Making Love (32 page)

He waved the contract at her like a distress signal.
 

“Won' even haggle ovah money with yuh. Hundid to show yuh I'm a gen'man.”
 

She came over to him and spilt her champagne on his member, which unfortunately excited him even more.
 

“This a new thin' in New York ‘fore you gobble it?” he asked sincerely, convinced that the city led the nation in perversion innovations, the home of sex inventors, eventually employed by groundbreakers like himself in the hinterlands.
 

“Gobble it yourself.”
 

He jumped up from the chair, made a grab for her dress; her nails, never before used for this purpose, peeled the skin of his cheek like a potato. He lowered his head, a spunky little contender, and butted her in the chest, momentarily knocking the wind out of her; but then with the advantage all his way he crumbled to the floor, aghast and horrified by the presence of his own blood.
 

“Sonny doesn't need your job,” she shouted hoarsely, “and when you look at yourself in the mirror, ask yourself why anybody would want to go to bed with a pig like you.”
 

“Always cheated me, tha son-of-bitch. I'd nevah hire him.”
 

“And that's the truth. You shit,” she muttered, grabbing her coat and bag.
 

 

* * * *

 

With the five o'clock rush hour in full flower, she pulled off the dazzling trick of snaring a cab, slumped in the seat, so speechless with rage that the driver had to ask three times where she wanted to be taken. Her headache had vanished mysteriously and her body throbbed from a rich intake of adrenaline. She'd plead her case to Sonny, allow him to do anything he wished, except discard his dignity, without which they'd both be lost.
 

She managed to collect herself by the time she reached Riverside Drive. No plan for the future jumped into focus, but she felt secure and lucid, capable of reasoning with her disappointed child.
 

When she saw him, sitting on a chair, looking out of the window, he was still wearing his brown business suit, both trouser knees pulled up to avoid creases. The ironing board, a towel, and the iron were out, all ready for an instant pressing job he'd undertake before going out into the evanescent limelight always tantalizingly out of reach. A ritual quest for an object that did not exist. Idealism in its purest form.
 

“How ... could you do this to me?” he asked quietly.
 

She decided not to answer, letting him cast the blame until he realized that he himself must be held responsible, and he'd point the finger eventually at himself. She had faith in him.
 

“I just got off the phone. He was hysterical, said you ripped up his face an' he'll be scarred for life. Why, Jane? He was gonna give you the contract....”
 

“He never had any intention of hiring you and he wanted me to go to bed with him after I blew him for a warm-up.”
 

“I don' believe you. Pudge give me his word. Swore on his life that he never come near you. You started in attackin' him the minute you met.”
 

“He took his clothes off, Sonny, ordered champagne and laid it on the line. Screw or else.”
 

“You're a goddamn liar. You dint want me to have the job. Admit it.”
 

“I think the job stinks, but I wanted you to get it. The man's a pig. He hates your guts and he used to sleep with Joy-Sue behind your back.”
 

“Christ, I think you're nuts. I've never heard of such filth from anyone. He was my friend.”
 

“Hated you, and told me you were third rate.”
 

“Pudge! Never. You ruined my chances ... broke up the only friendship I got. He was Wesley's godfather. You think every guy wants to jump into bed with you, which is a sickness.”
 

He turned away from her and she was too disgusted to cry.
 

“You cheated me,” he said, “just so I could stay your stud. That's all you want. How could you be so selfish ... vicious broad?”
 

“Sonny, you're making all this up. I love you and if this lousy job would make you happy, I wanted you to have it. I couldn't go to bed with the man, could I? Would that have been all right? If that's what I had to do to get it, then it wasn't worth it.”
 

“To you, you, that's all that counts, isn't it, Jane? An' I don' believe a word you're sayin'. Pudge can get all the girls he wants. Who needs you?”
 

“Look, I'm through talking. If you don't want to face the truth, then I'm sorry for you.”
 

“Called me third-rate?”
 

He swung around suddenly with animalistic grace.
 

“I did you a favor,” she protested.
 

“Them kinda favors is murder.”
 

Once as a child on a visit to the zoo she had witnessed the tortured, imprisoned rage of a gorilla, taunted by small boys. It seemed to her perfect art in its revelation, a marriage of intention and execution in its effect and the pleasure it had brought to the knee-high spectators. She saw it again in his eyes, an indelible record of human suffering, frozen in her mind. Sonny's anger, speechless and demented, complete with saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth, revealed a depth of emotion she could never have conceived him possessing. She held up her arms to embrace him in a fervor of longing that only his wound could inspire. Then he struck her.
 

“You laid your professor ... that Alan, and had an abortion. I know all about you,” he said fiercely. “What are you, anyway? Just another piece.”
 

The monstrous complicity of his scheme went through her head for an instant and her mind went blank.
 

Spangles of crisscrossing light waves, a child's sparkler burning down, mystical, lambent, exciting, and lost before she knew it ... the glory of light in undiscovered galaxies of the endless night of the mind. Falling, it was gorgeous.
 

His face was something gnarled, twisted out of recognition. He had yielded more than any man could ever hope to, but God, couldn't she see that he could no longer bend, that he was incapable of acts of impossible grace? At times she knew there was no kindness kinder than cruelty. Beat her he must, destroy her if his idealism could sustain him. Then, looking at her motionless on the floor, his anger vanished and something deep inside him like an animal's yelp of pain escaped from his body, and he was in another place at another time.
 

Green Bay.... Fingers frostbitten in twenty below, the field of ice, running away from cannibals. A shoulder separation the least of his pain; slipping, losing ground, always losing, the record holder for defeats, slithering in immovable frozen mud so tight a duck's ass couldn't get through; but he pounded away on the one-, two-, three-yard plunges, bringing to the game his pride and the league-leading average for ground gaining. Afterwards he wound up third, while some rookie cooling his heels on the bench with a ham-string pull came out first. First. First. First. He deserved the marbles. This time, not just first, but Most Valuable Player. He struck her motionless body again. Nobody complained about that forearm, the elbow on the cheekbone. He always got up, no matter how bad he was hurting, simply to deprive the spectators of the thrill of injury.
 

“Mother! Get up,” he shouted. “Blue twelve on three.... Hupp, Hupp, Hupp.” Off count, no cadence. Automatic because there was too much noise. Missing the call and then the sweet sound of bone-crunching contact.
 

He grabbed hold of one of his trophies and shoved it into his stomach.
 

“Way to carry, man,” a voice said.
 

He'd always dreamed of coming at the line backer, banging him, breaking through the secondary and heading for daylight.
 

He lugged the miniature brass man out ahead of him, his usual style of carrying, rushed breathlessly down the stairs, humped into somebody blocking his way, knocking him down. On the first floor he slammed the statue down to the ground, smashing it into jagged lumps. Glass shattered.
 

A young black kid, his teeth big as coconut hunks, smiled and said:
 

“You, Son-ney, now youse owe me foh six bottlus. Man tug it into the endzone oncet in a while.”
 

The kid picked up the pieces, a collector of small amulets in empty hallways, then gathered the bits in his box while Sonny stared through frozen eyes, a terrible wordless sound creeping like fog from his lips.
 

“Tuck it in you gut,” the kid said softly. He carried boxes and good advice was his stock trade. He handed Sonny a broken arm. “You kin always stick it up you ass if you kint fart.”
 

Sonny rushed outside into the cold night air, his tolerance level dropping to zero. He hoped he'd get lucky as he zigzagged in the gutter, and a car would find him, ending all conflicts. But the street was deserted and despite his shrieks for assistance, no window opened and no passerby stopped.
 

In the celestial emptiness of the big city, he shouted the finite challenge:
 

“Who gives a fuck? I don't. I don't. I don't. Number twenty Wesley C. Jackson don't give a fuck.”
 

 

 

 

A Month of Sundays

 

 

Hello, Jane. It's Charles Luckmunn.” The voice paused, waiting for an effect that never came. She switched the receiver to her right hand away from her cheek. She'd been lucky, escaping with a simple hairline fracture. Originally the color of burnt steak, it was now in the overripe plum stage. “You don't return calls,” he said.
 

“I took a vacation from myself.”
 

“Well, you missed
Coco
and the last Jet game. I called you on both occasions.”
 

“What an exciting life you lead.”
 

“Where did you say you'd been?”
 

“I didn't. Palm Beach.”
 

“Oh,” he said with a suggestion of disappointment. “I don't go there. They're not very pleasant to Jews. I had an experience once.”
 

Clever strategist, she thought. Refusing to see him made her anti-Semitic—the worst kind, one who didn't admit it.
 

“When can we have dinner?” he asked placidly.
 

“I don't know. I've become a militant lesbian.”
 

He chuckled softly, instantly disabusing her of the idea that he could be conned. She heard a strange mechanical hissing sound at the other end.
 

“Excuse me. I had to spray my throat. I had a polyp removed from my vocal cords last week, and it tickles. I said to the doctor,
Maybe you'll make me a singer
. Because when I sing, people start running away.”
 

“Oh, is that the reason?”
 

In the background she heard other phones frantically tolling for his attention.
 

“You're wanted,” she said.
 

“They can wait. May I suggest the Bemelman's Bar at the Hotel Carlyle. Eight o'clock?”
 

“Why not?”
 

“You'll be there?”
 

“Only if I haven't got anything better to do.”
 

“Good, I knew we were making progress.”
 

He hung up abruptly, getting in the last blow, a decision on points. He'd cropped up in her life, a different variety of weed, hardier than most, it appeared, and in a strange way she was glad. A tie to the past, her mother's last lover, establishing a relationship which she thought deserved a fate crueler than mere disavowal.
 

She hadn't gone anywhere for a vacation, although she needed one, possibly for the first time in her life. Apart from some Darvon capsules to relieve pain, the doctor who was treating her recommended frequent ice packs to bring down the swelling. Sonny had phoned twice, but Conlon had succeeded in stalling him, not a difficult assignment for so accomplished a liar, but afterwards she confessed to Jane that it had been a lousy thing to do.
 

“Something just exploded in him and he feels rotten.”
 

“Where'd you say I was?”
 

“In Palm Beach.”
 

A one-pound box of Barricini Festival chocolates arrived, as did a dozen maizelike chrysanthemums, to indicate the degree of Sonny's sorrow—which was both hopeful (the chocolates might sweeten her disposition) and funereal, for the flowers were scrawny weedlike things fit only to lay on the pocked ground of a cemetery.
 

“I think he lost his mind. You've got to forgive him, Jane.”
 

“Do I? Why?”
 

“He loves you.”
 

“You're a real defense lawyer. I can see Sonny's in good hands.”
 

Love? As a reason, a rationale for behavior, it had, like some fine-print legal clause, been displaced, submerged in a welter of other clauses which canceled each other out. She'd been just another contract holder with worthless paper in her hand. It was no longer valid. She wanted safety, a lawgiver to cover her for earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, a floater to cover fissures of the soul. He'd overheard her with Alan, kept it to himself for future use; under lock and key in the safety deposit box in his head. Bring out for future reference. Sonny like all the others, whether naïve, innocent, or simply stupid, had managed to taint himself by blackmail. She could forgive him anything except forcing her to turn against herself. That struck her as immoral and somehow beyond deceit.