Dusk and Other Stories Read online

  That year they sat in the steam room on limp towels, breathing the eucalyptus and talking about Hardmann Roe. They walked to the showers like champions. Their flesh still had firmness. Their haunches were solid and young.

  Hardmann Roe was a small drug company in Connecticut that had strayed slightly outside of its field and found itself suing a large manufacturer for infringement of an obscure patent. The case was highly technical with little chance of success. The opposing lawyers had thrown up a barricade of motions and delays and the case had made its way downwards, to Frik and Frak whose offices were near the copying machines, who had time for such things, and who pondered it amid the hiss of steam. No one else wanted it and this also made it appealing.

  So they worked. They were students again, sitting around in polo shirts with their feet on the desk, throwing off hopeless ideas, crumpling wads of paper, staying late in the library and having the words blur in books.

  They stayed on through vacations and weekends sometimes sleeping in the office and making coffee long before anyone came to work. After a late dinner they were still talking about it, its complexities, where elements somehow fit in, the sequence of letters, articles in journals, meetings, the limits of meaning. Brenda met a handsome Dutchman who worked for a bank. Alan met Hopie. Still there was this infinite forest, the trunks and vines blocking out the light, the roots of distant things joined. With every month that passed they were deeper into it, less certain of where they had been or if it could end. They had become like the old partners whose existence had been slowly sealed off, fewer calls, fewer consultations, lives that had become lunch. It was known they were swallowed up by the case with knowledge of little else. The opposite was true—no one else understood its details. Three years had passed. The length of time alone made it important. The reputation of the firm, at least in irony, was riding on them.

  Two months before the case was to come to trial they quit Weyland, Braun. Frank sat down at the polished table for Sunday lunch. His father was one of the best men in the city. There is a kind of lawyer you trust and who becomes your friend. “What happened?” he wanted to know.

  “We’re starting our own firm,” Frank said.

  “What about the case you’ve been working on? You can’t leave them with a litigation you’ve spent years preparing.”

  “We’re not. We’re taking it with us,” Frank said.

  There was a moment of dreadful silence.

  “Taking it with you? You can’t. You went to one of the best schools, Frank. They’ll sue you. You’ll ruin yourself.”

  “We thought of that.”

  “Listen to me,” his father said.

  Everyone said that, his mother, his Uncle Cook, friends. It was worse than ruin, it was dishonor. His father said that.

  Hardmann Roe never went to trial, as it turned out. Six weeks later there was a settlement. It was for thirty-eight million, a third of it their fee.

  His father had been wrong, which was something you could not hope for. They weren’t sued either. That was settled, too. In place of ruin there were new offices overlooking Bryant Park which from above seemed like a garden behind a dark château, young clients, opera tickets, dinners in apartments with divorced hostesses, surrendered apartments with books and big, tiled kitchens.

  The city was divided, as he had said, into those going up and those coming down, those in crowded restaurants and those on the street, those who waited and those who did not, those with three locks on the door and those rising in an elevator from a lobby with silver mirrors and walnut paneling.

  And those like Mrs. Christie who was in the intermediate state though looking assured. She wanted to renegotiate the settlement with her ex-husband. Frank had leafed through the papers. “What do you think?” she asked candidly.

  “I think it would be easier for you to get married again.”

  She was in her fur coat, the dark lining displayed. She gave a little puff of disbelief. “It’s not that easy,” she said.

  He didn’t know what it was like, she told him. Not long ago she’d been introduced to someone by a couple she knew very well. “We’ll go to dinner,” they said, “you’ll love him, you’re perfect for him, he likes to talk about books.”

  They arrived at the apartment and the two women immediately went into the kitchen and began cooking. What did she think of him? She’d only had a glimpse, she said, but she liked him very much, his beautiful bald head, his dressing gown. She had begun to plan what she would do with the apartment which had too much blue in it. The man—Warren was his name—was silent all evening. He’d lost his job, her friend explained in the kitchen. Money was no problem, but he was depressed. “He’s had a shock,” she said. “He likes you.” And in fact he’d asked if he could see her again.

  “Why don’t you come for tea, tomorrow?” he said.

  “I could do that,” she said. “Of course. I’ll be in the neighborhood,” she added.

  The next day she arrived at four with a bag filled with books, at least a hundred dollars worth which she’d bought as a present. He was in pajamas. There was no tea. He hardly seemed to know who she was or why she was there. She said she remembered she had to meet someone and left the books. Going down in the elevator she felt suddenly sick to her stomach.

  “Well,” said Frank, “there might be a chance of getting the settlement overturned, Mrs. Christie, but it would mean a lot of expense.”

  “I see.” Her voice was smaller. “Couldn’t you do it as one of those things where you got a percentage?”

  “Not on this kind of case,” he said.

  It was dusk. He offered her a drink. She worked her lips, in contemplation, one against the other. “Well, then, what can I do?”

  Her life had been made up of disappointments, she told him, looking into her glass, most of them the result of foolishly falling in love. Going out with an older man just because he was wearing a white suit in Nashville which was where she was from. Agreeing to marry George Christie while they were sailing off the coast of Maine. “I don’t know where to get the money,” she said, “or how.”

  She glanced up. She found him looking at her, without haste. The lights were coming on in buildings surrounding the park, in the streets, on homeward bound cars. They talked as evening fell. They went out to dinner.

  At Christmas that year Alan and his wife broke up. “You’re kidding,” Frank said. He’d moved into a new place with thick towels and fine carpets. In the foyer was a Biedermeier desk, black, tan, and gold. Across the street was a private school.

  Alan was staring out the window which was as cold as the side of a ship. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in despair. “I don’t want to get divorced. I don’t want to lose my daughter.” Her name was Camille. She was two.

  “I know how you feel,” Frank said.

  “If you had a kid, you’d know.”

  “Have you seen this?” Frank asked. He held up the alumni magazine. It was the fifteenth anniversary of their graduation. “Know any of these guys?”

  Five members of the class had been cited for achievement. Alan recognized two or three of them. “Cummings,” he said, “he was a zero—elected to Congress. Oh, God, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Just don’t let her take the apartment,” Frank said.

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy. It was easy when it was someone else. Nan Christie had decided to get married. She brought it up one evening.

  “I just don’t think so,” he finally said.

  “You love me, don’t you?”

  “This isn’t a good time to ask.”

  They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. “It wouldn’t work. It’s the attraction of opposites,” he said.

  “We’re not opposites.”

  “I don’t mean just you and me. Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they’re ready to leave.”

  She
got up without saying anything and began gathering her clothes. He watched her dress in silence. There was nothing interesting about it. The funny thing was that he had meant to go on with her.

  “I’ll get you a cab,” he said.

  “I used to think that you were intelligent,” she said, half to herself. Exhausted, he was searching for a number. “I don’t want a cab. I’m going to walk.”

  “Across the park?”

  “Yes.” She had an instant glimpse of herself in the next day’s paper. She paused at the door for a moment. “Good-bye,” she said coolly.

  She wrote him a letter which he read several times. Of all the loves I have known, none has touched me so. Of all the men, no one has given me more. He showed it to Alan who did not comment.

  “Let’s go out and have a drink,” Frank said.

  They walked up Lexington. Frank looked carefree, the scarf around his neck, the open topcoat, the thinning hair. “Well, you know …” he managed to say.

  They went into a place called Jack’s. Light was gleaming from the dark wood and the lines of glasses on narrow shelves. The young bartender stood with his hands on the edge of the bar. “How are you this evening?” he said with a smile. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Do you know me?” Frank asked.

  “You look familiar,” the bartender smiled.

  “Do I? What’s the name of this place, anyway? Remind me not to come in here again.”

  There were several other people at the bar. The nearest of them carefully looked away. After a while the manager came over. He had emerged from the brown-curtained back. “Anything wrong, sir?” he asked politely.

  Frank looked at him. “No,” he said, “everything’s fine.”

  “We’ve had a big day,” Alan explained. “We’re just unwinding.”

  “We have a dining room upstairs,” the manager said. Behind him was an iron staircase winding past framed drawings of dogs—borzois they looked like. “We serve from six to eleven every night.”

  “I bet you do,” Frank said. “Look, your bartender doesn’t know me.”

  “He made a mistake,” the manager said.

  “He doesn’t know me and he never will.”

  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Alan said, waving his hands.

  They sat at a table by the window. “I can’t stand these out-of-work actors who think they’re everybody’s friend,” Frank commented.

  At dinner they talked about Nan Christie. Alan thought of her silk dresses, her devotion. The trouble, he said after a while, was that he never seemed to meet that kind of woman, the ones who sometimes walked by outside Jack’s. The women he met were too human, he complained. Ever since his separation he’d been trying to find the right one.

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble,” Frank said. “They’re all looking for someone like you.”

  “They’re looking for you.”

  “They think they are.”

  Frank paid the check without looking at it. “Once you’ve been married,” Alan was explaining, “you want to be married again.”

  “I don’t trust anyone enough to marry them,” Frank said.

  “What do you want then?”

  “This is all right,” Frank said.

  Something was missing in him and women had always done anything to find out what it was. They always would. Perhaps it was simpler, Alan thought. Perhaps nothing was missing.

  The car, which was a big Renault, a tourer, slowed down and pulled off the autostrada with Brenda asleep in back, her mouth a bit open and the daylight gleaming off her cheekbones. It was near Como, they had just crossed, the border police had glanced in at her.

  “Come on, Bren, wake up,” they said, “we’re stopping for coffee.”

  She came back from the ladies’ room with her hair combed and fresh lipstick on. The boy in the white jacket behind the counter was rinsing spoons.

  “Hey, Brenda, I forget. Is it espresso or expresso?” Frank asked her.

  “Espresso,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m from New York,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he remembered. “The Italians don’t have an x, do they?”

  “They don’t have a j either,” Alan said.

  “Why is that?”

  “They’re such careless people,” Brenda said. “They just lost them.”

  It was like old times. She was divorced from Doop or Boos or whoever. Her two little girls were with her mother. She had that quirky smile.

  In Paris Frank had taken them to the Crazy Horse. In blackness like velvet the music struck up and six girls in unison kicked their legs in the brilliant light. They wore high heels and a little strapping. The nudity that is immortal. He was leaning on one elbow in the darkness. He glanced at Brenda. “Still studying, eh?” she said.

  They were over for three weeks. Frank wasn’t sure, maybe they would stay longer, take a house in the south of France or something. Their clients would have to struggle along without them. There comes a time, he said, when you have to get away for a while.

  They had breakfast together in hotels with the sound of workmen chipping at the stone of the fountain outside. They listened to the angry woman shouting in the kitchen, drove to little towns, and drank every night. They had separate rooms, like staterooms, like passengers on a fading boat.

  At noon the light shifted along the curve of buildings and people were walking far off. A wave of pigeons rose before a trotting dog. The man at the table in front of them had a pair of binoculars and was looking here and there. Two Swedish girls strolled past.

  “Now they’re turning dark,” the man said.

  “What is?” said his wife.

  “The pigeons.”

  “Alan,” Frank confided.

  “What?”

  “The pigeons are turning dark.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “Why don’t you just take a photograph?” the woman said.

  “A photograph?”

  “Of those women. You’re looking at them so much.”

  He put down the binoculars.

  “You know, the curve is so graceful,” she said. “It’s what makes this square so perfect.”

  “Isn’t the weather glorious?” Frank said in the same tone of voice.

  “And the pigeons,” Alan said.

  “The pigeons, too.”

  After a while the couple got up and left. The pigeons leapt up for a running child and hissed overhead. “I see you’re still playing games,” Brenda said. Frank smiled.

  “We ought to get together in New York,” she said that evening. They were waiting for Alan to come down. She reached across the table to pick up a magazine. “You’ve never met my kids, have you?” she said.

  “No.”

  “They’re terrific kids.” She leafed through the pages not paying attention to them. Her forearms were tanned. She was not wearing a wedding band. The first act was over or rather the first five minutes. Now came the plot. “Do you remember those nights at Goldie’s?” she said.

  “Things were different then, weren’t they?”

  “Not so different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She wiggled her bare third finger and glanced at him. Just then Alan appeared. He sat down and looked from one of them to the other. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I interrupt something?”

  When the time came for her to leave she wanted them to drive to Rome. They could spend a couple of days and she would catch the plane. They weren’t going that way, Frank said.

  “It’s only a three-hour drive.”

  “I know, but we’re going the other way,” he said.

  “For God’s sake. Why won’t you drive me?”

  “Let’s do it,” Alan said.

  “Go ahead. I’ll stay here.”

  “You should have gone into politics,” Brenda said. “You have a real gift.”

  Aft
er she was gone the mood of things changed. They were by themselves. They drove through the sleepy country to the north. The green water slapped as darkness fell on Venice. The lights in some palazzos were on. On the curtained upper floors the legs of countesses uncoiled, slithering on the sheets like a serpent.

  In Harry’s, Frank held up a dense, icy glass and murmured his father’s line, “Good night, nurse.” He talked to some people at the next table, a German who was manager of a hotel in Düsseldorf and his girlfriend. She’d been looking at him. “Want a taste?” he asked her. It was his second. She drank looking directly at him. “Looks like you finished it,” he said.

  “Yes, I like to do that.”

  He smiled. When he was drinking he was strangely calm. In Lugano in the park that time a bird had sat on his shoe.

  In the morning across the canal, wide as a river, the buildings of the Giudecca lay in their soft colors, a great sunken barge with roofs and the crowns of hidden trees. The first winds of autumn were blowing, ruffling the water.

  Leaving Venice, Frank drove. He couldn’t ride in a car unless he was driving. Alan sat back, looking out the window, sunlight falling on the hillsides of antiquity. European days, the silence, the needle floating at a hundred.

  In Padua, Alan woke early. The stands were being set up in the market. It was before daylight and cool. A man was laying out boards on the pavement, eight of them like doors to set bags of grain on. He was wearing the jacket from a suit. Searching in the truck he found some small pieces of wood and used them to shim the boards, testing with his foot.

  The sky became violet. Under the colonnade the butchers had hung out chickens and roosters, spurred legs bound together. Two men sat trimming artichokes. The blue car of the carabiniere lazed past. The bags of rice and dry beans were set out now, the tops folded back like cuffs. A girl in a tailored coat with a scarf around her head called, “Signore,” then arrogantly, “dica!”

  He saw the world afresh, its pavements and architecture, the names that had lasted for a thousand years. It seemed that his life was being clarified, the sediment was drifting down. Across the street in a jeweler’s shop a girl was laying things out in the window. She was wearing white gloves and arranging the pieces with great care. She glanced up as he stood watching. For a moment their eyes met, separated by the lighted glass. She was holding a lapis lazuli bracelet, the blue of the police car. Emboldened, he formed the silent words, Quanto costa? Tre cento settante mille, her lips said. It was eight in the morning when he got back to the hotel. A taxi pulled up and rattled the narrow street. A woman dressed for dinner got out and went inside.