Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look ghastly.”

“It’s this place.”

She looked about the office, frowning. It was she who had suggested he borrow the room-her father owned the building. “What’s wrong with it?”

He did not want to admit his fright at being almost forty floors above street level. “It’s too impersonal. I don’t know if I can write here.”

“You could work at the apartment.”

“You know I can’t write at home.”

She settled on him her gray-green gaze. “ Is it home?” The silence that followed this was a chasm into which they both cast a glance and then stepped quickly back.

“You could go out to Silver Barn.” Silver Barn was their-her-house on Long Island. “The study is all set up. It’s quiet, no one to disturb you.” He pulled a face. “Well then,” she said, with a tightening of the lips, “if you can’t work, you can take me to lunch.”

They walked east along Forty-fourth Street and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absentmindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect.

Mario’s was crowded, as usual these days. The red-check tablecloths and rickety bentwood chairs proclaimed a peasant plainness that was contradicted by the breathtaking prices on the menu. The Glasses had been coming here since the early days of the establishment, long before they had moved permanently to New York, when Mario himself was still in charge and the place really was plain. They had nicknamed it the Bleeding Horse, for reasons no longer remembered. Now Louise gave up her dripping umbrella to a waiter and they were shown to their usual table in a corner by the window, set, Glass noted, for three. Flutes of Prosecco were brought at once. “I wish,” Louise murmured, “I had the courage to tell them what a common drink I think this is.”

Glass said nothing. He liked Prosecco. He liked the gesture, too, the drinks coming uncalled-for and set down before them with an actorly flourish. It made him feel an old New York hand; he could almost see the caption, “Glass in the Bleeding Horse, one of his favorite Manhattan eateries.” He often thought of his life in journalese, it was an old habit. He wondered if Louise considered him common, too, like the wine.

“How is the work?” his wife asked, her eyes on the menu. “Have you made a start yet?” The rain-light from the window gave her the look of an early Florentine madonna as she sat there with her long, angular, pale face inclined, and the menu she was holding might have been a psalter.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t made a start. I mean, I haven’t started writing. There are things I have to do first.”

“Research, you mean?”

He looked at her sharply. But there was no way she could know about Dylan Riley; he had told no one about the Lemur. She was still reading the menu, bringing to it the rapt, radiant attention that she brought to everything she did, even, he ruefully recalled, lovemaking. “Yes, research,” he mumbled, “that kind of thing.”

The waiter came and Glass ordered linguine with clams and Louise asked for a plain green salad. It was all she ever ate at lunchtime. Why, then, Glass wondered, did she spend so long poring over the menu? Having taken their order, the waiter pointed his pencil inquiringly at the empty third place, but Louise shook her head. “David might look in,” she told Glass. “I said we’d eat and he could join us for coffee.”

Glass made no comment. David Sinclair was Louise’s son by her first marriage, to a Wall Street lawyer who seemed to have passed through her life leaving hardly a trace, except, of course, the young man who now occupied the center of her world. Glass looked round for the waiter and the wine list; if his stepson was joining them he would need more than a glass of Prosecco.

Their food arrived and they ate in silence for a time. The small rain wept against the windowpane and the cars and taxis going past shimmered and slid as in a wet mirage. Glass was wondering why he felt the need to be so secretive about Dylan Riley. Bill Mulholland’s life was emblematic of the last two-thirds of the chaotic, violent, and dizzyingly innovative century that had ended not so long ago. No one would expect a biographer to do unaided the extensive research that would be required for the writing of the life of such a man-no one except that man himself. Bill Mulholland was the original rugged individualist and required those around him to be made of the same stern stuff. What sort of sissy writer would hire someone else to do the donkeywork? He had offered the commission, along with a million-dollar fee, to his son-in-law because, as he had said, he trusted him; trusted him, that is, as Glass well understood, to leave certain overly heavy stones unturned. It was Glass himself-not his father-in-law, as he had told Dylan Riley-who wanted all the facts, even, or especially, the inconvenient ones. Glass believed Aristotle was right: he that holds a secret holds power.

He took a drink of wine and studied his wife. She was attending to her plate of greens with the long-necked, finical concentration of a heron at the water’s edge. She had urged him strongly to accept her father’s offer. “You used to like nothing better than a challenge,” she had said, “and writing my father’s life will be nothing if not that.” He had noted then, too, the tense employed. Used to. “And a million dollars,” she had added, with a lopsided, ironical smile, “is a million dollars.”

It was not the money that had made him take on the job. What, then? He supposed Louise was right. What greater challenge could there be than to write the official biography of his own father-in-law, one of the fiercest and most controversial of that last cohort of Cold Warriors who had, so they believed, brought the Evil Empire to the dust?

“You know you’ll have to give the manuscript to the boys at Langley for their okay,” his father-in-law had told him, with that famous twinkle. “There are some things that can never get told.” And Glass, remembering that remark, thought again now of Nixon, poor old Tricky Dick, sweating under the arc lamps, in another age.

David Sinclair arrived. He was tall and sleekly slim, like his mother, but black-haired and swarthy where she was russet and pearl-Rubin Sinclair, his father, was a hirsute and barely civilized redneck from Kentucky. David was handsome, in a dandyish sort of way, but his slightly protruding eyes were set unfortunately close together-whenever Glass contemplated his stepson he recalled Truman Capote saying of Marlene Dietrich that if her eyes had been a fraction nearer to each other she would have been a chicken. Waspish, wicked Truman. Glass had tried to interview him once, over a hopelessly bibulous lunch at the Four Seasons in the middle of which the sozzled novelist had laid his cheek on the tablecloth and gone noisily to sleep. Glass at the time was young enough not to be embarrassed, and contentedly finished his broiled squab and the remains of a bottle of Mouton Rothschild, calm in the knowledge that the lavish treat was being paid for by the Sunday Times of London.

“Hello,” David Sinclair said to Glass, sliding sinuously into his seat and unfolding a napkin across his lap. His attitude always toward his stepfather was one of amused skepticism. “How is the great world?”

Glass smiled thinly. “It wasn’t so great,” he said, “the last time I looked.”