Donald Westlake - Two Much!

“Then I’ll give you a ring tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh, I get it. There’s somebody there right now, and you can’t talk.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You and your girls,” he said, with a little chuckle of envy. “Okay, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Any time at all,” I said.

“So long.”

Would he ever get off the goddamn phone? “That’s right,” I said.

“Well, uh...” For the love of Christ , Ralph! “So long, then.” And he finally hung the hell up.

“The thing is, Art,” I told the dead phone, “when I came back East it was to be helpful.” I waited; the phone said buzzzz . “Well, sure, kid, I realize that” Buzzzzzz . “Fine. Then I’ll see you Wednesday.” Buzzzzzz . “So long.”

I hung up, and Betty said, “What was that all about?”

“That was Art,” I said.

“Well, I know that . What did he want?”

“He can’t come out this week. There’s some tax problem, auditing the company books, something like that. I really don’t know enough about that side of the business yet, so Art has to handle it himself.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “Liz will be disappointed.”

“So’s Art,” I said, and I meant it. “But he says I should just stay out here all this week. There wouldn’t be room for me in the apartment with him there.”

“Well, we’ll stay in my place,” she said.

Another complication? “What place?”

“In Manhattan.”

“Gee,” I said, “I do hate to waste these summer days. It’s so much nicer out here.”

She gave me a coquettish look. “But we have a special reason to go to the city,” she said. “Don’t you know what it is?”

I didn’t, and I hate uncertainty. Life is tricky enough as it is. “Some special reason to be in New York?”

“Do you know who I’m going to be by Wednesday?”

“ Who you’re going to be?”

“I’m going to be Mrs. Bart Dodge,” she informed me, then abruptly flung her arms about me and kissed me on the ear and neck. “Isn’t that going to be wonderful?”

“Fabulous,” I said, which was the simple truth.

She released me, and I saw there were stars in her eyes. “Do you think your brother could be our best man?”

“Gee, what a great idea,” I said. “Of course, he might be too busy this week, but I’ll sure ask him.”

Art was there in spirit. Like the tremulous virgins in Victorian novels, I went through my wedding in a daze. Betty ran the whole thing; all I had to do was sit back and let it happen.

And wonder, from time to time, just what the hell was going on. What did Betty want with me anyway? I knew why I was marrying her, but why was she so hell-bent on marrying me?

And I mean determined . From the moment of our arrival in Manhattan Sunday afternoon, when she browbeat the Kerner family doctor into backdating our blood tests to Friday, until the moment of our legalization in a judge’s chambers in Weehawken, New Jersey, on Tuesday evening, Betty drove forward like a piranha fish through a cow, undeflected by cartilage or bone. Was Bart really that lovable?

Well, what other explanation was there? I’d been too busy with my double life to pay much attention, but apparently I’d bowled the girl over right from the beginning with my plodding semidistracted amiability. I’d never realized such depths of passive charm resided within me. Nor was it likely to be generally as provocative as Betty found it. Hers had to be a very special taste: if I was in truth the most exciting bachelor she’d ever met, the moneyed class in this country is in serious trouble.

In any event, Betty set to with a will and got us married. “You just relax, sweetheart,” she said, giving me a quick kiss and a brisk shove into a handy easy chair, “and I’ll take care of all the details. And if there’s anything you want, just ask Nikki or Blondell or Carlos.”

“Yes, dear,” I said.

Nikki or Blondell or Carlos. The Kerner family home in Manhattan, an eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in the sixties, with windows and terrace overlooking the park from a safe seven stories up, was exactly my idea of the life of the rich, starting with the three servants just mentioned. We’d been roughing it at Point O’ Woods, doing our own cooking, dressing ourselves, all of that lower class raggle-taggle. A local girl from Bay Shore, a stout blonde teen-ager who seemed to be molded out of wet white bread and who occasionally answered to the name Francine, ferried over twice a week to do the laundry and sweep the floors, but my God even dental technicians have cleaning ladies.

Well, the apartment in New York was more like it. The rooms were spacious and expensively furnished, and the things hanging on the walls were, I discovered with my fingernail, paintings and not prints. There were three phone lines, reflecting the former occupancy of Kerner pére and his far-flung business interests, and there were four bathrooms, reflecting his tendency to produce daughters. And while the three servants lived in, they were hardly underfoot; they had quarters of their own, beyond the kitchen. Nikki, and Blondell, and Carlos.

The last-named, Carlos, was the chauffeur who’d had the piano key inserted in his shoulder during the New Year’s tragedy. A short and stocky forty-year-old with a flat sullen Indian face and an accent like a briar patch, he went out of his way to assure all and sundry that he was Mess-kin and not Poor Ree-kin. When not driving, which was most of the time — his trip out to Bay Shore to pick up Betty and me from the ferry Sunday afternoon had apparently been his first excursion in the family’s new Lincoln in several weeks — Carlos was vaguely a handyman, terrace gardener, sometime butler, frequent bartender, and general layabout. We viewed one another from the outset with mutual distrust.

Blondell, a great round black mammy of the sort I’d thought had been made illegal by the Supreme Court decision of 1954, was the cook, of course. She was also not an American citizen, which perhaps explained her continuing existence in a form that had to be rated a debit to her race. Hailing from an obscure Caribbean island named Anguilla, she carried a British passport, but the language she spoke could hardly have been less English. Her accent, even more impenetrable than that of Carlos, was like wayward breezes: soft and unpredictable. Since as Bart I wore glasses, and Blondell loved intellectuals above all things, she and I got along from the beginning.

Nikki’s accent was French. She was the maid, her manner was saucy, and her presence made me revise slightly my opinion of the late Albert J. Kerner. She had Candy’s boniness, and some of Candy’s foxlike facial features, but softened in her case by a more honest lewdness. Her uniform skirts were short, and she seemed to find an incredible number of work tasks that required her to bend over in front of me, showing me what she would have called her derrière . I called it an ass, and I wanted to bite it, but of course with the wedding so close that was impossible. Perhaps Art, in a few days?...

Well. That was for the speculative future; in the speculator’s present I was about to become a gushing groom. The waiting period in New York State was too long, so on Tuesday Carlos drove us to Jersey City where we took out our license, and where Charlie Hillerman’s birth certificate passed with flying colors. Then some sexual extravagances in the backseat of the Lincoln during a run out to Far Hills for dinner with an old college chum of Betty’s plus the chum’s new husband; these were the only people in on our little secret.

I must say I liked their house. This was the foxhunting section of New Jersey, where Jackie Kennedy used to hang out, and the house did the neighborhood proud. A great sprawling stone creature four stories high, it stood amid a park of imported trees, dotted with tennis court and arbor and swimming pool. The stables were out back. Inside, there were warm wood tones and expensive antiques and the comfortable aura of money gouged from generations of peasantry.