Plague (8 page)

The door chime
rang. Ivor went across and opened it, and in came Esmeralda, piled high with
marketing bags and with a long French loaf tucked under her arm. She kissed him
lightly on the cheek.

‘Hi, pa.
Hi, Manny. Tonight, we eat French.
Clams gratines, baby lamb with fresh beans, and hot garlic bread.’

Manny, rising
up from his chair, dropped a pile of papers on to the carpet. ‘I’m afraid I can’t
eat garlic,’ he blushed. ‘It gives me heartburn.’

Ivor came over
and patted him on the back. ‘That’s okay, Manny. You’re not invited to dinner
anyway.’

Esmeralda
walked through the sitting-room and into the kitchen. She dumped her parcels and
her loaf of bread, and came back in. ‘He can stay if he wants to. I bought
enough for three.’

Ivor sucked his
cigar and shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough of attorneys for one day. I would
just like to spend an evening in the quiet and charming company of my
daughter.’

‘It’s quite
okay,’ Manny said. ‘My sister is coming around tonight, and she cooks a
beautiful fish pie.’

‘That’s
wonderful for you. Es – do you want a drink? I’ll just show Manny out.’

‘Brandy-soda,’
called Esmeralda, disappearing into one of the bedrooms, ‘I’m just going to
change into something more comfortable. See you soon, Manny. Come for dinner
next time.’

Ivor showed
Manny to the door.

‘There’s just
one thing,’ said Manny, laying his hand on Ivor’s sleeve. ‘When we go in there
tomorrow, I want you to understand that you mustn’t show any signs of
bitterness, or revenge. I want you to act magnanimous. Like, Forward’s made a
mistake, but you’re willing to forgive and forget – provided he drops his claim
to the process. If you’re all sour grapes and spit, the jury won’t like you.
Will you do that for me?’

Ivor stared at
him, poker-faced.

‘Please?’
said
Manny.

Ivor nodded.
‘Okay. Tomorrow, it’s all sweetness and light. Do you want me to wear the
wings, and the halo?’

Manny shook his
head. ‘A smile should be quite enough.’

‘Okay.’

Without another
word, Manny turned on his heel and made off towards the elevator.

Ivor
thoughtfully shut the door, and walked back into the sitting-room to fix
himself another Scotch, and a brandy-soda for Esmeralda. He sat down with a
heavy sigh, and wondered if all men of fifty-two felt as old and used-up as he
did. Esmeralda came back in, dressed in a long turquoise silk negligee. It had
a wide, floppy collar, pleated sleeves, and yards and yards of floating train.
She was a tall, pale girl, with an exquisitely beautiful face; the kind of
haunting eyes
that fin-de-siecle artists
gave to their
decadent dryads. Her hair was long and curly and very black, and she wore a
thin turquoise headband. As she walked past the windows that made up two walls
of the high, rectangular room, the pearly afternoon light shone through the
silk of her negligee and gave her stepfather a shadowy outline of high pointed
breasts and flat stomach.

‘Bad day at
Black Rock?’ she asked, picking up her drink, and sipping it.

He shrugged.
‘Courts were made for lawyers, not people. This is the fifth day, and so far we
haven’t got any place at all.’

She sat down,
in a cloud of turquoise, in the opposite chair.

‘Never mind.
It will soon be over. You’ll see.’ He swallowed
Scotch. ‘That’s why I love you. You’re such an optimist.’

There was a
short silence. Esmeralda looked at him over the rim of her glass.

‘My optimism?’
she said.
‘Or my body?’

Ivor grunted in
amusement. ‘I guess it’s both. Seems like, these days, I’ve had more of the
former than the latter.’

‘Are you saying
that man cannot live by optimism alone?’

‘I don’t want
to force you. I don’t want to make you feel obliged.’

She gave him a
calm, almost supercilious smile. ‘No man ever could. You know that.’

‘I hope so,’ he
said, crossing his legs. ‘I mean, the gallery, and this place – you mustn’t
feel you have to pay me back.’

She didn’t look
up. She was twisting a gold and cornelian ring around her finger. ‘I feel
grateful,’ she said. ‘You can never stop me feeling that. You know, I looked
around the gallery today, and it’s so perfect, and it’s all because of you.
You’re a very beautiful man, pa. I mean that.’

He pulled a
face. ‘Your mother didn’t think so.’

‘My mother
didn’t know shit from sauerkraut.’

He laughed,
despite himself. ‘Don’t say that. That’s my former wife you’re talking about.’

Esmeralda stood
up, and walked around the apartment with her bluey-green train floating around her.
She wore gold rings on her toes, which Ivor always thought was incredibly
erotic.

‘Do you think
this place is too sombre?’ she asked.

He looked
around. The sitting-room was decorated in creams and grape colors, with muted
abstract paintings on the two inner walls. The furniture was all mirrors and
maple.

‘It has to be
sombre,’ he said.
‘When you pay $185,000 for seven rooms, and
$ 1,100 a month carrying charges – that’s sombre.’

She came over
and looked at him. Then she knelt down beside his chair, holding her brandy in
one hand, and stroked the back of his wrist with one finger. He looked back at
her, expressionless, seeking some kind of emotional flicker. She smiled.

‘I’d like to
say thank you,’ she said softly.

‘You don’t have
to.’

‘But I would.’

She took his
hand, and stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said, tugging him.

He thought for
a moment. Then, without a word, he laid down his drink, and followed her. They
walked across the soft, silent carpet to the main bedroom.

On the wide,
tapestry-covered bed, she sat him down and undressed him. First his shoes, then
his short black silk socks. He started to loosen his own necktie, but she
wouldn’t let him, and picked at the knot herself with her long dark-red
fingernails.

Soon he was
naked. His body was white and plump. There was gray wiry hair around his
nipples, and his legs were thin and stick-like. He lay there, bald and old and
unprepossessing, with his eyes closed. He knew what he looked like, but he also
knew that when his eyes were shut, and the reality of age and unfitness were
blocked out, there was a warm world of fantasy waiting that was more than
nourished by Esmeralda’s arousing treats.

Like a great
blue-green moth, she mounted him. Her hand sought his hardened
penis,
and. guided it up between her wide-parted thighs. She
eased herself back on him, and she
sighed
a distant,
muted sigh, as strange as the cry of some satisfied bird. Ivor kept his eyes
tight shut, and said nothing.

Time passed.
The apartment was quiet, except for the smooth rustle of Esmeralda’s negligee,
and their tense and excited breathing. Then Esmeralda started to tremble and
shake. She sat in her stepfather’s lap with her hands clenched tight against
her breasts, feeling the deep, dark ripples of her own orgasm.

They lay side
by side in silence for nearly half-an-hour. Ivor felt
himself
drifting into a curious sleep, and awoke after five minutes with a headache,
and a metallic taste in his mouth. He sat up, and reached for his black silk
bathrobe.

Esmeralda, her
negligee spread romantically around her, opened her dark eyes and grinned.

‘We’re a
strange pair, you and I,’ she said, as Ivor walked across to the mirror.

He raised his
head and examined her for a few moments in the glass. Somehow, she seemed less
beautiful when her face was transposed by a mirror. But that didn’t make him
love her any the less. He loved her more than any possession he had ever had.
Almost as much as his work, and far more than her mother.
To
fuck a daughter after fucking her mother is like buying your first new car,
after you’ve had second-hand models all your life.

He brushed his
few curls flat, splashed on some aftershave, and turned back to his
stepdaughter with a serious face.

‘I guess we
are. Strange, I mean. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s really happening.’

‘Isn’t that the
way with everything wonderful?’

Ivor nodded.
‘It is. But it’s the same with terrible things, too. When something truly
terrible happens, you can never believe it’s for real. You keep smacking
yourself and hoping that you’ll wake up.’

Esmeralda
stretched luxuriously. ‘Pa,’ she said. ‘What in the whole world could possibly
happen to us that’s terrible?’

On the floor
above, in apartment 110, a tall man of sixty years old sat in a large Victorian
spoonback chair, in almost total darkness. The heavy drapes were drawn over the
windows, and the condominium was rank with cigarette smoke. The man had a
handsome but heavily-wrinkled face, a white mane of leonine hair, and he was
dressed in a light blue nylon jersey jumpsuit that was absurdly young for his
age. He held his cigarette in a long ivory holder, and the ribbon of blue smoke
rose rapidly up to the ceiling.

He had been
watching home movies. An expensive projector on the small inlaid table beside
him had just run through, and the stray end of the film was still flicking
against the spool. On the far wall of the sitting-room was a blank movie screen
– an incongruously modern intrusion in an apartment that was crowded with
antiques.

The man seemed
to be paralyzed, or frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance,
and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips.

His name was
Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood’s hottest new property.

If you ever saw
The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you’d remember the face.

Or at least a smoother and younger version of it – a version that
remained confident, and open, and bright.
Herbert Gaines had just been
watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer
hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.

The door from
the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in
his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim
shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles,
came
padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his
short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.

The young man
looked at the blank screen. ‘Have you finished sulking yet?’ he asked. ‘Or are
you going to watch the other one as well?’

Herbert Gaines
didn’t answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention
was no longer fixed on the faded memories of.
1936, but on
the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.

The young man
came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light
illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine
plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines dosed his eyes.

‘I don’t know
why you’re sulking,’ said Nicholas. ‘I never said anything unpleasant.’

Gaines opened
his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did
so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.

‘You’re so sensitive,’
Nicholas went on. ‘This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship.
Least, that’s what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days
is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old
movies of yours.’

Gaines’ mouth
turned down at the corners in bitterness. But he still refrained from
answering.

‘I sometimes
think you want to fight,’ said Nicholas. ‘I sometimes think you take umbrage on
purpose, just to get me upset. Well, it won’t work, Herbert. It won’t. I’m not
the vicious kind. But damn it all, I’m the kind that gets tired of fights.’

Herbert Gaines
listened to this, and then took the burned-out cigarette from his ivory holder
and replaced it with a fresh one. He lit up, watching Nicholas with one limpid
eye.

‘When you’re
tired of fighting me, Nick,’ he said, in a rich, hoarse, cancerous voice, ‘then
you’re tired of loving me.’

Nicholas
finished rubbing his hair and threw his towel on the floor. Herbert Gaines
smoked listlessly, with his holder clenched between his teeth.

Nicholas paced
from one end of the room to the other. Then he stopped beside Gaines’ chair –
tense and exasperated.

‘You won’t
understand, will you? You’re too busy wallowing in forty-year-old memories and
uneasy nostalgia. Why don’t you try looking outside yourself for a change? Open
up the drapes, and realize what year it is? Christ, Herbert, I wasn’t even born
when you made those movies!’

Herbert Gaines
looked up. ‘You were there though,’ he said, in his throaty voice.

Nicholas was
about to say something else, but he stopped and looked quizzical.

‘What do you
mean?’

‘Precisely what I say.
You were there. Haven’t you seen
yourself?’

‘Seen myself? I
don’t...’

Herbert Gaines
put down the cigarette holder and laboriously got out of his chair.

Nicholas
watched him uneasily as he walked across to the bookshelves, and took down a
large Film Pictorial Annual for 1938. The old man put the book on his desk, and
opened it out. Then he beckoned Nicholas over.

‘Look,’ he
said, pointing with his pale, elegant finger to a large black-and-white
photograph. ‘Who does that remind you off?’

Nicholas took a
cursory glance. ‘It’s you. It says so, underneath. ‘Herbert Gaines plays young
Captain Dash-foot in Incident at Vicksburg’.’