In the living room, standing on his purple Turkish rug, framing himself against the blue silk he'd stolen from a Jersey boxcar eight years before, Jack was saying he couldn't be a hypocrite.
"That sound funny coming from me, Lew?"
"Not a bit, Jack. I understand." But I could see Lew too, watching a million-dollar idea curl up in the smoke of another Broadway pipe dream.
" 'Hypocrite? What the hell was he talking about'?" Lew asked me later when we were on the way back to the Hudson station. "Does he think I don't know who he is?"
"He had something else in mind, I'm sure," I said. "He knows you know who he is. He knows everybody knows. But he obviously doesn't think what he's doing is hypocritical."
Lew shook his head. "All the nuts ain't on the sundaes."
Lew too. Victim of tunnel vision: A man's a thief, he's dishonest. What we didn't know as we listened to Jack was that he was in the midst of a delicate, supremely honest balancing act that would bring his life together if it worked, let it function as a unified whole and not as warring factions. Maybe Jack thought he was being honest in his retreat from page one, in his acquiescence to Alice's implorings that he become a private man, a country man, a home man, a husband. This behavior generated in Lew's head the idea that if Jack could only stay down long enough, he was fodder for American sainthood.
But Lew's conversion plan was false because Jack's behavior in retreat was false. Jack wasn't a private but a public man, not a country squire but a city slicker, not a home but a hotel room man, not a husband but a cocksmith, not an American saint but an insatiable extortionist. ("Fuck 'em," he said when I told him about Warren Van Deusen's vigilantes.) And he was not the sum of all these life-styles either, but a fusion beyond them all.
In a small way this was about to be demonstrated.
Shirtsleeved, Jack shook our hands, walked us to the front door, apologized for not standing there with us, but said he didn't want to make it too easy for any passing shooters, and thanked us for livening up his afternoon.
The liveliness was just beginning.
The Winchell item in the Mirror read: "Stagehands in the Chicago theater where Kiki Roberts is dancing in 'Flying High' under the name of Doris Kane can set their watch by the phone call she gets every night at 7:30. You guessed the caller: Legs Diamond… "
"You son of a bitch, you said you weren't talking to her. "
"Don't believe everything you read."
"You're always out of the house at that hour."
"Doesn't mean a thing."
"You promised me, you bastard. You promised me."
"I talked to her once in four months, that's all."
"I don't believe that either. "
"Believe Winchell then."
"I thought you were being straight with me."
"You were right. I was. I didn't see her, I didn't see nobody."
"After all the goddamn nursing and handholding."
"I'm fond of the girl. I heard she was having some trouble and I called her. She's all right."
"I don't believe that. You're a liar."
"What's that on your housedress'?"
"Where'?"
"By the pocket."
"A spot. "
"A spot of what?"
"What's the difference what the spot is. It's a spot."
"I paid to have that housedress cleaned and pressed and starched. The least you could do is keep it clean."
"I do keep it clean. Shut up about the housedress."
"I pay for the laundry and you put these things on and dirty them up. Goddamn money going down the goddamn laundry sink.
"I'm leaving."
"What's that in your hair?"
"Where?"
"Behind your right ear. There's something white. Is that gray hair?"
"It might be. God knows I've got a right to some."
"Gray hair. So that's what you've come to. I spend money so you can get your hair bleached half the colors of the goddamn rainbow and you stand there and talk to me with gray hair."
"I'm going upstairs to pack."
"What's that on your leg?"
"Where?"
"Right there on the thigh."
"Don't touch me. I don't want you to touch me."
"What is it?"
"It's a run in my stocking."
"'Goddamn money for silk stockings and look what happens to them."
"Get your hand away. I don't want to feel you. Go on, get it away. I don't want your hand there. No. Not there either. No. You won't get it that way anymore. Not after this. No. Don't you dare do that to me with Cordelia in the kitchen and after what I just read. You've lied once too often. I'm packing and nobody on God's earth can do anything to stop me."
"What if I moved her in with us?"
"Oh."
"We could work it out."
"Oh!"
"She's a great girl and she thinks the world of you. Sit down. Let's talk about it."
Kiki lay naked on the bed that was all hers and which stood where Alice's had stood before Jack had it taken out and bought the new one. She was thinking of the evening being unfinished, of the fudge that hadn't hardened the last time she touched it, and of Jack lying asleep in his own room, his heavy breathing audible to Kiki, who could not sleep and who resented the uselessness of her nakedness.
They had been together in her bed at early evening, hadn't eaten any supper because they were going to have dinner out later. The fudge was already in the fridge then. Jack was naked too, lying on his back, smoking and staring at the wall with the prints of the Michelangelo ketches, the punishment of Tityus and the head of a giant, prints Jack told her he bought because Arnold Rothstein liked them and said Michelangelo was the best artist who ever brushed a stroke. Jack said Kiki should look at the pictures and learn about art and not be so stupid about it. But the giant had an ugly head and she didn't like the one with the bird in it either, so she looked at Jack instead of dopey pictures. She wanted to touch him, not look at him, but she knew it wouldn't be right because there was no spark in him. He was collapsed and he had tried but wasn't in the mood. He started out in the mood, but the mood left him. He needed a rest, maybe.
He wouldn't look at her. She kept looking at him but he wouldn't look back, so she got up and said, "I'm going downstairs and see if that fudge is hard yet."
"Put something on."
"I'll put my apron on."
"Take a housecoat. There may be somebody on the porch."
"They're all out in the cottage playing pool or in the car watching the road. I know they are."
"I don't want you showing off your ass to the hired help."
She put on one of Alice's aprons, inside out so it wouldn't look too familiar to Jack, and went downstairs. She looked in the mirror and knew anybody could see a little bit of her tail if there was anybody to see it, but there wasn't. She didn't want clothes on. She didn't want to start something and then have to take the clothes off in a hurry and maybe lose the spark, which she would try to reignite when she went back upstairs. She wanted Jack to see as much of her as he could as often as he could, wanted to reach him with all she could reach him with. She had the house now. She had beaten Alice. She had Jack. She did not plan to let go of him.
The fudge was still soft to her touch. She left another fingerprint in it. She had made it for Jack, but it wasn't hardening. It had been in the fridge twenty-eight hours, and it wasn't any harder now than it was after the first hour.