Phil said he and Irene weren’t ready to leave but he would drive me to the station at New Hastings where I could catch a train back to the city. He wandered off to find his car while I mooched about the hall and the big drawing room, trying to keep my brain inert and ignore the clamouring contradictions that were queuing up to be heard. As I prowled around, distracting myself, I saw a small, framed photograph amongst a clutch of others on a side table. It was an impromptu photo of Cleve and Frances, not looking at the camera, in near profile, both of them in casual clothes and taken early in their marriage, I imagined, long before the accident. I picked up the frame — tortoiseshell — and swung the little brass clips free on the back. I pocketed the photo and slid the frame into a bureau drawer. I had no idea why I’d done this or what had prompted me — it was a strange kind of trophy, I supposed, something that I had stolen and could keep and that would remind me of this cold afternoon in Connecticut: a symbol of something that had ended or was about to end.
I strolled back into the hall and saw Frances saying goodbye to a couple. I froze but she turned at that moment and saw me. She wheeled her chair round and propelled herself towards me, smiling her empty hostess smile.
‘You’re not leaving already, are you?’
‘I’m going back to England tomorrow,’ I lied, easily. ‘Still a lot of packing to do.’
She looked up at me from her chair — a fine ebony seat and bleached woven strand-cane, as elegant a wheelchair as money could buy, I thought — though she might as well have been looking down from some elevated throne, such was the regal hauteur and condescension in her manner.
‘Cleve is sleeping with you, isn’t he?’
‘Don’t be absurd! Really, what a—’
‘Of course he is. I can always tell which ones are his girls.’
‘I refuse to dignify your disgraceful accusation by any kind of—’
‘You’re not the first since my accident, Miss Clay. You may be the fourth or fifth — I don’t keep a precise count. One thing I’m sure of, though: you won’t be the last.’
She wheeled herself away but not before delivering a little pitying smile at me. I watched her leave the hall. Smug, frightened, powerful, threatened. Phil Adler ducked his head round the front door. Ready to go?
Cleveland and Frances Finzi, about 1929, before the accident. The photo that I stole.
4. SOUTH OF THE BORDER
I COULDN’T SEE CLEVE after the Connecticut Incident, as I referred to it. I told the office I’d been diagnosed with a bad case of pleurisy and would be confined to bed for at least a week.
Of course, Cleve telephoned and I didn’t answer. And then he came down to Washington Square, buzzed the buzzer, somehow gained admittance, beat on the door and, when I didn’t respond, slipped a note under it saying ‘I’ve been phoning. We have to speak. Everything is fine. I love you, C.’
I wondered what world he was living in where ‘everything is fine’? I didn’t blame or hate Cleve — just marvelled at his complacency.
One strange thing: I had the roll of film from my Voigtländer developed — I was keen to see the covert shot I’d taken of Cleve from the end of the terrace. It wasn’t very good but I found an image on the roll that I’d had nothing to do with. It was a long shot of me and Cleve standing by the lake, talking. Who had taken it? Someone had picked up my Voigtländer and had snapped that moment and preserved it. And, I thought, that someone had also wanted me to see it, or at least had known I’d see it one day. . Phil Adler? Irene? A stranger? No — I suspected the suede-gloved hand of Frances Moss Finzi. It unsettled me.
And then, in the perverse, unscripted way that life works, an upheaval arrived in the shape of a telegram from Hannelore Hahn, announcing that she and her travelling companion, Constanze Auger, were in New York for a few days before moving on south to Mexico. We had to see each other.
We met in the Brevoort Hotel on 5th Avenue. Hanna had changed: her hair was long, shoulder-length; she was wearing a cream crêpe de Chine dress with a red velvet collar. It was Constanze Auger who looked like the beautiful boy, the Bubi. Short blonde hair with the thick forelock hanging over one eye, face tanned, a shoulder-padded navy bolero jacket over apple-green Oxford bags, flat brogue shoes — but all this masculinity undercut by a pair of dangling jet earrings. She was very stern and tense as a person — even within a minute of meeting her I was aware of this: she didn’t have Hanna’s ease or sardonic sense of humour. For Constanze, it was as if her life was a serious mission of some sort, with an import only she could appreciate or understand and where ‘fun’ really had no part to play. She was striking-looking, slim, tall — heads turned in the Brevoort. She was a journalist, she said: she and Hanna were going to Mexico to write a book — text by Constanze, photographs by Hanna.
As I sat there listening to their plans I found myself envying them. This was a potent whiff of Berlin and its sense of everything being possible passing through Greenwich Village and rather showing the place and its denizens up. We ate, we drank, we smoked, we laughed — even Constanze, eventually. I could have been back in the Klosett-Club. The Brevoort, where I’d deliberately taken them, the Village’s beating intellectual heart, seemed sclerotic, timid, impoverished, provincial.
But maybe it was my own sour, damaged mood making me think like this. As I became more drunk, repeatedly ordering rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, my latest favourite tipple, I opened up to them and told them both about my affair with Cleve and the fiasco of the New Hastings weekend.
‘I tell you, Amory,’ Constanze said, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette, ‘he did it deliberately. He’s setting out — how do you say it? — marking the ground linings and the goalposts in a different configuration.’
‘The playing field. On his terms, you mean. Yes. .’
‘How could he take you to meet his crippled wife?’ Hanna said, seeming genuinely upset. ‘It’s disgusting.’
‘He just sees the world differently,’ I said, feeling I had to defend Cleve, somewhat. ‘Something that appears difficult, or a problem, to me, or to anyone, doesn’t seem like that to him. Everything has a way of being solved.’
‘It’s called arrogance, that attitude,’ Constanze said. ‘Or Solipsismus, yes? I live alone in my world. I have no problems. Who are you? What do you want?’
‘I don’t think he has any idea how I see him,’ I said, becoming confused, my mind blurry with drink, all coherence going. ‘I think he’d be outraged if I called him arrogant. Shocked.’
Hanna took my hand. ‘But you can’t stay here — in this situation. It’s impossible, Liebchen. Why don’t you come with us?’
‘To Mexico?’
‘Yes,’ Constanze added. ‘Bring your camera. Two photographers and a writer. We will make a wonderful book.’
In my mood of pleasant self-pitying inebriation, fuzzy and heroic with drink, in the company of these vibrant confident women, it seemed the perfect solution. I had money in the bank, it would be an adventure and, more significantly, it would show Cleve that I wasn’t prepared to fit in with his skewed, solipsistic vision of our future.
The next day I made an appointment to see him. We met in his office at the end of the afternoon. He was very calm.
‘How are you feeling, Amory?’
‘Much better, thank you. I needed the rest.’
‘Of course.’
He was sitting behind his wide desk, his jacket off, braided wire garters on his shirtsleeves, keeping his cuffs trim. I wished, not for the first time, that I had my camera, to capture Cleve like this, his eyes full of messages despite his compromised position as my boss — all his contradictions gathered in one room: casual, formal; editor-in-chief, adulterer; handsome man, inadequate husband; a power-broker who was about to find himself powerless in this instance.