The Magician's Wife Read online

  “You did something, the way she’s acting.”

  “All I did was tell her to have you call, but I can damned well cuss you if you keep up this hard-to-get routine! Who do you think you are, De Gaulle?”

  To this, Mr. Granlund bellowed: “I’ll not have Nelly mistreated—I won’t have it, I won’t have it, I won’t have it!” Then, even louder, but not quite so mean, he asked: “What did you call about?”

  “The corned beef. How’s it doing?”

  “Well, how would I know, so soon after—”

  “Steve, quit cracking dumb! The same way I know, by getting with it and finding out! But it’s O.K. If you don’t care how it’s doing, I can always switch.”

  “What do you mean, switch?”

  “Switch to Coastal, what do you think?”

  Mention of Coastal, Portico’s chief competitor, seemed to enrage Mr. Granlund, for he roared: “Clay, that’s blackmail, and I damned well won’t stand for it—not for one minute, do you hear?” Clay, suddenly sweet, replied: “I guess it is, Steve. I guess it is, at that, and I certainly apologize. Just the same, blackmail or not, another chain of restaurants, that I won’t call by name, gets it—and gets it quick—unless you start making sense. Once more, how’s my salthorse doing?”

  “Why, O.K., of course. It’s big.”

  “Fine. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “And where’s somewhere, Clay?”

  “I want a year’s commitment.”

  “Commitment? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” exclaimed Clay, and then, bellowing loudly: “Miss Helm, get me Coastal!” Then, “Be seeing you,” he told Mr. Granlund, and hung up. But he stayed Miss Helm’s hand when she reached for the phone, and waited. Sure enough, it rang, to a big laugh from the meeting. “We were cut off, Clay,” said Mr. Granlund when Clay answered. And then: “That commitment—you want it in writing?”

  “Stop clowning,” said Clay. “Your word’s plenty.”

  “Then we’ll make it a year, but give me a week on exact amounts. It’s too early yet to be sure how much we can sell. On a daily basis the demand might drop once the novelty wears off.”

  “Take a month.”

  “But now, Clay, I want your commitment.”

  “My commitment? How so?”

  “I must have this thing exclusive.”

  Caught by surprise, Clay tapped the desk with a pencil, taking a moment to think. Then, parrying: “You mean, in the area?”

  “Well, we have no interest elsewhere.”

  “So let’s see, let’s see.”

  “I want no knife in my back from Coastal.”

  “Then, O.K.—it’s yours alone provided we get menu credit. This must be Grant’s corned beef you’re selling—Grant’s corned beef, cabbage, and spud.”

  “Well, I thought that was understood.”

  “Then, Steve, we’re set.”

  He hung up to a round of applause, not only from the salesmen but also from everyone in the room, clearly implying pent-up resentments that his triumph had handsomely requited. He nodded, then got up and took a bow, saying “Thankew” like Bob Hope and “How sweet it is” like Jackie Gleason. Then a bit sheepishly: “So, our meeting’s over before it’s started! It’s all wrapped up and presold—but thanks for the memory!” They all laughed and he laughed, but once again, as when drinking in Bill Jackson’s praise, he betrayed deep emotion in sharp contrast with his temper, so marked with Sally, Portico’s Earl, and Mr. Granlund. And yet they seemed somehow related, as though facets of something else, a deep, consuming vanity that on the one hand hated frustration and on the other thirsted for praise, for understanding, for fellow human warmth. In the end, as they all started filing out, he rapped for quiet again, and told them. “I would forget the best news of all! Without my saying a word, he let drop all by himself: It’s to be a daily feature!”

  This got a hand and a cheer.

  He sat down, quite overcome for a moment.

  Back in his office, he put in a call to Mankato, Minnesota, where the company’s main office was, and asked for Pat Grant, the president. Ostensibly he was requesting outsize beef, “the bigger the better—I can sell all you let me have. Big meat is on the way back, and I don’t know what looks prettier on the plate than a half-acre slice of roast beef.” But then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned the day’s coup and swelled again to Pat’s praise. By five he was at the yacht club, playing billiards with Mr. Garrett, one of the habitués. It was a pleasant, rambling place, with a glassed-in balcony running around the second deck, its front facing Chesapeake Bay, its rear the yacht harbor, a pretty jumble of jetties, cruisers, and sailboats on a cove that made in from the river. By six he was at dinner on the bay side of the balcony. By seven he was home at the Marlborough Arms, an apartment house on Spring Street at John F. Kennedy Drive, formerly West Boulevard.

  His place, on the seventh floor, was quiet, spacious, and airy, and he was secretly, perhaps not so secretly, proud of it. It had an entrance alcove, with phone table, closet for wraps, and arches that led to the living room on one side and to a long hall on the other, along which were dining room, kitchen, bath, bedroom, second bath, and second bedroom—though this last was fixed up as an “office,” with typewriter, filing case, and dictating machine. The kitchen was a miniature World’s Fair exhibit, full of twenty-first-century gadgets, which he used on his inspirations, such as the corned beef. Office, bedroom, and dining room were in birch, not very original and not very masculine. But the living room was his, and masculine in every detail. It had large windows, looking down on city, river, and bay. Between windows were shelves filled with “books that I read,” mainly on history—handsome sets of Parton, Nevins, Van Doren, Freeman, Sumner, and the Bancrofts. They stopped at eye level, and over them, standing, leaning, or hanging, were all sorts of things: his framed diploma from Lafayette College, cups he once won for swimming, pictures of Grant’s conventions, and quite a collection of paintings, line drawings, and woodcuts, mainly Mexican. At one end of the room was a Steinway baby grand, and near it a record cabinet, with spinner, hooked up to a hi-fi system. The furniture was upholstered in crimson, and each chair had a table beside it, holding ashtrays and cigarettes. Facing the windows was a fireplace, a brass basket of wood beside it, a fine-mesh screen in front. Flanking it were two sofas, a cocktail table between. But a rug was the room’s most striking feature. It was Persian, very big, and soft to the feet over its waffle-rubber foundation. Its colors were rose, yellow, blue, and gray, but with the gray predominating. It blended subtly with the dusty tone of the paintings and with their weathered raw-oak frames.

  “So! You made a sap of yourself, didn’t you? Talking about her navel—now, there was an idea for you, something to thrill any girl! And then when she smacked you down you had to blow your top—get sore, like any third-rate jerk, like some goddam truck driver. Aren’t you ever going to learn? Well, you never have. ... Forget her! She could have said, couldn’t she? Then it wouldn’t have happened! Why the hell didn’t she say? You asked her plain enough, and—knock it off, will you, forget her! You want to set yourself NUTS?”

  He got this off to his mirror, a full-length one set in the closet door in his bedroom, for, like many who live alone, he had formed the habit of mumbling while tramping from room to room—but sometimes went further than this and had things out with himself directly. He calmed himself down, however, went into the living room, and without turning the floor lamps on, sat down in a chair by a window and stared out at the gathering dusk. After some time the phone rang. “Mr. Lockwood?” asked a girl when he answered.

  “Speaking,” he said.

  “This is Sally Alexis.”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed, and then again: “Oh!” But his voice sounded muffled and queer, and she seemed nonplused when she said: “You—remember me? The girl who served your lunch?”

  “Why, sure I remember you. Why, yes—of course I do. Over at Portico. Well,
what’s on your mind?”

  3

  BUT HE SOUNDED QUEERER than ever, and moments of silence went by while he cupped the phone with one hand and banged his brow with the other, telling himself, “Snap out of it. What the hell, has the cat got your tongue?” Then her voice cut across his, asking if he was Mr. Lockwood. Of Grant’s? Mr. Clay Lockwood? Then at last he regained control and was able to speak like himself, with a fair imitation of naturalness. Yes, he told her, he was Clay Lockwood of Grant’s, and if he sounded funny, it was probably from force of habit, keeping his voice down, what with people out in the hall—“so as not to be overheard.” With apparent relief she said then that that explained it, and then, drawing a deep breath, went on: Well—what I called about—!”

  “Yes?” he said. “What did you?”

  “Two things, actually. First, your five dollars.”

  “Please, forget my five dollars.”

  “Well, I certainly won’t. Mr. Lockwood, girls don’t acknowledge their tips, and I don’t encourage them to—for all sorts of reasons. It just doesn’t work out and, besides, could lead to things we’d better not go into. So you won’t be hearing from Ida, but I’m not a waitress, so I can tell you that getting a tip like that meant something to her. She has all kinds of trouble at home, and trouble always costs. So her face really lit up when I handed that money over, and I just wanted to let you know.”

  “Then, O.K.—but please, no more about it.”

  “So now. So now. So now.”

  “Yeah?” he said, and then echoed: “So now?”

  They laughed, a bit breathlessly, both seeming to know that things were about to be said that would mean a lot more than five dollars. She drew an audible breath, then declaimed: “Mr. Lockwood, you did not overstep!”

  “Oh, I did. No argument about it at all.”

  “You did not. I won’t have it that way!”

  “And—that’s the real reason you called?”

  “Well, maybe so. It was nice, just the same, that you did leave Ida five dollars, so I had such a pleasant excuse. So all right, it could be the real reason at that—why I looked you up in the book, counted ten—and dialed.”

  “To say I did not overstep?”

  “It wouldn’t drop out of my mind.”

  “I made a pass, though.”

  “So? Who minds a little pass?”

  “I talked about your navel.”

  “Well, as I told you, it’s there.”

  “I’d love to wobble my finger in it.”

  “Listen! Are you starting all over again?”

  “I’d like to. Why didn’t you say you were married?”

  “Mr. Lockwood, that’s the sixty-four-dollar question that I’ve been asking myself ever since you went out the door. And I’m not sure I know—how do you like that? Now that I have you, at a distance—a safe distance, I mean—on the other end of a phone and can talk in a natural way, be myself, without getting all fussed—I may just as well tell the truth and own up, I didn’t want to say. I was having a very good time, enjoying it, passes and all. I kept holding it back on purpose, Mr. Lockwood.”

  “Who’s this Mr. Lockwood? To you I’m Clay.”

  “Then why don’t you call me Sally?”

  “Sally, where are you calling from?”

  “Home. Why?”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Nobody—I’m alone.” And then, getting the point: “Oh, you mean my husband? He’s not here, Clay—he works at night. He’s in show business. He’s a magician. You must have heard of him—he has the act at the Lilac Flamingo. ... Well, what do you think? That I’d be dumb enough to put in this call to you with somebody listening in?”

  “Just asking, that’s all.”

  “Well, certainly not!”

  “Then—we’re back where we were before. Where would you like to go? To step out a little with me? And where do I pick you up?”

  “But I couldn’t go anywhere.”

  “If not, why not, Sally?”

  “I’m too well known, that’s why. Clay, I see hundreds of people a day, and a lot of them know who I am. And even if they don’t—”

  “O.K., visit me here.”

  “Said the spider to the fly.”

  “Where do you live? I’ll come get you.”

  “No! No! No!”

  She whimpered it like a child, and when he insisted, she hung up to “think things over,” saying she’d “call him back.” He thought things over too, again in the chair by the window, and thought them over hard. He wasn’t a stranger to women, and in the games he had played with them had scored a bit, and most pleasantly. There had been the girl in high school at Trenton, New Jersey, where he was born, and the guilty year with her before they both went off to college. There had been the woman at Easton, Pennsylvania, who had rented him a room his first few weeks as a student, and her liberal ideas about payment. There had been a bank teller at Coatsville, where he had herded cows one summer after getting interested in meat. But the games a student plays aren’t really for keeps, and so he had gone his way blithely, with no wounds to mar his memories. Now, however, he would have to play as a pro, and as he looked down at the lights, prickles ran up his back, as though to warn him of danger. When the phone rang, he hesitated. It rang twice before he answered.

  If possible, she was even more frightened than he was, or at least seemed to be, and took five minutes on his instructions, “so we don’t have any slip-up.” She lived on Elm, near Kennedy, just a few blocks away, but the problem was “nosy neighbors,” as she put it, so she must leave the house on foot, “dressed as I always am when I go to the picture show—so don’t expect any Zsa Zsa Gabor iced up for a personal appearance.” She would have to buy a ticket “at the Harlow Theater on Elm Street, from that dumb blonde cashier who lives three doors from me, and be checked by the doorman, who’s her husband and doubles as ticket taker.” But then “I can slip out the fire door, which is out of sight from the lobby, and if you’re parked up the street and wink your lights when I come, I can be in your car in a flash and—you can take it from there. But I must be back, must be seen leaving the theater, when the late show lets out! Promise you’ll get me there! On time!”

  He promised, put on the living-room lights, and slipped down to the basement garage, getting his car out again and driving to the theater. He took a turn past it, to be clear on all locations, then drove to a point behind it, parked, and cut his lights. He was surprised at the thump of his heart and not too pleased by it. “Take it easy,” he told himself, then repeated it, adding, “goddamit.” But he cut off suddenly as he saw her come up Elm Street and turn toward the theater. He stared and stared at the fire door, then thought he saw it move. He winked his lights several times. Then he caught the sound of footsteps, and a shadow moved in front of him. Then she was tapping on his window, and he jerked the door open for her. She jumped in and he started his motor, putting on his lights and pulling ahead before finding her hand and pressing it. It was cold, and indeed the whole thing had a clammy, underhand feel to it, quite different from what he had expected.

  When they reached the Marlborough Arms, he left the car on the street, and they started for the front door. But when he reached out to open it for her she caught his hand and held it. “Clay,” she whispered, peering at Doris at her switchboard, “I can’t go in there! That girl could know me—I see so many people!” And then, pulling him back toward the car: “Come on! It’s a nice evening—we’ll take a ride.” But he held her and said: “O.K., so you can’t go through the lobby. But there’s another way—nothing to it.” He led her up the alley beside the building to the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear, opening it with his key. Then they were in the freight elevator, creaking up to the seventh floor. Then they were tiptoeing along a hall, then stepping through his door. “Welcome to my humble abode!” he said, taking her light spring coat. As he hung it up in the closet she motioned to the rest of her costume, which consisted of sweater, pleated skir
t, knee-length black stockings, and loafers. “Did you ever see such a mess?” she asked sourly. “Just ratty-looking, that’s all. But that’s what it had to be—or else I couldn’t come.”

  It certainly thickened the clammy moment, but he managed to stammer out: “What do you mean, mess? You look fine.” She resumed her tirade against the neighbors, but broke off as she turned and saw the living room. Then, almost reverently, she whispered: “I might have known—should have known—you’d live in a place like this.” Then, out loud, and bitterly: “I live in a dump. Oh, the house is all right—outside, anyway. But inside it’s just a storeroom, one endless storeroom for junk: mirrors and mirrors and mirrors; varnish cabinets, with stainless-steel legs; baskets with double sides, baskets with false bottoms, baskets with trick pockets, every kind of basket there is, lined up against the wall, like Ali Baba’s jars, so they give you the creeps, and you go around lifting the tops for fear there are thieves inside; tables, with servants, spring pulls, false bottoms—all kinds of different tables; playing cards, feather bouquets, levitation gear, and canopies—they’re the worst. Do you have any idea how sick brocade can look, always pink brocade, with a silver fringe on it, in the broad light of day?”

  “Well, I can kind of imagine.”

  “I doubt it. Nobody could. You know what it’s like, what it’s really like? Like a Christmas tree in July.”

  She began inspecting the paintings, then waved her hand at them, saying: “Those things—my mother’s an artist—she’s buyer for Fisher’s and draws their ads for them—those goofy girls that look like the Easter parade—so I know a little about it—those things cost you something!”

  He told her: “Not really. Those Mexicans paint too much for their work to bring a price. There’s a fellow down there who brags that his is the only restaurant in all Mexico City without murals by Diego Rivera. But their stuff does have a style, a dry desert smell. Makes me feel in a certain way.”