Acceptable Losses (16 page)

“I’d prefer it if you stopped right now, Melanie,” Damon said with all the dignity he could muster.

“Don’t pretend to be a prude.” She lifted her hand from his thigh, then jabbed at his leg sharply with one finger. “After what I heard about you the performance doesn’t wash. It so happens that all three ladies had affairs with you.”

“You’re impossible, my dear girl,” he said flustered. “I don’t want to know what they said or who they are.” He was lying. From the way she was speaking he knew that what she was going to tell him would be flattering and would remind him of agreeable moments in the past.

“All the girls,” Melanie said, “were rating their various lovers. Who was the best, who was the worst. That sort of thing. If I told you the names of the ladies you’d know they had plenty of comparisons to go by. The vote was unanimous for the top of list. You turned out to be the best lay in town by a landslide.” She laughed again. “The worst lays they’d encountered were their own husbands.”

He couldn’t help joining in her laughter. When he stopped laughing he said, “That was long ago.” He guessed who the ladies were. “I was younger and more active then.”

“Not so long ago,” she said. “And stop talking about age. My present lover is fifty years old. He’s a broker down in Wall Street and he has a platinum plate in his head. They knocked the top off his head in Korea. He was a big hero there. He’s got a chest full of medals and he’s got guns all over the house he brought back with him. Well, he’s not a big hero anymore and nobody would pin a medal on him now for anything and every once in a while he thinks he’s in a foxhole or whatever he had in Korea and he thinks I’m a Chinaman creeping in on him and he’s grayer than you are and we have great times together.”

“He sounds like a young girl’s dream,” Damon said dryly.

“I have a father fixation,” Melanie said, “and I love it.”

“Well,” said Damon, “I don’t have a daughter and I haven’t a daughter fixation and I love it.” He tried, without success, to sound irritated. “I haven’t touched anybody but my wife in God knows how long.”

The girl ignored what he had said and ran her hand under his coat high up his leg. “I’m making a pass at you, Mr. Damon,” she said flatly, without emotion.

He put his own hand out and clasped her arm firmly so that she couldn’t go all the way up. He was both charmed and annoyed by her brusque directness, annoyed because there was a chance, more than a chance, that she was offering herself to him not for his reputation with the ladies in the acting class but as a lever to move him to suggest her for the part in the play to Proctor.

“In my day,” he said, “ladies waited to be asked.”

She didn’t try to move her hand any farther but said, “This isn’t your day anymore, Mr. Damon,” she said, “and I’m not a lady. I like to choose, not be chosen. What I would like would be for us to have a long languorous, romantic affair, starting tonight. Sneaky afternoons, slipping off to country inns on weekends …”

“That’s quite romantic—sneaky afternoons,” he said ironically.

She ignored the irony. “Climate of the times. You can be pragmatic and romantic at the same time,” she said calmly. “Don’t fight it. And don’t tell me you haven’t been chosen before.”

He remembered Julia Larch. “Maybe,” he said, but did not volunteer any information about the hotel on Thirty-ninth Street. “But the ladies kept it to themselves. Rules of the game. They had the grace to allow me to make the first move. And the second and the third.”

“Different times, different customs. Haven’t you heard about the Sexual Revolution?” A street lamp threw a hard light on her face, but she looked young and lovely and vulnerable in it.

“Let the old man go in peace,” he said gently.

“I will give you no peace.” Once more she laughed, refusing sentimentality. She looked out the window. “Oh, God, I’m nearly home.” As if this were a signal she threw herself across his legs and pulled his head down and kissed him. Her lips were soft and active and she smelled marvelous. It was a long kiss and she only released him when the taxi stopped in front of the house in which she lived. She sat up and straightened her coat, looked at him, her face full of the mischief that lay just under the surface at all times. “Last chance,” she said. “Want to come up?”

He shook his head sadly.

“You’ll regret it,” she said.

“I’m sure I will.”

She shrugged. “Have a merry domestic evening with your wife,” she said. “You don’t have to tell her you’re a good man. I’m sure she knows it.” She jumped out of the cab and ran up the outside steps of the house, lithe, graceful, swift, product of the private climate of her times. His own climate was a different one.

Damon watched her go, a wave of sadness coming over him, then gave his address to the driver and lay back against the imitation leather seat reeking of years of cigarette smoke and closed his eyes, trying to remember the names of the three ladies he had guessed had shared the recess coffee with Melanie Deal.

The next time he saw her, she was standing in the lobby of his office building when he came down after work. It was a week later.

She had a scarf over her head and her face looked drawn and worried. This time, he thought, if Oliver were to see her he wouldn’t be tempted to exclaim, “God, did you see that girl?”

“I have to talk to you, Mr. Damon,” she said, without preliminaries. “Alone. You’re in trouble. Can I walk a way with you?”

“Of course.” He took her arm and they went out into the street. Automatically he started toward Fifth Avenue. It was a fine spring evening, with the last glow of the sun in the western sky and the people around them, released from the day’s labors, seemed all to be bubbling with some secret joy as they savored their freedom and the prospect of the evening ahead of them.

They walked in silence awhile, the girl withdrawn, gnawing at her lips. “Why am I in trouble?” Damon asked quietly.

“I did an awful thing. Unforgivable, but I hope you’ll forgive me.” She sounded like a frightened child.

“What awful thing?”

“I told you about my lover, the fifty-year-old one … the stockbroker. In Wall Street.”

“Yes.”

“His name is Eisner.”

“I don’t know the man,” Damon said sharply. “What has he got to do with me?”

“He says he’s going to kill you,” she said. “That’s what he’s got to do with you.”

Damon stopped walking and faced the girl. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

She shook her head. “Not on your life,” she said.

“Why does a man I’ve never seen want to kill me?” Damon asked incredulously.

“He’s crazy jealous. That platinum plate he got in his head in Korea, maybe.”

“I never … I mean with you …” Damon stuttered.

“I told him you did. I told him I was wild about you and you were wild about me.”

“What in God’s name did you do that for?” Damon was icily angry and was pleased to see that his voice and the look on his face made the girl try to cringe away from him. He pulled her to him roughly.

“He slapped my face at a party.” She was weeping now. “He thought I was flirting with somebody. In front of more than twenty people.” Then her voice turned defiant and hard. “I don’t let people get away with things like that. Not anybody. I wanted to hurt him and I did. You were the first one who came to my mind, and he knows who you are and that you’re a lot older than he is. That turned the knife.”

“Well done,” Damon said sardonically. “Well, what you’re going to do is go back to that idiot and explain everything, that you were lying, that we’ve had nothing to do with each other and that I for one am damn sure we’re never going to. He can put away his goddamn gun and go back to Wall Street and stop being a damn fool.”

“It won’t do any good,” she said, snuffing back her tears, looking more like a distraught little girl than ever. “I told him all that last night, that I was lying. He didn’t believe me. He just sat there in his living room oiling the automatic he brought back from Korea.”

Damon took a deep breath. “All right,” he said grimly, “if he’s so goddamn set on it, you tell him tonight that I’ll be walking north on the block in front of Saks, unarmed, at exactly noon tomorrow. Let the soldiers shoot and be done with it. And now,” he said with frozen fury, “leave me alone and never come near me again.” He let go of her arm and strode down the avenue in the direction of home.

He had arrived at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street promptly at noon the next day. The weather was mild and sunny and the girls from the neighboring office buildings out on their lunch hour and the women going in and out of the glittering stores seemed all to have put on bright colors to confirm the advent of spring. It was not the place or the hour for a man to be waiting with a gun or for another man to await execution.

Damon squared his shoulders and slowly and deliberately walked the one block. It took him four minutes. No one accosted him. There were no shots. Melodrama, he thought contemptuously. Play-acting. Fantasy love games. The crazy ambitious little young girl pretending to be so modern and grownup. The poor sonofabitch with the plate in his head, ostentatiously oiling his gun for her benefit.

He knew a good restaurant on Sixty-third Street and he walked toward it, enjoying the spring sunshine and the store windows and the bright colors on the women he passed as he made his way at a sauntering pace to the restaurant, where he treated himself to an exquisite and expensive lunch, with a full bottle of wine.

He saw that his glass was empty and he thought, what the hell, and ordered another whiskey. He knew he wasn’t going to work any more that day and if he wanted to get through until evening, the whiskey would help him manage to do it.

He hadn’t seen or heard from Melanie Deal ever since the conversation on Fifth Avenue, and that was more than a year ago. He had never run into Mr. Eisner, the Wall Street broker with the platinum plate, the guns and the chestful of medals. The production of
An Apple for Helen
had fallen through and the author was still trying to rewrite the first act.

Still, if a man had declared he was going to kill him, even if he hadn’t shown up in front of Saks to carry out his threat, that was no lifetime guarantee of immunity. The stupid, Boy Scout act of bravado had seemed like a victory at the time and Damon had enjoyed his lunch, but an armed man might think twice about gunning down a rival in the noonday sun among the crowd on the main avenue of the city of New York and decide to bide his time, wait for a less public opportunity, lie in wait, nursing his dream of revenge for months, years. Jealousy was the most permanent of emotions and did not flare up and die down in twenty-four hours. Damon was sure Lieutenant Schulter would like to know about him. The broker had earned his place, Damon thought, on the list of personal enemies and maybe Melanie Deal, as flighty and unpredictable as she was, belonged there with him. At any rate, she was worth a telephone call.

He searched in his pocket for change for the telephone, then stopped. Mr. Eisner wasn’t the only man she had mentioned who had threatened him. Damon remembered what Melanie Deal had told him about Guilder’s peroration to the cast at the close of the opening night performance of
Man Plus Man.
Guilder had promised to ruin him and had done as much harm as money and whispered defamation of character would do toward that end. He had not succeeded and his failure might well have eaten at his soul enough since that time to have driven him into more direct action. Damon had dismissed him as of no consequence. He had been wrong to do so. At the place where he stood now no leads, no matter how flimsy they might seem, were to be ruled out. And the power of a frustrated demented rich young man who had narrowly escaped a long prison term for felonious assault with intent to commit murder and with the wealth to hire paid assassins was not to be ignored.

There was no doubt about it, Damon thought, as he found two dimes in his pocket, Melanie Deal was worth a telephone call.

He left his glass of whiskey on the bar and went to the back of the saloon where there was a telephone booth. He looked up her number in the Manhattan directory, remembering that she lived on Twenty-third Street and also remembering the soft touch of her lips on his in the taxi and her saying, “I have a father fixation and I love it.”

He dialed the number, but a mechanical voice came over the phone, saying “The number you have called is no longer in service.” He retrieved his dime, thought for a moment. He knew he could call Proctor’s office and find out how to reach the girl, but remembering what Oliver had said about Proctor’s practically undressing her in the office with a look, he felt it would be embarrassing to inquire about her in that quarter. God knew what had gone on between them, even though she had said, “No hope, New Jersey,” about the producer’s chances with her.

He thought for a moment, then looked up the number of Equity, the actor’s union. She would be listed with them and when he gave them his name they’d know he was connected with the theatre and that his call was legitimate and give him her number. As he dialed he thought, Well, it’s not as legitimate as all that.

It took some time to get the person who could give him the information he wanted, but finally a woman came on the phone whom he knew. “Sophie,” he said, after the exchange of greetings, “I’d like to get in touch with an actress by the name of Melanie Deal. An author of mine thinks he could use her for a play he’s writing,” he lied.

“Oh …” There was a long pause. “She died three months ago. In Chicago. She was touring with a revival and she was in an automobile accident. A drunken actor at the wheel and the roads were icy. I’m sorry. A pity. She was a bright young thing and she had a future. I’m terribly sorry. Was she a friend of yours?”

“Not really,” Damon said. Chicago, he thought. Add one to my dreams. Then he hung up.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

H
E CAME TO ON THE
floor. There was the smell of spilled beer and cigar and cigarette butts and a babbling of voices and faces staring down anxiously at him and somebody saying, “Don’t move him, his neck might be broken.” For a moment he thought he had fainted and tried to apologize to the faces above him, but he couldn’t get the words out. Then he remembered. When he had come back from the telephone booth to where he had left his drink and the open notebook, two men were shouting at each other next to him. Something about money, he remembered. Then one of the men, the smaller of the two, with a face like a wizened monkey, grabbed a bottle of beer from the bar and swung it at the other man, who ducked and retreated past Damon shouting, “Thieving bastard,” and covering his head.