“Okay, but he might as well be.”
“Oh please. He’s very sympathetic. Do you know that he forged the most perfect, the most beautiful name tag, using machines or whatever they are that Douglas had? Press credentials.”
“Why is he discussing your attributes?”
“Oh you mean my assets? I think he said I had a brief and short face, but I’m not sure. I’m taking it as a compliment. Why don’t you ever tell me I have a brief and short face?”
“I’ll try to remember. You think he’s an outlaw, yay! and I’m not.”
Nina was looking for something.
“What are you looking for?”
He couldn’t quite believe that she meant it when she said she was looking for a radio to play so the sound would cover what she was going to say.
“You mean like spies?” he asked.
“Exactement.”
She was serious. Defeated, he joined her search for a radio and found a clock radio on a shelf in the closet. He set it on the bedside table, plugged it in, and it worked. He tuned it into something religious, in fact Pentecostal, because the preacher would occasionally break into episodes of glossolalia. She was delaying.
She said she was cold and he proposed that they get into bed together, keep their clothes on until they were warm, and talk. It was cool, not cold, in the room, in his opinion. She had plenty of layers on, a denim windbreaker over a heavy sweater and tee shirt. She had on her famous boots, jeans, and a floppy black beret that might be hers or not, he didn’t know. He’d noticed that the women staff seemed to be offering her articles of clothing on loan. She sat on the edge of the bed and clapped her thighs together and jammed her hands between them.
He could tell she liked the idea of getting into bed. He hoped she understood that it was not going to be a case of once more into the breach tonight. He had a headache.
“First, what I’m going to tell you is mostly just recent. Not all of it is. And I had a reason for not telling you right away.
“Which is the following. Wait a minute, I was just going to lie to you about why I’ve been holding on to this. Let me start over.
“I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to tell you all this because of the way it makes Joris look. Not sordid or anything, but not great, either. And Ned I feel I’ve made friends here, strange as you may think that is. I like the man. I like him the best. Or no, I like him about equally with Gruen. I have to tell you that the story is going to make some other people seem sordid, but I don’t care about them.
“What I know is from Gruen …”
Ned said, “Please tell me what in hell this is, and why is he talking to you about it and not me?”
“If you listen you’ll understand. Oh God. Well here it is. Iva about a year ago initiated a peculiar kind of affair with Joris. Yes.”
Ned said, “And he told Gruen. Everybody talked to Gruen.”
Nina said, “The affair was rather intermittent. Joris told Gruen it started when she just sought him out. Joris couldn’t have been more surprised. She showed up and collapsed on him in misery. First she went to his office and then came to his apartment, collapsing. She was trapped and unhappy with Douglas is what she said and a divorce was going to come and she had always felt something for Joris, i.e., was in love with him. She was saying that.
“So an affair began. Previous to the affair Joris said he had seen Douglas and Iva twice a year, tops, at dinners, events, in New York City. Joris was overwhelmed. The logistics of the affair that developed were built around a convenient historical fact — she had been going to a particular hairdresser in Manhattan for years.”
Ned said, “Take your time. Get your breath.”
Nina pulled off the beret. She continued, “She was definite about it. She wanted to marry him once she got divorced. It was all going to be soon.
“Now. Now. The immediate cause of the break with Douglas was that she had caught him cheating with someone in a long-distance scheme. There was a woman he would hook up with whenever they could arrange it. Both of them traveled a lot. And the worst is that Iva found out that it was a deal to get this woman — he never named her — pregnant. And it was just intolerable. He was passing it off as a favor he was doing so someone could be a single mother, or just a mother period. So he was halfway claiming it wasn’t sex, it was an altruistic endeavor.”
Ned thought, Don’t speculate. But he had a hideous idea of who it might have been, must have been. His heart hurt, speculating. He coughed elaborately to get himself a break, a minute to stay sane and reliable.
Nina said, “All this came pouring out of Gruen. David. I don’t see why I shouldn’t call him David. I do call him David. Because David knew about everything that had happened, he didn’t want to leave, because he felt he owed it to you, and to Joris, and especially to Hume, to stay and do his best. He had only nice little stories about Hume to relate, nothing bizarre. One was at a picnic someplace, and Hume said, when a bag with three beer bottles in it was brought out, Oh the little things are trying to keep each other cold. David and Helen have no kids and he went out of his way to do things with Hume when he could.
“Really, she overwhelmed Joris. When she got to the apartment the first time she was topless under her blouse and within minutes she had dropped her coat where she stood and jerked up her blouse and mashed Joris’s hands all over her magnificent breasts. And that was step one.”
44
Ned was listening to Nina but he was losing some of what she was saying. She had just made a reference to Lincoln Center. He could ask her later.
Of course the individual soliciting Douglas to get pregnant had been his own Claire, who was on record with him as not wanting children. If the plan had worked, he would have had a baby to raise with her and would have assumed it was his, and that would have made for a life of its own kind. Nina must know it was Claire. It was kind of her not to treat it like what it was. It was going to be nothing. He was going to make it be nothing. Because it was going to be just one of the many things from his past with Claire that were going to be nothing forever. Were nothing now.
Claire was devious, so the question of whether her game had been to get pregnant and then use that fact to get money or some unimaginable arrangement out of it from Douglas was real. Or had it been the sincere game of wanting to have Douglas’s offspring because in her heart of hearts Douglas was the one she loved and revered and whose essence she wanted to reproduce? He could think of other permutations but didn’t want to. He had to concentrate on his luck in escaping something profoundly wrong, and not on the insult and not on his self-esteem. Nina takes care of my self-esteem, he thought.
“You don’t look like you’re listening,” Nina said.
“I wasn’t, for a second. Now I am. It was Claire, wasn’t it? In your opinion.”
“Ned he didn’t use the name. I think it is pretty obvious and I hate her. I hate her. Ah, don’t look so hurt. Don’t. You escaped something that would have gotten worse and worse. I thought of not telling you, but it would’ve come out because that story was the fuse burning underneath Douglas’s marriage and that was what blew up and led Iva to go after Joris. Also, Ned, I wanted to be the one to tell you and not have you get it from some other source and say How could you not tell me? Say, How weak do you think I am? Say that to me instead, Ned.”
“I have to digest this.”
“No you don’t, Ned. Or if you do, digest it. Do it. Do it now. You know I don’t like to talk against her but this is more than just something to add to the wrongs she did you, my man. But now I have you. You have me.”