I Come as a Theif (13 page)

"You don't like the room?" Tony asked.

"I didn't say that, Mr. Lowder. But actually I don't. However, it's not important. This is the way all our friends live till the second baby. Then they move to the suburbs and life becomes serious. The first apartment is for making love and storing wedding presents."

He had been right, after all, about the Joan Crawford movie. "And will you start the same way?"

"Oh, I want to start much better. Or stay where I am. Are you ambitious, Mr. Lowder?"

"Tony."

"Are you ambitious, Tony?"

"I've never been able to decide."

"Then you're not."

"Should I be?"

Joan shook her head, as if the question were not worth answering. Her gravity was becoming to her long face and dark, defensive eyes. "Max is always talking about you. Now Max is ambitious. Maybe he thinks he has enough ambition for both of you."

Tony thought already that he was going to like her. "You haven't told me what your ambition is."

"I didn't say I had one."

"You said you wanted to start better than the Leonards. Or is ambition only concerned with ends? It's not as apt to be concerned with means."

He saw by the automatic quality of her smile that although she recognized humor, she did not much relish it. Smiling with her was probably a matter of manners. "My ambition is concerned with things. Beautiful things. I want to travel and see them. I want to own them. Some of them, anyway."

"You mean, like paintings, sculptures?"

"Yes. And furniture. Porcelains. Jewels. I'm very serious about jewelry."

Tony noted that she wore none but a small sapphire ring. "So you must marry a rich man."

"I guess that's about it. I must marry a rich man. Or remain an old maid with my dreams."

"I'm not a rich man."

"Oh, I know that."

"Even if I became a successful lawyer, I shouldn't be rich enough to buy the things you want. For I imagine they're great things. Rembrandts and such."

"I suppose they are."

"So where does that leave us?"

Her smile was suddenly charming, because they were not being funny. "As friends," she replied. "A little-explored but not unsatisfactory relationship."

After some twenty minutes of this kind of talk, she agreed to have dinner with him. At the restaurant they had further drinks and then, almost without other preliminaries, they exchanged life stories. Only after they had finished dinner did their congeniality strike them as rare.

"Of course, I was prepared for you," she confessed as she took a sip of brandy. "I was intrigued by what Max told me about you. I put you together as a person with whom one could be honest, but I had no idea how honest. It's extraordinary. I've never admitted to anyone the things I've admitted tonight. Why do you suppose that is?"

"Because I'm the unshockable man."

"I can see why I need the unshockable man. But what on earth have you to get out of me?"

"Leave that to me."

She gave him a level look. "I suppose you think you can sleep with me."

"Is it so impossible?"

"Definitely."

"We can leave that to the future. If I ever suggest it, it will be because you want it."

Joan closed her lips tightly. She seemed for a moment to have lost her breath. "I want it now, don't you know that? But if you think I do all the things I want to do, you don't begin to know me."

"I'm beginning to know you. And now, if you've finished that brandy, I'll take you home. I have to be in court at nine tomorrow."

And so their strange friendship began. They went out together every two weeks, and on alternate dates Tony even allowed her to pay. Never once did he make a pass at her. She had told him all he needed to know, and he would recognize the moment—if it came. If it did not, well, New York was full of girls.

She told him about Norris Conway, whom Tony had also met at the Leonards'. He was handsome in a way that was blond and beefy, agreeable in a way that tried too hard not to condescend, conscientious in a way that feared to be brutal. Norris was determined to win every medal in life on his own, or at least to look as if he had. He was probably better off being rich, for without the modern compulsion of the wealthy not to seem proud, he might have been very arrogant indeed. He had the heir's fear of being "done," and to be married for his money would have been to be done in the worst way of all.

"My trouble is that everyone's on to me," Joan protested to Tony. "God knows why, for I never talk. I guess I must smell of it."

"You look deep, that's your trouble. And you are deep. People think deep people have hidden motives. And they do."

"I could have brought Norry around months ago if I had even half a million of my own. Why the very rich think the merely rich won't marry them for their money, I can't imagine. Norry's smitten, all right, and I'd make him a splendid wife. But he's got his ears back like a scared horse."

"Maybe I can help."

"How?"

"A little jealousy might do the trick."

"But he doesn't know anything about you and me."

"Now."

Joan said nothing more that night, but he perfectly understood that she had not liked the suggestion.

He also understood that she did not like the conviviality that had sprung up between him and her parents. Joan was fiercely protective about the old people and did not want her friends to sneer at them. On the other hand, she seemed to fear some possible exposure of herself in Tony's obvious admiration of her mother. Mrs. Lane was Joan's slave, but flattered by a young man, who could tell what disloyalty she might not be capable of?

Mr. Lane was a cheerful nonentity, both to the world and to his family—a coughing, stuttering, stertorous, red-faced old man, a neat, clean bundle of aimless hospitality, not unlike Tony's own father. Mrs. Lane had the more vivid personality. She was round and dumpy, but her dyed black hair and bangs, her many false jewels and tassels, her long, thin nose, her large blinking eyes and hoarse voice, had a dowdy distinction, like that of a retired English actress trying to impress the boarding house with memories of her Imogene or Portia. And, indeed, as Tony discovered, there was some basis for the comparison, for Mrs. Lane as a girl had shown a flair for the stage and had studied in Paris and even been praised by the great Bernhardt, before her father, a professor of religion, had hurried her back from the prospect of a life of sin to the safer arms of Jacob Lane.

"You must recite something to me," Tony urged her one evening at the Lanes' tiny apartment, as jammed and eclectic as a Third Avenue antique shop. "What is the great scene from
Phèdre?
The one all the French school children have to learn?"

"Now, Tony," Joan protested, "if you start Mother on
Phèdre
, we'll be here all night."

"Well, let's be here all night. How about it, Mrs. Lane?"

"I don't know if I still remember any of it," Joan's mother murmured deprecatingly, glancing at the husband who never failed her.

"Come, Jenny, give Tony a few verses. You know you can."

As Mrs. Lane looked down at the plush seat of the sofa and fingered an upholstered button, it was evident that she was going to recite and that her mere intention to do so had instantly increased her status in that small chamber. Even Joan was now respectfully silent. Mrs. Lane's long slumbering muse might have been a kind of Aladdin's lamp which, when rubbed, had still the power to subdue her family to an admiring vigil. Then she began to speak, and her voice was sharp, almost rasping, but very tense and very articulate. The French words seemed to emanate from another woman altogether:

"
Ah, cruelle, tu m'as trop entendue!
Je t'en ai dit assez pour te tirer d'erreur.
Eh, bien, connais donc Phèdre et toute sa fureur.
J'aime.
"

It was astonishing to see what dignity, what depth were conveyed to the bland old wrinkled face by Mrs. Lane's art. The dumpy figure seemed to elongate, to throw off its frills and badges, to suggest that behind the frame, perhaps behind the frame of every woman, lurked the ravaged soul of Theseus' queen. Tony recalled a novel, read in college, where the heroine, a rising young actress, scornfully rejects the proposal of a rising young diplomat conditioned on her giving up the stage. For how could she compare being an admirable ambassadress to being an admirable Phèdre? Surely, Mrs. Lane had made the wrong choice, for she had become nothing, produced nothing. Except Joan. Except Joan—precisely. Maybe Joan was the justification of her sacrifice. For Joan
would
be a great ambassadress.

"You should still go on the stage, Mrs. Lane!" he cried when she had finished. "Think what you have to teach us!" He turned to Joan. "Do you think anyone in our generation could love that way?"

"No, thank God!"

Another extraordinary thing about Mrs. Lane was that she appeared entirely to comprehend Tony's relationship with Joan. One evening, when he came early and found Joan still out, Mrs. Lane sent her husband downstairs to buy a cigar and proceeded to talk frankly to Tony about Norris Conway.

"I'd really rather she married you."

"Just because I like
Phèdre?
"

"Well, that's a kind of reason, isn't it? Norris Conway has never heard of
Phèdre.
"

"But why do you assume, Mrs. Lane, that I want to marry Joan?"

"Well, don't you?"

"No. We're not suited at all. Joan's got to be grand. It's her style. It's her trade. She'd be wasted on me, and I on her. Now with you it's different. I feel that you and I understand each other. If anything were to happen to Mr. Lane, which God forbid..."

Mrs. Lane gave a little shriek of laughter. "Oh, Tony, promise that if Joan does marry Norris, you'll still come in and see us old folks once in a while."

"Oh, I don't have to promise that. How could I stay away?"

The day after this conversation Tony called Norris Conway and asked him to lunch. They talked of fishing and politics and mutual friends, but afterward, as they paused at the entrance of Norris' office building, Tony asked him casually:

"Tell me, Norry, are you off Joan Lane?"

Norris immediately stiffened. "What do you mean?"

"Just that."

"What's it to you?"

"I'd like to know if the way's clear, that's all. I don't want to waste my time if you've got her sewed up. Are you engaged, or anything like that?"

"I guess that's something you'll have to find out for yourself," Norris said heavily. He was clearly upset.

"Good. I will."

"Well, don't go telling her I insinuated we were engaged." Then he added gruffly: "Anyway, we're not."

Tony now let a month go by without calling Joan. When he finally did so she asked him up for cocktails. Her voice was very cold, and the invitation sounded like an order. He arrived and found her alone. Her parents were south on an "annual sponge," as she put it, with a rich, but distant cousin in Palm Beach.

"I want you to tell me what you did to Norry Conway," she said, when he had mixed his drink. She already had her own, as if she had prepared herself for a scene.

"What makes you think I did anything?"

"Something he said."

"Has he been attentive?"

"Very."

"How gratifying."

"Do you really find it so?"

"I want what you want."

"I see." Joan was very definite now. "Then you did speak to him. You did it to make him jealous."

"And I evidently succeeded."

"Oh, yes. It worked like a charm. Except for one thing. You should have gone on taking me out."

"Why?"

"Because your failure to do so, after Norris told you we were
not
engaged, made it look as if you and I were in cahoots."

"So!" Tony exclaimed in surprise. "I never thought of that. Because, of course, we weren't. But it's easily remedied. All I have to do is tell him that he scared me off."

"You needn't. I've already told him."

"That he scared me off?"

"No. That he didn't. I've told him that I
have
been out with you. Twice in the last month."

Tony whistled. "You are a cool one. And it worked?"

"Oh, it worked divinely. He's on the point of proposing."

He raised his glass. "Congratulations, Mrs. Conway!"

Joan looked at him with a countenance from which she had carefully obliterated the least expression. "Is that all you have to say?"

"All
I
have to say! What about you? Aren't you going to thank me?"

"Stop joking, Tony. Just for once." She closed her eyes for a moment.

"I don't propose to be grim about this, you know."

"What
do
you propose?"

"That we be frank. You resent my helping you to marry another man. No matter what we both think is best for you, you have a fixed female resentment against any man who doesn't cast himself at your feet. But you're wrong. I am casting myself at your feet. I do cast myself at your feet."

Joan's eyes were wide with astonishment. "You mean you want to marry me?"

"I mean that I want to be your lover."

She gasped. "And Norry?"

"What Norry doesn't know isn't going to hurt him. You won't be the first woman to make love to another man during her engagement."

Joan rose and walked to the window so as to be turned away from him. "And how long would you propose that this bizarre arrangement should last?"

"As long as we both want it to. I doubt very much that you will want to continue it after you marry."

She stamped her foot. "Have you no heart at all?"

"Enough. We would be taking a gamble with our emotions, I admit. But I think we can handle it. I know I want to try."

She turned now and stared hard at him. Was it gratitude that he made out in that penetrating, dark look? "Very much?"

"Oh, yes."

"But not enough to marry me?"

"It wouldn't be right. The way for you to live is to be what you are. To accept yourself. Then your worldliness will be big and handsome. Not sordid and small."