In the Still of the Night (20 page)

He still said nothing.

“If you must know, Janet made the decision. She’s very fond of you, but she doesn’t like her agent playing editor.”

He turned his head to look at her. “You have such a gracious way of saying things.”

“I tell it the way it is,” Kitty said. “The trouble with Janet is her head is getting as big as the rest of her. She writes such awful stuff it’s hard to believe how popular it is.” She laid her hand on his where it lay cold and gloveless on his knee. “It would have been a waste of your time, darling.”

“When I could be playing agent,” Mark said.

Kitty left the apartment early in the morning, going directly to a meeting outside the office. Mark, his nerves jumpy from too little sleep and too much to drink, walked to work through the park. There was the feeling of snow in the air, and he could smell horse manure from the bridle path; the ground was hard beneath his feet. He thought of the time when, as a boy, he had tried to dig a grave for a bird the cat had killed and couldn’t because the earth was frozen solid. He’d put it in a shoebox and kept it in his room. One day he smelled feathers burning. When he looked in the box, the dead bird was gone. Neither he nor his mother ever spoke of it. Where had such silence gone?

In the office he tore up his notes on the Caruthers novel and sent the copy of the manuscript to file. Left in the drawer were the folder with André’s projected thriller and the advertisement for the survival knife. The knife would require six to eight weeks for delivery. André’s project could stay in abeyance. He got the tearsheets of Wilczynski’s published poems—as well as a few rejects—from the file and put them on Kitty’s desk.

At noontime he did his Christmas shopping and then visited Herman’s Sporting Goods and bought two knives, one for hunting, a long narrow blade, and the other an all-purpose survival knife. It was its description that kept getting to him. He got through lunchtime without a drink by the simple means of going without lunch as well. He called Tom Wilding midafternoon and said he’d changed his mind again. He wanted to take him up on the loan of the Cape Cod house. He’d be ready to go up in the morning.

“It’s not possible,” Wilding said and explained that his caretaker would have to turn on the water and get the heat up. Saturday at the earliest. “Mark, are you going alone?”

He hesitated. “Is that part of the deal, that I go alone?”

“Of course not. I was only thinking that it may get pretty lonely up there for someone as used to the city as you are.”

“That’s what I want,” Mark said, and arranged to pick up the key the next morning.

“It’s impossible,” Kitty said. “There are several things during the week that we really must go to.”

He cut into her recital of the holiday festivities. “You’ll get along. Tom will be glad to take you—any number of people—flattered.”

“It’s not the same. We’ve always been a couple.”

“Or at least one,” Mark said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know what it means to you. I only know what it means to me. If anyone should ask where I am, just say I’m drying out.”

“That’ll be the day. I suppose André is going with you?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“You said you were going to ask him.”

“That was a passing thought at the time.”

“It’s none of my business,” Kitty said. “I merely wondered.” She took her glass to the bar. For the life of her she could not figure out what was going on with him. “There’s time for another drink before dinner. Do you want to fix it while I light the oven?”

“André’s your client now. He’ll be devoted to you,” Mark said, getting up.

“What’s this business of your client, my client? They’re all
our
clients.”

“If you say so, dear. But I give you my word on it, André is not going to Cape Cod with me.”

“I don’t want your word on it!” She started for the kitchen but paused in the dining-room archway. “And I don’t want him as a client. I’m doing it for you, if you must know.”

Mark didn’t say anything. There was a time he had thought as much himself: He wiped his hands on a cocktail napkin. They were cold and sweaty. He mixed Kitty’s Manhattan and then added a few drops of water to what was left of his first martini. The thought of drinking it gave him no great pleasure. One day at a time.

In the kitchen, the swinging door closed, Kitty phoned Tom Wilding at home and, not reaching him there, phoned him at his club. Wilding listened out her tirade against him for having suggested that Mark go in the first place—this time of year, his tendency to catch colds, his state of mind. After which she demanded that he call Mark and say the place had burned down or blown away, anything to forestall his going. She was frantic, and he thought for the first time in years there was some hope in the situation. Old Mark was standing his ground.

Finally he said, “Kitty, why don’t you let him go? That’s the only way to stop him.”

“You and your goddamn riddles! You’re two of a kind.” And she slammed down the phone.

Friday promised to be the longest day in Mark’s memory. He went into the office thinking that Kitty might stay home, as she often did on Fridays, to read manuscripts without interruption. She was in the office fifteen minutes after his arrival. She kept coming in to see him on a variety of pretexts, some with concern about what he was taking with him—and did he want her to pack for him? He did not. There was concern also for what he was leaving behind, unfinished agency work. It was with almost demonic intuition that she said, “What about your desk drawers? You’re always sticking things away and forgetting them.”

“Clean,” Mark said. “I’ll be leaving them as clean as a whistle.” And at that point he decided that he had to take the Wilczynski proposal with him, or send it back, or take it home and bury it in his study.

On one of her sorties she announced that she had bundled off the collected poems of André Wilczynski to Linden House.

“So soon?”

“It’s almost Christmas,” she said, further implying the kindness of her gesture. She could not have read them; he was inclined to wonder if anyone would. He told himself that cynicism would get him nowhere.

“It will be interesting to see if you can pull it off.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” she said.

When Kitty went to lunch—to ease his own mind and despite his practice of not telling an author of a mere submission—he called Wilczynski. He told him that Kitty had submitted his poems to one of the biggest houses in Manhattan.

“No kidding. You mean she likes them?”

“I like them,” Mark said with asperity.

“It’s great. It’s just great,” André said.

“It’s by no means a hundred percent sure, but Kitty has a way with publishers.”

“Mark … don’t show Kitty that suspense thing I sent you. She’s a smart lady.”

“And I’m not smart?”

“I didn’t meant that, sir.” André reverted to formal address. As author to agent, he went on a first-name basis; as an employee, he called him Mr. Coleman. “I hope you’d understand what I was trying to do.”

“If I understand it correctly, I’m not sure I want to encourage you with that particular vehicle. Mind you, if you can write suspense, André, I’ll certainly work with you. But why don’t I send this manuscript back to you? Have another look at it yourself: I’m going out of town for a few days’ rest. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Mark … the apology was all right?”

“Of course. Otherwise …”

“Mark, please give it another read. The people can be changed. It’s the house and atmosphere and the puzzle at the end I want to hang on to. I’m very keen on it.”

He wound up wishing he had not called André at all. He put the manuscript in an otherwise empty dispatch case to take home with him. In the late afternoon he picked up the rental car. He felt too edgy to drive through the midtown traffic, so he went uptown by way of First Avenue to Ninety-sixth Street, where he crossed through the park and drove south again. He made several passes at a parking place near the apartment building and finally got the doorman to guide him into it. Upstairs he put the Wilczynski manuscript on a shelf in his study with a number of others in photocopy. Kitty called his study the land of forgotten books. But that was not so. There was some material there he even knew by heart.

He packed before dressing for the evening, laying the sheathed knives at the bottom of the suitcase. Only one of them had meaning for him, the survival knife. He wasn’t even sure why he had bought the other. Tom’s place was bound to have every kind of knife he might need—except the survival knife. The new film he and Kitty saw in special showing was not good, but the stars were there, and congratulations flowed, as abundant and effervescent as the champagne. Everybody assured everybody else of Oscar nominations. It would have taken him several martinis to warm to the occasion, and he was drinking ginger ale disguised as bourbon and soda. Kitty asked him twice if he was really going in the morning. Even her proposals to help him get away, he realized, were meant to deter him, and the ultimate act of deterrence was the dispatch of André’s poems. He was beginning to sweat with the strain of the evening, when Kitty looked at him and said, “I’d better take you home.”

While he was undressing, he noticed the carton half-tucked in at the side of his suitcase: a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. He thanked Kitty and then, while she was in the bathroom, buried the bottle in the drawer among his socks. His sleep was fitful and dream-ridden. He dreamed of someone he called mother, only it was not his mother. But it wasn’t Kitty either. Sometime before dawn Kitty left her bed and crawled in at his back. He stiffened everywhere except where, presumably, she wanted it to happen. A fierce fantasy raced through his mind: rape and he the rapist. All that happened was the sweat again, and Kitty left his bed as silently as she had come to it. He thought he heard her crying but pretended not to. If Kitty was crying, it was a last resort.

He showered and shaved and then decided not to take the shaver with him. Kitty had finally fallen asleep. He took his luggage into the vestibule before zipping it. He made instant coffee and toasted a slice of rye bread that scratched his throat when he swallowed it. He looked out at an ominous red and purple sunrise and wondered whether to waken Kitty or to let her sleep. It would be easier to get out the door by himself: He reminded himself not to forget to turn the key in the top lock: This was something that figured importantly in Wilczynski’s script, he remembered. He hadn’t understood it. He wasn’t sure the writer understood it either. Very muddy. For a moment he thought of taking the proposal with him. He even thought of losing it. Which had to be his low point on the ladder of cowardice. He brought in
The New York Times
from the hall and turned to the obituary page. There was nobody he knew among that Saturday’s deceased. He felt a little disappointed. He folded the paper neatly. If there was anything that got Kitty’s day off to a bad start, it was a newspaper that looked to have been read before she got to it. He used the maid’s bathroom; it wasn’t used very much, their household help coming in three days a week, the cleaning crew once a month. The water, when he flushed it, looked pink, rusty. He thought at first it was blood.

When he returned to the kitchen, he took up the chalk, intending to write a note on the blackboard. But what to say? See you this time next week? See you soon? Love. He put down the chalk, having written nothing. He set out a tray with a cup and saucer, plate and napkin. And the bud vase. A large bowl of chrysanthemums stood on the dining-room table. There were always flowers there, and he would often pluck one out and put it in the bud vase on the tray. Did he do it for Kitty or for himself? He put the dishes away, pocketed the napkin, and took the tray back to the butler’s pantry. He simply could not get going until he pushed himself. He took a handful of cigarettes from the box on the dining-room sideboard. It was years since he had smoked, but he remembered the comfort a cigarette used to be, a companion on a long drive alone. He could not remember his last cigarette or his last drive alone. He got his parka from the hall closet, his earmuffs, gloves, scarf, and keys. The only sound when he left the apartment was the heat starting up. In the lobby the night doorman was asleep sitting upright in a high-backed chair. A robot could have taken his place and done a better job. Mark let himself out without disturbing the man.

Kitty wakened a few minutes after eight with the feeling that she had been drugged, which was so: Valium at 5:00 A.M. He was gone, she realized, the bedding pulled down but left unmade, the heavy drapes closed, the room cold but too dry, always too dry. Another Saturday morning and he’d have brought her a tray by now—croissant if he’d been out—otherwise toast and fruit and dark fragrant coffee, Zabar’s best, and almost always a rose in the bud vase. He would draw the drapes to let in the sky, as he put it, and start up the music in the radiators. Very poetic. Which put her in mind of Wilczynski. “Shit and damnation,” she said aloud. She got up and went from one room to another, just to make sure he was gone, her mules clacking on the hardwood floor, then muted on the heavy rugs, then loud again and with a faint echo as of distant hammering. She was tempted to give up her Saturday morning at the health club. But why? To do what else? She rinsed his cup and used it, the jar of instant coffee on the counter where he’d left it. Not even a note on the blackboard. She phoned Tom Wilding.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything sexual,” she said when he came to the phone short of breath.

“I have better concentration than that, Kitty. What’s on your mind?” He had no intention of telling her that he was bicycling in place, and he never understood why he was the recipient of her sexual innuendos. Hardly innuendos, but they certainly weren’t passes either. To him she was about as sexually attractive as a camel in heat, and she could think up something as revolting to say of him, he was sure.

“Could I have your Cape Cod phone number? He’s on his way, you’ll be glad to know.”

“I’m sorry, Kitty. The phone up there’s turned off for the season.”