In the Still of the Night (18 page)

“He’s been seeing a psychiatrist for years.”

Wilding hadn’t known it. So much for psychiatry, he thought. “Well, let’s see what the apology will do. The warmer it is the better. And you might ask Mark to let me know if Wilczynski also apologizes.”

“He will,” Kitty said. “He’s jealous of me and he adores Mark. We shouldn’t represent him at all, much less make a household pet of him. He’s like every poet I ever heard of, arrogant as Lucifer and nothing you can do for him is ever enough.” Her voice became a purr of sarcasm. “But Mark has a conscience about impoverished talent. The more impoverished, the greater the talent.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Wilding said.

Mark, at his own desk in his office, hung up the phone after listening in. It was something he was not in the habit of doing, but neither was he in the habit of throwing punches, not since the age of thirteen. He looked at his bruised and swollen knuckles and tried to think why such a blazing fury should have erupted in him. No answer came. He had known there was no love lost between Kitty and Wilczynski, but André had kept it under cover until last night, when, Mark had a sneaking suspicion, he had deliberately provoked the boy into letting go. But to say that Wilczynski adored him was one more of Kitty’s exaggerations. And yet the very idea of it made him both sad and pleased—sad that he had struck him and pleased that someone among the agency’s clients still held him in esteem. So why had he struck him? Still no answer. He could ask his psychiatrist—if he had one. Kitty’s lies of convenience were a commonplace, but why it was convenient for her to tell Tom Wilding that he had been seeing a psychiatrist for years was one more thing he was at a loss to know.

He wrote André a note in longhand and mailed it himself when he went out to lunch. Kitty was furious. Not even a photocopy, with the machine sitting right outside his office door. “You should have spoken to me sooner,” he said.

“I thought we agreed you were
not
to apologize,” she said.

“Did we?” he said blandly. “Then I changed my mind.”

“So did I. But I’d like to know what you wrote.”

“I apologized.”

Kitty turned on her heel.

Tom Wilding went out of town that afternoon. He had already told Kitty before the party that he would be away for a few days attending his son’s wedding. It was a bittersweet occasion for Wilding because it brought him together again with his former wife, whom, despite her desertion and remarriage, he still loved. During the flight he pondered from time to time how that could be, given his anger, jealousy, pain, and humiliation, the embers of which still flared up now and then. He had not even realized when it was happening. He had been on the Coast a great deal and, the children in college, Irene had gone back to school and taken her master’s degree. He’d been very proud of her. There was in his musings a barely conscious comparison of his situation with Mark Coleman’s. He was comparing apples and oranges, he told himself. Irene had not emasculated him, although he felt it at the time, and he had put together another life without her. The Colemans were somehow bound together in their needs. They had simply switched places. Supposing Irene had stayed with him and got a law degree? He laughed at himself and rang the stewardess for another Scotch.

The next afternoon, while the wedding party was at the church rehearsing, he and Irene sat before a fire together. She had not changed save for the scattering of gray in her soft brown hair and a few new laugh lines. There came a moment when she looked at him with warm concern in a way that made him ache, remembering. “And how is your life, Tom?”

He was all but overwhelmed by the urge to tell her of his loneliness and what her leaving had taken from him. “I’m enjoying it,” he said, and the temptation passed.

Whenever he thought about the Colemans between then and his return to Manhattan, he would wind up trying to pinpoint the place and time when their rise and fall intersected, where in plain fact Kitty had taken over and Mark had let go. She had come to New York wanting to be an actress and was in acting school when Mark met her. She started in the office working part-time in the Dramatic Rights department; Mark thought it would give her confidence as an actress to learn something of the business end of things. He was jubilant when she was able and wanted to take over the department. That wasn’t long after they were married. Her next step upward was becoming a member of the firm, and after that the question arose whether the agency name shouldn’t be changed to include hers. She was adamant that it remain the Mark Coleman Agency. By then she might have thought she was the Mark Coleman Agency. Equality seemed never to have entered her mind. The only good word she had for the women’s movement was for those of her clients who wrote about it. Wilding tried to remember what Coleman was like in negotiations at given times along the way. More and more, he could see now, Mark had left the gritty bits to him, the legal expert. Kitty, to the contrary, would tell Wilding what she expected and, outrageous as it might seem, she almost always got it. She was an exhausting negotiator. Only once recently had he been with both Colemans in the same negotiations, and by then Mark had lost much of his personal prestige and his perspective. He insisted on explaining to Kitty points that she knew better than most of the people present. She listened him out, however, and smiled with cold defiance at anyone less patient than herself. She would defend him to the death from others, Wilding thought, and then turn on him and savage him herself.

One of the first things he did when he was back in the office was to find out if there had been an exchange of apologies. He would rather have talked to Mark, but it was Kitty who had promised he would apologize. “Mark wrote him,” she said, “and purposely didn’t show the letter to me. What do you think of that?”

“Understandable,” Wilding murmured.

“He kept no copy of it—wrote it in longhand. Is that also understandable? And no word from André in the meantime, at least according to Mark. What’s going on there, I’d like to know?”

“Let them sort it out between themselves, Kitty. Give it a little more time.”

“Tom, the more I think about it the more bizarre the whole situation seems to me. It isn’t like Mark to engage in fisticuffs. Between you and me, I can’t see him doing more than telling André to keep his opinions to himself: I suppose what I’m saying is, I don’t think I was the issue at all.”

“I don’t know what to say to that. Why don’t you give his psychiatrist a ring and have a confidential talk with him? He might find your input useful.”

“I suppose I could do that,” she said. “I’m glad you’re home. How was the wedding?”

“All brides are beautiful. It was very nice.”

That afternoon Wilding got André Wilczynski’s phone number and called him. A purely personal concern, he explained.

“No complications,” the writer said of his wounds. “How is Mark?”

“I wish I could tell you. I’ve been out of town and out of touch with him.”

“Why don’t you try and help him, Mr. Wilding? That man’s in trouble. Do you know what he wrote to me? I haven’t answered it yet, I don’t want her getting hold of it and twisting what I say into what she wants me to say. That’s pretty complicated, isn’t it?”

“What did Mark say?”

“He said he was hitting out at himself, and I just got in the way.”

“That
is
complicated,” Wilding said. “A very peculiar traffic jam.”

Wilczynski laughed, and Wilding was glad that he could—in more ways than one.

Coleman had surprised himself in writing as he had to André. It was almost as though he had let out something from his soul in automatic writing. But reading it over, he had known it was the truth and sent it off. When days passed and he had not heard from the young writer, he wondered if he had made a fool of himself. Or worse, if he had not compromised Kitty. When Tom Wilding called him and suggested lunch, he was sure something had gone very wrong. They had not had lunch alone together for years.

They met at the Century Club and had a drink at the bar before going into the dining room. Mark’s hand trembled as he conveyed the glass to his lips, and he said again something he had already said far too many times about the first drink of the day: “It’s nice to be drinking again.” He turned to Wilding. “You’ve heard me say that before maybe?”

Wilding laughed and admitted that he might have.

“Does Kitty know we’re having lunch?”

“Not unless you told her,” the lawyer said. “There’s nothing heavy on the platter, so relax.”

Mark could feel the relaxation happening. He turned his glass around and around by the stem and said, after a moment, “I wonder if these things aren’t doing me in. I forget things. I say things I don’t mean. Sometimes I even say things I do mean. I flare up—as you may have noticed. I blame Kitty …”

“For what?”

Coleman shrugged. “For more than she ought to be blamed. God knows, she takes good care of me.”

Wilding took a chance. “Is that good?”

“Have you been talking with Wilczynski?” It was said not seriously but with a twinkle reminiscent of the old Mark. Then: “I thought he might have answered my letter by this time. I suppose you know, I did apologize.”

“He’ll answer. He intends to.”

“But when? Kitty wants to see it in writing.”

At the table, when Coleman had his second drink in hand, Wilding said, “Mark, I’m going to make a suggestion. Give this thing time. Take a few days off and get away from the office …” He paused, seeing alarm in Coleman’s eyes.

“Why?”

“I was thinking how much good it did me to get away and see the family, people I hadn’t seen in years.”

“I see too many people. I’m sick of people and I’m sure a lot of them are sick of me.”

“Then how about this: Go up to my place on the Cape. This time of year it’s nothing but sea and sand and stars. It’s as pure a place as you’ll find on earth.”

Mark was instantly thrust back in place and time to the graceful sand dunes along Lake Michigan where he’d grown up, Carl Sandburg country, a poet all but forgotten, as were most of the poets of his youth. He blinked at Wilding across the table and said, “I’ve just had a short trip—back home to Indiana.”

“What about the Cape?”

“I can’t get away, Tom. I’ve got too many things in the works.”

Wilding clamped his mouth shut.

“Go ahead and say it,” Coleman challenged.

“You can’t get away from Kitty. That’s what it’s all about.” Wilding pulled back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. That’s for your psychiatrist to say, if anybody’s going to say it.”

With a smile that was almost self-satisfied, Coleman said, “I haven’t had a day of psychiatry in my whole damn life.”

Wilding was speechless. He felt that even the breath had been knocked out of him. After all the years of Kitty watching, he still had no idea of where her facile tongue might dart. “Might it not be a good idea, then—a few months of therapy? With the right man, of course. Or woman.”

Coleman missed the unintended irony. He had scored with himself for having again told the truth instead of fudging on it to cover Kitty’s lie. Then it occurred to him, causing him some anxiety, that there could have been a reason for Kitty’s saying he was in psychiatry: It put a wall up around him, as it were, to protect his privacy.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” Wilding added. “I presumed on a long friendship.”

“Psychiatry invades everybody in the patient’s life. I wonder if Kitty might not take it as an insult.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mark. I’m talking about you, not Kitty.”

“The same thing, isn’t it?”

They were back to square one. Mark had stopped any censure of Kitty before it started. Wilding gave up. There was no way to help a man who would not be helped.

After lunch, which both men found a strain, Mark put the lawyer into a cab and made his own way uptown through the swarming Christmas shoppers on Fifth Avenue. Salvation Army Santas were cleaning up, so were the vendors and the street musicians, who had to blow on their hands to keep their fingers nimble. Only the blind man, whose dog lay on a mat at his feet, was missing out. On the crowded sidewalk in front of Saks, people didn’t see him in time. Mark stepped off the curb, dug all the change from his pocket, and went back to put it into the beggar’s cup. It was a gesture that seemed to have perfect logic—if symbolic logic could be perfect. Something had happened with Tom Wilding at lunch that at the time gave him the smear of pain and satisfaction he usually found euphoric. But the pain lingered when the euphoria wore off. He had seen a longtime friend cut loose from their attachment.

Kitty was exasperated at her inability to come to terms with the Mark-Wilczynski incident. She, who was herself one of the greatest stonewallers in a business where such talent was indispensable, was wearing down under the failure of the situation to resolve itself. She imagined all sorts of changes in Mark. For example, he was not as responsive to her in bed as she had come to expect. But that might be the booze. And if there had to be a choice between the two, she’d rather it was the booze than Wilczynski certainly.

She walked into Mark’s office the day after he’d had lunch with Wilding, giving him only a moment’s notice as she came down the hall. Two of the younger associates were putting up Christmas decorations, and she stopped for a word with them. Mark smiled up at her from a desk as neat as a jellybean. The smile was false, she thought, meant to deceive, to distract her from something. It’s a Christmas present, she tried to tell herself, something he’d just managed to hide. She could tell that to someone else, not to herself. On the desk in front of him was a folder advertising a survival knife, the illustration a jagged, lethal-looking weapon.

“Christmas shopping?” It sounded as false as his smile had looked.

He threw the folder into the wastebasket. “I’d like to get away for a few days, Kitty. Tom has offered me his place on Cape Cod, and I might take him up on it.”

“Now?” Her mind raced to what she could remember about Wilding’s beach house. In summer it was private. This time of year it would be isolated.