The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 11

Douglas ran to the door but the hall was empty; Jesus had abruptly vanished. He was still staring down the empty corridor, lost in thought, when Garfunkel came up behind him and asked what was wrong.

When the security chief mentioned the possibility of trespassers, he grew unreasonably annoyed. It wasn’t until after he returned to the office that he realized he hadn’t wanted the boy caught.

He wasn’t sure why, at first. The kid would undoubtedly have made some wild accusations. After all, how had he gotten past the guards and into the building? Wasn’t it logical that Douglas had taken him upstairs for all the obvious reasons? It wouldn’t wash, of course; he had signed in alone, and Barton, whom he had met in the elevator, could verify he had been by himself. But there would still be the half smiles that said silently: “You know what queers are like.” He had been through that type of hassle before. Well, he had faced the possibility of blackmail years ago and had sworn he would never give in to it, regardless of the price he might have to pay.

No, fear hadn’t been it; there had been something about the kid himself….

He replaced the glass shelf and stooped to gather up the scattered netsukes, the small ivory carvings used as ornaments for obis, the wide sashes that bound formal Japanese kimonos. It was a few minutes before he found the last one, a startlingly realistic carving of a water buffalo. It was his favorite and he fingered it lovingly.

Thee artist had,*etched the hair onto the body of the beast with such accuracy that you’d swear you could see each individual strand.

The face of the buffalo was placid and bovine.

Douglas replaced the piece with the others, feeling a quiet sense of pleasure at its beauty. The thought of selling the buffalo was abhorrent to him and he had steered more than one would-be purchaser away from the carving.

There would come a time, he knew, when just the right person would be charmed by it and then he would part with it. But by that time the piece would be so engraved in his memory that the mere thought of it would be as satisfying as the reality.

He walked slowly through the shop, past the small models of rooms with their own miniaturized lighting and the broad teak table upon which were the books of fabric and carpet samples. Matching chairs of teak faced the table and on the wall behind it hung a print of Larry’s favorite Picasso, “La Minotaurmachie.” Douglas had given it to him on his thirtieth birthday.

The office in back had little of the comfort and charm of the showroom. Taking up a sizable fraction of the room was a Herman Miller desk with an electronic computer on top and scattered scraps of paper and open ledgers surrounding it. There was a businesslike atmosphere to it all that chilled his heart.

That was it, he thought. His whole life could be summed up in the figures in the ledgers, all forty-four years of it. He absently ran his fingers through his thinning hair, then sucked in his stomach and placed his hands between his belt and belly, feeling the flesh push back against his palms. I’m getting old, he thought, and that was the real problem. Without the resilience of youth, minor problems became major tragedies, and you discovered the strength you thought you had, had slipped away during the passing years. You didn’t welcome challenges any more; you just felt tired and inadequate, or simply beaten.

He and Larry were going broke; the ledgers, the computer didn’t lie.

They were going broke in ways other than financial, too. He glanced at the small Kodachrome under the glass working surface of the desk.

It was of him and Larry, taken a number of years before at Fire Island.

They had both gone there on a lark; they hadn’t bothered with the obviously gay sections, spending most of their time on the beach or alone with each other. The world was young, relatively speaking, and they would never grow old.

Only that was ten years ago, Douglas thought, when he had been a vigorous thirty-four. Now he was a thicker, tired forty-four. On the other hand, Larry, who was naturally slender and saved from being too pretty by an almost insignificant thickening of the bridge of the nose and a slightly heavy cast to his chin, had matured into a striking man of thirty-two.

Too striking, Douglas thought. Larry, he was convinced, had developed outside interests. Douglas had always assured him that he had complete freedom in that respect; he had never believed that a man and a woman could be completely monogamous over the long haul, let alone two men. Recently Larry had been coming in late at night with no explanations offered-not that Douglas would have asked-and a week ago when Douglas had been walking along the street hurrying to an appointment, he had spotted Larry through the window of Belcher’s having lunch with a man in his late thirties. The stranger had the tanned, athletic good looks of someone who had the leisure and the money.to spend a good deal of time in the sun and to keep his body in condition. He had reminded Douglas of himself a number of years before.

Douglas sighed and sat down with the ledgers again, then abruptly closed them and pushed them to one side.

The shop had been a gamble, one that they had lost.

They had thought they would attract a good many clients from among the obviously affluent tenants of the Glass House, but it turned out that most of the tenants were older and more conservative in their design philosophy.

Those who were younger preferred to boast that their apartments had been done by Peck and Wuncraft; Today’s Interiors was very declasse, very unstylish.

He pushed his chair back and walked into the storeroom where they kept bolt after bolt of expensive drapery fabrics with delicate weaves and bright patterns, as well as quantities of thick, nubby upholstery materials with intricate traceries of metallic threads. Many of them had been ordered for jobs that had failed to materialize or had been canceled. On the other side of the narrow aisle were stacks of polyfoam decorator cushions and sheets of polyurethane foam that they used in some of their in-house upholstering jobs. Most of their upholstering was subcontracted but occasionally Larry liked to recover some of their stock pieces, altering the lines into something new and striking. Douglas ran a hand gently over the surfaces of the cloth.

When they liquidated, most of the materials would bring only pennies on the dollar, hardly enough to satisfy their creditors.

He walked into the showroom and picked up the small ivory carving of the buffalo. Just fondling it gave him a momenta peace of mind.

And then he remembered Jesus again. The skinny little Puerto Rican kid

…

It hadn’t been lust … he was far removed from that.

It had been what? Pity? Probably. A good deal of identification, too. One loser - spotting another. It was easy to recognize the telltale sign: It was when you gave up, He sat down on the couch for a moment and kneaded his forehead with his hands. You had to be strong to get by in the world. With a little strength, you could face failure or perhaps summon up that final bit of effort to save the game at the last minute. But this game was finished.

He went back to the office and started the long, painful process of checking the figures once more. Funny to see himself mirrored in Jesus, he mused. Maybe he should have told Garfunkel about it; God knows what the kid might get into. But no, he thought, he’d thrown a scare into him. He was probably long gone by now.