Noah's Turn (8 page)

The next morning was bright and warm and the last melting ice left puddles that reminded Noah of exam time at university, when the girls peeled away coats and sweaters and bared their legs and shoulders. Eighteen-year-old spring tulips, velvet skin petals with a scent that was out of this world for the lucky few who were able to get their faces close enough.

Noah was sitting with his
New York Times
and coffee in the Starbucks below his apartment when The Hob-son Girl approached and stood in front of him until he
looked up. She was holding a coffee and her backpack of schoolbooks and didn't say anything but smiled and indicated with one hand that all the other tables were full and could she sit with him.

“Sit, sit down,” Noah said with what he sensed was a bit too much enthusiasm. He pulled back. “I was just about to leave. I have a meeting. But sit. How are you?”

“Fine.”

Another wonderful, monosyllabic response from the twenty-year-old fawn.

“Have you seen any hideous art lately?”

“No.” She smiled. It was clear that she remembered the gist of their conversation at his cousin's farmhouse.

“Don't you have exams about now?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you ready for them?”

“No.”

“Only the best and the brightest aren't ready.”

“I wouldn't say that's me, and I'm still screwed.”

“I'm sure you're exaggerating.”

“Yeah … well …”

“Do you have any flaws?” Noah wasn't sure why he asked this, but it seemed kind of sexy and he thought it
could be the kind of question a twenty-year-old girl may think was deep.

“Self-obsession.”

“This is good,” Noah perked up. “Very good, very healthy. The ethical by-product of self-obsession is self-awareness.”

“I'm not so sure about that.”

“Don't underestimate this flaw. A person without self-awareness is a person without her own sense of morality. This is a person who is much more likely to accept the morality of a religious or state authority. This is the fascist mentality—give up personal morality to the moral code of the state and allow the individual to ignore personal responsibility. This enables him or her to say, when the state is criminal, ‘I was only taking orders.'” Noah stopped and looked her in the eye. “I'm lecturing and you thought you were on a break.”

She didn't respond but did smile.

Noah wondered how these girls do it, how they remain silent without a hint of impoliteness, how they are able to be who they are without effort or need for decorum. He could only vaguely remember his own monosyllabic self, which had disappeared ages ago along with the muscle tone and flat torso that, at twenty-one,
he maintained without lifting a weight or running a lap. But now he had to be realistic and play the cards he held.

His conversational angle was, like always, tactical. With some women, drinks and a good restaurant worked. With others, like The Hobson Girl, who was intelligent, young and non-linear, it was all in the non sequitur.

“What are
your
flaws?” she asked, surprising Noah with an uncharacteristic interest in
him.

“That's a very long list and another conversation. How is your creative writing class going?”

“Not bad.”

“I thought you were the star.”

“Oh, please.”

There was now something more familiar in her responses. She was, he thought, playfully chiding him. This was the beginning of a certain kind of male-female conflict that laid down the differences between the sexes—a difference that is the core ingredient in sexual tension.

“What sort of stuff are you writing?”

“Short stories.”

“Poetry?”

“Not me. Poetry is beyond me.”

“Do you read it?”

“Some.”

“Who?”

“I don't … different stuff.”

“Name a poem you like.”

“Rilke's ‘The Panther.'”

“You win.”

“What do I win?”

“The grand prize. That is one of the great poems.”

“I didn't write it. I just read it.”

Noah was interested in her judgment. She was certainly smart, though only twenty years old. But it was her lack of maturity that attracted him. She spoke her mind with a direct innocence. She was not yet seasoned with cynicism or certainty. And he was not just interested in her judgment, he wanted to be judged by her. He was realistic enough to know that that was the most attention he could expect.

“Have you ever committed a crime?” he asked as easily as if he were asking for her favourite colour.

“No-ah!” she said with a sharp laugh. The end of her “no” went up an octave with an “ah” which was still heading up at the finish. Was this the “Are you nuts?” version of the word, or had she admonished him using his first name, “No-ah,” in a strikingly intimate way?

“Just wondering,” Noah said, sitting back with his right arm hooked over the back of his chair.

“Have you?”

“Yes. And it was curiously liberating.”

“I don't think I want to hear any more about this.”

“It wasn't as if I killed anyone,” Noah said with a reassuring chuckle.

“That's good. I have to go anyway.”

“Would you like to go for dinner some night?”

“I can't. Sorry.”

“Is it the age difference?”

“I'm seeing someone.” The Hobson Girl stood up, finished off her coffee and picked up her backpack. “It was interesting talking to you, as usual.”

“The same.” Noah smiled as if to say that part of him was in this encounter and part was looking down from above with a sociological curiosity.

He watched the movement of her ass, so perfect and tight in her faded jeans, as she walked out.

Noah wore his only suit to McEwen's book launch. He folded a kerchief into the breast pocket and wore a school
tie. When he dressed up, it was never contemporary or hip, it was “sensible traditional.” Noah knew no other way. When he didn't dress up, he also had little sense of style, and as his financial situation turned grim he began to look more and more like a shambling street person. Coming from old money, his idea of status had nothing to do with outward appearance. They
“had
hats,” as his mother used to say. “They didn't have to
buy
hats.”

McEwen's editor introduced Noah as a TV writer to a crowd of about fifty academic and literary types with glasses of white wine. Noah took the TV reference as a cheap shot and thought he would answer it by pushing the envelope of decorum. After all, this was an open-minded literary crowd.

“I remember my first TV contract on a network series. It was a lot of money for hack work, more than I had ever made. For me, the deal was like the orgasm and the actual writing was like trying to get the woman out of my apartment after I was finished.” Silence. The crowd either didn't get it or got it but chose to stand above the crudeness of reducing writing to a quick fuck. Noah had to dig himself out. “I keep forgetting this isn't about me.” This got a smattering of chuckles, but the sweat started dribbling from his underarms down his sides
under his Oxford-cloth button-down shirt. He pulled out the heavy platitudinous guns: “Let me talk about Patrick and this remarkable book.”

He gave both McEwen and the book an eloquent blowjob, and when he was finished, his earlier foreplay with the truth was forgotten. The applause was loud and appreciative. Noah stepped down to a firm handshake from McEwen and went directly to the bar in search of a stiff drink. He had been a bad dog but after a slap on the nose had behaved himself and was given a pat on the head. Besides cheap white wine, there was one bottle of vodka and one of gin behind the bar. He asked for a quadruple vodka.

“A quadruple?” the bartender asked with some sarcasm.

“Yes, a quadruple. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes, sir, but I only have one bottle of vodka.”

Noah, still wound up from the applause, leaned in and with a low hiss responded, “It's not my fault that these people are a bunch of cheap bastards. I'm an alcoholic and I want a quadruple vodka. My grandfather built this building, so please don't fuck with me.”

He got his quadruple vodka, downed it in three gulps and, staring at the bartender, picked up one of the
pre-poured glasses of wine and turned to mingle with the crowd.

“Terrific speech,” said a grey-haired man in his early sixties with a dowdy, smiling wife in tow.

“Thank you,” Noah responded. “And you're …?”

“John Garland. This is my wife, Morwyn. We're both at Trinity. What TV show are you writing now?”

“Some risky stuff. We don't know if it'll get done in this economic climate. They all want mainstream crap that will get high numbers or the advertisers will run for the hills.”

“What about public broadcasting?” his sexually limp wife asked with a sterile grin. He couldn't stop thinking, Who on earth would
fuck
her?

“The public broadcasters are worse than the private-sector whores. They want numbers but there's no financial reward. They have only one real power and that is to say ‘no.' I have no idea what those fuckers are thinking. They seem to be nothing more than pathetic ass-kissers and cocksuckers. They make me physically ill.”

The dowdy wife's smile was frozen on her grey, lined face as if she had nowhere to put it. It just hung there behind glasses far too big for her shrunken head. She and her husband stared at Noah, mute.

Noah realized that all of his anger toward McEwen and his self-disgust for playing his shill was now spilling out in the faces of this hapless duo. They were there to applaud McEwen's success and they were an easy target.

“But I'm a suicidal alcoholic, so you really shouldn't listen to my opinion,” Noah assured them. “Are you guys birdwatchers?”

“No.”

“Neither am I. Can you excuse me?”

Noah spotted The Hobson Girl and pushed his way through the bodies to get to her.

“It's The Hobson Girl.”

“Hi. I thought your speech was very good.”

“A blowjob is easier and more sociable than genuine critical analysis that requires some thought and may be impolite.” Noah gulped back his wine and momentarily lost his balance. “Oops. Sorry. I think you're very beautiful.”

“I think you're a little drunk, right.”

“A little. I have a problem with open bars.” Noah now realized he was suffering from “Hobson's disease”—the uncontrollable urge to sleep with this perfect young woman and teach her more about sex than she could even imagine. Just then McEwen approached.

“I guess you two know each other.”

“Yes,” Noah said, able to stop there and hold back a witty reply. He realized now how effective the singleword response could be and how seldom he used it.

McEwen turned to The Hobson Girl and said quietly, “Give us a minute.” She smiled and walked off. It was now clear to Noah that they had an intimate shorthand. This was a bad sign. McEwen took Noah's arm and walked him a few feet in the other direction. “She's not who I left Janice for. I think you should look elsewhere. I mean, Christ, girls that age can walk out on you because they meet a guy with a cooler car. She comes on more sophisticated than her years, but the fact is she's twenty years old.”

This all sounded like a classic non-denial denial, and Noah was sure that McEwen was screwing The Hobson Girl and that was that.

“Your speech was terrific,” McEwen said, gripping Noah's forearm.

“Well, the book was great.”

“You think so?”

“Terrific, amazing.”

“I'm sorry they passed on your outline, but the publishing business has become more about business these days than publishing.”

“I guess so.”

“We'll play squash next week.”

“Whenever,” Noah replied flatly. McEwen was too high on wine and his conquest to notice the lack of affect in Noah's answer. He gave Noah a hug and was gone.