Fortnight of Fear Page 6

  “Gie me the groat again, canny young man; the day it is short and the night it is lang; the dearest siller that ever I wan.

  “The tailor fell thro’ the bed, thimbles an’ a’.”

  Ever, Ever After

  New York, New York

  The locale of Ever, Ever After is Central Park South, which has always fascinated me because of its history. Walking along it now, it’s almost impossible to conceive that until as recently as the 1860s it was one of the ugliest and least desirable areas on Manhattan – a swash of garbage dumps, shantytowns and decrepit taverns, all punctuated by slabby outcroppings of rock. As the Herald said in the 1850s, “these things all looked bad, and some of them smelt bad.” Only with millions of dollars and thousands of laborers was the park transformed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux into what it is today. Even if you’re not very well-heeled, you can still enjoy the foyer and the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel; and there are few pleasures that better improve a snappy Sunday morning than a hot toddy in the Oak Bar and a walk in the park. Maybe the “poverty, misery, beggary, starvation, crimes, filth and licentiousness” that was rife in the 1850s has been replaced by “swank, perfume and a view that costs a thousand dollars a square inch”, but I could still conceive of something unsettling happening here …

  EVER, EVER AFTER

  The road was greasy; the light was poor; and the truck’s braking-lights were caked in dirt. Robbie saw it pull up ahead of him only ten feet too late; but those ten feet were enough to send a scaffolding-pole smashing through the windshield of his Porsche and straight into his chest.

  The medical examiner told me that he never would have known what hit him. “I’m truly sorry, Mr Deacon; but he never would have known what hit him.” Instant death; painless.

  Painless, that is, to Robbie. But not to Jill; and not to me; and not to anybody who had known him. Jill was his wife of thirteen weeks; and I was his brother of 31 years; and his humor and vivacity had won him more friends than you could count.

  For a whole month afterward I kept his photograph on my desk. Broad-faced, five years younger than me, much more like Dad than I was; laughing at some long-forgotten joke. Then one morning in early October I came into the office and put the photograph away in my middle desk-drawer. It was then that I knew it was over; that he was really gone for ever.

  That same afternoon, as if she had been affected by the same feeling of finality, Jill called me. “David? Can I meet you after work? I feel like talking.”

  She was waiting for me in the lobby, at the Avenue of the Americas entrance. Already the sidewalks were crowded with homegoing workers; and there wasn’t a chance of finding a cab. The air was frosty, and sharp with the smell of bagels and chestnuts.

  She looked pale and tired, but just as beautiful as ever. She had a Polish mother and a Swedish father, and she had inherited the chiseled face of one and the snow-white blondness of the other. She was tall, almost five feet nine, although her dark mink coat concealed most of her figure, just as her dark mink hat concealed most of her face.

  She kissed me. She smelled of Joy, and cold October streets.

  “I’m so glad you could come. I think I’m beginning to go mad.”

  “Well, I know the feeling,” I told her. “Every day, when I wake up, I have to remind myself that he’s dead; and that I’m never going to see him again, ever.”

  We went into the Brew Burger across the street for a drink. Jill ordered tomato-juice; I ordered Four Roses, straight up. We sat by the window while torrents of people passed us by.

  “That’s my trouble,” Jill told me, picking at her freshly-lacquered fingernails. “I’m sad; I keep crying; but I can’t really believe that he’s dead.”

  I sipped my whiskey. “Do you know what he and I used to play when we were younger? We used to pretend that we were wizards, and that we were both going to live for ever. We even made up a spell.”

  Jill stared at me; and her her wide gray-green eyes were glistening with tears. “He was always full of dreams. Perhaps he went the best way, without even knowing what was going to happen.”

  “Immortooty, immortaty – ever, ever after!” I recited. “That was the spell. We always used to recite it when we scared.”

  “I loved him, you know,” Jill whispered.

  I finished my whiskey. “Haven’t you talked about it with anybody else?”

  She shook her head. “You know my family. They practically disowned me when I started dating Robbie, because he was still married to Sara. It was no use my telling them that he and Sara were already on the rocks; and that he despised her; and that they would have been divorced anyway, even if I hadn’t shown up on the scene. Oh, no, it was all my fault. I broke up a healthy marriage. I was the scarlet woman.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” I told her, “I don’t think you’re scarlet at all. I never saw Robbie so happy as when he was with you.”

  I walked her back to her apartment on Central Park South. Thunder echoed from the skyscrapers all along Sixth Avenue; flags flapped; and it was beginning to rain. In spite of the swanky address, the flat that Jill and Robbie had shared together was very small, and sublet from a corporate lawyer called Willey, who was away in Minnesota for most of the time, something to do with aluminum tubing.

  “Won’t you come up?” she asked me, in the brightly-lit entrance lobby, which was graced with a smart black doorman in a mushroom-colored uniform, and a tall vase of orange gladioli.

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I have a heap of work to finish up at home.”

  There were mirrors all around us. There were fifty Jills, curving off into infinity, fifty doormen, and fifty mes. A thousand spears of gladioli.

  “You’re sure?” she persisted.

  I shook my head. “What for? Coffee? Whiskey? More breast-beating? There was nothing we could have done to save him, Jill. You took care of him like a baby. I just loved him like a brother. There was no way that either of us could have saved him.”

  “But to die that way. So quickly; and for no reason.”

  I grasped her hand. “I don’t believe everything has to have a reason.”

  The doorman was holding the elevator for her. She lifted her face to me, and I realized that she expected me to kiss her. So I kissed her; and her cheek was soft and cold from walking in the wind; and somehow something happened between us that made both of us stand for a moment looking at each other, eyes searching, not speaking.

  “I’ll call you,” I told her. “Maybe dinner?”

  “I’d like that.”

  That was how our affair began. Talking, to begin with; and spending weekends together with a bottle of California chardonnay; listening to Mendelssohn’s violin concertos; while Christmas approached, our first Christmas without Robbie.

  I bought Jill a silver Alfred Durante cuff watch and a leather-bound book of poems by John Keats. I left a silk marker in the page which said,

  “Love! Thou art leading me from wintry cold,

  Lady! Thou leadest me to summer clime.”

  She cooked wild duck for me on Christmas Day, and Robbie’s photograph watched us smiling from the chiffonier while we drank each other’s health in Krug champagne.

  I took her to bed. The white wintry light arranged itself across the sheets like a paper dress-pattern. She was very slim, narrow-hipped, and her skin was as smooth as cream. She didn’t speak; her hair covered her face like a golden mask. I kissed her lips, and her neck. Her oyster-colored silk panties had tucked themselves into a tight crease between her legs.

  Afterwards we lay back in the gathering twilight and listened to the soft crackle of bubbles in our champagne, and the sirens of Christmas echoing across Central Park.

  “Are you going to ask me to marry you?” said Jill. I nodded.

  “It’s not against the law or anything, is it? For a widow to marry her late husband’s brother.”

  “Of course not. In Deuteronomy, widows are ordered to marry their late husb
and’s brothers.”

  “You don’t think Robbie would have minded?”

  “No,” I said, and turned over to pick up my glass, and there he was, still smiling at me. Immortooty, Immortaty, ever, ever after.

  Robbie, in Paradise, may have approved, but our families certainly didn’t. We were married in Providence, Rhode Island, on a sharp windy day the following March, with nobody in attendance but a justice of the peace and two witnesses whom we had rounded up from the local bookstore, and a gray-haired old lady who played the wedding march and Scenes from Childhood.

  Jill wore a cream tailored suit and a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons around it and looked stunning. The old lady played and smiled and the spring sunshine reflected from her spectacles like polished pennies on the eyes of an ivory-faced corpse.

  On our wedding night I woke up in the early hours of the morning and Jill was quietly crying. I didn’t let her know that I was awake. She was entitled to her grief; and I couldn’t be jealous of Robbie, now that he had been dead for over a year.

  But I lay and watched her; knowing that by marrying me she had at last acknowledged that Robbie was gone. She wept for almost twenty minutes, and then leaned across and kissed my shoulder, and fell asleep, with her hair tangled across my arm.

  Our marriage was cheerful and well-organized. Jill left her apartment on Central Park South and moved in to my big airy loft on 17th Street. We had plenty of money: Jill worked as a creative director for Palmer Ziegler Palmer, the advertising agency, and in those days I was an accountant for Henry Sparrow the publishers. Every weekend we compared Filofaxes and fitted as much leisure time together as we could; even if it was only a lunchtime sandwich at Stars on Lexington Avenue, or a cup of coffee at Bloomingdale’s.

  Jill was pretty and smart and full of sparkle and I loved her more every day. I suppose you could have criticized us for being stereotypes of the Perrier-water generation, but most of the time we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. In July I traded in my old BMW for a Jaguar XJS convertible in British racing green, and we drove up to Connecticut almost every weekend, a hundred and ten miles an hour on the turnpike, with Beethoven on the stereo at top volume.

  Mega-pretentious, n’est-ce pas? but it was just about the best fun I ever had in my whole life.

  On the last day of July, as we were sitting on the old colonial verandah of the Allen’s Corners hotel where we used to stay whenever we weekended in Connecticut, Jill leaned back in her basketwork chair and said dreamily, “Some days ought to last for ever.”

  I clinked the ice in my vodka-and-tonic. “This one should.”

  It was dreamily warm, with just the lightest touch of breeze. It was hard to imagine that we were less than two hours’ driving from downtown Manhattan. I closed my eyes and listened to the birds warbling and the bees humming and the sounds of a peaceful Connecticut summer.

  “Did I tell you I had a call from Willey on Friday?” Jill remarked.

  I opened one eye. “Mr Willey, your old landlord? What did he want?”

  “He says I left some books round at the apartment, that’s all. I’ll go collect them tomorrow.”

  “Don’t mention tomorrow. I’m still in love with today.”

  “He said he hasn’t re-let the apartment yet, because he can’t find another tenant as beautiful as me.”

  I laughed. “Is that bullshit or is that bullshit?”

  “It’s neither,” She said. “It’s pure flattery.”

  “I’m jealous,” I told her.

  She kissed me. “You can’t possibly be jealous of Willey. He’s about seventy years old, and he looks just like a koala bear with eyeglasses.”

  She looked at me seriously. “Besides,” she added, “I don’t love anybody else but you; and I never will.”

  It thundered the following day; and the streets of New York were humid and dark and strewn with broken umbrellas. I didn’t see Jill that lunchtime because I had to meet my lawyer Morton Jankowski (very droll, Morton, with a good line in Polish jokes); but I had promised to cook her my famous pesce spada al salmoriglio for dinner.

  I walked home with a newspaper over my head. There was no chance of catching a cab midtown at five o’clock on a wet Monday afternoon. I bought the swordfish and a bottle of Orvieto at the Italian market on the corner, and then walked back along 17th Street, humming Verdi to myself. Told you I was mega-pretentious.

  Jill left the office a half-hour earlier than I did, so I expected to find her already back at the loft; but to my surprise she wasn’t there. I switched on the lights in the sparse, tasteful sitting-room; and then went through to the bedroom to change into something dry.

  By six-thirty she still wasn’t back. It was almost dark outside, and the thunder banged and echoed relentlessly. I called her office, but everybody had left for the day. I sat in the kitchen in my striped cook’s apron, watching the news and drinking the wine. There wasn’t any point in starting dinner until Jill came home.

  By seven I was growing worried. Even if she hadn’t managed to catch a cab, she could have walked home by now. And she had never come home late without phoning me first. I called her friend Amy, in SoHo. Amy wasn’t there but her loopy boyfriend said she was over at her mother’s place, and Jill certainly wasn’t with her.

  At last, at a quarter after eight, I heard the key turn in the door and Jill came in. The shoulders of her coat were dark with rain, and she looked white-faced and very tired.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded. “I’ve been worried bananas.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in a muffled voice, and hung up her coat.

  “What happened? Did you have to work late?”

  She frowned at me. Her blonde fringe was pasted wetly to her forehead. “I’ve said I’m sorry! What is this, the third degree?”

  “I was concerned about you, that’s all.”

  She stalked through to the bedroom, with me following close behind her. “I managed to survive in New York before I met you,” she said. “I’m not a child any more, you know.”

  “I didn’t say you were. I said I was concerned, that’s all.”

  She was unbuttoning her blouse. “Will you just get the hell out and let me change!”

  “I want to know where you’ve been!” I demanded.

  Without hesitation, she slammed the bedroom door in my face, and when I tried to catch the handle, she turned the key.

  “Jill!” I shouted. “Jill! What the hell is going on?”

  She didn’t answer. I stood outside the bedroom door for a while, wondering what had upset her so much; then I went back to the kitchen and reluctantly started to cook dinner.

  “Don’t do any for me!” she called out, as I started to chop up the onions.

  “Did you eat already?” I asked her, with the knife poised in my hand.

  “I said, don’t do any for me, that’s all!”

  “But you have to eat!”

  She wrenched open the bedroom door. Her hair was combed back, and she was wrapped in her toweling bathrobe. “What are you, my mother or something?” she snapped at me. Then she slammed the door shut again.

  I stabbed the knife into the butcher-block and untied my apron. I was angry now. “Listen!” I shouted. “I bought the wine, and the swordfish, and everything! And you come home two hours late and all you can do is yell at me!”

  She opened up the bedroom door again. “I went to Mr Willey’s, that’s all. Now, are you satisfied?”

  “So you went to Willey’s place? And what were you supposed to be doing at Willey’s place? Collecting your books, if my memory serves me. So where are they, these precious books? Did you leave them in the cab?”

  Jill stared at me and there was an expression in her eyes that I had never seen before. Pale, cold, yet almost shocked, as if she had been involved in an accident, and her mind was still numb.

  “Jill…” I said, more softly this time, and took two or three steps towards her.

  “No,” she whisper
ed. “Not now. I want to be alone for just a while.”

  I waited until eleven o’clock, occasionally tapping at the bedroom door, but she refused to answer. I just didn’t know what the hell to do. Yesterday had been idyllic; today had turned into some kind of knotty, nasty conundrum. I put on my raincoat and shouted through the bedroom door that I was going down to the Bells of Hell for a drink. Still she didn’t answer.

  My friend Norman said that women weren’t humans at all, but a race of aliens who had been landed on earth to keep humans company.

  “Imagine it,” he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing out smoke. “If you had never seen a woman before tonight, and you walked out of here and a woman was standing there … wearing a dress, with blonde hair, and red lipstick, and high-heel shoes … and you had never seen a woman before – then, then, my friend, you would understand that you had just made a close encounter of the worst kind.”

  I finished up my vodka, and dropped a twenty on the counter. “Keep the cha-a-ange, my man,” I told the barkeep, with a magnanimous W.C. Fieldsian wave of my hand.

  “Sir, there is no change. That’ll be three dollars and seventy-five cents more.”

  “That’s inflation for you,” Norman remarked, with a phlegmy cough. “Even oblivion is pricing itself out of the market.”

  I left the bar and walked back up to 17th Street. It was unexpectedly cool for July. My footsteps echoed like the footsteps of some lonely man in some 1960s spy movie. I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drunk, either. I wasn’t very much looking forward to returning home.

  When I let myself in, the loft was in darkness. Jill had unlocked the bedroom door, but when I eased it open, and looked inside, she was asleep. She had her back to me, and the quilt drawn up to her shoulders, but even in the darkness I could see that she was wearing her pajamas. Pajamas meant we’re not talking, stay away.

  I went into the kitchen and poured myself the dregs from a chilled bottle of Chablis, and switched the television on low. It was a 1940s black-and-white movie called They Stole Hitler’s Brain. I didn’t want to sit there watching it; and at the same time I didn’t want to go to bed either.