The Best Revenge (16 page)

Stimson chuckled.

“Balls. Real balls. You should have been in oil.”

“Thanks.” I knew he meant it as a compliment.

He'd given some kind of signal I hadn't seen, for the limo pulled up quickly and the driver was out of his seat and holding open the curbside rear door for Stimson.

“Drop you anywhere?” he asked.

“Thanks,” I said. “I want to get back to the theater. Will you be thinking it over?”

“Have. Great for cultural improvement, this new one of yours. I don't need the deduction with all the tax credits flowing from new equipment. Think I'll skip, but thanks sincerely for asking me. Enjoyed that bit in the theater. I'll come see the show.”

I felt as if the plug had been pulled on the Atlantic Ocean. I stood in the dry waste, drained. “Phone for house seats,” I said. “Any time.”

Stimson lowered the electric window. “I'll get mine from the brokers,” he said. “Or from a friend who's read the reviews. Depends, doesn't it?”

My last chance at putting an investor's money into the partnership pulled away. I watched the limo like hope, making its way to Park Avenue, then turning, lost to sight. Blindly I found my way back to the rehearsal, sat in the dark, not really hearing the lines, waiting for Louie's voice. I was twelve years old, and getting ready for my first magic show for strangers. Louie, watching me rehearse in front of the mirror, said,
The next thing you know you'll be pulling rabbits out of hats.

All my life, Pop. That's why the hat is empty.

12

Jane Riller

The day Harrison Stimson turned the faucet off, Ben came home late, his brain boiling. He put his attaché down. It fell over on its side. He left it there. When he hung his topcoat it slipped off the hanger to the closet bottom, over the children's boots. He didn't pick it up. I didn't need a news report to gauge the weather in his head.

I have been credited with intelligence, courtesy, reserve, poise, calm, control, and understanding, when my only act was to keep my mouth shut. Jews conceal their vulnerabilities not by silence but by talking too much. Why is my WASP tongue tied? Father had said, Jane, the cat got your mother's tongue for life. Keep yours. A man in trouble needs a woman's talk.

Silence is safe.

Not this evening.

“Ben,” I said at risk, “I feel trapped in Manhattan. Let's drive up to Westchester, maybe dinner at the railroad-car restaurant in Valhalla. Nora will feed the kids. Say yes.”

His skulk declared war on everybody.

I came close enough to run my forefinger around the periphery of his ear. “Please?”

He pulled away and headed for the closet, picking his topcoat off the floor. “Why not? Maybe a truck will hit us broadside.”

“No trucks on the Bronx River Parkway. Change your mind?”

“I'm not taking my coat off again. Come on.”

On the parkway I watched Ben, his gaze forward, both hands on the wheel, looking for an accident.

There was a time when we first started going together that his left hand on the wheel was enough. His right would be on my thigh, and I would feel the vibration of the car in my pubic bone. The ultimate destination of those rides was almost always sex, after dinner, after a Westport opening, or instead of either. On a high of success Ben could be turned on by a whisper.

I put my left hand on his thigh.

“What are you doing, Jane?”

“Remembering.”

“Like what?”

“Playing contortionist in the back seat.”

The first hint of a smile.

“That light's red,” I said quickly.

Ben braked hard. “I saw it,” he lied.

I turned, expecting a police car behind us.

“Want to tell me what happened today?”

“Lots.”

“Like?”

“Lots of unreturned phone calls.”

“And?”

I was famous with Ben for my “ands.” You'd have made a terrific psychoanalyst, he once said. You say one word and expect a torrent in return.

The flesh between Ben's brows furrowed.

“Are we in as much trouble as I think we are?” I asked.

He started to say something, stopped.

We were a submarine running silent all the way to the village of Valhalla. Seated in the restaurant, we ordered. Then Ben said, “I've got twenty-two percent of the units sold.”

“That's the same as three weeks ago.”

“Yep.”

I looked for the enthusiasm and energy in his eyes that always carried him from day one to opening night. What I saw were eyes looking down at food in a plate, picking it apart with knife and fork.

“You're not eating.”

“I guess not.” He looked up, his eyes awash.

“Could you—”

“Could I what?”

“Bring yourself to close the show.”

“Before it opens? I've never learned to walk backward.”

“Only the cast will know.”

“The pigs will wallow in it. The whole fucking world will watch me crash.”

Driving home, hurtling through the dark, I could hear his heart. Or was it mine?

“Ben,” I said, “are you doing a Louie?”

“A what?”

“Is
Revenge
a way of screwing up your life Louie-style?”

He looked at me as if I were a hated stranger.

I said, “Please keep your eyes on the road.”

The light ahead was yellow, then red. Ben drove right through. I glanced behind us. We had the parkway to ourselves.

“Let's be practical,” I said. “Stop rehearsals, pay off the set builder for work done, abort the production, cut your losses. It isn't a matter of face. It's common sense. Slow down.”

He floored the accelerator.

I said, “Can't we talk this out?”

“Louie was right.”

“Right about what?”

“He said if you marry a
shiksa
,
it'll be like living in enemy territory the rest of your life.”

“Stop hurting yourself, Ben.”

“Everybody else is having a go at me, why shouldn't I?”

*

My father is still living, but less and less. Judge James Charles Endicott Jackson, his “appellations” as he called his full name, that tall, lean, hollow-cheeked man who had made a religion of the law, preached from the head of our dining-room table each evening of my young life.

On the day that I announced I would be leaving the nest in Quincy for what my father called the buzz-factory of Barnard and Columbia, he delivered a warning. “Those New York City people talk with their hands.”

I knew what he meant.

When they stood next to their car at the bus station, for a moment I thought my mother was going to leave the Judge's side long enough to come forward and say a few words more than good-bye. But it was only the wind ruffling her dress, not a movement of her body that I saw. I admired her as one would a pioneer farm woman, someone who had lived a life no longer possible. What great and unacknowledged actresses the women of my mother's background were; to avoid shattering the fragile innocence of their spouses, some of them simulated not only their orgasms but their entire lives.

My father, who consecrated my graduation with three thousand dollars in the hope, he said, that I would use it for traveling in Europe—was it to spite him that I went to Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, countries full of people who talked with their hands? I suppose I discovered my sexuality on that trip because some of the idiotic things men say to get you into bed sound better in a foreign language. As for love, that took a long time coming.

*

At home, we went to bed.

He lay on his side, I on mine.

It was too late at night for pinwheeling talk.

I could hear the faint whirring of the digital clock on the bookcase across the room. We need firm sounds. At home in Quincy, the grandfather clock in the hallway sounded chimes every quarter hour to remind us, if awake, that we were losing life.

I must have dozed. The bed beside me was empty. I flicked the bed light on, afraid I'd trip in the dark.

The stairway down was ablaze with light.

The kitchen was dark.

The living room was dark.

“Ben?”

I heard breathing.

I turned on the overhead light.

“For Christ's sake, turn that thing off, it's blinding me.”

Ben was sitting on the blue couch, holding a tumblerful of ice and booze. I turned the rheostat so that the room was barely lit.

“What's that I smell?” I said.

“I smoked a cigarette.”

“You don't smoke.”

“Now I do. You think I have no business being in the theater anymore?”

“That's not what I said. I said the theater is not a business anymore.”

Ben jiggled the ice in his glass.

“I am not the enemy, Ben, come upstairs.”

“What am I supposed to do at this stage of my life, package air? I'm entitled to do a play I know is good.”

“
Of course.”

“I mean without having to worry about where every nickel is coming from. Besides.”

“Besides what?”

“Stimson wouldn't miss the money for a second.”

Ben the hunter is waiting in a blind for me to let a thought fly so he can shoot it down.

“What are your choices?” I asked. “Have you tried London? Your track record—”

“How the fuck do I turn that into money? I've turned over every rock I know except…”

“Except what?”

“Manucci. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm in the same damn trap my father was in. Maybe I ought to take off like Gauguin.”

I went to sit beside him. I took his hand. “I love the feel of your skin,” I said. “All of it.”

“Seducing me won't do either of us a bit of good.”

Ben gave me back my hand, saying, “Nobody ever welshed on your father, did they?”

“Ben, this isn't finding a solution,” I said.

“When the crash hit, every last son of a bitch who owed my father money welshed.”

“Ben,” I said, “you love your father more than anyone I ever met. He must have done something right.”

“The drapes were taken off the wall by the sheriff's people.”

“You told me.”

“My cowboy suit was taken to satisfy a claim.”

“You told me.”

Ben stood up, his eyeballs red. “I was the only white kid in first grade when we moved to Harlem. It was like jumping out of a plane and finding out your father forgot to hook up your parachute.”

“Come up to bed, Ben. Please?”

He was looking at the carpet.

“I know how Louie felt,” he said, “when the ceiling crashed.”

“Remember how long it took—?”

“To what?”

“To finance
Truckline
.”

“I should have closed
Truckline.
In rehearsal.”

I tried to touch him, but he pulled away.

“Don't start giving me my type of hope,” he said. “You can't bullshit a bullshitter. There are two choices. Abandon the play or…”

“What?”

“Manucci.”

“Ben, you've got a solid history to trade on.”

“I've haven't got a fucking thing to trade on. I'm finished.” He flung his arm wide, spraying drink and cubes across fifteen feet of room.

I went to get paper towels for the carpet. When I knelt, working at the tufts, he knelt beside me. I tried not to turn, scrubbing away. But I could hear. Ben was sobbing.

The hell with the carpet. I cradled his head. After a while I thought we'd fall asleep that way. The children would find us in the morning. “Come upstairs,” I said.

On the bed, Ben lay on his side, I on mine, an estuary of gloom between us.

*

I was a very little girl when we had our chimney fire in Quincy. I dreaded another more than my father's wrath. You could retreat from wrath, go up to your room, hide. You couldn't hide from a chimney fire, you had to deal with it. For fires of the heart, we had New England remedies: discretion, tact, propriety, appropriateness, silence. I was schooled to bar visible emotion at any cost.

Was that why I fled New England, my genes crying out for someone like Ben, whose people are less concerned about chimneys than storms in their brains. The thrust of their lives was to overreach themselves. My father would have said to the brothers Wright, Aren't the feet God gave you good enough? I suppose Louie would have said,
I love you. Fly!
Even in death Louie talks to us more than my father who is still alive.

The thought froze in my mind like a thief caught in a flashlight's beam: What must it have been like to have been made love to by Louie? Was I imagining it from Zipporah's point of view, or was that just camouflage for my own curious, suddenly windmilling mind feeling his hands on my skin, his tongue on my skin, his illicit kiss?

*

Sometime, in the drowning moments between sleep and waking, I felt the interruption of unexpectedness, the touch of one finger at the back of my neck descending tantalizingly down the length of my spine. The finger turned into a familiar hand. Then at the base of my neck it was lips, a flickering snake's tongue between them, traveling the same route slowly. I tried to turn but now two hands were on my shoulders keeping me from interrupting the traveling tongue. I twisted toward him as his fingers, all erotic members now, cruised my inner thigh. His lips exploring my ear found my lips until breath demanded breaking, and he was at my left breast nipple, taut, the right crying out jealously, and then his mouth descended at last to the other eager avid lips. How restive, fretful, anxious, and zealous ardor is. I pulled Ben's body up to split me, the rocking horse rocking as in the surge of the surf, to the apogee, cresting, splaying, sweaty, trembling, exhausted, sailing free.