Ruth poured herself a cup of coffee, laced it with Sweet’n Low and hovered over the table till Irving Thalamus cleared a spot for her. “Sleep tight?” he said, giving her a lascivious look as she sat down beside him and crossed her legs. His eyes were hooded, the lids puckered and dark. He looked as if he should be wearing a burnoose and sandals, counting camels and harem girls somewhere out in the Negev.
Ruth gave him a rueful smile. “Too much booze,” she said, “but Sax and I took a little stroll after we left you.” She paused. “That revived me, all right. And I slept like a stone.”
He dropped his eyes and began to fiddle with his fork, building a little pyramid of scrambled egg in the center of his plate. The card from his son—a freshman at Yale—had been bitter stuff. The son was planning to spend the holidays with the estranged wife in Mount Kisco; Irving Thalamus had apparently written to offer him a room in the house he was renting on Key West. The son had written back to say no, unequivocally, and to add that he considered his father a hypocrite, a narcissistic overpraised hack and a moral dwarf who couldn’t keep the patriarchal penis in his pants. The letter from the agent was worse. So bad Ruth had experienced a momentary pang of guilt while reading it—but it was only momentary, because, after all, she was an artist, an intellectual, and she made her own rules. The agent—one of the most venerable in New York—had written to say that Irving Thalamus’s publisher, the publisher who’d done his last six books, was advising him against coming out with the new novel.
“So how’s your new story coming?” he said, swinging his hard jaw back to her.
She knew he didn’t want to hear the truth, knew that the only answer to that question was to grumble, denigrate herself, whine about the blank page and how useless she was and wonder, awe in her eyes, how he managed to produce one astonishing book after another. She took another sip of coffee, set her mug down and leaned in close to him. “I’ve never worked better in my life,” she said.
“Hey, terrific,” he said, “that’s great, it really is.” His eyes looked wounded.
Bob shouted something about poker that night and then rose to leave the table. Ina Soderbord, wearing a pink sweat suit though it must have been ninety already, got up to leave with him and Ruth raised her eyebrows. Irving Thalamus nodded in affirmation. Then Rico cha-cha’d out of the kitchen, a muted blast of salsa music coming with him, and set down Ruth’s plate of egg and toast. She took a moment to upend the egg on the toast and dose it with salt and pepper before she turned back to Thalamus and asked the question that had, by all rules of writerly etiquette, to follow from his: “And how about you?
He gave her a strange look, the look of a man who’s had his shorts stolen and his mail rifled. But no, how could he know? He’d talked about nothing but
She was going to say something banal, like “I’m really happy for you” or “It’s the least we can expect from you, Irving,” but he turned to her suddenly and his face lit up. “Hey,” he said, “you hear the news?”
She hadn’t. She pursed her mouth and folded her hands in her lap. She was expecting something juicy, something to chew over and digest and laugh about till lunch, the thrilling little kernel of gossip that would make her whole billiard-room routine for the next week. The last thing he’d given her—and it was too much, she couldn’t have invented anything better—was the news that Peter Anserine had climbed the stairs to his room one night only to find Clara Kleinschmidt, lumps and all, reclining across his bed like the naked Maja—and the best part of it was, she didn’t leave till the morning. “No,” Ruth said, arching her back and darting a quick glance round the room, “tell me.”
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Guess who’s coming—for a
She couldn’t guess.
