Iris gave him an extremely twisted smile. "No, thank you."
The governor raised thick grizzled brows, and reached down to pull the dog's ears. "Don't mention it. Enjoy the rest of your picnic." He stalked away.
When the jeep started to drive off through the palm trees, Iris flung her beer can after it.
"What's the matter with you?" Paperman said.
"All I ask," Iris said, "is that they don't act superior to us. Is that asking such a lot?"
With a cat's quick turn she knocked Paperman backward, and pinned his shoulders to the blanket. Her blond hair was in a tumble, her eyes shining. Paperman was delighted, flustered, and a bit embarrassed. He could still hear the squeaking and bumping of the jeep. Moreover many big drops were splattering him. It was certainly starting to rain.
"What's all this?"
"Just shut up." She kissed him long and hard, seemingly unaware of the rain, but it was falling hard, all at once, falling like a thick bath shower. She looked up at the clouds and laughed, rain running from her hair, her face, her shoulders. Nearby the charcoal embers were hissing and pouring white smoke. "No, no, this is Pitt Bay," she yelled at the sky. "Pitt Bay, stupid! It never rains in Pitt Bay!" She twined her arms and legs around Paperman and rolled over and over with him on the hot sand in the beating rain like a tomboy, almost the way Sanders had been rolling with the dog. Half a rainbow appeared, arching low in the east. "Come on, Norm, let's get on home. Picnic's over, and a damn good thing. Go back to New York, and don't return without your wife!"
Chapter three
The Sending
I
Henny leaned her head against the icy window glass, wondering whether Norman's plane could land in this weather. Clouds of big snow-flakes were tumbling by outside. A cold draft rattled through the paint-crusted window, a pleasant little puff of relief from the blasting steam heat. Nothing in this building fitted any more or was decently kept up. The heating system was shot. From October to May you froze or you roasted. But at rent-controlled prices, in mid-town Manhattan, the apartment was a luxury, the envy of their friends. On their income, with Norman's habits of casual spending-he lived, as he liked to say, "the cashmere existence"-they couldn't move without going to the low-ceilinged cubicles of the new apartment houses, where you could hear every toilet flush, every wife nag her husband, four floors above and below you; or else out to the suburbs, and that was less thinkable for Norman than the Caribbean.
Here was Norman's room, almost twenty feet square, ten feet high, facing south, bright enough when the sun shone, a little gloomy maybe in its old brown paint, but with all the space in the world for his big steel desk, his electric typewriter, his large library, the new red leather couch for his prescribed naps; all the wall area he needed for signed pictures of celebrity clients and framed bright posters of plays he had publicized; all the office furniture he had accumulated through two decades, including the old brown armchair and ottoman set which came from his one-room bachelor apartment, and which she had reupholstered three times. He wouldn't part with it, because she herself had bought it for him during that long depression time when they had been lovers instead of husband and wife; lovers, the rationale had been, because Henny could live more cheaply with her parents; lovers also, to be truthful, because Norman had liked it that way and she had had some slight difficulty getting him to propose.
("You're going to marry me, you son of a bitch, do you hear!" with hot tears all over her face. "I'm tired of this, five years of screwing around is plenty. We're going to get married in two weeks or you're never going to see me again, I swear to God!") Twenty years! With all the agony, those had been the days! Henny settled into the old armchair, and put her feet up on the ottoman to sentimentalize; whereupon the telephone rang and she jumped for it.
"Henny? Lester. We just landed blind. I've never been so scared in my goddamn life."
"Hello, Lester. Where's Norman?"
"He stayed over. Henny, my mouth's full of blood. Why the hell do those broads give out gum when you come down? I damn near chewed off my own tongue. I think I swallowed a piece of it, Henny. This wasn't gum. It was meat."
"Why didn't Norman come home? I was expecting him. I have a big dinner-"
"He's phoning you tonight. A proposition like this takes a little looking into."
"Jesus, I was hoping this trip would cure him, Lester."
"Baby, look out of your window. Who needs this? I think Norman may be smarter than all of us. That island is paradise, and that hotel's a find. With what I told him to do with it, you're good for twenty-five, thirty thousand a year there, living easy in a goddamn garden of Eden. Hey, there come my bags. So long. I got a closing at four o'clock in the Chrysler building, and I'm boiled as an owl."
"You sound it."
"They give away booze free in first class, Henny. You got to drink up that difference in the fare, or Pan Am's buggered you. Bye-"
"Lester, Lester! Didn't he say anything about coming home?"
"He said tomorrow, maybe. Bye, small fry."
Henny sat dismayed, her hand still on the telephone, staring out at the whirling snow. This was Norman, all over. Yesterday, their twentieth anniversary day, he had spent on this dizzy excursion to the Caribbean. She had a turkey ready for the oven, champagne in the icebox; a belated celebration was better than none. Evidently, it was going to be even more belated.
2
The blast of sleety air shocked Paperman when he arrived next evening. The plane was three hours late. It was dark in the vast flat plain of Idlewild crisscrossed with miles of runway lights; dark, freezing, and windy. He encountered thick slush underfoot until he entered the terminal; then a long long trudge amid hurrying crowds, through lamplit corridors leprous with advertising, to the baggage claim counter; then a long wait in stifling steam heat through which frigid drafts lanced, chilling his neck and ankles, in a continuous clamor of loudspeakers; then a long shoving contest over the bags as they arrived, then a long search for a porter, as he wasn't supposed to carry luggage; then a long stand in wind and needling sleet amid a horde of angry combative people all jousting for the rare taxicabs that appeared; then a scary ride on an icy parkway, in a crawling river of skidding, headlight-blazing cars, with a cab driver who smelled unclean, smoked a foul cigar, and roared obscenities randomly all the way to Manhattan. Norman Paperman was home.
She murmured, "The tropics agree with you, obviously."
"Fountain of youth," he said. "Get those elbows out of the way."
"Oh, break it up, Norm." Henny pulled free, laughing. "I've got to get back to that turkey. What a marvelous color you've got! How come you're not exhausted?"
"I slept on the plane, and-I don't know, Henny, I feel as though I've just been born, that's all. Where's Hazel?"
"I guess with the Sending. She's bringing him to dinner."
"Oh no. No." He went back to his bags, bent and tottering. "Not the Sending. Not tonight. I feel old again."
"It was her idea. No Sheldon, no Hazel. What could I do?"
"Nothing, I guess," Norman groaned. "That's bad, though, isn't it? She never brought him to dinner before."
"It's not good," Henny said.
"Well, to hell with it," said Norman, opening his Mark Cross calfskin suitcase. "To hell with it. Let us be gay, at all costs. Here's a trivial souvenir of the tropics for you. Happy anniversary."
She unwrapped the gold paper in a flutter. "What is it? I should have bought you something, I guess, but-Norman." Henny was looking at an antique bracelet of Florentine silver and small diamonds nestled on purple velvet. Her voice became shaky and low. "You take this right back to the man who sold it to you."
"It's all right, isn't it?" He was removing his tie at a mirror. "It'll go with some of your things."
"It'll go with anything." She was screwing up her face in a characteristic way. Henny had a round pretty face with a small nose and a fairly full chin, and when she did this to her face she rather resembled a pug dog. "Norman, where ever did you find this? We can't afford it."
"Sure we can. There it is."
On the whole Norman thought it as well not to mention that Iris Tramm had guided him to the shop of the homosexual Turk on Prince of Wales Street; had vetoed several gewgaws which the mincing dealer had brought out; had compelled him at last to produce this bracelet, and had then proceeded to cut down the Turk's price to half. The bracelet had cost Paperman nine hundred and fifty dollars. He did not have much more free cash in the world. The plunge had come partly out of guilt over his flirtation with Iris, and there was the tropical sense of release and what-the-hell in it, too, but mostly it expressed the real way he felt about the wife of his youth. Norman Paperman loved his wife. Henny put up with him, despite his philandering, mainly because she knew he did; also because he amused her. Still, there had been times when she had been close to throwing him out.
Henny came close to him, holding the box. "Thanks," she said with some difficulty.
"Why? That's just for services rendered. And may I say I'm looking forward to twenty more years of the same:1 Don't change a thing."
"But what next, you nut? The Caribbean, honestly? A hotel?"
"Only if you want to, Henny. You see what's doing on Fifty-seventh Street? The sun was shining in Amerigo when I left. The hills were green. The sea was blue. The temperature was eighty degrees. And the breeze smelled like Arpege."
This was a misstatement. It was Iris Tramm, kissing him goodbye at the plane gate, who had smelled like Arpege.
"Keep talking," Henny said, "I'll probably weaken." She glanced at her watch. "Where in the lousy hell is our daughter? My dinner will be ruined. I'm going to telephone the Sending's apartment. I'll bet she's there."
3
It was a good thing Henny called. The girl with a giggle said that she and Shel had been painting his kitchen and had forgotten all about the anniversary dinner, but that they would come in fifteen minutes. Henny wisely took the turkey out of the oven, and they arrived an hour later.
Sheldon Klug was the sorrow in the parents' lives. They both covered their pain by trying to laugh at it. He was Hazel's present love, the latest in a rather long string-Hazel was nineteen-an English instructor at her college, broad-shouldered and handsome, if a bit too fat and a bit too bearded. The Papermans had very little doubt left that this young man had deflowered Hazel some months ago, and had been sleeping with her ever since at random opportunities. Hazel wasn't pregnant, and she wasn't talking. That was all they knew. Henny, still a crusading freethinker, swore often to Norman that she didn't care if Hazel had found sexual fulfillment; she was all for sexual fulfillment, before marriage or during marriage; but how could the girl find sexual fulfillment with such a horse's behind?
Since the boiling up of the Sheldon affair, Hazel was seldom in a hurry to get home. When she did get home, she often gave her mother the strong impression of being fresh out of a warm bed. But on this occasion she did appear to have been painting a kitchen. Her tangled hair, tied up with a red ribbon, had a frost of white paint over one ear. Paint stained her gray sweatshirt and also her patched, faded blue jeans, washed threadbare so as to strain explosively over her ripening hips.
The Sending, on the other hand, looked quite presentable: dark suit, white shirt with French cuffs and heavy silver cuff links, polished grainy black shoes. The pointy reddish beard outlining his somewhat pudgy oval face was well trimmed; his heavy dark red hair was carefully groomed. He did not always look like this. A few times, especially during the summer, he had showed up at the Paperman apartment in tight Western pants, dirty sneakers, and torn T-shirt. He then tended to have a fuzzy growth of beard, and to smell like a subway at rush hour.
Sheldon Klug had been dubbed The Sending by Norman's mother, who had met him only once for a few minutes. She had actually used a Yiddish word, onshikkeness, to describe him. The closest English version of this term, instantly adopted by Norman and Henny, was "The Sending," with its overtones of a curse, a haunt, a burden, a blight. Klug had not charmed the grandmother. To her immediate question as to whether he was a Jew, he had responded with some talk about ethnic origins, heretical faith, alienation, live options and dead options; both his parents were Jews, in short, but he considered himself an existential pagan whose religion was art. That part, the grandmother had shrugged off; he was Jewish, at least. Her objection to the young man arose from his beard, and from his failure to discuss marriage after almost a year of hanging around Hazel. Old Mrs. Paperman thought that young
American men with beards tended to be either phonies or immoral adventurers, and she feared for Hazel.
Hazel was a tempting girl. Her great blue eyes, set far apart and very slanted, were her best feature. They gave her without effort the startled-doe look that other girls needed paint to simulate. Hazel was aware of this advantage, and she tended to keep switching her head here and there, her eyes wide and startled, even when nothing startling was going on. Hazel had an unusually long upper lip, and a full lower one, so that when she smiled her mouth assumed a V-shape. Nothing was more characteristic of Hazel than a startled look and a coy V-smile. She had a lithe figure, and a marshmallowy bosom, concealed at the moment under the paint-smeared sweatshirt. This girl had mowed down many sophomores and juniors at New York University. Perhaps this very glut of triumph had bored her, and sent her questing among the instructors.
