Slam the Big Door Page 4

  “On guard?”

  “That’s the impression you give. Damn if it isn’t. Are you self-conscious about all this? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? And you were on your way to making it one way, and you goofed yourself out of that, so you married it. All right. I’ve got nothing against you marrying it.”

  “That’s nice to know. I needed your approval.”

  “Get nasty. At least it’s a change.”

  “It’s been five years. People change.”

  “Not this much.”

  “I guess I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “All of it none of my business, eh?”

  “Relax, Mike. You’re down here to relax. Soak up the sun. Have some laughs. Get drunk. But stay off my back.”

  “You’ve got bad nerves, Troy. Worse than mine.”

  “There isn’t any rule says you’ve got to know everything about everything.”

  “With me it’s a habit. Like finding out this big Horseshoe Pass Estates of yours is sour.”

  Troy stared at him. “Who says so!”

  “Nobody did. It was a shot in the dark. You just confirmed it, boy.”

  “Maybe a week is long enough. Maybe that’s all the rest you needed.”

  “I’ll stick around awhile, thanks.”

  “Goddamn it, Mike!”

  “Let’s drop it. When you get off this remote kick you’re on, and realize I might have some ideas—maybe even good ideas—about what’s chewing on you, look me up. I’ll probably be on the beach. Let’s drop it for now. Brief me on that pair over there.”

  Troy scowled at him for a few seconds, and then shrugged. “That’s the Claytons. Rex and Tracey.”

  “A very loving couple.”

  “He loves her and she loves anybody. I got to go find some aspirin.”

  During the next hour Mike had some dull talk with some dull people. When he was free he built a third drink and took it back to his pleasant guest room. He stretched out on the bed and thought about Troy. Friendship was one of the great variables. Like everybody is in their own little rowboat, with no oars, and the currents move you around. With some people it’s worth paddling with your hands to keep the rowboats side by side. With others neither of you have to work because you’re caught in the same current anyway. It had been like that with Troy. And he suspected it still was, if Troy would stop being remote. With Troy it wasn’t like other interrupted friendships—where you get back together again with great expectations and find out you’re a couple of strangers. Either you grew in different directions, or one stood still and the other one grew.

  He was cynic enough to know that Troy could never entirely forgive him for that New York mess. Nobody can conquer all the subconscious resentment against a man who sees him at his hopeless, helpless worst, and drives off the dogs and gets him back on his feet.

  He remembered how it was in New York. New York had to be put into historical perspective, because it was a part of a lot of things that had gone before.

  After the war Mike had tried to continue with the column. It meant good money. But a lot of things went wrong. The syndicate was small and couldn’t afford to invest in a promotion to make Mike Rodenska a peacetime success. The bookings began to dwindle. A bunch of the best wartime columns were published in book form, and didn’t sell enough to make the advance. And the labor of tapping out the columns had become more than labor. It was misery. Mauldin and Hargrove were having the same problem—and probably Pyle wouldn’t have found it too easy either had he managed to miss his rendezvous on Iwo Jima. Actually Mike hungered to be back as a member of the working press. Doing a column seemed too remote—almost phony. Buttons wanted him to do what would make him happiest.

  And so, by the middle of 1946, Mike and Buttons and Micky and Tommy moved into an elderly rented house in West Hudson, unpacked the cartons with gypsy efficiency, and Mike went to work at Guild minimum for the ancient, honorable and somewhat self-important West Hudson Leader, covering City Hall, County Courthouse and police, doing assigned Sunday features and a three-a-week op-ed column on purely local matters, happy as a flea on a large hairy dog.

  Three months later, quite by accident, he heard of a good opening in the largest local advertising agency, and on a hunch he wrote to Troy in Rochester, then tore up the letter and phoned him. For Troy it had come at exactly the right time. Troy was getting very tired of taking directions from a very young and very stupid man who happened to be the only son of the senior partner in the Rochester agency. And he was getting fed up with most of his pregnant Bonita’s Rochester relatives.

  Two weeks later Troy and Bunny were installed in a pleasant apartment Buttons had found for them. The first little girl, Lycia, was born on Christmas day, 1946, and the second Jamison baby, Cindy, was born on New Year’s Day, 1948.

  Those were the best years, Mike recalled. Buttons and Bunny got along perfectly. They were both smallish, talkative, excitable women, Bunny as dark as Buttons was blond. The four of them spent a lot of time together. And had fun. But to Troy, fun was secondary during those years. He had a lot of drive and intensity, taste and talent and a kind of ruthlessness that was too veiled to be disturbing. Mike remembered how Troy had said, “I want more than my share.”

  There was an inevitability about the way he went after it. And an inevitability about the way his work eventually came to the attention of one of the big New York agencies. Both wives wept when the Jamisons moved on to New York, toward Troy’s big golden future.

  Mike well remembered a curious thing that happened about a week after Troy and Bunny and Lycia and the baby were gone. He had been in the kitchen, talking to Buttons. And he had said, casually, and perhaps with a little twinge of envy, “Here you are stuck with a newspaper bum, while Bunny gets to lead the fat life.”

  Without warning, and only half playfully, Buttons had given him a smack in the chops that made his eyes water and shocked him. “Don’t you ever say that! You’re worth—fifty of Troy Jamison!”

  “Hey! I thought you liked the guy.”

  “I do, I guess. But he’s weak.”

  “Weak? Troy? I don’t understand.…”

  “He’s pressing too hard, darling. He’s pushing too hard, without really knowing what he wants. And when he starts to get what he’s after, and finds out it isn’t as important as he thought, something is going to give. He’s going to come apart. Bunny is going to be hurt, and maybe you’ll be hurt too, if I let you get dragged into it.”

  “But he …”

  She had come sweetly into his arms. “Hey, I busted you a good one. It left marks.”

  “I’ll get you a bout in the Garden with Sugar Ray.”

  “I love you, Mike, and don’t let me ever hear that kind of talk about the fat life. We live that fat life, honey. I couldn’t imagine being married to anybody but you.”

  He had thought her wrong, about Troy. But four years later, in 1953, when he was thirty-four, that clever, promising, driving, and demonstrably courageous young man, Troy Jamison, a thirty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year man with Kelfer, Sorensen and Ryan, owner of a lot of house in Larchmont and a pocketful of credit cards, blew up in everybody’s face. And they were astonished.

  Bunny had phoned Buttons long-distance, incoherent with tears, pleading for help. So Mike had taken time off—by then he was assistant to the managing editor, a promotion that had come about when he had gotten wistful about the Korea thing. They had stashed the boys with a close friend and neighbor and had driven down through soiled sleet to Larchmont, to a big house and a soul-sick woman who bore the bruises of the cruel and drunken beating she had been given, and a situation beyond repair. Bonita Jamison was under control, long enough to give them the facts. It had taken three months for it to go entirely sour—starting with a restlessness on Troy’s part, a compulsion to make savage comments to their friends, a growing indifference to both her and the children. Apparently things were still all right at the agency. But their personal life had gone to hell. There was
a woman in the city, from all reports a cheap, amoral type named Jerranna Rowley. Troy had a hotel room, but most of the time he was living with the Rowley woman. He had made no secret of the relationship—in fact he used it as a club. Bunny was sorry she had bothered them. She was going to leave the girls with her people in Rochester and get a Nevada divorce. It was all over. She said there was no point in Mike going into the city to talk to Troy. It had ended.

  But he went anyway, the next morning, a grubby gray Saturday morning. He checked the hotel from Grand Central, but Troy’s room didn’t answer. Bunny had said the Rowley woman was listed in the Manhattan book, so he phoned there. Just as he was about to hang up a fuzzy, sleep-thickened, querulous voice answered.

  “I’d like to speak to Troy Jamison,” he said.

  “Oh, God! What time is it anyhow?”

  “Quarter of ten. Are you Miss Rowley?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m an old friend of Troy’s. Mike Rodenska.”

  “Oh, sure. I heard him say that name, I think. Mike, you got a bad habit. Phoning people at dawn. You oughta break that habit.”

  “Can I speak to Troy?”

  “Lover-boy didn’t come home to Jerranna last night. Jerranna got drunky with friends. I don’t know where the hell he is. Try the Hotel Terr …”

  “There’s no answer there.”

  “Then check the old manse out Larchmont way. Maybe he crawled back to wifey.”

  “He isn’t out there either.”

  “Then I can’t help you, old buddy.”

  “Could I come and talk to you?”

  “About Troy? I don’t think you got the scoop, Mike. I can give you a message. You’d be wasting time.”

  “I’ve got a little time to waste.”

  “Okay,” she said listlessly, “but don’t show up in no half hour. Make it about eleven-thirty, hey? And look, they drunk me out of goodies, so you be a pal and show up with a jug of Gordon’s and a jug of Early Times, okay? It’ll save me going out on such a stinky-looking day.”

  The apartment was a third-floor walk-up a few doors from Second Avenue on East Fifty-first. It was in a defeated building and the enclosed air was both musty and sharply antiseptic. When he rang she buzzed the latch from above and he climbed the stairs to 3G, wondering how many times Troy had climbed those stairs. And why.

  When she opened the door, took the brown paper sack from him and thanked him absently, and turned toward the kitchen with long strides, saying, over her shoulder, “Sid-down and make like it was home, Mike,” he had even more cause to wonder why Troy climbed those stairs.

  She was younger than she had sounded over the phone. Nineteen or twenty, he guessed. She had a round, rather doughy face, a careless mop of pale brown hair worn long, a rather small head, a very long neck, and narrow shoulders. She was thin, but it wasn’t the kind of leanness that can be called slenderness. This was actually scrawniness, accentuated by knobby joints and a sort of shambling looseness in her gait.

  “Want I should fix you something?” she called from the kitchenette.

  “Bourbon and water. A weak one, please.”

  He sat down in a sagging, overstuffed chair with a torn slipcover and unidentifiable stains. No sun would ever come into this room. Aside from the furniture that had obviously come with the apartment, any additional touches seemed to be added by things won at carnival booths. There was a classic collection of liquor rings and cigarette burns. A broken spring prodded him in the left ham.

  He got up and thanked her when she brought his drink.

  “Manners, huh?” she said, and grinned at him, and sat in a chair that half-faced his and threw one leg over the arm of the chair. She wore black denim slacks and a burgundy cardigan. The rudimentary breasts under the cardigan, pointed and wide-set, seemed almost anachronistic compared with the rest of her figure.

  She had a tall glass of orange juice which he suspected contained plenty of gin. “Here’s lookin’ up your address,” she said and drained a third of it. “I was thinking I could get back to sleep maybe, but you cooked it for me.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Sleeping is the best thing I do. I can damn near fall asleep standing up, like a horse.”

  “It can come in handy.”

  “I suppose you’re going to sit there lookin’ at me like the cat brought me in, wondering where the hell to start saying what you came to say. So I’ll save you the trouble. He’s got a big career and a fine wife and a fine home and two darling little girls and it’s a damn shame he has to get mixed up with somebody like me, so I should give him up and go away quietly or something. That’s where you have the wrong message, Mike. He can take off anytime. I don’t give a damn. I can get along. I have before and I will again, without him paying the freight. I don’t love him and he don’t love me. Now that’s all over, what’ll we talk about?” She grinned at him.

  He stared at her. Her mouth was wide and heavy, her lips habitually parted, her teeth large and strong and yellow-white, ridged. He had seen her before, when the state cops had picked her up off the highway. Seen her in the hospital after a gang rape, still bitter, arrogant, undefeated. What in the name of God could attract Troy to this? A will to destroy himself completely?

  “Where did you meet Troy, Jerry?”

  She frowned. “Jerranna. I always use the whole thing. It’s my whole name and I don’t like nicknames. I met him at a hockey game at the Garden. The boyfriend I was with, he slipped on those damn steep steps and hit his head, and they took him away, and Troy was with some out-of-town guys, all a little high, and we went here and there and to and fro for kicks, me and those three guys, and Troy was the one lasted the distance and brought me home. That was … oh … months ago. I’m not so good on keeping track of time.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “Not right now. I gave it up. It was a cafeteria on Broadway up near Eighty-sixth. But I’m not sweating. I can go get a job anytime. I always have and I always will. Since I was thirteen, picking beans out in the Valley. And I’ll always have boyfriends too. Not so big shot like Jamison maybe, but ready and eager to take care—you know how I mean.”

  “I guess so.”

  “We’re all of us just here for kicks, I always say, so get all you can.”

  He asked her more questions. She answered frankly, acted slightly bored, smiled easily, combed her hair back with long fingers, joggled her foot in time to imaginary music, and made them a pair of fresh drinks. And in some entirely inexplicable way she seemed to change slowly, in front of his eyes, as they talked. He knew it was not the drinks. She had made his weak, as he had requested. In the beginning he had thought her entirely unattractive—so much so that he had thought her boast about boyfriends rather pathetic.

  But gradually he was becoming more and more aware of her in a physical-sexual way. The thick contours of her mouth, the girdle line along the top of the careless thigh, a knowing, self-confident look of mockery in her bland gray eyes. Yes, even the careless tangle of the brown hair, the thinness of a slightly soiled ankle, the bawdy and knowing tilt of the sharp, immature breasts.

  Awareness increased until he wondered how he could have been so unaware in the beginning. Feature by feature, line by line, she was unattractive—almost, in fact, a grotesque. But there was now evident an unmistakable aura, an amiable pungency, about her that was beginning to make his heart beat more quickly and heavily. He suddenly became aware of a silence that had lasted for some time.

  “Say it, old buddy,” she said. “What you’re thinking.”

  “Could you … would you want to … send him on his way?”

  She shrugged. “Why the hell should I? Anyway, I couldn’t. He’d be coming back.”

  “So how does it end?”

  “The way it always has. He’ll get on my nerves. You know. Giving orders like he owns me. You can do this and you can’t do that. No other boyfriends. No ramming around town. Stay right here. Hell with that no
ise. That’s when I quit.”

  “How?”

  “How big is this town? I move four blocks and he can’t find me. He can walk the streets howling like a dog, but he can’t find me.”

  “How much longer do you give him?”

  “You’re pretty sharp, Mike. Oh, maybe a month.”

  “This has happened before?”

  “Oh, sure. A thousand times. But not with a fella so rich like Troy.”

  “Why does it happen?”

  She smirked. “You mean like whadda they see in me? Nothing you can’t see right now, Mike. I’m not pretty. But I could always get fellas hanging around. I used to wonder. My God, how women hate the hell out of me! I’m the way I am. That’s all. I like kicks. And I don’t feel a damn bit shameful about the way I am. Like that song, doin’ what comes natcherly.” She swung the dangling leg.

  Mike put his empty glass aside. “I better be on my way.”

  She didn’t get up. She looked blandly up at him. The gray eyes were slightly protuberant. In the dim light he could see a slow pulse in her throat. “You in a big fat rush?” she asked.

  “I’ve got to be getting along.”

  “You’re a cute guy, specially when you look nervous like now. I could tell you what you were wondering about. I can always tell. Don’t you want to find out?”

  “But Troy might …”

  “I told you I do anything I want to do. I wouldn’t answer the door or the phone. I’d have no reason to tell anybody, and you sure wouldn’t want to. Like a bonus, for trying to help your pal.”

  He looked at her and felt actually, physically dizzy. Her gray eyes seemed to grow big enough to fill her half of the room. Her voice had been like fingernails being drawn sharp and slow down his spine. It was a persuasive, evil magic—a spell cast by a contemporary witch, a soiled, scrawny, decadent witch.

  He shook himself like a wet and weary dog, and made his voice flat and hard and said, “No thanks.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said and got up and went to the door with him.

  When he was in the hall, safe, like the swimmer caught in an undertow who climbs out onto a sandbar, he turned and said, “It’s messed Troy’s life up, Jerranna.”