Double Delight Page 20

  For how could any man doubt, this is love?

  And how vigorous and inspired a lover Terence had become, these past months. Like a young man again. Like the young man whom in fact he’d never been.

  Ava-Rose Renfrew seemed by her nature to want him to … force her, somewhat. Even, sometimes, to hurt her. Just a bit.

  Sometimes, after lovemaking, Terence discovered Ava-Rose’s face streaked with tears; her lovely eyes blurred, reddened. She buried her face against his neck as he embraced her, murmuring, “My darling, have I hurt you? I didn’t mean to.”

  Perhaps it is in the nature of lovemaking, that a man does force a woman … somewhat.

  That the woman does resist, just a bit.

  And afterward sighing in her lover’s ear, as Ava-Rose Renfrew sighed in Terence Greene’s ear, “Oh Ter-ence, oh!—you’re so strong.”

  How flattering, to a man’s virility. How irresistible, and wise.

  “So this is the man I really am. And the other—”

  With Phyllis, Terence had long felt merely tolerated; “loved,” of course, yet “loved” as a sort of useful appendage of the household, an amiable if exasperating presence, an escort to social events. In matters of lovemaking, he’d long felt somehow automated, and hollow: Phyllis pushed buttons, and Terence responded.

  Or failed to respond.

  “—the other is someone else.”

  How hurt he’d been, how he’d managed to forget, that time, that humiliating time, when Phyllis, frustrated, tearful, had lashed out at him It’s selfish to begin something you can’t finish.

  Yet Terence loved Phyllis. He loved Kim, Cindy, Aaron.

  Even in the delirium of passion he could not bring himself to suggest to Ava-Rose that they marry; nor even that he leave his family, to live with her. “I know I should begin to think of the next phase of my life,” he told Ava-Rose worriedly, “—but, somehow, I can’t. Not yet.”

  Ava-Rose laughed, and kissed Terence on the forehead. “‘In time, all is resolved.’”

  Terence knew that he should begin too to think of the “expenses” (the sum of the numerous financial calculations, withdrawals and deposits and rewithdrawals) he was incurring, in his eagerness to befriend the Renfrews, but somehow he could not—“Not yet.”

  Occasionally in the news it is revealed that some semi-public figure has embezzled funds, or stolen money from clients, or, hardly less inexplicably, failed to pay his income taxes, and one’s response is How could he think he could get away with it?—at least, for very long?

  The answer is, as Terence Greene might have acknowledged, You don’t think. Quite simply, you don’t.

  “Expenses”—so the problem was designated, succinctly and seemingly neutrally, in Terence’s mind.

  “The hell with ‘expenses’! I am a lover, not an accountant.”

  The Renfrews by their very nature reinforced such a sentiment. They were unjudging—“the salt of the earth.” If they disapproved morally of Terence, a married man, conducting a love affair with Ava-Rose, they did not so indicate; in fact, it seemed to Terence that, like Ava-Rose, they were becoming ever more fond of him. The proof of it was (so Terence surmised) that they accepted gifts from him, and occasionally even cash. Ava-Rose was delighted that her family had grown so fond of Terence, for, he gathered, there was a history of “things not working out quite right” with Ava-Rose’s man friends and the Renfrews. The family was not always predictable, Ava-Rose said, except in one matter: pride.

  “It’s a true failing, and a sin in the face of the Divine,” Ava-Rose said, frowning, “—this blindness called ‘pride.’ But I do love them! I swear, I would die for them! Family’s about all a person has, in the human world.”

  Terence would have liked to retort that, to him, the Renfrews were the true, the authentic, the American—so unlike the materialistic, loveless hypocritical families of such affluent suburban enclaves as Queenston, New Jersey. But he was so enchanted by the beautiful young woman when she spoke in that apologetic way, begging a forgiveness any lover would be eager to give, he could hardly bring himself to contradict her. He said instead, warmly, “I see nothing wrong with pride, Ava-Rose, if it doesn’t interfere with—matters of the heart.”

  All had to cooperate to shield Cap’n-Uncle Riff from knowledge of Terence’s financial support, and this led to some comical conspiracies. When Ava-Rose and Terence drove home in the splendid new Corvette, Ava-Rose at the wheel giddy as a young girl, for instance, the explanation was that she had won the car in a raffle!

  “Which raffle was this, exactly, my dear?” Cap’n-Uncle asked, as the family stood about in the driveway admiring the car, “—a raffle at the Church of the Holy Apocalypse?” The old man stroked his beard thoughtfully, waiting for his niece to reply.

  “Cap’n-Uncle, no!” Ava-Rose exclaimed, a bit piqued. “You know the Church of the Holy Apocalypse doesn’t countenance such things as raffles. This was the Catholic church over on Pennington Avenue, I’ve forgotten the name.”

  “I see,” said Cap’n-Uncle. He ran his hand along the polished flank of the Corvette, and let it drop away, with an elderly sort of sigh. “Well. Catholic or Protestant, it is damned beautiful.”

  And so, Terence thought proudly, it was.

  It was on the first warm, springlike day in April that Terence Greene’s happiness was nearly destroyed.

  The morning began awkwardly enough: When Terence stepped into his office at the Feinemann Foundation, he saw, to his surprise, portly Mrs. Riddle standing at his desk, hurriedly sorting through a stack of applications. She glanced up at him, smiling, though with the slightest suggestion (unless Terence imagined it?) of a squint. “Ah, Dr. Greene! Thank goodness! Marcia”—Marcia was Mrs. Riddle’s assistant, primarily a typist—“is desperate thinking she’s lost that long application from the Corcoran Gallery, and I’m wondering if it’s here on your desk?”

  Terence said, quickly, “Why, I’m sure it is. Let me look for it.”

  He saw that Mrs. Riddle was embarrassed, and hoped to put the woman at her ease. Hoping too she had not seen that flash of blind panic in his face.

  Not that there was any reason for panic, surely not, not in this office. Or, at any rate, so carelessly exposed atop Dr. Greene’s desk.

  Like my mother-in-law, with that pose of innocence. Going through my private things.

  The application from the Corcoran Gallery was found, and handed over to Marcia, and the incident was forgotten.

  Or would have been, if Terence had not noticed (had he noticed? or was it his imagination?) the women in the outer office, Mrs. Riddle, Marcia, and another secretary, laughing together and then growing suddenly silent when Terence appeared.

  The main business of the day was the final meeting of the committee on selection, the completion of a series of meetings begun months ago. Because of the prestige and monetary value of the Feinemann fellowships, and the intense degree of rivalry among applicants, and even among those recommending applicants, the Board of Trustees had wisely set up a division of powers under the guidance of the Executive Director: There was a committee of nomination, consisting of fifteen men and women of established reputations in the arts, which accepted applications and nominations for various Feinemann awards, and had the power too to nominate; there was a committee of evaluation, similarly constituted, which winnowed through thousands of applications and nominations, cutting the number by nine-tenths; finally, there was the committee of selection, which had the power of making the final selections, but could make these selections only on the basis of the list provided by the committee of evaluation. With so many checks and balances, and no committee member with the power of simply handing over an award to a protegé, which is usually the case with such awards, it was believed that the Feinemann awards were made as justly as possible.

  Since Terence Greene had become Executive Director, he had inaugurated a policy too of strict honesty regarding committee members’ connections with candidates for awar
ds and with one another—“Ideally, we want to avoid not only impropriety, but the appearance of impropriety. I’m sure you can all see why.”

  Everyone did; but, now and then, one or another committee member objected. As an elder dramatist, serving this year on the committee of nomination, said, jokingly, “There doesn’t seem to be much point in getting to be my age, and not being allowed some ‘impropriety.’”

  Because their work was preliminary, the first two committees, though disputatious, were generally less disputatious than the third: The third, the committee of selection, had the power of giving away $4 million, yet, ironically, could not give this money to any but candidates passed on to them. This year, of the fifteen distinguished members of the selection committee, it was Quincy Ryder who most vociferously objected to the list his committee had inherited. Months before, Terence had been shocked by the man’s flippant rejection of the poet Myra Tannenbaum; yet Ryder rejected others with equal contempt—“I really must insist that we make our own nominations, in the interests of maintaining cultural standards in the United States!”

  In Ryder’s droll Virginia accent, his shiny puckish-red face screwed up as if there were a bad odor in the room, the statement had a floridly comic tone. But few of Ryder’s fellow judges laughed.

  Terence, whose thoughts yearned toward Ava-Rose Renfrew, but whose responsibility was to maintain order in the meeting room, responded courteously to Quincy Ryder, as always—what else could one do?—and proceeded with the day’s business. Certainly, Quincy Ryder knew that the selection committee was forbidden to name Feinemann winners directly.

  One by one, judges spoke. These were serious, intelligent men and women, nine men, six women; yet rather soft-spoken and deferential, compared to the assertive Ryder. The most strong-minded was a black woman novelist of about fifty, who could be counted upon to stare stonily at Ryder when he launched into one of his cruel comic monologues, and who frequently challenged him when he overstepped the apparent boundaries of his knowledge. Today, Adele Brown blew her nose repeatedly in tissues which she left crumpled and scattered about the table in front of her. Her plum-dark skin seemed darker, her heavy-lidded eyes sullen. Terence hoped that the animosity between her and the conservative white man would not flare into a public quarrel.

  The list of candidates stood at two hundred seventy-two, and would have to be cut severely to one hundred forty; within the one hundred forty, there were twenty-five “Americans of Promise” awards which were slated for younger artists whose major work lay before them. These awards were especially coveted because they brought with them not simply a single year’s grant but a five-year grant of $40,000 yearly, tax free; Quincy Ryder seemed to feel most strongly about them on the grounds that the “most brilliant young artists of my personal acquaintance” had been rejected by a previous committee, or had not been nominated at all.

  Ryder was particularly incensed about the absence from the list of a young poet named T. C. Tucker, of whom Terence had never heard—“I say we restore this excellent poet’s name to the list, from which it was so ignorantly cut! Otherwise, I don’t see how we can take these deliberations seriously.”

  “Now Quincy,” Terence said, in the reasonable voice with which he met all unreasonable suggestions, “you know the by-laws of the Foundation. Even if this committee voted to—”

  “Fuck the committee, I’m talking about justice!”

  “We have two hundred seventy-two highly recommended candidates, and of these—”

  “T. C. Tucker is in the great tradition of Yeats, Eliot, Auden—he has already won numerous prizes for his books! It was an act of personal vengeance that that old fool—” and here Quincy reiterated a charge he’d made at previous meetings, that an enemy of his had purposefully cut young Tucker from the list when the committee of evaluation made its decisions. Ryder’s voice quavered dramatically. “I am talking about justice.”

  Adele Brown said, politely, “This ‘Tucker’—he’s a friend of yours, yes? Or maybe a relative?”

  Ryder said furiously, “Why should he not be a friend of mine? I choose my friends discriminatingly.”

  Several others joined in. T. C. Tucker was, or was not, a leading young poet. T. C. Tucker was, or was not, especially young—thirty-nine years old. (The suggested cut-off age for “Americans of Promise” was thirty-five.) Terence listened with rising dismay, recalling his experience as jury foreman in Trenton. How easily led people were by those with ulterior motives, even intelligent men and women like those on this committee. In groups, something came over them, clouding judgment; something ignoble, demeaning; a kind of consensus-consciousness. Ava-Rose had told him of the “rapture-awakening” that sometimes transformed services at her church, everyone in the congregation weeping for joy, speaking “unknown” tongues, and while Ava-Rose’s lovely face shone with the conviction that such ecstasy was not only desirable but divinely inspired, Terence was secretly appalled. (Ava-Rose, sensing his agnosticism, had never invited him to accompany her to church, and changed the subject when Terence brought it up. Maybe he was simply jealous?) From the initial meeting of this committee, most of the other judges had taken a dislike to Quincy Ryder’s haughty tone and transparent maneuvering; yet, now, with so little time to spare, they allowed themselves to be led by him into a pointless debate. Terence saw how they wanted to placate him, somehow—“Pitiful, the concessions good will make to evil!”

  Terence had not spoken aloud, but only sort of murmured, shuddering, under his breath. Marcia, seated beside him to take notes at the meeting, glanced at him curiously.

  It was a season now in Terence Greene’s life when people, whether strangers or trusted associates, had begun to glance at him curiously. Not without sympathy, but—curiously.

  Did Dr. Greene see?—or did he, prudently, not see?

  To inhabit bliss is blind.

  Several times since Wednesday (it was Friday today) Terence had tried without success to telephone Ava-Rose Renfrew. Was she angry at him? Disappointed? (He had not been able to help much with household expenses lately, for his inexhaustible source of funds was beginning to seem distinctly less inexhaustible—but surely that would not matter to dear Ava-Rose and her family?) He would try again, after lunch. He would call Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium. On such a fine spring day, when shoppers were likely to patronize the Chimney Point Shopping Center, Ava-Rose would surely be behind the counter of The Craft of Beauty.

  Terence interrupted the discussion, which had grown a bit heated. Quincy Ryder was “questioning the merits of” a black dramatist whom Adele Brown had championed from the first, and Terence wanted to avoid an explosion. He said, hating himself for that air of reasonable placating he now heard in his own voice, “Now, Quincy, the issue isn’t your candidate measured against another, and you must know it. Your candidate is not on the list. And so—”

  “Fuck the list, ‘Dr. Greene’! I’m warning you, I’ll go to the media. I have friends at the T.B.R.”—The New York Times Book Review—“who would see it as their professional duty to expose the corruption of this committee!—this ‘Feinemann Foundation.’ Everyone knows that Nelson P. Feinemann was a vulgarian and a crook.”

  Terence said quietly, “The founder’s business virtues, or lack of them, have no bearing on our business today, Quincy, and you must know it. Before we break for lunch, at least let’s—”

  Ryder glared at Terence with eyes small and glinting like slivers of mica. “Stop saying I ‘must know it,’ Greene. I must not know it, if it is false. I beg you all—justice is the principle here. I will go to the media.”

  Terence hesitated. He knew that Quincy Ryder had no case to bring to the media, yet—might not a scandal of some kind follow, however unjustly? Even responsible publications like The New York Times printed such internal disagreements as news.

  Terence said, “This committee will not be blackmailed, Quincy. That you must know.”

  Ryder drew breath to reply, but seemed not to know what to say. He
glanced about him, and saw no allies; Adele Brown was derisively blowing her nose. The little man visibly reddened. Even the glassy whites of his eyes were bloodshot. In his black-and-white-checked double-breasted suit, lavender Liberty-print bowtie and matching handkerchief, he appeared dapper as a store mannequin; yet his hands trembled. He sniffed, and shrugged, and said negligently, “Oh, fuck. When’s lunch? I want a vodka martini.”

  “Is Ava-Rose there?—may I speak with her?”

  “Oh, it’s you.” A pause. “Naw, she’s out for the day, I guess—wanna leave a message?”

  And, next: “Holly Mae? This is—”

  “Why h’lo, Dr. Greene! Naw, gee, Ava-Rose ain’t here, whyn’t you try Tamar’s, okay?”

  “No, wait, Holly Mae, don’t hang up—can you tell her I called, and I’ll call again this evening? Or maybe I should drop by?—I might have some good news for Ava-Rose, I—might. Maybe.”

  “Yeah? What kinda good news?”

  “I—I’d better wait, to make sure. Tell her I’ll call tonight at seven?”

  “What kinda good news? Something personal?”

  Terence was baffled how to reply. His heart was pounding rapidly, and his stomach so churned, he regretted the meager lunch he’d gobbled down. “Well, I guess—maybe.”

  At the other end of the line, Holly Mae laughed, Ethel-Merman style. The sound was disagreeably similar to Adele Brown blowing her nose. “Sounds pretty am-big-rous, ‘Dr. Greene’!”

  Following the lengthy lunch, during which Quincy Ryder downed four vodka martinis, the committee moved forward with surprising dispatch. Either Ryder had lost spirit for promoting his poet, or his adversarial edge had been blunted by alcohol. (Ryder was not the only judge to sit for long minutes with his eyelids shut.) Balloting began for the “Americans of Promise” grants, and Adele Brown argued so forcibly for the black dramatist that he won nearly unanimously—fourteen votes for, one abstention. (Ryder, of course.) Terence thought, Yes probably Adele is a friend of the man’s but the thought glimmered past, and dissolved. Terence wanted only that the selection process be completed, and the committee disbanded, and that he hold beautiful Ava-Rose Renfrew in his arms again. What else mattered!