Rich Man, Poor Man

When he told Jean about Virginia, she just laughed and said, “Oh, you poor attractive man.” Mischievously, one night, when they came back late to his apartment and he spotted Virginia in the shadows across the street, Jean wanted to go over and invite the girl up for a drink.

His work suffered and he found that he had to read simple reports over three and four times before they registered on his brain. He slept restlessly and awoke weary. For the first time in his life he had a rash of pimples on his chin.

At a party in New York he met a bosomy blonde lady who seemed to have three men around her at all times during the evening, but who made it plain to him that she wanted to go home with him. He took her to her apartment in the East Eighties, off Fifth Avenue, learned that she was rich, that she was divorced, that she was lonely, that she was tired of the men who pursued her around New York, that she found him ravishingly sexy (he wished she had found another style of expressing herself). They went to bed together after one drink and he was impotent and he left on a volley of coarse laughter from the useless bed.

“The unluckiest day of my life,” he told Jean, “was the day you came up to Port Philip to take those pictures.”

Nothing that happened made him stop loving her or wanting to marry her and live with her for the rest of his life.

He had called her all day, ten times, a dozen times, but there never was any answer. One more time, he decided, sitting disconsolately in the living room of his apartment, I’ll try one more goddamn time and if she’s not home I will go out and get roaring drunk and pick up girls and fight in bars and if Virginia Calderwood is outside the door when I come home I will bring her up here and screw her and then call the men with the straitjacket and tell them to come and take us both away.

The phone rang and rang and he was just about to put it down when it was picked up and Jean said, “Hello,” in the hushed, childish little way she had.

“Has your phone been out of order?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been out all day.”

“Are you going to be out all night?”

There was a pause. “No,” she said.

“Do we meet?” He was ready to slam the phone down if she said no. He had once told her that he only had two alternating emotions about her—rage and ecstasy.

“Do you want to meet?”

“Eight o’clock?” he said. “I’ll give you a drink here.” He had looked out the window and had not spotted Virginia Calderwood.

“I have to take a bath,” she said, “and I don’t feel like hurrying. Why don’t you come down here and I’ll give you a drink.”

“I hear the sound of cymbals and trumpets,” he said.

“Stop trying to sound educated,” she said, but she chuckled.

“What floor?”

“Fourth,” she said. “No elevator. Be careful of your heart.” She hung up.

He went in and showered and shaved. His hand wasn’t steady and he cut himself badly on the chin. The cut wouldn’t stop bleeding for a long time and he didn’t ring the bell of her apartment on East Fortieth Street until five minutes past eight.

The door was opened by a girl in blue jeans and a sweater whom he had never seen before, who said, “Hi, I’m Florence,” and then called, “Jea

“Come in, Rudy.” Jean’s voice floated out of an open door leading off the foyer. “I’m making up.”

“Thanks, Florence,” Rudolph said and went into Jean’s room. She was seated naked at a table in front of a small mirror putting mascara on her eyelashes. He hadn’t realized before that she used mascara. But he didn’t say anything about the mascara. Or her being naked. He was too busy looking around the room. Almost every inch of wall space was taken up with photographs of himself, smiling, frowning, squinting, writing on the clip board. Some of the photographs were small, others were immense blowups. All of them were flattering. It’s over, he thought gratefully, it’s all over. She’s decided.

“I know that man from somewhere,” he said.

“I thought you’d recognize him,” Jean said. Pink, firm, and dainty, she went on putting on mascara.

Over di

“What I like,” Rudolph said bitterly, “is a girl who knows her own mind.”

“Well, I know mine,” Jean said. She had grown sullen as Rudolph had argued with her. “I think I know what I’m going to do with my weekend,” she said. “I’m going to stay home and tear down every one of those photographs and whitewash the walls.”

To begin with, she was grimly devoted to secrecy. He wanted to let everybody know immediately, but she shook her head. “No a

“I have a sister and a mother,” Rudolph said. “Actually, I have a brother, too.”

“That’s the whole idea. I’ve got a father and a brother. And I can’t stand either of them. If they find out that you told your family and I didn’t tell them, there’ll be thunder from the West for ten years. And after we’re married I don’t want to have anything to do with your family and I don’t want you to have anything to do with mine. Families’re out. Thanksgiving di

Rudolph had given in on that without too much of a fight. His wedding couldn’t be a gloriously happy occasion for Gretchen, with Colin dead just a few months. And the thought of his mother blubbering away in some horrible concoction of a church-going dress was not an appealing one. He could also easily do without the scene Virginia Calderwood would make upon hearing the news. But not telling Joh

They had not agreed upon what they would do when they returned from Europe. Jean refused to stop working and she refused to live in Whitby.

“Damn it,” Rudolph said, “here we’re not even married yet and you’ve got me down as a part-time husband.”

“I’m not domestic,” Jean had said stubbornly. “I don’t like small towns. I’m on my way up in this city. I’m not going to give it all up just because a man wants to marry me.”

“Jean …” Rudolph said warningly.

“All right,” she said. “Just because I want to marry a man.”

“That’s better,” he said.

“You’ve said yourself, the office rightly ought to be in New York.”

“Only it’s not in New York,” he said.

“You’ll like me better if you don’t see me all the time.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Well, I’ll like you better.”

He had given in on that, too. But without grace. “That’s my last surrender,” he said.

“Yes, dear,” she said, mock demurely, fluttering her eyelashes. She stroked his hand exaggeratedly on the table. “I do admire a man who knows how to assert himself.”

Then they had both laughed and everything was all right and Rudolph said, “There’s one sonofabitch that’s going to get an a

“Fair enough,” Jean said, “if I can send an a

Cruel and happy, hand in hand, they left the restaurant and went into bar after bar on Third Avenue secretly and lovingly and finally, drunkenly, to toast the years ahead of them.

The next day he bought a diamond engagement ring at Tiffany’s, but she made him take it back. “I hate the trappings of wealth,” she said. “Just make sure to show up at City Hall on the day with a nice simple gold band.”