Who He? - (16)

"Some of those bitches I tried are talking," Audibon went on savagely. "The word's getting around. You know you can't keep a secret on The Rock. You've got to come back. The talk's got to stop. It's the one thing no man can stand. You can lose an arm or a leg and they're sorry for you ... but when you lose that, they laugh."
    "Please, Roy...." Gabby tried to escape the trap. Audibon held her.
    "I'm being honest now, pet. No romantic pitch from me. I'm not asking for old-fashioned marriage and virtue and chastity. Understand? I said on your own terms. You'll be free. Completely ... so long as you're discreet." Audibon's face twisted. "I'll give everything. All I want is you in my house."
    "So I'm back to public relations again."
    "And you in my bed ... once in a while, to give me a fighting chance. Just once in a while. Take time out from whoever it is and give me a break. For God's sake, is that unreasonable?"
    "No. It's generous and horrible." Gabby stopped struggling and looked at him with disgust. "If you don't let me go, I'm going to scream."
    He flung her from him. She stumbled against the soda fountain and one of the stools toppled with a crash.
    "So help me God," Audibon said, "I'll ruin you. I'll tear you apart ... you and Lennox. I'll run you off The Rock. I'll run you out of the country. You'll lay for him in a two-bit flea-bag remembering this. Now get out!"
    He turned, stalked around the monitor and walked back onto the sets, the dazzling smile corroding his face. Gabby began to cry. She opened her purse, groping blindly in it for a handkerchief, scattering the contents of her purse over the soda fountain and the floor.
    "THIS IS YOUR UNIVERSE!" the voice roared suddenly. "AN INVITATION TO EVERYMAN TO ABANDON SELFISH THOUGHT AND JOIN THE GREAT GALAXY ... CONCEIVED AND PRODUCED BY LEROY W. AUDIBON!"
    When Gabby regained control of herself, she gathered her possessions and returned them to her purse. The last thing she picked up was Macro's slip of paper. She examined it again, then followed Audibon out onto the sets. She walked with her lazy carriage, shoulders square, arms relaxed, followed by wolf-whistles from the technicians. Audibon was in the schoolroom, one foot on a bench, lashing the director and assistants with his smile and his words. Gabby went to him, apologized for interrupting and handed him the slip of paper.
    "You forgot this, Roy," she said quietly.
    "Oh? Will I need it?"
    "Of course. That's why I returned it." She held out her hand. "Goodbye, Roy."
    He ignored her hand and turned away. Gabby smiled and left the studio. Downstairs, she went to a telephone booth and called Jake's apartment. Cooper answered the phone and sounded cold when Gabby asked for Lennox.
    "He's not home, Gabby."
    "Do you expect him? I'd like to leave a message."
    "No, I'm not expecting him, I'm happy to say."
    "Why do you say that?"
    "I'd rather not discuss Jake with you, if you don't mind."
    "You still don't like me, Sam."
    "What's your message, please?"
    "Tell him I can't see him tonight."
    "I can't guarantee he'll get it."
    "Oh," Gabby said. "That's bad. I don't want to stand him up without warning."
    "Why don't you try the theater? They'll still be rehearsing. He may be there."
    Gabby called the Venice Theater. The stage doorman was the deaf, quaint type ... wonderful for anecdote, impossible for messages. After two minutes of patient shouting, Gabby got Tooky Ween on the phone.
    "Tooky Ween speaking," he rumbled. "Make it fast. We got headaches."
    "I'm sorry, Mr. Ween. That man made a mistake. I want Jordan Lennox."
    "Lennox!" Ween roared. "That lousy, chiseling son of a--He wouldn't have the crust to show his crust here. If he did he'd be dead and couldn't answer the phone anyway."
    Ween hung up. Gabby considered, then called the Grabinett office. It was after hours and only the line to Grabinett's desk was open. Blinky took the call himself.
    "Is Jordan Lennox there?" Gabby asked.
    "No," Grabinett snarled. "I only wish he was. I'd kill him with my naked hand. I'd kill him dead and do a repeat for the west coast, that--" Grabinett caught himself. "Excuse me. Are you a relative?"
    "No," Gabby said. "I wanted to leave a message."
    "Not here!" Grabinett shouted. "Not with this office. I wouldn't do that Almighty vandal a favor if I was to get paid for it."
    Blinky hung up. Gabby made one last try and called me. When I answered the phone, Ned Bacon was in our living room, murdering our Bourbon and Lennox. Gabby could hear him cutting Jake to pieces while she gave me the message. I wanted to ask her up. I'd seen enough of her at the Rox Record party to be interested, and I had about twenty-seven questions to ask her, but there was no way of getting Bacon out of the house and we couldn't have the two of them there together. So I promised to deliver the message, if possible, and let her hang up.
    That was about seven o'clock. She wandered east to the 59th Street Bridge, cutting through some of the toughest sidestreets on The Rock. She went through those streets unmolested. Gabby had a miraculous quality of escaping the common dangers that make every woman think twice. Perhaps it was because she never thought of them once. Perhaps it was her candid, virginal manner that forced the world to give her extra special treatment ... the way men are reluctant to swear before a child, unwilling to be the first to teach it what they know it must inevitably learn.
    She went to a gloomy candle-lit restaurant under the bridge. It had avant-garde murals on the walls, Puccini records on a phonograph, and hectographed menus. Half the waiters were enrolled with the Art Students League and were friends of Gabby's. Half the patrons knew her too. Nevertheless, she sat alone, consumed half a plate of pasta and half a bottle of California wine. She began to cry again, and had to snuff out the candle on her table. She was so upset that she wandered out of the restaurant without paying. No one made a fuss. They tucked her check in the cash register for another day.
    It was half past nine when she got home. She took the elevator up, trembling, aching, yearning for a hot bath and ten hours of sleep. As she stepped out of the elevator and glanced down the corridor, she stopped short. A man was squatting on the mat before her apartment door with crossed ankles, knees high, forearms draped on his knees. It was Lennox. He arose as she approached.
    "Didn't you get my message?"
    He nodded. "From Sam."
    "Please go away, Jordan. I can't see you now."
    "I've got to see you, Gabby."
    She was so weak she dropped her key. Lennox picked it up, unlocked the door and opened it for her. He followed her into the apartment, shut the door and switched on the lights with a practiced hand. Then he pulled up the giant shade that covered the studio window. Gabby sank down on a low, quilted bench before the cold fireplace and said nothing.
    "I wasn't parked here because I was jealous," Lennox said anxiously. "Please don't think that. I mean ... I am jealous, yes; but I trust you."
    Gabby didn't look at him.
    "I've loused myself beautifully today. I've been tramping around the Village waiting to see you."
    "I can't talk, Jordan."
    "Could you listen a little?" He smiled appealingly. "Comes a time in every man's life when he knows he's done bad things and feels guilty. That's when he needs a friend to reassure him. Everybody has to have somebody who believes he's never wrong."
    She shook her head. "I haven't got the strength."
    "Then could I just be near you a little? Maybe we can help each other without words."
    "No," she said. "Please go."
    "What's the matter, darling? You're in trouble too."
    "I can't talk about it now."
    "Something's happened?"
    "Yes. You loused me beautifully, too."
    "I did?"
    She nodded.
    "How?"
    "With Roy."
    Lennox went cold. He waited for her to continue.
    "Roy delivered an ultimatum. Either I go back to him, or--"
    "That Communist routine?"
    "And adultery."
    "What!"
    "Adultery," Gabby repeated. "You let something slip this afternoon.... Or did you boast?"
    "This afternoon! I--Oh my God!" Lennox sat down heavily.
    "Don't sit down, Jordan. Please go."
    "Sit down? I'm groveling. I'm on my knees. How in Christ's name could I have...."
    "Be quiet. Just go."
    "We've got to discuss it. We can't let him pull off a filthy trick like that. We've got to fight him."
    "No!" Gabby wailed. "No! No more fighting. I can't stand it any more. I feel filthy. You're like starving dogs, all snarling and fighting and eating each other. I won't be a part of it any more."
    "You're just scared, darling. Don't...."
    "You can't drag me into it again. Never again. Go away, Jordan. Go away. Don't come back."
    "Wait a minute," he said slowly. "You don't just mean tonight? You mean for good?"
    "Yes. I do."
    "What the hell's got into you?" he demanded roughly.
    "And now you're fighting with me again." Gabby pounded her fists on her knees in desperation. "Get away from me. Leave me in peace, for pity's sake!"
    "That's a hell of a way to talk. Hello. Goodbye. I thought we were in love."
    "No," she said bitterly. "It was a roll in the hay with a stranger."
    "For God's sake, Gabby...."
    "That's what you're turning it into. You're not the man I met. You're somebody else. I'm really meeting you for the first time, and I'm ashamed. I ... If you love me ... whatever your idea of love is ... for pity's sake go away!"
    "My idea of love isn't running away," he answered. He put his hand on her shoulder. "It's sticking together right down the line and fighting it out together."
    "Please don't touch me," Gabby said, shrugging her shoulder out of his grasp. "And stop using that horrible childish word over and over again. Fighting. Fighting. Fighting. That's all you know."
    "What else is there?" Lennox glared at her. "Will you grow up! Somebody mentions fight and you start screaming. Do you know what you're screaming about? Have you ever been in a scrap?"
    "Don't argue like a child."
    "I'm asking a question. I want an answer. Have you ever been in a fight?"
    "No."
    "I thought not. You're so damned pretty and so damned sweet-tempered you've never had to fight for anything. Life's handed you everything in your lap."
    "I haven't had everything."
    "Only because you haven't wanted everything. Sweet God, why don't you find out what it's all about before you pass sentence on slobs like me who've had to fight every inch of the way." Lennox pounded a fist into his palm. "You're blind. You've had it too easy. A writer-type guy once made up a circle. Life is Character, he said. Character is Conflict. Conflict is Life. That's the vicious circle we're all trapped in. You too."
    "No! I won't be trapped in the dirt."
    "Yes, you too! And it isn't dirt. You're like the prudes who think sex is dirty. What the hell are you afraid of? Try a fight. Maybe you'll get to like it. Maybe you'll get to grow up a little and come out of your dream world."
    "You're impossible!" she cried. "You're hateful!"
    "You make a big pitch for peace," he growled, his face darkening. "You talk it up about feeling filthy because the dogs are fighting; but that's just cover-up, girl. That isn't the truth of what's in you."
    "No?" Gabby answered steadily. "What is?"
    "Jealousy. Envy."
    "Of what?"
    "What every man has and no woman has. You love to castrate us. That's the one burning drive in you with your career and women's rights and politics. You can't forgive us for that. You try to cut every man down to your size, your sex, your weakness. I don't know what you did to Audibon with your knife, but you're not doing it to me!"
    She turned white. "You're horrible," she whispered. "You're worse than Roy. Worse! I don't want to see you again ... ever! Go away. Don't come back ... ever!"
    "So you can go back to Audibon?"
    "Is that what you think I'll do?"
    "What else can I think if you won't fight and won't let me fight? How else am I supposed to take this?"
    She leaped up, ran to the front door and opened it. She held it open, her dark eyes flashing furiously at Lennox. He picked up his burberry and went to the door. There he hesitated.
    "Listen," he began. "We can't do this. We've got to help each oth--"
    "Go away!" she cried. "Go away and fight. Find your Aimee Driscoll and beat her up again. Or would you rather stay and beat me? That would make you feel manly, wouldn't it? Then I could go to Aimee and show her my bruises. Would you enjoy that ... you big, virile beast?"
    "Go to hell, you God damned bitch!" he shouted and blundered out into the hall. Gabby slammed the door and locked it. She began to sob and gag painfully. She ran to the bathroom and was violently ill. One thought persisted through the sobbing and the sickness, Lennox had destroyed everything and finished with her ruin.
    CHAPTER XII
    By five o'clock Saturday morning, Lennox had walked himself to exhaustion. He slipped into the apartment in 33 Knickerbocker Square and went to bed. At nine o'clock he was shot out of bed as by a cannon. He dressed, went downstairs, picked up his mail and left the house. Two envelopes were from the Grabinett office. They contained his script fee and his royalty for the "Who He?" show of December 18th, a total of seven hundred and fifty dollars.
    The banks were closed on Saturday. Lennox went to a bookie he knew on 14th Street who also operated a check cashing office. There, he converted his checks into fifties and twenties.
    "Getting set for a big New Year's Eve, hey?" the bookie laughed.
    "No," Lennox told him. "I'm going to be murdered tomorrow."
    He stepped into the nearest saloon and had two brandy Alexanders.
    "Startin' early, hey?" the bartender laughed.
    "No," Lennox said. "I'm having my last fling. I'm going to be murdered tomorrow."
    On the way uptown he had a couple of more Alexanders and then breakfast at Androuet's on Persian melon, coffee, and Croque Monsieur Roquefort, which is a blend of Roquefort, Brie and cream, broiled on Virginia ham. It is usually taken with wine. Lennox finished a bottle of Muscadet and ordered another pot of coffee and a telephone. When the phone was plugged in at his table, he called the East River Airport and chartered a plane.
    "You are celebrating the New Year en l'air, M'sieur Lennox?" his waiter inquired in astonishment.
    "No," Lennox answered. "I'm taking a last trip home."
    It was cold and still on the East River. A heavy grey ceiling hung low in the sky. As Lennox climbed from the dock to the pontoon of the tiny Cub and then into the cabin, the pilot looked dubious.
    "There's fog coming in at Montauk," he said. "I hope we can beat it."
    He swung the Cub out into the river and taxied frantically toward the 59th Street bridge. Lennox wondered whether they were going under or over the bridge when suddenly the buffeting of the chop ceased and they shuddered their way sky-ward. Instantly The Rock was transformed into a make-believe city ... a toy on a table.
    They flew east over Long Island City and Jamaica and then northeast from Freeport up Great South Bay, past Amityville and Babylon to the Bay Shore Harbor where the Cub landed in Great Cove and taxied in.
    "I won't be an hour," Lennox told the pilot.
    He went to a white clapboard fish-house on the dock, phoned for a cab and waited in the bar. There was an enormous coal fire glowing in the fireplace grate and an enormous jolly proprietor glowing behind the bar. He looked like a benevolent wrestler.
    "If you were drinking your last bottle on earth," Lennox asked him, "what would it be?"
    "Irish," the wrestler answered promptly.
    Lennox sampled the Irish until the taxi honked its horn outside the fish-house. He got into the car and they drove through Bay Shore to Islip and then down a bleak road to the Champlin Marshes.
    "There's nothing down to the end of this road," the cab driver said, "It's a dead-end."
    "So am I," Lennox grunted.
    The road ended in a small circle of pits and ruts. Around it was half a mile of dry brown marsh reeds rustling listlessly in the light breeze. Beyond the marsh was the steel grey of Great South Bay. A rotting boardwalk led from the circle to a large shack built at the edge of a narrow creek that wound out through the marsh to the bay. The house was weathered silver, the windows had long since been burst in, the shutters had been blown away.
    Lennox got out of the cab and walked down the boardwalk to the shack. When he reached the door, his hand automatically lifted high to grasp the doorknob. His lips twisted at this memory of the childhood flesh. He lowered his hand, pushed the door open and entered. For a paralyzing moment he thought his dead father was standing inside the house. Then he looked closer and saw that it was a stranger, a tall, thin man with white hair, fussing with a camera on a tripod.
    "God has answered my prayers!" the photographer exclaimed. "Can I trouble you for just a moment, sir? Look here...." He pointed. The seaward wall of the house had collapsed. The marsh, the sea and the sky were framed in broken, silvery timber ends.
    "A perfect L composition. Verticals on the left; horizontals below. The eye is led in to the middle distance from any corner. Quintessential desolation. But there's a fundamental weakness on the right. You see it?" The photographer darted to a heavy square stud and rapped it sharply at the precise spot where Jake's slicker used to hang. "This must be broken. What I need is a shoulder. Someone outside, leaning against this post, staring out to sea. We don't see him, of course. Just the part of the back and the shoulder carrying the eye back to the center. You don't mind?"
    The photographer led Lennox to the stud, positioned him, and rushed back to the camera, chuckling and twittering. Lennox stood there, staring at the marsh, the creek, the remnants of the dock where his father's clam boat had been moored. He was filled with hatred and shame.
    "Thank you, sir. Thank you so much," the photographer called. "If you only knew how many weeks I've been waiting for this light. And then to have you come along just in time.... What brought you, h'mm? Are you an angel or a photographer?"
    "I was born and raised here," Lennox answered. "As a matter of fact, I think I own this place."
    "My dear sir! Am I trespassing?"
    "Yes," Lennox said. "We both are."
    He returned to the cab and drove back to the Bay Shore docks. There he sampled the Irish again until the pilot hurried him into the plane. He had been phoning up and down Long Island and the fog was closing in rapidly. By twelve-thirty when they were over The Rock again, it had covered the river.
    "We can't get in here," the pilot muttered.
    "What do we do? Head for Spain?"
    "I'll settle for the Coney Island station," the pilot said. "How about it?"
    "Why not?" Lennox said. Suddenly he began to laugh. "Do you know, I've never been to Coney Island in all my life? Why not now?"
    "It's dead now."
    "I'll be dead tomorrow. Why not catch up on everything I've missed? What the hell am I so damned gloomy for? I'm going to enjoy."
    The Cub circled and soared over the Upper Bay and sneaked down through breaks in the heavy nacreous blanket. There was no chop on the water off Coney Island, but there was a swinging groundswell as they taxied in to the small station. It made the brandy and Irish fume pleasantly inside Lennox.
    He paid off the pilot, parted from him genially, found a saloon, and requested to be served with "Dog's Nose," a drink he recollected from Dickens. He was now in the first, or literary stage of drunkenness. The bartender consulted his blue book and regretfully reported that no such drink was listed. Lennox settled for a pair of Boilermakers and wandered out to the desolate amusement park, empty, canvassed and boarded up.
    Lennox beamed. He took out his gimmick book and silver pencil, turned to a clean page and wrote: "Blessed be the man who sells joy. He is humanity's benefactor." He tore the page out, folded it and slipped it under the shutter of a dormant shooting gallery. He strolled to the ticket office of the roller coaster, wrote: "Better to be happy than wise," and tucked it under the window.
    To the Half Man Half Woman booth he donated "Pleasure is virtue's gayer name." To the 25 CANNIBAL BEAUTIES 25 he contributed "Life is not life at all without delight." And for the Giant Swing he wrote: "Pleasure is the sovereign bliss of humankind." As he was tucking this fond salutation under the door of the box-office, a thought struck him. He opened the slip, considerately wrote "Alexander Pope 1688-1744" under the quotation and replaced the message.
    He left the amusement park, bought a pack of cigarettes and hailed a cab. He told the driver to take him back to The Rock, and as they sped along the Belt Parkway, he opened the pack and lit up.
    "Look at me smoking. I'm intox'ated," he told himself, and laughed immoderately, thinking of the dear Shroff.
    The fog slowed the traffic and there was a slight jam as they approached the tunnel to Manhattan Island. The car behind them lost its temper and began an exasperating horn honking.
    "That's rude," Lennox muttered. He called: "Stop, driver!"
    The cab stopped its forward crawl, Lennox got out, went to the car behind them, bowed politely, opened the engine hood and pulled the wires off the horn. He marched back to the cab, got in, and with a grand air ordered: "Drive on, coachman. Drive on!"
    At Sabatini's he had three very dry Gibsons and entered the dining room where he ordered oysters, turtle soup, Shrimps Livornese, marinated asparagus, escarole and coffee. The dining room was half empty; very few of the people in the business are around on Saturdays, and fewer still on the afternoon before New Year's Eve. Lennox consumed his oysters and soup and allowed his gaze to relax on a couple at the next table. He didn't know the man, but the young lady was familiar.
    She was a blonde, with enormous blue eyes and an exquisite pouting mouth. She wore a black siren-type dress that exposed her neck, shoulders and altogether too much cleavage.
    "That's a Theda Bara dress," Lennox muttered in annoyance. "No ingénue ought to be wearing it."
    What annoyed him even more was the fact that the ingénue was behaving like a road-company Theda Bara. She pouted, she hooded her eyes, she undulated her shoulders and heaved her poitrine like the High Priestess of the Python.
    "Now where have I seen that corn-ball playing that routine before?" Lennox asked himself. Suddenly he remembered. An ingénue in a velvet gown trimmed with miniver, batting her eyes at Oliver Stacy over a champagne glass. He began to laugh. The girl looked up, caught his eye, and gave him a slinky undulation. Lennox arose and bowed. Then he reached into his water glass, took out a lump of ice and dropped it into her cleavage.
    He didn't have to pick himself up off the sidewalk, but there was no doubt he'd been thrown out of Sabatini's.
    "Live dangerously," he chuckled and was afflicted with thirst. He quenched it with a bottle of stout at the saloon in the network building and then wandered upstairs to visit the studios.
    He poked his head into rehearsals and waved affectionately to friends and strangers. The last studio down the corridor was on the air with some kind of radio mystery. Lennox tip-toed in, waved, and placed himself alongside the sound table where the soundman stood with a gun poised in his hand while a couple of gangster-type actors snarled at each other on mike. Lennox watched the script over the soundman's shoulder, and as the gunshot cue came up, on sudden impulse he snatched the gun out of the soundman's hand.