At The Breakers: A Novel

Part Five: January

January part five 231 ONE At twilight, they entered the Holland Tunnel and emerged into the brightly lit, charged-up New Year’s Eve city. Soon they were out in the throngs of early Times Square celebrants, who rushed along, vivid, urgent, as though trying to flee in the waning moments of the world, before the bomb dropped at midnight on them and the pretzel and chestnut vendors, the great neon displays which loomed above, the movie and theater marquees and yellow taxis. Vendors yelled out, “Blow your own horn, blow your own horn.” A man in handcuffs was being loaded onto a stretcher, and then into a police van. Jo was stunned, after the world of tides and little white Christmas lights, blinking on and off. Then they were in a taxi, holding hands, both of them mute, as they rolled into the quieter, more expansive precincts of the Upper West Side and finally came to a stop before the regal old building on West End where Victor had lived since he and his wife divorced, fifteen years earlier. The paneled elevator rose at a stately pace toward the twelfth floor. Victor unlocked the two locks, held the door open. She went in. She had imagined this civilized establishment, way back when she was his student, though she also sometimes placed him in a chaotic graduate-student apartment, the headlong Vic Mangold, wild spiller of drinks, strewer of ashes, loser of student papers and telephone numbers. She stood shyly at the edge of the living room, takinginthedimlengthofit ,therankofwindows,thelamplitbook-lined library opening off on one side, the long corridor at the back, leading 232 to—oh, that she hadn’t imagined. She felt she had been here before, smelled before the exact combination of books, coffee, old plaster, gas from the pilot light of the kitchen stove. Next to the austere quality of her own accommodations at The Breakers, the life lived here seemed cumulative rather than pareddown , full of things chosen with discrimination and amusement over many years, hung onto, tended to. Even the plants in his windows reminded her of sleek housecats. The place was full of artifacts of a long, interesting life—photographs, paintings, tapestries, books, vases, found objects, each one with a private meaning for him. “Here we are,” he said. He took her in his arms, smiling down at her, drew her into a dance to inaudible music. She let herself drift down into gladness. “Wait till you see what a good time we’re going to have, my love.” Take what’s offered, since it’s offered with such kindness, she counseled herself, resting her forehead against his shoulder. You need this so much. Soon, the slow dance danced itself down to the end of the corridor , where double doors opened onto a 1930s Nero Wolfe–type bedroom, arched doorways to the bathroom and closets, one set of windows facing the cross street and the other looking out across somebody’s roof garden to the tops of trees in Riverside Park, then the river, and the Palisades beyond, as promised. As promised. The bed, she discovered in due course, was made up in silk sheets. It was new to her experience that a man with such confidence also had the imaginative concern for her comfort, the desire to please her, to go out and buy such sheets—dove gray! And then to make the bed. The anticipation that such an act required seemed not calculating but generous. “Those are for you,” he remarked offhandedly. He left her there then, bowing out like a good valet. She laughed, astonished. She’d heard of honorable intentions before, but . . . She turned to begin unpacking her suitcase, hearing him banging around in the front of the apartment, ordering Chinese on the phone, running water somewhere, humming, talking to himself. 233 Soon, here he came again, with a little wine and an album of Franz Schubert lieder: “Ich wollt, ich war’ ein Fisch, so hurtig und frisch!” No room for Hank Dunegan here. He seemed puny, powerless —she’ll fuck anybody a bathroom-wall slander, a crude child’s taunt, against the great civilized life force sprawling beside her now on the bed, hands clasped over his belly, spewing out jokes and songs, eccentric observations, delighted exclamations. When the food he’d ordered arrived, they both ate ravenously, leaning against each other, telling each other over...