Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

I now return to the February day when I left the university. I drove into New York at about six o’clock in a heavier rain that was just beginning to turn to sleet. I put the car in a garage on 44th Street and started phoning hotels. There were conventions and the city was loaded. I gave up after a dollar’s worth of dimes, and phoned Gabe Shevlan.

Gabe sounded cordial but preoccupied. I told him the hotel problem. He said I had caught him on the way out, but come on over. I could bunk on the couch. He’d phone the apartment later on, and I should wait there for the call.

It was on 77th, near Second Avenue. I pushed random buttons until somebody buzzed the front door open. I went up to 3B and Gabe had left it unlocked as he said he would. It was a smaller, dingier place than I expected.

Gabe had been a fraternity brother. He had graduated a year ago last June, and had worked with CBS for a while and then gone with an advertising agency. He looks like an underfed Lincoln without the beard. He is highly nervous and ambitious, and always has a dozen projects going at once.

After I’d gotten organized and built a drink, I called home long distance and got hold of Ernie. I could tell from the background noise they were having a big cocktail party. She sounded slightly loaded.

“What are you doing in New York? Darling, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Hang on while I go take this in the bedroom.” I heard her ordering somebody to take the phone and hang up after she got on the other extension.

“Kirby? Now what’s this all about, dear?”

I told her I’d quit. She didn’t like it. It didn’t fit her maternal ideas of how my life should be regimented. She kept pounding at me to get at some reason that would make sense to her. Was it because of a girl? I kept telling her I was tired of it, and so I’d quit. What was I going to do? Look around and find something to do. She said the old man could line up people for me to see in New York. I said the hell with that. I didn’t want any part of that routine, thanks. She asked me about money. I said a check would help, and I gave her Gabe’s address. She had me hang on while she went and got the old man. From the time it took, I guessed she was briefing him.

I was right. He came on big and ugly. “What kind of goddam childish nonsense is this, son?”

“I felt like quitting so I quit.”

“You felt like it. That’s great!”

All I could do was let him rave. I was spoiling the big plans he had for me. I was letting him down. I was letting the Executive Training Program down. I was going to be a bum. Well, by God, no more gravy for me. No more feather-bed. I wasn’t going to get one dime from him. A fool who quits four months before his degree doesn’t deserve any kind of a break. Now what did I have to say for myself?

“Goodbye,” I said, and hung up.

Incidentally, the check came from Ernie two days later, on Thursday. Airmail. Five hundred, accompanied by a rambling letter in her angular backhand, telling me how hard this was on the old man. They didn’t know what to tell people, and so on, and so on. One reading was all I could give it.

Gabe phoned at eighty-thirty and asked me to come right along and join them at an Italian restaurant in the sixties. When I got there he was pacing back and forth in front of the hat check booth.

After we shook hands I started to thank him and brief him on why I was in New York, but he broke in and said, “Time for that later, Stass. I can use you. There’s three at the table. The guy is John Pinelli. The blonde is Kathy Keats, an actress — Pinelli’s wife. The little brunette is Betsy Kipp. She’s a special friend of mine. I had to stab Pinelli in the heart tonight. He’ll want to cling to me like a Bandaid. I want to peel off alone with Betsy, so when any chance comes, you help out.”

I agreed. He gave me an extra key to the apartment and said we could talk later, maybe tomorrow. We went to the table. It was a corner table, not far from the bar. A place had been made ready for me. Gabe introduced me around. Pinelli was a big, soft, pink-and-white man who looked more like a Swede than an Italian or a Spaniard or whatever he was. The two women were gorgeous. Betsy was younger and had a special glow. I knew I’d seen Kathy Keats before and heard her name before. I knew I’d seen her in the movies and on television. Her hair was dyed a beautiful silverblond, and done up in a regal and intricate way. She was on my left. Her shoulders were smooth and bare.

She has a Dietrich face, long, slightly Slavic, a long throat, erect carriage, so that at a distance she looks tall. But close up you realize she is a small woman, about five four, a hundred and ten. I never found out how old she is. On that first night I would have guessed twenty-five. Since then I have guessed as high as thirty-seven. She gives an impression of terrible control. Every movement is slow and graceful. When her smile comes, it is slow in coming, and it flowers to great brilliance, but you feel she is back there behind that smile, watching you, watching everybody.

John Pinelli was stupidly drunk, and drinking steadily. But there was more than that wrong with him. He was lie an ox who had been clubbed on the head. He kept shaking his big head in a bewildered way. Two conversations went on at once. One was between Gabe, Betsy and Kathy, bright talk about people I didn’t know, none of whom seemed to have last names. John Pinelli carried on a monologue, most of it so slurred you couldn’t understand it, all of it ignored by the other three, as thoroughly as they ignored me. From the little I heard of Pinelli’s ramblings, he was telling himself about the great, important, sensitive, significant things he had directed.

The food that came was wonderful. Betsy Kipp and I were the only ones who ate it. Pinelli ignored his. Kathy Keats ate a few small bites with slow precision. Gabe has always been too jittery to eat much.

The whole evening was unreal. At about eleven Gabe said, “I’m sorry, but we have to be running along.”

Pinelli fixed him with a heavy, bleared eye and said, “Got to talk to you, my boy. Got to explain why you need me...”

I felt a touch on my right knee. I reached down and took folded bills from Gabe.

Gabe stood up and took hold of Betsy’s chair and said, “Settle with you later, Stass. Have fun, kids.” And they were gone.

I paid the check. It was over sixty dollars. Gabe had passed me two fifties.

I said to the Pinellis, feeling awkwardly out of my depth, “I guess I’ll say good night and...”

“Stay with us,” she said. It was an order.

“Flamenco guitars,” Pinelli rumbled. “Flamenco guitars, darling.”

She knew where he wanted to go. She gave the name to the cab driver. It was a dark place. The three of us sat at one side of a round table, and looked at the small stage where a man sat in a kitchen chair under a very bright spotlight and played intricate Spanish music on the gaudiest guitar I have ever seen. He had fingernails longer than any woman’s. Under the music I could hear Pinelli muttering to his wife. We drank white wine there, a lot of it.

At two-thirty, when there was no more guitar, and Pinelli was slumped with his eyes closed, she worked his wallet out of his pocket, took two twenties out of it, wedged the wallet into her small gold evening bag, handed me the forty dollars and said, “I’ll have the cab wait for you.”

I helped her get him up. Once he was on his feet he walked well enough. The cab was waiting. We went back up to the seventies, this time off Fifth. The little elevator was just big enough for the three of us. It climbed very slowly. Just as it stopped at their floor, Pinelli slid slowly down the elevator wall and sat on the floor like a fat child, his chin on his chest. We couldn’t waken him. She held his head up and slapped his face until the corner of his mouth started to bleed. He was too big to carry. I took him by the wrists and dragged him. She went ahead and opened the door, shut it when I had dragged him inside, and then went ahead, leading the way to the bedroom.