WHILE THE CAB PUSHED and shoved its way through traffic slowed even more than usual by the rain and the slick streets, she found that she couldn’t just shut off her imagination now that she was safe, heading toward normal. Where had the man gone? Had he waited in the shadows, in the bar with the window on the street across the way, in a crowd of people at the bus stop? Had he watched her leave the building? Had he taken another cab and followed her? God, she really was out of control—
Still, what had she actually seen? He had thrown away a gun. Why? What had he done with the gun? You hold up delis with guns, you mug people with guns, and—well, inevitably, you kill people with guns. So what had this bozo done with the gun? Why throw it into a construction site where someone was bound to find it? Guns could be traced. Or could they?
They were heading up First Avenue, then left in the Seventies, and she was home. She tipped the driver too much because she wasn’t paying attention and let herself in the two front doors. She checked her mail in the common front hallway and heard Sir Laurence coughing and whoofing and scratching at the inside of her own front door. How did he always know it was she? Or did he do the same number every time somebody came in?
She had found Sir Laurence half-starved, in a parking lot nine years ago and he’d eaten pretty well ever since. He was presumably some sort of poodle and cocker mixture, with the requisite soulful eyes, thick bushy brows, and a now-gray beard that tended toward—admit it—a determined sogginess. His life revolved around Natalie, a collection of six tennis balls, and snacks of something called Bonz.
Opening the door, she saw him backing up, wiggling, and finally depositing a wet, almost hairless orange tennis ball at her feet. She sighed, picked it up gingerly using just two fingers, and dropped it over the balcony into the living room, listening to him crash clumsily down the stairs. She lived on the two bottom floors of a brownstone, with a garden in back, trees and flagstones. Sir Laurence was one lucky dog, indeed, with a yard of his own in the middle of Manhattan.
Some days she couldn’t quite imagine what she would do without Sir to come home to. Like most New Yorkers with pets, she talked to him a good deal. Like most New Yorkers’ pets, he not only listened but seemed to understand the difficulties of her pressured existence. He, on the other hand, seldom lost his generous willingness to hear her out. A perfect relationship. He even slept with her, a warm bundle who, if he kept his questionable breath pointed in the other direction, was always welcome. He had a tendency to leave sand and grit in the bed, but then, nobody was perfect.
She treated him to a handful of Bonz in the kitchen, replenished his water dish, chatted him up a bit about his day, and he went out his own door to the backyard, where he had a bathroom in the far corner—there were times she couldn’t quite face a walk.
She put a Modern Jazz Quartet tape in the deck, set out a piece of Brie and some green grapes, and checked her answering machine. T. Jones over on Third Avenue had called to tell her her new coat was altered and ready; Jay must have just called from “21” to tell her that he really wished she’d change her mind and join him; and Julie Conway, who lived upstairs, said that she’d be stopping down shortly. …
Natalie spent ten minutes throwing Sir his tennis balls, then ran a very hot tub, and Julie arrived. She was everything Natalie was not: tall, with long blond hair, once a model who had done a spread for Playboy in the late sixties, now a public-relations executive in a major hotel chain. She was a master at what had once been called “staying loose, man,” while Natalie was always on the edge of being “uptight, man.” Yet—or perhaps because of their differences—they had become good friends. Based on the fact that they lived in close proximity to one another: rare in Manhattan.
Long-legged, broad-shouldered, wearing high swashbuckler’s boots and a wildly swirling skirt and vest, Julie looked like an advertisement for a tour of Rumanian gypsy-folklore festivals. She swaggered down the stairs, picked up Sir and rakishly rubbed noses, scaring him half to death in the process, and threw her immense length onto a couch.
“What,” she asked, her voice deep and elaborately full of vowels, “do I have to do to get you out for dinner? My spies brought me a PW; your picture is so beautiful it made my teeth hurt, according to the story you are also ‘hot’ and ‘rich,’ and on the whole it seems like a good idea to be seen on the town with you. So, let’s go.” She smiled lazily, waiting for the expected reply.
“I may be hot, I’m not rich, and I’m a wreck. I plead for a break. A lonely dinner, a lonely bath, to bed with my dog and a set of contracts—” She was pacing, didn’t want to get into offering Julie a drink. Didn’t want to get started telling her about the man with the gun. Not right now. For an instant, listening to Julie rattle on, it seemed hardly to have happened at all.
“You must eat. Oysters and tortellini at Maxwell’s, a short stroll on a nice rainy night. Nightcap at George Martin, check out the local worthies.” Julie’s booted foot was tapping the air, already impatient, knowing the argument so well.
Natalie shook her head. Smiled. “Not tonight.”
“I worry about you,” Julie announced for the seven-hundredth time. “You and Sir are alone too much. He’s only a dog—”
“A dog maybe but never only—”
“You should be out celebrating tonight, Nat, you know that as well as I do.”
Natalie smiled. She might as well have been talking to Jay Danmeier.
“A nice dinner, maybe a new man who is capable—just conceivably, mind you—of conversation,” Julie persisted, “… and he turns out to be a good lay. Voilà, one celebration, right on the money! Really, be absolutely honest with me, wouldn’t you like to just let go and go to bed with somebody tonight? Sort of top off the day?”
“Oh, Jules, what can I say? The answer is no, I really wouldn’t want to go to bed with somebody. If there were a man I cared about—well, sure, I’m feeling a little fragile, and making love slowly and for a long time would be the best. But that’s a big if, kiddo.” She stood looking out into the floodlit garden, watching Sir engage a couple of wet leaves in some sort of contest she would never comprehend. “Look, it’s just a difference of outlook, that’s all.”
“Judge me!” Julie cried. “See if I care—actually, I do care. You always sound like a mature, sensitive, nifty lady and I always sound like a sex-crazed asshole. But,” she sighed and stood up, so devastatingly confident, such a soldier of fortune in the sexual wars, “a long time ago I decided if the shoe fit I might as well put it on. I tell myself I merely communicate on an earthier plane than such as you—”
“And more effectively, no doubt.” Natalie followed her up the stairs. “Whatever happened to Dave? Or was it Dick?”
“Don. And the Jets are playing in San Diego and Seattle, two straight weeks, so he’s out of the picture for the moment. You know, I was amazed—he’s a gallery man, hits all the art galleries, they know him, he’s a customer, collects drawings, sort of eighteenth centuryish. Unexpected frontiers on the offensive line. I’d rate him a contender. If he doesn’t find himself too young for this thirty-six-year-old knockout.” She paused at the door. “You’d like him, actually, much more your type than mine. He told me he suspected me of sportfucking—he was really upset. Definitely your type, now that I think about it.”
In the hallway she turned back, her face suddenly serious. “Did you see the Post today? A nurse was stabbed to death in a nice brownstone three blocks from here last night—doorman building; not a clue. A word to the wise, okay? Put that with all the robberies in the neighborhood—and lock up tight tonight. Promise me.”
“Of course.” On impulse Natalie crossed the hallway and hugged her. “And thanks for saying nice things about me and wanting to go out with me tonight. I really am worn out—”
“Listen, I’m the last girl to give up.”
“Be careful, Jules.” She smelled the Opium perfume, felt the long, tawny hair against her cheek, suddenly felt herself a short, dark, funny-looking creature beside Julie.
“Never fear. I’m big and tough.”
And she was gone into the night. On to George Martin. On through the Upper East Side, leaving bodies floating in her wake. Excelsior!
Natalie lay in the tub, feeling the sweat running down her face, smelling the fragrant bubbles. The telephone sat on the floor, in arm’s reach. Sir lay in the doorway, watching her, mauling a yellow tennis ball. She picked up a hand mirror and scowled at the face that always struck her as too much the little-girl’s face, too much Natalie-at-twelve. As she had grown into womanhood the face had changed so little: only the addition of laugh lines at the corners of her mouth’, a faint spray of lines radiating outward from her eyes. A few gray hairs, which she didn’t mind, didn’t even consider hiding. The scowl faded, her face fell into repose. She supposed she was pretty, if you liked the type. A smooth, olive complexion, neatly shaped black hair that was presently wetly plastered across her forehead, a slender, pointed nose, dark eyes that could be expressive.
The fact was, she’d always thought of her physical appearance as her arsenal, the weapon she could fall back on when the going got tough and everything else failed and she needed to get her own way. That was her father’s fault, she imagined. He had loved to sit and look at her and sometimes she had caught him at it, seeing in his eyes not so much love as a simple fascination at what she looked like, at the fact that she had come at least partly from him. Still, he’d always told her she had a good brain, too. She’d always been the quickest, brightest, hardest-working little thing. … She put the mirror down and closed her eyes, pushed her thoughts away from herself.
But she still saw the curious look her father had. She’d seen it in other men, admiring her. She didn’t need to share their enthusiasm to use it, to get her way. When she’d mentioned such reflections once, Julie hadn’t known what she was talking about. But then Julie didn’t reflect much.
Now, Natalie smiled at the Jets’ offensive lineman worrying about Julie’s sportfucking. It was precisely the same charge that she had leveled at poor Julie a few months before, and as usual Julie had taken it in her stride, faced it, dealt with it, and said the hell with it—I am what I am. Which she was.
But Natalie cared for her and consequently worried about whatever fate might lie in wait for her at George Martin or Elaine’s or Maxwell’s or Xenon or … wherever. The Jets’ lineman sounded fine; the prognosis was not therefore terribly promising in Natalie’s view. Julie tended to attract her own kind, or at least those who matched the facade she had constructed. Not enough guys like Don the Jet.
She believed that Julie had seriously misread the message of the liberation of women, which was not an uncommon fate to befall women of their generation, caught more or less in the middle. The novels, hopeful and angry and bitter and bemused and frequently very funny, crossed her desk with the regularity of White House claims that the economy was turning around. Novels written by bright, literate women trying to decipher the code of the New Woman—and too often there was an unsettling undercurrent of hatred. … Was it too strong a word? Perhaps it was a hatred that the authors might commit to paper but would never act on in the course of life. She certainly hoped so.
A hatred of men. A stifling, destructive, soul-destroying hatred of half the human race, sometimes written out of justifiable personal experience, sometimes academically ingested prejudice, sometimes merely trendy. But the hatred was there and she couldn’t bring herself to represent the books. One had gone on to rise as high as seven on the Times best-seller list, but she hadn’t regretted turning down its representation. There was something so desperately wrong about it. Something so terribly pornographic, in the truest sense of that trashed word. Jay had wanted to handle the book, had sensed its commercial potential, and they had fought the issue to the wall. Natalie, not one to make theatrical gestures, had made one that day: we take on the book and I leave. In the aftermath she felt foolish, ignorant, stupid, not even sure she wouldn’t have buckled—but Jay had broken first, and the book had gone elsewhere. Where it had made a mint, he never hesitated to remind her.
Julie …
She ran some more hot water into the tub, turning the taps with her big toe, soaking up the steam.
Dammit, it was a dangerous world out there for all the Julies. Rapists, coked-out jerks with too much money, values all backward and running amok … herpes, God forbid! Julie was coming off two divorces and looked upon men as something less than people—though she mustn’t always have been that way. Now, Natalie was sure, Julie was consumed with a deep, boiling hatred of men, their egos, their toughness, their use of women, and was responding by turning herself into a mirror image of them. …
It was so sad.