“Just wanted to see how I was holding up, did you?”
“That’s right—trying to keep you afloat.”
“Isn’t the litigation wearing you down?”
“Why should a few hardship cases wear me down when the law is on our side and there are opportunities wherever I look?” A piece of almond that had attached itself to his lower lip bobbed as he spoke. He felt it there and tried to lick it off between phrases, but it stuck.
“You’ll have to seize them without me.”
“But can you still afford to be on the sidelines?”
“It’s no time for me to take chances.” This was only half true. If I didn’t keep ponies or host shooting parties or race my own cars, I still had about as much as I wanted. I could identify the pinched feeling etched on the multitude of new faces around me, but I hadn’t known it myself. And as long as I minded my own business and remained wary of Mickey’s prospects, this was how it would stay.
Mickey wouldn’t hear of it. Every building site we drove past—and they were everywhere: you couldn’t tell whether the shopping malls were going up around the new houses or houses around the malls or whether both were there for the sake of the roads that led to them—provided an occasion for a harangue on the favorable climate. He kept at me until I agreed to look over documents he’d happened to bring with him. It was these that I was pretending to grapple with upstairs when my neighbor dropped in to thank me for the favor I’d done him when we first met.
He didn’t seem to remember that I hadn’t done the favor willingly. Or if he did remember, he didn’t care.
A record playing in the living room (a scratchy string quartet I’d stopped listening to in the search for the pack of cigarettes I was beginning to suspect I’d again left by the pool), the tones of Vicky’s phone voice merging from upstairs with the line of the viola, our scaredy-cat mastiff Frances sprawling across the newspapers that were scattered at the foot of an Eames ottoman in the library, ice cubes melting in a tray on the kitchen counter: such was the scene when he stuck his head through the screen door and said “Hello?”
Frances went through her routine, the folds wrinkling between her eyes as a sense of alarm penetrated her anvil skull. She rushed for the door, pulled up short, and barked once perplexedly before hiding herself behind the couch. “Come in,” I answered.
“Big dog,” he said, staying put.
“Big pussycat.”
He entered and extended his hand to me, a straightforward offer after many cautious salutations. “I’m Bud.”
He didn’t look up close as I’d imagined he would. Black, Vitalis-sheathed hair pushed back and to the side, broad brow barely creased but heavily freckled, eyebrows tapering into arrows that pointed at his pulsing temples when he frowned, hooded eyes, a nose that was big without being long or wide and suggested the bowl of an upside-down tobacco pipe, an upper lip that didn’t fit evenly into the lower. His face was an odd fit, a motley composite hard to take in all at once, hard to take in and hard to pin down because he was always in motion; he talked with his hands, listened with his brow, agreed or disagreed by touch. No wonder that my brush with his memory comes as a clap on the shoulder.
“Bud?” I asked. “As in . . . ?”
“As in Schullberg, Adler, Hackett, Rommel.”
“Rommel?”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Jumpy, huh? Just seeing if you were listening. I often get away with that. My last name’s Younger, by the way.”
Younger than whom? I thought, and nearly said.
“I moved in next door a few months ago. You’ve seen me coming and going, haven’t you? I know I’ve seen you.”
“Well, sure,” I said, finally taking his hand. “Neil Fox. Pleased to meet you.”
His wife had taken his five-year-old daughter, who was running a high fever, to the hospital. It was just a precaution, he explained; there was no real danger. Still he wanted to borrow a car to go see them.
He had put me on the spot. I owned three cars, but only my pleasure car was in its bay, an Alfa Romeo runabout in that red that only the Italians seem to be able to get—vermilion luster with crimson depth—or that looks the way it does only beneath their enamel. I had lent the car out before, and it hadn’t come back in the same shape. Even good drivers were prone to struggle with its tricky clutch. Who knew what a father racing off to save his daughter might do to it? The simplest thing would have been to drive him there myself. The fact that I’d put a few scotches under my belt wouldn’t have stopped me, except that I’d recently been pulled over and couldn’t risk its happening again.
“You see, I’m due somewhere.”
“You wouldn’t have to take me. I could borrow a car.” He absentmindedly swept a few bits of ice from the countertop into the sink. “Your wife—you’re married, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t she drive?”
“She’s away.”
He nodded in the direction of our three-port garage. “And you haven’t got another car?”
“Normally, yes, but just now they’re out of commission.”
“Maybe you’d have time to drop me there beforehand?”
“I’m afraid not. You see yourself that I’m not dressed to go out.”
“How long will that take?”
“A taxi would be here sooner, I’m sure.”
“A taxi, here? It’d take forever.”
“I’m sorry, if it was any other time . . .” Any other car, I meant.
My refusal staggered him. That is, the look he gave me before he turned to go—part wince and part sneer—staggered me.
“Hold on a minute,” I said, following him out the door. “Can you handle a sports car?”
“I used to sell them for a living, practically.”
I decided to go with him. At least this way I’d be able to assess the damage to the car if not to control it and, after some coffee, drive back myself. “Be with you in a minute,” I told him and went upstairs to run a razor across my face and change my clothes.
He was waiting by the car when I came down. “Were you able to change your appointment?”
“No trouble at all.”
He did know how to handle the roadster, handled it so well that—despite the usual difficulty getting into reverse—I enjoyed the ride, a rare occurrence as a passenger in my own car.
I wasn’t the only one enjoying myself. He seemed to be taking us on a tour of the neighborhood.
“If it’s the hospital you want,” I said as we made our second lap around the local streets, “there are more direct routes.”
“There’s a shortcut to the Expressway. You go behind the park up there.”
“Take a right up here. It’ll put you on the access road.”
“But I’m telling you, we can go parallel to it.”
There was no such shortcut but I let him drive on. It had been a while since I’d taken any notice of the hilly streets named for fallen stands of trees or of the specimens that survived along the edges: locusts along The Locusts, birches along The Birches, dogwoods along The Dogwoods, hemlocks along The Hemlocks.
When the crash of ’29 threatened to ruin the masters of the estate of Dunsinane—its hillside chateau commanding the harbor, stables, polo grounds, and dairy—they sold their woods to a builder who put up