Hazard (4 page)

This night she got out immediately and went in to return the Yorkshire to its owner. That she came back out was a promising sign but not to be taken as a commitment. She sat there in the Packard eating her ice cream. “I've got a good one for you.”

“What?”

“Who was the world's fastest psychiatrist?”

“Fastest?”

She nodded, believing she had him stumped.

After only a moment's thought, Hazard told her, “Dr. Albert Weiner of Erlton, New Jersey. He treated as many as fifty patients a day, using simultaneously four or five consultation rooms. His principal methods were narcoanalysis, muscle relaxants, and electroshock. So many of his patients died from his using unsterile needles that he was tried on twelve counts of manslaughter and convicted of same in 1961, December twelfth, to be exact.”

Keven didn't know if that was fact or fiction. She'd invented the question because the idea of a fast psychiatrist had seemed funny and impossible. She hadn't expected a serious response. It was a sort of perpetual game with them, her testing his reservoir of knowledge. At any moment she'd just ask him something, usually something trivial but not infrequently something important. And almost always he'd just reach into his extraordinary mind and recite the answer. At first, Keven was awed by Hazard's ability to do this and, even now, after hundreds of times, she was impressed. To satisfy her suspicion that he might be bluffing, she went to the library and checked up on some of his answers. She found he was right, practically verbatim right.

She decided to try another, a piece of trivia she'd read and made a point of remembering especially for this purpose.

“What English king had the most legitimate children?”

He hardly hesitated. “Edward the First. Had sixteen children by his two queens, Eleanor of Castile and Margaret of France. Eddie died in the year 1307 at the age of thirty-five.”

Keven nodded that he was right.

“Want illegitimate?” he asked.

“Okay, smart ass. Who?”

“Henry the First sired, as they say, twenty-two illegitimate children, ten sons and twelve daughters by six mistresses. And he lived,” added Hazard with appropriate emphasis, “to be sixty-seven, a ripe old age for those days.”

“Let's go to your place,” she said.

It was only five blocks away on Park Avenue in the seventies, one of those older, better-preserved buildings. Hazard's apartment wasn't large, wasn't expensive, and actually wasn't his. It was three rooms that had been sectioned off from a once-spacious fourteen-room flat. It was a cooperative, with a monthly maintenance charge of four hundred and twenty dollars. And the owner had temporarily lost it by having confidence in three queens while Hazard was looking down his opponent's throat with a club flush. Hazard still had another two years of the three coming to him. The only things in the apartment that belonged to Hazard were his clothes and personal items, a Marc Chagall signed lithograph, a stereo cartridge player and a twenty-three-inch remote-control color television. Keven had some things there, kept neatly in an old, clean, compartmentalized steamer trunk that stood open on its end in the corner of the bedroom. Nothing of hers hung in the closets. Not to crowd him, was her excuse. Of course, the trunk could be shut, locked, ready to be hauled out at any moment.

As soon as they arrived at the apartment Keven went to the trunk and changed into a floor-length silk jersey at-home gown that nicely declared her lines. Hazard wasn't subtle about watching her change. Nor was she shy although she did take his point of view into consideration. Sometimes she enjoyed having him undress her and at times turnabout was more than fair play, but usually they enjoyed this arrangement—intimate act and very appreciative audience of one.

Hazard went to her, held her full length against him. After a brief kiss they kissed another longer one. And after it, when their mouths were still almost touching, she told him, “My tongue is thawed now.”

She broke gently from him then, got some things from a drawer of the trunk, and went into the bathroom. Hazard could still feel the impression her body had made on his. He was always a bit amazed that she had such a lasting effect on him. He was more accustomed to turning abruptly on and off.

Before Keven, less than a year ago, the women in and out of Hazard's life had mostly been models from the agencies, from Ford's or Stewart or Wilhelmena. Those taller than average, hungry-looking girls who carried their identities around in folios of photographs. They seemed to be always hurrying from booking to booking, from go-see to go-see and bed to bed. Taking off from Kennedy to work a week, a month, or to do the collections somewhere for so much. Without more than a good-bye phone call, and usually that only when a flight was delayed, they impetuously quit New York for Rome or London or Paris. They seemed addicted to change, needing constantly to alter where they were and how they looked according to fashion's superseding phases. The most consistent thing about them was their transientness.

Here now, soon gone. In love today, out tomorrow, or surely the day after. Hazard, at the time, found them and their ways attractive and congenial.

When he met Keven he thought at first sight that she was another of those models. Just another. She was certainly pretty enough, with long dark hair and eyes like children's blue marbles with slivers of silver flaws in them. Also, she had the height for a model, though she wasn't too thin, didn't have that starved-for-the-sake-of-fashion sort of body. Hers was a less angular sort of leanness, more feminine. Where Hazard first saw her she seemed out of place. Standing her turn in line at one of the windows of the off-track betting parlor on East 58th Street. On a summer Saturday morning.

His approach was direct because he was sure of the type he thought she was. Would she have lunch with him?

She ignored the invitation.

How about dinner that night?

Her eyes told him to fall through the floor.

What was she doing tomorrow?

She told him she was taking her children to the park.

The several rings on her left hand, Hazard noted, were antique, not a legal ceremony among them. But by then she'd reached the window and made her bet. She walked away and he didn't follow for another try because her walk didn't ask for it and there had been that mention of her children. Anyway, she was just another, he told himself.

But the next afternoon he rented a bike, which was unusual for him, and pedaled through the park, not really believing he'd see her but holding to a small hope he would. The park was crowded with people trying to escape temporarily from concrete and, after about an hour of it, Hazard had had enough. He started to leave via 72nd Street, and that was where he saw her. On the corner at an ice-cream vendor's.

Any doubts he'd had about recognizing her were immediately gone. She was outstanding. With her were two small black children, both girls, about four or five years old, hanging on as though their lives depended on her. That set Hazard back a bit. Her children she'd said. It was possible.

Nevertheless, he went over to her, expecting more of the brush-off he'd gotten the day before, so he was surprised when she smiled at meeting him again. She asked amiably if he'd won his bet. He lied yes and she laughed that she'd lost. He tried to think of some tactful way to ask about the children, decided he didn't have to the way she was mothering them. He pushed the bike along to walk with them up the park side of Fifth Avenue. She let him believe whatever for a whlie and then told him the children were from the New York Foundling Hospital. She was officially treating them to a day out, a voluntary once-a-week duty on her part.

He helped by carrying the two little girls on his shoulders while Keven pushed the bike. He bought balloons that wanted to get away. And more ice cream.

That was the start of them.

He learned right off that Keven wasn't a model and didn't want to be one. She couldn't handle the day-by-day possibility of rejection, she admitted. She'd been on her own for eight years, nearly nine, since she was sixteen.

When she told Hazard that, he immediately imagined her running away from an adequate home and love to make a lot of young mistakes, a girl this pretty. But then, without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, she explained with a smile that she'd been what was called an unwanted child. Her grandmother had come over from Ireland to be someone's maid in San Francisco. Her mother was somewhere, she said vaguely, not noticeably resentful.

Hazard couldn't see how she could ever have been unwanted.

Especially now as she came from his bathroom with the ends of her hair wet, the robe loosely tied, and her remarkable eyes looking forward to pleasure. She brought him a glass of water and a handful of vitamins and minerals.

“What's the little yellow one?” he asked.

“Take it.” She was standing above him. She smelled of fresh tangerines, a natural extract she used instead of perfume. Unexpectedly arousing.

“I only want to know what it is,” he told her.

“Folic acid.”

It sounded ominous. He took all the others.

“Folic acid helps your body utilize—”

“You think I need help?”

“Come on.” She exaggerated her impatience.

“You don't like the way I utilize?”

His hands were on the backs of her legs, moving slowly over the silk, feeling through, knowing her skin, the same fine texture all over.

“Please take it,” she said.

“I will,” he promised.

And a moment later she tossed the little yellow pill anywhere to free both her hands.

After lovemaking they held together for a long while in the lingering float of what they'd felt, a natural sedation that should have taken them easily to sleep. But it was only one thirty.

Hazard reached under his side of the bed for the remote-control switch while Keven got the television schedule from under her side. He clicked the set on. She consulted the listing and announced, “
The Barkley's of Broadway, I Am a Fugitive,
or
The Mummy's Hand.
”

“You pick.”

She took a moment to decide she was more in the mood for Astaire than Paul Muni in chains or Dick Foran in a pith helmet.

Hazard clicked to Channel 2 and there was Ginger in her chiffon prime and the suave Fred creating centrifugal force on a surface so shiny and perfect that they seemed to be dancing on still, black water.

It was only the second or maybe third time Hazard and Keven had seen this particular movie, so it was comparatively fresh, considering they'd seen most of the late-night films many times over. They knew some practically scene by scene. So well, in fact, that they could cut the sound and do the dialogue themselves. Keven did a fair Joan Crawford and Olivia DeHaviland. Hazard was best at Bogart. Sometimes, just for the hell of it they'd switch roles. Every time Hazard did Bette Davis, Keven laughed so much her belly hurt and her eyes cried.

By the time Astaire and Rogers got all wrapped up in a happy ending it was nearly 3
A.M
.

Hazard clicked the television off.

Keven began brushing her hair, long soothing strokes.

“How about some breeze in the trees tonight?” he suggested. “Do you feel like breeze in the trees?”

They also had small children at play, waterfalls with intermittent rippling brook, horses gamboling, rain on a roof, country birds, tinkling Himalayan bells, sea breakers, and a blizzard.

She preferred country birds, she said.

In Hazard's opinion country birds was the least tranquilizing, all those birds nervously chirping and trilling. However, he inserted that long-playing cartridge into the tape unit.

“How about a game?” he asked.

“Just relax.”

She stopped brushing and from the night table on her side she removed her black sleeping shade.

He asked her if she was sleepy and, when she told him no, he was again silently grateful. He thought back to how different and not nearly as good it had been for him before with the models, who could go unconscious in a minute, leaving him with nothing to do but envy them and all the other easy sleepers in the world. Like most insomniacs he felt deprived, victimized by some personal but abstract dysfunction, terribly insular. Also, insomnia wasn't something one readily admitted to, as though in a competitive world it revealed a weakness, a handicap, like putting extra weight on a horse that had to run.

He considered it a blessing that Keven was as chronic an insomniac as he was. She was certainly glad that he didn't sleep well.

Sharing the problem actually made it less of a problem. Now, while the rest of the world seemed to be sound asleep, they didn't have to feel so singularly damned. Now each had someone to not get sleep with. It helped make them all the more compatible. It took them to obscure all-night Chinese restaurants, to deserted Wall Street canyons, for a practically private voyage on the Staten Island Ferry. Adventures together replaced their individual bitching.

“Want some warm milk and honey?” she asked, still believing in such sleep-inducing remedies that had never really worked.

“I don't think so.”

“I'll do your feet.” She smiled.

“We could play cribbage or something.”

“I'll do your feet.”

She got a jar of vitamin E ointment from her trunk and sat cross-legged on the end of the bed with a pillow on her lap. She covered the pillow with a towel and he placed his bare feet on it.

Included in Keven's personal orthodoxy regarding the benefits to be derived from natural things and natural ways was her belief in Reflexology—a method of therapeutic massage applied to the soles of the feet. Purportedly, areas of the feet contained nerve centers that related to various other parts of the body. By massaging the feet, nervous tensions affecting those other parts could be relieved. For example, the little toe corresponded in some remote way with the sinuses, the inner edge of the arch with the spine, the center of the heel with the sex glands.