Rich Man, Poor Man

Gretchen had an idea of just how lonely the night and the weekend were likely to be. He had two other mistresses in New York. That she knew of.

“I can never make up my mind,” Ida said, “whether he’s a jerk or a genius.”

“Neither,” Gretchen said and began putting the sequence that displeased her on the moviola again, to see if there was anything she could do with it.

Rudolph came into the cutting room at six-thirty, looking politically hopeful in a dark-blue raincoat and a beige cotton rain hat. Next door a train was going over a trestle on the sound track and farther down the hall an augmented orchestra was playing the 1812 Overture. Gretchen was rewinding the sequence she was working on and the dialogue was coming out in whistling, loud, incomprehensible gibberish.

“Holy man,” Rudolph said. “How can you stand it?”

“The sounds of honest labor,” Gretchen said. She finished rewinding and gave the spool to Ida. “Go home immediately,” she said to her. If you didn’t watch her, and if she didn’t have a meeting to go to, Ida would stay every night until ten or eleven o’clock, working. She dreaded leisure, Ida.

Rudolph didn’t say Happy Birthday when they went down in the elevator and out onto Broadway. Gretchen didn’t remind him. Rudolph carried the small valise Gretchen had packed in the morning for the weekend. It was still raining and there wasn’t a cab to be had, so they started walking in the direction of Park Avenue. It hadn’t been raining when she had come to work and she didn’t have an umbrella. She was soaked by the time they reached Sixth Avenue.

“This town,” Rudolph said, “needs ten thousand more taxis. It’s insane, what people will put up with to live in a city.”

“Energetic administrator,” Gretchen said. “Moderate liberal thinker, far-seeing town-pla

Rudolph laughed. “Oh, you read that article. What crap.” But she thought he sounded pleased.

They were on Fifty-second Street and the rain was coming down harder than ever. In front of Twenty-One he stopped her and said, “Let’s duck in here and have a drink. The doorman’ll get us a taxi later.”

Gretchen’s hair was lank with the rain and the backs of her stockings were splattered and she didn’t relish the idea of going into a place like Twenty-One looking bedraggled and wearing a Ban the Bomb button on her coat, but Rudolph was already pulling her to the door.

Inside, four or five different door guarders, hatcheck girls, managers, and head waiters said, “Good evening, Mr. Jordache,” and there was considerable handshaking. There was nothing much that Gretchen could do to repair the ruin of her hair and stockings, so she didn’t bother to go to the ladies’ room, but went into the bar with Rudolph. Because they weren’t having di

“This’ll destroy your reputation in this place,” Gretchen said. “Coming in with someone who looks the way I look tonight.”

“They’ve seen worse,” Rudolph said. “Much worse.”

“Thanks, brother.”

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Rudolph said. “Actually, you’re beautiful.”

She didn’t feel beautiful. She felt wet and shabby and old and tired and lonely and wounded. “This is my night for self-pity,” she said. “Pay no heed.”

“How’s Jean?” Gretchen asked. Jean had had a miscarriage with her second child and had taken it hard and the times Gretchen had seen her she had seemed remote and subdued, dropping suddenly out of conversations or getting up in the middle of a sentence and walking off into another room. She had quit her photography and when Gretchen had asked her once when she was going back to it she had merely shaken her head.

“Jean?” Rudolph said shortly. “She’s improving.”

A barman came up and Rudolph ordered a Scotch and Gretchen a martini.

Rudolph lifted his glass to her. “Happy birthday,” he said.

He had remembered. “Don’t be nice to me,” she said, “or I’ll cry.”

He took an oblong jeweler’s box from his pocket and put it on the bar in front of her. “Try it on for size,” he said.

She opened the box, which had Cartier inscribed on it. Inside was a beautiful gold watch. She took off the heavy steel watch she was wearing and clipped on the slim gold band. Time, jeweled and fleeing, exquisitely. The day’s one gift. She kissed Rudolph’s cheek, managed not to cry. I must make myself think better of him, she thought. She ordered another martini.

“What other loot did you get today?” Rudolph asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did Billy call?” He said it too casually.

“No.”

“I ran into him two days ago on the campus and reminded him,” Rudolph said.

“He’s awfully busy,” Gretchen said defensively.

“Maybe he resented my telling him about it and suggesting he call you,” Rudolph said. “He’s not too fond of his Uncle Rudolph.”

“He’s not too fond of anybody,” Gretchen said.

Billy had matriculated at Whitby because when he finished high school in California he said he wanted to go East to college. Gretchen had hoped he would go to UCLA or the University of Southern California, so that he could still live at home, but Billy had made it clear that he didn’t want to live at home any more. Although he was very intelligent, he didn’t work, and his marks weren’t good enough to get him into any of the prestige schools in the East. Gretchen had asked Rudolph to use his influence to have him accepted at Whitby. Billy’s letters were rare—sometimes she wouldn’t hear from him for two months at a time. And when they did come they were short and consisted mostly of lists of courses he was taking and projects for the summer holidays, always in the East. She had been working more than a month now in New York, just a few hours away from Whitby, but he hadn’t come down once. Until this weekend she had been too proud to go up to see him but she finally couldn’t bear it any longer.

“What is it with that kid?” Rudolph said.

“He’s making me suffer,” Gretchen said.

“What for?”

“For Evans. I tried to be as discreet as possible—Evans never stayed overnight at the house and I always came home to sleep, myself, and I never went on weekends with him, but, of course, Billy caught on right away and the freeze was on. Maybe women ought to have fits of melancholy when they have babies, not when they lose them.”

“He’ll get over it,” Rudolph said. “It’s a kid’s jealousy. That’s all.”

“I hope so. He despises Evans. He calls him a phoney.”

“Is he?”

Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t measure up to Colin, but then, neither did I.”

“Don’t run yourself down,” Rudolph said gently.

“What better occupation could a lady find on her fortieth birthday?”

“You look thirty,” Rudolph said. “A beautiful, desirable thirty.”

“Dear brother.”

“Is Evans going to marry you?”

“In Hollywood,” Gretchen said, “successful directors of thirty-two don’t marry widows of forty, unless they’re famous or rich or both. And I’m neither.”

“Does he love you?”

“Who knows?”

“Do you love him?”

“Same answer. Who knows? I like to sleep with him, I like to work for him, I like to be attached to him. He fulfills me. I have to be attached to a man and feel useful to him and somehow Evans turned out to be the lucky man. If he asked me to marry him, I’d do it like a shot. But he won’t ask.”

“Happy days,” Rudolph said thoughtfully. “Finish your drink. We’d better be getting on. Jean’s waiting for us in the apartment.”