HE WALKED SLOWLY UP Sixth Avenue, remembering that there was a big store that sold electronic equipment near Fiftieth Street. He felt physically bruised after his session with Lieutenant Schulter. It was as though he had just gone through an excessively rough massage. Schulter hadn’t been of much help, had, in fact, raised more questions than given answers. And it had been painful to have to tell him about Julia. After all these years to come weeping out of the past to bedevil him with a problem not of his own making. He remembered the evening they met. He and Sheila had gone to a small party at which the talk had been mostly about books. Someone learned she had been a librarian before her marriage and regretted having left New York. She only joined in the general conversation at intervals, although the few things she said made it plain that she had read a great many of the contemporary writers, knew about all the books that came up in the course of the evening and kept up with literary gossip, even in Gary, by reading a lot of magazines and by correspondence with friends she had left behind in New York who were on the fringes of the publishing and theatrical worlds. She was a pretty little thing, in a pale, washed-out, shy way and she made no distinct impression on Damon, either good or bad.
He was going through a rough period with Sheila. He was drinking heavily because his business was going badly and several of his more successful clients had drifted away. Three or four nights a week he stayed out until two or three o’clock in the morning with friends of his who could be counted on to drink themselves into a stupor by midnight. He, himself, more often than not, reached his apartment walking unsteadily and fumbling as he put the key into the lock of the front door. His excuses were lame and Sheila listened to them in icy silence. They hadn’t made love for weeks before the night of the party. When they got home after it, they barely said good night to each other before Sheila turned off the light on her bedside table.
He was feeling lustful and had a huge erection and reached out to caress her. She pushed his hand away angrily. “You’re drunk again,” she said. “I don’t make love to drunks.”
He lay back, wallowing in self-pity. Nothing is right, he thought, everything is sliding downhill, this marriage won’t last much longer.
In the morning, he didn’t wait for Sheila to make his breakfast, but had it in a cafeteria on the way to work. Miraculously, he had no hangover. Clearheaded, he decided that his behavior of the last few months had been Sheila’s fault as well as his. The deterioration of the marriage had started with a quarrel about money. He was bringing very little in and Sheila never made much, and the bills were piling up. Then a publisher with an unsavory reputation who had become rich by publishing sensational semi-pornographic books had made him an offer of a job in his office to start a more respectable line. The money he promised was very good, but the man was a vulgarian and Damon felt it would take ten Damons ever to make him respectable. He had turned the offer down and had made the mistake of telling Sheila about it. She had been furious and let him know it.
“You’ve had it too soft up to now, my dear husband,” she had said. “Integrity is all very well, but it doesn’t pay any bills. If you’d ever had to deal with abused, bewildered, violent children, like me, you’d know what it’s like to have to do the meanest and ugliest of jobs to keep from starving.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“You’re the one who’s being melodramatic. Sacrificing everything to keep the holy flame of literature alive. Okay, remain pure and three cheers for Roger Damon’s precious integrity. I know you too well to think for a minute that you’d change anything just to please me. Go back to that seedy shrine of an office of yours and smoke your pipe and wait for the next T. S. Eliot to come through the door and anoint you with a signed contract.”
“Sheila,” he had said sadly, disturbed by this echo of what Mr. Gray had told him of his last conversation with his son and the son’s contempt when he said that his father was content to live in a corner on crusts all his life. “Sheila, you’re not talking like yourself.”
“There’s one thing I can guarantee you, my dear husband,” Sheila said harshly, “and that is that poverty is one sure way of changing the tone of a lady’s voice.”
It was after that he took to drink and late nights with the boys, as Sheila sardonically called them. Any excuse in a storm, he thought, too honest with himself to be able to shift all the blame.
Remembering all this and the stubborn resentment on Sheila’s face that had persisted now for months, he thought, She looks like a peasant and she’s acting like a peasant. It was ugly and he didn’t like it and although he wasn’t sure how it would turn out in the end he was certain he wasn’t going to endure it any longer.
He had been sitting at his desk, unhappily going over his accounts and thinking resentfully of how Sheila had pushed his hand away in bed the night before, when the phone rang and he picked it up. It was Julia Larch. He had tried to keep the surprise out of his voice when she announced her name. “I’ve been thinking how nice it was to meet you last night,” she said, “and how much nicer it would be to meet you again.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Uh … Mrs. Larch,” Damon said.
“I dreamed about you just before I woke up this morning.” She laughed softly. “That’s just about ten minutes ago.”
“I hope the dream was a pleasant one,” Damon said, beginning to feel embarrassed and hoping that Oliver at his desk couldn’t guess what was being said at the other end of the telephone line.
She laughed again. “It was very sexy,” she said.
“That’s good news.”
“And I thought, Wouldn’t it be a good way to end my holiday in New York if you’d come up to my room right away, before I could forget the dream, and make love to me.”
“Well, I … I,” Damon stuttered. “It’s very tempt …”
“I’m at the Hotel Borden. It’s on East Thirty-ninth Street. The room number is 426. The door will be open.” And she hung up.
Damon put the phone down slowly, painfully aware, after weeks of abstinence, of how much the low voice over the phone had aroused him.
“Anything important?” Oliver asked.
“Just somebody saying good-bye.” He sat for five minutes more looking at the dire figures listed on the page before him, then stood up and went out of the office and walked across town to East Thirty-ninth Street and the hotel door that would be open for him.
He was still thinking about that call almost eleven years ago and the day that had followed it as he made his way through the heavy noontime pedestrian traffic of Sixth Avenue. In bed, Julia Larch had proved to be neither pale nor washed out or shy and by the time night fell he had had more orgasms than he had ever had in one day or one night, even when he was a youth of eighteen.
Whether it was a coincidence or not, after that his fortunes improved abruptly. A client whose previous two books had been badly received and had not sold came out with a novel that stayed somewhere in the middle of the bestseller lists for two months; Damon swung a contract for a newspaperman to co-write an autobiography with a movie star and arranged for a whopping advance; an aunt in Worcester died and left him ten thousand dollars in her will. He no longer felt the need to drink and Sheila, at first suspicious that this was only a passing phase, finally became the old Sheila again and apologized for being a shrew. It was no longer necessary to reach out for her in bed because she now reached out for him.
Looking back at it now, he could date his happiness for the last decade from the day he went up to Julia Larch’s room. But now, remembering the events of the past few days, he felt that a new era, dark and cold, one of wire-taps and warnings, of men who dealt in murder, an era of shameful memories, ushered in by the continuing presence of the dead, was beginning for him. He knew he was going to get drunk that afternoon. He also knew that Sheila, her faith in him as a dependable provider now restored, would forgive him for it.
He had reached the store that sold electronic equipment and gazed into the window, marveling at the limitless ingenuity of mankind which had so cleverly solved the most abstruse of problems which nature had set before the race to produce the tiny computers, the radios and cassette players and minute television sets. Before he went in, he decided he’d buy a message-taking machine for his home telephone, but not the gadget with which he could turn himself into a peripatetic recording studio. I am not built for spying, he told himself righteously. But without really confessing it to himself, he knew he was being superstitious. If he wired himself for sound, when Zalovsky called next, he would feel compelled to see him. Unwired, there would be no good reason, he told himself, to confront the man.
He went in and crossed to a counter where a clerk was waiting on a customer. “I want one that’s small and light enough so that I can throw it into my bag when I travel,” the customer was saying.
Damon started as he heard the voice. It was the voice of the man who been in acting classes with him before the war and had been a shipmate and close friend of his in the Merchant Marine and shared an apartment with him for several years, Maurice Fitzgerald. At the time that Damon was deciding to give up acting, Fitzgerald was already doing very well on the stage and in constant demand. They had remained good friends, even though Damon had left the theatre, but had parted coolly. Their friendship had been irreparably damaged and Damon had not gone to the farewell party for Fitzgerald and Damon’s recent lover, Antoinetta Bradley, on the eve of their departure for London. But now, seeing the familiar jaunty face, under the Irish tweed hacking cap, the coolness was gone and replaced by the old comradely warmth of the days on the ship and of the bachelor apartment. In London, with his sonorous Irish voice and his ability to play any sort of part, Fitzgerald had made a solid career for himself as a dependable second lead. Despite his talents, he had known he never would be a star. He was short and his face, elastic and sly, would have been useful to a comedian in burlesque. He could never have been called handsome, even by his mother, as he used to say with a rueful smile.
Damon was tempted to go up to the man, whose back was now turned to him, and tap him on the shoulder and say, “On deck, mate.” But, feeling a strange, disturbing tingling all over his body and remembering his encounter with the man he had thought was Mr. Gray, he waited until he could get another good look before saying anything. One encounter in a week like the one with the false Mr. Gray was enough for anyone.
But when the man turned around, Damon saw that it was Fitzgerald: not the young man he had known, with black hair and an unlined face, but a man of about the same age as himself, with gray sideburns under the cap.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Fitzgerald said. “Roger Damon!”
Even as they shook hands, Damon knew that no matter what, out of fear of ghosts, he would not have been the first to speak. “What’re you doing back in the old country?” Damon asked.
“I’m in a play that’s starting rehearsals tomorrow. I didn’t realize I’d get such a kick in being back in New York. Is there a man with soul so dead, who etcetera, etcetera … And bumping into you the second day back is just the icing on the cake.” He gazed fondly at Damon. “You look well, Roger.”
“As do you.”
“A little ragged around the edges.” He took off his cap and touched his head. “Gray hair. Worry lines around the eyes. The eyes no longer shining and innocent. Well, I’m glad to see you still have your hair, too.” He grinned. “Two old cocks. Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang and all that.”
“You don’t look old at all,” Damon said. He was speaking the truth. At the worst, Fitzgerald looked no more than fifty, although he was several months older than Damon.
“Being in the public eye. Does wonders, in a desperate sort of way, toward keeping up the illusion of youth.”
“Sir,” the clerk, who had been standing patiently watching the two men, now asked, “Sir, are you taking this set with you?”
“Yes, thank you.” Fitzgerald tossed a credit card down on the counter. “What’re you buying here in this house of magic?”
“I’m just looking, not buying.” Damon didn’t want to explain to Fitzgerald why he needed a machine that took messages over the phone and excused you for not taking the calls in person. “I think this reunion calls for a drink. Don’t you?”
Fitzgerald shook his head regretfully. “Damn it, I’ve got a lunch with the producer of the show. Mustn’t stand up the brass, you know. I’m late as it is.”
“How about tomorrow night. Have dinner at our place. I’d like you to meet my wife.” Fitzgerald had known Elaine and had congratulated Damon on getting rid of her, but he had gone to London long before Damon married for the second time.
“That sounds smashing,” Fitzgerald said. “What time and where?”
“Eight P.M. Here, I’ll give you my address.” He took out the notebook from which he had torn a page to write Julia Larch’s address for Schulter and wrote his own address for Fitzgerald. The local habitations and names of friends and enemies, torn out of a twenty-cent notebook. Poet’s work, as Shakespeare had noted.
“Before you go,” Damon said, hesitating before asking the question, “is Antoinetta here with you?”
Fitzgerald looked at him queerly. “She died in an airplane accident,” he said, his voice flat. “Ten years ago. The plane went down in the Irish Sea. All hands lost.”
“I’m sorry,” Damon said lamely. “Very sorry.”
Fitzgerald shrugged. “The luck of the draw,” he said. “Ah, I try to be offhand about it, and I thought I’d get over it, but I never have.” He tried to smile. “No sense thinking about.” He made a little ambiguous gesture, dismissive, warding off pity? Damon couldn’t tell.
They walked out onto the avenue together.
“See you tomorrow night at eight,” Fitzgerald said. “Tell your wife I eat anything at all.” He jumped spryly into a taxi. Damon watched as the taxi drove off, then went back into the shop and up to the same counter and bought the instrument for taking messages off the phone.
Then, carrying the machine in a wrapped box, he went into the nearest bar and ordered the first drink of the afternoon and thought of the good times and bad times he and Fitzgerald had had together.
Among them were the long nights in Downey’s Restaurant or Harold’s Bar, where actors gathered after their shows were out, and he and Fitzgerald would argue with anyone who came along about the different talents of O’Neill, Odets, Saroyan, Williams, Miller, and George Bernard Shaw. Fitzgerald, who had a prodigious memory, would quote from all of them or anybody else, to prove a point. Styles of acting were examined and Fitzgerald dubbed The Method, as exemplified by the Group Theatre, “The New York School of Mumble.” His father was Irish and had gone to Trinity in Dublin and had bequeathed his son a clear and pleasing musical speech, which could rise to Shakespearean heights or drop into a lilting Irish accent when he quoted passages from Joyce.
Despite his stature and the comedian’s face, he always attracted girls and there were always two or three of them around, asking him to recite favorite poems of theirs or one of the great soliloquies, which Fitzgerald delivered with quiet passion and admirable clarity, no matter how drunk he happened to be at the time.
He also had a great talent for picking up girls who could cook and would bring them to the apartment triumphantly to prepare feasts of boeuf bourgignon and fritto misto and duck à l’orange. When he found a girl who could cook better than the current candidate for the title, he ruthlessly cut her off and dubbed the new one la Maitresse de la Maison. Damon couldn’t count the names of Maitresse de la Maison they went through while they had the apartment together.
The first time Damon had brought Antoinetta to the apartment, Fitzgerald had immediately asked, “Can you cook?”
Antoinetta had looked questioningly at Damon. “Who is this peculiar fellow?” she asked.
“Humor him,” Damon had said. “He has this thing about cooking.”
“Do I look like a cook?” Antoinetta had asked.
“You look like the goddess rising from the foam,” Fitzgerald had said, “and the foam is made of chocolate mousse.”
Antoinetta had laughed at that. “The answer is no. I definitely cannot cook. What can you do?”
“I can tell a hawk from a handsaw and a flat soufflé from a sirloin steak.” He turned to Damon. “What else can I do?”
“Argue,” Damon said, “sleep late in the morning and make the rafters ring when you recite Yeats.”
“Do you know ‘In Flanders Fields’?” Antoinetta asked. “I recited it once in the school auditorium when I was ten. They cheered when I finished.”
“I bet,” Fitzgerald said nastily. Damon knew Antoinetta well enough to know that she was joking, getting even for being asked if she were a cook. You couldn’t joke about poetry with Fitzgerald. He turned to Damon. “Don’t marry the lady, good friend,” he said. He never told Damon if he had said it because Antoinetta couldn’t cook or because he didn’t approve of “In Flanders Fields.”
In the end, Damon thought, ordering a second drink from the barman, he had taken Fitzgerald’s advice. He had not married Antoinetta.
He should have warned Antoinetta before bringing her home that Fitzgerald was at his best with the Irish poets. If he had, she might have saved herself the snub and Fitzgerald would have been interested in her from the beginning and saved all three of them a great deal of trouble.
Fitzgerald’s greatest admiration for poetry was reserved for that of William Butler Yeats, and during the slow voyage across the Atlantic in convoy, he and Damon would stand at the bow of the Liberty ship as it pushed across the long swells of the North Atlantic and he would intone the haunted verses of the poet. He recited “Sailing to Byzantium” as a special treat on nights when it seemed they were out of danger and the sea was calm. Damon had heard it so often that even now, standing at a bar on Sixth Avenue, he could whisper it in Fitzgerald’s Irish accent.
He whispered because he didn’t want the other people in the bar to think that he was a madman, talking to himself.
That is no country for old men.
The young in one another’s arms,
Birds in the trees—those salmon-falls,
The mackerel-crowded seas. Fish, flesh,
Or fowl; commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
Fitzgerald would be weeping softly as he came to the end of the first verse, and Damon could feel the tears come to his own eyes as he remembered those moments.
Fitzgerald seemed to know practically all of Shakespeare by heart, and on nights of the full moon, when the convoy was outlined as perfect targets against the horizon for the wolfpacks of submarines, he would recite, with sardonic courage, Hamlet’s soliloquy after Fortinbras’s first exit—
Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
And let all sleep, while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O! from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.
One night just after he had recited the soliloquy, a ship in their convoy had been torpedoed. The ship had blown up, and they had watched the flames and the sinister column of brilliant smoke in despair as the ship went down. It was the first time they had seen one of their ships destroyed and Fitzgerald sobbed dryly, once, then said, in a soft voice, “Good friend, we’re the eggshell and all thoughts on the sea and deep in it tonight are bloody.”
Then, recovering, he had quoted from The Tempest, with an ironic lilt,
Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones is coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange,
Sea nymphs hourly hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them—ding-dong bell.
Fitzgerald had been silent for a moment after that, then said, “Shakespeare, the speech for all occasions. I’ll never live to play Hamlet. Ah, I’m going below. If we get hit by a torpedo, don’t tell me.”
They were lucky and were never hit by a torpedo, and they came back to New York joyous, young and eager to resume the work they were born to do, as Mr. Gray had said on another occasion. It was then that they decided to share an apartment. They found one near the Hudson River, in a district where the streets were mostly given over to used-car dealers and warehouses. It was a rambling, ramshackle flat that they furnished with odds and ends of furniture, quickly cluttered with books and theatrical posters, which the girls who kept drifting in and out kept trying to put in order.
Like Damon, he had been married before the war but had received a Dear John letter from his wife in which she admitted being in love with another man whom she wanted to marry. “It was a cold divorce,” he said. “The legal ties were broken in Reno while I was just below Iceland in the North Atlantic.”
He swore he would never marry again and when one woman who had endured three months in the apartment made it plain she wanted him to marry her, he had declaimed to her, in Damon’s presence, a mock-heroic from a play he had acted in, “I’ve been swindled by women, mulcted by women, rebuffed by women, divorced by women, jilted, mocked, teased by women, laid, belayed and betrayed by women. It would take the power of Shakespeare to describe my relations with women. I was the Moor unmoored, the Dane disdained, Troilus tripped, Lear delirious, Falstaff falsified, Prospero plucked, Mercutio with a hole in him twice as deep as a well and five times as wide as a church door—and all by women.”
Then he gave the lady a chaste kiss on the forehead. “Does that give you a faint idea of my feelings on the subject?”
The lady had laughed as he expected and had not brought the subject up again. Placidly, she had kept frequenting the apartment along with the successive bevies of other girls.
To maintain their friendship, Fitzgerald and Damon had an unspoken agreement that each would keep his hands off the girls the other had brought home, and it worked, even through the wildest of parties, until Damon appeared with Antoinetta, who soon became a fixture in their lives, sleeping over with Damon three or four times a week and even stabbing at preparing a meal for them during those infrequent intervals when Fitzgerald had run out of cooks.
In the mid-afternoon silence of the New York bar, free of submarines, a prey to other dangers, Damon ordered another drink. “Make it a double this round,” he said to the barman. Even though he had had nothing to eat since breakfast and was drinking on an empty stomach, the whiskey was having no effect on him. He felt sober and melancholy, reflecting on the lost, exuberant years, and then the one really bad time with Fitzgerald.
Damon knew that there was something wrong when he came back to the apartment after work. It was a polar New York winter evening. The walk over from Mr. Gray’s office had left him chilled to the bone, and he was looking forward to drink and the warmth of the fire that he hoped Fitzgerald had started.
But there was no fire and Fitzgerald was red-eyed, still in a dressing gown, which meant that he hadn’t gone out all day. He was pacing up and down unsteadily in the living room with a drink in his hand, and Damon could tell with one glance that he had been drinking all afternoon, something he never did before going onstage, which he would have to do that night.
Fitzgerald looked startled when Damon came into the room. “Oh,” he said, raising his glass, “you caught me in the act. An actor’s unforgivable crime. Reporting for duty while under the influence.”
“What’s wrong, Maurice?”
“What’s wrong,” Fitzgerald said, “is that I’m a shit, if that can be considered wrong in this day and age. Join me in a drink. We’re both going to need it tonight.”
“Curtain time is in less than three hours, Maurice.”
“I can go through that piece of money-grabbing Broadway junk in my sleep,” Fitzgerald said contemptuously. “I can also let the curtain go up without me and let the audience guess who’s missing.”
“Cut it out, Maurice. What is it?”
“All right, nursey-nurse.” Fitzgerald went over to the table where they kept the bottles and the ice and glasses. “Here, let me fix you a drink. The maids have all fled. And about time, too.” His hands shook as he made a drink for Damon and freshened his own. The lip of the bottle clinked against the rim of the glasses. Spilling whiskey from both glasses, he crossed the room to where Damon was standing. Damon took a glass, sipped at it and sat down.
“That’s it, good friend, sit down. It might be a long chat.”
“Okay, Maurice;” Damon said, “what is it?”
“It,” Fitzgerald said, “is Antoinetta. Or to be more accurate, it is Antoinetta and your good friend, Maurice Fitzgerald, aptly named. Bastard son of Gerald.”
“You don’t have to spell it out,” Damon said quietly, although he had to fight back the impulse to strangle the man at whose side he had survived the war and had celebrated hundreds of hilarious nights.
“You didn’t guess?” Fitzgerald, Damon could see, was trying to look contrite, but with all he had drunk, the expression on the loose comedian’s face was a leer.
“No,” Damon said, “I didn’t guess.”
“Bless the innocents of this black world.” Suddenly, Fitzgerald hurled his glass into the empty fireplace. The whiskey made a trail across the floor and the glass shattered against the back wall of the fireplace.
“How long has it been going on between you two?” Damon still managed to keep his voice down. He didn’t want details or explanations; all he wanted was to rid himself of the flushed, leering face hanging over him. But the words came out automatically.
“A month. Just enough time for a lady to make up her mind.”
“Christ,” Damon said, “she slept with me all this weekend, and last night, for God’s sake, with you in the next room.”
“Amor omnia vincit,” Fitzgerald said. “Or perhaps the other way around. Omnia amor vincit. Men and women, good friend, men and women. Beasts of the jungle.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“Probably in due time,” Fitzgerald said. “There are decks to be cleared, regrets to be expressed.” He had been having a long affair with one of the cooks he had brought home. She was cloyingly devoted to him and Damon guessed that was one of the decks to be cleared.
“There’s no rush to the church,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ll make an honest woman of Antoinetta in the end.”
“You are a shit,” Damon said bitterly.
“I said it first,” Fitzgerald said, “but I don’t mind being quoted. Where the hell is my drink?”
“You threw it in the fireplace.”
“Oh, the lost and wind-grieved ghost of a bottle of Scotch. From the works of Thomas Wolfe, a famous American author. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. More from the famous author. God, I never can forget anything. What a burden. I won’t forget you, good friend.”
“Thanks,” Damon said. He stood up. “I’m going to pack and get out of here.”
Fitzgerald put out his hand to stop him. “You can’t. I’m the one who has to go.”
“I’m not wild about living in a whorehouse,” Damon said. “Especially after I find out what the red light in the window means.”
“One of us has to stay,” Fitzgerald said. “Our lease still has a year to run.”
Damon hesitated. He couldn’t pay for another place to live and pay half the rent for the apartment at the same time.
“I have a prop-proposition to make,” Fitzgerald said. “Let’s toss for it. The loser stays and pays the full rent.”
Damon sighed. “Okay,” he said.
“You got a coin?” Fitzgerald asked. “All my change is on the table in my room, and I hate the thought of your being alone for a minute, good friend.”
“Just shut your mouth, Maurice,” Damon said, reaching into his pocket for a coin. He pulled out a quarter. “And if you call me good friend once more, I’ll break your jaw. I’ll toss. You call.”
“Tails,” Fitzgerald said.
Damon tossed the coin, caught it in the palm of his hand and covered it for a long ten seconds with his other hand. Then he lifted the hand. Fitzgerald was bending over to see the coin. He let out his breath in a low hiss of sound.
“Heads it is. I lost. I stay,” he said. “The luck of the draw. Acceptable losses, as the military so delicately put it when drawing up plans for the next invasion which would cost only eighteen thousand lives. I’m sorry, Roger.”
Damon flipped the coin at Fitzgerald, who made no move to catch it and let it hit him in the forehead before dropping to the floor.
Then Damon went in to pack. It didn’t take long, and when he came out of his room, he heard Fitzgerald singing in the shower, preparing for his evening performance.
Full fathom five Antoinetta lies, Damon thought, and moved with his glass down toward the end of the bar because a group of men had come in and were arguing loudly next to him about a television show, for which one of the men was the sponsor’s representative and the other men were advertising executives and people connected with the program in one way or another.
Full fathom five, Damon thought. Is there coral in the Irish Sea? He had never seen Antoinetta again, and the wound had long since healed, and her double defection had left him free to marry Sheila, blessed woman, lover, stalwart companion, many years later.
Fitzgerald had done him a service, even though neither he nor Damon had known it at the time. Before the farewell party for Fitzgerald and Antoinetta Bradley, to which Damon had been invited and had not gone, he had received a letter from Fitzgerald, in which his erstwhile friend had written, “Forgive me. I love you like a brother and I am not one to use the word brother loosely. But brothers are fated to screw each other. Consider Cain. Be happy. And the next time we meet I hope we can embrace.”
Well, this afternoon had been the next time they had met, and if Damon had been a man used to such gestures between men, he would have embraced his old deceitful friend. When Maurice came to dinner the following night, he would remind him of his letter and he would embrace him.
By this time the whiskey had taken effect and the world was misting over, and for no reason that he could explain to himself he tried to repeat the first verse of “Sailing to Byzantium,” but stumbled over the words and didn’t remember the middle lines and giggled foolishly as he said, with great dignity, to the barman, “The check, please.”
Under the influence, as Fitzgerald had put it, he left the message-taking machine on the bar. He was not thinking of Zalovsky or Lieutenant Schulter at the moment.
He never got the chance to embrace Fitzgerald. When he opened the New York Times the next morning, there was Fitzgerald’s photograph on the front page and beside it the story. “Maurice Fitzgerald, the noted actor, whose career spanned more than forty years on the American and later the English stage, suffered a heart attack and collapsed in the restaurant in which he was lunching with the theatrical producer, Mr. Nathan Brown. He was taken to the Lenox Hill Hospital in an ambulance but was pronounced dead on arrival.”
Damon put the paper down on the table beside his coffee cup and stared vacantly out the window at the house across the street. Then he bowed his head and put his hand over his eyes.
Sheila, who was sitting across from Damon at the breakfast table, saw by the expression on his face that something was seriously amiss. “What’s the matter, Roger?” she asked anxiously. “Are you all right? You’ve suddenly gone dead pale.”
“Maurice died just after I saw him yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh, the poor man,” Sheila said. She reached over and took the newspaper from his side of the table. She glanced at the small headline at the bottom of page one, then read the short article. “He was only sixty-five,” she said.
“My age,” Damon said. “Time to go.”
“Don’t say that,” Sheila said sharply.
Damon felt that he was going to break into uncontrollable sobs. To stem them, he made a hideous joke. “Well,” he said, “he’s missed a good meal tonight.”