Mysteries of Motion Read online

  “Bet you she comes all the way around the block again,” Mulenberg said.

  Ventura checked his watch again. “Got fifteen. Then, I’ve gotta.” He always had an appointment, sharply kept. Often in the Oyster Bar, south side of the Plaza Hotel. “Give you anything she’s a model. Or an actress, maybe. Going to meet her numbers runner, or her rock-jock, at that new African movie. Or even a college girl.”

  “Upper Lexington Avenue, you might be right. Or the Village—absolutely. But not this street,” Mulenberg said happily. “I tell you what. Same stakes, but give me a handicap. Make it twelve. Twelve minutes. She took long steps.”

  Ventura nodded, slowly. “So she’s it, huh.” When he shrugged he did do it like a shorter man. “Wish you luck.”

  Mulenberg turned to watch the crowd milling along past the white-striped hotel marquees which were heated in the winter, the iron coach lamps shining down from another era on traffic signals, the car headlights and the muted glow of closed shop windows silky with tourist-deluxe ivories, or burning with flowers too precious to be sincerely sent to anybody. Central Park South at night was always a stage, moving with the same masks as on streets he knew in Rio or Caracas, or like on the Élysées or the Veneto—and these days even with the same authenticating touch of beggardom, in a deep niche or curbside. But this street at this hour had for him another pressure behind it, sweet over the gasoline cording his throat strong. It was partly the park, wrinkling behind all like one of those blurred Barbizon prints in hotel bedrooms—although his travel triangle included several such parks. From here he could see, high up in the Gulf tower, his own office floors, barred with light. Standing here with Ventura, mentally he could turn on the faucet of the bar sink in his own private lounge stories above, and see all his rainbow success flow from it—while down below here, he teased the whole funicular schedule of his life with a little healthy risk. This was the stage he was on. It was why he stayed at the A.C.

  “Three minutes.” Ventura looked worried this month, baggier under the eyes. “I wouldn’t go with a college girl if you paid me. It’s been offered. On my own tennis court.”

  “And you wouldn’t go with a black one,” Mulenberg said idly. He knew the answer. Not a question of color.

  “None of your crazy barbarics. I want to be reminded.”

  And you don’t, Ventura meant. All he knew of Mulenberg’s wife was the name inscribed on the watch Mulenberg took off, poolside, and that Mulenberg had met her in high school, going on to college with her, back when the money was potatoes—and from them, from both their parents’ farmlands. But he was right.

  “How is your court?”

  “Wet, dry. Grassy, muddy. Even monsters. Woodchucks, moles. Two fifty a month, the lawn service. I do it myself. But the kid is learning.” He has a tired, responsible smile. Mulenberg likes him again.

  “And the business?” All Mulenberg knows is that its profits, dependent on many painstaking Asiatic hands in obscurely shifting places, are far too small for the gross.

  “It goes.” Ventura was staring up at the Gulf & Western. “Why you don’t just sit up there—and phone. From a gold-plated mouthpiece. I’ll supply you one. Made in Hong Kong.”

  “Why don’t you? Phone. From the warehouse in Astoria.”

  “Because the place is loaded with family. I have brothers-in-law the way other people have warts.” Ventura threw up his hands. But he was enjoying this. “Six minutes. Where you suppose she is, already on Fifth Avenue? Looking in the window, Bergdorf’s? Or’d she cross to Tiffany’s window, look wistful, and get picked up by some other john?”

  “Tell you what,” Mulenberg said. “I can’t stand brunch. But I lose—what do you say to a tip on a modest killing in Saudi crude?”

  “That what they’re calling money these days?” Ventura said lightly.

  “When it comes in tankers.”

  “Tell you the truth, haven’t seen much of it any style lately.” Ventura’s eyes closed. “And what if you win?”

  “Settle it later.”

  Ventura’s eyes opened. “Made a bet like that myself a while back.” He shook himself. “Then you think you’re going to lose?”

  “By a hair. But I feel her, loping along.” He positively could. It was like an inner rhythm. Of the luck that came to him on this corner, behind which the A.C.’s back end gave off an odor of steak-fart and french fries into the pearly light pouring upward, natural but powerless against that oil rig of his on Columbus Circle, from the dirtier end of a park “built in the already outmoded style of Louis Philippe,” as he’d read in an article on it while waiting for a plane in the executive lounge at Düsseldorf. Sending on a contribution to the park’s restoration fund, afterward.

  “This is one of the great romantic streets of the world.”

  Ventura ducked his head. “You better watch yourself.”

  He laughed. A shock of world-stained blond hair fell over his eyes. He wiped it back. “Not tonight. This is always my lucky night.”

  “Yeah, you told. About Rome.”

  “Did I?” In his mind these adventures were always private, but this corner must make him loose-tongued. It hadn’t been a pretty exploit. He’d picked her up from a doorway on Trastevere where she was lounging deep in shadow. An old trick, but even when drawn to a lamp she was extraordinary, tiny and cream-skinned, an absolute Italian beauty with a chorine’s legs, and costumed like a legionnaire, except for the round bellhop’s hat. He didn’t like costumes, ordinarily. In the cab she’d smelled fresh enough, of that same mink-oil hairwash all the office girls there were using. Until they were inside, she hadn’t smiled.

  “Then she opened her mouth, you said. And the whole Forum was in it.”

  Brown, rotting stumps. Little tombstone teeth. In gums of ancient red. He’d paid her off at once, as kindly as he could.

  Ventura was putting the frayed cigarillo in a case. He caught Mulenberg’s glance. “Expensive.”

  “Must be. Never before saw you light one.”

  “Come from India. My swami gets them for me. Want some? I can get them for people.”

  “India. Who the hell gets cigars from India? If you can call those cigars. Hate to tell you what they remind me of.”

  “What?” Ventura has a funny half smile on him.

  “Of my sheepdog pup’s—” He didn’t like to say it. Of a thing a man put in his mouth.

  Ventura looked down at the case, a flattish wide one containing maybe twenty of the skinny smokes. “Thank God they don’t look like mine.”

  Mulenberg stared farsightedly at the corner where the girl could come on from either Fifth or Sixth, if she was coming. Out of the edge of his eye he saw Ventura was anxiously monitoring also. Wanted to win, no doubt about it.

  Ventura turned suddenly. “I like them normal,” he said with vicious emphasis. “Normal for me. Some nice-looking woman, not a girl. With brown eyes. And hips. In a pink slack suit.” He grinned “My swami orders those too. On the half shell.”

  Mulenberg thought he knew now what there was about this man that gave one such an advantage over him. He had the over-limpid aura of a man who didn’t know his own processes.

  Turning away uncomfortably, Mulenberg saw her. There surely—that floating drapery, center crowd, half down the block. His heart pounded.

  His elbow is touched. “Let me get a girl for you, Jack. The right way. Your taste even. I have an idea my swami’s—pretty dark.”

  Ventura’s first name is Clark. Mulenberg has never called him by it.

  “There she is,” Mulenberg said. “Look at her. Sailing down the block.”

  “Down a street. But you win.” Ventura tried to grin. “It’s twelve, on the nose.”

  They both have stopwatches.

  “Thirteen,” Mulenberg lies. “I told you. By a hair.”

  “You’re—” Ventura grasps for his hand. “A good guy.”

  “My lucky number.”

  Ventura gives a slight shiver, as if to say “N
ot mine.” Eyes half shut, he watches the girl as if she were cargo. “That material she’s wearing. We stocked it.”

  “I’ll put the order through Monday morning. In your name. Quarter shares in a tankerful. Of the best Arabian light.”

  “Monday.” Ventura rubbed his eyes, sighed. “And today’s Saturday. All day. Well—so be it. I withdraw brunch.”

  The girl neared them. “The best Arabian—” Ventura whispered slyly. “That a brand-name?”

  Mulenberg, nodding, signaling him to blow. This was often the way it happened. He found—as huntsmen said of a fox discovered. And Ventura left, for his appointment.

  “Arabian light?” Ventura was laughing. “Ah, I don’t blame you. But watch yourself.” He left, going off toward Fifth.

  And Mulenberg, stepping forward from under the marquee, drew breath for what he’d come here to find. The perfect synthetic experience.

  The girl took his arm, riskily. Close up, she was absolute black, too much so for the West Indian mix he’d thought her. Black marble, and taking the evening afterglow on small mouth, nose and shining cheekbones, the eyes big under wingy brows. The mouth parted, on pearl. No, ivory. Her ears were crimped as tight to her head as he’d ever seen, as if a doting mother had nibbled off excess.

  Only the hair was bronzed, straight hair, not fuzzed but braided into many small weavings curved from center skull and rounded on the nape, giving the effect of a madonna’s coif.

  A beauty, though not being the expert on blacks that Ventura supposed him, he had no idea of her nationality. But she must be an amateur. She was doing it all wrong. Coming right up to him. Standing there. Eye to six-foot-three eye. She was his height exactly. Or a quarter inch more.

  “Slip me the telephone number,” he said dead-mouthed. “And walk on. Smile how-d’ya-do and good-bye. And walk on. Police.” There was a campaign on. They were picking up anybody and everybody this part of town. Said the Club.

  Smiling, she slipped her arm further in the crook of his. Dangling from her wrist, a fluffy pouch brushed his hip. But to Mulenberg’s credit, when the cop came up he stood where he was. At that point he caught sight of the television camera grooving up to the three of them.

  So had the cop. Caught in the simper with which ordinary people faced the tube, the cop righted himself. “ABC Playhouse?” he barked. The camera crewman—there was only the one, a short young man, black too—nodded. “That program, huh,” the policeman said as a second cop came up, the other half of his detail. “Now don’t all crowd in,” the first one said loftily to the two or three persons already gathering. “This lucky man’s going to win something. Aren’t you?”

  Mulenberg nodded slowly. At the girl. “If I’m smart.”

  The second policeman dismissed the crowd with a circular spin of his hand, as if winding them up. The two officers then walked on.

  The girl flattened herself protectively against Mulenberg’s shoulder—she was too tall to cuddle, or too proud—and urged him toward the Seventh Avenue corner. It was easy to do as he was being bidden, or forced. Their steps matched.

  The crewman, toddling his camera, followed them.

  One block south they went, to Fifty-eighth, where they crossed the avenue and continued west on the south side, and now indeed they were in front of the Playhouse and its almost eternal line of freebie ticketholders waiting to be let in to clap for tonight. Gawking self-importantly, about to inhale the same high ozone as some Hollywood star only fifty feet from them, they took no notice of Mulenberg and his—escort. As he’d suspected, he and she weren’t destined for the Playhouse itself. But as they swept or loped past it—for he’d caught her ball-foot, heel-foot stride—the crewman detached himself and his camera, disappearing with it behind an iron fence well beyond the main entrance, which Mulenberg, idly passing, had often noted. So this was what that so secret-looking television-palace door was merely for.

  This whole operation, or abduction, if that was what was intended, was so amateur. Except for the girl herself. He now had hopes of her. He could feel her funny purse knock-knocking against his thigh. He was meant to, of course. He thought maybe she already knew he was enjoying it.

  It was Mulenberg’s by now self-acknowledged fate to have a body—and a soul also, he was convinced—which only a well-managed copulation brought to full integrity. At such a moment, not only the limbs, mouth and hands accessory to the act moved symphonic with his genitals. In his head, imagery moved musically, toward accomplishment. Ideas fruitioned and took root. All of him swam in a piety of the whole and the solvable. And though it might be fate’s ultra-seminal joke on him, everything conceived, including his children, had at first worked out.

  Until his wife’s death he’d never even realized this. For so many years his sexual life had been at home exclusively. When this had had to change it seemed to him that he simply left his deeper needs—including a liking for his wife which was more than love and not far from holy—in home’s hands. During the intervals of her illness when he did seek out other sex, it was always in a foreign country, a foreign language, allowing him a minimum of self-observation. At the same time his business was blossoming, so that he was really learning more about other cities than about other women. Meanwhile, each time that he could return to her, the drama of her diminishing body held him fast. All his spiritual remission—which was how he vaguely saw his own process—was surely there, had been kept for him. For the last year and a half of her life, staying at her side, he went without sex—and continued so for months after she was gone. Somehow he couldn’t get back to it. At last a friendly pal in Oklahoma—a banker more worldly-wise than most of their neighbors, and with a property adjoining Mulenberg’s—one night came to the homestead where Mulenberg was malingering while all business and family success slid from him, and brought with him a compliant and quite appetizing woman. “Had to be,” the banker had said later, and sharply. The woman, a widow, had been his sister-in-law, and he’d hoped for marriage for her. “You didn’t drink.”

  Within a meteoric week of that night and the next, Mulenberg’s spirits and fortunes had risen again, in an almost palpably breeding way. Yet the woman herself, aside from her decent manners, in no way resembled his wife—nor those other women either. Perhaps it was her very median-ness which had convinced. On Mulenberg’s newly embarked-upon travels, doubly extended because of the necessary business repairs, he’d begun to test carefully, finding that to a degree beyond any the banker would ever dream of, there did seem to be a most solemnly direct line between his copulations and his successes or failures.

  Though he had no special perversions, he did prefer that his girls, those goddesses out of the machine who performed his fate for him, be sensational rather than cozy—and, wary of personal connection, he never repeated them. Both habits seemed to him deductively natural. His subconscious clearly was afraid it might find out that its “process” could happen with anybody. The conscious Mulenberg had proved it. He would never again, of course, leave that process in the hands of one woman. After the Oklahoma widow, none of the women he chose was his contemporary, or came from anywhere near his own lifestyle—nor did any of his night attendants ever look anything like Trixie Bjornson, later Tess Mulenberg.

  The girl leading him stopped him short, in front of a narrow brownstone wedged between two warehouses. They were now on a block between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, across from an all-night garage in the open rear of a big apartment house, a 1940s affair of bow-knotted bay windows and freckle-colored stone. The house they faced had a ground-floor store to the right of the entry, a discount toiletries, shuttered now. Three steps led down to the outer door; probably a buzzer system released a locked inner one. Three stories rose above; the first one up had boarded windows, probably an extension of the store. Two upper floors of flats, that would be, either floor-throughs or divided front and back. After college he and his friends, making their maiden flight East, had lived by the dozens in such houses, then cheap. Brownstones, reces
sed yet street-wise, anonymous by the thousands, servicing the young of his day, the archaically old, a host of failed sexual partners not yet known as “singles” and all the human degrees between adventure and atrophy, were for no other reason always memorable.

  They went down the steps and through the outer door. Yes, there were the letterboxes: three, a bell-press below each. Would she buzz now to some accomplice above?

  She took out a key hung round that long neck. He noticed the skin texture, not oily brown, not powdery slate—a satiny opaque. Two of the letterboxes had names he couldn’t distinguish; the third was the store’s. Two floor-throughs then, no duplex. A fine indolence idled in all his limbs. Adventure always took him like this. But though he had luck, he never depended on it.

  “Give me the gun.”

  Turning without the slightest wince—yes, her eyes leveled with his—she handed him the purse which had been bobbing against him. He slung it on his left wrist and followed her up the stairs. One flight. Two. Not a stickup then, or a kidnap; maybe she carried the gun the way some women now carried police whistles or spray cans of Mace. Or maybe the two floors did constitute a house. Where the women shanghaied the customers? If this turned out to be some sort of setup, would he leave? He wasn’t sure.

  The second floor had only one door, with the customary peephole. Nobody peered from it. She opened up. He followed her cautiously, into a lighted flat, and stood there blinking. He was no longer a man whom the sight of a home rug or a remembrance of candles made nostalgic. Rooms satisfied him, or were ignored. But here was the flat in which he and his kind, two years out of school and not yet going back home, had lived with their new wives or girls, or alone. There was that same fireplace—more depersonalized, no matter what the incumbent put on its mantel, than the young Mulenberg, brought up on a ranch, had thought a fireplace could be. He’d had just such a black iron grate. Along with the day bed, in his time covered in one of those monosyllabic all-wear fabrics: “Duck? Rep? Sail?” which the clerks had used to emit like hiccups. Her couch was puffed leather, old and good. There were the books, quite a lot of them, and the single desk, with just such a reading lamp as he would have coveted. To his right, the windows that would give on the street were heavily draped; he’d made do with the landlord’s shades. Beneath the windows was a second and ampler sofa he could never have afforded. Opposite him, a fold-back door would open on the “efficiency” kitchenette, spick-and-span or roachy. Or with dime-store ruffles edging the shelves, if there had been a girl. To his left, back of sliding doors prized if remaining, or vanished as here, would be the windowless inside bedroom; he glimpsed a coverlet. Beyond, separated by a screen, probably a third small space, dressing room or studio, or for the too-soon child. In the bathroom at the very end, the door would be hung with a robe and a mildewed towel, or a robe and a nightgown, with the douche bag meekly below.