The Great and the Good Page 13

  ‘It’s awful, I’m late now … Arturo meu, it was wonderful to see you again. You really haven’t changed a bit … yes, I promise you, you’re just the same; you don’t look your age at all! It’s so nice just to see each other once every six months. We don’t have time to get tired of each other. See you in six months’ time … you promise, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll be in New York in July and August.’

  ‘Call me then. But don’t say anything to Getulio. You know how odd he is. You never know how he’ll react. He’s the impulsive one. I think he’s slightly afraid of you. He told me that one day you nearly knocked him out. You know that I would never have forgiven you if you had.’

  ‘Give me your phone number.’

  ‘It’s 567 … it’s not important, I can never remember it. I live with friends on Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth knows exactly where it is. She’ll tell you.’

  She held his face in both hands and placed a rapid kiss on his lips. When she had gone through the door she turned round, her hand already on the banister.

  ‘I felt very bad when Concannon died. Getulio didn’t want me to go to the funeral.’

  ‘He didn’t go either.’

  ‘Getulio didn’t like Concannon. It would take too long to explain. Actually he doesn’t like anyone. Yes … me … maybe. Poor little me. Always crying. And ridiculous. Arturo, don’t ever forget me.’

  They heard her going down the steep staircase. Elizabeth walked through to the room that overlooked the street.

  ‘Arthur, come see!’

  In the street a white Rolls-Royce was parked, with a black uniformed chauffeur standing next to it. He opened the door for Augusta and she disappeared into the car without looking up.

  ‘Ye gods!’ Elizabeth sighed. ‘Have we lost her already?’

  Two months later the answer came: yes, and no.

  After passing his exams without mishap, Arthur returned to New York and started work with Jansen and Brustein. For the first few nights Elizabeth looked after him. They agreed that they would not impose on each other, especially since she was starting rehearsals of a new play, about which she remained secretive. In Rector Street, not far from her, he rented a small room on the top floor, which was just about comfortable: bed, wardrobe, table and chair, shower, old engravings of Austrian monarchs on the wall. Captain Morgan’s trunk was Arthur’s only addition. His landlady, Mrs Paley, who was Hungarian, had known better days and claimed once to have been a star in the corps de ballet at Budapest, before the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She spoke French with an attractive guttural accent and from time to time wielded a vacuum cleaner with the air of a princess somewhat down on her luck but with wonderful pluck in the face of adversity. The spire of Trinity Church loomed outside the window. Jansen and Brustein’s offices were round the corner. Arthur arrived at eight o’clock and left at five, when, after a frenetic day, the district relapsed rapidly into somnolence and tons of paper churned out by telex machines littered the roadway and pavements of Wall Street outside the Stock Exchange. Mr Jansen was rarely seen, remaining in his office and receiving visitors as sparingly as possible. He aped the City of London brokers: pinstriped double-breasted suits, blue shirts with starched white collars, plain ties. His associate Brustein, who was permanently scruffy, in corkscrewed trousers, a crumpled jacket with shoulders snowy with dandruff, and his tie askew, brimmed with vitality: he always had a joke on his lips, called the employees by their first names, shook hands ten times over, and possessed dazzlingly fast judgement and a decisiveness of mind that had made the firm’s fortune. Rumour had it that he had been a codebreaking genius during the war. His friendship with Porter dated from that time.

  The employees were squashed into a round room from where the view swooped down an enfilade of skyscrapers towards the yellow waters of the Hudson. A dozen of them worked in the glass-walled room, which sweltered at the slightest ray of sunshine. It did not take Arthur long to become aware of their hostility. He had not climbed the ladder, and senior figures, who were theoretically loathed, protected him. To begin with, he found it hard to concentrate in the clamour of conversations, the shrill nagging of the telephone and the continual interruptions, and then, little by little, he managed to follow Mr Brustein’s advice and keep himself apart.

  ‘They’re idiots. Ignore them; they’ll respect you for it. Wall Street’s a jungle. You don’t defend yourself here: it’s attack, attack every time, as if your life depended on it.’

  ‘But I’m only here temporarily.’

  ‘Don’t forget that we might offer you a permanent post, then one of them will have to go. Whoever gets the short straw. Be especially careful of one of the two women, Jenny. She thinks the whole world’s against her. Twenty-five, and already divorced twice. Sounds like fun, doesn’t she? The other one, Gertrude, wears a hearing aid under that great wig of red hair. She’s deaf, and so naturally she hears very well. She’s got a great future.’

  The employees took it in turns to break for lunch, but some stayed in the office, munching sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola over their typewriters and calculators, making do with taking the phone off the hook.

  ‘They’re scared to death that someone’ll take their place,’ Brustein said, chuckling. ‘Come and have a bite with me. They won’t be able to sleep for six months when they see us leave together.’

  At a table in a little bistro pretending to be a Parisian bar, Brustein opened up a bit more.

  ‘Allan Porter’s wrong to make himself so noticeable. Someone’ll take a shot at him one day. He was much more effective when he stayed in the shadows. But we’re all like that! One day we itch to stick our nose outside. At the same time we never quite shake off our old loyalties. But don’t get sucked into his set-up, except with the greatest of caution: once you’re in, it’s hard to get out again … Enough said. Did you know that I have a very great pretension? Which is that I am the greatest connoisseur of Cézanne in the whole United States. You like Cézanne?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m afraid I may need to brush up on him if I’m going to have to talk about him to a fanatic.’

  ‘Okay, then let’s meet up again in two weeks and I’ll blitz you. Start getting your answers ready.’

  The employees who did not stay in the office would go down to the shade in Battery Park and sit on the benches and watch the estuary and sky above it, filled with a myriad seagulls that chased the cargo ships, liners and tugs in and out of the docks. Arthur became fond of Battery Park. In the morning he was up at six to run there: half an hour’s jogging helped him put up with a day sitting at his desk.

  In the evenings he would sometimes look for a cinema or a theatre, but most often he would stay in his room, getting ready for the second year at Beresford. Elizabeth surprised him by beginning to come to his room after midnight. The rehearsals were exhausting her. Having fired Piotr and Leigh, who did not understand ‘anything about anything’, she had taken on Jerry, a young black student at New York College who was ‘terribly handsome’. She would undress in front of Arthur, as freely as she did everything else in her life. It was a joy to see her take off her clothes, so close to perfection in her nakedness that you forgot to desire her. Yet contrary to appearances, she remained extremely shy at the most intense moment. Coming back from his jogging in Battery Park and finding her still asleep, he would make her tea with fresh croissants. In the sweltering city, immobilised by the summer’s heat, the pleasure that they shared with each other was Arthur’s only link with real life. To the rest of it he was indifferent. This world would never be his world. But where was his world? He started to write to his mother more regularly, trying to repay her by his attentions; he urged her to see a cardiologist after she told him she was suffering from dizzy spells. He would come in September. She lived for his return and wrote to him that ‘you’ll never know how much your success at your exams has delighted the family. We’re so pleased about your lovely job with the stockbroker.’ If only she could have seen where
he was working, the cramped conditions, the noise, the runners constantly coming in and out dripping with sweat, and at the end of the day the waste-paper baskets overflowing with printouts, empty mineral-water bottles, out-of-date tables, scrap paper … She would not have added, ‘That’s it, my dear little one … to me, even if you become an important financier, you’ll always be my “little boy”, playing with the great and the good.’ What sort of illusions must have been going through her head? ‘You don’t talk about your Brazilian friends any more. I suppose they’re with their family for the holidays. And what about that pretty American? You don’t say anything about her either. I know how much you like secrets. Is there something going on that you’re not telling me? You know you can’t hide anything from me. I can read between the lines!’

  As the two months went on, the gulf grew wider, filled with shame and heartache. Work helped take him out of himself; his nights with Elizabeth brought him a too-fragile peace that vanished into thin air when she rolled away from him and drifted into sleep, as stiff as a statue. A stranger, a passer-by. If he took her hand for reassurance she would pull it away and desert him until New York shook itself awake and bayed again. The murmur would grow and amplify, and then crash like a torrent over lower Broadway. Jogging in Battery Park, he imagined an ideal conversation with Elizabeth. ‘Carrying on being as cautious as we are, keeping our two existences properly separate so that they never collide with each other, you know that what we have could last a lifetime … I hear you say, “How awful!” but think, we never lie to one another, and how many people can say that? Anyway … I’m just theorising … Have you noticed, despite the fact that you don’t pay any attention to such things, how we never use the word “aimer”? It never passes your lips. Has it ever? It doesn’t spring to mine either, and even if it did when I wasn’t looking, you’d start laughing and I’d soon stop. It’s easier in English: “I like you” is immeasurably more attractive than the banal and threadbare “I love you”. Italian has a marvellously appropriate phrase you won’t find in any other language: “Ti voglio bene”. I wish you well. You wish me well. We wish each other well. It’s a jewel of civilised behaviour; there’s a mountain of tenderness behind those words: respect, generosity, friendship. I come back; I don’t forget the croissants. You drink your tea sitting up in bed. You have beautiful breasts which will never look tired, by the way. Then you get dressed and vanish. You possess the only key to our meetings. You won’t entrust it to me, and you won’t do anything to help me see Augusta again.’

  There he was mistaken. Brushing her hair one morning, she said, ‘Before I forget! Getulio wants to have lunch with you on Saturday.’

  ‘To tell me Augusta’s getting married?’

  ‘No. She’ll be there. Along with a Brazilian friend who’d like to meet you.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘Arthur, do try to like yourself a bit. A tiny bit.’

  ‘I can’t see what interest I might offer to someone from the milieu that Getulio frequents.’

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘Of course I’ll go, just to see what sort of trap Getulio wants to lure me into.’

  What do we retain of that impalpable, possibly non-existent thing we call the past? Hardly more than a few words that we’re no longer sure were really said or whether we simply invented them in the naive desire to justify ourselves, to believe we really existed on that day, at that crucial time, whose memory haunts us. There are only images – sometimes linked together like a film in which a censor has cut the best or worst scenes, stripping the sequence of all logic – images that surface and allow us to reconstruct an episode from the past that we are convinced was a fatal crossroads. That was where everything changed. A step to the left instead of a step to the right, a minute later, and an entire life tumbles into the unknown.

  Why does Arthur recall, of that July Saturday morning in New York, firstly his long walk through the city from Rector Street to 72nd Street, along the furnace of Broadway and then Fifth Avenue, the burning pavements, the traffic lights that break his rhythm, the lost couple who ask for directions in a language he thinks might be Lithuanian, the scraggy yellow dog that follows him from the Stock Exchange and leaves him at Times Square, a girl on roller skates in blue shorts and singlet spinning like a top around Rockefeller Plaza, pretty, bursting with health, her skin like burnt bread, her dyed hair tied back in a ponytail? After this there is a gap, as if magically Arthur is transported by what the Italians call “ministero angelico” from the roller skater on Rockefeller Plaza to the glass door of the Brasilia, which a doorman holds open so that he can receive the full force of Augusta’s anxious look, sitting at a table facing the door, opposite two men whose backs are to him. One has a circle of thinning hair, like a monk’s tonsure: Getulio on the way to being bald. The other, in contrast, has hair that curls over his collar and, crow-black, is plastered to his temples by a lavish application of brilliantine: the Brazilian wheeler-dealer who is the reason for this meeting. These two disparate hairstyles are accessories in the film which has already started and whose beginning will be revealed little by little. The soundtrack is missing. On the screen there is now only Augusta’s blue eyes in a succession of close-ups that enlarge to the point of eliminating both the restaurant’s splashy decor and the waitress in a costume of Bahia who, with a sweetness devoid of irony, takes Arthur’s hand to guide him through the maze of occupied tables to that of Getulio, who gets to his feet and, after Augusta has offered her cheek to the Frenchman, introduces Luis de Souza and Arthur Morgan to each other. The latter still has no idea of what is going to be asked of him, he only knows that he is running a risk because of Augusta and her bare arms, her pretty dress of orange twilled silk that reveals her shoulders and her throat, the musicality of the Brazilian voices around him: the girl from Bahia, the maître d’hôtel, who is a Carioca, and the wine waiter from São Paolo. The soundtrack is plugged in: a light-hearted Brazilian song drifts through the room. Cocktails arrive, gin with passion fruit, and a bottle of cachaca is placed in an ice bucket in the middle of the table, to clean their palates between courses.

  The details are, as expected, tedious. In short, de Souza is seeking information that Arthur can supply from a file held at Jansen and Brustein’s, concerning a company traded by the two brokers. Arthur protests: he’s an intern, the twenty-fifth and smallest wheel, and he only sees the files he’s given.

  ‘Come on,’ Getulio said, ‘no false modesty. At a dinner last week at the Lewises’, Brustein was singing your praises.’

  ‘I bet he was.’

  Augusta’s leg is pressed against his. He is not the nothing he pretends to be; she is there at his side, facing the two schemers and Getulio’s lies. They pour him a glass of cachaca. It is firewater. Arthur tries to think about something else, about Elizabeth walking naked around his room and lifting her arms, showing her cool blond armpits as she brushes her short hair. He wonders if Luis de Souza is the man Getulio wants to sell his sister to. He wants to run out with her, smack the flashy de Souza, call Getulio the pimp he is, or kill the pair of them. He feels Augusta’s thigh against his. In Elizabeth’s apartment she had nestled against him. The mere memory of it makes him feel superior to these two men who think they can manipulate him.

  There is a jump cut then, a blank whose length he cannot work out. He is walking on Fifth Avenue with Augusta. Luis and Getulio have driven away in a cab. By leaving him alone with her, they think they are playing a decisive trump card, but perhaps this last card is one too many, like the extravagant tips de Souza dispensed to the restaurant’s junior staff. Suspicious and proud, Arthur will not let himself be lumped in with a restaurant’s minions. His hand squeezes Augusta’s bare upper arm. Suddenly she craves shops.

  ‘Don’t worry, Arturo meu! I shan’t buy anything. I’m a voyeur.’

  Mostly she wants to have fun catching the salesgirls off guard with falsely innocent questions. At Tiffany’s, in front of a showcase containing a ruby
necklace, she asks, ‘In your experience is it the husbands who buy this kind of jewellery, or the lovers?’

  In the lingerie department at Bloomingdale’s she questions a girl with shingled hair: ‘Don’t you have anything in pink and black? My husband prefers black, my lover pink. I can’t be expected to change three times a day.’

  In a bookshop: ‘I’m looking for the Kama Sutra in Braille. It’s not for me. I read it twice already, anyway. Did you read it?’

  The air conditioning in the shops makes the air in the street even more unbreathable. Augusta’s hand flies to her throat.

  ‘I am going to die, for sure. Wouldn’t that be better for everybody? For Getulio, who can’t make ends meet and spends every day dreaming up fabulous schemes that keep us off the street. For you too, darling, who say you love me.’

  ‘I’ve never said that to you.’

  ‘I can see it as clear as the nose on your face. Where do you live?’

  ‘Lower Manhattan.’

  ‘I want to see your apartment.’

  ‘It’s not an apartment, it’s just a room I rent from a Hungarian ex-ballerina.’

  ‘I want to visit your garret, then.’

  ‘It’s nothing like a garret and it’s just round the corner from Jansen and Brustein’s and not much further from Elizabeth’s.’

  A cab drives them to Rector Street. The black chauffeur smiles in his rear-view mirror when they speak French.

  ‘I’m Haitian … I like hearing French spoken. And even more when people say please and thank you to me.’

  The man’s hair is a frizzy black ball. He wears blue sunglasses. Arthur wonders why today he is noticing the hair of all the people he meets. On the landing they come face to face with Mrs Paley emerging from Arthur’s room with a duster and broom in her hands.