Jack and Susan in 1953 (9 page)

The buzzer sounded again.

Jack pulled himself up off Woolf, and moved much more slowly this time. He had no idea who might be on the other side of the door.

It was Rodolfo García-Cifuentes.

Invalids, Jack thought, should not be subjected to unpleasant surprises, which retarded their healing.

Jack said nothing. Did not smile. Did not invite the man inside. There was something about this visit that offended Jack deeply. He tried to think of the last time anyone had showed up uninvited at the door of his apartment. Never.

“I was passing,” said Rodolfo, “and I dropped by to see if you were well.”

“I've got bruises all over my damned body,” said Jack.

“May I come inside?” said Rodolfo, gently pushing away Woolf, who was industriously licking his brushed-leather shoes. The man dressed perfectly, even on a Saturday afternoon. Wearing an oatmeal-colored sport jacket and light brown flannel trousers. His oxford shirt was perfectly complemented by a brown silk tie. The ideal outfit to intimidate a rival in love. In his tousled hair, bare feet, wrinkled shirt, and his too-short trousers, Jack felt grubby.

“Have you recovered yourself?” Rodolfo asked, dropping into a chair with perfect ease, without invitation.

“I'll be fine,” said Jack, taking a seat on the couch. “Someday.”

Rodolfo smiled. The smile seemed genuine. “I am glad you were not injured.”

“Lucky for me—and lucky for you as well,” Jack agreed. “Foreign nationals running down native pedestrians is not looked on with favor here.” He considered offering Rodolfo something to drink, then decided against it.

Rodolfo smiled again. “Shoo!” he said quietly to Woolf, now licking the cuffs of his trousers.

Jack remained offended by Rodolfo's presence. Whatever his motive in coming was, it was sure to be underhanded, sneaky, unworthy of a man. Jack had decided that one thing about Rodolfo was effeminate: not his appearance, not his carriage, or mannerisms, but his mode of treachery. Jack didn't know what Rodolfo intended to say or do this Saturday afternoon, but he was certain this visit constituted some sort of attack. He may not have had his arm raised high above his head, and there was no knife visible, but it was an attack all the same.

“Susan was very worried,” said Rodolfo after a moment of silence.

“She telephoned a while ago.”

“Did she?”

“Yes,” said Jack.

“She said she intended to. I'm glad she did,” said Rodolfo. “She also said you two were once in love.”

Jack remained silent, but he could feel what must have been an entire pint of blood surging up out of his heart to suffuse his face with color. Rodolfo smiled. The smile enraged Jack. But he still refrained from speech. The last time he'd gotten into one of these bewildering conversations, he'd asked questions, and he'd ended up engaged—or, rather, engaged to be engaged.

“I am glad,” said Rodolfo. Still Jack did not speak. He tried to will the blush to fade. Blood began to flow downward through the veins in his neck. He was beginning to look less like a beet, he hoped. “I do not like to be the first man that a woman has loved,” Rodolfo went on. “A woman, when she loves for the first time, does not see clearly love. She does not love, she only imagines that it would be sweet to be in love. It is not she who loves, it is her heart. But the second time…”

The sensation was peculiar—to sit in his own apartment, attending to a Cuban making a disquisition on love. It made Jack squirm. “The second time?” Jack prompted, and then wished he hadn't.

“…the second time, a woman loves not only with her heart. But with her soul. And with her mind. It is the second love that is the stronger.”

“Would you like a drink?” Jack said, getting up and heading for the kitchen.

“No thank you,” said Rodolfo politely.

Good
, thought Jack
, that leaves more for me
. He poured three fingers of scotch into a glass.

Jack didn't talk about such things as love, neither aloud nor silently to himself. That was why it had taken him so long to realize that he still cared for Susan Bright. That was why he had gotten so entangled with Libby Mather. And now here was Rodolfo, employing love as a theme, and Jack had no idea how to respond.

“Miss Mather is very beautiful,” said Rodolfo, when Jack had returned to the couch.

“Pardon?” asked Jack in surprise.

“Susan says she is also very rich.” Jack didn't answer. “Very beautiful and very rich. Not all men are so fortunate as to marry a woman like that.”

Rodolfo smiled blandly at Jack.

The blood that had been draining slowly through his neck suddenly reversed direction and sped back up into Jack's face. More came up from his heart. He feared his feet would go numb again because it felt like so much blood was rushing upward to fill his cheeks and make his forehead bead with sweat. Sodium pentathal. Lie detectors. The rack and screw. None of those could get the truth out of Jack Beaumont as quickly and as undeniably as his own blushes.

If Rodolfo had been guessing, then he now knew that he had guessed correctly. Jack felt cornered in his own house—as if he'd asked the Spanish Inquisition over for tea or opened the door to Hitler's storm troops.

It also occurred to Jack that Libby, despite her promise of discretion, might have placed an engagement announcement in the paper. The morning
Times
lay on the floor next to the couch. Jack stifled an urge to leap up, grab the paper, and search out the appropriate page to see if his name were publicly linked there with that of Elizabeth St. John Mather.

Instead, he took another swallow of scotch.

“It is an interesting question,” said Rodolfo.

“What question?” said Jack.

“Who gets to the altar first.” Rodolfo smiled. A smile that said,
I am a romantic Cuban, and my outlook on life is essentially romantic. You are a reserved American man, and do not show your feelings. Ah, well! At heart, you're no less romantic than I…

Jack didn't buy a bit of it. Rodolfo had come here on a fishing expedition, to find out whether Jack still cared for Susan and to find out if Jack had any intentions toward Libby. By Jack's blushes, Rodolfo had got answers to both questions: Jack was still in love with Susan—whether or not he admitted it to himself. And Jack stood in danger of being married to Libby Mather—whether or not the actual proposal had been made.

Jack blushed again, for himself, and the contradiction in those two statements.

Then Rodolfo said: “I am glad that things have worked out this way.”

“What way?” said Jack.

“That you are in love with Miss Mather as I am in love with Susan. So easy. So convenient. We do not step on one another's feet.”

Jack said nothing.

“Love…” began Rodolfo, and then shrugged with a smile.

“Love what?” said Jack.

“Love will make a man do what he would not do under another circumstance. Not here, perhaps, but in Cuba,” said Rodolfo, “a man may die for love.”

“Is that so?” said Jack, idly noticing that his drink was more than half gone already. He pondered the question of whether he should ask Rodolfo to leave politely or ask him to leave in some other fashion—with a threat of instant death if he did not, for instance.

“A Cuban man may even kill for love,” Rodolfo added blandly.

That
was definitely a threat.

Good
, thought Jack,
that's something I can deal with
. But Jack made no immediate response. He wanted to hear how far the Cuban would go.

No further, as it turned out.

“I must leave, and allow you to recover,” said Rodolfo. “I would not like Miss Mather to think that I had delivered up her bridegroom as damaged goods.”

Jack smiled a smile he hoped was as false as Rodolfo's. Jack saw Rodolfo to the door, and had to grab Woolf by the scruff of the neck to keep him from blithely following after Susan Bright's Cuban suitor.

S
USAN BRIGHT WORKED every Sunday morning, and sometimes evenings as well, quite alone in her small apartment, translating Russian pamphlets, documents, and letters supplied her by the U.S. Army. Even at the best, this was tedious work, but Susan was quick at it and accurate, and so the army used her even though it had a flock of its own specialists. Money earned this way bought Susan hats, the prices of which were in reverse proportion to their size—and hats this year were very small indeed. The work kept her atomizer filled with Duchess of York perfume. And once every two weeks, the translations paid for a trip to the hairdresser's.

She'd already made an appointment for late Saturday afternoon at Monsieur Marcel's—a new shop on East Forty-eighth Street—when Rodolfo asked her to accompany him on Saturday night to dinner at the Cuban consulate. Susan had been to the United Nations and had seen diplomats, but she had never sat down to table with a consul. She decided that she would ask Marcel to cut her hair in whatever was the newest fashion, no matter how peculiar it looked.

She cut her last tour short so that she could get to her appointment on time. The group of fifteen—from the Midwest, mostly—never realized that they had missed two large galleries of Florence and Siena…

Marcel's, from the street, consisted of a tiny door and a tiny window with two bewigged wooden heads staring sullenly out—as if the blades they were advertising were guillotines rather than scissors. Directly inside the door was a small reception area occupied by a red-haired receptionist, a young dragon-in-the-making, who was a martinet about tardiness and
never
let in anyone who hadn't had an appointment. It was rumored that the dragon was in frantic and useless love with Monsieur Marcel.

The layout of Marcel's shop was distinctive; it got bigger as you went farther back. And the place went so far back, that by the time you ever got to see Monsieur Marcel himself you had the feeling you'd already crossed Forty-seventh Street and were burrowing on toward Forty-sixth. First there came two long corridors of changing rooms, where smiling women with cold hands took your coat or your jacket and whatever else you were carrying, gave you a check for them, and then helped you into a large, loose, green smock with large green buttons down the front. (It had been recently reported that these green smocks had now been seen at Palm Beach, as quaint cover-ups for bathing costumes.) The corridors widened into a large room filled with sinks and hair dryers and the sound of rushing water and the thunder of blowing hot air and women talking, talking, talking. A dozen ill-paid female assistants with pruned fingers massaged the scalps of a dozen women in smocks while a dozen more women sat beneath dryers reading about Mamie Eisenhower's plans for redecorating the White House and other such articles of absorbing interest.

Then finally, behind absurdly large double doors of oak, was the inner sanctum of Monsieur Marcel himself. A half-dozen tall raised comfortable chairs were arranged in a circle, facing outward—like some sitting-room Stonehenge—and a half-dozen women, staring at themselves in the mirror-lined walls, were all taken care of simultaneously by Monsieur Marcel and a single assistant. (Monsieur Marcel was a tall man and didn't like to stoop when he was designing. Designing was Monsieur Marcel's own word for what he did.) Monsieur Marcel wore black trousers, a white shirt, and a black silk tie. His skin was very white, and his hair was black and slick. Monsieur Marcel looked like a black-and-white photograph. Monsieur Marcel's assistant looked as if he might be a younger, adoring brother, who tried his best to look and act exactly like his elder sibling. The assistant had red cheeks, however, which gave him an air of health, but spoiled the resemblance.

Susan arrived half an hour before her appointed time. The dragon eyed her suspiciously, checked the appointment book twice, answered the telephone and tried to make it appear that Susan herself was the object of the conversation, and finally allowed Susan to pass through the narrow door behind her desk.

Susan smiled at the young woman who helped her into a smock, picked out a recent issue of
Collier's
, and then stepped into the shampooing room.

The place was always a madhouse of laughter, chattering voices, and running water. The odor of perfume, shampoo, and lotions seemed to take up what little space wasn't occupied by the noise.

On the worst days, a shampoo, cut, and set could take five hours. Four of that was waiting. One girl employed by Monsieur Marcel did nothing but make coffee all day long.

Susan read all the articles in
Collier's
, then picked up a discarded copy of
Vogue
, paying particular attention to the ads. She asked herself what she would buy if she had a million dollars to spare. Not much.

Only two and a half hours of waiting. Not bad.

Her hair was shampooed by a girl whose nails were too long and who went after Susan's scalp very much after the fashion of a cat attacking a scratching post. With a light green towel turbaned on her head, she was led into the inner sanctum. There she waited another ten minutes for an empty chair.