of the house. Sure, we know the people who run it, eat with them now and then, but they have a separate administrative structure, handle their own claims and so on. If we got close enough to the business to analyze it, let alone commit fraud with it, the political stink would be so high we’d be out on our butts within an hour. Guaranteed.”
I shook my head reluctantly and turned to my ice cream. Ajax did not sound promising, and I’d been pinning hopes to it. “By the way,” I said, “did you check on Ajax’s pension money?”
Ralph laughed. “You are persistent, Vic, I’ll grant you that. Yeah, I called a friend of mine over there. Sorry, Vic. Nothing doing. He says he’ll look into it, see whether we get any third-hand stuff laid off on us-” I looked a question. “Like the Loyal Alliance people give some money to Dreyfus to manage and Dreyfus lays some of it off on us. Basically though, this guy says Ajax won’t touch the Knifegrinders with a ten-foot pole. Which doesn’t surprise me too much.”
I sighed and finished my ice cream, feeling suddenly tired again. If things came easily in this life, we would never feel pride in our achievements. My mother used to tell me that, standing over me while I practiced the piano. She’d probably disapprove of my work, if she were alive, but she would never let me slouch at the dinner table grumbling because it wasn’t turning out right. Still, I was too tired tonight to try to grapple with the implications of everything I’d learned today.
“You look like your adventures are catching up with you,” Ralph said.
I felt a wave of fatigue sweep over me, almost carrying me off to sleep with it. “Yeah, I’m fading,” I admitted. “I think I’d better go to bed. Although in a way I hate to go to sleep, I’ll be so sore in the morning. Maybe I could wake up enough to dance. If you keep moving, it’s not so bad.”
“You look like you’d fall asleep on a disco floor right now, Vic, and I’d be arrested for beating you or something. Why does exercise help?”
“If you keep the blood circulating, it keeps the joints from stiffening so much.”
“Well, maybe we could do both-sleep and exercise, I mean.” The smile in his eyes was half embarrassed, half pleased.
I suddenly thought that after my evening with Earl and Tony, I’d like the comfort of someone in bed with me. “Sure,” I said, smiling back.
Ralph called to the waiter for the bill and paid it promptly, his hands shaking slightly. I considered fighting him for it, especially since I could claim it as a business expense, but decided I’d done enough fighting for one day.
We waited outside for the doorman to fetch the car. Ralph stood close to me, not touching me, but tense. I realized he had been planning this ending all along and hadn’t been sure he could carry it off, and I smiled a little to myself in the dark. When the car came, I sat close to him on the front seat. “I live on Halsted, just north of Belmont,” I said, and fell asleep on his shoulder.
He woke me up at the Belmont-Halsted intersection and asked for the address. My neighborhood is just north and west of a smarter part of town and there is usually good parking on the street; he found a place across from my front door.
It took a major effort to pull myself out of the car. The night air was warm and comforting and Ralph steadied me with shaking hands as we crossed the street and went into my front hallway. The three flights up looked very far away and I had a sudden mental flash of sitting on the front steps waiting for my dad to come home from work and carry me upstairs. If I asked Ralph to, he would carry me up. But it would alter the dependency balance in the relationship too much. I set my teeth and climbed the stairs. No one was lying in wait at the top.
I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Martell from the liquor cupboard. I got two glasses down, two of my mother’s Venetian glasses, part of the small dowry she had brought to her marriage. They were a beautiful clear red with twisted stems. It had been a long time since I had had anyone up to my apartment, and I suddenly felt shy and vulnerable. I’d been overexposed to men today and wasn’t ready to do it again in bed.
When I brought the bottle and glasses back to the living room, Ralph was sitting on the couch, leafing through
Ralph told me that his family was Irish. “That’s why it’s ‘Devereux’ without an A-the As are French.” We sat for a while without talking, drinking our brandy. He was a bit nervous, too, and it helped me relax. Suddenly he grinned, his face lighting, and said, “When I got divorced I moved into the city because I had a theory that that’s where you meet the chicks-sorry, women. But to tell you the truth, you’re the first woman I’ve asked out in the six months I’ve been here-and you’re not like any woman I ever met before.” He flushed a little. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not hopping in and out of bed every night. But I would like to get into bed with you.”
I didn’t answer him, but stood up and took his hand. Hand-in-hand, like five-year-olds, we walked into the bedroom. Ralph carefully helped me out of my dress and gently stroked my puffy arms. I unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his clothes and we climbed into the bed. I’d been afraid that I might have to help him along; recently divorced men sometimes have problems because they feel very insecure. Fortunately he didn’t, because I was too tired to help anyone. My last memory was of his breath expelling loudly, and then I was asleep.
7
A Little Help from a Friend
When I woke up, the room was full of the soft light of late morning, diffused through my heavy bedroom curtains. I was alone in the bed and lay still to collect my thoughts. Gradually the memory of yesterday’s events returned, and I moved my head cautiously to look at the bedside clock. My neck was very stiff, and I had to turn my whole body to see the time-11:30. I sat up. My stomach muscles were all right, but my thighs and calves were sore, and it was painful to stand upright. I did a slow shuffle to the bathroom, the kind you do the day after you run five miles when you haven’t been out for a couple of months, and turned the hot water in the tub on full blast.
Ralph called to me from the living room. “Good morning,” I called back. “If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to come here-I’m not walking any farther.” Ralph came into the bathroom, fully dressed, and joined me while I gloomily studied my face in the mirror over the sink. My incipient black eye had turned a deep blackish-purple, streaked with yellow and green. My uninjured left eye was bloodshot. My jaw had turned gray. The whole effect was unappealing.
Ralph seemed to share my feeling. I was watching his face in the mirror; he seemed a little disgusted. My bet was that Dorothy had never come home with a black eye-suburban life is so dull.
“Do you do this kind of thing often?” Ralph asked.
“You mean scrutinize my body, or what?” I asked.
He moved his hands vaguely. “The fighting,” he said.
“Not as much as I did as a child. I grew up on the South Side. Ninetieth and Commercial, if you know the area- lots of Polish steelworkers who didn’t welcome racial and ethnic newcomers-and the feeling was mutual. The law of the jungle ruled in my high school-if you couldn’t swing a mean toe or fist, you might as well forget it.”
I turned from the mirror. Ralph was shaking his head, but he was trying to understand, trying not to back away. “It’s a different world,” he said slowly. “I grew up in Libertyville, and I don’t think I was ever in a real fight. And if my sister had come home with a black eye, my mother would have been hysterical for a month. Didn’t your folks mind?”
“Oh, my mother hated it, but she died when I was fifteen, and my dad was thankful that I could take care of myself.” That was true-Gabriella had hated violence. But she was a fighter, and I got my scrappiness from her, not from my big, even-tempered father.
“Did all the girls in your school fight?” Ralph wanted to know.
I climbed into the hot water while I considered this. “No, some of them just got scared off. And some got themselves boyfriends to protect them. The rest of us learned to protect ourselves. One girl I went to school with still loves to fight-she’s a gorgeous redhead, and she loves going to bars and punching out guys who try to pick her up. Truly amazing.”
