St. Urbain's Horseman (27 page)

Stamp her Jake's. Irretrievably Jake's.

Even on their return to London, she vacillated, delighting in his presence most of the time, but on her despairing days enormously resentful of the manner in which he overwhelmed her, after the first week no longer phoning to ask if she was free tonight, but instead turning up after work every evening as a matter of course, sinking to the sofa, putting his legs up on the coffee table, knocking off his shoes, and pouring himself a drink. He was suffocating her, she feared, and yet – and yet – she anxiously awaited his arrival each evening, fretful if he was late, embracing him at the door, and yielding to him in bed before dinner. He excited her, he made her laugh. She had never experienced such tenderness from a man. But there were days, abysmally depressing days, when she felt like a prize, one Jake desired only because Luke had sought it first, and when she would have been gratified not to see him, however marvelous their evenings together. Days when she would have been happier not to bathe and oil and perfume and powder herself, make up, and dress from the inside out, all to arouse Jake, to give Jake pleasure, but, instead, could do her own things. However modest. Like wash her lingerie, mooch about the flat in an old sweater and jeans, read, listen to records, and nibble cheese and crackers when she felt like it instead of preparing an elaborate dinner for the two of them. Which dinners, another growing resentment, were increasingly consummated not by their inherent succulence for she was a first-rate cook, but only when the master rubbed his hands gleefully over the plate, smacked his lips, and dug in with a vengeance. And there were evenings when she would have been grateful to indulge her own fancies, however despicable, rather than be obliged to rise and respond to his moods. His hopes. His work. His burgeoning ego.

He was of course impatient of her attempts to find work.

“Publishers here don't pay a living wage,” he said. “They hire debs for a pittance.”

Stealthily, pretending all the while there had been no change in their relationship – admitting, in principle, she was free to see other men – he began to move into her flat by calculated inches. One night he came with fresh asparagus from Harrod's, a thoughtful gift, and the next he arrived with steaks as well – and a teak salad bowl – and a machine for grinding coffee beans – and when she protested heatedly that they would either eat what she could afford or he could visit after dinner, he seemed so hurt, even ill-used, that she surpassed herself in bed, flattering the bejesus out of him, and this he took as license, on the weekend, to turn up with a carful of groceries and liquor, cartons of his favorite food and drink.

To begin with, he lingered in her bed until three in the morning and then, because she insisted on her independence, which meant separate flats, he rose groggily, overcome with self-pity, to drive off in the cold and flop on his own bed. But having once been allowed to stay overnight, it seemed no more than sensible to keep a toothbrush at her place, his shaving things, clean shirts and underwear. And, come to think of it, scripts he had to read, his bedside lamp, the morning papers
he
wanted, and matzohs which he munched absently in bed. Her bed. Phone calls began to come for him at the flat. Indignantly, she took messages. Like his secretary. Or mistress.
But you are his mistress now, aren't you, Nancy, dear, and your day doesn't truly begin until he comes through the door. You sleep better with him beside you
. Which only heightened her self-disgust. For why should she be dependent on another for her happiness? Who knows if he could be trusted? If she hadn't already begun to pall on him? Then one morning, scratching himself on her sheets, he was foolish enough to wonder aloud, “Why don't we stop kidding ourselves and move in together?”

Which made her spring out of bed, “No, no, no. This is my place,” and hastily stack his things in the middle of the living room. His
shirts. His underwear. His coffee-grinding machine. His scripts. His bedside lamp. His jar of pickled herring. He disappeared into the bathroom, taking a suspiciously long time to collect the rest of his stuff, and then with an, oh well, if that's the way you want it, scooped up his things, a salami riding the top of the heap. She stood by the window, tears sliding down her face, as she watched him descend the outside stairs, chin dug into his mound of possessions, his bedside lamp cord trailing after him, the plug bouncing on the steps.

Typically childish, he didn't phone the next morning, and she wept copiously, humiliated because she didn't dare leave the flat in the afternoon, just in case he did phone. He didn't come by in the evening, either, and she was incensed. Suddenly, the flat seemed empty. Without excitement or promise. Such was her rage at what she had to admit was her dependence that when he did condescend to phone the next morning, she informed him, with all the frostiness she could muster, that no, sorry, she had a date tonight.

Nancy bathed and oiled and powdered herself, she put on the garter belt that had made him whoop, beating the pillow for joy, and the bra with the clasp he couldn't solve. She slithered into her dress, undoing the top two buttons, then doing them up again contritely, feeling wretched, fearful she couldn't yield to another man.
And why not? She was hers to give, wasn't she?
So she defiantly opened her medicine cabinet to make sure – just in case, as it were – that she was not without vaginal jelly. She was still searching for the tube and her cap, incredulous that he would actually have the gall, cursing him, when the doorbell rang and, running to answer it, she undid first two, then three, buttons of her dress, blushing at her own boldness.

Tall, tanned, solicitous Derek Burton, the literary agent who had phoned her every morning for a week, wore a Westminster Old Boy's tie, carried a furled umbrella, and did not instantly sink to the sofa, kicking off his shoes, but remained standing until she had sat down, and lit her cigarette with a slender lighter he kept in a chamois pouch, and raised his glass to say, cheers. He didn't have to be asked
how she looked, grudgingly pronouncing her all right, and taking it as an invitation to send his hand flying up her skirts, but immediately volunteered that she looked absolutely fantastic. Outside, he opened his umbrella, and held it over her. Derek drove an Austin-Healey with a leather steering wheel and what seemed, at first glance, like six headlights and a dozen badges riding the grille. There were no apple cores in the ashtray. Or stale bagels in the glove compartment. Instead, there were scented face tissues mounted in a suede container. There was also a coin dispenser, cleverly concealed, filled with sixpences for parking meters. As well as a small, elegant flashlight and a leatherbound log book. Once at the restaurant, Derek tucked the car into the smallest imaginable space, managing it brilliantly, without cursing the car ahead of him, or behind, in Yiddish. Then she waited as he fixed a complicated burglar-proof lock to the steering column. Jake would absolutely hate him, she thought, which made her smile most enticingly and say, “How well you drive.”

“One does try,” he allowed, and he asked if she had ever competed in a car rally.

Alas, no.

Could she read maps, then?

No.

A pity, that, because he had hoped they might compete together.

Somehow or other, mostly by encouraging him to tell her about his military service in Nigeria, they struggled through dinner without too many embarrassing silences, but she was hard put to conceal her boredom, and would certainly not have invited him into her flat for a drink had she not espied a familiar car parked across the road, the lights out.

Fortunately, Derek was easily managed and when, breathing quickly, his cheeks flushed, he did lunge at her, squeezing her breasts like klaxons, murmuring all the while that she was super, a smashing girl, the phone began to ring. Ring and ring.

“Shouldn't one answer it?” he asked.

“Would you mind taking it, please?”

He did. Listened, blanched. And hung up.

“Don't let it worry you,” Nancy said. “It's a local pervert. He usually gives me a tinkle at this hour.”

Which was when he began to pull insistently at her dress, his expectations seemingly fired by the phone call, and, pleading fatigue, she handed him his umbrella and saw him out. Once he had driven off, she crossed the street, swinging her hips, and stopped in front of Jake's car to hike her dress and adjust her garter.

Sliding out of the car, he shrugged, shame-faced.

“Ooo,” Nancy exclaimed, “I never dreamed it would be you. I was hoping to turn over a quick flyer.”

“All right,” he said. “All right,” and he trailed after her into the flat, contemplating the dents in the sofa.

“Come,” she said, opening the bedroom door, “don't you want to see if the sheets are mussed?”

“O.K.,” he protested, “O.K.,” but he did peer into the bedroom.

“Bastard. What did you say to him on the phone?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said, fleeing into the bathroom, and emerging to demand, “Have fun?”

“Super fun. Would you care for a drink?”

But he was already pouring himself one.

“I have been invited for a weekend in the country,” she announced, curtsying. “With the Burtons. The Berks. Burtons, don't you know?”

“Well now, I never suspected you of social climbing.”

“And can you give me one good reason, Jacob Hersh, why I shouldn't go?”

“Go,” he said.

“Oh. Oh. Go to hell! And what if we were to marry and I was to bore you after ten years. What then? Would you trade me in for a younger model, like your fine friends?” His film friends.

“I love you. You could never bore me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Oh, Nancy, please!”

“You can't know. How can you know? And maybe you'd bore me after ten years?”

“I've got it. Let's get a divorce right now.”

She had to laugh.

“Look here, if we continue to anticipate, we can suck all the pleasure out of it.”

“Yes. I know. May I have a drink too, please?”

Instead, he kissed her and, undoing her buttons, led her to the bed, where suddenly she didn't respond, explaining she couldn't, not tonight, because her equipment had mysteriously disappeared.

“How could that be?” Jake asked, his voice quivering.

“You tell me.”

“Maybe if you looked again …”

“Oh, Jake. Darling Jake. I suppose I will have to marry you.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, if you like.”

“Christ Almighty!”

O
SCAR HOFFMAN CONSIDERED THE TANGLED AND
confused carton of accounts, receipts, and statements Jake had brought him, and then a bony little man, a bantam with steel-rimmed glasses, gathered them together, his smile servile, and retreated from Hoffman's office as unobtrusively as he had entered.

Returning to his cell. The tiny cell where he consumed his days, increasingly busy and acrimonious days, vengeful days, sipping luke-warm milky tea with his chocolate digestives. The cell where he squinted over the fanciful expense accounts of film types (producers, directors, writers, and the very stars themselves), ostensibly the most nondescript and obsequious underling in the offices of Oscar Hoffman & Co., Accountants.

Harry Stein, he mused, easily the most servile of bookkeepers, a treasure, a fiddler
ne plus ultra
, even more effusive than the embarrassing Sister Pinsky, ready with his autograph book whenever one of the anointed was paraded down the hall to Father Hoffman's sanctuary, to cogitate over the virtues of a company in the Isle of Man as opposed to selling ten years' future earnings to Galaxy, taking shares in the Trust in lieu of salary. Or founding something new on the rock of the Bahamas. Or Luxembourg. Obliging Harry, first to offer a star a magazine or a cuppa, a clean ashtray, perhaps, if she had to wait in her (deductible) furs and obligatory dark glasses before being ushered
into Father Hoffman's confessional, petulantly settling her lubricant cunt into an unaccustomed hard chair, squeezing her clever little accountant between an assignation and a visit with her osteopath. “I don't know what I'd do without you, Oscar. I simply don't understand anything about money.”

Harry instantly at the star's side to chirp, “I must take this opportunity to tell you how marvelous you were in …,” picking out the picture the critics had damned.

“Why, thank you,” she'd say, not even bothering to look at him, a blatant nonentity. His praise after all as inevitable as rain.

Particularly enjoyable to Harry were the left-wingers, those staunch heroes of the Hampstead barricades, who signed letters to the
Times
protesting the latest American obloquy. Who refused to hold shares in Dow Chemical. Who defied the “establishment” on television interviews and were unfailingly on first-name terms with their chauffeurs. And yet – and yet – had need of Father Hoffman's intercession with the Almighty to save them from surtax on earth and the avarice everlasting of used wives.

“I must say,” Harry would enthuse, “I am looking forward to your latest …”

“Why, that's very good of you, Mr.…?”

“Stein.”

“Yes. Say there, Stein, how would you like to come to the opening?”

“Ooooo …”

Two tickets to the first night of the latest epiphany, albeit in the second balcony, where the grips and electricians squatted with their wives, old cows tricked out in garish finery, who arrived earliest and lingered longest in the lobby, craning their seamed necks, oohing, aaahing, at a glimpse of the fabled as they emerged from big black cars, the men in evening dress trailing starlets who rivaled each other in cleavage, bitches acknowledging the roped off but bedazzled plebs with a teensy wave, pausing, tits outthrust for the bothersome photographers from the
Mail
and the
Express
. Harry delighted in treating
one of the models from the Graphic Arts Academy to such displays, saying, “Not to worry, dear,” as she swelled to a legendary presence, “she's as much of a whore as you are.”