Jack and Susan in 1953 Read online

  Jack grabbed Mr. Hamilton’s shoulder and spun him around.

  Mr. Hamilton’s friends were alternately petrified, scandalized, and indignant. Mr. Hamilton himself was very nearly tearful—to be humiliated this way in front of his peers and a crowd of strangers. What good did careful attention to one’s appearance do when one was subjected to incidents like this? Pawed by a drunk in the street.

  “Tell Maddy she’s beautiful!” Jack shouted right in Mr. Hamilton’s face. “I don’t care what you think about her, tell her she’s beau-ti-ti-ful!”

  Then Jack staggered on, leaving Mr. Hamilton to find whatever meager enjoyment he could get out of Rosalind Russell’s performance this evening.

  Twice Jack fell off the curb, scraping his knees and doing more damage to his trousers. First he hit the pavement of Park Avenue, and later the sidewalk near Sixty-third Street.

  From time to time he would make an attempt at hailing a cab, and finally one did stop for him, and Jack climbed in. “Sixty-sixth between Second and Third,” Jack said, slumped in the seat.

  But because they were only a block and a half away from that destination, the driver threw him out again.

  Jack hadn’t lost his keys, though he might as well have, because he couldn’t get them into the lock. He fumbled and swore until the night elevator man noticed his plight and opened the door for him. Jack stumbled into the lobby and winced against the forty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture, which shone bright as the sun.

  “Some party, hunh?” said the elevator man, pulling Jack toward the elevator.

  Jack got into the elevator, but then he began to give out. His legs started to crumple under him, and he sank all the way to the floor and fell asleep.

  The elevator man awakened him on the fifth floor.

  “Here you are, Mr. Beaumont. Give me your keys.”

  Jack shook his head. “I can do it,” he said groggily.

  Then he fell asleep again on the floor of the elevator.

  The elevator man fished in his pocket for the keys, picked him up off the floor—with a little help from Jack himself—and then led him to the door of his apartment.

  Jack heard violent barking from inside.

  He turned to the man and said wistfully, “Somebody still loves me…”

  The elevator man turned the key and pushed open the door.

  “You be all right?” he asked.

  Woolf jumped out and knocked Jack against the wall of the narrow corridor.

  “No dogs allowed,” said the elevator man mildly. “I’m going to have to report you. Good-night.”

  “Good-night,” said Jack, giving the elevator man the two dollars he’d so carefully saved for the taxi.

  Woolf licked Jack’s face, cast, and any other place he could find with bourbon stains.

  Jack sat in the corridor for a while and allowed himself to be licked. His apartment, through the open doorway, seemed about three miles away. He was just dozing off again when he felt someone’s gaze on him. He looked up groggily, and then was unsure whether he was dreaming or not.

  There in the open door of his apartment stood Susan Bright, looking down at him with a grimace of disgust. She was not wearing her wedding gown.

  “I’m not a bit surprised,” she said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I CAN’T FACE him right now,” Jack pleaded, his head pressed against the swirled pink plaster of the corridor wall. “Later. Not now. Tell him to go away. Please. Just do that for me, Susan.”

  Jack hugged Woolf close.

  “Who are you talking about?” asked Susan. “You’re drunk. I can’t believe how drunk you are. You stink, you’re dirty, and look at that hole in your trousers. I can see your underwear.”

  A door opened down the hall and an old woman peered out.

  “Somebody get rid of that dog!” she called out.

  Woolf barked vehemently at the woman.

  “You’re drawing attention,” said Susan darkly. “At least come inside. It’s your own apartment, after all.”

  “Then he’s not inside?” Jack asked weakly.

  “Who?” said Susan.

  “Rodolfo.”

  “Unless he’s been hiding in the closet for the past five hours, Rodolfo is not in your apartment. Five hours—that’s how long I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “You came here right from the church then,” said Jack as he struggled to his feet. Or attempted to. His balance was not good and Woolf had evidently decided that smack between Jack’s legs was the only place in the world to be. Nowhere else would do.

  Susan gave him a helping hand.

  “You’re not making any sense,” she said. “Do you know that? Do you know how little sense you’re making? I’m going to make some coffee, and you’re going to take a cold shower.”

  “I’m not allowed to take showers,” Jack mumbled. “Not with my cast.”

  “Then you’re going to take a cold bath. Right now,” she said.

  He obeyed docilely…

  A quarter of an hour later, Jack had come to the conclusion that there was, in the entire range of human experience, only one sensation that was worse than a cold bath when you’re drunk, and that was a cold bath when you’re drunk with a dog licking the side of your face every time you started to fall asleep.

  “Cover yourself,” called Susan from outside the bathroom door. “I’m bringing in a cup of coffee.”

  Jack jerked the shower curtain halfway closed. In its cast, his left arm dangled to the tile floor away from the water. Unfortunately, the opaque white shower curtain was decorated with an undersea scene with sunfish and mermaids, and was just suggestive enough of the sea to make Jack’s stomach queasy.

  “Are you a little less drunk?” said Susan.

  “A little. What’s your husband going to say when he finds you in the bathroom with a naked man?” said Jack morosely. The coffee smelled good as Susan handed him the cup.

  “Don’t worry,” said Susan, calmly putting down the toilet seat and arranging herself comfortably on it. “In the first place, you’re hardly in a condition to attack me. In the second place, I’m not married.”

  Jack halted the cup at his lips. He sniffed at the coffee, then took a sip. He thought about what Susan had just said.

  “You’re not married?” he asked, trying not to slur his words. He thought that he ought to get this part straight, even if he understood nothing else.

  Susan shook her head. “Definitely not married. Did you have a particular reason for thinking I might be?”

  Jack nodded, staring at the water and continuing to sip his coffee.

  Woolf took the corner of the shower curtain in his teeth and dragged it open again.

  Susan, politely averting her eyes, readjusted it.

  “When can I get out of this cold water?” he asked. “It’s horrible in here.”

  “When you’re sober,” said Susan. “Why did you think I was married?”

  “Circumstantial evidence,” said Jack, even though those were difficult words for him to articulate. “I went to the church this afternoon and I saw you and Rodolfo standing in front of the altar and I heard the preacher say, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’”

  Susan stared. Jack continued to sip his coffee.

  “‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’” Jack repeated.

  “Rodolfo got married today?” asked Susan after a moment.

  Jack nodded.

  “Who was the bride?” she asked.

  Jack smiled. A smirky, bitter little smile.

  “What time was this wedding?”

  “One o’clock. I was a few minutes late.”

  “At one o’clock I was passing through Hicksville, Long Island. I had to stop for gas.”

  “You don’t have a car.”

  “Rented.”

  “At one o’clock?” said Jack, swallowing the last of the coffee and automatically holding out the cup for more.

  Susan had brought the pot along, and had it rig
ht outside the bathroom door on a pot holder. She fetched it and poured another cup for Jack.

  “Yes,” she said, “at one o’clock, I was at a Standard Oil station in Hicksville, Long Island. I remember seeing a clock.”

  “Then who was the bride?” said Jack.

  “You didn’t see her face?”

  “Brides wear veils.”

  Both of them pondered for a few moments. Jack ran a little more cold water and thought he’d die, but he was getting sober very quickly, and an idea was forming in his brain. He was beginning to make certain connections in his mind. Item 1: Susan Bright did not marry Rodolfo García-Cifuentes. Item 2: Susan Bright was now in his apartment and had been, she said, for some time. Item 3: What was item 3? It was the most important of all, Jack knew, but he wasn’t sufficiently recovered to have figured out just what it was. That was why he’d just run a little more cold water, even though it made him want to commit suicide.

  Susan was thinking hard, too.

  “You’re sure it was Rodolfo?” she asked.

  “Positive.”

  “How did you know about the wedding? Were you invited?”

  Jack nodded. “More or less. The bride came by this morning and left a message with the elevator man. I thought it was you.”

  “This morning I was in the Hamptons,” said Susan. “Visiting an old family friend—my father’s law partner in fact. I needed a little advice of a legal nature.” Her tone discouraged curious probing on the subject, and anyway, Jack was in no condition to solve two sets of mysterious circumstances.

  “Well, it was the bride who was here. The elevator man said she was wearing a wedding veil, and she—”

  “Which means that you know the bride,” said Susan, with a leap of reasoning utterly beyond Jack.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment, “I guess you’re right.”

  “So who is it?”

  Jack thought a moment. Then he looked at Susan, and Susan looked at him, and they both knew the answer, and they stared at each other, and then Susan began to giggle.

  In another hour, Jack was nearly sober, though he had a headache that felt like the entire North Korean Army was marching across the inside of his forehead. He still had not figured out what Item 3 was.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked Susan. She was sitting in his living room, curled up on the sofa, watching the “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.”

  “I’m famished,” she said.

  “There’s a spaghetti joint around the corner. If you can rip up one of my shirts so that the cast fits through the arm, I’ll take you.”

  Susan pondered a moment, as if deciding between Jack and Irene Dunne. Miss Dunne had just promised Susan a splendid hour’s entertainment, but Jack’s offer won. “Let’s see what we can do…”

  They found a sport shirt in Jack’s dresser, and with a pair of kitchen shears Susan slit the left sleeve, and helped Jack wriggle into it.

  Woolf was already excited. Any sort of movement in the apartment suggested to Woolf that he was about to be taken for a walk.

  “Not tonight,” said Susan warningly to the dog.

  “Maybe later,” said Jack.

  Sullen Woolf laid himself down across the threshold of the front door, so that when they left it was necessary for Susan to pick up the dog and move him aside.

  The restaurant, called Simeone’s, was somewhere in the neighborhood, though Jack couldn’t remember exactly where. Sixty-seventh or -eighth or -ninth or maybe even Seventieth; between Second and Third avenues, or maybe between Third and Lexington.

  It turned out to be on Seventy-first between Second and First, which Susan discovered by looking in a book in a telephone booth.

  Simeone’s had red-and-white checked tablecloths, guttering candles in old wine bottles, Agfa-Color photographs of Naples and the Isle of Capri on the wall, and a gypsy violinist who wouldn’t go away for less than a dollar.

  “No wine for you tonight,” said Susan, peering at the menu.

  “Do you have Orange Crush?” Jack asked the waiter.

  The waiter shook his head.

  “Nehi? Royal Crown? Yoo-Hoo? Squirt? Coke?”

  “No soft,” said the waiter carefully—it was evidently a memorized speech in a foreign tongue. “Only wine.”

  “One glass for you,” Susan said.

  The waiter went away and came back with a bottle. They ordered spaghetti and ravioli.

  Jack poured for them both.

  They raised their glasses, as if to toast, and then—simultaneously—they put their glasses down, and looked away, embarrassed.

  After a moment, Jack looked at Susan. “How did you get in my apartment today?”

  “The elevator man let me in. He recognized Woolf.”

  Jack considered this.

  “Why did you come?”

  “I was returning Woolf.”

  “Why did you have him? I told Libby to take him to the kennel.”

  Susan looked at Jack closely. Then she said slowly, “I came to see you last week. You were in the shower, and Libby—”

  “What do you mean, the shower? I just got out of the hospital this morning,” said Jack.

  Susan blinked. “You mean that Libby…”

  “Libby what?”

  Susan didn’t answer the question. She changed the subject. She said: “You were right about Rodolfo.”

  “Well, you didn’t marry him.”

  “He asked me.”

  “But you said no.”

  “Actually,” said Susan, “I said yes. But I didn’t do it.”

  “Why did you say yes?”

  “It seemed like a good idea—or at any rate it didn’t seem like a bad idea.”

  “I think he might even be dangerous.”

  “He was. That’s one of the most attractive things about him. Besides, being around Rodolfo couldn’t possibly have been as dangerous as being around you,” she said, glancing at his broken arm.

  “He would have made you very unhappy.”

  “Probably,” admitted Susan.

  “I was fired,” said Jack suddenly. He’d just remembered that.

  “What?”

  “I was fired. On Friday. Maddy came by the hospital and told me I was fired. I don’t know why.”

  Susan pondered this. “I know why,” she said.

  Jack stared.

  “Libby had you fired.”

  “Why? Why would she do that?”

  Susan shrugged. “She was probably mad at you for something. For trying to commit suicide on the night you were supposed to announce your engagement.”

  “You know I didn’t try to commit suicide. You of all people know—”

  “I know,” said Susan, “but Walter Winchell said it was an attempted suicide.”

  “I have never even met Walter Winchell. I wish people like Walter Winchell—”

  “I think that Libby was upset—so upset that she ran off and married Rodolfo. Therefore I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she was upset enough to show up at the office of the president of your firm, and say, ‘Jack Beaumont has mismanaged my finances. I want him fired.’ I think it might well have happened that way.”

  Jack’s eyes were wide. “I think maybe you’re right. I don’t see any other way it could have happened. But how do you think those two got together? Libby and Rodolfo. Libby was always pretending she couldn’t even remember his name.”

  Susan looked troubled. “I don’t know exactly. But something happened between last Monday night—when Rodolfo asked me to marry him—and this afternoon, when he and Libby got married.”

  “We’re not really sure it was Libby,” said Jack. “I didn’t see her face, after all.”

  “I’m pretty sure,” said Susan. “And I’m not happy about it either. The more I think about it, those two—” She took a long sip of wine.

  “Those two what?”

  “—Don’t deserve each other,” she concluded.

  “Rodolfo doesn’t deserve Libby? Or Libby doesn’t d
eserve Rodolfo?” Jack couldn’t help grinning, but he didn’t get to hear Susan’s opinion, because just then the waiter brought their food. In the few moments he took in putting down the dishes in the wrong place and getting them right again, Jack figured out exactly what item 3 was.

  Item 3: If Susan Bright was not married to Rodolfo García-Cifuentes, then she was ostensibly free to marry Jack.

  “So will you?” he said aloud, forgetting that Susan had not been privy to his sudden happy enlightenment.

  “Will I what?” asked Susan, blushing.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you do that—blush,” said Jack. “Will you marry me?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “ON ONE CONDITION,” said Susan.

  “All right,” said Jack. He didn’t care what the condition was; he’d accept anything so long as Susan agreed to marry him. His mind was still a bit fuzzy, but he knew one thing with absolute certainty: the only truly important thing in the world was that as soon as possible he and Susan Bright stand up in front of a preacher and say the words, “I do.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask what the condition is?”

  “No,” said Jack. “I don’t care.” She looked so disappointed that he asked, “What’s the condition?”

  “That we go on a honeymoon and I choose the place.”

  “Anywhere,” he said, then after a moment added, “except Cuba. Where do you want to go?”

  She didn’t answer, but looked at him with misgiving.

  “Cuba?” he asked.

  She took a sip of wine and nodded.

  “Then of course we’ll go to Cuba on our honeymoon,” Jack said briskly. Despite his word, in his mind he saw the face of Rodolfo García-Cifuentes, and wondered if there was a connection. “Now wasn’t that easy? So when?”

  “When what?”

  “When do we get married?”

  “As soon as possible,” Susan said, and then added, peculiarly, “I’m very anxious for us to get down to Cuba.”

  Jack ate a little ravioli, wondering if he really had heard somewhere that Italian food cleared the brain or whether he had just made that up, and then said, “I think there’s something you’re not telling me, Susan. And since we’re going to be married—or at least I think you said you’d marry me—”