Black Widow Read online

  “That’s good. Then come up. Breakfast is ready.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “My dear, you can’t just sit there and eat by yourself. Brian’s fixing everything. Come right on up.”

  Soon Lottie would have me up there sleeping in the same bed with them.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, fighting for my independence.

  “You’d better be.” Brian’s cheerful voice sounded on the kitchen extension. “Scrambled eggs and sausages.”

  “But—”

  “Nonsense,” broke in Lottie. I could just see her at the other end of the phone making ferocious doodles all over the telephone pad the way she always did when she felt she was being crossed.

  “If you’re not here in five minutes, I’ll come down and get you.”

  I yawned and was sufficiently awake to start missing Iris again. Iris was the one who could handle Lottie. When I argued with her, I only got mad and then Lottie sulked, became unendurable, and caused havoc at the theater. Resignedly, I got out of bed, put on a robe, and went upstairs.

  Lottie was wearing a terrible pair of Chinese lounging pajamas—a tomato-red blouse with pagodas on it and a pair of chartreuse pants. She was bouncy the way she always was in the mornings, as if she had a full day ahead and was raring to go. Brian had cleared away all traces of last night’s party. Lottie pecked me on the cheek and dragged me into the kitchen.

  Sundays, the daily woman who worked for both Lottie and us didn’t show up. Lottie and Brian always ate breakfast in the kitchen because it made Lottie feel domestic. Feeling domestic, with Lottie, consisted of reading the Sunday papers messily all over the kitchen table while Brian cooked. When we went in, we found her husband, tall, amiable, and handsome in a yellow robe, bending over the stove scrambling eggs.

  Brian was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to Lottie. She had discovered him when she did her only picture in Hollywood five years before. He was a Montana boy who had been in the Coast Guard during the war. He had all the standard male requirements except any visible ambition. He had played a few small parts in some of Lottie’s successes and had done a little stage-managing. But Lottie really preferred to keep him at home as a private asset, and he never objected. He seemed perfectly happy answering her fan mail, cooking for her, running errands, and reminding her how wonderful she was. Although he was entirely dependent upon Lottie financially, there was nothing objectionable about the situation. Everyone agreed that Brian should be permanently endowed by Equity for his great service to the theater in keeping Lottie Marin contented.

  The Sunday papers were scattered all over the kitchen. On the table, among the dishes, was the Theater Section of the Times. I saw the headline: Charlotte Marin Reaches New Heights. So Brooks Atkinson had taken a return trip to Star Rising. That was fine. It would jack up the already soaring box-office returns and keep Lottie good-tempered for a week.

  “Another rave from Atkinson, darling. Brian, do hurry up with those eggs.”

  Lottie’s appetite was always enormous when things were going well. She sat down at the table and watched me with that gimlet look of hers. I knew exactly what was on her Oatfields, Wisconsin, mind. It came out when we were all of us halfway through our eggs.

  “Well, Peter, who was that girl?”

  “What girl?” I asked innocently.

  “That girl you sneaked away with from the party.”

  “Her name’s Nanny Ordway. I told you.”

  “I never invited her. I never heard of her. Brian, did you?”

  “Did I what, dear?” asked Brian from behind the Sports Section.

  “Invite a girl called Nanny Ordway last night?”

  “Nanny Ordway? Don’t think I know her. Should I?”

  “Some people brought her,” I said.

  “Who?” demanded Lottie.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  “Well, I wish people wouldn’t do things like that.” The gimlet glance was back boring into me. “What exactly did you do with her, anyway?”

  “I took her to Hamburger Heaven and talked about Iris. Then I took her to her subway.”

  “Well,” said Lottie, one perfectly mated individual to another, “I suppose it was all right. But I do think it’s rather peculiar—with Iris only gone a few hours.”

  “Better cable her,” I said. “Return at once. Peter taken mistress.”

  “Don’t be silly. Still, I don’t think it was wise. When a man’s been married over ten years, he’s in a very dangerous phase. It’s a well-known fact.” She paused to let these words of wisdom sink in. “Are you going to see her again?”

  “Sure. I just sent her away to get baked into a pie. Tonight I’m going to cut the pie and she’s going to spring out naked except for a pair of orgiastic scarlet garters.”

  Lottie flushed and looked annoyed. “Brian, dear, do put down that dreary Sports Section and read what Brooks Atkinson wrote about me.”

  Lottie had it all figured that I was to spend the rest of the morning with them and then catch a Sunday matinee so as not to be lonely. But I managed to slip away around noon, saying I had scripts to read. It was true. I was looking for another play to do that season. That was one of the reasons, including a normal aversion to my mother-in-law, why I hadn’t been able to go with Iris to Jamaica. I got through the afternoon reading bad manuscripts and wondering why so many hundreds of misguided people think they can write plays. Then I went out to dinner with Alec Ryder, who tried to sell me again on Iris doing his play in London. It was a mild enough Sunday. I went on missing Iris all the time and wrote to her about Alec’s offer, knowing she’d turn it down. I had meant to mention Nanny Ordway in the letter, but by that time, after my session with Alec, I had forgotten her.

  I didn’t, in fact, think about Nanny Ordway until the mail came on Monday morning. One of the envelopes was addressed in a large, sprawling handwriting I didn’t know. I opened it. Inside there was nothing but a little kid’s circle-and-line drawing of a girl sitting at a telephone with a typed telephone number floating above her in a balloon.

  I smiled when I saw it and took it with me to the office. I went every day to the office even though half the time, when I had no new play getting started, there wasn’t much to do because of Miss Mills. Miss Mills had been with me ten years and took most of the chores off me. She supervised the stenographers, answered most of the mail, weeded out playscripts, got rid of the wrong actors, charmed the right actors, and settled most of the squabbles of the Star Rising company. Miss Mills played it sour but she was mother to all the world.

  I had a conference with her about a script she was crazy for and I didn’t like. Then I spent ten minutes or so calming down Gordon Ling, the actor from Star Rising who had been at Lottie’s two nights before. He had finally trapped me about the cuts I’d made in his lines in the third act. “It doesn’t feel right any more, Peter. I can’t get it across, honest. And I’ve nothing to say when I walk back to the sofa.” It was the same old actor’s complaint. If actors had their way, each of their own speeches would be as long as Paradise Lost and the other members of the cast would answer in monosyllables. It wasn’t hard for me to be firm with Gordon. He’d been out of work a long time. I’d given him the job largely through kindness and he knew it. I soon got rid of him.

  After he left, I was alone and I took Nanny Ordway’s drawing out of my pocket. It was a cute little picture, and on an impulse I dialed the number. If Lottie hadn’t made such a fuss about her, I probably would never have done it. But I remembered that “dangerous phase” dogma and, I suppose, I wanted to prove how impregnable I was.

  A girl’s voice answered. “Hello.”

  “Nanny Ordway?”

  “Who’s calling?” The voice sounded Bostonian and severe. The roommate.

  “Peter Duluth.”

  “Wait a moment, please.”

  Soon Nanny came on the phone. “Hello.” It was nice to hear her. It brought back pleasant memories.


  “Hello. I just thought I’d call to find out how inspiration was flowing.”

  “It’s flowing okay, I guess.”

  “That was a cute picture. Giotto was fifteen when Cimabue found him drawing sheep.”

  “There’s no need to kid me. I haven’t been pretentious yet, have I?”

  “Had your hamburger?”

  “What hamburger?”

  “The one you wake up yearning for.”

  “Oh, no. Not yet. Besides, I don’t yearn for them now. That was last year.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that I had no lunch date. It would be amusing to see her and why shouldn’t I? To hell with Lottie. “How about lunch?”

  “I’m sorry. I have lots more work to do.”

  “Is that a lie?”

  “Why a lie?”

  “You’re always saying something and then saying it’s a lie.”

  “Oh, no. It’s true. I can’t possibly come to lunch. It’s against my schedule.”

  “Dinner any better?”

  She paused. “Do you really mean it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then if you’ll do it my way. Come here. You’ve already fed me. I’ll cook dinner for you. You should see.”

  “See what?”

  “How unimportant figures live. Do you know the Village?”

  “Bon Soir? The Vanguard?”

  “Oh, no. Not that. The real Village. I’ll show you. Come at seven.”

  “Fine.”

  She gave me the address and elaborate subway directions. Soon after, Miss Mills came in.

  “What have you been doing, Peter? You look furtive.”

  Did I look furtive? It was stupid. There was nothing to look furtive about. But I almost wished I hadn’t called. I wrote a letter to Iris. It was, as usual, a love letter. In it, I said:

  I forgot to tell you I’ve already been wildly unfaithful. I took a twenty-year-old girl away from Lottie’s party the other day and fed her hamburgers. Now I’m going to have dinner with her in the Village. She has bangs and plans to be a literary genius and thinks you’re wonderful. Lottie already has me tabbed for adultery and a return to the bottle. Watch out…

  I arrived at Nanny Ordway’s apartment on Charlton Street at seven o’clock.

  She opened the door to me in an apron over the same dress she had worn at Lottie’s party. She looked homely until she smiled. I was glad she hadn’t tried to fix herself up for me and glad that I didn’t find her attractive at all. The girl she roomed with was out, she said. I was to make myself comfortable in the living-room and not fuss her in the kitchen. The living-room was a bedroom, too. There were two studio couches. The Bostonian roommate seemed to be a painter. The walls, painted dark Oxford-blue, were hung with rather surly still life of a Braque-ish variety. There were other pictures stacked against the walls and an easel pushed into a corner. Books were lying around over everything—lofty books—Santayana, Malraux’s Psychologie de L’Art, Jean Genet in French, and some Henry James. A bottle of Chianti and a glass were on the cluttered coffee table by a bunch of violets in a jelly jar.

  It was all depressingly Bohemian and rather pathetic.

  “Drink the wine,” called Nanny from the kitchen. “It’s put there for you.”

  I felt physically uncomfortable and a little foolish. I couldn’t quite see any more what I was doing in a twenty-year-old girl’s apartment. I drank some of the wine. Finally Nanny came in with a spaghetti dinner. It wasn’t terribly good. We ate it on separate ends of the coffee table with Henry James slipping every now and then into the meat sauce.

  It would have been awful if it hadn’t been for Nanny’s enthusiasm. She sat there next to me, her dark hair falling over her young face, pleased about every minute of it. She was paying me back. She was showing me a way of life she thought I didn’t know. She chattered in her leaping, inconsequential way. I felt ashamed of being bored, ashamed, too, of my own unadmitted prudishness. To Nanny Ordway a casual, asexual evening with a man was obviously an accepted social phenomenon. Although she objected, I helped her with the dishes in the horrible little kitchen.

  There was a phonograph in the living-room. She made coffee and put on Welitch’s records of the end of Salomé. She listened with all her body as if the music had been written especially for her. She didn’t talk about herself or her writing. She didn’t even talk about me. She just seemed to like my company.

  Afterward we went out to some neighborhood bars—“the real Village.” They were none of them very exciting. In fact, without Nanny, they would have seemed sordid and raffish, full of faky “artistic” types. We even danced at one dim little joint with a three-piece hot orchestra. She didn’t dance as well as Iris.

  “You see?” she said, smiling up at me, proud as if she had given me the biggest kick of my life. “You don’t have to be rich to have fun.”

  But I didn’t really have fun. I was almost glad when she said she had to go home. She didn’t invite me in. She just stood on the steps above the ashcans put out for the garbage truck and held out her hand.

  “I’ll remember tonight,” she said.

  “So will I.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t. Why should you? But at least you’ve seen. Tell your wife when you write. It would amuse her.”

  That was the first time she had mentioned Iris all evening.

  “I’ve already written about you,” I said.

  She smiled. She was delighted. “I’m glad.” And then: “I think it’s wonderful for a girl and a man to be friends.”

  “Sure.”

  “It is possible. People talk such nonsense.”

  She stood there with her door key in her hand. I thought of that cluttered room she had to go back to with her roommate probably washing nylons in the bathroom. I thought of all the millions of other city lives all over the world with their drabness, their anxieties, their hopes that would never materialize. I shouldn’t have come. It hadn’t got anyone anywhere.

  “Good-by, Peter.”

  “Good-by, Nanny.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN I REACHED HOME, I dropped in on Lottie and Brian for a nightcap so that Lottie wouldn’t be difficult. The show had gone well and she was in a sweet mood the way she sometimes was, quiet and affectionate. I was pleased to see her as something which belonged with my sort of life. I didn’t mention Nanny, and she didn’t ask where I had been. We talked about Iris and I went to bed purged of my cosmic pity for struggling young girls.

  About two weeks went by before I had anything more to do with Nanny Ordway. Then one morning around eleven Miss Mills came into my office.

  “Peter, there’s a girl out there who won’t go away. She says you picked her up last night at Roseland and promised her a part in a road company of Star Rising. She says she’s come to sign the contracts.”

  “She’s crazy. What’s her name?”

  Miss Mills grimaced. “Gloria,” she said. “Gloria O’Dream.”

  “For God’s sake!”

  “Peter, you didn’t do anything charmingly boyish last night, did you?”

  “Of course not. It’s some kind of a gag. Well, let her in, I guess.”

  Nanny came in. After Miss Mills had shut the door on her, she crossed to my desk. She was wearing an old tweed coat and no hat. She had a Manila envelope in her hand.

  “Hello. That was meant to be funny—that about Roseland and Gloria O’Dream. I suppose it wasn’t, was it?”

  I didn’t quite know how I felt. Mostly I think I was flustered about Miss Mills, who wasn’t at all pixy.

  Nanny looked around the office. “So big—so opulent. How peculiar that business, which is so dreary, has to go on in a pretty place. Shouldn’t I have come? Is it bad? I was just passing. I saw the name up on the window—Peter Duluth.”

  She looked so worried that I smiled. “It’s a pleasure. Sit down, Miss O’Dream. What’s that envelope you’ve got?”

  She sat down in a chair across the desk from me. “Oh, it’s ju
st a manuscript. I’ve been to pick it up at the New Yorker. They turned it down.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “They said it was okay to write like Truman Capote and okay to write like Somerset Maugham. But it wasn’t okay to write like them both at once. I’ve got to work a lot yet. I know that. Years, maybe, before I’m any good.” I asked to see the manuscript but she wouldn’t hear of it. I’d been a little worried that she’d come angling for a lunch date. It was a reprehensible thought on my part. Why the hell shouldn’t the kid try for a free lunch once in a while? But I had maligned her. She didn’t even give me the chance to invite her. She got up after a couple of minutes and said she had to go.

  “I just came in because I was passing.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She turned at the door, the Manila envelope pressed against her small breast. “Is it silly if I ask you something?”

  “Of course not. Go ahead.”

  “If ever you feel like it, call me. Oh, I don’t want you to take me out. Nothing like that. There’s no point. But between friends—I do like a link. Will you? Call, I mean?”

  “Sure I will.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  She was out of the office before I realized that I didn’t want her to go.

  Miss Mills came in.

  “All settled, Peter?”

  “It was just a gag.”

  Miss Mills looked at me cleverly. “Well, whimsy will never cease, I guess. What is she? The Fairy Heliotrope from the top of the Christmas tree?”

  That was when I decided I wouldn’t see Nanny Ordway again, that I wouldn’t call to make a “link.” I didn’t know why I liked being with her, but the fact that I did seemed to make it obvious that it all should stop. It was a relationship which had started for no particular reason and had no particular future. Links forged between friends! That was all kid stuff. It didn’t become me to step that far out of my age bracket. The whole thing was pointless for both of us.

  I shouldn’t be thinking in terms of “both of us,” either.

  That afternoon I stood in on the matinee of Star Rising. Lottie was magnificent. No one in the audience could have imagined her as the tiresome, busy little woman upstairs in the Chinese lounging pajamas. From then on I spent almost all my time with her and Brian—almost as if I needed her possessiveness as a protection.