Wherever There Is Light (22 page)

Simon was waiting for her in the entranceway. “Hey there, Kenni-Ann.”

“Simon, you won't believe it. I have an agent.”

“Way to go, girl. Tell me about it.”

As they went through the labyrinth of rooms with knots of people gathered before the bursts of colors on the walls, Kendall quietly recounted her discussion with Léo, omitting the plans for her show. Simon would want to attend and that could get complicated with Julian there.

“If you're too famous for the
Courier
, I'll miss seeing you.”

Kendall grinned. “Not too famous—yet.”

They came to the posters, which extolled the mundane sweetness of American life that boys, if summoned to war across the seas, would willingly die to defend: a small-town July Fourth parade; children sleigh-riding down a hill; a collie herding cows into a pasture.

Simon let out a low, harsh laugh. “How come there're no colored folks picking cotton? Or riding in the back of a bus?”

They were standing side by side, Kendall's shoulder touching his arm.

“Kenni-Ann, these posters remind me of Benton. They've got the same exaggerated realism, don't they?”

“Those three do.”

“Benton must have been a fan of cartoons.”

“He used to be a cartoonist.” Kendall liked that Simon had seen that, liked it enough that she was uncomfortable again, as if she had betrayed Julian.

After twenty minutes, they went outside and started walking, neither of them speaking until they reached the corner of Fifty-Third and Fifth, where Simon turned to her, his eyes full of the same hunger that Kendall often saw in Julian's gaze.

“Drink?” he asked.

“Simon, I'm involved with someone.”

“The more the merrier.”

“I'm a one-at-a-time girl.”

“Suppose I'll have to wait for you to write me in on your dance card.” He tipped his newsboy cap. “See you around.”

Simon strolled up through the shoppers. Kendall admired his languorous stride and imagined wrapping herself around him as he moved inside her, and the image, so sudden and shocking, left her breathless.

When Kendall got off the subway at West Fourth, the image was still flashing behind her eyes—disconcerting, to be sure, but suffusing her with warmth. During her drunken conversation with Christina at the Brevoort, Kendall had mentioned that she felt distant from Julian, and Christina had commented that Julian was too prosaic a partner for an artist. Kendall had dismissed her observation. She was the one who was changing. Maybe it was spending those months in Harlem and feeling comfortable in her skin for the first time in her life. Or maybe it was her growing confidence as a photographer and that, contrary to her mother's prediction, she realized that she could carve out a career for herself. Yet even though Kendall resented that Julian wasn't more like Simon, imagining living without him was unbearable and another cause of her resentment, as if Julian had trapped her by entwining himself around her heart like Brig and Christina's chain.

The Friday evening crowd was out on MacDougal, and as Kendall went past the Minetta Tavern, the image of her and Simon was gone, but the warmth had become a tension at the center of her, and upon entering her apartment and taking off her coat, she was glad Julian was on the sofa reading the
Sun
.

“How was the gallery?” he asked.

“Wonderful.” She bent to kiss him and went into the bathroom.

Julian was folding up the newspaper when Kendall appeared in just her pear-colored cashmere sweater.

“You can't get into a restaurant without shoes,” he said with a straight face.

Kendall chuckled, but in short order she had tugged off his trousers and boxers, and pushed him back, touching him, straddling him, guiding him into her, closing her eyes, and moving, wanting the tension to go away, if only the tension would go away, move move move, chasing oblivion, the serenity of oblivion, the tension winding her up, tight, tighter, tighter still, and Kendall came with such a loud, piercing cry that she scared herself.

La petite mort
, the French call it, the little death, and the only trouble was that when Kendall opened her eyes, nothing had changed.

A
t lunchtime, 21 was as jammed and noisy as a ball game. Wild Bill Donovan, his gray-flannel-covered elbows on the table, said, “Longy says you're the guy that can buy and sell foreign currency and then make it disappear and appear again.”

Julian chewed an olive from his martini. Donovan was in his late fifties, a burly corporate lawyer with distinguished white hair and jowls.

“Longy forgot to mention you're a mute.”

Not that Julian didn't trust Donovan, but during Prohibition he'd been a US attorney chasing bootleggers. He'd come out of World War I with the Medal of Honor, and last year Hollywood had made him extra famous with a movie about his unit,
The Fighting 69th
, with James Cagney as a coward punk who becomes a hero, Pat O'Brien as the wise chaplain, and George Brent as Wild Bill himself. Abe knew Donovan from the city and, since it couldn't hurt having friends in high places, had shoveled some cash at him when Wild Bill had run for governor of New York. Donovan had lost the election, but lately he'd been working for FDR, speaking on the radio about the necessity of the country's readying itself for war. Abe said that the president had knighted Donovan the Coordinator of Information, an Ivy League euphemism for chief spy, and Donovan had asked Abe to recommend someone for “a project.”

Donovan said, “I'm not J. Edgar Hoover, you got it?”

“I've done some banking abroad.” Julian finished his martini. Donovan could've been Eddie's older, better-educated brother—a tough Irish prick with a law degree. “Hedinger and Company. It's off the beaten path—in Lucerne, not Geneva. Money goes in with them, it can pop out anywhere you want.”

“I hear your German's fluent.”

“This a job interview?”

“It's not like I can have you fill out an application. If you sign on, I'll give you the oath myself. How's your French?”

“Nobody's gonna confuse me with Maurice Chevalier.”

Donovan rattled the ice cubes in his tumbler of Scotch. “Mr. and Mrs. America might be acting like Hitler gobbling up Europe has nothing to do with them, but we're gonna get in this fight. And once we are, you can be drafted or volunteer. Why not do something important? We'll need somebody in Switzerland to funnel funds and weapons to partisans. Could you think about being that guy?”

“I could.” Julian didn't consider himself a cloak-and-dagger type, but he was able to keep a secret and, despite the feds poring over his tax returns, they had failed to sniff out the bulk of his fortune, which was resting comfortably in bank vaults and safety-deposit boxes in Florida, the Bahamas, Canada, Ireland, and Switzerland.

Donovan gave Julian his card. “You need motivation, I'll tell you the same I told Longy. Those Nazi shitbirds are shooting every Jew they get their hands on.”

With his Borsalino low on his head and the collar of his polo coat shielding his neck from the wind, Julian stood outside the granite edifice of Tiffany & Co. and looked at the engagement rings in a window. Donovan was right. War was coming, and Julian wanted to do his share, but it hurt when he thought about leaving Kendall, and he was determined to marry her before shipping out. That way, if he came home in a casket, she could inherit his legitimate dough and assets.

Except he couldn't say whether she'd marry him.

Not that anything was exactly wrong, but Kendall still kept him at a barely perceptible distance, drawing a line that she wouldn't allow him to cross, as if declaring that he was her companion and lover, but this was as far as they would go.

Maybe he was misreading her. Sure, that was probably it. He'd talk to her about it, straighten things out. Then he would buy her the ring.

Y
ou like it?” Kendall asked, pirouetting before the full-length mirror on her closet door.

“I do.” Julian was on the bed with dresses scattered around him. It was the evening before her exhibit, and this was the ninth dress she had previewed.

“You don't like it.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No, you don't.” Reaching onto a shelf in the closet, she retrieved a cardboard box from Wanamaker's department store and set it on the bed.

Julian asked, “Is that new?”

“Hardly. My grandfather bought it for me my senior year of high school. He was on a civic committee with some of the Wanamakers. They were helpful to Negroes in Philadelphia, and they must've been friendly with Ezekiel, because he was able to take me shopping at the store in the morning before it opened.”

“Your mother didn't take you shopping?”

“She was about as interested in my clothing as she is in my photography. I mailed her a catalog of the exhibit two weeks ago, and when I called to see if she got it, she thanked me for sending it and said she was too busy with
work
to make the opening.”

Kendall slipped into the dress and inspected herself in the mirror. To Julian, the sheath of shimmering black velvet was as exquisite in its simplicity and lushness as her photographs. And suddenly, he was choked up, recalling his conversation with Donovan and looking at Kendall with her hair back in waves of thick, dark silk and her skin the color of honey and her hazel eyes more green than brown in the light from the brass and crystal sconces. Julian tried to fix a snapshot of her in his memory and wondered how, when war came, he'd ever muster the strength to leave her.

“Something wrong?” Kendall asked. “Can I fix you a martini?”

“No thanks.” He got off the bed, dug into his pants pocket, and held out a rectangular Tiffany-blue box with a white satin ribbon around it. “To remember your first show.”

Kendall untied the ribbon. Inside the box was a teardrop emerald pendant on a platinum chain. “Oh, Julian.”

He fastened the chain around her neck. Kendall studied the pendant in the mirror, then hugged him. “This dress is the one, isn't it?”

Julian held her tighter, memorizing the tart vanilla fragrance of her perfume. “It is.”

Kendall wasn't scheduled to be at the gallery for her opening until six thirty. Julian had recently rented an office in South Orange and had hired a secretary and bookkeeper, and he'd gone to meet with them, promising to be back by four. So Kendall had a whole day to get through. At the Caffe Reggio, she ate her usual croissant
and
a scone with clotted cream, drank four cups of coffee, smoking a cigarette with each cup, and read the
Times
and the
New Yorker
. Then she cleaned her apartment and was thumbing through the new issue of
Look
when she heard knocking on the door, and Brig calling, “Anyone home?”

Kendall let him in. He smelled as if he'd been swimming in gin.