So Willing

Nine

Well, now, the best laid plans of mice and men, of mouse and man, of moose and Mau Mau, mink and marigold, as the trite and true old phrase doth say, often go astray.

Well, there was New York, and here came Vince, roaring down from the upstate foothills like a one-man tidal wave, like a timebomb ready to go off in any girl who got in his way. Well, and then here was New York and here was Vince, in the middle of Manhattan with a suitcase in his hand and a gleam in his eye. Well, and then there was New York, and where was Vince?

Vince was in Boston.

The tale of how Vince ricocheted and rebounded, how he was bank-shotted off the biggest city in the world and basketed in Boston, is one of those long sad stories without even a happy ending to make it all worthwhile. Or much of any ending at all, except that he went to Boston.

It started with the Port Authority Terminal where the bus emptied, Vince with it. He went out to the street, which was Eighth Avenue, with 41st Street to his left and 40th Street to his right. So he turned left, having had seventeen years of not going right and not wanting to change things at this late date, and a block and a half with the suitcase brought him to 42nd Street, which is the hub of half-a-dozen very strange worlds, most which Vince had no interest in.

But he had to turn right now, because the bright lights were off to the right, and there was nothing off to the left but some more street and the river, and he was too young for the river. So he turned right, in spite of himself, and lugged the suitcase toward the milling people and the flashing lights.

And a girl walked by him, crying her pretty blue eyes out.

“Hey!” That was Vince, and he said it again: “Hey!” And dropped the suitcase and started back and touched her on the arm and said it again. “Hey. What’s the matter?”

“He’s a bastard,” the girl said, and went right on weeping. A good-looking girl she was, what the pulp-writers call class, and she was wearing a short-sleeved, full-skirted, pale blue dress of the kind that’s too expensive for Saks to carry, and she had a nice young body like Spring and soft blonde hair that had been molded by the loving touch of a professional hairdresser, and even though she was weeping and strolling down 42nd Street past midnight, she had the look of lots of money, of Newport money and Palm Beach money, of private estate money and private girl’s college money.

Vince took all this in while he was saying, “Who’s a bastard?”

She stopped walking then, but she didn’t stop weeping, and when she turned to face Vince, he saw that all that loveliness had been callously flawed by a swift right to the eye. And not too long ago either, because the swelling hadn’t yet finished and the skin around the eye was only just beginning to darken. But she was going to wake up in the morning with the kind of shiner that looks cute on boys of ten but distinctly out of place on girls of twenty, particularly rich young girls who look like Spring.

“Archer is,” she told him, which was the answer to his question, but he’d already forgotten all about that question and instead said, “Hey! Who hit you?”

“Archer,” she said again, still crying. And started walking again.

“Hey, listen!” Vince cried. He had done a number of things in his young life, but the attempted destruction of beauty hadn’t been among them, and the stirrings of a brand-new indignation was causing a flurry in his chest. “Hey, listen!” he cried. “Where is this guy? He can’t do a thing like that to you!” He was trotting along after her, and glanced back once at his suitcase, sitting in the middle of the empty sidewalk, then trotted on because suitcases always come second after beauty.

“He’s a bastard,” she said again, and the word seemed as out-of-place on her lips as the shiner did on her eye.

“Listen!” Vince cried, caught up in the romance of the thing. “Tell me where he is! Tell me where he is, and I’ll take care of him for you!”

She stopped and turned to him with a glad cry. “Would you?”

Vince had never before felt like a knight-errant, but there’s a first time for everything. “Damn right I will!” he cried, and shook his fist.

The girl had stopped weeping to beam at him, and now she stopped beaming to frown and look doubtful. “But why would you?” she wanted to know. “You don’t even know me.”

Vince tried to put it into words, and it wasn’t all that easy. “A girl like you,” he started. “A girl as good-looking as you — to punch a girl in the eye—” He stopped, took a deep breath, and shouted, “He can’t do a thing like that, that’s all!”

“Do you really mean it?” she demanded.

“Of course I mean it!”

“He’s gone home,” she said. She reached out and touched his arm and she must have been carrying a load of static electricity because the touch of her fingers on his arm jolted him to his soul. “He’s gone back to his apartment,” she went on. “I’ll take you there.”

“I’ll show him!” cried Vince.

“My car is down here,” said the girl. “In the parking lot.”

He went with her three steps, then stopped. “My suitcase,” he said. “Wait, I’ll only be a minute.” She waited, and he ran back, to discover that an agitator with a Bible had taken up a stance on the sidewalk next to his bag, and a crowd had gathered around to punctuate his appeal with good-natured obscenities, and it took Vince a couple minutes to worm his way through the Philistines to the suitcase and back. “Are you saved?” cried the agitator, and Vince shouted, “I’m going to be!” and ran back to the girl who looked like Spring.

She led him to the parking lot and to her car, which not surprisingly turned out to be a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL which, while not the hottest car on the road today, is the hottest one that isn’t actually on fire.

They got in the car and she drove. She wasn’t crying anymore, but looking furious and determined, and as they snaked through the cabs she told him one or two things. “His name is Archer Danile,” she said. And a minute later: “I’m Anita Merriweather.”

“Vince,” he told her.

She nodded and was silent and sneaked between a cab and a truck and shot through a red light and made a right turn without taking her foot off the accelerator. “We were out tonight,” she said all at once. “And we got into an argument. He was drunk, and he hit me.”

“The bastard!” Vince cried. The girl’s wild driving didn’t scare him, it exhilarated him. This was all he’d been missing in Modnoc. Action and adventure and romance, and the feeling of adrenalin coursing through him and his pulse pounding and he was, by God, a bloody knight errant.

She drove and drove and then stopped, and they were on East 63rd Street between Madison and Park Avenue, which is what you call a ritzy address. They got out of the car and went into a building, and they were in a square little place that was mainly marble. The street doors were behind them, another set of doors was ahead of them, and the square metal bank of mailboxes and doorbells was to their right.

“When he asks who it is,” she said, “I’ll answer. He’ll let me in. Then we can go up and you can take care of him.”

“Right,” Vince said. He clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders and knew he could lick the world.

The girl — Anita — pressed a button and a minute later a blurry voice said, “Who’s there?” and she leaned close to the mouthpiece to answer, “Anita.” And a buzzing sound came immediately from the door.

They went in and there was a wide long room like a hall, with a mirror and a table and a vase full of flowers and a self-service elevator. They zoomed up to the eleventh floor and down the hall, and Vince waited beside the door, out of sight of the peephole, while Anita rang the bell.

Click went the peephole, and click again, and then the door opened, and Anita walked in. Vince followed.

The door led to a hall, which went away to the left, to the living room. Anita walked down the hall and Vince followed, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the apartment at all, which was ridiculous.

Anita turned around to frown in puzzlement at Vince, and her eyes widened and she cried, “Behind you!”

Vince turned. This Archer Danile had been behind the door, which was now closed, and he was coming grinning down the hall toward Vince. He was tall and blond and Greek-goddish, which is to say somewhere between Apollo and Bacchus. And Vince looked at him and knew he had better smite the first blow, because there might not be a second.

So he stepped forward to the grinning Greek god and punched him square in the nose. And Archer Danile went, “Uck!” and half-turned, and leaned against the wall. His profile was plain before Vince’s eyes, all manly nose and manly jaw, and Vince snapped another fist out, lacing across the manly jaw, and Danile went “Urk!” again, and fell down.

“Hit him!” cried Anita. “Hit him!” More strange words to come from the mouth of a girl who looked like Spring.

“Quite enough,” Danile said clumsily. He was sitting on the floor, looking at the opposite wall, and trying quite unsuccessfully to smile. “Quite enough,” he repeated, just as clumsily. “You’ve already broken my jaw.”

“Your jaw?” Vince had been standing there, fists clenched, waiting for Danile to get up and rejoin the fray. Now he eased the taut fingers and leaned forward to look at Danile’s face. It did seem different now, he noticed, a trifle unbalanced. The jaw seemed to be a bit too far to the left.

“You’ve done it this time, Anita,” said Danile, still trying to smile and still looking across at the opposite wall. “You’ve really done it this time.”

“Well, look what you did to me!” The girl pushed past Vince and leaned forward, pointing at her eye.

Vince all at once felt left out. The two were comparing wounds, and Vince didn’t have any interesting malfunctions worth mentioning. Not only that, but the romance and high adventure were quite rapidly leaving this whole episode. The whole thing was suddenly a disappointment. For one thing, it hadn’t actually been a fight he’d had with Archer Danile. He’d punched the man twice, knocked him down, and broken his jaw. And he didn’t even know him!

For another thing, he didn’t even know Anita Merriweather. He’d been walking along, minding his own business—

She was tugging him by the elbow. “Come on,” she was saying. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“You’ve done it this time, Anita,” said Archer Danile mildly.

Vince allowed her to lead him from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator and down the elevator to the first floor and out the door and into the Mercedes-Benz 190 SL.

“You’ll have to come home with me,” said Anita.

“Okay,” said Vince. He had given up thought for the duration and was simply letting things happen.

Anita jumped on the accelerator as though it were Archer Danile’s head, and they shot away from the curb and down the street.

After one or two blocks, Vince’s mind began once more to work. And, Vince’s mind being what it was, the first thing he thought of was sex.

Sex with Anita Merriweather, that was. If anything was obvious in this green world, it was that Anita Merriweather wasn’t part of the greenery. That is, she wasn’t green. To put it simply, she was unvirginal. It was plain, that is, that she was not a virgin.

Because, of course, she’d been living with that guy. Right? Of course. There wasn’t any question. And besides, she was rich, and everyone knew what the rich did. Even more often than the poor. And with more people. And started younger.

And besides that, she had invited him to her place. Which meant only one thing. He had beaten up her old boyfriend for her, and he was on his way to get his reward. And his reward would be — Anita.

There had been a time when such a reward would have filled Vince with mouth-watering anticipation. But that time had ended somewhere in the last month, and now, instead, he wondered where the romance and ad-venture had gone, and he wondered further if it wouldn’t be a good idea to just step out of this hot little car the next time Anita decided to obey a traffic light, and wander off into the city again.

But it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, and Anita was offering, besides her body, a place to sleep. That would be nice. And in the morning he could begin again and afresh, and henceforward he would ignore all weeping girls, even weeping girls who look like Spring and dress like money.

Anita was silent now, and so was Vince, and they drove and they drove. They crossed a bridge, and that startled him at first, until he realized that a girl like this, wealthy and all, undoubtedly would live on Long Island. So he relaxed and lit a cigarette, and they drove and drove.

And they kept on driving, they just kept on diving, and Vince noticed that they were on a major highway.

“Hey! Where do you live, anyway?” he asked.

“Boston,” she said, and kept on driving.

So that was how Vince happened to go to Boston. He hadn’t planned on going to Boston, he hadn’t even ever thought much about Boston, one way or the other. But there he was, at six o’clock in the morning, in Boston. They drove around the Common, and up Beacon Hill, and then they stopped, and they were parked in a driveway beside a mansion.

“Come in,” said Anita, and she got out of the car and walked away, toward the back of the mansion.

Vince scrabbled for his suitcase, and once more he trotted after the girl, and they went in a back door and down three steps and they were in a kitchen. A huge kitchen, with three white walls and the fourth wall of unpainted brick. There was a big wooden table and wooden chairs and a strange combination of the most modern (refrigerator and freezer and dishwasher) with the most antique (a wood-burning stove and shelves lined with intricately designed china).

“Sit down,” Anita said, and Vince sat down.

“I bet you could use some coffee,” Anita said, and Vince nodded.

He was stunned and he was exhausted. It had been quite a while since he’d slept, and so everything that happened in the world outside his eyes happened in a strange slow-motion sort of way, and he had plenty of leisure to be stunned about things that were surprising.

And Anita was surprising. And Boston was surprising. And his presence in this kitchen was surprising. So he just sat there and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

And he knew something was going to happen next. He’d been feeling strange ever since he’d first noticed Anita, weeping and black-eyed, go walking by him, back on 42nd Street in New York. And now, like Anita’s shiner, that strange feeling within him had grown and grown, and he knew that something fantastic was going to happen, and he didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t even know if it were going to be good or bad.

She had a hell of a shiner by now, a swollen black discoloration around the left eye, but instead of marring her, it merely emphasized the beauty of the rest of her. A beautiful girl, who moved like a racehorse and looked like a debutante’s self-delusion, and who was going to be a prime mover in the strange happenstance that Vince could feel coming upon him.

She sat down with him at the table, bringing with her two steaming mugs of black coffee, and she said, “Tell me about yourself.”

“You first,” he countered, not knowing why, but only knowing that that was the thing to say.

“All right,” she said. She smiled and shrugged, and said, “I’m Anita Merriweather. My parents have lots of money. I’m twenty years old and I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t anything I have. I hate Archer Danile and everybody like him, parasites, drifters. That’s what the argument was about. I went to college two years and then I stopped, because there wasn’t anything there I wanted. I’ve been to Europe and I’ve been to Japan, and I don’t feel as though I’ve been anywhere. I’m young and I feel young, and I want to grow up. And now it’s your turn.”

“I’m Vince,” he said. And then he told her about himself, and he told her the truth. He told her about his summer, about his virgin hunt and about Saralee and about pimping and leaving the car and telling his father he was going out into the big wide world to seek his fortune. She laughed at the right places, and she looked serious at the right places, and when he was finished she said, “I wish I’d been with you. I wish I’d been along for every minute of that. I don’t know anything. I’ve never had anything except money, and that isn’t enough.”

He looked at her, and he felt the happening coming on, getting ready to burst, and he opened his mouth to give it a chance to happen, and when his mouth was open he said, “Will you marry me?” And he hadn’t known that was what was going to happen.

And she smiled at him. And she said, “Yes.”

“Anita,” he said. It was all he could say. He didn’t even know her, and a million pieces of common sense were clamoring for his attention, were hollering at him that he couldn’t propose marriage to a girl he’d met six hours ago, and he ignored them all.

“Vince,” she said, and looked at him, and her one good eye was as deep as a bottomless abyss, and he knew he was teetering on the edge of that bottomless abyss, and he knew he was going to topple in.

He got to his feet. “Come on,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

She had to lead the way, because it was her house and not his and he didn’t know where her room was. They left the kitchen and they walked through one room after another, and through halls and corridors, and up a flight of stairs, and around them all the way was the kind of richness Vince had only seen in old movies on television.

And finally they came to a closed door and Anita opened it and they went in and she closed the door behind them. It was a big room, as big as the whole cottage had been back at the miserable lake, and across on the other side of the room were three windows, with the early morning sunshine pouring in. And midway between the door and the windows, its headboard against the right-hand wall, was a bed, Anita’s bed.

She turned to him to say, “You haven’t even kissed me yet.” And her voice broke when she said it, and he knew that she was as terrified as he.

He reached for her, and she came slim-waisted and eager into his arms, and he kissed her. And her lips were soft and cool-warm, and her tongue was a slender reed playing with his thick bear of a tongue, and her body was slender and like Spring against him.

He kissed her, and then she moved away, crossing the room, making a wide berth around the bed, going to the window, looking out and down, her face and hair high-lighted by the sun, and she was the slimmest, youngest, most beautiful, most heart-wrenchingly perfect thing he had ever seen in all his life. Betty and Rhonda and Del and Saralee and all the others ceased to exist. He could feel them receding away from him, like smoke, evaporating, and he felt a momentary sadness at their departure, and then he didn’t care anymore, because the blonde-haired girl dressed in blue, made up for all of them, and was all he would ever need.

He came across the room to her, feeling himself lumbering and clumsy, wishing he were lighter, more graceful, more accomplished, more an ideal, to match the ideal that she was. He came across the room, and he touched her arm, as he had done years ago in New York on 42nd Street near Eighth Avenue, and he said, “I love you, Anita.”

“I love you, Vince,” she said.

It was a ritual, like the marriage ceremony, except that it was much more solemn and much more binding. And he held her arm and turned her around and kissed her again. And their clothes seemed to float away, like gossamer and lace in the barest of breezes. They were naked, and hand in hand they walked to the wide sunlit bed.

Her body was Spring, was young and Spring.

She was closed to him at first, and her clear brow ruffled in a frown as her lips whispered, “Vince.” And then she sighed, and her good eye closed, and his lips were by her cheek, and he murmured her name, “Anita. Anita. Anita.”

And they flowed together, blended together, and the sweatiness of the past disappeared, and he understood now why he had lost interest in all those others. It was because he had needed this completion, this unhurried blending, this oneness.

“You were a virgin!”

“Yes,” she said.

The sound of the door opening spun him around on the bed. A woman, fiftyish, tall and prim, obviously Anita’s mother, stood wide-eyed on the threshold. Her eyebrows lifted and she looked at Vince. “I don’t believe I know you,” she said.