“I’ll join her then.”
“Of course, sir.” He hesitated.
“I don’t think I’ll require a guide, but you might tell my wife I’ll be with her in ten minutes or so.”
Bateman repeated his, “Of course, sir,” and went out. The truth was that I wanted to assure myself that everything I had carried in the pockets of my old suit—car keys, wallet, and so on—had been transferred to the new one he had laid out for me; and I did not want to insult him, if I could prevent it, by doing it in front of him.
Everything was where it should be, and I had a clean handkerchief in place of my own only slightly soiled one. I pulled it out to look at (Irish linen) and a flutter of green came with it—two bills, both fifties.
Over eggs Benedict I complimented Marcella on her new dress and asked if she had noticed where it had been made.
“Rowe’s. It’s a little shop on Fifth Avenue.”
“You know it, then. Nothing unusual?”
She answered, “No, nothing unusual,” more quickly than she should have, and I knew that there had been money in her new clothes too, and that she did not intend to tell me about it.
“We’ll be going home after this. I wonder if they’ll want me to give this jacket back.”
“Going home?” She did not look up from her plate. “Why? And who are ‘they’?”
“Whoever owns this house.”
“Yesterday you called him he. You said Priest talked about
I said nothing.
“You think he spent the night in my room, they separated us and you thought that was why, and you just waited there—was it under a sheet?—for me to scream or something. And I didn’t.”
“I was hoping you had and I hadn’t heard you.”
“Nothing happened, dammit! I went to bed and went to sleep, but as for going home, you’re out of your mind. Can’t you see we’ve got the job? Whoever he is—wherever he is—he likes us. We’re going to stay here and live like human beings, at least for a while.”
And so we did. That day we stayed on from hour to hour. After that, from day to day, and at last from week to week. I felt like Klipspringer, the man who was Jay Gatsby’s guest for so long that he had no other home—except that Klipspringer, presumably, saw Gatsby from time to time, and no doubt made agreeable conversation, and perhaps even played the piano for him. Our Gatsby was absent. I do not mean that we avoided him, or that he avoided us; there were no rooms we were forbidden to enter, and no times when the servants seemed eager that we should play golf or swim or go riding. Before the good weather ended, we had two couples up for a weekend; and when Bette Windgassen asked if Marcella had inherited the place, and then if we were renting it, Marcella said, “Oh, do you like it?” in such a way that they left, I think, convinced that it was ours, or as good as ours.
And so it was. We went away when we chose, which was seldom, and returned when we chose, quickly. We ate on the various terraces and balconies, and in the big, formal dining room, and in our own bedrooms. We rode the horses and drove the Mercedes and the cranky, appealing old Jaguar as though they were our own. We did everything, in fact, except buy the groceries and pay the taxes and the servants, but someone else was doing that, and every morning I found one hundred dollars in the pockets of my clean clothes. If summer had lasted forever, perhaps I would still be there.
The poplars lost their leaves in one October week; at the end of it I fell asleep listening to the hum of the pump that emptied the swimming pool. When the rain came, Marcella turned sour and drank too much. One evening I made the mistake of putting my arm about her shoulders as we sat before the fire in the trophy room.
“Get your filthy hands off me,” she said. “I don’t belong to you.
“Priest, look here. He hasn’t said an intelligent word to me all day or done a decent thing, and now he wants to paw me all night.”
Priest pretended, of course, that he had not heard her.
“Look over here! Damn it, you’re a human being, aren’t you?”
He did not ignore that. “Yes, madame, I am a human being.”
“I’ll say you are. You’re more of a man than he is. This is your place, and you’re keeping us for pets—is it me you want? Or him? You sent us the ad, didn’t you? He thinks you go into my room at night, or he says he does. Maybe you really come to his—is that it?”
Priest did not answer. I said, “For God’s sake, Marcella.”
“Even if you’re old, Priest, I think you’re too much of a man for that.” She stood up, tottering on her long legs and holding on to the stonework of the fireplace. “If you want me, take me. If this house is yours, you can have me. We’ll send him to Vegas—or throw him on the dump.”
In a much softer tone than he usually used, Priest said, “I don’t want either of you, madame.”
I stood up then, and caught him by the shoulders. I had been drinking too, though only half or a quarter as much as Marcella, but I think it was more than that—it was the accumulated frustration of all the days since Jim Bruce told me I was finished. I outweighed Priest by at least forty pounds, and I was twenty years younger. I said, “I want to know.”
“Release me, sir, please.”
“I want to know who it is; I want to know now. Do you see that fire? Tell me, Priest, or I swear I’ll throw you in it.”
