A Certain Age (29 page)

“You have money, too.”

“My parents' money, Sophie. It's a trem—trenem—it's a
great
difference.” She frowns, looks around the room, and discovers her cigarette case lying on top of the icebox. Bracing herself carefully on the table, she rises to her feet. “And they won't stand for this.”

“For sharing an apartment with me?”

“No. I don't think they'd care as much about that.” With some difficulty, she lights the cigarette, and then—apparently exhausted by the effort—collapses back against the icebox, puffing quietly. “It's the rest of it. Making my own money.”

Sophie frowns. So hard to concentrate, when the world is so beautifully muddled. “But you were going to get a job anyway, weren't you? With me. We were going to get an apartment together and find work and be indepen—dependent and modern.”

“Oh, a
job
! But that's nothing, darling. You can't make a real living on a mere job.
My
kind of living, I mean, the kind that will keep me in the style to which I'm tragically accustomed.” She waves her hand, butterfly-like. “As long as I need my allowance, they've got me in the end, right? I can only stray so far, like a little doggie on a leash.”

“But you'll be with me.”

Julie shakes her head slowly. “I can't take your money, dearest. Not even for the sake of eman—enamci—freedom. The creed, you know.”

“What creed?”

“The creed that says we don't sponge off our dearie-wums.”

“But I
need
you!” Sophie wails. “I can't run my firm without you! You know so much more about—managing people—and
economics
!” (She says it carefully, so as not to embarrass herself:
e-co-nom-ics.
)

Julie's smooth face takes on a bit of wrinkle at the forehead. “But engineering's so grubby. Can't you run a department store instead?”

“But I don't know anything about that.”

Julie reaches down and takes off a shoe, fumbling with the buckle until it slides free from her stocking. She holds it up before her. “You see this?”

“I think so.”

“What is it?”

“A shoe?”

“Exactly! It's just a shoe, darling. You don't have to know everything about it. You just have to know if you like it. You have to have the guts to say,
I like this shoe, damn it
, and every woman in New York is going to wear it next season
. And you
have
that kind of guts, Sophie. You do.” She wobbles. Braces herself against the icebox. A bit of startled ash drops from the end of her cigarette. “I don't, though. I have the guts to bob my hair and smoke in public, but I don't have the guts to scratch for my own worms. That's a special kind of brave, my sweet, and Julie doesn't have it.”

Sophie leans her cheek into the palm of her hand and thinks that Julie looks awfully brave enough to her. She stands teetering on the pinnacle of the present sleek moment. Her breasts are flattened by a state-of-the-art brassiere. Her waist doesn't exist. Her skirt hovers dangerously at the middle of her shin. Her lips are round and rosy, her hair short and curled and burnished. In her modern costume, she makes you think of a juvenile, fresh and unspoiled and yet utterly naughty: a girl who will give you all the good times you crave, without all the messy grown-up consequences. Julie blazes a fearless new trail, just by standing there in her glittering, straight-edged best, trailing a cigarette from her hand.

Sophie rises from the table and staggers toward the blurry image of Julie, leaning against her icebox. She takes the shoe and kneels down to replace it on Julie's slender foot, encased in its delicate stocking of daring flesh-colored silk. The beaded dress, which looked gray outside in the streetlights, is actually the color of moss.

“I think you do, though,” Sophie says. “I think you
are
brave enough. Just go out there and do it. You don't need all the dresses and the luxury. You just need spirit. You need a soul.”

“But I'm afraid I haven't got that little thing.” Julie kneels next to her on the kitchen floor. “It's not so bad, though. I'm having the time of my life. It's just absolutely ripping, isn't it? A smashing success. Eventually I'll have to get married, I guess, when my parents lose patience with me, but I think I've got a few years left. A few years and a lot of fun.”

Sophie stares at Julie's eyes, which are now ringed in soft charcoal smudges. “I don't understand. You're the bravest girl I know.”

“God, no. What a thing to say.” Julie giggles quietly and settles her head in Sophie's lap. “Don't you see how conventional I am? I'm never going to bite the hand that feeds me. Maybe a nibble from time to time, just to keep them on their toes. But give up this?” She lifts a section of dress. “No.”

“You can if you want to.”

“But I won't. That's your kind of courage, not mine.”

Sophie runs her finger along the waving golden line of Julie's hair, until it ends in the diamond clip. Actually, it's not diamonds. It's rhinestones or some other costume jewel, very up-to-date, glittering with irony. Julie's eyes are closing. The cigarette sags against the floor.

“And our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Sophie whispers.

Julie's faded pink lips create a tiny smile. She lifts her hand—her left hand, not the one with the cigarette—from the hygienic linoleum floor and curls it around Sophie's fingers, atop the rhinestones.

“O brave new world,” she whispers back, “that has such people in it.”

TELEPHONE.

The word tears across Sophie's mind, leaving a wide and painful gash. Or maybe it's the noise itself, the persistent
brring-brring
that will not be denied. The word keeps tearing, and the noise keeps
brring-ing,
but she can't put the two ideas together.

She lifts her head. “Come in!” she gasps out.

Brring-brring.

Sophie opens her reluctant eyes and thinks,
Telephone
. This time she remembers what a telephone is. But
where
is the telephone? Where is Sophie? A parlor, well appointed.
Her
well-appointed parlor! New York? Head. Oh God,
head
! What's happened to her head? She's having a stroke. Where's the—

Brring-brring.

—telephone?

Sophie rolls to her side and falls unexpectedly from a sofa. A vague memory wafts past: Julie and a bottle of bourbon and not wanting to climb the stairs. Because Father. Because Octavian. Octavian and Mrs. Marshall.

“Julie?” she calls hopefully.

Brring-brring.

The hall. Sophie stumbles to her feet and crashes into a wall. She's still wearing her navy skirt, her untucked blouse. At one point, there was a cigarette. And a phonograph. The rest is silence.

Brring-brring
.

Sophie's staggering down the hall now, toward the stairs, wincing in agony. On the half landing, the telephone sits in its cubicle of shame, outlawed from any civilized room.
Brring-brring,
stabbing her temples with a pair of lead pencils. She snatches the earpiece—it's a dreadfully old-fashioned telephone, that's Father for you—and puts her lips to the mouthpiece, and just that same second she realizes she needs to vomit.

“Hello?” (Greenly.)

“Hello? Miss Faninal?” (Crackling.)

Sophie hangs there in confusion, and then she remembers that Faninal is Fortescue. Faninal is Sophie.

“Yes. Speaking.”

“This is Mr. Manning.”

Sophie is hot and cold and hot. Her tongue is coated in wet flour. A small, succulent rodent seems to have died at the back of her throat. She moves her head—a mistake—and rests it against the plaster wall. “Manning?” she repeats.

There is a slight hesitation on the other end. “Your attorney, Miss Faninal. Your father's counsel. I apologize for the early hour. I'm afraid something's come up . . .”

“I'm sorry. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

“Miss Faninal, this is a
long distance
—”

Sophie sets down the earpiece and bounds up the remaining steps to the
bathroom on the second floor, where she bends over the toilet and empties an improbable quantity of poisonous yellow-green bile into the bowl. This takes some time. Every last speck of bile, apparently, must be evacuated, or her stomach won't rest. When she raises her head at last, she doesn't recognize the image in the small mirror above the sink. She reaches for a square of linen and runs it under the faucet. The coolness helps. Reminds her skin it's alive. When her face is clean and pink, she turns away and walks unsteadily out of the room. There's something pressing downstairs, isn't there? Something she needs to do, and doesn't want to do.

Her father's room lies at the end of the hall, fronting the street. The door is open, a strange thing. Father always closed his door. Even the maid had to ask permission before cleaning it. What time is it? Feels awfully early. There's not much light showing at the edges of the curtains. Sophie's not wearing a watch. Father's room? Father's room has a clock, probably. And if she goes into Father's room, she won't have to do that thing downstairs, that thing she's trying to ignore, even though it's kicking the back of her brain, urgent and unsatisfied.

She walks straight through the doorway into Mr. Faninal's dark and stale-smelling sanctum, but she doesn't look for the clock. (She doesn't know where it is, anyway.) She heads to the first window and pulls back the curtain.

Just past dawn. The sky is an eerie soot blue, streaked with pink above the buildings to the east, and the streetlamps are still lit, a thick and sickly yellow in the morning haze. The street is deserted, except for the milk wagon trundling around the corner, jangling faintly through the glass, and . . .

And a dusty green Ford Model T parked along the curb next to the house.

Sophie's hand crawls upward to her throat and rests against her windpipe. She closes her eyes, opens them, closes them again, and when—slowly—she raises her lids a final time, the car is still miraculously there.

The roof shields the interior from view, and she can't see through the windshield either: the angle is too acute.

But he's there. How long has he been parked there, keeping watch? Her cavalier. After his dinner with Mrs. Marshall? All night?

Sophie starts to breathe again. Her fist curls around the thick damask curtain and drags it to her cheek.

Telephone.

She remembers now. Mr. Manning, her father's defense counsel. Why would he telephone her at this early hour?

She gives her forehead a last damp stroke with the linen cloth and lets the curtain fall. Before she leaves, she catches sight of the clock on her father's small tin mantel:

5:42.

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that the woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn from the rest of them.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

The Pickwick Arms, around the same time

A
T LAST,
the damned telephone stops ringing, but I'm afraid it's too late. I am irrevocably awake, and it's not even morning, at least by my standards.

I have slept remarkably well, all things considered. I don't generally sleep well in someone else's bed, but the Pickwick people have done themselves proud in the matter of mattresses, bless them, and at least there's no one to disturb me. No one to disturb the pattering of my own brain. The linens are fresh, the furniture painted to harmonize with the flowers on the curtains.

The telephone rests at the side of the other bed. At my bedside perches a neat little white vulture of an alarm clock. I roll to my side and lift it away. My eyes seem to be having a little trouble in this gray light; I can't imagine why. It's either nearly six o'clock or half past ten. Either way, the hour's later than I thought. Those chintz curtains must be thick.

I swing my legs from the bed. My guest will be arriving soon, and I'd like to bathe first.

THOUGH I DON'T PARTICULARLY ADMIRE
the new shapelessness in fashion—the dropped waist, the straight, roomy lines—I suppose I should be grateful. In the bath, the roundness of my belly is obvious enough.

I squeeze a washcloth over the slight and gentle summit and admire the way the soap cascades downward in luxurious runnels. The doctor says late October. I suppose he's right; after all, I was able to provide the date of conception with reasonable precision.
Congratulations, Mrs. Marshall,
he said, without irony.
Couples at your stage of life are seldom successful in conceiving
. I presume he doesn't read the gossip pages.

I suspect it's a girl, though maybe I don't remember the particulars of pregnancy well enough. The differences between them. It's been so long since Billy was born. I've forgotten how sleepy you are, how your veins ache. I've never been that sick, early on, but I've been sick with this one, let me tell you. That's how I knew. First I thought it was a germ of some kind, and then I thought it was the immense strain of everything. When they discharged the Boy from the hospital, he was so distant and distracted. He wouldn't stay the night; he wouldn't go to bed with me at all. Observing the proprieties, he said, until the divorce came through, fair and square, but I knew it wasn't the divorce he was waiting for. It was her. It was the trial, the Faninal trial. The damned Faninals and their love affairs.

Eventually, I put two and two together and went to the doctor. Congratulations, Mrs. Marshall. You now have a trump card, a final surefire piece to play in this little match. If all else fails.

We are required, Sylvo and I, to be separated for a year before a suit for divorce may be launched in court. (You can get it done faster in the state of Nevada, I've heard, but we want to do this in a respectable, dignified fashion.) We've decided I'll be the one to file the lawsuit, citing adultery. Again, very proper and gentlemanly of Sylvo, taking the blame like that, when the facts clamor that we're both adulterers. That's what the Boy called it, anyway, the very morning after I paid my first call upon the van der Wahl guesthouse. He made breakfast, as I said, and sat down at the little table with me, but his face wasn't so gleeful as it seemed during the night. He hardly spoke. I
asked him if anything was wrong, had I done anything wrong, and he looked up at me and said—I remember the exact words, the exact miserable tone of voice—
I guess I've committed adultery now
.

I pointed out that
I
was the adulterer, not him; he was merely my accomplice. A garden-variety fornicator.
A fornicator of a married woman,
the Boy said, staring at the crowded surface of his plate, and I set down my coffee and climbed into his lap. I said he wasn't to worry about that; the sin was mine.
Mine, do you hear me? You have nothing to atone for, silly Boy
.

Well, he'd never had a woman in his lap before, that much was obvious, and after a little persuasion he put his hands under my bottom and lifted me up and carried me into the bedroom, before I could explain that the kitchen table might prove even more amusing, for a change. I don't know how he managed, after such a night of dissolution, but he did. Youth, I suppose, and all those years of suppression, and the simple act of turning our bodies to find the mirror on the dresser, exposing the lascivious angle of our joining into perfect view, his flesh disappearing into mine, until we had no choice. No choice but to strive on for the pinnacle, hard and ecstatic and eviscerating.

But the melancholy returned right afterward—it usually does, with the Boy, as I soon learned; I think there's a Latin term for the condition—and he detached himself and lit a customary cigarette and declared that, on the contrary, he had plenty to atone for, that he was now utterly damned. That we would have to get married, that was all there was to it. I said he was crazy. You don't marry your mistress.
Is that what you are?
he asked the ceiling, and
That's what I am,
I confidently replied.

He turned to me and asked what would happen if I became with child
.

I won'
t,
I said, and
What if you do?
he insisted.

The possibility seemed so remote. I had miscarried twice after Billy, both early on, and then nothing. Not that I had much opportunity, at the time; Sylvo and I were just reaching that placid, friendly, sterile stage of our marriage when I was occupied with the children and he was . . . well, otherwise occupied. The idea of pregnancy had blurred away into the past, like debutante parties and trousseau fittings. Something that younger women did.

I crawled, naked, to where he sat at the head of the bed, smoking his cigarette, propped up by a crumpled pillow, looking far too sunlit and fresh-cheeked for either activity: sex or cigarettes. But his eyes were old and blue, and his skin reeked marvelously of debauchery. Of me.

Then I guess I'd have to get a divorce, in that case,
I said, but I didn't mean it. I had no intention, ever, of ceasing to be Mrs. Theodore Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue. I just said it to please him. The Boy, I thought, would be my little secret, for as long as I needed him. For as long as he still wanted me.

MRS. LUMLEY ARRIVES AT PRECISELY
six forty-five, just as I requested. Her knock is timid, her hat brim wide and low on her forehead. She's dressed respectably, in a neat suit of forest green, and I ask her if she's had breakfast.

She removes the hat with trembling hands and says she isn't hungry.

“Well, I'm famished,” I say, and I lift the telephone receiver and ask for room service.

Though terribly nervous, Mrs. Lumley is an attractive woman. Her hair is smooth and dark, not a single gray hair, and her eyes are large and brown. When she was eighteen, and a fresh new housemaid in the Faninal house, she would have looked so appealing, like a young doe. She removes her gloves and places them alongside the hat. I invite her to sit on the sofa, and she obeys me, stroking the wings of her hair with those trembly little fingers.

As she sits, the telephone rings again. Mrs. Lumley darts me a frightened look with her wide brown eyes, and I wave her concern away. “It's not for me. I've taken the room from someone else,” I explain.

“From whom?” she asks, suspicious.

“From Mrs. Fitzwilliam. She left yesterday afternoon with her daughter.”

“Where's she going?”

“To Florida, I believe. To join her husband. She was terribly eager to be away, not that I blame the poor woman. What a dreadful ordeal for the two of them.”

Mrs. Lumley looks into her lap. “Yes.”

“However, as I told you yesterday over the telephone, Mrs. Fitzwilliam was good enough to discuss the case with me before she left, inserting a few details she didn't see fit to air in a public courtroom, if you understand my meaning.”

“Yes.”

“You can speak in perfect confidence, Mrs. Lumley. The case is obviously closed. Mr. Faninal has been convicted, and I understand that no appeal is planned. There's no danger to you, even if I were the sort of person to reveal secrets, which I most assuredly am not.” I laugh comfortably. “I have enough secrets of my own, believe me!”

She presses her thumbs together. “I'm sure you do,” she whispers.

“Because, if your husband were to find out—”

“No!” Her face flashes up, so white. “You won't say a word to him, will you?”

“Of course not. Husbands should never be privy to one's secrets, I've always thought.”

“He simply can't know I'm here.”

“Of course not. Of course not.” I reach between armchair and sofa and pat her tangled hands. “It's none of his business, is it?”

She's starting to weep. I rise and recover a handkerchief from my pocketbook. “We never did it, I swear,” she says, dabbing at her eyes.

“Did what, my dear?”

“You know. We only kissed a few times, that's all. He was a gentleman. I only felt sorry for him, because of—because of—”

“Because of his wife.”

“Yes.” She takes in a deep breath, collecting herself. “She was always nice to me. I felt awful, what we were doing to her.”

“What
you
were doing to her? My goodness, you're generous. She wasn't exactly a saint, herself.”

“But it still wasn't right.” Mrs. Lumley looks up with her watery eyes. “It's been killing me ever since.”

“Secrets have that effect. And now the trial is over, and Mr. Faninal has
been convicted and will probably hang in short order, which should spare you any further embarrassment.”

“I don't know what to do! I'm going to die of it.”

“Calm yourself, my dear. We don't die of guilt.” I lean forward and capture those tearful peepers with my own, firm and steely. “Even for adultery.”

“Adultery?”

“Yes, adultery.” I lift my eyebrows. “Good heavens. Do you mean to say there's
more
?”

Her gaze drops hastily back into her lap. “No! My goodness. Of course not. Just—just that.”

“But I thought you said that the two of you didn't actually—oh, what's the phrase—
do
it.”

“We didn't! I mean—dear me. I must be going. I shouldn't have come.” She jumps from the sofa. “I have—my husband will be wondering—”

A knock strikes the door.

I put one hand on the arm of the chair and rise to my feet.

“Ah! There we are at last. I confess, Mrs. Lumley, I do enjoy a good breakfast.”

NOW, I DON'T MEAN TO
bore you with all my stories about the Boy. Maybe it's the pregnancy, turning me all sentimental, or maybe I simply want to do him justice. You can skip them all if you like. I don't care.

Except this one. It's too important.

We had been lovers for a few months, I believe. Long enough that we were at ease with each other, attuned to each other's habits. I knew that he liked fish over meat; he knew that I liked the opposite. I knew that he had nightmares, violent ones; he knew that I knew, and that I wasn't going to speak of it. That sort of thing.

At the same time, we preserved a certain frisson between us, by virtue of only seeing each other twice a week, and by harboring our little secret in
front of an obsessively secret-mongering society. We would walk along a street in Greenwich Village, or some other neighborhood safely out of the way of my usual crowd, and my attention, as we made our way along the sidewalk, hung utterly on him: his movements, the details of his dress, the few words he could spare.

The Boy, on the other hand, didn't seem to pay me much attention at all. His eyes never roamed my face and figure; they roamed the streets and buildings, the passing vehicles, the nearby men and women: a fact that caused me no end of agony. If I could just get him to notice me. To answer my questions with genuine sentences. Then I would
know
he loved me; I'd have proof of his devotion, wouldn't I?

Until the evening we were walking toward some new club or other, a little joint I'd heard about from certain quarters, in an insalubrious spot near Chinatown. Chattering on about the day's news, about our plans for the night. An ordinary Tuesday. And a man came up, as men do, and produced a gun and begged that we should do him the favor of relinquishing our money and our jewelry into his keeping.

Rather foolishly, I had on a pair of diamond earrings and a ruby bracelet—well, a lady likes to show off a bit, from time to time, especially when she's in want of a little personal attention—and I'm afraid I disgraced myself. Screamed in terror. The shock, I think.

Not the Boy. Oh, no. Cool as you please, he kicked the gun out of the man's hands, drew back his fist, and delivered our poor thief a piece of chin music that very nearly killed him. I thought it
had
killed him. He crumpled to the ground without a sound, and for a second or two—notwithstanding the blood dripping from his split knuckle—the Boy stood over him, gazing down, like a lion claiming his kill.

Then he turned and held out his elbow. “Come along,” he said to me, and I, stunned, just took his arm and stepped around the body. A minute or two later, when I could speak, I asked if the man was dead, and the Boy said no, still breathing, and I asked why we hadn't called the police and the Boy
laughed—not a civilized laugh, I assure you—and said because it wouldn't make any difference. The Boy had delivered justice himself; what was the point in summoning the law to finish off the man for good?