Making Love (31 page)

“If you want a job, you don't have to grovel to anyone. I can introduce you to people who'd help you get yourself set. I've got some money, too.”
 

“Stick it up your ass.”
 

“Sonny, be reasonable for once in your life.”
 

“I want
this
job on
this
ball club. I know the front-office people from way back, a couple of the coaches are still there I played under. We got lots of things goin' for us.”
 

“Why didn't they come to you years ago?”
 

“I was messed up. Runnin' after Joy-Sue. Tryin' to look out for the kid. Bein' pulled every which way. How could I think straight? Even if they asked, I wouldn't have joined ‘em.”
 

“Did they ... did they ask?”
 

“No! I just explained why.”
 

“They dropped you from the team.”
 

“Listen, when you're through and can't help the club you gotta expect that. Everybody in sports knows that after a certain age he can't perform and he's gonna get the push. Why was I any different? What should I've expected? Special treatment? Plenty of guys hang around when it's over and they become creeps. I pulled myself together. Now the sun's shinin' on me. I been standin' out in the rain for years. It's my turn,” he protested. “You have a little lunch with a guy, it's gonna kill you?”
 

“What if it doesn't do any good?”
 

“Then nothin's lost, is it? Honestly, I don' see what your objections are. I never asked you to do anythin' before. No favors, no nothin'. You love me, I love you. Then shit, Jane, let me pull myself together.” He got up, walked into the kitchen, and poured himself another cup of coffee and one for her. He handed her the coffee and she was moved, she didn't know why, by his small acts of gentility. “So?”
 

She touched the bridge of his nose, swollen forever to the width of a thumb, and thought for a moment that she understood his passion, saw the beauty in the brutality to which he'd pledged his life. Then it was gone. The senseless abuse of one's body seemed to be an impossible project. She lit a cigarette and he batted away the smoke. He held her wrist and avoided her eyes. She knew the definition of failure, falsehood and accusation its sinew, the absurd justifications for something not working out, as sour as a wine drunk—all of it a permanent fixture of Sonny's character; and she gave in, as she realized she would. In her ability to deny him nothing, she denied him everything.
 

“Okay,” she said, “I'll go.”
 

He looked at his watch. It was getting late.
 

“Grab a cab, ‘cause you'll have trouble parkin' your car.”
 

“What do I do?”
 

“Talk it up for me. Tell him you know for a fact that the Jets and Rams are after me to scout. I been approached. But I been waitin' for the right thing. Don' come right out with it. Slip it in, when you can. Pudge doesn't like bein' conned. Give him a little of your background. Connecticut stuff. Your father, the golfer. Saranac College. He'll eat up that stuff. He'll be impressed once you lay things like that on him. He'll respect your opinion.”
 

“If he wants more than conversation, what then?”
 

“Listen, Jane, he won't. I told him that I was sendin' him somebody special an' you can rely on me in that department. I'm not settin' you up for anybody. Pudge give me his word that he wouldn't try a thing. He's a gentleman. Come right back to my place, I'll be waitin'. I'm not goin' into work tonight. Phonin' in sick. I'll leave a note for Conlon, so she knows where we're at.”
 

He held her coat for her, then kissed her.
 

“Honey, I won't forget this. Ever.”
 

 

* * * *

 

Sitting next to the small bloated man in the cab, the lunch at Leone's was a blur. She had drunk too much, found the food portions enormous and detestable, and Pudge's company intolerable. She had reached the headache stage of her lunchtime drunk and floated dreamily along, half listening to a series of achievements delivered in a verbal code that threatened to end only with Pudge's immediate death. There had been some girls present, the kind that she had seen demonstrating front-wheel drive at automobile shows and handing out brochures at conventions. They were not quite hookers, and not quite not hookers, separated by an invisible line which only men could see or cross. Sportswriters swarmed, gabbling to coaches, and owners stood in the background, as dignified as emperors. All of them had money, so much in fact that they indulged themselves, became sportsmen, flinging themselves impossibly back to childhood whims. Her father would understand, he was one of them. Newspaper photographers took a group picture of the owners seated at the dais, the men bunched together in a synthetic
bonhomie
, tallest to the back, smiling, drunk with their toys, all the rich kids of America posing at the endless birthday party that was their life.
 

Neither discretion nor gallantry had ever been inflicted on Pudge. He treated everyone in the same way, as chattel. Texas gas, West Virginia sulphur, and Montana copper ran in his veins. He had holdings in livestock, transportation equipment, and beverages, and was conservatively worth thirty million dollars on paper. Next to the Siddleys, she knew, the man was an upstart, and the one thing she'd learned about such people from her grandfather was that they were uncontrollable and characteristically unpleasant. Having failed to wield power at some stage of their lives, they succumbed to spite. The major stockholders of Invictor were fortunately buffered from the Pudge Denisons of the world. She wondered now if it had been a good thing.
 

The impoverished charm of figures had no effect whatever on her, and Pudge soon realized that the girl was either accustomed to men like himself or hopelessly dumb. She was unimpressed and it worried him. Since she had been accepted at Saranac, he concluded unhappily that she could hardly be stupid. Irony and contempt for the accomplishments of others was an Eastern weapon he'd been exposed to before. He didn't like it. Money had done nothing to temper his skin, it was still thin. Through his Wild Turkey and branch water, he detected a small weakness: Sonny Jackson. Incomprehensible though it might seem, he noticed it, and drove small darts in an opening that became larger with every passing minute. Her face became tense, nervous, whenever he mentioned him. A clumsy bridge player at best, he recognized a finesse when he saw one. He hit on the magic word:
contract.
 

“Sonny'd be most valuable to the ball club an' I know it. His enthusiasm is somefin' we all could use. Never too mucha tha'.”
 

“He knows the game.” Since she didn't, she felt like a fool. “He's got an eye for young players.”
 

“No denyin' tha'.” What was this buildup leading to, a loan? “Ever seen him, durin' his playin' days?” She shook her head, then mentioned filmed highlights. “Inspirational ball player, I call ‘em. They don' have the real stuff ‘at makes great ones, but they plug, an' grind out theah two yards when we need that fust down. Go right at the defensive line, an' they finish up on the suicide squad, cose they don't know when to quit.”
 

“Is that what happened to Sonny?”
 

“A real tryer, but thud rate.”
 

He saw her wince and squeezed his hands in anticipation. No woman Pudge couldn't quarterback. When money and power failed, guile brought them into sack. He had developed such qualities as he possessed into an art, the flexibility of his game plan always the key. The lobby of the Americana had all of the charm of wax flowers in a funeral parlor, and suitcase snatchers hungrily eyed the bellhops.
 

“It's in mah attaché case in the suite ... Sonny's contract,” Pudge said.
 

“Why don't you mail it or give it to him yourself?” she said, regaining her presence of mind.
 

“When're you goin' to see him?”
 

“Tonight, I guess.”
 

“Wount it be nice if you could hand it to him?”
 

An incontrovertible argument, she thought, looking into the horny green porcine eyes, deep set in his head, the skull an abutment. Pay-off time was at hand. His nineteenth-floor suite overlooked forty-one loitering prostitutes, the graveyard of Broadway at its cusp of the abandoned Lindy's, and ran eye-level to other structures of shapeless gray stone, enough to give even a hardened New Yorker glaucoma of the soul.
 

He excused himself to attend to telephone messages in the adjoining room and, she hoped, to ferret out Sonny's passport to respectability from the folds of a red-lined Samsonite case. A man's destiny seemed worth more to her than the ambiguous fine print on a scrap of paper, and Sonny's should be handed to him by an angel. He stuck his head out for a moment and said:
 

“Joy-Sue give him a real tough time o' it. Known to consort with nigras at the end. Tell yuh one thin', Sonny could really pick ‘em. Private stock, not to be believed. Teammates called him king of the cheerleaders. Ever gal ever twirled a baton or rode a pinto south of Virginia come into his stable at one time or ‘nother. I usta git the overflow. Can't complain. But compared to yuh, Joy-Sue was nuffin'.”
 

She ignored the heady compliment, familiar with the good old-fashioned needle.
 

“I thought you were going to give me a contract.”
 

“Don' rush me. Hate to be rushed.” He handed her a photograph of a young blond girl with a silver baton in her hand, snub nose, and hippy enough to satisfy any man. “Joy-Sue in huh prime.”
 

She glanced at the snapshot. Cuckolding she was convinced had long ceased to be a cause for tragedy. The previous Mrs. Jackson—not exactly a sight for sore eyes, Baby Doll in aspic, caught in the throes of a touchdown leap—had the fanatical, rapturous expression of a four-year-old who truly believes that Santa is alive and well at the North Pole.
 

“Had the hots foh huh foh years.”
 

“I hope you didn't fail where many succeeded.”
 

“Real sharp tongue in yoh mouf foh sucha young lady.” The folksy drivel was giving her heartburn, but he seemed a tireless commentator.
 

“She had the hots foh me, too, if you want to know the truf o' it.”
 

“Your a real salesman,” she said flatly, noticing his color rise to the hue of a Harvard beet. “I'm sure you moved lots of girls in your time.”
 

He nodded approvingly, a visitant to many foreign camp beds.
 

“Nevah married. Soonah o' latah, I'll need a kid, but I kin wait.”
 

“The world waits with you.”
 

“Din' catch...”
 

“Not important.”
 

“Yuh evah been married, Jane?”
 

“No,” she said wearily, “I can wait, too.”
 

“Two of a kind we are.”
 

He left the room again, and she saw the phone button light up. She curled in a chair, the booze headache had reentered without knocking. A bottle of Möet appeared as if by magic with a waiter shoving along a wagon through the room.
 

“Jane, sign it an' give the boy a dollah.”
 

The waiter was not a happy man.
 

Pudge reappeared in a dizzying green paisley robe with matching neck scarf. Trouserless, his unsupported stomach sagged forward. He had a sheaf of stapled papers in his right hand which caught Jane's eye, and she became incredibly almost irrationally angry. It seemed ridiculous that Sonny's future should ride on an afternoon hump, and moreover her sacrifice was not even to be dignified by cover of darkness during which such things, she imagined, would be less painful. Bitterly she regained her composure, forced a smile.
 

“I'm getting the treatment, I see.”
 

“Nuffin' but the best,” replied Pudge, searching for lofty expressions but failing.
 

“This is a true existential predicament. Either/or.”
 

“Don't give me any of th' Supreme Coat she-it.”
 

“Either I go to bed with you and Sonny gets his contract, or I don't and he winds up a scout without a team.”
 

“Man without a country,” Pudge said at last, catching the drift. “They teach yuh all tha' stuff in college.” She said they had. “Ain't missed a thing, then. Left school—”
 

“If this is another success story, please spare me. My head's exploding.”
 

He popped the champagne cork deftly, catching the first flow of bubbly on his lower lip. He poured two glasses, handed her one and sank into a firm foam-rubber club chair; he resembled, she thought, one of those Pabst Blue Ribbon beer kegs, draped in bunting and lugged by smart gray horses in old-time beer commercials stressing flavor. He exposed the fact that he had abandoned his jockey shorts during his last wardrobe change.
 

He wagged a finger, beckoning her to his side.
 

“Come on ovah, little sister, an git down on it. Ain't gonnah bite yuh.”
 

“Anyone ever tell you, you've got a real subtlety going for you?”
 

“None o' tha' smart-ass, now. I want it real bad.”