Two Much!

23

The telegram arrived at nine that night. Good old Joe; it’s a blessing to have friends you can rely on, particularly when they live in California and you need a telegram from California.

Betty and I were having dinner for two on the terrace, bathing in the warm August air and watching the lights of taxicabs on the Park Drive. Liz was out somewhere, foul-tempered and door-slamming, and Art hadn’t been heard from all day.

“Now what?” I said, and extended the yellow form across the coffee and peach melba toward Betty. Nikki had brought it out to us, wiggling her rump, and now stood beside the table, giving me her lewd looks and awaiting further orders.

Betty took the telegram, frowning past it at me. “What is it? that’s all, Nikki.”

Nikki turned like a Buckingham Palace guard, but more interestingly, and pranced back indoors. She moved like someone with good pelvic muscles. I said, “It’s a telegram. Trouble of some kind.”

Betty cautiously lowered her eyes to the words on the yellow paper, reading them by candlelight. I knew what they said. Not only had I just read it myself; earlier today I’d written it. And what it said was:

“Who’s Joe Gold?”

“An old friend of mine in Los Angeles. Makes a living writing record liner notes.”

“You know the strangest people,” she said, and handed the telegram back to me. “What’s it all about?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I better call.”

“Do you still have business affairs out there?”

“No. I told you, I sold my interest in the car wash before I came back East”

“Then what could it be?”

“I just can’t think of anything. I ought to call.”

“I suppose so,” she said doubtfully. She frowned in mistrust at the telegram in my hand, a legitimate telegram legitimately sent from Los Angeles by a man legitimately named Joe Gold. “I suppose so,” she repeated, then picked up the summons bell on the middle of the table and shook it.

Nikki responded immediately to the tinkle — an eavesdropper, apparently, among her other qualities. “Yes, madame? I should clear now?”

“The telephone for Mr. Dodge.”

“Yes, madame.”

While she was gone, Betty said, “Why would he send a telegram here?”

“He must have called the office, and Art gave him this address.”

“Then why wouldn’t he call here?”

“I don’t know.” I did not, in fact, have a good explanation for that, and trusted the question would eventually become lost in the onrush of events. For my own purposes, a telegram established the California connection much more realistically than a telephone call, but that was hardly something to mention to Betty.

Nikki came back with the long-corded phone. “I wish he’d given his number,” I said. “How do I get information in Los Angeles?”

Betty’s take-over qualities came promptly to the surface, as I’d hoped they would. “Give me the phone,” she said. “Nikki, pencil and paper.”

“Yes, madame.”

While Nikki pogoed away once more, Betty dialed L.A. information, then asked me, “What’s his address, do you know?”

“Vassar Drive, in Hollywood.”

“Vassar?” Her lip curled slightly. “Those people out there. Yes, operator. In Hollywood, a Mr. Joseph Gold on Vassar Drive. Yes, I will.”

Back came Nikki, with pad and pencil. She started to give them to me, but I shooed her over to Betty. She started then to leave again, but I said, “Nikki, wait here a minute. We may want something else.” If she was an eavesdropper, I didn’t want her near any of the extension phones in the next few minutes.

“Yes, Mr. Bart.” The words, the manner, and the look were all directly out of The Story of O, and not for a minute did I believe that coincidental.

Betty, her hand over the receiver mouthpiece, said to me, “Is he Jewish?”

“I really don’t know,” I said.

“He probably is.” Then, into the phone, “Yes, operator?” She wrote down some numbers. “Thank you, operator.” Hanging up, she said, “Nikki, give all this to Mr. Dodge.”

“Yes, madame.”

Ignoring Nikki’s dance routine, I glanced at the phone number on the pad, saw that Betty had gotten it right, and dialed it from memory. Ring. Two rings. Three rings. Come on, Joe, you said you’d be home, it’s only six P.M. there. Four ri—“Hello?”

“Hello, Joe?”

“Hey man. You got it, huh?”

“Yeah, I got it. What’s it all about?”

“I must say,” he said, “your relationships with women get more baroque all the time.”

“Good God!” I said. I sounded shocked, and I’m sure I looked stunned. Nikki and Betty both watched me, with curiosity and apprehension.

“I never did like Lydia,” Joe was saying, “even when you were married to her.”

“When?” I asked. I was hunched tensely over the phone.

“But at least,” Joe said, “that was your ordinary tag-team unfaithful modern marriage.”

I said, “Do you think she meant it?”

“What you’re into now,” he said, “I shudder to think.”

I said, “What do the doctors say?” Both women on the terrace with me reacted predictably to the noun.

“There must be an easier way to get laid,” he said. “Or to break off with a woman, or whatever the hell you’re doing.”

I said, “Good God, Joe, that was over a long time ago. I never gave her any—” And stopped, as though I’d been interrupted.

Joe was saying, “Don’t you have any massage parlors back there?”

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said reluctantly. “But what am I supposed to do?”

“Have you considered onanism?”

I gave Betty a helpless look, shaking my head. “Joe,” I said, pleading to be understood, “you don’t understand. I have commitments back here now, I can’t just—”

“Of course,” he said, “as Marx once pointed out, the bourgeoisie had to invent adultery to keep from dying of boredom.”

“I realize that, Joe,” I said desperately.

“Or was it Lenin? One of those commies.”

“Well, how long would it be for?”

“The point is, maybe what you need is a hobby. Jigsaw puzzles, for instance.”

“The thing of it is, Joe,” I said, being confidential with him, “I’ve got a girl now, back here in the East”

“I don’t doubt it for a second.”

“It’s, uh, it’s serious, Joe. If I came out, I’d have to—”

Again I appeared to be interrupted. Both Nikki and Betty looked shocked at this suggestion that I was being asked to go to California. Meanwhile, Joe was saying, “Maybe you’d like to grow plants. Vines and things. Tell them all your little secrets, and watch their leaves fall off.”

“Joe,” I said, “how can I explain that to my girl?”

“If anybody can, Art,” he said, “you can.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, but I didn’t sound happy about it I said, ‘The doctors really think so, huh?”

“They sure do,” Joe said. “They think you’re a nut”

“Thanks, Joe,” I said. “I’d appreciate that. Be better than a hotel.”

“Do you get the impression,” he asked me, “that we’re talking at cross-purposes?”

“I don’t see how I can promise anything,” I said.

“Go ahead and promise, baby.”

I nodded slowly, listening. Logic, duty, friendship, my own moral sense, all were clearly conspiring to make me agree to something about which I was extremely reluctant “You’re right, Joe,” I said.

“Why, thank you,” he said.

“I’ll work it out somehow at this end,” I said, “and I’ll get out there as soon as I can.”

“Don’t you dare,” he said.

“Sure, Joe, I know,” I said, “and I appreciate it So long.”

“Is it soup yet?” he asked me, and I hung up.

Betty said, “You’re going to California?”

“It’s—” I stopped myself, glanced at Nikki, and said, “You can take the phone back now, Nikki.”

“Yes, Mr. Bart.” Off she went, no doubt to hide behind the draperies and listen to me tell my tale.

Betty was showing understandable impatience. “For heaven’s sake, what is it?”

“A girl,” I said. “Her name’s Lydia, we used to go together when I lived in L.A. For a while, we even talked about getting married.”

“And?”

“We broke up,” I said. “I hadn’t seen her for two or three months when I left. In fact, that’s part of the reason I was so glad when Art called and wanted me to go into the card business with him. I was ready to come back.”

Her impatience was not appeased. “And?”

“She tried to kill herself.”

“Bosh,” Betty said, sitting back, and suited the old-fashioned word with an old-fashioned expression of disbelief and contempt “It’s a silly ploy to get you back.”

“I don’t think so, I really don’t think so. She drove her car off a cliff, up on Mulholland Drive. I mean, it wasn’t a sleeping pill thing or head in the oven, one of those tries with rescue built right into it. She really did try to kill herself.”

“Well, what are you supposed to do about it? Go back and marry her?”

“Go back and see her,” I said. “Her doctors think she’s idealized me or something, that if she sees me as I really am, if we have a talk and she sees the reality of it she’ll snap out of it. She made another try in the hospital, tried to drag herself to the window.”

Sympathy for this unknown victim of heart’s blight finally began to seep into Betty’s expression, mixing with the impatience and the annoyance there. “Don’t they have her under restraint or something?”

“They can’t leave her like that forever.” I reached across the table, taking Betty’s hand in both of mine, and gazed sincerely into her eyes. “Betty,” I said, “this thing is ghastly. I wish I didn’t know a thing about it. But I do know, and how can I turn my back? What if I refused to go out there, said it wasn’t my problem, and—”

“It isn’t your problem.”

“What if she tries again, a third time? What if she makes it? Could I have that on my conscience the rest of my life?”

“She might try it anyway, even if you do go out”

“But at least I’ll have done what I can. Betty, how could I face myself if I didn’t at least make the try?”

Her arguments were failing, and she knew it. “This is so inconvenient,” she said, looking away at the darkness of Central Park. “I’m not sure I could get away now.”

“Betty, you can’t come with me. Don’t you see what a shock that would be to her, rubbing her nose in it, I show up with—”

“You mean you’ll go out by yourself?”

“Just for a day or two,” I said. “Joe offered to let me stay at his place. You have the phone number, we can be in constant contact.”

Briskly dismissing that, Betty said, “She wouldn’t have to know I was anywhere in the state. We could stay at the Bel Air, I could visit friends while you were at the hospital, there wouldn’t be any problem.”

“You may think I’m silly,” I said, “but I couldn’t do that. It would just be on my mind all the time, as though I were flaunting my own happiness in the face of her misery. Let me do this my way, Betty. It won’t be for long, and once it’s over it’ll be over for good.”

She frowned. “How do you know she won’t do it again a year from now? An annual event, like the tulip festival. Lydia’s leap.”

“Even if it happened,” I said, “I wouldn’t feel obligated any more. Once is all I owe her, but I do owe her that. And besides, you wanted our marriage kept a secret. How could we travel together, stay at a hotel, visit your friends out there, do all of that and keep the secret?”

She glared out over Central Park, with its viaduct of taxi headlights and the dim lamps gleaming uncertainly along the blacktop paths. She considered arguments, rejected them, went back to them, thought out the potentials and the implications, and at last irritably shrugged her shoulders and said, “All right. Do it your way. I suppose I should be happy I have such a straight-arrow husband”

“And I’m delighted,” I told her, squeezing her hand, “that I have such an understanding wife.”