Rich Man, Poor Man

“How much money you got?” Thomas asked, as they reached the foot of the harbor, where the fishing boats, with their acetylene lamps, were tied up, with the nets laid out along the pavement, drying.

“How much money I got?” Dwyer said querulously. “Not even a hundred bucks. Just enough to buy one-millionth of an ocean liner.”

“I don’t mean how much money you got on you. I mean altogether. You keep telling me you save your dough.”

“If you think I’ve got enough for a crazy scheme like …”

“I asked you how much money you got. In the bank?”

“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” Dwyer said reluctantly. “In the bank. Listen, Tommy, stop jerking off, we’ll never …”

“Between us,” Thomas said, “you and me, one day, we’re going to have our own boat. Right here. In this port. Rich man’s weather, like the Englishman said. We’ll get the money somehow.”

“I’m not going to do anything criminal.” Dwyer sounded scared. “I never committed a crime in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

“Who said anything about committing a crime?” Thomas said. Although the thought had crossed his mind. There had been plenty of what Dwyer would call criminals hanging around during his years in the ring, in two-hundred-dollar suits and big cars, with fancy broads hanging on their arms, and everybody being polite and glad to see them, cops, politicians, businessmen, movie stars. They were just about like everybody else. There was nothing so special about them. Crime was just another way of earning a buck. Maybe an easier way. But he didn’t want to scare Dwyer off. Not yet. If it ever came off, he’d need Dwyer to handle the boat. He couldn’t do it alone. Yet. He wasn’t that much of an idiot.

Somehow, he told himself, as they passed the old men playing boules on the quay-side, with the harbor behind them, the protected sheet of water crowded with millions of dollars worth of pleasure craft, shining in the sun. The one time he had been here before, he had sworn he’d come back. Well, he had come back. And he was going to come back again. SOMEHOW.

The next morning, early, they caught the train on the way to Genoa. They gave themselves an extra day, because they wanted to stop off and see Monte Carlo. Maybe they’d have some luck at the Casino.

If he had been at the other end of the platform he’d have seen his brother Rudolph getting out of one of the sleeping cars from Paris, with a slender, pretty, young girl and a lot of new luggage.

Chapter 6

When they walked through the exit gate of the station, they saw the Hertz sign and Rudolph said, “There’s the man with our car.” The concierge at the hotel in Paris had taken care of everything. As Jean had said, after the concierge had arranged for tickets to the theater, for a limousine to tour the chateaux of the Loire, for tables at ten restaurants, for places at the Opera and Longchamps, “Every marriage should have its own private Paris concierge.”

The porter trundled their luggage over to the car, said merci for the tip and smiled, although they were plainly American. According to the newspapers back home Frenchmen were not smiling at Americans this year. The man from the Hertz agency started to talk in English but Rudolph showed off with his French, mostly to amuse Jean, and the remaining formalities for renting the Peugeot convertible were concluded in the language of Racine. Rudolph had bought a Michelin map of the Alpes-Maritimes in Paris, and after consulting it, with the car top down, and the soft Mediterranean morning sun shining on their bare heads, they drove through the white town and then along the edge of the sea, through Golfe Juan, where Napoleon had landed, through Juan-les-Pins, its big hotels still in their pre-season sleep, to the Hotel du Cap, shapely, cream colored and splendid on its gentle hill among the pines.

As the manager showed them up to their suite, with a balcony overlooking the calm, blue sea below the hotel park, Rudolph said, coolly, “It’s very nice, thank you.” But it was only with the greatest difficulty that he kept from gri

The manager bowed himself out, the porters finished placing the bags on folding stools around the gigantic bed-room. Solid, real, with a solid, real wife, he said, “Let’s go out on the balcony.”

They went out on the balcony and kissed in the sunlight.

They nearly hadn’t married at all. Jean had hesitated and hesitated, refusing to say yes or no and for awhile he was on the brink of delivering an ultimatum to her every time he saw her, which was tantalizingly seldom. He was kept in Whitby and Port Philip a great deal of the time by work and then, when he did get to New York it was often only to find a message with his answering service from Jean telling him that she was out of town on a job. One night, he had seen her in a restaurant after the theater with a small, beady-eyed young man with matted long hair and a week-old growth of dark stubble on his jaws. The next time he saw her he asked her who the young man was and she admitted it still was the same one, the one she was overlapping with. When he asked her if she was still sleeping with him, she answered that it was none of his business.

He had felt humiliated that he was in competition with anyone that unsavory looking and it didn’t make him feel any better to be told by Jean that the man was one of the most famous fashion photographers in the country. He had walked out on her that time and waited for her to get in touch with him, but she never called him and finally he couldn’t bear it any longer and called her, swearing to himself that he would screw her but he’d be damned if he ever would marry her.

His whole conception of himself was damaged by her treatment of him and it was only in bed, where she delighted him and seemed to be delighted by him that he found any relief from his brooding feeling that he was being debased by the entire affair. All the men he knew assured him that all the girls they knew did nothing but plot constantly to get married. What sensational lack was there in his character or his lovemaking or general desirability that had made the only two girls he had asked to marry reject him?

Virginia Calderwood hadn’t helped matters either. Old man Calderwood had followed Rudolph’s advice about allowing his daughter to come down to New York and live alone and take a secretarial course. But if she was learning typing and stenography, Virginia must have done it at very odd hours indeed, because almost every time Rudolph went to his New York apartment, he would spot her, lurking in a doorway across the street or pretending just to be walking by. She would telephone in the middle of the night, sometimes three or four times, to say, “Rudy, I love you, I love you. I want you to fuck me.”

To avoid her, he took to staying in different hotels when he came to New York, but for some prudish reason, Jean refused to visit him in a hotel and even the pleasures of the bed were denied him. Jean still wouldn’t let him call for her at her apartment and he had never seen the place where she lived or met her roommate.

Virginia sent him long letters, horrifyingly explicit about her sensual longings for him, the language straight out of Henry Miller, whom Virginia must have studied assiduously. The letters were sent to his home at Whitby, to his apartment, to the main office at the store, and all it would take would be for one careless secretary to open any one of them and he doubted if old man Calderwood would ever talk to him again.