Then there had been the architects in the afternoon, and they had been trying, too. He was working on the plans for the center and his hotel room was littered with drawings. On Johnny Heath’s advice, he had chosen a firm of young architects who had already won some important prizes, but were still hungry. They were eager and talented, there was no doubt about that, but they had worked almost exclusively in cities and their ideas ran to glass and steel or poured cement, and Rudolph, knowing that they considered him hopelessly square, insisted upon traditional forms and traditional materials. It was not exactly his own taste, but he felt it would be the taste best appreciated by the people who would come to the center. And it certainly would be the only thing that Calderwood might approve of. “I want it to look like a street in an old New England village,” Rudolph kept saying, while the architects groaned. “White clapboard and a tower over the theater so that you can mistake it for a church. It’s a conservative rural area and we’re going to be catering to conservative people in a country atmosphere and they will spend their money more easily in an ambience that they feel happy and at home in.”
Again and again the architects had almost quit, but he had said, “Do it this way this time, boys, and the next time it’ll be more your way. This is only the first of a chain and we’ll get bolder as we go along.”
The plans they had sketched for him were still a long way from what he wanted, but as he looked at the last rough drawings they had shown him that day, he knew they would finally surrender.
His eyes ached and he wondered if he needed glasses as he made some notes on the plans. There was a bottle of whiskey on the bureau and he poured himself a drink, topping it off with water from the tap in the bathroom. He sipped at the drink as he spread the sheets of stiff paper out on the desk. He winced at the drawing of a huge sign, CALDERWOOD’S, that the architects had sketched in at the entrance to the center. It was to be outlined in flashing neon at night. In his old age, Calderwood sought renown, immortality in flickering multicolored glass tubing, and all Rudolph’s tactful intimations about keeping a single modest style for the center had fallen on deaf ears.
The telephone rang, and Rudolph looked at his watch. Tom had said he would come by at five and it was almost that now. He picked up the phone, but it wasn’t Tom. He recognized the voice of Johnny Heath’s secretary on the phone. “Mr. Jordache? Mr. Heath calling.”
He waited, annoyed, for Johnny to get on the phone. In his organization, he decided, when anybody made a call, whoever was making it would have to be ready to speak when the phone was answered. How many slightly angered clients and customers there must be each day in America, hung up on a secretary’s warning trill, how many deals lost, how many invitations refused, how many ladies who, in that short delay, had decided to say, No.
When Johnny Heath finally said, “Hello, Rudy,” Rudolph concealed his irritation.
“I have the information you asked me for,” Johnny said. “Have you got a pencil and a piece of paper?”
“Yes.”
Johnny gave him the name and address of a detective agency. “I hear they’re very dependable,” Johnny said. He didn’t inquire why Rudolph needed a private detective, although there must have been some guessing going on in his mind.
“Thanks, Johnny,” Rudolph said, after he had written down the name and address. “Thanks for your trouble.”
“It was nothing,” Johnny said. “You free for dinner tonight?”
“Sorry,” Rudolph said. He had nothing on for the evening and if Johnny’s secretary had not kept him waiting he would have said yes.
After he hung up, he felt more tired than ever and decided to postpone calling the detective agency until the next day. He was surprised that he felt tired. He didn’t remember ever feeling tired at five o’clock in the afternoon.
But he was tired now, no doubt about it. Age? He laughed. He was twenty-seven years old. He looked at his face in the mirror. No gray hairs in the even, smooth blackness. No bags under the eyes. No signs of debauchery or hidden illness in the clear, olive skin. If he had been overworking, it did not show in that youthful, contained, unwrinkled face.
Still, he was tired. He lay, fully clothed, on the bed, hoping for a few minutes of sleep before Tom arrived. But he could not sleep. His sister’s contemptuous words of the night before kept running through his mind, as they had been all day, even when he was struggling with lawyers and architects. “Do you enjoy anything?” He hadn’t defended himself, but he could have pointed out that he enjoyed working, that he enjoyed going to concerts, that he read enormously, that he went to the theater, prizefights, art galleries, that he enjoyed running in the morning, riding a motorcycle, he enjoyed, yes, seeing his mother sitting across from him at the table, unlovely, unlovable, but alive, and there, by his efforts, not in a grave, or a pauper’s hospital bed.
Gretchen was sick with the sickness of the age. Everything was based on sex. The pursuit of the sacred orgasm. She would say love, he supposed, but sex would do as a description as far as he was concerned. From what he had seen, what happiness lay there was bought at too high a price, tainting all other happiness. Having a sleazy woman clutch you at four in the morning, trying to claim you, hurling a glass at you with murderous hatred because you’d had enough of her in two hours, even though that had been the implicit bargain to begin with. Having a silly little girl taunt you in front of her friends, making you feel like some sort of frozen eunuch, then grabbing your cock disdainfully in broad daylight. If it was sex or even anything like love that had brought his mother and father together originally, they had wound up like two crazed animals in a cage in the zoo, destroying each other. Then the marriages of the second generation. Beginning with Tom. What future faced him, captured by that whining, avaricious, brainless, absurd doll of a woman? And Gretchen, herself, superior and scathing in her helpless sensuality, hating herself for the beds she fell into, adrift from a worthless and betrayed husband. Who was immersing himself in the ignominy of detectives, keyhole-peeping, lawyers, divorce—he or she?
Screw them all, he thought. Then laughed to himself. The word was ill chosen.
The telephone rang. “Your brother is in the lobby, Mr. Jordache,” the clerk said.
“Will you send him up, please?” Rudolph swung off the bed, straightened out the covers. For some reason, he didn’t want Tom to see that he had been lying down, with its implication of luxury and sloth. Hurriedly, he stuffed all the architects’ drawings into a closet. He wanted the room to look bare, without clues. He did not want to seem important, engrossed in large affairs, when his brother appeared.
There was a knock on the door and Rudolph opened it. At least he’s wearing a tie, Rudolph thought meanly, for the opinion of the clerks and bellboys in the lobby. He shook Thomas’s hand and said, “Come on in. Sit down. Want a drink? I have a bottle of Scotch, but I can ring down if you’d like something else.”
“Scotch’ll do.” Thomas sat stiffly in an armchair, his already-gnarled hands hanging down, his suit bunched up around his great shoulders.