THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 1974—NEW YORK

Nick caught a twelve ten plane to New York. He sat in a daze sipping cranberry juice and mourning Keifetz. He should have paid him more. Why was he so stingy with everything? He remembered Keifetz’ uncle, an old dermatologist named Harry Lesion. Keifetz used to send the old man a hundred-dollar bill whenever he thought of it. He’d have Daisy dig out the old man’s address, Nick decided, and send him the raise Keifetz should have had. He got to the family flat at the Walpole on upper Madison at a quarter to six. He took a bath, left a call for seven thirty, and went to bed so he would be as fit as possible for an evening with Yvette Malone.

***

Yvette Malone was a lightly bruised woman of about thirty who had been trampled by a man named Malone in holy matrimony and who had been fleeing ever since to almost anywhere it was emotionally comfortable, because a love of emotional comfort was all she had been able to salvage out of a marriage that had happened ten years before, when she had been even more defenseless. She had married one of those men who are retroactively determined to fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain or to become the leading climber of the Sherpa people for the first conquest of Everest or to pitch four consecutive no-hit games in the 1928 series against the Yankees—almost anything superlative if it were fictional or unattainable. He punished his wife for being denied these ambitions. After two years of doing the dishes for this prince of obscurity Yvette got out of town and moved to Paris. She divorced Malone.

***

As contracted, Nick called from the lobby of the building at exactly eight o’clock and rose like a randy eagle to her flat on the twenty-eighth floor. They didn’t speak much for the first hour—mostly there were grunts, moans, wails and shrieks. He threw himself at her, ran his hands up along her legs under her dress and grabbed everything that was waiting there. He scooped her up and ran down the short hall with her into a bedroom with a large bed. He threw her on it, then threw himself on top of her and began to flop about trying to kiss her and get out of his clothing while refusing to give up his hold on her crotch. She got his clothes off at about the same time he got hers off. It was fierce. It was poignant. It was noisy. And it was very, very carnal. As they were reaching a third climax he proposed to her. But he did it just before she moved into exultant chords of orgasm, bellowing “Yes, yes, yes!” to the extraordinary pleasure of the moment. He forgot she always responded just like that and thought she had agreed to marry him with enormous enthusiasm.

Forty minutes later, while they were getting ready to sit down to dinner in the kitchen, as he opened a bottle of French wine she had smuggled in with her, he told her how happy she had made him by accepting his proposal so happily.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“I asked you to marry me, and you yelled ‘yes’ three times.”

“Nick, I couldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t marry you.”

“Why not?”

“Just because I can’t, that’s all.”

He put the bottle down with the corkscrew impaled in the cork. “I think I deserve more of an explanation than that. Have you met somebody else whom you’d rather marry?” he said stiffly.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nick. There isn’t anybody else, and I’ve cooked a very good dinner, and we can certainly talk about anything else in the world except about getting married.”

“Just answer one question. Do you refuse to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Ever?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can’t even stay here, much less eat your dinner.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad you didn’t propose the minute you got out of the elevator. At least we got something out of this evening.”

“Listen, Yvette—you’ve said about thirty times that you love me. You certainly act as if you love me. You certainly couldn’t be more sure that I loved you. Are you just generally against marriage because you had that one bad experience, or what is it?”

“I can’t marry you, Nick. That’s all there is to say about it, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

As he started to protest, the telephone rang. Yvette answered it. “It’s for you,” she said.

Baffled, he took up the telephone. It was Pa. “Nick? Pa. You’re all set with Dawson. The house is on the Muskogee road, outside Tulsa. He’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock.”

“Thanks, Pa.”

“Before you leave the Tulsa airport set the car’s odometer to zero, then drive out on the Muskogee road for one seven, point four miles. It’ll be a white house on the right-hand side.”

“Does he know what I want to talk about?”

“He knows you’re in the oil business. He probably thinks it’s about a deal. He’s an odd bird. He keeps fresh money in laundry sacks and runs all his meetings lying down in a dentist’s chair.”

Nick hung up. “That was my father,” he told Yvette.

“I’ve heard of him,” she answered curtly.

“Listen. What the hell is the matter with you? I haven’t seen you for almost five months, and it’s like all that time you’ve been studying up on how to chop me down.”

“Everything’s changed.”

“What? How?”

“I have to have time to think.”

“What has changed? What could possibly have changed? I talked to you from London a couple of days ago and nothing had changed.”

“I am not going to talk about it until I get it worked out.”

“You are so going to talk about it! I want to know what has changed?”

“If you force me to talk about it, I swear to you, Nick, that that could be the end of it for us. I don’t think I want it to be the end.” She began to weep. “I know I don’t. But it’s hard. It’s very, very hard.”

He walked to her and tried to put his arms around her. She moved away from him, eluding him. She said, “Please just sit down and eat this marvelous daube.”

“What the hell, Yvette,” Nick shouted. “How can I eat? How can we sit here staring at each other and pushing food into our faces to keep from talking about whatever it is you won’t talk about?” He stalked out of the kitchen along the hall to the front door, grabbed his overcoat and hat and left, slamming the door, Yvette sobbed into her hands at the kitchen table, thinking about the lies Nick’s father had spread all over the world about her father.