The Arriviste, page 23
I had to tilt my head back to look at him, and the convertible top pressed against the crown of my hat.
He asked after Vicky, and I asked after his children in turn. I revved the motor; exhaust fumes overwhelmed the tang of mulch.
I gave him my hand. “Good to run into you, Bud. I’ve got to make tracks.”
“A little late for chasing the worm, isn’t it?” A car came up behind us. He moved closer to my car to make room for it to pass. He wasn’t about to step out of the road and let me go too.
He took a couple of cigarettes from a pack in his shirt pocket and without asking whether I’d like it lit up both and handed one to me.
The smoke seemed to compose him—it stilled the hands that had kept fluttering so near my head. “How about this sunshine,” he said. The gray line of cloud was now out over the water, rimmed by the sunlight that appeared to be dissolving it. If Bud hadn’t been standing over me, I’d have been looking straight into it. The only shadows to be seen were the ones beneath the branches he had cut and stacked. “Spring’s here.”
“It’s a bluff.” I could almost see the big-flaked, windless, dogwood-winter snowfall to come. “You don’t sound like a man who’s wintered in the islands.”
“That’s because I’m a man who for the last two weeks has been wintering in St. Louis and Cleveland and Chicago. Can sinuses get frostbitten?”
“I heard you’d been doing some traveling.”
“I’ve been everywhere. There’s plenty of interest, no doubt about it. So long as we can turn the corner.”
Another car went around us, the driver giving me a dirty look in passing. Not so many years earlier it would have surprised me to see two cars go down my road in the course of a morning.
“You wouldn’t happen to know a man named Vogel, by the way?”
“Not personally.”
“But you’ve heard the name.”
“I have. Yes.”
He leaned forward to look me in the eye. This left me staring straight into the light and I shifted to have him shade my eyes again. But my new position must not have given him the view of me he wanted. Once I moved he did too, which led in turn to my moving once more to escape the glare. We swung our heads back and forth like fighting cocks looking for a point of attack. When we were finally in some sort of alignment, I saw that both his hands rested on the side panel in front of the door. “I’m supposed to see him today,” he said, “and—”
“Excuse me, Bud, if you don’t mind.” I looked at his hands.
“I thought if you knew him . . .” He saw where I was looking and looked there too in perplexity.
“The finish, it smudges so easily.”
He raised his hands as if at gunpoint.
“So I thought if you knew him, you might talk to him for me, remind him of our relationship.”
“I’d have been glad to, if I knew him. I don’t, unfortunately. I told you that.”
“But you do know of him, and he must know of you through Mickey.”
“I suppose, but that’s hardly an acquaintance. If there’s something you think he needs to hear from someone else, why don’t you have Mickey speak to him?”
“Mickey?” He looked around. Again the daylight flooded my eyes. I lowered the brim of my hat against it. “That’s another story, if you see what I mean.”
“I don’t know that I do. But it doesn’t matter since I can’t help you in any case.”
“Just a thought,” he said, exhaling a last puff of smoke and flicking away his cigarette. Another car was approaching, from the opposite direction this time. He slipped his hand over the crack above the lowered window and ducked his head closer to mine, which gave his talk a confidential air. “Things all right with Cecilia?” I thought I saw his glance shift toward my house and wondered whether he knew she was there. “She’s doing you justice?”
He was set up like a target. His head filled the window frame, his face so near that I could feel the modulation of his breath. I could have cold cocked him. It was such a bad position to taunt me from that I decided he mustn’t have meant it.
The car flew past, and Bud’s hair fluttered in its current. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I had begun cranking up my window. He jumped when he felt it, yanking his hand away, and I took mine off the crank in equal surprise. “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” he added.
“Not at all, but I’ve really got to get a move on.” I shifted into gear and eased off the clutch, leaving it for him to get out of the way. “Good to see you.”
“And you,” I heard him say as I set off, his voice sounding distant through my half-shut window.
It was true that winter didn’t go without a last gasp. The snow a few days later was perfunctory, the fulfillment of an old quota. It had the sparseness of an undermanned siege, the flakes spiraling down like parachutists. No arctic gusts, no darkness came with the passing storm cloud. The accumulation might have amounted to an inch as the papers claimed, but within hours the sunshine was routing the patches of white even from the big stones besides the streets. The remaining snow squatted on the ledges like cats, till it had shrunk to lounging lizards camouflaged against the trail of their own dampness.
Cecilia started to stay over, three or four nights a week. The warm wet early spring was the season of our domestication, rain our background and also our stimulant. Coming through half-open windows, its sounds and scents carried us along—the smell of the new grass, of the laurels and lilacs, the patter of raindrops and the warbling of the newly returned birds were all the activity we needed. They set a mood in which our differences could be taken for granted.
In the house where I had lived with Joyce and which I was still accustomed to consider hers, I’d have expected the loyalty to cling. But amid tree peonies’ black stalks and flaming buds, the money-colored apple shoots and rioting broom sedge, it was hard to feel shabby about having Cecilia around. She was part of the general bloom.
We were quieter and easier, but there was one topic on which she began to have more to say: Bud. At first I welcomed the change along with the rest. I hadn’t wanted to hear about him, but I hadn’t trusted her not talking about him either. She worked for him and with him. How could she have so little to say about him? Why should she be guarded when he himself was outspoken about having nothing to hide?
This nothing-to-hide was so much a part of Bud’s style that I had had to distrust it, to suspect that his innocence was itself a deception. And to suspect him was, sooner or later, to suspect Cecilia. Her avoidance of the topic of Bud had come to seem like a dodge, and I was reassured when it stopped. Her talking about him might indicate some distance between them and bring us still closer. I thought it meant that I had become more to her than he was.
Even if I was right, I didn’t enjoy these confirmations. They were a bore. I might have been able to summon interest in the kinds of things she had to tell me about Bud if my investment in his business had mattered more to me. But my stake was Mickey’s too, which annulled whatever proprietary feeling I might have had about it. It was ours, hence not mine. And it was too little to worry about anyway. It wasn’t real money, not to me.
What was I to say to Cecilia’s reports on developments at Bud’s company? This was the kind of talking about Bud that she had gotten it into her head to do. By the fireside, I learned that a bus strike in Puerto that had been cutting into workers’ hours was near to being settled; while I was listening to a ball game, that a proposed tariff on metals used in Bud’s process would be defeated in the Aggregentine legislature; while we were dancing, how well the backup generator had worked during a power outage; as I was falling asleep at night I learned it again.
A motivated business partner would have appreciated these briefings, not only for the information they provided but also for the manner of their presentation, in which the overcoming of every adversity followed from its acknowledgment. Bud himself couldn’t have been more upbeat. A motivated partner would have found it all gripping.
But I wasn’t such a partner. It was an effort to keep my eyes from glazing over. I took whatever amusement was to be had from hearing her recite a publicist’s lines. But this soon paled. When it had, all I could think was that she was robbing our moments of their charm.
We were in the car one evening, out for a bite. The access road was under construction. We waited for a temporary traffic light to change. The line of cars was so long that the signal might have been stuck. “There’s great news,” she said, turning the radio down.
She wouldn’t be able to see me nod in the dark; more active signs of assent would be called for. “It turns out that Bud’s cousin has a friend who’s been hired to run a division at a big department store,” she continued in a dramatic whisper. “Bud’s already been in contact with him. They’re talking about a big order, gigantesco. Isn’t it exciting?”
“Wonderful.”
We crawled a short way. A police car in the hazard lane passed with its lights flashing. A high tide of head- and taillights in the distance indicated a pileup on the highway entrance ramp, and possibly an accident. I turned the radio back up to find out.
We cleared the temporary light. Traffic toward the highway ramp was indeed blocked, but a newly constructed left lane was open. As I cut into it I realized that it was a turning lane and ended at the next crossing. But it was too late. The car behind me had already taken my place. “Do me a favor? Roll down the window and see if you can get someone to let us in.”
One car after another passed us, and after a while she ducked her head in. “Sit back so I can see the side-view in case lightning strikes and someone stops for us.”
“Why are you upset, Neil? You should be happy.”
The clicking of the turn signal was getting to me. “What do you say we turn back? We could grab something in the village.”
“It’s still a secret by the way.”
“What is?”
“The order Bud’s setting up. You can tell your brother, but don’t say anything to anybody else till it goes through.”
“Don’t say anything?” I turned off the radio, and after glancing into the side-view mirror looked at her profile. A car pulled up behind us. Its lights flashed on her earring and gathered in points on the hair above it. “To whom?”
“You know how talk can bubble over.”
“And I may not be able to contain my ebullience.”
She turned and looked at me as the driver behind flashed his brights. In those flashes, I saw her more clearly than I should have. The set of her eyes and nose, the heaviness of her eyelids, and the flanging of the nostrils from the septum had at that instant a crudeness about them, a stupidity. “Let me tell you something that you don’t seem to have noticed: I’m not interested in the ins and outs of your business. It’s nice that you have such enthusiasm for it. I’m happy for you. But do I have to hear every detail?”
She turned her head and looked out the window. I sped to the crossing and made a U-turn, shielding my eyes against the sea of opposing headlights. When I’d gotten clear of them she turned back. “It’s not my business. It’s yours. Yours and Bud’s. You’re partners.”
“But I’m supposed to be a silent partner, silent and deaf. If I had had any idea when I agreed to go in with him—whenever that was—that I’d have to hear about it every day, do you think I’d have done it? I gave him a few sous. It isn’t worth my time.”
She put her hand on mine, which rested on the stick shift. When I changed gears she took it away. “But you need to know these things.”
“Do I?”
“To know whether to put in a few more sous.”
“That’d be a great way to get him out of my hair.”
“But you and Bud are in it together. That’s how he thinks about it. Did you know that he has a picture of you from the newspaper in his office?”
I tried to think what picture this could be, and remembered one that had appeared in the back pages of Crain’s. In our flannel suits, I and the man shaking my hand across a desk couldn’t have looked more ordinary, unless you happened to look closely at my mouth. I seemed to have chosen that moment to bite my lip. The incisor that was bared over it gave me a snaggletoothed look. Someone in the office had noticed it, and I caught wind of a remark to the effect that the crocodile had moved up from my shirt. “If it’s the picture I’m thinking of, I look like I’m about to bite someone’s head off. He must have it for a joke.”
“Maybe he has it because it’s true to life.”
We didn’t get our supper that night. Though Cecilia wasn’t generally particular, none of the places I took her to looked good to her. Eventually she said she wasn’t hungry and we went home. The next day she went back to the city, and disappeared. The days in which I didn’t hear from her stretched to weeks and months. I’d phoned her and buzzed at her door till the message was unmistakable.
The cause was bewildering. We’d established ourselves beyond the point at which a spat like the one we’d had should be fatal. On the scale of my wrangles with Joyce, it would hardly have registered. There’d been no shouting, no attempts to wound. It wasn’t legitimate grounds for a break. And if it had been only a pretext for one, wouldn’t I have noticed her looking for it? She’d given no hint. On the contrary, the impulse for our being together as much as we were had come from her.
Before the spring, I could have taken or left her. The end of it was the last time I’d seen her. And now, with summer stealing past, I was carrying a torch for her. My regret pushed everything else that happened to the background. Whether public or private, for better or worse, events were pretty much of a piece to me. And though I’d remind myself that regrets are costlier with age, I brooded nonetheless on what had gone wrong, which was itself another aspect of their going wrong.
The proceeds from the first lot of shares I sold back to the firm came in. Once I cashed in the remainder, I’d have a sum that only a plutocrat would sneeze at. The coming windfall might have given me some pleasure. But I hardly thought of it, and when I did it was only to reflect that I’d have traded it in for another chance with Cecilia. It was the kind of fantasy I was too old and sensible to have, and had all the same.
I went back inside and ran into Danny at the foot of the staircase. “You play well,” I said.
“Oh. Well, thanks.” He seemed unsure what I was talking about.
“I enjoyed your performance.” I nodded at the piano behind me. “That’s not an easy piece.”
“Well, thanks,” he repeated. The self-possession he’d arrived with had left him. Even his jacket seemed to hang less casually on his frame.
I showed him to the door. The ground lights caught the chalky clouds he kicked up in his march across the gravel.
They were dispersing when he came back a moment later. “I almost forgot,” he said, handing me an envelope. “My father asked me to give this to you.”
chapter ten
I couldn’t have imagined myself hurrying to open an envelope from Bud. No message from him was likely to interest me much. It wasn’t that he was lacking in goodwill; he overflowed with it. But his goodwill was the spontaneous kind. I couldn’t see him setting it down and putting it in an envelope to send over with his son. He’d have been after something.
But that was then. Now I was after something: news of Cecilia. I’d have liked to know what she’d said to him about us, even to contact her, if only through him. Bud, who had always seemed to be the barrier to her, had become my connection.
I wasn’t about to ask him about her, though. It would compromise my privacy that much further, and if he was hoping to deal with me on a quid pro quo basis, then it would be a capitulation to him. He thought of me as his partner, Cecilia had told me. He’d have welcomed this need of mine. He might have been waiting for it to arise. Cecilia’s leaving me would have given it to him if I let it.
But I hadn’t let it. I hadn’t been given the chance. Without Cecilia around, I no longer knew what Bud was up to. Evidently, he was still scrambling. Whenever that summer I happened to notice, he was gone. Driving past or getting up from my desk on the third floor and looking out the window, I might see Charlie pushing the mower or Irene working in the flower beds. I’d see the rest of the Youngers, but not Bud. From here or there, I’d imagine I heard him coming. Because he seemed to feel comfortable dropping by whenever it suited him, it wasn’t the wildest mistake, or wouldn’t have been if made once or twice. I made it more often than that, however—too often not to see that at the same time that I was steering clear of him, I was also looking for him, hoping for a chance to find out what he could tell me.
The contents of Bud’s envelope were less than I’d hoped but better than I’d feared. Our county executive was running for congress and Bud and Irene were hosting a fund-raiser for him. The personal touch Bud added to the invitation showed his customary tact. “NO EX WIVES THIS TIME, NEIL,” he wrote, “NOT YOURS, ANYWAY! SEE YOU THERE.”
The assurance of my ex-wife’s absence and my liking for the candidate weren’t enough to make me put myself on display. I had something on for that night anyway, a club banquet. I sent my regrets along with a contribution. I did feel a scruple or two about the possibility of Cecilia’s being there. I was also sorry for my inhospitableness to Irene. Bud popped in whenever he thought of it, but Irene had always kept her distance. I’d have liked her to take on a bit of his forwardness. It’d have been better all around.
I ended up sending regrets to the banquet committee as well. My colleagues were making my exit as difficult as possible. Though I’d refused to take on as many of the assignments they threw at me as I could, there were a few that I couldn’t turn down, a visit with a Swiss client’s headquarters in Zurich among them. I was scheduled to get back an hour beforehand and wouldn’t feel like carting myself off to another obligation.
