A Fine and Private Place Read online

  “What kind of agreement?”

  “It will say that she consents to have no property claim against me or my estate, not even the ordinary dower right, for five whole years after the wedding. This is so that she will not become my wife and then leave me. But if she sticks to our bargain-if she’s still my wife and living with me on September 9th, 1967-then she becomes my heir. My only heir, suocero. How does that grab you, as they say? Could anything be fairer than that?”

  “There’s the little matter of good faith between man and wife,” the prospective father-in-law began; then he stopped and laughed. “No, you certainly have the right to protect yourself under the, uh, circumstances.” He reached over, retrieved the Havana, and relit it. “But, Nino… “

  “Ora che cos’e?”

  “On September 9, 1967 you’ll be-let’s see-68? Since we’re speaking frankly,” he said through a dribble of Cuban smoke, “I have to raise the disagreeable possibility that you may no longer be with us on that date. What happens to my daughter if you should die before the expiration of the agreement? She’d be left holding a very empty bag.”

  “Yes,” Importuna said, “and so would you.”

  “But, Nino, that could mean she’ll have wasted up to as much as five years of her young life. That doesn’t seem right-”

  “I agree, amico. But it’s a chance she’ll have to take. Is it such a bad gamble? Considering the stakes? Besides, try to see it from my point of view.”

  “Oh, I do, Nino. Still, Virginia’s all I have. Her mother is dead, as you know. Not a single relative we know of left on either side-”

  “My poor future suocero. I bleed with you. But what do they say? You won’t be losing a daughter, you’ll be winning a son-in-law.”

  “So true,” the tall man murmured. “Well, Nino. I can only say I’ll do my damnedest. Oh, yes. About those proofs… “

  “What about them?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “I keep my bargains,” Importuna said. “Do you doubt my word?”

  “Certainly not-”

  “And you may keep your controllership and the vice-presidency. You pull this off and I may even raise your salary, give you stock. But I warn you, Mr. Big Shot.”

  “About what, Nino?”

  “No more borrowings from Superba Foods, Ultima Mining, the others. Little borrowings that add up so fast to so much. Capito?”

  “Of course. Naturally.”

  “And no more magic tricks with the books. Hartz will be checking you.”

  “Nino, I give you my word-”

  “And don’t offer Hartz a cut of your thievings to give me false reports-there will be someone you don’t know double-checking him. Not that I give nine damns in hell whether you rot in jail or not, caro. But how would it look for the wife of Nino Importuna? Her own father. Excuse me.” He picked up one of the battery of telephones on the Florentine table, the one that was discreetly buzzing. “Yes, Peter.”

  “Mr. E just got in from Australia,” a man’s voice said.

  “Mr. E? He’s here? In the apartment?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Good, Peter! I want to see him right away.”

  Importuna hung up and waved his right hand to his visitor in dismissal. He appeared no more self-conscious about the hand in waving it a few feet from the tall man than when he had kept it in sight on his chin during their long conversation. The hand possessed only four fingers; where the index and middle fingers should have been there was a single finger of double thickness, a sort of digital Siamese twin.

  It was curiously flexible.

  “Ciao, suocero,” the nine-fingered multimillionaire said gently.

  CONCEPTION

  Under normal conditions the ovum lies in the uterus for about 24 hours, waiting.

  If fertilization takes place, then, instead of passing through the uterus into the world of waste, the organism-now a zygote-attaches itself to the uterus wall and sets about its built-in program of growth.

  From the Diary of Virginia Whyte Importuna

  DECEMBER 9, 1966

  I wonder why I keep adding to this, oh,construction.

  This higgledy-piggledy, slam-bang architecture of feelings… hopes, disappointments, terrors, joys, the lot. Is it because of the joys? The few I have? And the almost addictive need to express them? Then why do I keep dwelling on the bad scenes? Sometimes I think this isn’t worth the risk. If N. were ever to find you, Diary… Well, what could he do? After all!

  Plenty.

  He would, too. And not just to daddy.

  Let’s face it, Virginia. He’s got you by the lady parts.

  I feel… Today was the Bitch of Time. A bad one, yea, verily. It began on that marvelous self-generating morning note of hope, rising, raising the flesh really in a gorgeous thrill of beauty digging deep and a sense of much more under that, like Sutherland at the Met when she’s in top voice… Oh, stop drooling along like some ninny teen-ager rolling around in her first crush. At the age of twenty-five! And allegedly married.

  The fact is I was on the upsurge, wanting, wanting to be alone with P., not daring even to look at him with that monstrous kipper of a Crump around watching with those fried eyes of his while that prissy mouth shapes those luscious “Madams” that sound as if he’s tasting me.

  And old Editta with her red and squishy nose. I swear it twitched this morning when P. and I happened to nearly collide in the hall outside my dressing room. Or is that the hem of my guilt showing? To be afraid of a personal maid who can hardly utter an intelligible sentence in her own language, let alone mine!

  I’m growing paranoid. The old soul’s probably coming down with the flu and wishing I’d bathe and undress myself for bed once. Editta cara, I wish I could. Why N. insists on this slavish servitude, as if I were a sultana, I’m not quite sure. Of course, he’s the sultan, so I suppose it’s a matter of his image, his ego, not mine. I exist for greeting and planning and hostessing and being decorative around his kowtowing friends and underlings and big-belly business associates from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East-a kind of glorified five-star housekeeper, as P. truly calls me (but not in N.’s hearing!).

  There, I’ve got rid of the poor thing for tonight, anyway. I had to reassure her that the signore would never, never know. Maybe we could work out an accommodation, Editta and I, for the future. Happy, wishful thought. She’s so dad-blamed, all-fired scared of Nino, all he has to do is give her one of those evil-eye looks of his and she wets her mutandine, as Julio says with his customary refinement. And not from passion, either, she’s past the age. Poor Editta.

  Poor me. A bitch of a day, I repeat. My “cover,” as the spy boys call it (don’t they? or am I misusing the term? I must consult P., he knows everything)-anyway, my cover, or cover-up, or excuse, or alibi, or whatever, was that I was to do some Christmas shopping (Saks,

  Bergdorf’s, Bonwit’s, Georg Jensen, Mark Cross, Sulka, Brentano’s-the circuit), which would put me out of range of Crump’s Halloween eyes and Editta’s bunny nose and into the blessed pollution of Fifth Avenue, the tintinnabulation of the Santa bells, and the trivial perils of purse snatchers, panhandlers, and muggers. And with N. skillions of miles away, in West Berlin or Belgrade or Athens or wherever, scheming how to make his millions propagate more millions-what did Julio, or was it Marco, say yesterday the conglomerate is now worth, cold turkey? close to half a billion dollars? how does anyone digest sums like that!-with him on the other side of an ocean I was free… free to spend most of the day with Peter! Even to be reckless. Such as now, writing his name full out and fancied up like H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n’s… P*E*T*E*R. p*jr*rp*E*R E*N*N*I*S.

  There! Oh, Peter darling…

  We were reckless sure enough. Luckily no harm was done. I think. But the way it turned out… Peter’s denouement… I don’t know. Who knows where harm lies? From which direction it can come, and when, and even why? Am I being paranoid really? Peter says that life in New York these days is an unending ga
me of Russian roulette to which one either becomes inured or goes crackers. And after a while one even challenges it, he says-dares it sassily to do its lethal worst. While all the time, under the bravado, there cowers the wee sleekit mousie of a person being just-plain-damned-scared.

  What’s a mugger in the dark behind you with a knife blade at your throat compared with being in the clutches of a demon like N.?

  Dreadful thought. I’ve waked up well over a thousand times saying thank God it was a nightmare and finding out it wasn’t.

  I know people would consider me off my bloody wicket if they could hear me sound off about N. like this. Why, darling, he’s the kindest, most generous-and richest-man on four continents! And he absolutely, positively adores you, loves you madly. Oh, N. loves me madly, all right, the way a Jivaro loves his favorite shrunken head. Love… They should know what that word means to him. And what it means for a girl to have to endure over four years of…

  I need a drink, dear Diary.

  Better.

  It’s getting late and I’ve made hardly a start chronicling the day’s events. Well, who gives a flying damn? Excuse me again, Diary. That tasted like more.

  Everything a wife could ask for. Their envy tells me that. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see the wife.

  May as well set the bottle handy. Handy brandy. Can’t think of a rhyme for “cognac.” Except “Zatzo, Mac?” and that wouldn’t take fourth prize in a contest for idiots.

  I wonder if Savonarola looked anything like Nino. One of these days I must look up a portrait of the kindly old fra of Ferrara. I’ll bet their profiles match.

  What Nino really looks like is a wicked, wicked version of Federico Fellini, that’s what. I’m chained to an aging Fellini image who creates whole planets of illusion with a wave of his fat, wet hands. Those nine fingers of his… They revulse me.

  It’s unkind of me. Really unfeeling. Nino can’t help an accident of birth any more than the Minotaur and Quasimodo could help theirs. I wouldn’t shrink from a man with, say, a gross harelip (unless he tried to kiss me, ugh). But something about that rubbery two-ply digit of his gives my stomach elevator-dropitis. And when he touches me with it… or should I say them?…

  And his ridiculous superstitions. Beyond belief. Imagine a leading power in the business world, an authentic big wheel, one of the grand moguls of Wall Street, the Bourse, and points east, actually dropping the last two letters of his surname, the name of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and having the poor circumcised thing (that’s a bad metaphor, considering its location) conferred on him by the official act of a judge just because the name he was born with didn’t conform to his lucky number! That’s what’s called bending fate to your will with a vengeance. He really believes in that nonsense. Not even Marco, who was born to be the prophet’s disciple, can swallow that, though he does a manful little job of trying. This name business is about the only thing I can sometimes like Marco and Julio for. Editta’s told me what pressure Nino-Big Brother-used on them to get them to drop the final t-o of Importunato the way he did. But they never would.

  What I seem to have tonight is writer’s wanderlust. Is what I seem to have tonight. No tittle, jot, or iota of discipline. Look who was going to be the Emily Dickinson of the 20th century! Only, how can the Muse compete with a third of half a billion dollars? Not to mention loyalty to a daddy who can’t keep his hands off other people’s property, thereby getting me into this hell of a hole in the first place? Oh, dad, dear dad, if only I didn’t love you, damn you, I’d let you rot where you belong, which is up the river and under the trees-six feet under. And you’d take your leave with your 0 so charming smile, and a butterfly kiss on the back of my neck… the kind you used to plant there when I was very small in the chest and very large in the jealous-of-mama department, whose face I can’t even remember any more.

  I was browsing through Blake’s “Songs of Experience” after dinner hunting up old friends, when “A Poison Tree” renewed our acquaintance:

  I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  And I water d it in fears Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles.

  And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine,

  And into my garden stole When the night had veil’d the pole;

  In the morning, glad, I see My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.

  I hadn’t read it in years. It’s rather awful, I think, although once I doted on it. But it does about sum me up just now, I mean what’s been going on away down inside where the heat’s unbearable. The San Virginia Fault. Guaranteed to give anybody’s seismograph the hotfoot when least expected.

  Anyway.

  Peter and I had an argument (“I was angry with my friend”) about where to meet. For some reason it seemed terribly vital to both of us. He was in as bad a case as I was, but oppositely oriented. He was in his Goddam Nino Mood, during which he usually threatens to shove Nino’s teeth down his throat. This time he wanted to climb up on the 43rd Street marquee of the Biltmore with a bullhorn, where everyone coming out of Grand Central on Vander-bilt and walking along Madison in the other direction could hear him proclaim our star-crossed love-everyone, including any passing newspaper reporter. I mean he actually opted for Le Pavilion, or 21, or that impossible restaurant everybody’s flocking to where the maitre d’ insults you or refuses to seat you no matter who you are, in fact the better known you are the nastier he can get, and I said positively no, Peter, in those omnium-gatherums it’s all grapevine, the word would reach Nino in two hours in Addis Ababa, if that’s where he is; and Peter said, “So what? The sooner the better!” He was being absolutely suicidal.

  In the end we compromised on my choice, which was a dowdyish, unfashionable hideaway daddy had once taken me to (if they’re hidden away, old daddums knows ‘em!), where there was no chance anybody we or Nino knew would spot us. And the food’s better than in a lot of the toity places where they even charge your date for the look the cigaret girl allows him down her cleavage.

  Somehow, being out in public with Peter for the first time, which I’d thought was going to be a supergas, turned out to depress me wonderfully. I certainly wasn’t at my best. For one thing, I don’t know why I picked the Pozzuoli A-line to wear, I loathe it, it makes me look as if I were hiding a pregnancy in a muumuu, which I loathe also; they’re great only if you’re in the ninth month or have the hips of Babar. And the coat I wore over it, the cashmere with the queen-sized Russian lynx collar, which I’d selected from the mixed herd in my closet because it’s the least conspicuous winter coat my lavish husband has allowed me to buy, had a hideous stain of some sort right in front, which I hadn’t noticed and which I couldn’t hide without laying back the coat, thus revealing the hated A-line. It was a total disaster.

  In the second place, I was jolly-jelly-legged with funk in fear of being seen in spite of our precautions.

  And thirdly, instead of acting the wise and understanding male and sticking to brilliantly innocuous table talk, Peter insisted on pounding away at me again about divorcing Nino and marrying him. As if I didn’t want to!

  “Peter, what’s the point of going into that again?” I said in my most reasonable tone of voice. “You know it’s impossible. I’d like some glogg, please.”

  “In this Greasy Spoon you picked?” Peter said, giving me his most hateful smile. “They wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, dear heart. My suggestion is to order beer. That they’ll understand. And nothing’s impossible. There has to be a way.”

  “I’m cold, I want something hot,” I said. “And sarcasm isn’t your strong point. I repeat, impossible. I can’t leave Nino, Peter. He won’t let me.”

  “How about an ordinary prole-type Tom and Jerry? There’s a fighting chance they’ll know what that is. How do we know he won’t give you a di
vorce unless you ask him?”

  “Peter, no! Because you’re so close to him all day doesn’t mean you know him. I tell you there’s no chance he’d let me go, none at all, even aside from the religious reason. Oh, I’m sorry we were so foolish today. I have a feeling we’re going to regret going out together like this.”

  “He really has you petrified, hasn’t he? Well, he doesn’t petrify me!”

  “I know, dear, you’re old lion guts, while I’m the original chicken. Besides, there’s daddy to consider.”

  Peter’s really sexy mouth drooped. Daddy is a subject we try not to kick around. Peter knows how I feel, and he does what he can to respect my feelings, but he never makes a very good job of it. Peter’s trained himself to be the unobtrusive backgrounder, like Winstons and confidential secretaries should, but he’s just too beautifully tall and broad and dark-gold-blond and God-bless-American good-looking and gray-blue-green-eyed (depending on what’s going on in his glands at the moment) to get by unnoticed all the time; I mean I at least can read him like a traffic signal. There was a big red light coming up.

  So I suppose in trying to avoid it I stepped on the gas too hard and blabbed what I’d never told anyone, especially Peter. And did it the worst way-jokingly, as if it were some belly buster, the yuk of yuks.

  “Oh, let’s stop talking about daddy,” I said cutely. “Do you know I have a pet name for my husband?”

  Peter reacted as if I’d shot him. “A pet name? For Nino?”

  “Sickening, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, you are, aren’t you?”

  “Not a bit of it.”

  “But how could you? What is it?” Peter asked grimly.

  “It’s a diminutive of Importuna.”

  “Diminutive. You mean like Import? Look, Virgin, you’re trying to sidetrack me-”

  “Shorter than that.” Something kept egging me on. A demon, what else? No other explanation is sane.