Jack and Susan in 1953 (18 page)

Jack blushed violently, but he stood his ground.

The preacher grimaced at Jack as he spoke the words, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

Jack turned and fled from the church like a man possessed.

He spent the afternoon in an Irish bar near Times Square on Seventh Avenue. It was a dim, smoky place, and the ratty decorations left over from St. Patrick's Day jostled with the even rattier decorations left over from Valentine's Day. Jack had captured a booth all to himself, and wouldn't give it up even to the parties of six who came in and stared at him balefully and made loud comments about people who were even more selfish on Sunday than they were weekdays. The management wouldn't move Jack because he was drinking enough for six.

Jack spent on bourbon the change from the taxi that had taken him to the church where Rodolfo García-Cifuentes had married the woman he loved. That left him a single twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. He thought maybe he should eat and asked the bartender if the kitchen would prepare him a plate of wieners smothered with mayonnaise.

The kitchen wouldn't like it, the bartender told him, but the kitchen would do it. A kitchen in a bar in Times Square got a lot of unappetizing requests.

As he consumed one white and slippery weiner after another, Jack wondered what he should do with the rest of his life now that Susan Bright was out of it.

The first thing he should do, he thought morosely, was to pick a fight with somebody and get his other arm broken.

He amended that plan to: get drunker first, and
then
pick a fight and get your other arm broken.

He was halfway through his last twenty-dollar bill when he ordered a second plate of weiners smothered with mayonnaise. He washed them down with bourbon. Jack could take up a whole booth by himself, he was so lanky and tall, and as he got drunker he seemed to stretch. With a torn trouser leg, his arm in a cast, his eyes bloodshot, his clothing rumpled and bourbon-stained, he looked very much the barfly.

He carefully preserved the two dollars that would get him home in a taxi. He staggered out of the bar at seven-thirty in the evening, but no taxi would pick him up.

He would have to walk home.

This will sober me
, he thought, not wanting to be sober.

He could easily have avoided Times Square, but that didn't suit his mood. He wanted to appear as he was—an unemployed tramp.

Fate, which hadn't been very kind to Jack recently, decided to go along with his mood for once.

It put acquaintances in his path. Passing the theater where
The King and I
was playing, he saw a couple he recognized as friends of Libby. They stared at him with horror as he approached them.

“Where's Libby?” Jack demanded, grabbing the man by a lapel. “She's gonna be my wife. Where is she? She won't answer the phone. She's gonna make me the husband of the fifth richest woman in America…”

The man pushed Jack away with a startled expression. “It
is
you. Helen and I couldn't believe…”

Jack thought he was going to throw up, and he thought it best not to throw up on Libby's friends.

He staggered off.

Rosalind Russell was playing in
Wonderful Town
, and Mr. Hamilton—Maddy's new pansy boss—was waiting to see it with several of his friends.

All of Mr. Hamilton's friends were meticulous dressers. Jack counted five—no, six; no, just five—of them waiting outside the theater.

Mr. Hamilton knew it was Jack. The cast on his arm, the torn trousers, the drunken limp, the bleary eyes—none of that fooled Mr. Hamilton for an instant. Mr. Hamilton turned abruptly away with a blush so violent it nearly could have matched one of Jack's own.

Jack grabbed Mr. Hamilton's shoulder and spun him around.

Mr. Hamilton's friends were alternately petrified, scandalized, and indignant. Mr. Hamilton himself was very nearly tearful—to be humiliated this way in front of his peers and a crowd of strangers. What good did careful attention to one's appearance do when one was subjected to incidents like this?
Pawed
by a drunk in the street.

“Tell Maddy she's beautiful!” Jack shouted right in Mr. Hamilton's face. “I don't care what you think about her, tell her she's beau-ti-ti-ful!”

Then Jack staggered on, leaving Mr. Hamilton to find whatever meager enjoyment he could get out of Rosalind Russell's performance this evening.

Twice Jack fell off the curb, scraping his knees and doing more damage to his trousers. First he hit the pavement of Park Avenue, and later the sidewalk near Sixty-third Street.

From time to time he would make an attempt at hailing a cab, and finally one did stop for him, and Jack climbed in. “Sixty-sixth between Second and Third,” Jack said, slumped in the seat.

But because they were only a block and a half away from that destination, the driver threw him out again.

Jack hadn't lost his keys, though he might as well have, because he couldn't get them into the lock. He fumbled and swore until the night elevator man noticed his plight and opened the door for him. Jack stumbled into the lobby and winced against the forty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture, which shone bright as the sun.

“Some party, hunh?” said the elevator man, pulling Jack toward the elevator.

Jack got into the elevator, but then he began to give out. His legs started to crumple under him, and he sank all the way to the floor and fell asleep.

The elevator man awakened him on the fifth floor.

“Here you are, Mr. Beaumont. Give me your keys.”

Jack shook his head. “I can do it,” he said groggily.

Then he fell asleep again on the floor of the elevator.

The elevator man fished in his pocket for the keys, picked him up off the floor—with a little help from Jack himself—and then led him to the door of his apartment.

Jack heard violent barking from inside.

He turned to the man and said wistfully, “Somebody still loves me…”

The elevator man turned the key and pushed open the door.

“You be all right?” he asked.

Woolf jumped out and knocked Jack against the wall of the narrow corridor.

“No dogs allowed,” said the elevator man mildly. “I'm going to have to report you. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Jack, giving the elevator man the two dollars he'd so carefully saved for the taxi.

Woolf licked Jack's face, cast, and any other place he could find with bourbon stains.

Jack sat in the corridor for a while and allowed himself to be licked. His apartment, through the open doorway, seemed about three miles away. He was just dozing off again when he felt someone's gaze on him. He looked up groggily, and then was unsure whether he was dreaming or not.

There in the open door of his apartment stood Susan Bright, looking down at him with a grimace of disgust. She was not wearing her wedding gown.

“I'm not a bit surprised,” she said.

“I
CAN'T FACE him right now,” Jack pleaded, his head pressed against the swirled pink plaster of the corridor wall. “Later. Not now. Tell him to go away. Please. Just do that for me, Susan.”

Jack hugged Woolf close.

“Who are you talking about?” asked Susan. “You're drunk. I can't believe how drunk you are. You stink, you're dirty, and look at that hole in your trousers. I can see your underwear.”

A door opened down the hall and an old woman peered out.

“Somebody get rid of that dog!” she called out.

Woolf barked vehemently at the woman.

“You're drawing attention,” said Susan darkly. “At least come inside. It's your own apartment, after all.”

“Then he's not inside?” Jack asked weakly.

“Who?” said Susan.

“Rodolfo.”

“Unless he's been hiding in the closet for the past five hours, Rodolfo is
not
in your apartment. Five hours—that's how long I've been waiting for you.”

“You came here right from the church then,” said Jack as he struggled to his feet. Or attempted to. His balance was not good and Woolf had evidently decided that smack between Jack's legs was the only place in the world to be. Nowhere else would do.

Susan gave him a helping hand.

“You're not making any sense,” she said. “Do you know that? Do you know how little sense you're making? I'm going to make some coffee, and you're going to take a cold shower.”

“I'm not allowed to take showers,” Jack mumbled. “Not with my cast.”

“Then you're going to take a cold bath. Right now,” she said.

He obeyed docilely…

A quarter of an hour later, Jack had come to the conclusion that there was, in the entire range of human experience, only one sensation that was worse than a cold bath when you're drunk, and that was a cold bath when you're drunk with a dog licking the side of your face every time you started to fall asleep.

“Cover yourself,” called Susan from outside the bathroom door. “I'm bringing in a cup of coffee.”

Jack jerked the shower curtain halfway closed. In its cast, his left arm dangled to the tile floor away from the water. Unfortunately, the opaque white shower curtain was decorated with an undersea scene with sunfish and mermaids, and was just suggestive enough of the sea to make Jack's stomach queasy.

“Are you a little less drunk?” said Susan.

“A little. What's your husband going to say when he finds you in the bathroom with a naked man?” said Jack morosely. The coffee smelled good as Susan handed him the cup.

“Don't worry,” said Susan, calmly putting down the toilet seat and arranging herself comfortably on it. “In the first place, you're hardly in a condition to attack me. In the second place, I'm not married.”

Jack halted the cup at his lips. He sniffed at the coffee, then took a sip. He thought about what Susan had just said.

“You're not married?” he asked, trying not to slur his words. He thought that he ought to get this part straight, even if he understood nothing else.

Susan shook her head. “
Definitely
not married. Did you have a particular reason for thinking I might be?”

Jack nodded, staring at the water and continuing to sip his coffee.

Woolf took the corner of the shower curtain in his teeth and dragged it open again.

Susan, politely averting her eyes, readjusted it.

“When can I get out of this cold water?” he asked. “It's horrible in here.”

“When you're sober,” said Susan. “Why did you think I was married?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” said Jack, even though those were difficult words for him to articulate. “I went to the church this afternoon and I saw you and Rodolfo standing in front of the altar and I heard the preacher say, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.'”

Susan stared. Jack continued to sip his coffee.

“‘I now pronounce you man and wife,'” Jack repeated.

“Rodolfo got married today?” asked Susan after a moment.

Jack nodded.

“Who was the bride?” she asked.

Jack smiled. A smirky, bitter little smile.

“What time was this wedding?”

“One o'clock. I was a few minutes late.”

“At one o'clock I was passing through Hicksville, Long Island. I had to stop for gas.”

“You don't have a car.”

“Rented.”

“At one o'clock?” said Jack, swallowing the last of the coffee and automatically holding out the cup for more.

Susan had brought the pot along, and had it right outside the bathroom door on a pot holder. She fetched it and poured another cup for Jack.

“Yes,” she said, “at one o'clock, I was at a Standard Oil station in Hicksville, Long Island. I remember seeing a clock.”

“Then who was the bride?” said Jack.

“You didn't see her face?”

“Brides wear veils.”

Both of them pondered for a few moments. Jack ran a little more cold water and thought he'd die, but he was getting sober very quickly, and an idea was forming in his brain. He was beginning to make certain connections in his mind
. Item 1
: Susan Bright did not marry Rodolfo García-Cifuentes.
Item 2
: Susan Bright was now in his apartment and had been, she said, for some time.
Item 3
: What was item 3? It was the most important of all, Jack knew, but he wasn't sufficiently recovered to have figured out just what it was. That was why he'd just run a little more cold water, even though it made him want to commit suicide.

Susan was thinking hard, too.

“You're sure it was Rodolfo?” she asked.

“Positive.”

“How did you know about the wedding? Were you invited?”

Jack nodded. “More or less. The bride came by this morning and left a message with the elevator man. I thought it was you.”

“This morning I was in the Hamptons,” said Susan. “Visiting an old family friend—my father's law partner in fact. I needed a little advice of a legal nature.” Her tone discouraged curious probing on the subject, and anyway, Jack was in no condition to solve two sets of mysterious circumstances.