Skinny Island (25 page)

"Is that it, Lucian? You don't like people?"

Well, I could play their silly game as well as they. "I don't especially like the people who occupied Gay's rooms, no. Marquis and comtes with rich American wives. But the rooms, at least, are beautiful. Gay believed that rooms have souls even if their owners don't. Or perhaps he imagined the souls the occupants thought they might develop by living in those rooms."

"As Lucian hopes to be saved by surrounding himself with gewgaws," Abby drawled, getting up to display her figure in strolling before this new prey. "He thinks there may be some kind of spiritual osmosis from old prints and vases."

"What do you think I should buy, Mrs. Day?"

"Call me Abby, for goodness' sake. What should you buy? Let me see." She looked him up and down as if she were measuring him for a suit. Then she strode down the gallery to a cabinet of precious metals. "I know what you should buy." She picked up a small lion, flattened to be worn as a pin or buckle. "Scythian gold! Made by some wretched Greek slave for a pirate's hoard. Or maybe for his tomb where he would be buried with cattle and horses and wives, all walled up alive with his jewel-decked corpse!" She crossed the room to hold the lion against Peter's chest. "Yes, that's it. You should have an apartment with dark paneling and nothing on the cabinet shelves but objects of refulgent gold. And they should all be loot, too!"

It irritated me to see how obviously Peter was enjoying her crude flattery, and I tried to end this absurd discussion by taking the Scythian lion from Abby and putting it back on the shelf. But when I turned I found them ready to leave—together.

Things between those two went rapidly, it was an obvious case of symbiosis. Abby wanted Peter's money and power, and he wanted her elegance and style. The sexual game between them was equally obvious: she was playing the haughty Roman princess who yearns to be raped by the barbarian, and he was Attila, titillated by her degrading urges and thrilled by his own brutishness. But it would have been petty on my part to begrudge Abby her little triumph. She had not, after all, had much from our childless marriage, and I should have been glad to see her better herself so long as not at the expense of someone to whom I owed a duty. What possible duty could I owe to Peter Chisholm?

And so when she dropped into the gallery one morning, looking particularly smug, I remarked with heavy joviality: "Well, is he on the hook now? Are you ready for the net?"

Abby seemed actually embarrassed. "Well, I'm beginning to think he really likes me."

"You mean what Tennessee Williams calls a letch or the real thing?"

"Oh, the real thing—what rot you talk, Lucian. I mean I think I can marry him."

"And that's what you want?"

"Well, shouldn't I? I mean, isn't he about the hottest thing in his field?"

"Would that make him the hottest thing in your bed?"

She shrugged. "I haven't been fool enough to give him the chance to show me, anyway. But what the hell, he's not a fag, is he? Wasn't there a first wife and kids?"

"Oh, I don't mean he isn't manly enough for all reasonable women. But are you that, darling? You weren't always."

"That's right; blame me and not your own tepid ardor. But I don't want to get into all that again, for Christ's sake. I want your help, Lucian."

"All right."

She looked at me doubtfully. "Seriously?"

"Of course."

"Well, then, I want you to make him think we've been considering a reconciliation."

I stared. "You mean you want to move back? But you can't! My apartment's too small."

"No, no, that won't be necessary. We'd only have to be seen dining together. Or going to people's houses together. We could let it be known that we'd dropped the idea of getting a divorce."

"And why, pray, would we do this?"

"To fool Peter." She suddenly became excited. "You see, Lucian, Peter never really wants anything unless it belongs to somebody else. He can't be aroused unless he's grabbing it from someone who values it."

"You make him sound charming."

"Never mind that. That's what they call the 'given.' That's where we start. Oh, Lucian, if you wreck this for me, you really will be a bastard. Give me my chance, will you? I promise that once I'm Mrs. Peter Chisholm I'll buy out your whole gallery. And if it's him you're worried about, damn it all, I'll make him a perfectly good wife. As good a wife as he'll be a husband, anyway."

As I stared at the yellow gleam in Abby's now desperate eyes I wondered if this were simply the case of her last chance for a money match or whether she might conceivably have lost what scrap of a heart she possessed to our new tycoon. But in either event she was right. I owed her a boost.

It was not long after my reluctant promise to play this rather ignoble role that Peter came into the shop to check up on me. He did not beat around the bush.

"Are you and Abby thinking of getting together again?"

"I don't suppose I'm required to answer that."

"Well, don't you think you should? How's a guy like me to know if the road is clear?"

"A guy like you? I didn't realize there were guys like you, Peter."

"Me, then. I haven't been able to figure out whether or not this is a 'hostile' takeover."

"You're sure it
is
a takeover?"

"Of course I am. I want Abby. The point is: do you?"

His directness made it hard for me. I had not anticipated that he would play so fair. But a promise is a promise, and I could not give Abby away. "I don't think I care to discuss my relationship with my wife with anyone but her."

"But I'm telling you. I want her!"

"And do you suppose that entitles you to her? Do you think you can just grab anything in this life you want?"

"I trade; I don't grab," he corrected me. "I give full value for what I get. That's what life is, trading or fighting. Take your pick. It's the soldiers, not the merchants, who cause all the trouble."

"Why do you look at me like that? Aren't I a merchant, too? I certainly don't feel like a soldier."

"Any more than you act like one!" Peter exclaimed with a rude laugh. "Yes, I suppose you are a petty trader—in dolls' houses. Your trouble is that, coming from a so-called old family, you inherit the soldier's silly code of honor, which is nothing but a kind of etiquette between massacres. But honor or no honor, I repeat: do you want Abby?"

"Do you care whether or not I do?"

He looked at me hard for a moment and then shrugged. "No, I don't suppose I do. Now."

"Well, if you think I'm going to sign her over to you by a conveyance, you are quite wrong."

I was not very happy at how I had conducted myself, but Abby seemed content. Not long after this her lawyer called me up to arrange for a friendly divorce; it appeared that the mighty Chisholm was actually committing himself. There seemed to be only one hitch; his insistence on a prenuptial agreement. Abby seemed to regard this as an infringement of her fundamental rights as a free white American fortune hunter.

"But isn't he settling something on you?" I asked when she burst into my gallery to complain about it.

"A measly hundred G's! And do you know what he wants in return? He wants me to waive every right I have to every penny of his fortune! Even on a divorce. Even on his death!"

"He could still provide for you in his will."

"But how can I count on that? Did you ever hear anything so chintzy?" She shrugged angrily when she saw my smile. "Oh, I know. You think I have a hell of a nerve to object, considering it's the money I'm after. But that's all a matter of motive. That will soon be in the past. This is a marriage we're talking about, which will soon be the
present.
A man has certain obligations in a marriage."

"I thought it was divorce we were really talking about."

"Well, that's part of marriage, isn't it? Suppose five years from now, he decides to kick me out. How am I supposed to support myself?"

"On your settlement, I presume."

"But I can't live on
that.
And I'll be older. It may not be that easy to snag another guy."

"Oh, I'll be around."

"Thanks! I've got to have better security than that. Seriously, Lucian, what should I do?"

"Sign the agreement. It won't stand up in a court of law. You'll be the helpless little girl who knew nothing about business and was so much in love she signed what the big bad wolf put before her. Why, it's a pushover! Chisholm won't have a chance with a jury."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Well, I can't guarantee it, but I'd give strong odds. Anyway, one thing
you
can be sure of is that you'll scare him off for good if you refuse to sign."

"Can't I make a scene about its not being a thing he can ask of a lady?"

"Haven't you done that already?"

"I suppose so." Poor Abby seemed to droop. "I guess you're right. There's no other way to play it. And I thought the law favored us poor girls. I should have known it was made by chauvinist pigs."

Once Abby had agreed to sign the prenuptial agreement, it was only a matter of days before she became Mrs. Peter Chisholm. In the year that followed I did not see much of the newlyweds, who moved in circles more exclusively financial than mine, but I followed the course of their social life in the public prints. Abby received wide coverage, and her photograph showed her among the high and mighty in the world of the charity ball. With her looks and social energy and Peter's dynamism and gold, they became almost overnight one of the most fashionable couples in town.

My first indication of trouble even in that paradise came one night at a dinner party when I was seated by Abby. It chastened my ego to realize that our hostess did not even know that I had been married to her. Abby, in her usual way, picked me up just where she had left me.

"You're looking for Peter," she observed as my eye ran over the room. "He's not here. He's working. He gave out at the last moment. He does that whenever he likes."

"Well, at least he works to good purpose. When I worked at night it wasn't to provide you with ruby bracelets like that one."

"But he's always grinding. I thought we'd be able to travel and do all sorts of things. He used to sneer at people who talked about how hard they worked. He said it was a rotten American habit."

"Talking about it. Not doing it."

"Well, he took me in completely. I thought he was a genius who could pull off a deal by noon and then take me to the races. That was the way
he
talked, anyway. And now what do I find? That he works like a nigger!"

A month later, when I met Abby at a cocktail party, again without her husband, she looked even more plainly discontented.

"Do you know what he's just done? He's bought a château in the Dordogne! Without so much as a pretty please."

"How charming! I'd love to have a château in the Dordogne."

"But it's nowhere near anyone that I know. I'm not going to hole up in some French province every summer. Besides, it's hot as Hades there."

"What does he say when you tell him that?"

"He says I don't have to come. He consults me in nothing! The apartment is run by his butler. The meals are all ordered and prepared by the cook. He draws up the dinner lists. I might be a guest in my own home!"

"But doesn't he let you buy what you want?"

"Oh, he gives me money. That's not a problem. He's even offered to buy the floor beneath us so I could furnish that the way I wanted. But
his
things,
his
life can't be touched. It's crazy. No husband's like that. No American husband, anyway."

"My advice to you, Abby, is to settle down and accept it. You've got what you were after. Don't rock the boat."

But Abby was utterly incapable of such resolution. She suffered from a sense of personal outrage over Peter's refusal to give her a seat on the board of directors of his existence. She beat her fists in vain against the adamantine wall of his will. I had not realized how strongly she felt about what she called "principles." She seemed to feel that she was letting down her whole sex in allowing Peter to dominate the home as well as the office. If need be, she might even prove a martyr!

I realized how serious things were when she asked me to lunch at her apartment, and arriving, found there were just the two of us. Abby's tone was clipped and hard.

"I thought as my 'ex' you'd be interested to know that I'm planning to move Peter into your category. But he is certainly being very difficult. He won't give me a penny! Before I talk to my lawyers I want to ask your opinion. Didn't you once tell me that prenuptial agreement would never stand up in court?"

"Not if you have grounds for divorce."

"But it seems I haven't! That's what Peter blandly assures me. Nor will he give me any. He looks at me in that maddening way, and says, 'Lady, face it. You're stuck.'"

"Could I have a look at that agreement?"

We went into the library to see the papers, and I admit that I was appalled to see what she had signed. There were two large bound volumes of typed inventory listing not only every stock, bond, mortgage or other security that Peter owned, but every partnership or joint venture in which he had a minor interest, and every item of tangible personal property down to his last pair of cuff links. And Abby had affixed her initials to every single page! The agreement itself was equally detailed, containing lengthy descriptions of Peter's broad commercial ambitions and promises on Abby's part not to look beyond what he would provide for her in his will, even should his estate exceed a hundred million dollars.

"But this is ridiculous!" I exclaimed. "Even if you can't get a settlement, you're still entitled to alimony."

"How do I get alimony if I can't get a divorce? Or even a separation? I have to have grounds, Lucian!"

"But I thought any grounds would do these days. I thought if your husband trumped your ace in bridge it was cruel and inhuman treatment."

"But the bastard won't trump my ace! He's a goddamn model husband!"

It was only a week after this—for everything went rapidly where Peter was concerned—that he came to see me at my gallery. "My" gallery! I was at once to be disillusioned about that.