“I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOU.”
“Jay, I can’t believe you don’t have something better to do—”
“A debatable point. But, nevertheless, I have been watching you.” He sat down where Tony had sat, shot his cuffs, crossed his legs, and straightened the crease. “You look more or less like I feel, a bit of a lost soul. Am I close?”
“I don’t know.” Natalie shrugged. “My circuits are somewhat overloaded at the moment.” She smiled wearily. “You are not the lost-soul type, however.”
“I skipped ‘21’ tonight. I must be off my feed. Just walked on home, not feeling up to par. Maybe I’m getting old, who knows? Full of memories I’d just as soon forget. There was nothing in the fridge, it’s my housekeeper’s night off … so I took to the streets, wandering, bereft.” His crocodile smile had lost its usual gloating aspect. He took a black pigskin case from inside his jacket and slipped out one of his cigars, clipped the end, smelled it. “I hadn’t been in here for years, since the old days. Thought I’d drop by, look at the drawings on the walls. Then I saw you and Tony and, well, things didn’t seem to be going awfully well and I figured I’d just watch. Like the little boy with a view of the girls’ locker room. Dreadful fellow that I am.” He lit his cigar and she smelled the smooth, pungent aroma, liked it. “What was the present for? It’s very pretty.”
“Just celebrating memories.” Her hand went to it again. “I guess it’s a night for memories.” Jay ordered a split of champagne and she took a swallow, wondering if it was a good idea. .”You didn’t by any chance send me flowers today, did you? To my home?” She watched him shake his head.
“Should I have?”
“Somebody did. But didn’t sign the card.”
Jay smoked, scowling. “I don’t like these little oddball things happening to you, Nat. Not since the man with the gun—”
“You’re too jumpy, Jay. Forget it.”
“I’ve got a couple of reasons for not forgetting it.” He wasn’t kidding: it was interesting how much more appealing he was when he wasn’t being the Jay Danmeier. She liked him in his serious, quiet mode.
“What kind of reasons?”
“Well, for one thing, that cop, MacPherson, stopped by the office just after you left. He wanted to see you but said it could wait. He spent some time in the hallways looking at the framed dust jackets. Got me to talking about birds. Looked through my binoculars—there was something going on in his mind that made me uneasy. I did a little checking on him once he left.”
“You checked on a cop? What’s gotten into you?”
“I thought I remembered something about him, that’s all. My memory’s pretty damned good. So I called a mystery writer I know—Victor Stallybrass, you’ve met him in the office—and asked him. Well, I had remembered something about him all right. You told me he didn’t seem very coplike?”
“Yes, something like that.” She bit her thumbnail, an instantaneous gesture, concluded almost before it began. What was Jay getting at?
“Turns out he’s got good bloodlines. His father was a cop, too. Mark MacPherson. Almost forty years ago he cracked a case here in Manhattan that set people talking for years—you don’t recall that Franklin P. Adams—Dorothy Parker—Bob Benchley—Alec Woollcot bunch, of course, but there was another columnist, very big in his day. Guy named Lydecker, Waldo Lydecker. He tried to kill a girl who jilted him, but shot the wrong girl. Mark MacPherson pinned it on him and married the girl who had jilted him. Beautiful girl, Laura Hunt, wound up owning a big ad agency. Our MacPherson is their son.” He leaned back, puffing, surrounded by smoke. “I hope he’s as smart as his daddy. It’s his mother’s genes that keep him from being the prototype cop. Anyway, he made me nervous, looks like an English professor. … Look, let’s get out of here. Get something to eat.”
It was beginning to sleet and they found a quiet little Szechuan restaurant nearby. Natalie felt as if she was just being swept along, low on emotion, almost out of gas. She couldn’t have argued with Jay if he’d decided to sell her into white slavery. The fight with Tony—the sorrow and ugliness in the memories and in her reaction to him—had taken everything out of her. She wasn’t really even Natalie anymore. What, she wondered, had MacPherson wanted to see her about? And who was sending her yellow roses?
Jay ordered fried dumplings and a large bowl of cold sesame noodles. Natalie insisted on drinking tea and picked at the edges of the food. Then there was moo shu pork and garlic shrimp. She couldn’t resist. The food was too good, and using chopsticks was like a course in basket weaving to calm the criminally insane. Short of a lobotomy, Szechuan food would get the job done.
She found herself telling him about the unpleasantness with Tony and the burglary of her apartment the night before. She almost told him about the man at Scandals who had approached Julie about her roommate, then thought better of it. Jay was nervous, something eating at him. It would have been a bad idea to aggravate his state of mind.
“You said you had two reasons for not forgetting my mystery gunman,” she said instead.
“That’s right. People with guns scare the hell out of me. I never told you about my wife, did I? My first wife?”
“No. I didn’t know your present wife wasn’t your first wife.”
“Christ, my present wife!” He shook his large, craggy head. “I hardly ever think of her as my wife anymore. … Anyway, Diana was my first wife. Long time ago. I was working in the story department at MGM, thinking I wanted to be a movie producer, and I met the daughter of a really big producer. Diana. I fell madly in love, we got married, and her dad put up the money for a house in Brentwood. Hell of a house, huge lawn, pool, tennis courts, a greenhouse. We had a son, Paulie.” He stopped eating, laid down his chopsticks, sipped hot tea. “By then I had decided I wanted to be an agent. I was working for one of the top shops out there, mainly with literary properties. It began to look like I had found my niche, as Wodehouse would say. Then, one night I had a meeting about a new property—Christ, it was Vic Stallybrass, come to think of it—I’ll never forget that night.” He sighed pensively, his eyes faraway. “I got home and my wife, Diana—y’know, it’s funny, like I’m telling a story about somebody else—she was dead on the stairs coming down from our bedroom. Paulie was dead, too, both of them shot. Burglars. Guns. They had panicked and killed two people they didn’t have to kill. … I don’t even remember the next few days, then the weeks are sort of blurry, and finally I was here in New York becoming the man you see before you covered with garlic shrimp.” He smiled self-consciously. “You can understand why I don’t talk about it much. And you can understand why people with guns spook me. I’m worried about you until this thing gets settled …whatever the hell that means, Nat.”
“I don’t know what to say, Jay. It’s so utterly awful.”
“Yes, it is. Life sort of gets that way. But it was a long time ago, thirty years. … Funny, I started this agency with the insurance money. So, Diana got me started here in New York. She’d have enjoyed this life—at least, if I remember her correctly.” He caught her eye and nodded. “Yeah, you do forget. That turns out to be the saddest part of all, the forgetting. You think she’ll live in your mind forever, she’ll be with you until you die, and little Paulie, too. Well, surprise, Natalie—it’s not true.”
Ten years later he had married Helena, an English heiress, and she now ran the London office of the Danmeier Agency. The marriage had become a business relationship, which was fine with both of them. They loved each other but not as man and wife, not anymore.
“So, now that I’m baring all my secrets,” he said, “I might as well make myself clear on something else. You know how I feel about you. I want you. I’m curious about you, I know what you’re like in the office, I’ve kissed you, and you’ve kissed me back, Natalie, and now I want to know what you’re like in bed, all that sophomoric stuff that makes so much sense however old you are. Any of this surprise you?”
“No.” She touched the back of his hand. “You haven’t exactly been a shrinking violet. I’ve thought about the same things you have, I’ve wondered, but I’m frightened, okay, frightened of being alone for the rest of my life and frightened of making the wrong kind of commitment. I’ve got one huge mistake behind me and sometimes I think I’ll never find the guts to choose again. But what I can do is like you, and hope you can be tolerant of me. We know each other differently now than we did at lunch today. That’s exciting to me, whatever else may happen between us later.”
“Well, let me tell you, I’m not going to keep pestering you, Nat. I can live without you and be happy. Maybe I’d rather live with you in my life. Maybe I’d be happier—”
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said softly, smiling, tapping fingernails on his hand.
He nodded and grinned, accepting the uncertainty.
He hailed a cab on the corner and as she leaned up to peck him good night, he held her tight and kissed her. A real kiss. If the cab hadn’t already been standing there, she wasn’t altogether sure what might have happened.
Natalie sat before a single leftover log she’d managed to get burning and tried to pay attention to an unpromising manuscript. The Saint-Saens Organ Symphony was playing on the tape deck the burglars had left behind. She had read for about an hour when her brain gave a last surge of rebellion, fuzzed the lines of type. She couldn’t shake free of the tragic story of Jay’s wife and son … the sudden nastiness of the quarrel with Tony … the realization that this was how, at thirty-seven, she had celebrated her birthday—with discord, tragedy, the attentions of a man about whom her feelings were too ambivalent to define, a cop with a weird background and the bearing of an Ivy League professor, the shadow of a gunman across her life, and those damned, ominous, sinister, anonymous yellow roses in the vase before her. …
The memory of the scene with Tony bothered her.
Why had she been so unsympathetic? What was it at work in her? What was she afraid of? She felt as if she was vulnerable to contamination. Other people’s weaknesses might become hers and then, somehow, inviolate, independent Natalie would be irrevocably lost. …
What a lot of crap! She determinedly grabbed the telephone and called Lew Goldstein. While she waited out the rings her hand went to the silver diamond, caressed its warmth. There had to be an explanation for her behavior. Tony hadn’t done anything so awful. He hadn’t done anything awful at all. He had remembered her birthday. Lew’s answering machine came on at last and she hung up without waiting to leave a message. Just as well. Pointless to bother Lew. …
She was too wide awake to go to bed. As if sensing her confusion and frustration, Sir came bounding down from the bedroom, throwing his tennis ball into the air and chasing it with utter abandon.
“Poor old Sir,” she remarked to him, “you’re not afraid to go for a walk, are you? Good idea, Sir?” He threw himself ecstatically against the front door, rattling his leash, which hung from the doorknob. Natalie slipped into her old sheepskin jacket, hooked his chain through the loop on his collar, and set off It was safe: there were still strollers on the street and Sir would protect her. Fierce fellow that he was.