“When I want advice, I can always read some tea leaves.”
“All right, reassurance then. What’s wrong with wanting reassurance? I don’t mind people telling me I’m wonderful. That’s because I don’t mind thinking I’m pretty wonderful myself.”
“You’re pretty wonderful all right, Mary Frances.”
“See, I didn’t even blush, although I could’ve if I’d wanted to. My grandmother taught me how. She said it was most becoming of well-brought-up young ladies to be able to blush, even when they didn’t feel like it. She taught me a lot of crap like that.”
“Well, doctor, you certainly have been a help. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
“I know what you would’ve done,” she said with another grin.
“What?”
“You’d have found somebody else to play doctor with.”
We decided that we were hungry so we took a shower together, which was pleasant, and then got dressed. It took Mary Frances longer so I wandered around her apartment, lifted up the tops of jars and peered inside, read the titles of some of the books that covered two walls of her living room, studied a couple of paintings that she had recently bought, and snooped around her desk, but resisted reading her mail.
It was an apartment whose furnishings had been selected with a great deal of care and thought, but managed to look as though they had come together by happy chance. There was a pale green sofa and a scarlet easy chair that shouldn’t have gone together at all, but did. There were some low polished tables and some plump pillows and some more chairs and in one corner was a small piano that Mary Frances liked to play while she sang revolutionary songs. Any revolution would do and sometimes I joined in with her on the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” although we sometimes argued about whether it qualified.
When she came out of the bedroom she was wearing a pair of light tan pants, a short, dark suede jacket over a dark green blouse, and a big floppy hat which, by rights, she was too short to wear, but which on her looked just right
“You look as good with your clothes on as you do with them off, which is smashing,” I said.
She made a mock curtsy. “You do turn a wicked compliment, sir,” she said. “And I thank you.”
“I was just wondering.”
“About what?”
“About whether there might be a vacancy in this building. I’m being evicted.”
“Now that’s the best goddamn news I’ve heard since Easter week. When?”
“End of the month.”
“And you haven’t found any place yet?”
“I haven’t even looked.”
“You should have got out of that hole you live in years ago.”
“Probably. There was a small matter of inertia.”
She stood in front of me, her small fists on her hips. “I’ve just had one hell of a good idea.”
“What?”
“You can move in here.”
I looked around the room. “That’s a very kind offer.”
“That’s not an offer. It’s a proposition. We’ll split the rent and everything else right down the line. If it doesn’t work out, then you can pack up and move on. But it’ll work. I don’t know whether I’m in love with you, St. Ives, but I’m damned fond of you, and the rest of it — well, hell, we’ll work at it.”
“You’re pretty sure, aren’t you?” I said.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s the matter, then? Does it burn you because I asked you instead of you asking me?”
“I think we’re both a bit beyond that. It’s just that if I move in, I don’t want to move out.”
“That’s fair enough. I sort of like that.”
I put my arms around her and held her close. Then I tipped her face up to mine and kissed her.
“I’m going to have to be gone for a while,” I said.
“On this thing we were talking about?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“A week. That’s all I’ll give it.”
“Where?”
“Los Angeles.”
“When do you think you’ll make up your mind about my proposition?”
“Give me a couple of days. Maybe three. I’ll call you.”
“You’re leaving when, tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Call me and tell me yes, no, or maybe. I’m shameless. I’ll even settle for maybe.”
“It won’t be maybe,” I said.
“Phil.”
“What?”
“You’d be a fool to say no.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
11
I made four calls late that Sunday night. The first call was to Max Spivey out in Los Angeles to tell him that I would be there the next day. The second call was to Myron Greene in Darien to let him know what I had decided to do. The third call was to United Airlines for a reservation, and the fourth call was to Mickey Cupini who lived in Brooklyn, but who ran his union out of offices down near City Hall. He was the executive director of a public employees’ council that embraced nearly all the unionized city workers with the exception of the cops and the firemen and some hospital workers. He ran it as a despot would run it and every once in a while, just to show his muscle, he would call out the garbage collectors or the bridge tenders or the welfare workers and the city would gasp and go into a rapid decline until Cupini got what he wanted.
He was also a power in the Democratic Party, could make his weight felt down in Washington, and maintained loose but cordial relations with organized crime, among whose more notorious middle-management members he could count three cousins and one brother-in-law.
Mickey Cupini was smart, articulate, fairly ruthless, and had once confessed to me that by the time he was fifty-five he intended to be president of the AFL–CIO. He still had twenty years to go and I felt that he might very well make it. Fifteen years ago when he had been a kid head-merchant, struggling to organize the city’s white-collar workers who then thought of themselves as belonging more to management than to labor, I had written him up in a couple of more or less sympathetic columns. He had never forgotten it and every Christmas thereafter, he had sent me a twenty-pound turkey, which I usually turned over to an aging gay couple who lived on the fifth floor of the Adelphi, were marvelous cooks, and didn’t have too much money.
When I was through asking Mickey Cupini about his wife and each of his six kids, I asked if he would like to have lunch the next day. He said that he would and we agreed to meet at Minuto’s, which is a small restaurant down on Eighteenth Street where the food would be good and the service even better, possibly because it was owned by Mickey Cupini’s wife’s cousin.
Cupini was already there when I arrived at one o’clock the next day with my suitcase.
“You going out of town?” he said after we shook hands.
“For a few days,” I said.
There were only eight tables and four booths in Minuto’s and it was packed as always with reservations running right up until two o’clock. Cupini and I had the back booth and I let him order for me because he liked to make a little ceremony out of it.
“You haven’t been around lately,” Cupini said when he was through ordering. “What’ve you been up to?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” I said.
“You married again?”
“No.”
“Got a girl?”
“Well, there’s this one I’ve been seeing a lot of.”
Cupini nodded several times. “That’s good. You oughta get married and if you don’t get married, you oughta move in with her. Living alone’s what’s bad.”
“How’s the labor business?” I said.