Looking at the ledger, it occurred to him to take it and leave. He had often mused on burglary as a means of retrieving it. He turned his eyes from it only because Melissa reentered the room in a baby blue satin robe and matching pompommed mules. She had brushed her silvering chestnut hair, colored the cream of her cheeks with a subtle touch of rouge, lifted her eyes from sleep with pale green eye shadow, and powdered away the gleam of her shining morning brow. Her beauty, though controlled by chemistry, was a miracle at forty-nine, given the terror of personal and professional oblivion with which she had lived most of the last decade. Even her wrinkles were now seemly, allowing her to relinquish at last that girlish beauty with which she had lived far too long, keeping her on the cover of Photoplay, but sabotaging all her efforts to become a serious actress. For who could believe an anguished spirit lurked behind a face as elegant and proud of itself as Melissa’s? No one could, until her role as the cloistered Marina (Katrina) of The Flaming Corsage forced a reappraisal of her talent by the critics: Here is a totally new Melissa Spencer. . acts as if born to the stage. . confounds critics who said her voice would fail in talkies. . most fully articulated female presence on the Broadway stage this year, etc.
She went straight to the telephone and ordered breakfast for two: cantaloupe, camembert, croissants, and champagne. Of course. Then she flounced into an armchair across from Martin, framed by Daybreak and a cut-glass vase full of white roses opening to the morning with the shining sublimity of their final blooming, only hours left in their life.
“Are you well?” she asked.
“I may be recuperating, but I’m not sure.”
“That sounds dreadful, as if you’re living in some awful sanitarium.”
“That’s not far off. I’ve been on a morose spiritual jag for years, and it’s worse these past few days.”
“Is it your father? How is he?”
“It’s that, but it’s not that simple. And he’s quite senile but otherwise healthy. It’s my son going off to the priesthood, and it’s a friend just kidnapped by hoodlums.”
“A kidnapping! How fascinating!”
“Oh, Christ, Melissa.”
“Well, isn’t it fascinating?”
“Everything isn’t fascinating. Some things are serious.”
“Oh, poo.”
“Tell me about you. I suspect you’re well. I read your notices.”
“It is rather a ducky time.”
“You look very fit. For anything.”
“Don’t be forward now, lovey. It’s much too early.”
“I’ve known you, my dear, to throw away the clock.”
“Me? Not me, Martin. You must be remembering one of your casual women.”
“I could’ve sworn it was you. That week the taboos came tumbling down. The Hampton, was it?”
“Don’t be awful now. Don’t. I get shivery about that. Tell me about the play. Did you like it?”
“You were quite splendid. But then you’re always quite splendid. And I did find that wig becoming.”
“Did I look like her to you? I did try.”
“At times. But she was never quite as sensually animated as you played her.”
“She must have had her moments.”
“I think,” said Martin, and he pictured his mother coming down the back stoop naked, walking past the small garbage pail, wearing only her sunbonnet hat and her white shoes and carrying her calico handbag, “that all she ever had was her repressions.” Walking into the waiting arms of Francis Phelan? Did they ever make love after that intimacy?
“So sad,” said Melissa.
“Very sad. But that’s not one of your problems, I’ve noticed.”
“Avoiding things never made any sense to me, none whatever.”
“You’ve done it all.”
“I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, lovey.”
“But it must be difficult to surprise you.” Martin resented her use of “lovey.” It sounded vaguely cockney, and insufficiently intimate for what they’d had together.
“Surprises are always welcome,” said Melissa, “but they’re only the interest on the principal, and it’s the principal I’m most fond of.”
“I have a bit of a surprise for you,” Martin said.
“How delicious,” said Melissa. “When do I get it?”
“Don’t be forward now.”
When breakfast came she insisted he sit on the sofa as they had at the Hampton, and she dropped pieces of melon into his mouth, a scene, he presumed, she had copied from a Valentino or Gilbert film. She lifted champagne to his lips, gave him wafer-thin slices of camembert and croissant, and more and more champagne. He thought he had eaten his fill at Keeler’s, but satiation too has its limitations, and he accepted all that she offered.
He kissed her when both their mouths were full, shared his champagne with her. He kissed her again when their mouths were empty, stroking the breast of her robe lightly. And then he leaned away.
“What is this gift you have for me?” he said.
“Can’t you guess?”
“I’ve imagined a thing or two.”
“I hope you didn’t see it,” she said, rising from the sofa and crossing the room. She held up the ledger, giving him a full view of the cover with another of his father’s date markings: February 1908 to April 1909.
“I didn’t mean to leave it here in full view, but you caught me unawares, coming in like that. You didn’t see it before, did you?”
“No, no, I didn’t. You say you’re returning it?”
“It’s yours,” she said, coming toward him with it. “I took all I needed for my memoirs.”
“I thought you wanted it for the film.”
“It’s not necessary now. They have more than enough in the play, if they really want to do it. They don’t deserve any more than that. So it’s yours.”
“Then I must return your money.”
“Of course you must not. Absolutely you must not.”
He had charged her eight hundred dollars for the ledger, an arbitrary price from nowhere, for how could he possibly have set a true dollar value on one of his father’s notebooks? He’d said eight hundred for reasons no more explicable than his dream of rhomboids. An odd figure, she said. Oddness, he told her, is my profession.
They had been talking then on the roof garden of the Hampton, where she had taken a suite while she found a way to take possession of the ledger, whose contents she had, at moments, watched being written. The Albany sky was the darkest of blues, swept by millions of stars, the moon silvering the river and the rooftops of buildings on the Rensselaer side. From where Martin and Melissa sat, the Yacht Club, the night boat landing, the Dunn bridge, and much of lower Broadway were blocked from view by a tall, ghostly structure with window openings but no windows, with an unfinished, jagged, and roofless top. This was the “Spite Building,” built by a bitter cleric who felt the Hampton had wronged him. And when the hotel opened its roof garden to enormous crowds, the cleric erected this uninhabitable tower of vengeance. It fronted on Beaver Street and nestled back to back with the hotel, and it rose, finally, above the glamorous rooftop cafe, blocking the view and insulting the lofty crowds with its crude bricks and its grotesque eyeless sockets, where squads of verminous pigeons roosted.