The Gent

She was a pretty, dark-haired thing with big black eyes, the daughter of his friend Gus, and he had watched her grow up on the beaches of East Islip. From the porch of the cottage he rented each summer, Harry could see her fly along the water's edge, doing cartwheels, leaping over dunes, practicing ballet steps from The Nutcracker. She giggled and fought with her friends and tried on makeup, and when she got older, she worked at the farm stand. Then she went off to one of the good schools. But she came back for the summers. And when she had matured into a young woman, Harry got the feeling she was interested in him. Grace was 19—well-built, with long legs, sizable breasts and a playful-looking rump—when this notion of his took hold. She had the good schools in her voice, too, which was a weakness of Harry's and, as far as he was concerned, put her over the top.

Her parents owned a summer house right down the beach from Harry's cottage. Whenever they gave a barbecue, they would invite Harry over, and at some point in the evening, Grace would corner him and with her black eyes shining ask him about the communications field and how to break into it. Or sometimes she wouldn't ask him about the communications field but would poke him and tickle him and tell him to loosen up. One day he drove her into town to get some lighter fluid for the barbecue. With her skirt drawn back, her hands in her lap and her tanned legs kicked up on the dashboard, the pressure was so intense he almost had to stop the Jeep. At the checkout counter, she said she had gotten her own flat in the city and why didn't he come by and say hello. When he said he'd think about it, she let out a frustrated growl and pinched his ass in front of three customers. So it wasn't his imagination. She was there for him. Yet he kept his distance. He was a good deal more than twice her age, which explained it somewhat but not entirely, since he was no stranger to young women. Also, he lived alone and was divorced, so he was covered in that department. And it certainly wasn't fear of her mother, Nora, who had actually encouraged him. Nora was a cool and complex woman with a million thoughts colliding behind her troubled forehead. Whenever she saw Harry and Grace together, she looked on with interest. One day she took Harry aside and said, "I don't see why she can't have a mentor."

So Nora was on board, but the main reason he stayed away from Grace was that he did not want to hurt Gus. Gus and Harry had been friends since high school and had played on the same football team. Gus was a great big curly-haired bear of a man who smoked a dozen cigars a day, ate anything he wanted—despite a dangerously expanding waistline—and generally enjoyed life tremendously. He was Harry's hanging-out buddy, and they got together in Manhattan at least once a month. As a union official, Gus was entitled to a chauffeur, but he insisted on doing his own driving in the city, even though he was terrible at it. He would pick up Harry in his Lincoln Town Car, and with his cigar waving to make points and sometimes taking a little blow to make things worse, he would somehow weave them safely up to Sylvia's in Harlem, or Wally and Joseph's across town, or all the way down to Little Italy for a feast on Mulberry Street. He fancied himself an expert on food, and Harry, who thought he knew something about it, too, was content to sit back and let Gus do the ordering and be generally seignorial. On the nights they got together, Harry got to mingle with Gus' friends—busted-out jazz musicians, ward politicians from Harlem and medium-level wise-guys from President Street in Brooklyn—the kinds of people Harry would never meet in the normal course of things. There were hookers in the mix as well.

Gus' best quality was his loyalty: A friend could do no wrong. Harry had produced his share of stiffs in the movie business, but as far as Gus was concerned, each one was a gem and should have been nominated for an Academy Award. And Harry repaid this loyalty in kind. On one occasion, Gus was accused of mishandling union funds and was forced to take a sabbatical and lie low in Providence for a couple of years. Harry, without being asked, had sent him five hundred here, five hundred there, and Gus had never forgotten it. As it happened, when the heat was off and Gus got his old job back, Harry was busy with a TV series and rarely got to see his friend.

"Now that I'm doing good, you never call me," Gus complained over the phone. "I guess you're one of those foul-weather friends."

As much as he might have wanted to, there was no way Harry was going to sleep with Gus' daughter.

So he bit the bullet and hunkered down and it wasn't that awful. He lived alone in a duplex on Manhattan's East Side that belonged to a wealthy cousin of his who owned an advertising agency and had homes all over the world. Harry paid the cousin a nominal fee each month, a fraction of what the place would have cost had it been rented legitimately. The only catch was that he had to show up to entertain his cousin's clients at lunch once in a while. Additionally, a crew would arrive every couple of months or so and use the apartment as a backdrop for an advertisement, which really set Harry's teeth on edge. That, and the fact that he couldn't have his name on the tenants' directory. There were times Harry felt like a kept woman. But if this was so, he was being kept in a grand manner. The top floor of the duplex was covered by a glass canopy, and Harry slept each night beneath a shower of stars.

At this time of his life, Harry wasn't happy and he wasn't unhappy. He was treading water in the romance department. There was a National Hockey League executive in the building across the street who came over and rolled around with him a couple of nights a week and then went back to her own apartment, an arrangement that suited her as much as it did Harry. Yet Grace was always out there on the edge of his thoughts. More than once he had wondered what it would be like to be in bed with her.

Harry ran into her once on the street and she was only medium friendly. After saying hi and introducing him to a couple of good-looking yups, she went off arm in arm with them. Harry guessed she had a new agenda going and he could close the chapter on her, which left him both disappointed and relieved. Gus told him she had gotten a job as a researcher at NBC.

One day Harry got a call from Gus' accountant saying that his friend had drowned off the coast of Providence. Evidently, he had jumped off a fishing boat to take a swim, got caught in the tide, lost his breath and turned blue. By the time the fishing-boat captain and the Coast Guard got to him, he was dead. There was some question as to whether he actually drowned or had a heart attack, and this never got resolved.

"All I know," said the accountant, "is that he leaves a great gaping hole in our lives that can never be filled."

Harry could have done without the gaping-hole reference. What was he doing, trying out material for a eulogy?

It took a while for the news to sink in. Gus had been such a force. It wasn't so much that he loved life, he was life, and it was hard to imagine him gone.

There was a ceremony at Campbell Brothers Funeral Home on Madison Avenue. A large group of Gus' nighttime friends were there, most of them looking gray and haggard in the daylight. A contingent of hard-looking men came up from Miami Beach. Grace was prettier than ever in her black dress and seemed properly subdued. Nora had a fixed and quizzical look on her face. She'd been aware of some philandering on Gus' part, and the funeral seemed to be just another day at the office for her. After the rabbi had spoken, the accountant followed with a eulogy, and sure enough, he came in with the gaping-hole material. Harry had jotted down some notes of his own on the theme of size—the size of Gus' appetite, the size of his heart, the size of his hopes and dreams—but he was not called upon to speak, which really pissed him off.

After the ceremony, Grace invited a small group of friends back to her apartment, and Harry decided to go along. She lived in a basic one-bedroom flat on the top floor of a downtown high rise. Harry knocked back a couple of Stolis, ate some crabmeat hors d'oeuvres and exchanged reminiscences about Gus with a press agent. Then he thought he might as well go home. He'd worn a suede safari hat to the apartment and had tossed it on a bureau in the bedroom, but when he looked around, he couldn't find it. Grace followed him into the bedroom, bumped her hip against his and told him not to worry, she was sure it would turn up. All he had to do was drop by the next day and she would have it for him. So she was up to her old tricks again.

He decided to write off the hat, but she was on his mind more than ever. He'd noticed, at the apartment, that she had developed a careless, fidgety quality that made her even more desirable. He lost all interest in the National Hockey League executive.

One night, over drinks at Clarke's, he described his confusion to a smalltime hustler named Bobby, who had been a friend of Gus' and who made his living selling hot brooches he got from a jeweler in Vegas. Bobby had been out of town and missed the funeral. Harry told him how attracted he was to Grace and that she'd made it clear to him that she was his for the asking, but that he had stayed away from her because of his friendship with Gus. Bobby, who'd spent six years in prison as a young man, looked at him as if he were crazy.

"Fuckin' guy's dead now," he said. "What the hell are you worried about?"

Well, maybe that's the way they thought in prison, but it had nothing to do with Harry. Gus' death made it all the more impossible for him to go after Grace. What was he supposed to do, (concluded on page 222) The Gent (continued from page 102) step over Gus' body and fuck his daughter? If he'd had any kind of balls, he would have fucked her when his friend was alive and taken the consequences. What kind of swine would do it now?

So he held his ground, and Grace did not make it easy for him. She called him a couple of times to invite him to screenings and sent him a note that read: "You were spotted on Christopher Street by one of my spies, Harry. Why didn't you come over and say hello?"

He ran into her one night at a Christmas party given for network executives. She was standing at the bar, talking to a blonde woman who looked familiar. After studying her for a while, Harry recognized her as being one of the kids Grace had grown up with in East Islip. Her name was Trish, and as a kid she'd been a gawky thing; she still was, except now the gawkiness was under control.

Grace dragged her over to see Harry, and after squeezing him and telling him he wasn't going to get away this time, she disappeared in a swirl of network executives, leaving him alone with Trish.

Straightaway, Harry told her about the trouble he'd been having with Grace and his dilemma.

"She can be aggressive," said Trish in what Gus would have called a whiskey voice. "But I'm sure you'll be kind."

She had silky hair, and Harry loved the way she attacked her cigarette.

They chatted for a while. She said she was a copywriter at an ad agency. Harry remembered her father. Harry didn't like her father very much.

Grace came back and grabbed Harry's arm, tucking it between her breasts, and said that she and her friends were going downtown to check out a new club on Jones Street.

"And you're coming with us," she said to Harry.

She was falling out of her dress and she was painfully beautiful, but her eyes and the shape of her face reminded him of Gus. So he said he'd love to go along but he had to finish a pilot the next morning and would have to take a rain check. She insisted, yanking at his arm, and there was the possibility of a scene, but somehow he managed to get out of there.

He hung around on the street enjoying the fresh air and let a few cabs go by. Then he saw Trish leave the building. She said she was in the same boat as Harry and had to get some copy ready first thing in the morning.

"Can I give you a lift?" he asked.

"Why not, why not," she said with a theatricality that killed him. "Why not, indeed."

He kissed her in the cab and the kiss lasted around seven stoplights, and suddenly he didn't know what part of town he was in. He asked her what she would think about coming upstairs for a drink.

"Why, Mr. Towns," she said, fluttering her eyelashes. "Whatever did you have in mind?"

That killed him all over again.

He paid the cabdriver and unlocked the door of his building. As they waited for the elevator, she glanced at the tenants' directory and wondered why he wasn't listed. He said it was a long story and then told it to her anyway.

"But someday," he said as he unlocked the door of the duplex, "some way, I'm gonna get this apartment for myself."

He poured some drinks and led her up to the bedroom beneath the glass canopy, and then out to the terrace, where you could see the 59th Street bridge and listen to the hacking cough of the internist in the next apartment. They talked some more about the spot that Grace had put him in and about East Islip, and he kissed her again and her body went limp as a rag doll's. He'd been prepared for a long, patient seduction and was a little disappointed that it hadn't worked out that way. But the National Hockey League executive had gone off to join the Edmonton Oilers and he had nothing going at the moment, and in Harry's uncertain existence, you took what was offered to you and forgot about tomorrow. So he held her hand and led her to the simple white bed beneath the stars with the mirror alongside that was shaped like a caballero. After undressing her and making love to her face and her hair, he entered her, for his own pleasure, for the love of his friend Gus—and to strengthen his perception of himself as a man of honor.

"He asked her up for a drink. 'Why, Mr. Towns,' she said. 'Whatever did you have in mind?'"