The Golden Calves (20 page)

Mark was already calling him Peter, and they were actually discussing the former's relationship with the lawyer lady. The younger man was being as frank as if Peter had been a college crony.

“The trouble with Chessie and me was that we were rivals as well as lovers. She's full of sex antagonism. Of course that can sometimes be sexy—Theseus overcoming the Amazon. It can make screwing a livelier business, if it's not carried too far."

Peter felt his throat constrict. This invitation into the scene of the younger man's sporty bedroom was almost too much. He thought of Augusta's passive response to his own fumbling lovemaking in the years before even that had ceased.

“Our real trouble began during the trial. It gave Chessie too much of an advantage over me. There I was, cutting a sad and sorry figure, and there she was, the blazing righteous advocate. And afterwards, it was as if Shylock was expected to make love to a victorious Portia, though maybe the old boy would have liked that. But not this cat. I knew I wasn't going to make the grade, but like an ass I tried anyway. And Chessie's reaction was horrendous. She couldn't imagine, at least in her psyche, that she wasn't being spurned, even humiliated. It drove her right up the wall.”

“But surely you could explain that." Peter feared that his eyes might be bulging as he mentally recreated the scene. “Even if at the moment she was too excited, wouldn't she feel differently in the morning?”

"But there wasn't any morning; that's just the point. She kicked me right out of her apartment. She said all was over between us.”

"And that was that? That was final?”

"Not quite. Unfortunately. There were two other occasions when we got together again. You can imagine what happened. I was so anxious not to have a repeat of those tantrums that I funked it each time. You can't make love with a pistol to your head. At least I can't. And the last time it happened I got sore myself. If she preferred indulging a nasty temper over trying to work things out rationally, she could do so, and to hell with her!”

Peter noted the sudden thin line of Mark's lips, which made him now look his age, in his thirties, not his twenties. The boy wonder had ceased to be a boy.

"But you implied that she couldn't help it. That her sense of rejection was not a thing she could control.”

"Oh, that may be true enough. She's probably suffering from not having been loved sufficiently by her parents. Or by her adored brother. He killed himself. I suppose there's no harsher rejection than suicide. Yes, I can see it. She fortifies herself against being unloved and hence unlovable by taking up women's causes and becoming a fighting trial lawyer. But then I come along to slip through the fortifications and take the citadel by surprise. And once she's exposed herself, once she's betrayed her secret weakness, I spit on her, so to speak. ‘Ah, so
that's
what you've been hiding,' she imagines me crowing. 'Your essential unlovableness!'”

"But, Mark, if you can see all that so clearly, surely you and she can talk it out? Not in the bedroom, perhaps, but, say, at the lunch table?”

"It's possible. But the truth is, it makes sex too clinical for me. I know people prate about understanding and sympathy and couples going together to shrinks, and I don't say it never works. But sex has always come easily to me—until Chessie, at least—and I don't propose to waste my life with someone who makes heavy weather of it. Let Chessie find her own storm partner. Let them enjoy the rumpus they make of a simple thing. As for myself, I'm through with tense Vogels and erupting Nortons. Give me a girl who can love a good roll in the hay and laugh off a punk one. I sometimes wonder if the old puritanism we thought we'd kicked out of morals hasn't gone underground and come back to plague us in the sexual act.”

"People have to be serious about something. I've made my god out of art. I suppose the less fortunate may have to make theirs out of screwing.”

“Is it a sin to want to enjoy a little peace and quiet with a woman?”

Peter could not help reflecting that he had not perhaps been just to Augusta. She had always been so patiently uncritical of performances on his part that must have been pallid versions of what this finely knit fellow, for all his modesty, was capable of. Suppose he, Peter, had married a Chessie instead of an Augusta! “Good heavens, no!” he answered Mark's question. “There must be plenty of young women glad to offer you that.”

"Well, let's drink to it.” Mark raised his glass of red wine. ‘It's really swell of you to let me rattle on like this. I could never talk to my father about these things.”

His father! The term cast a chill. But what other relationship indeed was possible? You old fool, Peter Hewlett, he snarled to himself; take what's offered you and be grateful! "If we're going to drink toasts, I think we'd better have some champagne.” And he raised a hand to beckon a waiter.

When the Moët-Chandon was uncorked, Peter changed the subject to one that seemed to offer more common ground. "At any rate, you have your work at the museum. That must be your solace until Miss—or Ms.—Right comes along.”

Mark seemed immediately disposed to be equally confidential in this field. “Well, that's the great thing, of course. Though it's sometimes a bit difficult to match the term ‘solace' with the kind of isolation that's imposed on me there.”

"Isolation? You mean the director is held in such awe?”

"On the contrary. The director is held in such disesteem.”

"But why on earth should that be? Do you mean they're all jealous of you?”

"They may be that indeed, but it has nothing to do with their low opinion of me. Surely, Peter, you know that I'm generally regarded as Claverack's sidekick? They think he put me up to what I did in the Speddon affair. And they're right, too. He did.”

Mark's gray-green eyes, intent now upon his host, took on a look of what seemed almost defiance.

"But, my dear fellow, surely your giving Miss Vogel back her old job—and her being willing to take it—must have quieted people down on that score."

"Not really. I guess they figure it's some kind of tricky ploy. Anita herself has been nice enough, and her friend Carol Sweeters at least talks to me now, but I can never feel sure of him. He's as slippery as an eel. You can't tell where to have him.”

"I know. That smile. And those ghastly compliments! I always feel that he's really insulting me. But what strikes me as curious in your situation, my candid friend—if I may be equally candid—is that Claverack himself does not seem to regard you in the same light that you say the staff do. Far from considering you his sidekick, I'm under the distinct impression that he wonders whether you're not entirely too independent of the sacred trustees. And in particular of the sacred chairman.”

Mark's immediate broad smile seemed, charmingly, to accept the worst. "Exactly. You might say that I've slipped between two stools. A toady to the staff and a rebel to the board. Oh, Peter, if only you were in Claverack's place! I think we'd get on wonderfully. Why don't they rotate the job of chairman? They do in some museums.”

Peter had a sudden dazzling vision of their working together, the wise old Roman emperor leaning on the strong shoulder of his adopted successor, the perfect union of sagacity with adventure, of experience with innovation, of an old man's love with a young man's ... well, affection. Yes, surely he could call it that!

"Well, of course it's my fault. I've always tended to avoid administrative work, and there was Sidney just dying to take it off my hands. Perhaps he has had the job long enough. We'll see.” Peter gazed now complacently into the golden mist of his glass. "Tell me something, Mark. So long as you are fancy free at the moment, how would you like to come down this weekend to Long Island? You've never had a proper look at the pictures there. Come on down—we'll be all alone. Inez is away, I believe, and her children are in their own wing. We'll eat well and drink well and revel in beautiful things!”

It worked out just as Peter had hoped, at least on Friday night and Saturday. Mark showed no interest in having any company but his host's, and he roamed with him through the treasure-laden rooms, between succulent meals, with long appreciative pauses before each work of art. Even when, on Saturday afternoon, he organized a softball game for Inez's children and some of their friends, Peter felt gratifyingly included, for Mark insisted that he act as umpire and feigned a jocular but still convincing outrage whenever a youngster had the nerve to challenge the old boy's ruling. The house came alive under Mark's enthusiasm as it never had under Augusta's silent and efficient management.

Only once was Peter upset by anything his guest said, and that was when, standing before the Gauguin of the Pont-Aven period, a shimmering green summer landscape with yellow wheat and three small, white-capped Breton women, he exclaimed: "You know, Peter, anything so beautiful begins to quell my doubts about putting European art in a museum dedicated to another continent. After all, beauty is beauty, and there isn't so much of it around that we can afford to be too fussy about periods and geographies. So long as I can see
that
in a museum, am I going to care that some people might think it really belonged in the Met or the National Gallery?”

So Mark had doubts. Well, of course, he would have. Peter should have known that. And now Mark was going to have to get over those doubts; that was all.

What was much worse—oh, very much worse—was Inez's arrival on Saturday night in time for dinner. She had been staying with her sister Doris in Greenwich, a visit that always put her in a bad mood, as Doris invariably managed to insinuate the superior position of the younger and still married sibling to the older divorced one. And then, too, Doris's husband was rich and successful, and Inez had to be partially supported by her parents. But when Inez saw Mark, of whose bachelor status and temporary freedom from romantic entanglement she had evidently somehow apprised, she became as soft and pliant and rolling-eyed as a cat in heat. She paid scant attention to her father and directed every remark to the affable but (Peter prayed) not unduly impressed director.

As the conversation developed, it became uncomfortably apparent that Inez was quite prepared to make a bonfire of her old man to warm even the fingertips of this potential admirer.

"I can just imagine what a dull weekend you two must have been having, cooped up here alone. Really, Dad, couldn't you have arranged something better for poor Mark? A game of golf or tennis at Piping Rock? Or had some neighbors over for a drink? But no, I can see what he's been exposed to." Here she winked conspiratorially at Mark. “Lectures, lectures and then more lectures about all the art in the house. My, my. How are your tactile values, Mark? In good significant form?”

Peter would not have believed that even Inez could be so odious. Mark, he had to acknowledge, responded with great tact. He managed to smile at her jokes, all meanly pointed at her father, treating them as if they were the friendly jibes of a fundamentally adoring daughter, and at the same time to imply, by glancing with a little nod at his host, that any implication that the weekend had not been the greatest fun was patently absurd.

"I'm not a great one, Inez, for club sports. That softball game with your kids was just fine for me. The rest of the time I was more than happy to relax and bask in this beautiful atmosphere. Your father's been the deprived one. He's probably been pining to get out on the golf course.”

“Oh, Daddy doesn't play golf. He doesn't play anything, really. His idea of exercise is to stroll along the bay and yack about Monet and Manet. But if you'd like, I can give you a bit of a change after dinner. Betty and Al Herrick are having a party down the road. I told them I didn't know when I'd be getting in from Greenwich, so they said to come over any time. How about it?"

"What do you think, Peter?"

"Oh, Daddy hates going out after dinner. Besides, there won't be anyone his age there."

"Well, thanks very much, but I think I'll stay here with him."

"You don't have to, you know. He always likes to go to bed early.”

Peter was beside himself. Not only did he resent Inez's active effort to appropriate his guest; he was upset by the suspicion that Mark really wanted to go. The Herricks were well known as party givers; the atmosphere would be bright and festive. He might even find a mate, even Inez, God forbid! But the one thing Peter knew he must not let himself be was the curmudgeon who stands between youth and gaiety. And he had too much sense to taint the picture that he hoped he had created in Mark's mind of the old epicure reigning in his temple of art with the less lovely image of the old fogy unwanted at the younger party. Could he not just hear the diplomatic Betty Herrick's too-gracious greeting: "Oh, Inez, darling, what a sweetie pie you are to have brought your wonderful father! I wouldn't have dared ask him to this philistine affair. And now I shall drag him into a corner and have him all to myself. For I put everyone on notice that I entertain a clandestine passion for Mr. Hewlett!”

"No, Mark, you must go. I insist. Inez is quite right. I like to turn in very early."

Mark allowed himself to be taken off to the Herricks immediately after dinner, and Peter, too vexed to be able to read in bed, took two sleeping pills that he might not hear the crunch of wheels on the gravel below his window and know how late they came in.

However late it had been, Mark was down in time to breakfast with him on Sunday morning. Gratifyingly, he made no reference to the party but started at once on a discussion of the Manet in the dining room.

“I was thinking, when I woke up, that I'd found just the place for it in your new gallery—”

Inez, who never rose till lunch time on Sundays, came in at this point and took her seat.

"Heavens, what brings you down so early?" Peter asked, a bit cattily. "I thought only a fire alarm would get you out of the sack before noon."