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Again and again the architects had almost quit, but he had said, “Do it this way this time, boys, and the next time it’ll be more your way. This is only the first of a chain and we’ll get bolder as we go along.”
The plans they had sketched for him were still a long way from what he wanted, but as he looked at the last rough drawings they had shown him that day, he knew they would finally surrender.
His eyes ached and he wondered if he needed glasses as he made some notes on the plans. There was a bottle of whiskey on the bureau and he poured himself a drink, topping it off with water from the tap in the bathroom. He sipped at the drink as he spread the sheets of stiff paper out on the desk. He winced at the drawing of a huge sign, CALDERWOOD’S, that the architects had sketched in at the entrance to the center. It was to be outlined in flashing neon at night. In his old age, Calderwood sought renown, immortality in flickering multicolored glass tubing, and all Rudolph’s tactful intimations about keeping a single modest style for the center had fallen on deaf ears.
The telephone rang, and Rudolph looked at his watch. Tom had said he would come by at five and it was almost that now. He picked up the phone, but it wasn’t Tom. He recognized the voice of Joh
He waited, a
When Joh
“I have the information you asked me for,” Joh
“Yes.”
Joh
“Thanks, Joh
“It was nothing,” Joh
“Sorry,” Rudolph said. He had nothing on for the evening and if Joh
After he hung up, he felt more tired than ever and decided to postpone calling the detective agency until the next day. He was surprised that he felt tired. He didn’t remember ever feeling tired at five o’clock in the afternoon.
But he was tired now, no doubt about it. Age? He laughed. He was twenty-seven years old. He looked at his face in the mirror. No gray hairs in the even, smooth blackness. No bags under the eyes. No signs of debauchery or hidden illness in the clear, olive skin. If he had been overworking, it did not show in that youthful, contained, unwrinkled face.
Still, he was tired. He lay, fully clothed, on the bed, hoping for a few minutes of sleep before Tom arrived. But he could not sleep. His sister’s contemptuous words of the night before kept ru
Gretchen was sick with the sickness of the age. Everything was based on sex. The pursuit of the sacred orgasm. She would say love, he supposed, but sex would do as a description as far as he was concerned. From what he had seen, what happiness lay there was bought at too high a price, tainting all other happiness. Having a sleazy woman clutch you at four in the morning, trying to claim you, hurling a glass at you with murderous hatred because you’d had enough of her in two hours, even though that had been the implicit bargain to begin with. Having a silly little girl taunt you in front of her friends, making you feel like some sort of frozen eunuch, then grabbing your cock disdainfully in broad daylight. If it was sex or even anything like love that had brought his mother and father together originally, they had wound up like two crazed animals in a cage in the zoo, destroying each other. Then the marriages of the second generation. Begi
Screw them all, he thought. Then laughed to himself. The word was ill chosen.
The telephone rang. “Your brother is in the lobby, Mr. Jordache,” the clerk said.
“Will you send him up, please?” Rudolph swung off the bed, straightened out the covers. For some reason, he didn’t want Tom to see that he had been lying down, with its implication of luxury and sloth. Hurriedly, he stuffed all the architects’ drawings into a closet. He wanted the room to look bare, without clues. He did not want to seem important, engrossed in large affairs, when his brother appeared.
There was a knock on the door and Rudolph opened it. At least he’s wearing a tie, Rudolph thought meanly, for the opinion of the clerks and bellboys in the lobby. He shook Thomas’s hand and said, “Come on in. Sit down. Want a drink? I have a bottle of Scotch, but I can ring down if you’d like something else.”
“Scotch’ll do.” Thomas sat stiffly in an armchair, his already-gnarled hands hanging down, his suit bunched up around his great shoulders.
“Water?” Rudolph said. “I can call down for soda if you …”
“Water’s fine.”
I sound like a nervous hostess, Rudolph thought, as he went into the bathroom and poured water out of the tap into Thomas’s drink.
Rudolph raised his glass. “Skoal.”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. He drank thirstily.
“There were some good write-ups this morning,” Rudolph said.
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I read the papers. Look, there’s no sense in wasting any time, Rudy.” He dug into his pocket and brought out a fat envelope. He stood up and went over to the bed and opened the envelope flap and turned it upside down. Bills showered over the bedspread.
“What the hell are you doing, Tom?” Rudolph asked. He did not deal in cash—he rarely had more than fifty dollars in his pocket—and the scattering of bills on the hotel bed was vaguely disquieting to him, illicit, like the division of loot in a gangster movie.
“They’re hundred-dollar bills.” Thomas crumpled the empty envelope and tossed it accurately into the waste-basket. “Five thousand dollars’ worth. They’re yours.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rudolph said. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“There’s your goddamn college education that I did you out of,” Thomas said. “Paying off those crooks in Ohio. I tried to give it to Pa, but he happened to be dead that day. Now it’s yours.”
“You work too hard for your money,” Rudolph said, remembering the blood of the night before, “to throw it away like this.”
“I didn’t work for this money,” Thomas said. “I got it easy—the way Pa lost his—by blackmail. A long time ago. It’s been in a vault for years, waiting. Feel free, brother. I didn’t take any punishment for it.”