“Well,” Dane said with deliberate indecisiveness. Then, with a laugh: “Incidentally, John, I noticed a man going into the building a while ago whom I’d never seen here before. While you were at dinner. Gray hair, chin whiskers, wearing glasses, and carrying a medical bag. Is somebody sick?”
“That would be Miss Grey’s doctor,” said John Leslie. “I saw him leave a few times and asked Miss Grey once who he was, and she said Dr. Stone. How are you coming along with your book, Mr. Dane? You must tell us when they print it, now. The missus and me have your other books, and we like them champion.”
“Thanks, John.” Dane knew that his two books lay in the Leslies’ cabinet beside their picture of the Royal Family. “Oh, don’t mention to Mother that I’ve been by. She’d feel bad about missing me.”
Dane made his way to Lexington Avenue and a bar that advertised No Television. The interior was cool and smelled of malt, as a proper bar should, and not of spaghetti sauce and meat balls, as a proper bar should not. He ordered a gin and tonic and drank it and ordered another.
Miss Grey. Sheila Grey.
So she was “the other woman.”
It was a proper shock.
Sheila Grey, rated on anyone’s list, was among the Top Ten of international haute couture. And she was not much older than Dane (old enough, he thought, to be the old bull’s daughter). In the United States her reputation as a fashion designer made her one of the Top Three; there were some who acclaimed her first among equals. She had the penthouse.
Dane reorganized his emotions. Whatever this was, it was no longer an ordinary liaison. Ash McKell certainly was not “keeping” Sheila Grey, who could well afford half a dozen penthouses; this could not be an affair of love-for-money. Could it be — he felt a chill — love? In that case, God help Mother!
And now the theatricalism made a little more sense. You couldn’t meet a woman like Sheila Grey in a motel somewhere, or tuck her out of sight in the Westchester countryside. She would be strongly independent; as far as Dane knew, she was not married; if a lover were to rendezvous with her, it would have to be in her apartment. Since her apartment happened to be in the same building occupied by her lover and his wife, he could only visit her surreptitiously. Ash McKell had chosen disguise.
It must make him wriggle, Dane thought. His father’s conservatism was constantly embattled with his zest for living; in this, as in other respects, he was a paradox. He would writhe at the necessity of making a fool of himself, at the same time that he mastered the technique of theatrical make-up. It was really rather skillfully done.
But then everything Ash McKell set out to do he did skillfully. Dane had never known that his father knew karate until the night they caught a sneak thief in the McKell apartment. His father had broken the man’s wrist and three of his ribs with no more than a few blurred gestures.
Dane ordered a third gin and tonic, and over this one he felt anger return. It was all very complex, no doubt, but there was nothing complex about Ashton McKell’s romance. To commit adultery almost directly over his wife’s head! It was plain vulgarity, mean as hell.
Did his mother know that her rival occupied the penthouse?
Dane tossed off his drink. Whether she knew or not (and if he were betting on it, he would have bet that she knew), something had to be done.
He did not attempt to rationalize the compulsion, any more than he could have rationalized his feelings toward his mother. She was silly, arbitrary, hopelessly old-fashioned, out of place and time, and he adored her. Whether he adored her because of what she was or in spite of it did not matter. Her reason for being was threatened, and who else was there to remove the threat?
Now a rather leering interloper crept into his thoughts.
What to do next... break up the affair, certainly, but how? He asked the question, not rhetorically — he had no doubt that it could be done — but in order to organize his modus operandi... That was when the intruder crept in.
For the first time, under the liberating influence of the alcohol, Dane admitted to himself that his feelings were not unmixed. He did feel sorry for his mother. He did feel angry with his father. But why was he also feeling enjoyment? Self-satisfaction, really?
Dane ordered another gin and tonic.
First, there had been the ridiculous ease with which he had uncovered the identity of his father’s paramour, and their trysting place. Small as the triumph was, it gratified him. We all like to think we’re so noble, he reflected, when what really pleases us in our relationships with others is our little part in events, not theirs.
To self-satisfaction he had to add excitement. The emotion was definitely there, his personal response to a challenge. It derived from the nature of the situation. It was a story situation — one of the oldest in literature, true; still, it might have come from anyone’s typewriter. It raised plot questions. How would I handle it if it were a situation in one of my stories? Could people be manipulated in life as handily as on paper? If they could... Here was real creation! — the creation of action and reaction in context with a cast of flesh-and-blood characters, one of whom was himself.
And the delicious, the best part of it was that it would be done without any of the principals being in the least aware that they were puppets!
Am I a monster? Dane wondered, sipping moodily at his fourth gin and tonic. But then aren’t all writers monsters? Cannibals feeding off the flesh of friends and enemies alike, converting them into a different form of energy for the sheer joy of digestion? (And how much of it, Dane thought ruefully, followed the human economy and went down the drain!) The truth was, any writer worth his salt would give a year off his life for a chance like this. (Thackeray coming downstairs, weeping. “What is the matter, Henry? “I have just killed Colonel Newcombe!” How the old boy would have risen, like a trout to the lure, to such an opportunity!) It was commonplace for authors to make lemonade out of the lemons handed them by life, and poor pink stuff it became, too. How would the real thing look and taste...?
By his sixth gin Dane was drawing bold lines on the table with the condensation from his glass. Thus, thus, and thus:
He would contrive to meet Sheila Grey.
He would make love to her.
He would make her love him.
He would displace his father in her life.
That should do it.
How would his father react to being deposed by his son? Or by having to “share the latchkey” with him (Dane’s writing mind foresaw the possibility that this Sheila, still uncomprehended, might be the sort of woman to whom the notion of sleeping with father and son on alternate nights was amusing)? Of course, he felt sorry for the old man (how old is old, Dane?). The blow to his ego would be shattering. Well, serve him right. Send him back where he belongs, to Mother.
After that, what? Drop her, go back to work? Why not? Serve her right, breaking up a solid ’Murrican home, Episcopal yet! Dane chuckled, the chuckle turning giggly.
There was no doubt in his mind, after the seventh gin and tonic, that he could pull it off. What the deuce ’d she look like? He tried vainly to recall. He had passed her in the lobby on three or four occasions, but each encounter had happened to coincide with a love affair, when other women hardly existed for him. He had seen her photo in Vogue and the Sunday papers several times, but her face remained a blank. She couldn’t be outstandingly ugly, or some impression would have lingered. So she must be relatively pleasant to look at, thank heaven.
He decided to order just one more drink.