The Arriviste, page 24
I spent three short days in Zurich. There was little time between meetings to heed the regular procession of men in Tyrollean hats, women walking small dogs in sweaters, green shuttered trams that were almost as quiet as the swans listing in the canals’ slow currents. But it is impossible when traveling so far so quickly just to pass through. The part of the mind that adjusts to new surroundings cannot immediately readjust.
A distinguished-looking man of about sixty began talking to me one morning in the hotel elevator. His hair had thinned on top and was brushed back tightly along the sides, where it was not quite long enough to curl. His beard was pointy, his serge jacket had brass buttons, his talk was mundane: Was I enjoying my stay? Had I been here before? How did I find the service? I assumed he was connected with the hotel management. I replied that everything was satisfactory. He was glad to hear it, he said. It was evident that he had the privilege of addressing a man of parts. To such a man he owed nothing less than the truth. The truth, he was bound to confide, was that complaints at the hotel were not the rarity they’d once been. But he was certain that this confidence would not by itself suffice to lead such a man as I to the conclusion that the service was wanting. Such a man would judge for himself. He had personally investigated the complaints he referred to and concluded that they were in nearly every instance unfounded. There had recently begun to appear at the hotel a type of guest who looked for opportunities for complaint as a means of establishing his credentials of worldliness and discernment. Of course, the phenomenon wasn’t limited to the hotel’s guests. At this moment a broad class of men had achieved a level of comfort unprecedented in the history of the species. Even the patricians of Rome were not so fully indulged; Lucullus himself had had to contend on a daily basis with greater hardship. But he could assure me that for their intolerance of even the slightest discomfort the current age’s pampered class would reap a bitter harvest, one by one.
My room was on an upper floor of the building, a typical continental grand hotel of about twenty stories. While he talked, the man kept making the elevator stop, though no one got in and he didn’t appear to have any intention of getting out. As soon as the door would open on one floor he would push the button for the floor below. If you don’t mind, I interrupted him. We were on fifteen at the time. His finger hovered over the button for fourteen. You can finish testing the elevator once I’m out of it, I added. I’ve got somewhere to be. Oh you have, have you? he said. I was in this elevator before you were. I can stop whenever I want. It’s my prerogative. I don’t know what that’s got to do with anything, I said. Aha, he said, a glint coming into his eye, I see you’re one of them. You’re not required to do anything to get where you’re going. You don’t have to lift a finger. All you have to do is stand and wait. But even that’s too much for you. He punched every button down to the lobby and hopped out at the next floor. I’ll see you below, he said. Don’t forget to apprise the manager of your displeasure.
On my way out of the city, the cab to the airport was held up at a crowded junction. The driver happened to lower his window while an organ grinder on the corner was playing one of those Alpine folk melodies that in the shops of my boyhood were inescapable at Christmastime: Min Vater isch en Appenzeller, I think it was. We weren’t stopped there for more than a minute, but in that life-size music box of a city, it was a minute too long. The tune stuck in my head. It and that musicbox feeling for which it was the theme were with me on takeoff and touchdown.
At home, I responded to the news that the heating-oil delivery man had taken a look at Frances and refused to get out of his truck and that his counterpart at the lumberyard had stacked a cord of wood against the wrong wall in the garage by trying to nap. But after lying in a sleepless trance for what had seemed no more than a few minutes, I bolted upright. In one of those jet-lagged moments in which the obvious and the strange—the near at hand and far away—change places, the possibility of Cecilia’s being at Bud’s party struck me anew. I was tired of thinking about her. I’d see her if I could, if only to begin putting her out of my mind.
When I got up, I discovered that hours had passed. It was nearly ten. I dressed quickly, with the sense that everything that was right in front of me was as distant as Zurich. Wherever I might drag my body, the better part of my mind was behind in a world I had entered just long enough to be held over in it.
The night was dismal. The rain froze where it landed, and the frost kept the burrs in the weeds from catching in my coat. But it wasn’t so much the rain and cold that made the night dismal. It was the low sky and the clammy wind blowing in from the water. As I made my way up the front walk, a shutter knocked against the bricks beside an upstairs window; freezing raindrops gleamed from a dangling hook and an empty eyelet on its corner.
“Hey, get in here! What are you, trying ta remember the password? Does this look like a speakeasy?” I was peering through the viewer in the front door when it flew open. The baboon who’d stained my sport jacket at the first party was on the other side. He whisked me in and a warm draft hit me, an interior wind created by the guests’ collective breath. “It’s him, the feisty neighbor! What took you so long, milord, trouble getting down from your curricle?” He raised his hand to his mouth. “Sir Norwich Beaufort Chalfont-Godspeed IV!” he trumpeted. “Where’d you park your batman? I’ll send the coach boy around presently.” He turned to the man beside him, who had a long strand of hair hanging to the side, like an orchestra conductor. “You don’t want ta cross this guy. He runs hot under the collar. Almost walloped me last time.” He turned back my way. “Hey, Champ, who’re you gonna knock out tonight? See?” he said to the other man. “He’s getting sore already.” He put his arm around me as I was wiping my feet. I kicked an umbrella stand trying to create space between us.
“Look who’s here!” he shouted. Quite a few of the faces that turned looked familiar, more than they should have considering how long it had been since I’d last seen them. For a moment I imagined that this was no fund-raiser but a costume party and they had come as their old selves—hostages to the celebration of their friend’s upward mobility even while their feast exhausted his stores—and been here all this time.
Even Bud’s son Charlie, taking my coat in the same way he had before, seemed to expect me. “You’re awful late,” he said. He was taller now; he’d grown at that frantic boy’s pace the sight of which makes anyone, however fast he lives, reflect that time is slipping away. Charlie’s voice was changing. Stray whiskers appeared on his chin like dust on polished furniture.
“‘Awfully,’ you mean.”
“Yeah. You’re the only man with a blue raincoat.”
“I did it on purpose. Anyone who tries to make off with it will look conspicuous.”
Again my attempts to kid him fell flat. “Oh, no one’ll do that.” He looked at me askance. “Who’d want a blue raincoat?”
“Exactly.”
He stepped onto the landing. “The coats are in Danny’s room. Danny’s old room. It’s mine now.”
“Congratulations,” I mumbled after him.
My eyes lit on Irene at the other end of the hallway. Guests surrounded her, but I could see the light in her hair and the shimmer of beads on the straps of her dress.
The living-room furniture had been pushed to the sides the way it would have been at a fraternity mixer. I worked my way into the back of a sprawling line for drinks.
“I know you,” the man ahead of me said. He was chomping on a celery stick with cheese smeared in the groove. A lampshade’s bright round shadow on the ceiling directly overhead gave him a high halo.
“You don’t sound so sure of it,” I answered, but I remembered him from the last party. His eyes drooped and his mustache wilted and his mouth frowned, and all the downward pressure seemed to fall on his bow tie, which sagged at the corners. He played his manner off against it; there was a hangdog congeniality about him. “You’re, you’re, don’t tell me, your name starts with a W, right? I can see it.” He rattled off a series of names beginning with W. “I know. It’s Wolf,” he added. “Right? No? All right. Don’t tell me.”
“Wolf’s close enough. It’s Fox.”
“I said not to tell me. You didn’t tell me, did you? It’s not Fox. You’re pulling my leg. It’s something else . . . Frelinghuysen! Am I right?”
I gave him my name again. He tried to stop his ears but was too slow, and when he said “I’m Isadore,” he spoke dismissively, drowning the last syllable in a sigh. In failing to remember my name, he seemed to have lost his esteem for his own.
We inched toward the bar. It was my turn to stand beneath the halo. “You were calling yourself Izzy when we met before.”
“I was answering to it anyway.”
“Where’s the guest of honor?”
“Long gone. He left this guy behind.” He pointed out a young man with rolled-up sleeves, a loosened necktie, a “Free Huey” button on his vest, eyeglass frames propped on bushy hair.
“Did the candidate speak?”
“It was lofty. The nation at a crossroads, Southeast Asia, the Chicago Seven, civil rights—you’d have thought he was running for president.”
Izzy peeked over his shoulder at the entrance. “If you’re looking for your friend,” I said, “he’s by the door.”
“My friend?”
“The guy with us when we met before.”
“I met quite a few people.”
“You were standing with a skinny guy with big ears. Only an hors d’oeuvre could keep him quiet.”
The man I was talking about came into partial view. Not much of him was visible to us, a section of the back of his head and the lobe of one of those big ears. I pointed that way. “He’s over there. Hector, isn’t it?”
Izzy shrugged. A man tried to cut between him and the bar. I tapped the man’s shoulder, and when he turned I saw that it was my orthopedist. “Just checking your reflexes,” he said, and we greeted each other and chatted while he poured our drinks. There was no bartender—unlike the last party, this had no service—and the orthopedist punished the whisky in his absence, holding the bottle at the base and letting it tip of its own weight until the liquor stopped spilling.
“Easy on mine. I’m just off a long flight,” I said somewhat after the fact.
“So much the better.” He handed me my glass. “A couple of these and you’re anybody’s.”
I cleared away from the bar and turned back to Izzy. “Don’t even mention that person to me,” he said, picking up the subject he’d avoided. “That crook, I mean.” Vengefulness pinched his expression, tensed its droopiness without lifting it. “He should be in jail. But where is he? Out on the town, trolling for the next rube.”
The orthopedist lingered on the fringe. He was tall enough to hover discreetly. “Stole your money?” he asked.
“Of course he stole my money. A condo development deal. He was the trustee. Risk free, he said, an ideal shelter. In fact I think it was here he got me interested.” He looked around for an ashtray, then emptied his glass and tipped his ash into it. “People are so disappointing. There’s nothing they won’t do for money. Absolutely nothing. Only children can have real friendships anymore.”
I sipped my drink, seeking something in it: a return of a sense of dimension, a firming of the ground beneath my feet.
“I’ll get him sometime,” Izzy said.
“And how’ll you get him?” I asked.
The orthopedist wandered off. “How? Oh, I don’t know.” Izzy gazed in his enemy’s direction. I thought I felt a pair of eyes on me and glanced up. A curly haired redhead with sinecurve eyelashes and a brunette with a wooden-bead necklace were standing together. If they’d been looking at me, they weren’t any longer. Each had her attractions, but neither was like Cecilia. I took a look around the room and saw how little anyone had in common with her. This wasn’t her world. I was kidding myself if I expected to see her.
“By powder,” Izzy said. He raised an imaginary pistol. “That’s how I’ll get him. Bang, bang.”
A man came up from behind and, his back to me, put a hand on Izzy’s shoulder. “I didn’t realize you were armed,” he said, his shoulders shaking beneath his white jacket and broad particolored collar, his thin hair shagging down the back of his neck. He looked like a barker or a balloon-twister.
“The times demand it,” I heard Izzy say. I missed most of what followed between them. My eyes strayed to Bud at the far end of the room. The contrast between his suntan and the light checks of his jacket made him stand out, not only from everyone else but from the piano he was leaning against and the wall behind him. His image looked superimposed on its background.
I started toward him, thinking I’d ask him straight out about Cecilia, but changed my mind. There were more people between us than I cared to fight my way through, and Alan, an upstart junior partner from my firm, was one of them.
Izzy looked where I was looking. The man he’d been speaking to had fallen in with a woman in a vinyl jacket. His back was still to me. “Him too,” Izzy said.
“Who? Him?”
“I hear Bud’s been taken in. Swimming with the sharks.” He took a bite of celery and laid his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “He was just telling me about it. I don’t know if you’re acquainted.”
The man turned. Thick eyebrows above wire-rimmed glasses and thicker sideburns framed his eyes and cheeks like smoke falling back on a smokestack. It was Garson, who had left the meeting with Mickey and me that Bud had brought him to. “We’re acquainted,” I said.
“Keep him covered,” Garson said, taking a step back and making his own imaginary pistol. Now there were two guns pointing at me.
The redhead I thought had been looking at me a moment earlier crossed the firing line. “Uh oh. Looks like I’ve walked in on a stickup. You’ll have to shoot me to get to him,” she said over her shoulder.
“That’s very noble,” Izzy said, his eyes darting over her buxom prow. “That’s some bodyguard you’ve got,” he said to me.
“I really must thank you, Neil,” the redhead said. “I hadn’t realized how close it was in here until I tried to pick up that glove myself. And for every person, two feet! When I bent down, shoe-polish fumes rushed up at me and the blood swam in my head. I thought I’d better stand up quick. It was so nice of you.”
Before I could tell her that she had the wrong man, she spirited our glasses to the bar. A couple of other guests came along and the conversation moved on. I thought I’d caught a glimpse of Cecilia. I realized my mistake and my empty-handedness began to bother me. I’d fade if I didn’t keep going. I looked around for the redhead and for the drink I’d expected her to bring back.
There were no clean glasses left at the bar. The man who always seemed to be on my train into town no matter which one I took was also trying to find a glass. His wife had big green eyes and a winning air that made me abandon the inference of his misery I’d drawn from his desolated look and inability to lose himself in a newspaper—assuming she was his wife.
He picked up a couple of the dirty glasses. “We could rinse them with gin,” he said. “That’s the practical solution.”
“Why don’t we look for some others?” she said.
I followed them toward the kitchen without intending to go so far. I’d take a quick look around for Cecilia and go home to bed. I hadn’t exactly searched high and low.
The redhead approached from the side, bearing two wellfilled glasses aloft, out of harm’s way. I stopped him and pointed at her. “One of those is mine,” I added. “Special delivery.”
“See you on the morning train.”
“Here you are.”
“Here I am? I didn’t realize that I was the one who’d disappeared.”
“You wouldn’t believe what I went through to get this.” She handed me the glass in triumph and awaited my approval. She’d been holding it for a while—the ice was melting and the side was fogged with the imprint of her palm. But the liquor looked dark. I took a drink. It was coarse and syrupy and made me shudder.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?”
“It caught me by surprise.”
“I can get you something else if you’d like.”
“That’s all right.”
“I thought it was what you asked for.”
“I don’t remember that I asked for anything.”
Melancholy descended on her. The lengths she’d gone to for me seemed in her mind to have created a contract between us. She’d brought me a drink and I was to drink it.
And so I did, quietly. To speak was now beside the point. To encourage me she smiled at my every sip, like a mother watching a child eat his supper. When I’d belted back the last of it she laughed. This laughter was odd, a sort of hissing that filled the silence we’d lapsed into while the party buzzed and clattered around us.
With the last drink I became aware of an exhilaration rising against my fatigue, flowing into it like a cold downdraft. My ears hummed. I was coming around, happily. I was already too old not to take accesses of vitality as they came.
Izzy stopped in passing. “Hey, what’d she say to you?” he asked me.
“Who?”
“Corky. That woman you were talking to.” He pointed out the redhead.
“Her? She’s got me confused with someone else.”
“I’m sure Corky knows who you are.”
“She thinks I’m someone who picked up a glove she dropped.”
“But you are! She and her husband just split.” He winked at me, and moved on.
“Everything all right in die Schweiz?” Alan clapped me on the shoulder, a cufflink peeking from his jacket sleeve, his Friar Tuck belly pressing against his tattersall shirt and peg-legged pants. “You know I covered for you while you were gone. That Edmonds—talk about a prickly client! But this isn’t the place, is it? I’ll brief you. Let’s have lunch one day next week.”
