveless and numb. But here in the soft dark he found himself aswarm with gentle feelings. This woman, like Margy, would be dear to him for life. Was that self-deception? Or had pop mythology just missed the point. Was it intimacy and connection that everyone was seeking? He thought, oddly, of Dixon. Did the master swordsman also experience his thousand interludes this way? Yes. Probably. Even for Dixon there must have been more to his wandering than the chance to brag. He craved acceptance, tenderness, female succor, before returning to the world made harsh by men. So, too, Mr. Alejandro Stern. His life as he had always known it was gone, and the road down which he marched was largely unknown to him. What was ahead? The last months, he recognized quite suddenly, had been rife with fear. But not right now. For the moment, with Helen curled in the crook of his arm, her breathing against him slowing as she dove near sleep, he had stepped aside, taken time out, cooled himself in the refreshed air of night. For today, tonight, for the first fraction of time since it had happened, he was able to declare himself, however briefly, at peace.
For the occasion, Stern borrowed the 1954 Chevy of his law school classmate George Murray. At this time in America, automobiles had only recently ceased being shaped like teakettles and Stern regarded this vehicle, which came equipped merely with a heater, as sleek and impressive. He had not made the acquaintance of many girls in the United States; there seemed to be so few opportunities. For years, he had been ahead of himself in school and, accordingly, was of little interest to the young women around him. And since he was seventeen, he had worked each weekend, driving a punchboard route that took him all about the Middle West in a dilapidated, foul-smelling truck owned by Milkie, his grubby one-eyed boss. Over time, his inexperience seemed to compound itself. Foreign-born, Hispanic-accented, Jewish, he was apt in female company to feel like something set down here from another universe.
So he was grateful for Clara’s ease with him. He crossed his feet trying to race her to the car door, but she remained amused and casual. Somehow, he made this dour young woman comfortable. As much as he aspired to her, blindly and instinctively, she perhaps thought he was all that she deserved.
“You know,” she said, as soon as he was seated, “this was really my idea. I begged my father to ask you.”
“This,” said Stern, gesturing to the two of them, “was my idea. You, however, put it into action.”
“Oh, you are smooth.” She smiled. “Daddy says that. He thinks you’re very bright.”
“Does he?” Stern, unaccustomed to city driving, watched the road in desperation. If this car suffered any injury, he would have to flee the state. Murray had made that clear.
“What do you think of him?” she asked. “My father?”
Stern, in spite of himself, was too distracted to prevent himself from groaning.
Clara laughed out loud. She touched his arm as he moved the gearshift along the column.
“I am terrible, aren’t I? I’m not like this, Mr. Stern. It’s all your fault. Do you know that I am usually so quiet? People will tell you that about me.”
“What else would they tell me?” Stern asked. He had fallen into a companionable mood. She smiled, but it was the wrong question.
“Tell me about Argentina,” she said after a moment.
The concert was Ravel. She spoke to him about the music, making offhand reference to passages that she supposed were as plain to him as if they were words written on the page. At the intermission, he bought orange juice. Only one bottle, for her. His normal penury had guided him without reflection and he saw at once that he had disconcerted her by making his lack of means so plain. But she refused to be flustered. She offered him the straw that had been punched down through the cardboard bottle cap and made him take a sip. And there something occurred. The concert hall was crowded; the grand acoustics of the building amplified the hubbub, and the lobby lights were stingingly bright after the prior hour in darkness. But the moment to Stern grew more intimate than an embrace. Somehow her character had become as clear to him as the notes which had been played: she was kind. Committedly. Unceasingly. She cared more for kindness than social grace. This vision of her overtook him, and Stern, in a kind of swoon, felt himself suddenly immersed in that warm current and his heart swimming toward her.
“That was wonderful,” she told him as they moved along beneath the theater lights after the concert. She had carried her coat out the door, and they stood, buffeted by passersby, as she struggled with one sleeve. Summoning himself, Stern asked her to accompany him to Chinatown for dinner. He had contemplated this moment all week. He would have to take her somewhere. Chinatown, he eventually decided, answered the imperatives of economics and romance, and the thought of the meal—he was thin in those years and always hungry—had tantalized him for days. She refused, however. The money, surely, was on her mind.
“I must tell you, Miss Mittler, that I intend to take a telephone next week.” This was true. He had held off only because he was not certain Henry would allow him to keep his office. But the remark, spoken in jest, succeeded in amusing her. This, Stem recognized at once, was a kind of rare power with her. Under the marquee lights, Clara Mittler easily laughed. She was wearing a tiny pink hat, with a trimming of white veil, and she reached up to hold it.
“Next week,” she said. “We’ll make a separate outing of it. Why rush ourselves tonight?”
Agreed. He offered her his arm and she took it. They strode off together through the symphony crowd, the men in overcoats, the women in fur stoles and jewels. Stern felt a swell of pleasure. He was certain that someone there looked up and thought, What a handsome young American couple.
19
THE PHONE MESSAGE SAID “Margy Allison.” If it had read, simply, “Margy” he would have realized who it was an instant sooner and felt a lesser pang. He had not had a word with her since they had parted at the hotel. No more flowers—not a call to say hello or, more pertinently, to mention that he might have inflicted a social disease. He’d had every intention. But it would have been easier to have the Department of Public Health send a postcard than explain this matter by phone. And how was he to account for the underlying facts, while protecting Clara’s privacy—and his own? Peter had already called to report that the specimen tested spotlessly; after the second blood test, due in a couple of weeks, he’d have a clean bill of health and nothing to tell her. Better to wait, he had thought. But now, with the message in hand, he was cornered. Well, he had gone the great circle in a few months, from faithful husband to complete cad. He sighed and asked Claudia to get Margy on the phone.
“Hi, there,” she said. Stern thought he detected a chord of good cheer in her voice, but his hopes were soon dashed. She was being ironic. “Long time, no nothin,” Margy added.
The line gathered sound. What had ever made him think he had skill with women?
“If I said I am horribly embarrassed, would you believe me?”
“Shore,” said Margy. “I’d believe that. I’d believe that makes a lotta sense.”
She was angry. Indignant. Stern sank a little lower in his chair, trying to hold himself together around a livid core of guilty feelings. She was going to give it to him. He had it coming.
“I am afraid—” he said, then stopped. He was going to say that he was new to all of this and, accordingly, confused. Bui it was much too pathetic an excuse.
“Of what?” said Margy. “You gonna tell me there’s somethin you’re scared of?” Skeered.
“Margy, I am truly sorry. Truly. You are much too fine a person to be treated so shabbily.”
“You bet I am,” she said.
“I know that. I really—”
“But here I am callin you.”
“I am very pleased you did so.”
“I didn’t call you to please you. I got somethin you better see.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Like it or not, I figure you’re the guy I gotta talk to about this.”
When the thought came to him, it was like being stabbed. Oh God, he thought. Oh God. He closed his eyes. She had it.
“I sat there lookin at this goddamn thing and that’s what I thought—well, I’m gonna be talkin to that rascal now.”
“Oh, Margy,” said Stern. He waited a moment in unbearable shame. “When did this appear?”
“Yesterday.”
Naturally. Count on Peter to get it all wrong.
“This is my responsibility,” said Stern. “You should have no doubt about that.”
“Why would I have any doubt about it? I’m callin you, ain’t I?”
Stern continued to keep his eyes closed. Never in his life had he undergone a moment like this. Never. He had always treasured his honor. One hand crept absently along the desk until he recollected that this furtive search was futile. He was going to buy cigars today. That was a promise to himself. A sworn oath.
When he did not speak, she said, “I need you to tell me what-all I gotta do.”
“Of course.”
“How long is this goddamn thang gonna last, anyway?”
What was it that Peter had said? Three weeks to a lifetime. He told her simply that one could never be certain. He had no wish to get into details.
“That’s great. I suppose I gotta come down there?”
“Here?”
“Where else?” She was apparently confused about treatment or diagnosis.
“I would think everything necessary can be done in Chicago.”
“Well, I’d think so, too,” she said, “but it ain’t gonna be like that.”
He had no idea what outraged impulse she was giving vent to now.
When the thought of Helen came to him abruptly, he could not breathe. He sat back in the chair rigidly, dumb. Surely, there could not be a problem there, too. Peter had virtually promised. And if he was wrong twice? Stern’s eyes were now
open wide.
Margy asked if he was there.
“I am sorry.” He asked her for a moment and pulled himself closer to the desk, gripping the glass by its green edge. All that control he had exerted, that excessive, ugly compulsive grasp he always had on himself and had always quietly despised—it had a purpose. He saw that now.
“You know I only got three weeks,” Margy said.
“Three weeks?” he asked.
“Till I’m supposed to be there. This thing says June 27th.”
What thing, he almost said. But he did not. A miracle process of reconstruction was immediately at work. Oh, he was still alive. He understood now: she had been served with a grand jury subpoena. He slapped himself on the chest, where he could feel his heart pounding.
Answering his questions, she provided a short account of events the day before. The subpoena had been served by Chicago FBI agents, local functionaries uninvolved in the investigation, who merely dropped off the paper, telling her she would have to testify on the twenty-seventh about the documents called for.
“You are quite right,” said Stern. “You must come here. I was thinking for a moment that they might not require a personal appearance before the grand jury, but since they told you otherwise—” He was lying fabulously now—in an instant he would have the entire conversation retooled. “So you say the twenty-seventh.” He reached for his appointment book, but Claudia had it. He did not bother to retrieve it. “Yes, that is fine. Well, I shall see you here then.”
“That’s all?” she asked.
“No, no,” said Stern, “of course not. I must meet with you, review the documents, determine why they have bothered you.”
“But you’re my lawyer. It won’t be like John. Like you said—you’re responsible.”
“I must check with the Assistant United States Attorney to be certain. But I must say—” Stop, he told himself. Cease. He was blathering, still electric with relief. “Margy, put the subpoena on the fax machine. Right now.” For a moment they were on the line together, unspeaking, difficult small things gathering in the hushed whirring. Then Stern announced that Claudia was summoning him to another call, a fiction out of whole cloth, and placed Margy on hold until the subpoena copy was laid on his desk. It sought corporate records and, properly, should have been served on him as the corporation’s lawyer. He had not taken Klonsky’s warning to mean they would go this far. But Chief Judge Winchell had let the prosecutors get away with this tactic in other cases where they had argued it was necessary to be sure that employees would be exacting in producing documents. And as usual, Stern noted, the government’s informant had been on target in identifying who would know MD’s records best.