8 Plus 1 (17 page)

“Anyway,” he continued, “that was the moment of truth, in the bedroom with the girls, kissing them on the cheek, and touching Sandra’s bruises—she fell off her bike the day before and hurt her chin—that was when I knew there was no turning back …”

“Did you want to turn back?” I asked gently, sensing the agony of his moment in the bedroom. “I mean, for one moment there did you wish that it hadn’t happened, that you hadn’t met her?”

He was silent for a moment or two, and when he spoke his voice came out almost in a whisper.

“I didn’t go that far, Jerry. I couldn’t. I’d already told Ellen, and I’d known from the start that it would hurt, that we’d all be hurt in some way. Jerry, it’s easy for you to sit there judging
me, thinking that I’m different, that I don’t feel things the way other people do and that that’s why I was able to walk out on my wife and kids last night. But that isn’t the way it is, not at all. I didn’t all of a sudden turn into somebody else. I’m still Walt Crane. I still love my kids.” He pushed the glass away. “Look, by the time I got to Tommy’s room last night I was wrung out. The girls were bad enough, but Tommy … well, I’d seen myself in him
so
many times. That’s what really hurt, kissing him goodnight, goodbye, knowing that when he woke up the world would be changed for him.”

“But you did it, Walt. All that didn’t stop you,” I said, trying to understand what kind of love could make a fellow take a step like this, planning a life with his children left out of it.

“That’s right, I did it,” he said. “But Jennifer’s worth it all. It’s like”—he groped for the word—“like being born again.”

I thought: He’ll be quoting poetry next.

“So there it is, Jerry. I wanted to tell you myself, before you heard it from somebody else.”

“Well, I appreciate that, Walt. We’ve been through a lot together, the good times and the bad.”

“And I want you to meet her, Jerry,” he said.

“Fine, Walt, fine,” I replied automatically, preparing to pay the check, knowing that the conversation was over, that a certain way of life was over.

“She’s supposed to meet us here,” he said. “She should be here any minute.”

His words did not carry their meaning to me
immediately because I was thinking of that bedroom where Walt had kissed his daughters goodbye while they lay sleeping, thinking that their world was still bright and safe and secure. I thought of my own children, Kathy and Joey and little Carol, and how much I loved them. But I knew that I didn’t love them any more than Walt loved his. And through the sadness that accompanied these thoughts I realized what Walt had said.

“She’s coming here? To meet us?” I asked.

“I want you to know her, Jerry, to find out how wonderful she is,” Walt explained. “I know what everyone thinks of someone like Jennifer. What do they call her—the other woman, the homewrecker? All those clichés. But when you see her face to face, you’ll know what I mean …”

He looked beyond my shoulder toward the door, and I saw the flashing in his eyes, the youth that suddenly raced across his features like a sunrise, the way he half-raised himself from his chair —I knew that Jennifer West had entered the place and drawn him to her like a magnet.

She was heart-wrenchingly beautiful. A brunette, with violets for eyes, pale skin, young. So young, achingly young. Walt seemed to be drinking in her loveliness as she approached, forgetting me, forgetting the bar’s clatter and everything else as he looked at her. My own eyes were on her. Old Walt, with a girl like that to love.

He stumbled through the introductions as he went around the table and pulled out a chair for her. “My best friend,” he said, nodding toward
me. And inclining his head toward her, he said to me, “My best girl.”

If she hadn’t been so beautiful and if he hadn’t looked so happy, the little introductions would have seemed ludicrous. Jennifer West acknowledged her introduction with a radiant smile that revealed perfect teeth and a sudden dimple in her cheek. I could see the thing she had in her smile—she could look at one person as if there were nobody else alive in the world. She looked at me that way for a moment, and when she turned away there was a sense of loss because I knew she looked at other people in that manner for only an instant or two, while she gazed at Walt continually that way. But before she turned away, she said, “I’m glad to meet you, Mr.—”

“Please call me Jerry.”

“—Jerry, because Walt’s spoken so much about you that I feel we’ve known each other for a long time.”

Where do I go from here? I asked myself. Stay or leave? I didn’t want to betray Ellen and the old life that all of us—Walt and Ellen, Harriet and I and the children—had shared, by sitting there pretending to condone what Walt was doing, by pretending that this girl Jennifer West was a welcome arrival. But I have always been a coward in small gestures, betraying myself in a million ways—laughing at a dirty joke that isn’t really funny, remaining silent when someone makes a nasty crack about somebody who’s left the room, never wanting to make a fuss, avoiding embarrassing situations. And so I decided to paste a polite smile
on my face and stick it out awhile, noncommittal, until I could leave after a decent interval.

Jennifer West disarmed me by saying, “I’m sorry to make you so uncomfortable, Jerry, but please don’t blame me. Walt insisted that I meet you, even though I told him from the beginning that you had every right to resent me.”

She was probably twenty-two years old, but she spoke and held herself with a dignity beyond her years. Her poise perhaps stemmed from her training as a model, although I felt that she had been born with that regal manner. I could see why Walt did not speak of her as “Jenny” or “Jen,” but referred to her always as “Jennifer.” When she was seven years old and little boys in the second grade were fighting over her at recess, she’d probably been called Jennifer. And she must have had that warmth, that intimacy, in her eyes even then.

I remembered suddenly that she had addressed me directly, something about resenting her.

“Look, Jennifer, I’m not a judge or jury,” I said, knowing the contempt I would fling at myself later for not taking a stand here and now, for not showing how I really felt about it all. “Walt’s not a kid anymore …”

She reached out and closed her hand over his, a small act of defiance—more than defiance, possession. And I felt left out, as if I were sitting at another table.

The waiter hovered nearby, awaiting her order. “Martinis all around,” Walt said.

“He’s corrupting me,” she said to me. “My speed used to be weak daiquiris.”

Speaking of corruption, I should have said, you
haven’t done too badly with him, either. But I didn’t, of course. Instead I said, “Do you like modeling?” and listened intently to her answer, noticing the small, lovely hint of down on one ear, and her eyes which, incredibly, changed color as you looked at them, violet to gray and back again. The third martini is always the one that softens the edges of everything, and it tasted wonderfully dry and stinging; the jukebox, or whatever they had in the bar, played softly in the background, some old song I couldn’t quite remember but that reminded me of dances after football games at school. As we sat there I studied her surreptitiously, including Walt in my scrutiny. He still wore a crew cut, but when he inclined his head the pink scalp was visible through the thinning hair. His face had been slashed by time, the erosions of the years. Jennifer’s skin was without blemish, her ebony hair was luxuriant, her eyes were sparkling. They seemed an unlikely couple, certainly, the young and the old. But Walt’s evidence of age didn’t seem to matter. He sat alertly beside her, like a small boy preening, immersed in her words, basking in her presence, responding to every nuance of her tone or gesture. Once in a while he’d look at me, pride stamped on his face, as if to say, What do you think of her, Jerry? Isn’t she worth it all? And I would smile at him, a small, stingy smile that hid what I really was beginning to think: that she was one of the loveliest girls I’d ever seen, so lovely that it caused a pain in my chest.

“I want to know everything about Walt,” she was saying. “Tell me about him, Jerry, all the
things he likes and dislikes, so that I can make him happy.”

“Well, let me see, now,” I said, falling in with the game, carried on the waves of the third martini and feeling a warmth for Walt, my old buddy. “He’s not really a martini man but a beer drinker. Don’t ask him about his war experiences, because he tries to look modest but finally he’ll tell you how he lost his Good Conduct Medal in a barroom in Naples on a wild weekend. He’ll tell you that he can’t stand television, but he sits up till two o’clock watching ‘The Late Late Show.’ ”

My words sounded cleverer than they really were, and Jennifer was caught up in them because of her love for Walt; and Walt pretended embarrassment but seemed actually to be enjoying himself.

“And, let’s see,” I continued, sipping the drink, savoring the taste, “He likes Hemingway and Steinbeck who wrote
The Grapes of Wrath
, and Brubeck and Ellington. And his prized possession is an original recording of ‘I Can’t Get Started’ by Bunny Berigan.”

A frown scrawled itself across her forehead. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re getting ahead of me. Bunny Berigan?” The dimple asserted itself as she wrinkled her nose in concentration. “Bunny Berigan,” she mused, turning to Walt. “Wasn’t he a musician or something?”

“That’s right,” he said. “He played a great trumpet, and that song Jerry mentioned, ‘I Can’t Get Started,’ broke all our hearts back in those days.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if he could hear that tortured horn reaching for the high one
even now. And those old echoes, if that is what he could hear, brought a sadness to his face.

“Well,” she said, briskly businesslike, “I’ll have to add Bunny Berigan to my list of things to catch up on.”

Walt looked at me, pride in his eyes. “She learns fast,” he said, but I still detected the sadness there. I wondered if he was hearing somehow, that sorrowful song that poor tragic Bunny Berigan had played so long ago. Or was there another reason?

“Jennifer,” I said, a small excitement in my voice, “ever hear of bank night?”

She shook her head.

“
Winterset?
With Burgess Meredith as Mio?”

She regarded me blankly.

“A song called ‘Rosalie’?”

Still nothing.

“Baby-Face Nelson? Fireside Chats? Gas rationing? The sit-down strikes? ‘Pete Smith Specialties’? ‘One for the Gipper’?”

She looked at me as if I had lost my senses, as if I had begun to speak some strange, unknown language, and she turned to Walt in an appeal for assistance, rescue. But he wasn’t, for once, looking at her. He was studying me, his face naked and unguarded, caught in some loneliness, a loneliness I had mistaken simply for pain earlier in our conversation.

“How do you feel about naps after supper?” I asked her.

She smiled, a patient answer, having decided that the martinis had reached me.

“I’ve got to rush off to a fitting, honey,” she told Walt. Turning to me, laughing softly, she said,
“Jerry, it was so nice meeting you. You’ve got to tell me all about those—what did you call them?—‘Pete Smith Specialties’ sometime.”

Walt scraped his chair as he rose. “Yes, we’ll have to get together soon,” he said hurriedly. “I’ll give you a ring, Jerry.” He seemed on edge, trying to smooth out our goodbye and signaling the waiter for the check and fumbling for his wallet and wanting to leave with Jennifer, naturally. What man wouldn’t want to walk out of a bar with a lovely thing like Jennifer West on his arm? He scurried in Jennifer’s wake while I lighted another cigarette and thought, What will you do, Walt, when the bloom leaves Jennifer, as it left Ellen and leaves everybody?

I guided myself through the revolving doors and emerged into the afternoon sun, dazzled by the onslaught of light, the way it used to be on Saturday afternoons when I’d come out of the Globe Theater into the real world, vivid and eye-shattering, after the black-and-white exploits of Tim McCoy or Hoot Gibson.

Hey, Jennifer, ever hear of Hoot Gibson?

I signaled for a passing cab, suddenly realizing that I was overdue at the office. As the car drew up, a girl stepped smartly into my range of vision. She wore a crazy candy-striped beret and had blond bangs. She looked at me charmingly, coquettishly, but she still beat me to the cab.

The taxi took her away and left me standing there on the sidewalk, thinking of Walt, poor Walt, and Jennifer, who had never heard of Fireside Chats or sit-down strikes, as lovely as she was. I watched the taxi bearing away the beautiful
girl wearing the crazy beret and thought: How lucky some of us are! Lucky, because we have the temptations but not the opportunities, because we’re always missing the cabs or the elevators or the trains that might have changed our lives and that would lead us eventually to the hell that always awaits the ones who break the rules. Like Walt. And I wondered—if I was so happy to have missed that possible hell—why I felt like crying, standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by people, at two-thirty in the afternoon.

“If any author in the field can challenge J. D. Salinger or William Golding, it is Robert Cormier.”

—
Newsweek

“As with all the best young adult fiction, only the subject matter suggests that these stories should carry that designation: serious readers of any age ought to find
Eight Plus One
interesting.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“This collection presents a sensitive, loving writer who shares himself, his life, and his craft with readers of all ages.”

—
ALAN Review

“His ideas are a stimulus to any young person wanting to write.”

—
The Denver Post

“A strong collection … that probes the emotions of adults and young people with equal sensitivity.”

—
Booklist

“These are stories to savor.… The finest writers write for all of us, without respect to age, and Cormier again demonstrates his mastery of the art.”