He looked over the calm, devouring, rouged, spending, acquiring faces, mothers, brides, virgins, spinsters, mistresses, listened to the voices, breathed in the jumbled bouquet of perfumes, congratulated himself that he was not married and loved no one. He thought, I cannot spend my life serving these worthy women, paid for his malted milk, and went up to his office.
On his desk, there was a letter. It was a short one. “I hope you’re coming to New York soon. I’m in a mess and I have to talk to you. Love, Gretchen.”
He threw the letter in the wastebasket and said, “Oh, Christ,” for the second time in an hour.
It was raining when he left the store at six-fifteen. Calderwood hadn’t said a word since their talk in the morning. That’s all I needed today, rain, he thought miserably, as he made his way through the streaming traffic on the motorcycle. He was almost home when he remembered that he had promised his mother that he would do the shopping for dinner. He cursed and turned the machine back toward the business section, where the stores remained open until seven. A surprise, he remembered his mother saying. Your loving son may be out on his ass in two weeks, Mother, will that be surprise enough?
He did his shopping hastily, a small chicken, potatoes, a can of peas, half an apple pie for dessert. As he pushed his way through the lines of housewives he remembered the interview with Calderwood and grinned sourly. The boy wonder financier, surrounded by admiring beauties, on his way to one of his usual elegantly prepared repasts at the family mansion, so often photographed for Life and House and Garden. At the last minute, he bought a bottle of Scotch. This was going to be a night for whiskey.
He went to bed early, a little drunk, thinking, just before he dropped off to sleep. The only satisfactory thing I did all day was run this morning with Quentin McGovern.
The week was routine. When he saw Calderwood at the store, Calderwood made no mention of Rudolph’s proposition, but spoke to him of the ordinary business of the store in his usual slightly rasping and irritable tone. There was no hint either in his manner or in what he said of any ultimate decision.
Rudolph had called Gretchen on the phone in New York (from a pay station—Calderwood did not take kindly to private calls on the store’s phones) and Gretchen had sounded disappointed when he told her he couldn’t get down to the city that week, but would try the following weekend. She had refused to tell him what the trouble was. It could wait, she said. If it could wait, he thought, it couldn’t be so bad.
Denton didn’t call again. Perhaps he was afraid that if given a chance at further conversation Rudolph would withdraw his offer to speak in his behalf before the board next Tuesday afternoon. Rudolph found himself worrying about his appearance before the board. There was always the chance that some evidence would be produced against Denton that Denton didn’t know about or had hidden that would make Rudolph seem like a confederate or a liar or a dupe. What worried him more, though, was that the board was bound to be hostile, prepared to do away with Denton, and antagonistic to anyone who stood in the way. All his life Rudolph had attempted to get people, especially older people in authority, to like him. The thought of facing a whole room full of disapproving academic faces disturbed him.
Throughout the week he found himself making silent speeches to those imagined, unrelenting faces, speeches in which he defended Denton honorably and well while at the same time charming his judges. None of the speeches he composed seemed, in the end, worthwhile. He would have to go into the board as relaxed as possible, gauge the temper of the room and extemporaneously do the best he could for both Denton and himself. If Calderwood knew what he intended to do …
By the weekend he was sleeping badly, his dreams lascivious but unsatisfactory, images of Julie dancing naked before a body of water, Gretchen stretched out in a canoe, Mary Jane opening her legs in bed, then sitting up, her breasts bare, her face contorted, accusing him. A ship pulled away from a pier, a girl, her skirts blowing in the wind, smiled at him as he ran desperately down the pier to catch the ship, he was held back by unseen hands, the ship pulled away, open water …
Sunday morning, with church bells ringing, he decided he couldn’t stay in the house all day, although he had planned to go over a copy of the papers he had given Calderwood and make some corrections and additions that had occurred to him during the week. But his mother was at her worst on Sundays. The bells made her mournful about her lost religion and she was apt to say that if only Rudolph would go with her, she would attend Mass, confess, take Communion. “The fires of hell are waiting for me,” she said over breakfast, “and the church and salvation are only three blocks away.”
“Some other Sunday, Mom,” Rudolph said. “I’m busy today.”
“I may be dead and in hell by some other Sunday,” she said.
“We’ll just have to take that chance,” he said, getting up from the table. He left her weeping.
It was a cold, clear day, the sun a bright wafer in the pale winter sky. He dressed warmly, in a fleece-lined surplus Air Force jacket, a knitted wool cap, and goggles, and took the motorcycle out of the garage. He hesitated about which direction to take. There was nobody he wanted to see that day, no destination that seemed promising. Leisure, the burden of modern man.
He got on the motorcycle, started it, hesitated. A car with skis on its roof sped down the street, and he thought, why not, that’s as good a place as any, and followed, the car. He remembered that Larsen, the young man in the ski department, had told him that there was a barn near the bottom of the tow that could be converted into a shop for renting skis on the weekend. Larsen had said that there was a lot of money to be made there. Rudolph felt better as he followed the car with ski rack. He was no longer aimless.
He was nearly frozen when he got to the slope. The sun, reflected off the snow, dazzled him and he squinted at the brightly colored figures swooping toward him down the hill. Everybody seemed young, vigorous, and having a good time, and the girls, tight pants over trim hips and round buttocks, made lust a healthy outdoor emotion for a Sunday morning.
He watched, enjoying the spectacle for awhile, then became melancholy. He felt lonely and deprived. He was about to turn away and get his machine and go back to town, when Larsen came skimming down off the hill and made a dashing, abrupt stop in front of him, in a cloud of snow.
“Hi, Mr. Jordache,” Larsen said. He had two rows of great shining white teeth and he smiled widely. Behind him two girls who had been following him came to a halt.
“Hello, Larsen,” Rudolph said. “I came out to see that barn you told me about.”
“Sure thing,” Larsen said. Supple, in one easy movement, he bent over to free himself from his skis. He was bare headed and his longish, fine, blond hair fell over his eyes as he bent over. Looking at him, in his red sweater, with the two girls behind him, Rudolph was sure that Larsen hadn’t dreamt about any boat pulling away from a pier the night before.
“Hello, Mr. Jordache,” one of the girls said. “I didn’t know you were a skier.”
He peered at her and she laughed. She was wearing big green-tinted snow goggles that covered most of her small face. She pushed the goggles up over her red-and-blue woolen hat. “I’m in disguise,” she said.
Now Rudolph recognized her. It was Miss Soames, from the Record Department. Jiggling, plump, blonde, fed by music.
“Good morning, good morning,” Rudolph said, somehow flustered, noticing how small Miss Soames’s waist was, and how well rounded her thighs and hips. “No, I’m not a skier. I’m a voyeur.”