Part 9 (2/2)

- Then you come here.

- I can't, she said.

- Of course you can. You can do anything you want. I feel so terrible. He wanted to prevent me from talking to you. Listen, darling. This may take a little time to work out. We'll have to lie a little low. You know I'm crazy about you. You know no one in the world has ever meant more to me. Whatever he said, nothing can affect that.

- I suppose.

He felt something then, a crack, a fissure. He had the sense of something impending and unbearable.

- It's not you suppose. You know it. Tell me something, tell me the truth. When did it happen between you and him? I just want to know. Before?

- I don't want to talk about it now, she said.

- Just tell me.

Suddenly something he hadn't thought of came to him. He suddenly understood why she was so hesitant.

- Tell me one thing, he said. Does he want to keep seeing you?

- No.

- Is that the truth? You're telling me the truth?

Sitting in a chair near her, legs sprawled like a lord, was Tahar with a bored look of patience.

- Yes, it's the truth, she said.

- I don't know what the solution is, but I know there is one, Brian a.s.sured her.

Tahar could hear only her end of the conversation and did not know who it was with, but he made a slight motion with his chin that said, finish with that. Pam nodded a little in agreement. Tahar did not drink but he offered a powerful intoxicant: darkened skin, white teeth, and a kind of strange perfume that clung even to his clothes. He offered rooms above the souk with a view of the city one could not even imagine, nights of an intense blueness, mornings when you had drifted far from the familiar world. Brian was someone she would remember, perhaps someone she could always call.

Tahar made another gesture of slight annoyance. For him, it was only the beginning.

Palm Court.

LATE ONE AFTERNOON, near the close, his a.s.sistant, Kenny, palm over the mouthpiece, said there was someone named Noreen on the phone.

- You know her, she says.

- Noreen? I'll take it, Arthur said. Just a minute.

He got up and closed the door to his cubicle. He was still visible through the gla.s.s as he sat and turned toward the window, distancing himself from all that was going on, the dozens of customers' men, some of them women, which once would have been unthinkable, looking at their screens and talking on the phone. His heart was tripping faster when he spoke.

- h.e.l.lo?

- Arthur?

The one word and a kind of s.h.i.+ver went through him, a frightened happiness, as when your name is called by the teacher.

- It's Noreen, she said.

- Noreen. How are you? G.o.d, it's been a long time. Where are you?

- I'm here. I'm living back here now, she said.

- No kidding. What happened?

- We broke up.

- That's too bad, he said. I'm sorry to hear that.

He always seemed completely sincere, even in the most ordinary comments.

- It was a mistake, she said. I never should have done it. I should have known.

The floor around the desk was strewn with paper, reports, annual statements with their many numbers. That was not his strength. He liked to talk to people, he could talk and tell stories all day. And he was known to be honest. He had taken as models the old-timers, men long gone such as Henry Braver, Patsy Millinger's father, who'd been a partner and had started before the war. Ona.s.sis had been one of his clients. Braver had an international reputation as well as a nose for the real thing. Arthur didn't have the nose, but he could talk and listen. There were all kinds of ways of making money in this business. His way was finding one or two big winners to go down and double on. And he talked to his clients every day.

- Mark, how are you, tootsula? You ought to be here. The numbers came in on Micronics. They're all crying. We were so smart not to get involved in that. Sweetheart, you want to know something? There are some very smart guys here who've taken a bath. He lowered his voice. Morris, for one.

- Morris? They should give him an injection. Put him to sleep.

- He was a little too smart this time. Living through the Depression didn't help this time.

Morris had a desk near the copy machine, a courtesy desk. He had been a partner, but after he retired there was nothing to do-he hated Florida and didn't play golf-and so he came back to the firm and traded for himself. His age alone set him apart. He was a relic with perfect, false teeth and lived in some amberoid world with an aged wife. They all joked about him. The years had left him, as if marooned, alone at his desk and in an apartment on Park Avenue no one had ever been to.

Morris had lost a lot on Micronics. It was impossible to say how much. He kept his own shaky figures, but Arthur had gotten it out of Marie, the s.e.xless woman who cleared trades.

- A hundred thousand, she said. Don't say anything.

- Don't worry, darling, Arthur told her.

Arthur knew everything and was on the phone all day. It was one unending conversation: gossip, affection, news. He looked like Punch, with a curved nose, up-pointing chin, and innocent smile. He was filled with happiness, but the kind that knew its limits. He had been at Frackman, Wells from the time there were seven employees, and now there were nearly two hundred with three floors in the building. He himself had become rich, beyond anything he could have imagined, although his life had not changed and he still had the same apartment in London Terrace. He was living there the night he first met Noreen in Goldie's. She did something few girls had ever done with him, she laughed and sat close. From the first moment there was openness between them. Noreen. The piano rippling away, the old songs, the noise.

- I'm divorced, she said. How about you?

- Me? The same, he said.

The street below was filled with hurrying people, cars. The sound of it was faint.

- Really? she said.

It had been years since he had talked to her. There was a time they had been inseparable. They were at Goldie's every night or at Clarke's, where he also went regularly. They always gave him a good table, in the middle section with the side door or in back with the crowd and the unchanging menu written neatly in chalk. Sometimes they stood in front at the long, scarred bar with the sign that said under no circ.u.mstances would women be served there. The manager, the bar-tenders, waiters, everybody knew him. Clarke's was his real home; he merely went elsewhere to sleep. He drank very little despite his appearance, but he always paid for drinks and stayed at the bar for hours, occasionally taking a few steps to the men's room, a pavilion of its own, long and old-fas.h.i.+oned, where you urinated like a grand duke on blocks of ice. To Clarke's came advertising men, models, men like himself, and off-duty cops late at night. He showed Noreen how to recognize them, black shoes and white socks. Noreen loved it. She was a favorite there, with her looks and wonderful laugh. The waiters called her by her first name.

Noreen was dark blond, though her mother was Greek, she said. There were a lot of blonds in the north of Greece where her family came from. The ranks of the Roman legions had become filled with Germanic tribesmen as time pa.s.sed, and when Rome fell some of the scattered legions settled in the mountains of Greece; at least that was the way she had heard it.

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