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“I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep,” she said.
He tied his shoelaces deliberately.
“Everybody leaves me,” she said, “every goddamn sonofabitch leaves me. I’ll do anything. Stay till six, until daylight, until five please, honey. I’ll suck you, please …” She was crying now.
Tears all night, the world of women, he thought coldly, as he stood up, buttoned his shirt and did up his tie. The sobs echoed behind him as he stood before the mirror. He saw that his hair was mussed, plastered with sweat. He went into the bathroom. Dozens of bottles of perfume, bath-oil, Alka-seltzer, sleeping pills. He combed his hair carefully, erasing the night.
She had stopped crying when he went back into the bedroom. She was sitting up straighter, watching him coldly, her eyes narrowed. She had finished her drink but was still holding her glass.
“Last chance,” she said harshly.
He put on his jacket.
“Good night,” he said.
She threw the glass at him. He refused to duck. The glass hit him a glancing blow on the forehead, then shattered against the mirror over the mantelpiece of the white marble fireplace.
“Little shit,” she said.
He went out of the room, crossed to the front hallway and opened the door. He stepped out through the doorway and closed the door silently behind him and rang for the elevator.
The elevator man was old, good only for short trips, late at night. He looked speculatively at Rudolph as they went down the whining shaft. Does he keep count of his passengers, Rudolph thought, does he make a neat record at dawn?
The elevator man opened the elevator door as they came to a halt. “You’re bleeding, young man,” he said. “Your head.”
“Thank you,” Rudolph said.
The elevator man said nothing as Rudolph crossed the hall and went out into the dark street. Once on the street and out of sight of those rheumy recording eyes, Rudolph took out his handkerchief and put it up to his forehead. The handkerchief came away bloody. There are wounds in all encounters. He walked, alone, his footsteps echoing on the pavement, toward the lights of Fifth Avenue. At the corner he looked up. The street sign read ‘63rd Street.’ He hesitated. The St. Moritz was on Fifty-ninth Street, along the Park. Room 923. A short stroll in the light morning air. Dabbing at his forehead again with his handkerchief he started toward the hotel.
He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got there. Ask for forgiveness, swear, “I will do anything you say,” confess, denounce, cleanse himself, cry love, reach out for a memory, forget lust, restore tenderness, sleep, forget …
The lobby was empty. The night clerk behind the desk looked at him briefly, incuriously, used to lone men late at night, wandering in from the sleeping city.
“Room 923,” he said into the house phone.
He heard the operator ringing the room. After ten rings he hung up. There was a clock in the lobby. 4:35. The last bars in the city had been closed for thirty-five minutes. He walked slowly out of the lobby. He had begun and ended the day alone. Just as well.
He hailed a cruising taxi and got in. That morning, he was going to start earning one hundred dollars a week. He could afford a taxi. He gave Gretchen’s address, but then as the taxi started south, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to see Gretchen and he certainly didn’t want to see Willie. They could send him his bag. “I’m sorry, driver,” he said, leaning forward, “I want Grand Central Station.”
Although he hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, he was wide-awake when he reported to work at nine o’clock in Duncan Calderwood’s office. He did not punch the time clock, although his card was in its slot. He was through punching clocks.
Chapter 3
1950
Thomas twirled the combination of the padlock and threw open his locker. For many months now, every locker had been equipped with a padlock and members were requested to leave their wallets at the office, where they were put into sealed envelopes and filed in the office safe. The decision had been pushed through by Brewster Reed, whose talismanic hundred-dollar bill had been lifted from his pocket the Saturday afternoon of the weekend Thomas had gone down to Port Philip. Dominic had been pleased to a
Thomas undressed and got into a clean sweatsuit and put on a pair of boxing shoes. He was taking over the five o’clock calisthenics class from Dominic and there were usually one or two members who asked him to spar a couple of rounds with them. He had learned from Dominic the trick of looking aggressive without inflicting any punishment whatever and he had learned enough of Dominic’s phrases to make the members believe he was teaching them how to fight.
He hadn’t touched the forty-nine hundred dollars in the safety deposit box in Port Philip and he still called young Sinclair sir when they met in the locker room.
He enjoyed the calisthenics classes. Unlike Dominic, who just called out the cadences, Thomas did all the exercises with the class, pushups, situps, bicycle riding, straddles, knee bending, touching the floor with the knees straight and the palms of the hand flat, and all the rest. It kept him feeling fit and at the same time it amused him to see all those dignified, self-important men sweating and panting. His voice, too, developed a tone of command that made him seem less boyish than before. For once, he began to wake up in the morning without the feeling that something bad, out of his control, was going to happen to him that day.
When Thomas went into the mat room after the calisthenics, Dominic and Greening were putting on the big gloves. Dominic had a cold and he had drunk too much the night before. His eyes were red and he was moving slowly. He looked shapeless and aging in his baggy sweatsuit and since his hair was mussed, his bald spot shone in the light from the big lamps of the room. Greening, who was tall for his weight, moved around impatiently, shuffling his boxing shoes against the mats with a dry, aggressive sound. His eyes seemed bleached in the strong light and his blond hair, crew-cut, almost platinum. He had been a captain in the Marines during the war and had won a big decoration. He was very handsome in a straight-nosed, hard-jawed, pink-cheeked way and if he hadn’t come from a family that was above such things, he probably could have done well as a hero in Western movies. In all of the time since he had told Dominic that he thought Thomas had stolen ten dollars from his locker, he had never addressed a word to Thomas and now, as Thomas came into the mat room to wait for one of the members who had made a date to spar with him, Greening didn’t even look Thomas’s way.
“Help me with these, kid,” Dominic said, extending his gloves. Thomas tied the laces. Dominic had already done Greening’s gloves.
Dominic looked up at the big clock over the mat room door to make sure that he wouldn’t inadvertently box more than two minutes without resting and put up his gloves and shuffled toward Greening, saying, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”
Greening came at him fast. He was a straight-up, conventional, schooled kind of fighter who made use of his longer reach to jab at Dominic’s head. His cold and his hangover made Dominic begin to breathe hard immediately. He tried to get inside the jab and put his head out of harm’s way under Greening’s chin while he punched away without much enthusiasm or power at Greening’s stomach. Suddenly, Greening stepped back and brought up his right in an all-out uppercut that caught Dominic flush on the mouth.