— Hello?
— Arthur?
The one word and a kind of shiver went through him, a frightened happiness, as when your name is called by the teacher.
— It’s Noreen, she said.
— Noreen. How are you? God, it’s been a long time. Where are you?
— I’m here. I’m living back here now, she said.
— No kidding. What happened?
— We broke up.
— That’s too bad, he said. I’m sorry to hear that.
He always seemed completely sincere, even in the most ordinary comments.
— It was a mistake, she said. I never should have done it. I should have known.
The floor around the desk was strewn with paper, reports, annual statements with their many numbers. That was not his strength. He liked to talk to people, he could talk and tell stories all day. And he was known to be honest. He had taken as models the old-timers, men long gone such as Henry Braver, Patsy Millinger’s father, who’d been a partner and had started before the war. Onassis had been one of his clients. Braver had an international reputation as well as a nose for the real thing. Arthur didn’t have the nose, but he could talk and listen. There were all kinds of ways of making money in this business. His way was finding one or two big winners to go down and double on. And he talked to his clients every day.
— Mark, how are you, tootsula? You ought to be here. The numbers came in on Micronics. They’re all crying. We were so smart not to get involved in that. Sweetheart, you want to know something? There are some very smart guys here who’ve taken a bath. He lowered his voice. Morris, for one.
— Morris? They should give him an injection. Put him to sleep.
— He was a little too smart this time. Living through the Depression didn’t help this time.
Morris had a desk near the copy machine, a courtesy desk. He had been a partner, but after he retired there was nothing to do — he hated Florida and didn’t play golf — and so he came back to the firm and traded for himself. His age alone set him apart. He was a relic with perfect, false teeth and lived in some amberoid world with an aged wife. They all joked about him. The years had left him, as if marooned, alone at his desk and in an apartment on Park Avenue no one had ever been to.
Morris had lost a lot on Micronics. It was impossible to say how much. He kept his own shaky figures, but Arthur had gotten it out of Marie, the sexless woman who cleared trades.
— A hundred thousand, she said. Don’t say anything.
— Don’t worry, darling, Arthur told her.
Arthur knew everything and was on the phone all day. It was one unending conversation: gossip, affection, news. He looked like Punch, with a curved nose, up-pointing chin, and innocent smile. He was filled with happiness, but the kind that knew its limits. He had been at Frackman, Wells from the time there were seven employees, and now there were nearly two hundred with three floors in the building. He himself had become rich, beyond anything he could have imagined, although his life had not changed and he still had the same apartment in London Terrace. He was living there the night he first met Noreen in Goldie’s. She did something few girls had ever done with him, she laughed and sat close. From the first moment there was openness between them. Noreen. The piano rippling away, the old songs, the noise.
— I’m divorced, she said. How about you?
— Me? The same, he said.
The street below was filled with hurrying people, cars. The sound of it was faint.
— Really? she said.
It had been years since he had talked to her. There was a time they had been inseparable. They were at Goldie’s every night or at Clarke’s, where he also went regularly. They always gave him a good table, in the middle section with the side door or in back with the crowd and the unchanging menu written neatly in chalk. Sometimes they stood in front at the long, scarred bar with the sign that said under no circumstances would women be served there. The manager, the bar-tenders, waiters, everybody knew him. Clarke’s was his real home; he merely went elsewhere to sleep. He drank very little despite his appearance, but he always paid for drinks and stayed at the bar for hours, occasionally taking a few steps to the men’s room, a pavilion of its own, long and old-fashioned, where you urinated like a grand duke on blocks of ice. To Clarke’s came advertising men, models, men like himself, and off-duty cops late at night. He showed Noreen how to recognize them, black shoes and white socks. Noreen loved it. She was a favorite there, with her looks and wonderful laugh. The waiters called her by her first name.
Noreen was dark blond, though her mother was Greek, she said. There were a lot of blonds in the north of Greece where her family came from. The ranks of the Roman legions had become filled with Germanic tribesmen as time passed, and when Rome fell some of the scattered legions settled in the mountains of Greece; at least that was the way she had heard it.
— So I’m Greek but I’m German, too, she told Arthur.
— God, I hope not, he said. I couldn’t go with a German.
— What do you mean?
— Be seen with.
— Arthur, she explained, you have to accept the way things are, what I am and what you are and why it’s so good.
There were things she wanted to tell him but didn’t, things he wouldn’t like to hear, or so she felt. About being a young girl and the night at the St. George Hotel when she was nineteen and went upstairs with a guy she thought was really nice. They went to his boss’s suite. The boss was away and they were drinking his twelve-year-old scotch, and the next thing she knew she was lying facedown on the bed with her hands tied behind her. That was in a different world than Arthur’s. His was decent, forgiving, warm.
They went together for nearly three years, the best years. They saw one another almost every night. She knew all about his work. He could make it seem so interesting, the avid individuals, the partners, Buddy Frackman, Warren Sender. And Morris; she had actually seen Morris once on the elevator.
— You’re looking very well, she told him nervily.
— You, too, he said, smiling.
He didn’t know who she was, but a few moments later he leaned toward her and silently formed the words,
— Eighty-seven.
— Really?
— Yes, he said proudly.
— I’d never guess.
She knew how, one day coming back from lunch, Arthur and Buddy had seen Morris lying in the street, his white shirt covered with blood. He had accidentally fallen, and there were two or three people trying to help him up.
— Don’t look. Keep going, Arthur had said.
— He’s lucky, having friends like you, Noreen said.
She worked at Grey Advertising, which made it so convenient to meet. Seeing her always filled him with pleasure, even when it became completely familiar. She was twenty-five and filled with life. That summer he saw her in a bathing suit, a bikini. She was stunning, with a kind of glow to her skin. She had a young girl’s unself-conscious belly and ran into the waves. He went in more cautiously, as befitted a man who had been a typist in the army and salesman for a dress manufacturer before coming to what he called Wall Street, where he had always dreamed of being and would have worked for nothing.
The waves, the ocean, the white blinding sand. It was at Westhampton, where they went for the weekend. On the train every seat was taken. Young men in T-shirts and with manly chests were joking in the aisles. Noreen sat beside him, the happiness coming off her like heat. She had a small gold cross, the size of a dime, on a thin gold necklace lying on her shirt. He hadn’t noticed it before. He was about to say something when the train began bucking and slowed to a stop.