A Letter Marked Personal E-Book

J.P. Donleavy

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Nathan Johnson, forty-eight and restless, began his career as a door-to-door lingerie salesman, reaching the top of the rag trade with a penthouse overlooking Manhattan. A 'confirmed social climber' in 1990s New York City, he looks back on his early struggles, indulging fantasies of life as a country squire on Blueberry Hill – the Westchester estate he buys his wife Muriel as a birthday present. He meets a model from Iowa, different from the rest, and is captivated. When, out of the blue, a letter marked 'personal' arrives, his wife opens it and life unravels. A Letter Marked Personal is J.P.Donleavy's final novel, completed in 2007. His portrait of a flawed Anglophile delineates the American Dream, from aspirational greed to the vanity of human wishes. This poignant story of Nathan's rise and demise speaks for the everyman – an apt farewell from one of literature's true originals.

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BOOK I

ONE

he was one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet and had reached an age when he could take solace from the fact that he no longer had the whole wilderness of his life ahead to worry about. Especially in a business where sometimes you had to hurt people and you blamed yourself for wondering if you’d hurt them enough so that they couldn’t hurt you back. But one of the facts of life he well and truly had learned was that adversity does get rid of loneliness. And then makes you really lonely.

He was living more than comfortably in New York City during a period when pornography was getting respectable, exercise had come into vogue and guys and girls were jogging all over Central Park. If you saw a little group of people you thought had collected to sympathize with a mugging victim, it was often the mugger himself who’d been apprehended by a small crowd of fit and decent New Yorkers and more than a female or two among them. He once witnessed such a gathering and instead of an ambulance for the victim, a paddy wagon came along to relocate the culprit to jail.

‘Hey, what the hell happened.’

‘He tried to steal the lady’s handbag. She held on to him.’

In short, this king of cities was becoming a better place to live and merited its reputation as the world’s capital of money and entertainment. Not to mention beautiful women. In fact as he peered out of the window one day, breaking the law with powerful binoculars, he focused on a spidery window cleaner high on a skyscraper, then zoomed towards a street corner near one of the first bargain erotic lingerie stores he had established, spotting in the distance a stunning female creature whose mere existence by the store inspired him to feel he was engaged in one of the best businesses in the world.

He savoured the comfort that this was a metropolis where, if you didn’t stand too close to the edge of the subway platform and if you gently minded your own activities and mumbled ‘Have a good day’ in as many directions as it might be called for and made a heap more than a few dollars and kept to routine and didn’t let computerized bills drive you out of your mind, life could, at least for quite decent stretches of time, be sweet. As his had become with a still pretty wife and three children grown up and gone off into their own lives with the youngest just graduated from college, while Muriel, their mother, was free to attend a plethora of social activities between her beauty appointments and fitness classes. And they both knew, as seasoned New Yorkers, that you needn’t say please to tell someone to get the fuck out of your way.

From the thirty-seventh floor of his newly built apartment block, he could watch the air traffic of helicopters and planes vectoring across the sky. Walking from room to room was a constant pleasure as was looking out over the city with a map and then, consulting a detailed guidebook of buildings, finding out what he was looking at. North to where the trees of Central Park ceded to Harlem and where, in this increasingly democratic New York atmosphere, white people might venture. But south to Wall Street, anybody of any colour or creed could try to make money, placing their bets on stocks and bonds and sitting on their asses waiting and hoping for a kill, but most ending up losing their shirts in a bust and, if they were stylishly dressed, having to cash in their cufflinks as well.

The thing he liked best about being comfortably rich was lounging in bed while Muriel was at a yoga class. He waited for Ida, the maid, to bring breakfast and then watched from his propped-up pillow as the sun arose over Long Island and gradually hit the towers of Manhattan. It was his best time of day for inventing lingerie language to knock the market for a loop, and he never failed to find it awe-inspiring to come up with a name, like Japanese hug-and-tug silk knickers, for his latest creation. But then looking east to Brooklyn, where there were plenty of chimney stacks, he felt less inspired. The stacks were a reminder that whoever was sending up those smoky fumes maybe wasn’t glamorous but was probably making money. Maybe even lots of it.

Then in the early evening, when he came home after his workout at the Game Club, it was Martini time. Into a shaker full of ice cubes, he poured his careful quantities of gin and vermouth and added a couple of squeezes of lemon. Filled a Baccarat glass and played Mozart and Mahler on the piano. On a third drink, he toasted old friends and lovers gone till the tears came, then cast his eyes west over Central Park to dream past the Hudson river to Weehawken and speculate upon the future locations that still lurked out there for a lingerie boutique or two. And from that side of the river, one thing was for sure, it was limitless expansion.

He would occasionally contemplate having a big mansion and estate one day. Away from the fumes and grime, the fire engines and police sirens reminding him of injury, murder and death. Plus, what the hell, it would really show them that he’d made it in New York, which you could easily think of as the lingerie capital of the world. With all his bank loans paid off, his credit rating purring, he’d even tested establishing outlets in the smaller boondock towns far out west where, price reduced, you could sell a heap of silk chemises, lace-trimmed camisoles and housewives’ see-through boudoir wraps.

Meanwhile, the daily feasting upon the panorama of this soaring megalopolis was a treasuring preoccupation. It made him feel that a city he had arrived in as a bit of a hick was now his personal preserve to enjoy. A place in which he always felt that there was nothing he wanted and could pay for that he couldn’t get. And what he didn’t want or didn’t like, he could easily avoid. Or at least have the offenders whacked. Like the multiplicity of sneaky knock-off artists nosing rat-like in his new-season lingerie designs. Which, why not admit it, he purloined himself out of the erotic stratosphere of Paris and Milan to race back home with and put them on his own cutting tables. But that part of the business also provided the deep satisfaction he got from beating the competition with his own obviously superior quality and style and leaving them standing scratching their privates next to a mountain of inventory. But what a persistent endless bunch of conniving buggers they were.

He liked to choreograph his day. Following breakfast in bed and reading all the news that was fit to print, then taking a bath in the British manner, a Radox muscle soak, his ablutions done and further indulging in leisurely grooming, he carefully chose a shirt and tie to sport with his Savile Row suit and finally descended as an anglophile to the lobby of Midas Towers. Even on a sunny day always carrying a tightly rolled umbrella. Avoiding eye contact, tapping his way through the building’s damn nice lobby. Four sumptuous leather sofas flanked by palm trees in large ceramic pots. A selection of papers and books to read. The latter being tomes that no one in their right mind would want to open never mind steal. And no visitor could avoid seeing the sign engraved in brass on the concierge’s desk,

ALL VISITORS STRICTLY MUST BE ANNOUNCED

The management maintained that using the word strictly added an air of exclusivity. Which not even the police could ignore for less than three minutes before they drew their guns. One thing he’d learned early in the practice of business was to make damn sure you always knew who was coming to see you, plus have more than a hint of their agenda. And to put a stop to all wishful thinking that the folk coming were rich, charming and good-looking investors ready to back you to the hilt. Of course all they really wanted to do was board your gravy train.

Another big realization was that in trying to be the latest in New York was a waste of time. Because you were already old hat as soon as you were the latest. However, he was among the first to sign up for this ultramodern condominium Midas Towers, publicized as ‘Better Than Tomorrow’s Best’. And there was no doubt that the apartments were palatial without any sign of stinting.

Sometimes it amazed him that where he lived could matter so much. He still kept and spent time semi-secretly in his first down-market windowless office near the Flatiron Building, where he hung out alone for endless hours daydreaming and listening to music. And what the hell, it was always a bolthole for times if they ever got really bad. And if times stayed good, then it was a reminder of his long struggle up the ladder of success. But aside from his socialistic sensitive feelings, he was proud of where he currently lived. In the lobby of Midas Towers, he could gaze at the fresh flowers in vases on the marble-topped tables and sniff their scent while being lulled by the fountain of water spouting from the mouth of a stone cherub. He especially liked the idea that a waiting visitor, or more likely his wife, anxious to get to the theatre on time, could, instead of being irritated, read an out-of-date copy of Who’s Whoin America. He supposed too that the little verbal amusements provided by the Irish doormen, who were not that keen on his British affectations, were thrown in at no extra charge.

‘Good morning, Mr Johnson. So nice to see you looking just as well as you did yesterday when it didn’t rain.’

‘Ah, but it does from the fountain there. If you stand too close without an umbrella, the spray would ruin your shoe shine.’

Of course this play-acting was just to reassure himself, even in these safer times, and with now somewhere like an eagle’s eyrie to peacefully lay his head, that he could continue enjoying all that he had fought so long and hard for without some son-of-a-bitch street marauder relieving him of his life if he refused to be relieved of his valuables.

Nathan Langriesh Johnson, one-time door-to-door lingerie salesman, founder and chairman of Nathan Johnson Lingerie, had reached the top and intended to stay there.

TWO

Nathan was proud of his wife and their accumulated years of faithfulness, his grown-up children already past coming to grips with the world. And his dedication still intact to them all. His existence entirely for their benefit. Even digging into his pocket to pay their parking fines. But he could get philosophical enough in his occasional depressions to recognize that no matter how all-encompassing love and devotion were, there still existed the other side of the coin. Which when you didn’t know why you were feeling so goddamn far down in the dumps, you realized you were. Then thinking maybe you wouldn’t be much admired or loved if you started to limp, blow your nose or fart at the wrong time. Or really worse, go bankrupt or give into temptation to cheat in the shape of a stunning female human being. There in front of him nearly every five minutes during fashion shows, with at least one of them immediately available for the asking.

He had to contend with such temptation in two upcoming shows, one in Paris and another in Milan. Travelling alone and staying at damn nice hotels. Front-row seating along the catwalk. Italian women had such expressively pleasant faces. He could later, gathered for champagne, say, ‘Hi honey, you looked really great, here’s where I’m staying.’ He knew that if he didn’t care that his solemn marriage vow in forsaking all others would have to be fatally broken, he’d be in bed with this dazzling piece of ass. Yet he held fast. Ready to resist absolutely, so if any such creature appeared on the scene, all he’d do was smile and nod.

Yet even with its emotional risk foreign travel was what he most loved. Simply to watch others in another culture enjoy life. Plus, in Paris, it wasn’t all that bad to have breakfast alone in bed. The French had a big head start on the road to pleasure by simply accepting life as it is. Just as it went by you on the boulevard as you sipped a late afternoon aperitif. Planning where you’d dine that evening and crowning your day with fraises du bois in some fabled restaurant. Continuing the pleasure with an Armagnac and coffee in a neighbourhood bistro. Fellow habitués nodding their approval as you savoured a moment. Then, comfortably leg-weary, back to sleep at your hotel to awake to breakfast. Three thousand miles away from home. Perusing the International Herald Tribune. And that the bad news you left behind in America was now far too far away to concern yourself with.

For there were, back in New York, some of his friends for whom he felt sorry. Held in parlous straits by the legal pincers of a once-optimistic marriage. Now facing a bitch who, finished with her castrating, was making sure there was no peaceful place left for men to lay their heads. His own smaller domestic considerations seemed like nothing to trouble about. Such as on sunny days sporting his brolly, one of the few things that made Muriel noticeably cringe. He made it even worse when he would point out that it provided others with a little entertaining glimpse into the more secretly sophisticated life of the city. If it were in fact a sunny day, and with his tightly rolled umbrella pecking his way along Park Avenue, it would get a smile or two from those court tennis players popping in and out of the Racquet and Tennis Club. Or indeed, if you were up near their part of town, the Knickerbocker or Union Club men.

Already a member of the Game Club, which was more devoted to athletics than social ascendancy, he never found himself deeming it useful to belong to any of these more exclusive clubs, as much as the idea attracted him. He guessed anyway it would be unlikely he’d ever be proposed for membership. He read enough to know that these so-called chaps or blokes missed nothing about the right way to be wrong in how you dressed or behaved. But there was something about the sexual overtones in designing and manufacturing lingerie that you didn’t boast to those of the stuffy socially registered that it was your line of trade. However, he took a certain satisfaction that his tightly rolled umbrella produced in these gentlemen such a simpatico sense when he walked by. As if you might be hearing words spoken on an English grouse moor. Damn high bird and well shot, sir. But Muriel, ever downright blunt and practical, thought that they more likely would be saying, what a goddamn asshole.

Boy, that was no fun to hear. But the umbrella situation did at least remind one that one was a confirmed social climber, having made a study of every rung of the ladder. Being rich was the first step. The next was being very rich. But he had learned that every rung above you had, as you reached for it, some fucker aiming his footwear to stomp on your fingers. And his umbrella did once start a conversation. A guy, giving him an appreciatively amused look, did at the same time run into a fire hydrant. He commiserated with the chap, perhaps too much out of good manners, and suddenly I’m telling him I’m in lingerie. Well, not in lingerie, but in the lingerie trade. And you never saw a guy so pleased to hear it. He was a transvestite who knew all about harness bras, thigh straps, lantern-sleeved shifts, bodices, and high-voltage coloured microskirts. The guy accepted his card.

‘Nice to make your acquaintance, sir. I’ve actually been to one of your stores.’

Those last eight words were beautiful to hear. Of course it was to such as this aficionado that one owed more than a small part of one’s annual profits. Which, as it happened, were being computed at present by his eccentric accountant Reginald, who reminded him that the number thirteen had recently become significant in his life.

‘With that contract signed, Nathan, it makes a total of twelve stores. I’m not superstitious, but maybe it’s a good idea to avoid any needless invitation of bad luck. Don’t set up a thirteenth store somewhere without opening up a fourteenth at the same time.’

Reginald also suggested that perhaps it was time, as they had just added a swimwear line, to go upmarket across the board and call some of his more erotic lingerie sleepwear instead. Which would allow for the stores to be more elegantly regarded. Although he hoped it had already been noted he was a man of dignified steady routines. Taking his walks. Dedicated to finding architecture he could appreciate everywhere and anywhere in the city. And having a concern for the genuinely homeless. Only chasing those irascible bastards who suddenly in the street took to insulting him and his umbrella. And only losing his temper during the annual panic he felt monitoring his tax liabilities.

‘Nathan, a couple of little numbers here, a couple of little numbers there. Cut travel expenses a bit, and the IRS shouldn’t start growling too loudly at us.’

Although he didn’t much like Reginald’s reference to the ‘too loudly’ bit, he trusted his accountant to act correctly in all things financial and to be a board member of the company. But he wasn’t going to be like other superstitious New Yorkers in avoiding this bit of notional bad luck, magnified all over the city by there being no thirteenth floor in apartments and hotels. Even so, he thought he should waste no time and maybe fly to Texas to open a thirteenth store in Houston and a fourteenth in Austin, where rumour had it there was a coterie of lingerie fetishists, who might throw a welcoming party.

Then maybe even call the outlets ‘The Thirteenth’. Anyway, it was well known how brash New Yorkers could be. But coming as he did from an upstate town where his family, from all of whom he’d grown estranged, had a brush factory for a couple of generations and owned a little bit of property as well, he would have to be regarded as gracious. He felt his own modest social bona fides gave him a degree of vested interest in this otherwise rude city. In college he at least ended up pledged to the second-best fraternity and even kept unrevealed their mildest secrets from Muriel.

‘Muriel, why can’t other guys’ wives be like you.’

‘Well, maybe they are. They may just need better husbands.’

It got his gorge when he overheard in the steam room of the Game Club some member, whose face was unidentifiable in the mist, saying, ‘The guy who invented the harem was a genius. No lawyers, no bullshit, just I’ll have that one, maybe in triplicate, tonight.’

He found himself on the verge of saying, ‘Hey buster, why didn’t you wait and find and marry the right one?’ And here he was in a business where nubile young women were frequently a temptation. Yet wearing a gold wedding ring and keeping his distance with a degree of courtliness not always appreciated by ambitious models, one or two of whom dropped heavy hints, especially at fashion shows, that maybe they were ready to open their legs to advance in their profession. And to those amenable girls, he would invoke equally heavy hints of observing his principles of dedicated faithfulness to his wife.

Of course from his gold ring, they probably knew it. Although, because his business depended upon it, he let it be known that he took a twinkly-eyed interest in the passing drama of attractive women coming that season to New York and not least from the Midwest state of Iowa. One of whom, modelling his swimwear and lingerie, was, with her unusually long, softly smooth-skinned legs, a statuesque charmer. Suddenly flashing her come hither look that instantly incited a warming glow between your legs. In photographs, unless told to smile, she wore a smouldering sulky pouting look. My god, did this sell lingerie. But on longer observation there was a sense of sadness, a look of loss and loneliness in her face. When seen first standing in front of his desk, looking for a job, she did say she was a hick from out west and actually shook a few hayseeds out of her hair. Which fell on a new store’s lease he was just about to sign.

‘That’s right, Mr Nathan, I’m from Iowa. Sorry, I mean Mr Johnson. How much more of my clothes do you want me to take off. Everything underneath is real.’

She had, along with the most beautiful hands, ankles and feet, a body that made him draw in his breath and try not to have it heard too loudly as he exhaled. As she put her black skirt and blue sweater back on, a gentle sorrowful softness came into her voice as she described the most dire disaster in her life.

‘They blew up my dog Gesundheit with a shotgun for crapping on their lawn. I told them I hoped they had crabgrass growing there for the rest of their lives. I know it has nothing to do with this job, but that’s why I came to New York. So I wouldn’t have to get to know my neighbours. Like the kind who shot my dog.’

And Nathan backed away. Realizing this girl with her beauty could get any job she liked in New York. Moisture in her eyes made them glisten a strange green.

‘Do you mind, Mr Johnson, if I ask if you are an egotistical reactionary. You know the kind. Who for no reason flies the American flag on his front lawn.’

He thought, holy Christ, with no front lawn, how do you answer that one? Then having put on her coat, she picked up a dog’s leash draped over a battered Gladstone bag. He could just make out a tag that read Gesundheit. She seemed embarrassed as she looked up and saw his tears. Still welling. And one dropped. He had a dog too, which when he was a boy someone had shot. Putting the small hole of a rifle bullet in its head instead of the large devastation of a shotgun. Then from her suddenly changed expression, it was almost as if she had confessed the worst thing in her life.

‘Sorry about the question, Mr Johnson. I really am. It was meant to be funny, but I guess it’s not. But these people who shot my dog were egotistical reactionaries and thought the sun shined out of their asses. I guess I also came east because I lived so far from the ocean and wanted to walk the beach and collect seashells. Anyway here I am loyal and reliable and without an agent, doing forty-two sit-ups a day and, while going to acting school, trying to work my way up in the job market, and too honest for my own good. So let’s have it straight. Any chance of a job.’

‘No problem.’

Although taken aback by her bluntness, he could hardly get those two words out fast enough. But boy, he would sure have to watch his step. As models went, most were, given time, such a goddamn huge problem before they really became an intolerable pain in the ass. If they weren’t prima donnas on the make, then they were unreliable the instant they thought it suited them and thought they were destined to aspire to better things than lingerie.

‘And Mr Johnson I’m not one of those people who’ll soon be telling you sad-faced that my agent just phoned to tell me the good news of a better job.’

He believed her. And she said to call her Iowa. And to excuse her a moment to powder her nose. Which gave him plenty of time to think. Here was someone who might contradict what in his business could give a bad impression of women. There were girls, and now he had to think of them as having hayseeds in their hair, who, perhaps not quite like this Iowa girl, crowded aplenty into New York. Girls who still hadn’t lost all their innocence and to whom you could be considerate and kind, as you might be to your own daughter, but of whom you had to be scrupulously careful in other ways. With this Iowa, as he began to practise calling her, he found she could make him laugh and it left him wanting to spend more time in her company. She had, along with her wit and verve, a tenderness that could glow like embers in her strangely sad green eyes.

‘You see, Mr Johnson, I don’t want to appear too familiar, but I believe in a love that distance never breaks, nor other lives can ever intrude upon.’

And that was Iowa. From whom he immediately found he had to hold himself emotionally steady when she said those words. Especially during her training period over the next few weeks because he thought he once detected a sudden look of affection in her face. He had to remind himself to keep hands off. For as more weeks passed in close proximity, he was finding it harder and harder to not fall in love. Particularly as it had already happened. Which meant not accepting an invitation to dinner at her apartment when by chance they were at a lingerie fashion shoot on her side of town. It was getting late in the evening and she, it seemed mischievously, winked.

‘Hey, I’m a damn good cook, especially of spinach and sirloin steaks. What about it, pops. From all these books around the place, I know you love architecture and looking at different buildings. Come on over to my apartment. It’s in an authentic bunch of brownstones and practically right around the corner and halfway down the block.’

It was the first time he’d ever been called ‘pops’, which shook him. But then he’d never before been invited anywhere so enticingly. And somehow architecture and calling him pops took care of having to tell him to his face he was an ancient old fool. Even though at the Game Club, he could do fifty sit-ups to her forty-two. Nor had he ever so disappointedly refused an invitation he was so desperate to accept. If she in turn were crestfallen, she gave no sign. He knew a lot of male folk were under the impression that the lingerie business, for all its bitter competition, could be a bit of a lark. But this was not one of its moments. How could he say he had a jealous wife? He was corruptible and nothing could be further from the truth that he did not want to go. And that was the not-inconsequential conundrum.

Trying to not let her know he was hanging on her every word. Then she reached into her pocket, held out her arm and chuckled as he watched what seemed to be a bean jump in the palm of her hand.

‘You see, pops. A Mexican jumping bean. You try to figure out which way it’s going to jump, and that will test your ability to predict the future. Here, it’s a present for you.’

Meanwhile watching too many times and guessing wrong which way his Mexican jumping bean would jump, he was trying discreetly to delve into her past. The first shock was that she briefly worked as a salesperson for an undertaker and quit when asked to model as a scantily covered corpse in a coffin. Then as a hat-check girl in a semi-fancy restaurant. She moonlighted occasionally as a singing nightclub waitress earning enormous tips but constantly getting fired.

‘Pops, I guess you want to know why I’ve taken this pretty low-paying job and never lasted anywhere very long. At least when I wasn’t wearing much. And I hope it’s not going to be a problem for you, I always got fired because I wouldn’t shave off the hair in my armpits.’

‘No problem.’

Again it didn’t take him long to put those two increasingly popular words together. After having her brownstone address checked out and knowing which were her windows, he let her witness his signature on a couple of leases. The prospect of arriving in her street on the West Side with an armful of flowers and a bottle of champagne alone provided many a moment of pleasant fantasy. Looking up to see her face looking down. Maybe she could be impressed by watching him step out of the longest limozine in town. No, maybe not.

‘Iowa, I imagine that not many of your evenings are free.’

‘Well, pops, I get dated a lot. So I sometimes prevaricate to exactly say thanks but no thanks. And I don’t explain that I’m just a hick, still in my emotional bare feet. I’m good at humility. But all I really want is to stay alive long enough to torture myself one day with motherhood. That’s right, I’m nuts. But I don’t like to seem ungrateful when they ask if I’d like to own the Empire State Building or have a palace built for me in Mexico, with a swimming pool in my boudoir and closets full of clothes.’

‘Iowa, you could have nearly anything you want in this town. And omit the word “nearly”.’

After some of their conversations, he felt like he was standing in his emotional bare feet. Wondering which finger was the one she was wrapping him around. And holy Christ, when she sat cross-legged in a diaphanous black chemise, a white horizon of tooth in view between her parted lips, the hardened lingerie man flipped his foot-thick cast-iron lid. And although this had become a dangerous dream, being one of her suitors with his less lavish lingerie gifts declined, it was, for all its disappointment in Iowa’s case, the sweet side of the lingerie business. Because the other side was the ripping off and wholesale larceny by either staff or suppliers and if not that, then the logistical design deadlines always descending and frequently finding yourself quoting to yourself as one of his most ardent competitors did, ‘This business is in fact a fucking nightmare without the fucking.’

The ardent competitor was, according to more than rumour, getting plenty of fucking and all he, Nathan Johnson, could safely do was dream. Or think that maybe Iowa, as they got to know each other better, did have a solution. Suggesting, hey gee pops, don’t look like that at me, all sad and down-in-the-dumps miserable, cheer up and get out your jumping bean. Watch it jump and laugh. But of course what he really did when down in the dumps was what he always did.

He retreated to his hidey-hole. Marking time in his secret office listening to Mahler and then in a moment of courage emerging from the lair and, starting from the Flatiron Building, commence to walk the fifty city blocks down Broadway, which went straight as an arrow to Bowling Green and Battery Park. From there take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. Cross the grey waters of Upper New York Bay. Seagulls criss-crossing the sky. Then on return the same buildings rearing up anew against the heavens. It was nearly pleasant to feel sorry for yourself.

‘Hey, pops, none of my damn business, but where do you sometimes disappear to.’

‘Ah, Iowa, if I told you, you’d stop wondering, and I’d be disappointed that you had no reason to think of me anymore.’

But he had now to be conscious of showing Iowa too much attention. Making excuses for having her summoned somewhere to be alone with her. And he dutifully practised resisting the temptation. Reminding himself that there were, although few, compensating occasions with Muriel, when he was glad to be with her in her less shyly demure moods. She would be tight on too many Martinis and peeling off the latest of the firm’s black satin leotards.

‘See any tits today as good as these, Nathan.’

‘Honey, none as ripely and appetizingly beautiful as yours.’

That kind of action, if he were to be realistic about the timeframe, could have been somewhat longer than a year or two ago. He knew too that Muriel wasn’t past using, as Ida the maid did, a vibrator to occasionally amuse herself. Nevertheless, his divorced friends thought it was astonishing that, married as long as they were, they could still behave so affectionately and sensuously and show each other such genuine warmth. Which their friends should have realized was because they meant it. Leading him to have embellished in capitals on all the jewellery he gave her,

TO MURIEL

AND HER BEAUTY

IN BODY AND SPIRIT.

Every year now, for at least the last six years, he took real pleasure in buying her a new, personally customized Buick convertible with To Muriel engraved on the dashboard. He took quiet satisfaction too that on the occasions of giving her presents, and without even opening them, she would always smile and rush to throw her arms around him with a kiss. There wasn’t much of that kind of reaction going on among his friends, especially one of whose wives, having opened her present and seeing a diamond necklace and bracelet, asked, ‘How much are these pieces of crap really worth, Harold.’

And Harold, who happened to be a good actor, his shoulders heaving and his hands up clutching his face, broke down in tears.

‘It bankrupted me, honey, and we’re broke.’

Trouble was it was true. By an impetuous raising of his hand at a Sotheby’s auction, or was it Christie’s, Harold was the highest bidder and kept confirming it by raising his paddle and shaking his head up and down. The gems he bought trying to please an ungrateful wife were the real thing, provenance proved, originating from the French crown jewels. And for this poor pal, Nathan had to guarantee a bank loan.

‘Nathan, you’ve saved my life, you really have. If there is ever anything I can do for you, please just let me know.’

The wife, finding out the jewels were real and worth more than their apartment, the ownership of which was in her name, sold them and the apartment pronto. A dealer then robbed her blind over the jewels. She beat it to Monaco, set herself up in a suite at the Hôtel de Paris. As the last of the money ran out, she boarded a Hollywood film-producer’s yacht and sailed out of Harold’s life, to finally get dumped ashore on the island of Trinidad. Meanwhile, Harold became Nathan’s hottest lingerie rep and reorganized his sales team. On the side, he made a pot of money overnight currency trading, moved to Monaco with an Asian beauty and was rich enough to buy and sail his own yacht. You never knew where justice was going to strike next, and a low-calibre person get their just deserts.

There were, of course, in Nathan’s own life everyday small matters which, although they didn’t impoverish him, he found irritating. As pleased as Muriel could get over gifts of gems, she was socially ambitious and niggly over aspects of his table manners. Like not breaking a slice of bread into smaller pieces before buttering it. An occasional belch didn’t go down well either, despite his maintaining it was very British upper class as it showed all present you enjoyed your meal.

Anyway, if his friends suffered hostility in the form of domestic standards at the hands of their wives, as far as the general treatment he got in his marriage, it really couldn’t be better. Even as the express elevator shot upwards past the floors of Midas Towers, he felt an increasing sense of well-being, knowing his current home high up in this spacious apartment had become a safe, tried-and-true oasis where Muriel’s voice could be heard.

‘Hi honey, how were the prima donnas today?’

In a few moments he would watch a basketball game on TV and sit back with a Martini, shoes off and even sometimes, rare as they might be, the soles of his feet gently massaged by Muriel. OK she read it in a magazine at college that it made husbands happy and admitted ripping the page out. But did actually, these years later, try it exactly four times in five months. And finis. But who’s counting, when you know that for such wifely ministration feminists would jeeringly have you hung drawn and quartered? Which thought always led to a second Martini and eventually to a third. Then he could, with a glass still in his hand, look down from his high perch in this city and convince himself, especially in a winter blizzard, that for a few hours at least, he was in supreme harmony with the world, free from care and sorrow. A baron of business and numismatically victorious. And if a bitch of a problem suddenly came up, he could resort to his secret office downtown to figure out the remedy. And wear snowshoes to get there.

And when he did have a third Martini, he didn’t think of blizzards or snowshoes and they would almost always repair to one of the guest bedrooms. Which did, the way Muriel could occasionally behave, test the bedsprings and distract the mind. Because boy, even with the diversionary amusement he was currently enjoying with Iowa, manufacturing and retailing did sometimes need that kind of horny wild distraction. For in no business on earth was it more difficult to remain numismatically victorious or was the competition faster at ripping you off. But the right amount of commercial hostility can keep you vibrantly alive. And you could in seeking retribution expect to hear, ‘Hey Nathan, what are you accusing me of. My own erotically creative genius.’