Who He? - (21)

They argued budget for half an hour and then signed the agreement. Jake's hand hardly trembled when he picked up the pen and signed his name. He was beginning to feel solid again. The three days were disappearing.
    As he left the office, Grabinett called after him: "Regular show conference tomorrow at two. Don't forget. Have the script ready."
    "Mel! Have a heart. I've been in the hospital since Sunday."
    "So you had a nice rest. Get to work."
    Downstairs, he met Kay Hill, very slim and English in tweeds and a fisher scarf, dashing into Sabatini's for a drink. She dragged him with her. Lennox went back to the phone booth and tried for Gabby at Houseways, Inc. She was not there either. He returned to Kay at the bar.
    "So they let you out of the hatch, darling," she said. "Happy, happy day. We'll pickle it."
    "My God," Lennox said. "Nothing's changed."
    "Nothing ever does change. What's your brew?"
    "Soda."
    "Scotch and soda? Bourbon and soda? What and soda?"
    "Soda and soda."
    "Lent's a little early this year," she told the bartender. "Soda for my father. Listen, darling, there's no earthly reason why--Hello darling!" She waved to someone who kissed her cheek and clapped Lennox genially on the back. "Why you have to hire a pair of bloody squares from--Hello darling!" Another kiss and another clap on the back. "From Missouri to expert your new show. I'm your girl for the job and--Hello darling!--I'll sleep for it."
    "Listen," he said abruptly. "What happened at your place Saturday night?"
    "Oh that? I was bloody plastered. You pulled in around midnight with that Bleutcher bitch and--"
    "Midnight? You're sure?"
    "Of course--Hello darling!--and when Oliver ran out with her I thought the usual had happened." She finished her drink and snapped her fingers to the bartender. "Poor dear, he went out like something after a hot bitch. He came back like something after a cold shower; and I wouldn't turn my electric blanket on for him. What about that job? It's a cozy--Hello darling!--blanket."
    Sabatini's was filling with the regular cocktail crowd, the men in the same grey flannel suits with white oxford shirts and large expensive ties, escorting the same pretty girls, exchanging the same dangerous dialogue that flashed sparks like steel knives scraping together. It was familiar and steadying. Sick, it might be, but it was the only life that Lennox knew. He actually was able to grin at Kay.
    "I could use your body, love," he said, "but I wouldn't dare touch your dialogue."
    "Don't be a bloody bug, Jake. You know I'm discreet on camera, I'd never say--Hello darling!" Another kiss and another clap on the back from somebody who paused to chat.
    "What's with Cooper?" he inquired. "I hear he got into some crazy jam and hung himself in the middle of the first commercial."
    Lennox looked at him. "It was an accident," he said slowly.
    "Darling," Kay began. "Everybody knows poor Sam--"
    "It was an accident." He turned to Kay and for a searing moment his eyes were more acid than hers. "Never forget that for a moment. Pass the word around."
    "Yes, Jake," she whispered.
    "He was a wonderful guy ... too good for this business. I wrote those crazy letters. Not Sam. He died in an accident."
    Lennox left the bar and walked south on Madison, the highway of his business, the highway of his life, the quintessence of Now. And the Now was the same Now of last week, last month, last year. Nothing had changed; nothing was lost, except Cooper. The life he had fought so bitterly to hold together still stood firm, better than ever ... except for Cooper.
    "I don't know how I'll ever make it up to you, Sam," he thought. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I can make the business jump through the hoop, but that's not enough of an answer."
    He turned east in the Twenties, threading through the dismal sidestreets until he came at last to the little square with its sycamore trees, its Greek cross of gravel paths, its black and brass fence. He unlocked the street door of No. 33 and entered the kitchen. His heart constricted. There were the Siamese making love to what appeared to be Cooper kneeling on the kitchen floor filling their dinner plate. The figure arose. It was Gabby in blue jeans and a shirt, wearing dark glasses.
    The plate was empty by the time he forced himself to release her. He looked at her, still without a word. He had knocked the glasses off in the first fierce embrace. She had a lurid black eye.
    "Can you go inside?" Gabby asked. "Is it all right? We can go down to my place."
    "It's all right, I think...."
    They went through the pantry hall into the living room. It was exactly the same, even to the pile of manuscript paper on the piano.
    "Why shouldn't it be?" Lennox muttered.
    "I had to give the skunk away," Gabby said. "I didn't know what she ate."
    "He," Lennox said mechanically. "Raw chicken."
    "Was it ... all right in the hospital? Did they hurt you?"
    "No. I'll tell you about it.... Some other time."
    With his arm around her waist, he paced up and down the long living room slowly, letting his eyes wander, not daring to think. At last he said: "A week's a long time on The Rock."
    "Sometimes it's a lifetime."
    "Usually it is. That's why we burn out so fast. Do you remember what you said to me the Sunday we ended this affair?"
    "You mean began it."
    "No. That was the end. It's been backwards all along. Here we are at the beginning. Let it be the real beginning."
    "All right, Jordan."
    He stopped pacing, took her hand and smiled artificially. "Good afternoon. May I introduce myself? Jordan Lennox."
    "I'm Gabby Valentine."
    "What does Gabby stand for?"
    "Gabrielle."
    "Jordan stands for Junky. That's a hophead ... a lunatic."
    "Oh Jord--"
    "Shh! I'm introducing myself. I'm a crazy man, Miss Valentine. Unbalanced. That's what makes me a successful writer, they say. Some people don't believe talent is talent unless it's crazy. Do you think so?"
    "No," she answered gravely.
    "Now while I'm introducing myself, Miss Valentine, I should tell you what I write. You know the dirty words you see written on subway station walls? I write them. That's my job. I also compose poems in public toilets and do dirty drawings...."
    "Please, Jordan...."
    "Recently I was graduated to de luxe work ... dirty letters. But I was so crazy I wrote them to--" He began to shake. "Remember what you said? That I was poison. I am. I am. Be kind to me. Kill me."
    "You know the truth now?"
    "Yes."
    "Then don't waste it. Remember it. Don't throw it away. Use it."
    "How long have you known?"
    "Since Sunday."
    "And you're still around? Why aren't you running from me?"
    "I've known since Sunday morning, not Sunday night. I wasn't running Sunday, was I?"
    "No. You were lying like an account man to save me." Lennox turned away. "How long did Sam know?"
    "A week."
    "And he tried to save me, too."
    "Yes, Jordan. He tried very hard. He tried to protect both of us."
    "Do you know why he did it, Gabby?"
    "Yes," she said. She was about to blurt the truth of her last meeting with Cooper when she caught herself. "But you'd better tell me."
    "I let him down," Lennox said bitterly. "He was a sweet guy, a whole man, the only normal in the business. He had sense enough to want to stay out of the rat-race and I shoved him into it. And then I let him down."
    "How?"
    "I don't like to remember."
    "It'll be best for you to remember. You won't be free of it until you confess it. How did you let him down?"
    "When he loused the song spot. He was shaky with stagefright. You saw him. Sure he loused it. Why shouldn't he? He wasn't a performer; he was a composer. He came offstage licked. And instead of standing by him I blew my crazy stack about the letters."
    "What did you say to him?"
    "Christ! What lousy things didn't I say! I called him a fag and a Judas and tried to get the cops to arrest him...." Lennox grunted in agony. "How can a man do a thing like that to a friend? He was half my life."
    "He still is."
    "He's gone."
    "No, you still have him."
    "I destroyed him."
    "You can't destroy remembering him. Never. Always remember Sam Cooper, the whole man, your friend."
    "It hurts," Lennox groaned.
    "You're lucky. You can punish yourself for what you did. It's the people who can't confess who suffer."
    "Is that why you think he did it?" Lennox asked.
    "Yes," Gabby answered steadily.
    "Why didn't he hold on? Just a few more days. I licked 'em. I beat 'em at their own game ... maybe because I'm their own kind ... but I came out on top. I've still got the old show. I've got a new one. I've got everything I was fighting for. Why couldn't he wait a little?"
    "I put you on top," Gabby said.
    "That goes without saying. I couldn't have done anything without you, I--"
    "You didn't do anything. I did it for you. Roy did it for you."
    "Roy! Audibon?"
    She nodded. "I made a bargain with Roy. I told him I'd go back to him."
    "You told him you'd...." Lennox slumped on a chair. "So that's why the show was renewed. That's why the network bought the new one. It was a deal. Yes?"
    "Yes. So here it is," Gabby said. "The life you love ... the life you've been fighting for so desperately ... the life you want more than anything else in the world. Here it is wrapped in ribbon, and cheap at the price."
    "Cheap!"
    "Cheap. You won't even have to give me up. That's part of the bargain too. I can have a lover if I'll be discreet."
    "You're kidding," Lennox said faintly. "Please don't, darling."
    "No, I'm serious." Gabby watched him closely with solemn dark eyes. "You're two people in one. Everybody is, more or less, and it doesn't matter. But it does to me because I'm in love with one of you and not the other. I hate the one who built this life for you. I love the one who's trying to knock it down. He's the real Jake."
    "You've got it backwards, haven't you?"
    "You've got it backwards. You admire the wrong one. You're trying to protect the wrong one. I hate the one that's your favorite."
    "But the letters? The crazy filth...?"
    "I don't care. He's the one I love. He's filthy because he's never had a chance, but he's the real Jake ... the honest Jake. He's a man to be proud of; not the arrogant, hostile Jordan Lennox who hides him."
    Lennox shook his head in bewilderment.
    "Sometimes people fight to keep something alive when they should let it be destroyed," Gabby said. "That's what you've been doing. You taught me there are times when it's right to fight." She touched her eye. "I'll tell you about this some day. Now I want to teach you that there are times when it's right to surrender."
    "What do you want me to do?" Lennox asked.
    "Make a choice. All this and me for a mistress, or none of this and me for a wife." She backed against the piano, still watching him intently. "I won't cheat. I'll love my Jake just as hard as I can ... as long as I can find him in you. But the rest is up to you. You can have your shows and your victories and your money, and take your chance of losing the real Jake forever...."
    "And you too?"
    "And me too. Or you can let this life come down in ruins ... you know what Roy can do to both of us ... and start building the real Jake out of the rubble."
    "Maybe you're wrong about the real Jake."
    "Maybe I am. That's a chance you'll have to take. But it's a fighting chance, and you're a fighter, aren't you?"
    "I used to think so."
    "And there's one more thing. You know you're sick."
    "I said I was."
    "But you don't mean it. You're upset now, and ashamed. Later on you'll forget. You've got to go to a doctor."
    "A talk-doctor?"
    "Yes. It won't be easy."
    "I don't believe in analysts."
    "That's why it won't be easy. But you need one, badly. You'll have to promise to start and go through with it." Gabby took a breath. "All right, Jordan. There's your choice. Keep on fighting the old way, or tear it down and start fighting for something new. Make up your mind now."
    Lennox stood up slowly. He looked once around the room and then was caught again by Gabby's intent gaze. For a long moment they stared at each other while a voice within Lennox cried: "Run! Run! Run!" Suddenly he reached into his jacket and pulled out the gimmick book. With one powerful swing of his arm, he hurled it through the garden window into oblivion. As the glass came tinkling down, he swung Gabby up in his arms and carried her upstairs to his bed.
    "I cheated," she murmured honestly. "I dressed for the part."
    "Sweetheart?"
    "Ned Bacon told me you'd be home today and I know you're sucker for girls in pants."
    CHAPTER XVI
    This Friday, Robin and I packed a bag, bought groceries and liquor, got into the car and got off The Rock. We drove out toward Trenton, and ten miles this side of Princeton Junction we turned off the express highway onto Gun Hill Road, went through the fat Jersey farmland and finally reached Stokewold, a village of one church, one supermarket, one bank, one--Oh, one of each. You take the right fork out of Stokewold around the pond and it's two miles to Gabby and Jake's house which they've named Cooper Union.
    By the time we reached Stokewold we were halfway into a laughing jag. We always start laughing on the way to visit the Lennoxes. You think about their accidents and adventures building their house and you can't stop.... The three second-hand cars Gabby bargained for and bought which, one after the other, broke down as soon as she got them home, turning the place into a Used Car lot. The time Jake got arrested for trucking their nine-foot plate glass picture window on the express highway. The big July Fourth party weekend when the water system went haywire and Gabby tried to empty out a hundred gallon tank with a teacup. Privately, Robin and I call the house Hysteria Cottage.
    Outside of Ned Bacon, Robin and I are the only people from the business who like to see the Lennoxes. The Rock's turned its back on them. But we love to come down to Cooper Union and help Gabby and Jake build their house. We hammer and saw and paint while Gabby lectures to us from Builder's Guides. Robin plants, mostly, and I'm the king of the concrete, I have a touch with a trowel that astonishes people ... including myself.
    The reason the house is still building is that they blew all their money on the property. They have about a hundred acres of farmland, meadow, timber, and whatever else they call rural-type land. The house (what there is of it) is on a small hill shaded by elms. A hundred yards behind the house is a tiny extinct quarry which was flooded out by natural springs years ago. We swim there in summer and the water's glacial.
    Gabby's pregnant. Gabby's the cute type. Her figure's exactly the same except she looks like she swallowed the head of a torpedo. Ned Bacon, who lets on to be a shingling expert, spends all his time finding out if it's going to be a boy or a girl. He makes her lie down, borrows a wedding ring (Gabby doesn't have one yet), and dangles it on a string over her stomach. The theory is, if it swings in circles it'll be a girl and if it swings back and forth in a straight line it'll be a boy. So far the odds are seven to three on a boy.
    Gabby hasn't changed a bit. Robin and I were there in April when they held a town meeting and we drove in with them. There were about a hundred people sitting on camp chairs in the church basement, and half of them were glowering at the Lennoxes because of the way the unfinished house looks. They're all rich Squares who write stinging letters to the Stokewold Star Times beefing about the gutter-bred Lennoxes who are turning their township into a slum.
    This didn't make any difference to Gabby. She was on her feet a dozen times, lecturing and admonishing the township on ethics, fair play and civic corruption. Lennox sat solemnly alongside her and nodded his head emphatically to her points. Once he caught my eye and winked, but the laugh was on him because Gabby got him elected chairman of the Garbage Committee.
    Jake does a few scripts now and then, most of them under a pen name now that Macro and Audibon have had him blacklisted (not officially) for Communism, which is a laugh. He sells a few stories. They struggle along. It isn't easy with those two trips a week to the talk-doctor to pay for, but they don't complain. Gabby tells me that Jake is having a rough time getting straightened out, but he doesn't bleat. Both of them are so grateful for their fighting chance that they act as though they've won already. That's why we like to visit them.
    We never bring our troubles out to Gabby and Jake. You can always find someone on The Rock who'll enjoy listening to your headaches. In fact most people get sore at you if you don't complain a little. Happiness is the problem. You have to share it with someone to get full enjoyment out of it, but there's no one you can do this with on The Rock. If you tell one of the tight rope walkers you've had a lucky break, he's so jealous he's ready to kill you. So we save the good luck stories for the Lennoxes.
    Gabby and Jake are glad if anyone else gets a break. They beam and shake your hand and she delivers a ringing lecture on how creative you are and how much you've deserved success. And they write you follow-up letters to ask how your success is doing and they make you forget that they've got problems too. The result is, you can't wait to be invited down to break your back building their house.
    So we drove up the little hill this Friday afternoon and honked the horn, Gabby and Jake came pouring out of the house followed by the Siamese who looked like amateur tigers. Gabby kissed me. Jake kissed Robin. I wasn't too jealous because I've got a kind of yen for Gabby.
    We yakked all that Friday night and didn't get to bed until three. Eight o'clock Saturday morning we were awakened by Gabby who was making weird noises in the unfinished study. When we investigated, she explained that she was trying to hammer quietly. We began to laugh, got into our work clothes, had breakfast with Jake and didn't stop laughing all day.
    Sunday, the volunteer slaves started arriving to spend the day. Bacon pulled in with Olga Bleutcher. Then came the friends of exile ... the odd people who live on The Rock and never let it bother them. Eugene K. Norman brought a man with a guitar. Two of the prettiest girls I ever saw in my life drove up with a man wearing a red beard. In their car was a wicker picnic basket the size of a steamer trunk. They were artist friends of Gabby and spent the afternoon painting LENNO*X on the RFD mail box.
    After lunch, Lennox and I strolled down the hill, across the little valley and up into the rise where his stand of timber was. I looked back at the house and was suddenly struck by a resemblance.
    "Jake," I said.
    "Yes, Kit?"
    "Look at the house from here, will you?"
    He looked.
    "What does it remind you of?"
    "Should it remind me of anything?"
    "Yes. That place you showed me out in Islip. Where you were a kid."
    For a moment his face lost its calm and I had a glimpse of the agonizing road he was climbing toward adjustment. It shocked me and I was ashamed of my slip. I tried to change the subject. He stopped me.
    "It's all right, Kitten," he smiled. "You haven't done anything wrong. These things have to be faced. The house does look like the old place in Islip."
    "You see it?"
    "I feel it." He was silent for a moment. "It's a funny thing. I spent half my life running away from that clam-shack, and here I am right back in it again."
    "Any idea when you'll get this place finished?" I asked, still trying to change the subject. This time I succeeded.
    "Who knows?" Jake said. "There's no rush."
    "Don't those letters in the paper bother you?"
    "Hell no!" He laughed. "You've seen Gabby's plans. You know how beautiful the house'll be when we're finished. What's the hurry?"
    "Your neighbors'd like you to hurry."
    "Squares!" he grunted. "They're just like the noodnicks on The Rock, Kitten. You find them everywhere. Rush. Rush. Rush. Nobody wants to work for the work's sake. They want it done overnight so they can have the result quick. But it's the work that's the fun. I finally found that out. Nobody's going to hustle me into rushing through the best part."
    "How long do you expect to take?"
    "There you go thinking like The Rock again. You mean three months or six months or a year, don't you?"
    "It couldn't take longer, could it?"
    "I hope it takes three generations," he said.
    I didn't have any answer.
    Sunday night we were the last to leave. It's a point of pride with us to show that we're the Lennoxes' favorite friends. We kissed them goodbye, drove down the hill and started back toward The Rock. We looked up and saw them, silhouetted against the lights of the house, arms around each other, waving madly. We started to laugh again.
    "Crazy kids," I said.
    "They're pure gypsy," Robin said.
    "When the baby comes he'll have to get to work again."
    "Gabby says they're going to name it Sam if it's a boy."
    "What if it's a girl?"
    "She says they'll name her Ned to teach Bacon a lesson."
    We chuckled and rehashed the weekend and the glow lasted all the way to the George Washington bridge. There The Rock loomed up before us like a vast purple volcano, lights flaring over it sulphurously, the sky above reflecting the burning craters below. Robin began to cry.
    "What's the matter, Robin?"
    "Somehow I can't help feeling sorry for them."
    As we drove across the chasm of the river back to the private chasms of our lives, we both knew she was lying. The weak never weep for the strong; they weep only for themselves.
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    [Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]