The Stark Truth Read online

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. I tried to picture her, where she was sitting, what she was wearing. I couldn’t.

  “Tommy,” she said then, her voice taut, “I think you’d better say exactly what’s on your mind. Unless you’ve gotten so paranoid you think your home phone’s being tapped.”

  No, I hadn’t gotten that paranoid.

  “I’ll tell you what’s on my mind. Information. Insider’s information, of the kind that’s now illegal, in case you haven’t heard. Your timing was too good, Kitty. Nobody could have played it so right without knowing exactly what was going to happen ahead of time.”

  “So?”

  “So we live in the age of the computer, Kitty. The Manderling fiasco—what happened to the stock—is going to be scrutinized within an inch of its life. They’re going to run every transaction through their computers, every buy, every sell, and when it took place, and yours are going to pop with little red flags attached.”

  “Well,” she said angrily, “I don’t see what makes you so uptight about it. You’ve made me cover you every which way. I bet you’ve already checked your files to make sure.”

  In fact I already had, but I didn’t like being reminded of it.

  “I didn’t think we were talking about you or me, Kitty,” I blurted out. “I thought we were talking about us.”

  Even as I said it, I knew I was making a mistake. Perhaps I’d wanted to antagonize her? If so, I succeeded beyond my expectations.

  I’d never heard such a tearful and shrewish outburst from Kitty, not even at her angriest. How could I do this to her? How could I call her in the middle of the night (it wasn’t the middle of the night, and who had called whom?) and lay these threats and accusations on her? I was supposed to be her lover, wasn’t I? Here she was, on the verge of the worst weekend of her year, and where was the support she needed from me? The support she had every right to expect? How was she supposed to get through the weekend when the only one she could turn to in the world accused her of being a criminal? She couldn’t believe it! Maybe it was a good thing she was finding out now who I was, sooner rather than later. And maybe it was high time somebody did use me, if I, Mr. Stark Thompson III, wouldn’t use myself!

  This last suggests that the outburst was far from one-way, but I remember little of my side of it. I did accuse her of using me. More than anything, though, I remember the sensation of blood rushing to my head, of a pounding congestion and the feeling of something beyond anger—is rage the right word?—which Kitty, and only Kitty, was capable of arousing in me. I also accused her of using her brother. Goldmark would have been a logical source for her, wasn’t he a senior managing director at Braxton’s? I remember her laughing me down at that. Did I really think she was that stupid? Did I really think Teddy was the only man she knew who knew something about the market? Which led me to further charges (“What does that mean?”) and her to further ripostes (“Exactly what you think it means!”). And something about the Spodes because yes, of course she knew the Spodes, she’d done the bar mitzvah reception for Buddy’s older son.

  But beyond that? Only the sense of charge and countercharge, ugliness against ugliness, in a futile and exhausting escalation. A finally unequal escalation, I should add, for there was no way—ever—I could outrecriminate Kitty.

  And Ted Goldmark’s warning, yes. I put it down now because I remember it ringing in my head that awful night.

  “Stay away from her, Tommy” was what he’d said that day in the office, by our elevators. “She eats guys like you alive.”

  And yes, I’d thought at other times, yes, Kitty’s brother, that’s exactly what I want her to do. But this night, recoiling before her on the phone, I knew what he’d meant.

  As for Kitty and me, I do recall, quite clearly, the last words of our exchange.

  Here were Kitty’s, a bitter conclusion:

  “I’m going to hang up now. I’m going to take a sleeping pill—you know how I hate doing that, but what choice do you leave me—and try, if I can, to forget that this conversation ever took place.”

  And mine:

  “Good night, Kitten.”

  But I doubt she heard mine, for the phone had gone dead in my ear.

  8

  Who slept?

  I can’t speak for Kitty. I myself managed no more than two fitful hours. I dreamed the recurrent dream again, the one that started with my son Starkie whimpering and ended up with me waking in a sweat. But then I was up, sitting in the darkness, pacing the confines of my apartment.

  I had lived there almost five years. I hadn’t intended to. When I’d moved out on Susan and the children, I’d taken it because it was there, furnished, available. Two and a half rooms, in real estate hyperbole, it was really one, half of a floor-through of an old Village brownstone. An alcove kitchen, another larger alcove where—my one major investment—I’d replaced the incumbent bed with a fold-out couch. Good light from windows overlooking the backyard, a (precariously) working fireplace with bookshelves on either side, an old-fashioned but still functioning bathroom with an ineradicable rust stain near the tub drain.

  Home.

  That I’d stayed reflected less on my inertia than on my limited disposable income, plus the fact that, since it was in the Village, I could get away with it. People I knew thought it bohemian, a post-divorce change in lifestyle reflecting eccentricity, perhaps, but not poverty. (I knew full well, though, what Kitty would have said, and it was no accident that our lovemaking had invariably taken place in her boudoir, never in mine.)

  I heard my old French clock, one of the few treasures I’d rescued from my marriage, strike its approximation of three. And four, five, six, each hour like a day marked on the wall by the prisoner in his cell, for I had thirty-six such hours confronting me, an interminable sentence. I was due in the morning to collect my children for a visit to their grandmother—no subterfuge this time—and Kitty had her stupid wedding, her asinine brunch.

  Or, the unthinkable thought: Was it really over between us?

  But how could that be?

  We’d had a fight, that was all, wasn’t it? And hadn’t we had others?

  But always before we’d been face to face, body to body, able to sublimate our anger in sex.

  I’ll try, if I can, to forget that this conversation ever took place.

  God damn her for saying that!

  I thought of going in search of her, even then, the middle of the night. I had no idea which hotel she was in, but how many could there be in Stamford? I’d go from one to the other, room by room, I’d wake up the town till I found her! (Was it just as well I didn’t? Or too bad I didn’t?) Instead, I sweated in the overheated building, my windows open to the night air of early spring, while I waited for Saturday morning and my children.

  At dawn I showered, shaved, dressed, packed, and picked up my old Dodge Aries from the garage in the West Village. There was little traffic on the parkway and I pulled into the driveway a bit before nine.

  My old house sat on a little over an acre, with tall trees and a sward of lawn that rolled down to the edge of some communal woods. Its sturdy New England wood frame had been repainted the year before (my expense), forest green shutters and trim against a white facade. Strange to say it seemed foreign to me, even smelled foreign, this house where I’d lived and which still sheltered my once-wife and still-children, Mary Laura and Starkie, aged twelve and nine.

  Susan met me at the door, unconsciously barring my way.

  “Gee, you’re early,” she said. “I mean, what happened, did you get a new car?” Then, apparently noticing the Aries behind me: “What’s the matter, no playmate last night? You must be slipping, Tommy.”

  She grinned at me, revealing the space between her upper front teeth (which, so help me, I had once thought sexy). I said something to the effect that it was a beautiful day and that I’d wanted to beat the traffic.

  “Well,” she said, “as you can see, I’ve taken up jogging. Come on, get rid of
your long face. I mean, the kids are still having breakfast, I’ll make us some coffee. There’s something I want to talk to you about anyway.”

  And here it comes, I thought, following her in.

  Susan—I’m probably the only person she knew who was never able to call her Sukie—was tall, with straight light brown hair which she wore short, blue eyes, regular features in a long and square-jawed countenance. Why I’d once considered her beautiful I’ve no idea, but she belonged to that New England type that tends to age well, where the eyeglasses in their colorless frames seem to belong and the figure, always slim, knows no sag. She was decked out in a maroon sweat suit, with white towel wrapped around her neck and white Reeboks on her feet.

  Mary Laura and Starkie were perched on stools in the breakfast corner, their backs to the counter, cereal bowls in their laps, watching Saturday morning TV. Mouths full, they waved to me as I entered the kitchen. I’d have thought they were a little old for cartoons, Mary Laura at least. Their mother and I, meanwhile, made small talk around the kitchen table, that worn, massive, beautiful oak piece which had come with the house and the sight of which invariably filled me with resentment.

  Her coffee, as always, was too weak, and the same could be said for our conversation, except for one exchange. We’d long since been reduced to talking about the children, which, ninety-five percent of the time, meant talking about money, which, ninety-five percent of the time, ended in recriminations. But not this Saturday morning, when her mood was almost gay.

  “I hear you’ve been seeing Helen,” Susan said.

  “Helen who?”

  “Is there more than one, Tommy? I’m talking about Helen Charles.”

  There it was, like that, my unnamed companion from that weekend in Connecticut. I glanced toward the children, well within earshot, but they didn’t seem to be listening.

  “What have you heard?” I said.

  “Just that. I mean, that you’ve been seeing her. I don’t know her myself. I mean, I know her of course. Is it serious?”

  “No.”

  “Same old Tommy,” she said, shaking her head and smiling with that condescension she’d learned to affect as, I suppose, a defense against my infidelities.

  It irritated me—not her superciliousness, which I was used to, but the fact that the story was around. Buck Charles was my colleague and, more or less, my friend. I hadn’t seen fit to tell him of my tepid dalliance with his estranged wife. As a rule, men didn’t talk about such matters. Women apparently did.

  “Do you think there’s a chance she and Bucky will get back together again?” Susan asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” I said. In fact, knowing Buck, I doubted it. He was enjoying his freedom too much.

  “It’s so hard,” Susan went on. “I mean, it’s so hard to build the trust back after all that’s gone on. And what’s a relationship without trust? But I think Helen would like to try.”

  Was she telling me all this to make me feel bad? I wondered. I asked if I was supposed to carry a message back to Buck. Of course not, she said. But she went on about the Charleses anyway, in that same soap opera vein, and I felt the unmistakable urge to tell her about another relationship I knew of, one involving a woman she didn’t know but who, even as she rattled on, was no more than fifteen minutes away. Because as I stood in that kitchen, somehow repelled by its very odors, Kitten rose up in my mind, in full fume, as it were, and the horrible irony of the moment, as of that whole endless weekend, was that in the midst of their chitchat—hers, my mother’s later, the children’s throughout—there was no way I could banish Kitty for very long.

  I didn’t, needless to say—I mean, tell Susan (to use her abominable syntax). Instead I gathered up the children, and off we went to grandmother’s house, the three of us abreast in the front seat, Starkie in the middle.

  I’d been accused—what noncustodial father hasn’t?—of being neglectful of my children. All in all, the charge seemed fair enough. In part it was because I had no good place to take them. There was no room for the three of us in my apartment, and where spend the night? In some anonymous motel? On occasion I took them out for the day, and we’d have lunch and go to a movie or, in summer, to the beach, and then sometimes out to dinner. Once each winter we’d go skiing. Twice a year I took them over to their grandmother’s. The truth was, though, that we never had a great deal to say to each other. The further truth was that the children, Starkie particularly, still harbored the ridiculous fantasy that somehow, someday, their mother and I would get back together. Viz. (in the car, driving west through the beautiful rolling back roads into New York State but away, I kept thinking, from Kitty):

  “Do you like Helen Charles?” This from Mary Laura. I guessed that she’d overheard after all.

  “Helen?” I said. “Yes, I do. She’s a nice person.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “Well, how much do you like her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know her all that well. I’d say she was a nice person.”

  “How nice?”

  “Hey,” I said, “what is this? Some kind of inquisition?”

  “Well, you’re going out with her, aren’t you?”

  “No. Actually I have gone out with her. But not now.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence.

  Then Starkie: “Do you like her better than Mom?”

  Mary Laura saved me the trouble of answering. She jumped all over her brother for asking such stupid questions.

  Silence.

  Then Starkie again: “But you’re not going to marry her, are you, Dad?”

  A huge sigh from his sister.

  “No, Starkie, I’m not,” I said.

  But there was a flip side to it, at least from their point of view.

  “Did Mom tell you?” Mary Laura said a few miles later. “We’re not supposed to be back early tomorrow.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she said she doesn’t want you to bring us back till late afternoon at the earliest.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “Yes.” Then, while I did my slow burn: “She has a date.”

  Mary Laura’s tone was scornful. Maybe she was jealous, or fearful, or whatever it is daughters are in such situations. Or thought I’d be jealous, for all I know. What drove me up the wall, though, was that Susan should decide arbitrarily when I’d be permitted to bring the children back. As if I had nothing better to do. Presumably this was what she’d wanted to talk to me about, not Helen and Buck Charles. Presumably, in her inimitable way, she’d “forgotten” and had left it to her daughter to deliver the message.

  As soon as we got to my mother’s, I was on the phone to her. I endured her I-have-the-right-to-my-own-life peroration, punctuated by tears, until finally we reached a compromise. I could bring Mary Laura and Starkie home at three on Sunday. If she wasn’t there, they could fend for themselves.

  Why do I torment myself, though, with the details of that dreary and irrelevant weekend? My mother, even in my earliest recollections of her, had never harbored any particular liking for me. I was simply one of her children. She had remarried again, this, time a career Navy officer, now retired, a sawed-off, crew-cut, blazer-clad man, whom I found offensively vulgar. For instance, that evening after dinner, by the gaslit fireplace, he said to me:

  “Y’ought to get married again yourself, Tom—only to somebody with money this time, eh? That’s what I did, and look what it’s got me!”

  At this he reached out and gave my mother, who was standing next to him, a swat on the rump, something less than a slap but more than a pat. I watched her push his hand away, feigning disapproval but laughing at the same time.

  I suppose, though, that there’s no accounting for people’s tastes. My mother was a tall, handsome, and still elegant woman, and one of very considerable independent means. She and her commodore lived well enough, in a rather sterile ranch house on a bluff ove
rlooking the Hudson, with a couple over the garage to take care of their needs (I don’t recall my mother ever cooking anything more complicated than a soft-boiled egg), an apartment in Palm Beach for the winter, trips to Europe on the QE 2. And he, her third husband, made no bones about the fact that she was paying for it all. Indeed, he seemed to boast of it, as of the fact that she’d once been married to my father. “A great figure in his day,” he invariably chimed in when my mother—equally invariably—asked after the Senator.

  With effort I could summon a few other details of that visit. (My older sister was there for dinner, and her husband.) But what we ate, or did, or talked about, or where the children were, or why finally I was there to begin with, are questions I can’t answer.

  Someone must have noticed my distractedness. “What’s wrong, Tommy?” I remember being asked, and replying, “Why, nothing. Nothing at all.” Nothing indeed except that I lusted after Kitty haplessly, hopelessly, with a schoolboy’s ardor and, at the same time, a schoolboy’s rage. For I knew she had used me, exploited me, and the two visions of her, as the object of my passion and the exploiter of my passion, drove me from ardor to anger, anger to ardor, until by Sunday morning, after a fitful, tossing night, these had themselves given way, like the thesis and the antithesis of the old Hegelian equation, to a new and pervasive emotion.

  Yes, she had used me, and yes, I had been forewarned: She eats guys like you alive. But didn’t the two together suggest that, having already gotten what she wanted out of me (the million dollars’ profit in the Sprague estate), she might already be moving on?

  How did I know she’d been alone when she called Friday night? How, for that matter, did I know she’d been in a hotel in Stamford? Or at a wedding in Connecticut on Saturday? Or at a brunch in the city today?

  I didn’t know any of these things! Yet I had to know. Yet I dreaded knowing.

  Dread. Not jealousy, dread. With lassitude and helplessness for companions. In other words, by Sunday I’d managed to convince myself, however irrationally, that I’d already lost her. And rather than rushing to confirm this awful fate, I found myself contriving ways to postpone it.