Читать книгу The Landlord - Kristin Hunter - Страница 11

4

Elgar thanked God, for the hundredth time, that Lanie was always up after midnight. What better time to paint those nightmarish canvases, brown and black limbs and organs writhing in white limbo; and practice modern dancing, tragic shudders and leaps and thuds that reverberated from her high ceilings; and play her records about gin and sin and the man that done me in; and entertain her friends, a motley bunch of nightcrawlers including Elgar; and smoke in great hissing gasps until she reached the marijuana nirvana where, eyes slanting in withdrawal, skin sallowed by candlelight, mouth smiling La Giocondawise, she seemed more than ever a Eurasian monster he’d picked up somewhere on the Ginza.

Way-out by night, she was completely “in” by day, anonymous and all business behind the counter of the D-R Luncheonette, across from the Trejour. Working in tandem with Lucy the short-order cook, she was typically American and terrifyingly efficient: crisp white uniform, severely bunned rusty hair, a quick-frozen smile. Together they were like a pair of connected machines—reaper and thresher, washer and dryer—tall Lanie calling “Order toast!” and Lucy, compact and contained as an ebony statuette, responding instantly with buttered brown slices of joy.

Lanie’s schizzy schedule, he’d learned, was a brisk seven A.M. to three at the D-R; a hearty supper from three till four; a loudly snoring sleep from four till midnight; then up, and up, and up. At sometime between dawn and seven each morning she pulled together her various selves, Vampira and Cho-Cho San and Bessie Smith and the rest, packaged them all in crisp Betty Furness cellophane, and trundled them off to work in an old M.G. that looked and sounded like a shopping cart.

Imagining violent Jekyll-Hyde convulsions—hair disappearing, eyes brightening—Elgar always wanted to stick around to watch the transformation. Werewolf Woman Becomes Doris Day, a thrilling Technicolor feature. But he was never permitted to see it.

“Out, lout,” she’d say, with a firm toe or elbow in his sensitive windpipe or worse. “It is my private hour.”

Nor was he ever allowed in her bedroom. His part-time evening excursions with Lanie never proceeded farther than her living room couch, and once, when he’d taken the wrong turn stumbling toward the john in the dark, she had sharply screamed, “Stop!”

But at least she’d wrung the tensions from him in many memorably athletic pre-dawn hours, and by daybreak Elgar was always reconciled to living through another twenty-four hours anyway. It was nights when he needed Lanie or somebody, and her topsy-turvy schedule had saved his life on several occasions, nights when otherwise he would have carried out his ace in the hole, Plan S. —Though lifesaving was the furthest thing from the laconic intentions of Lanie, who often said she couldn’t care enough to lift a finger to save a kitten drowning in a toilet. A description that aptly fitted Elgar, alone in the depths of certain damp nights in his cell in the Trejour. She didn’t have to lift a finger, though; all that was necessary was that she be there.

And there she was, always. Dependable as the sun overhead each day were the lights burning every night in Lanie’s loft over the laundry. The schedule never varied, though the program changed.

Tonight, he could tell from the street, it was her records, an unearthly musicale of Mississippi Delta howls and laments. Stretched out on the floor, the better to absorb the vibrations of Soul through every pore, Lanie ignored the jeroboam of gin he had brought for them. While one long, red, elevated, Danskinned leg beat time in the air to washboard thumpings and wailings about drinking muddy water, Elgar went to rummage in the kitchen for ice and to retrieve two glasses from the swamp of her sink.

When he returned the machine was clanking a new record into place. Through the soup of scratches on an ancient record came an angelic little voice he had heard somewhere before, probably in a high-church choir. But now it was crooning:

I’m a hard-workin’ woman and you know I don’t mind tryin’.

I’m a hard-workin’ woman and you know I don’t mind tryin’.

But if I catch you wrong, Papa,

I know you don’t mind dyin’. . . .

“Shhhh,” Lanie said, deigning to accept a drink but not to converse during the razzmatazz trumpet bridge between the sacred verses. “It’s a collector’s item.”

Elgar coughed, spluttered, sprayed the air with gin as the voice went on, sweet, girlish and suddenly familiar:

I was out all night, my revolver in my hand.

Out all night, my revolver in my hand,

Lookin’ for that woman who ran off with my man. . . .

“An early Marge Perkins,” Lanie said reverently. “Cost me a month’s tips, and worth it. Nobody has Marge Perkins records any more.”

Belatedly she took note of Elgar’s predicament: choking to death before her eyes.

“What’s the matter? Ginsy too strong for baby? Oh, oh, Mommy fix. Right away.” She whacked him on the back with the massive strength that occasionally made him wish Lanie were not such a great, big, healthy girl.

“There. Now drink the rest of your gin, all the way down to the bottom. Atta boy, Elgar. Get all the vitamins so you can grow up big and strong.”

Well, you used to be my true love, now you’re my used-to-be.

Used to be my true love, now you want to be free.

But I’ll bury you, Papa, before you bury me.

“Isn’t she wonderful?” Lanie exclaimed with delicious little shudders of appreciation all over and under the leotards. “So real. So alive.”

“So dangerous, you mean,” Elgar said with shudders of his own, violent ones in the vicinity of his stomach.

“She knows what love is all about, Elgar,” Lanie said, pouting. “Which is more than you can say.”

“The time is coming, Miss Elaine K. for Know-it-all Lacey, when you will wish you had shown some respect for me.”

“Respect isn’t the issue, Elgar,” Lanie said gravely. She was beautiful when serious, the hazel flecks in her eyes lighting up to match her freckles. Shadows in the room softening the long horsy planes of her face. “I was simply stating a fact about you, the fact that you cannot love, a fact you know very well. I wish you could learn to keep your tender ego out of our discussions.”

She stretched, swinging the heavy curtain of dark red hair that hung to well below her shoulder blades. She reminded Elgar of a bay mare he had once owned: coarse red mane, long graceful legs, large dark eyes like wet leaves. And good strong teeth: she had bitten him more than once.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I don’t know what love is all about either. Oh, I have lots of ideas, but no experience.”

“It’s a grim struggle to the death,” Elgar said, “if I can believe your minstrels.”

“Yes, but that’s only part of it, Elgar. Why are you smiling that strange, smug way?”

“I was merely anticipating your reaction,” he told her, “before telling you that today I enjoyed a command performance by your collector’s item.”

Lanie was up in an instant, neighing excitedly. “Marge Perkins? In person? I don’t believe it! Where, Elgar? Where?”

“Well, perhaps enjoyment is not the precise word. I was, after all, a captive audience. And unfamiliar with the lady’s reputation.”

“She’s only the Sepia Nightingale, Elgar. The Queen of Blues. The Tragic Voice of the Twenties and Thirties. She started out in New Orleans. When she came to Harlem, the lines stretched for five blocks outside of Small’s Paradise. The cover charge went to ten dollars, and still they stretched. She had rooms full of orchids. Cars a block long. Proposals from European royalty. She only made a few records. And then she disappeared. Elgar, where is she?”

“If you will take your claws from my throat, and behave like a proper hostess, for once, and show some hospitality, for once, and get me another drink, maybe I will tell you. But only then,” he cautioned, “and only maybe.”

“Oh, oh,” she said, withdrawing. “Great White Father wants the service due his whiteness. Yassuh, Marse Elgar,” she said with a low bow as she picked up the glasses. Repeating the bow with her back turned on her way to the kitchen. “Yassuh, boss. Right away.”

There it was. Every evening had to be spoiled at least once by her intruding the race thing like a two-edged sword between them.

“Lanie, please cut that out,” he growled. “I’ve asked you before, now I’m telling you. It’s unnecessary, especially with me. And it’s ridiculous. Why, you have freckles, for God’s sake!”

“On you it’s freckles, boss,” she said, returning with the drinks on a tray and elaborately offering one to him. “On me, it’s melanin. Dat ole debbil pigment.”

Raising the glass to her lips she looked at him solemnly, large brown eyes level below coarse auburn fringe. “Here’s to pigment and its mysteries. For instance, its mysterious relationship to music. One more drink, and maybe I’ll understand why it takes melanin to produce melody.”

“I suppose you have never heard of English madrigals?” Elgar inquired coldly, refraining from joining in the toast. “Scottish bagpipes? Irish jigs and reels? Forget about those. I have an extensive musical education, I can refute you all night long. What about German music? Are you going to try to convince me Beethoven was a Negro?”

She did not answer; her eyes were hopeless black holes in a long, ironically chalky face.

“Anyway,” he added angrily, “I’ll believe it about all three B’s before I’ll believe it about you. Not that it matters, Lanie, you know it couldn’t matter to me, but once and for all, are you colored, or not?”

“People see in me what they want to see,” she answered.

“No fair!” Elgar shrieked, with the same frustration he’d suffered in the hide-and-seek games years ago when he was It and his brother Schubert, discovered behind the old oak tree, simply streaked across the lawn to another hiding place.

Lanie took a long, satisfied inventory of the way the red knit fabric clung to her long, satisfactory curves before looking up at him lazily and saying, “Actually I’m Greek and Creek. If you must know. A Greek father and a Creek Indian mother. How’s that for a combination?”

“But that changes everything. Hooray!” he whooped. And started down on his knees to propose to her, as he already had, vainly, to all of his other girls.

“It changes nothing, Elgar,” she said coldly, withdrawing from his touch as from contact with a crocodile, untwining herself from a black leather butterfly chair and rising. “I just said that to see how you’d react. Of course I’m colored. My grandmother is as black as that chair.”

Still on his knees, he looked up at her in horror. “Lanie!” he pleaded. “Tell me the truth! My God. I don’t know what to believe now.”

“No, Elgar,” she said, stepping over him neatly as she would a turd on her living room floor. “Why should I? As you said, it doesn’t matter to you.”

“Lanie, come back here!” he howled. One part of him hating, the other admiring the clean, athletic, independent stride, the muscles dancing under receding red jersey.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elgar,” she said as she returned with a clinking glass. “I only went for more ice.”

“Tell me the truth, Lanie,” he said, still on his knees, hollow-voiced and desperate.

“Some other time, Elgar. When it’s not so important.”

“I think I get the point,” he said, rising shamefacedly, feeling embarrassment tint his face to match her tights.

“Do you, Elgar?” she asked sweetly.

“Do you mind if I have another drink?”

“It’s your gin,” she said. “Help yourself.”

If she had called him “boss” that time, he would have slapped her. And, what with the payload of rage he always carried around inside him, Elgar feared any slapping might get out of control.

“But Lanie,” he began, waving his hand with frustration. Then he thought better of it. He paused a long time while considering the next question. “Do you like me, Lanie?”

“Of course I do, Elgar. You’re a sweet guy.”

“I am not!” he howled. “I’ve just proved it.”

“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “Everybody has that.”

In the same tone in which she might say, “Everybody has germs.” He had a sudden glimpse of the abyss at the bottom of which she and his tenants lived. He pulled back from it in horror.

“The sweet guys try to kid themselves into believing they don’t have those feelings. They’re ashamed of them. That’s the only difference, Elgar.”

“Yeah,” he said, gulping his drink and quickly replenishing it because a moment ago he’d been about to ask her the touchy and terribly urgent question again.

—Yes, but why should it be so touchy? his reasonable mind questioned.

Because he made it so terribly urgent, came the instant, reasonable response.

Elgar sprawled disgustedly in the butterfly chair while Lanie coiled lazily on the India-print couch, regarding him with large, calm eyes. How could she be so casual five minutes after he’d been hacking away at her most sensitive spot? Repeated jabs and blows toughened, he supposed.

“I’m getting less sweet though, Lanie,” he announced. “Come taste me and see. Every day in every way I’m getting more and more sour.”

She laughed and declined his invitation. “Oh, not you, Elgar. I don’t believe it. Why?”

“I am the proprietor of a madhouse, that’s why. An apartment house over on the corner of Poplar and Jackson. Your precious torch singer is one of my crazy tenants.”

Lanie whinnied with joy. “You’ve bought a house with Marge Perkins in it? Oh, Elgar, you’re so lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

As if Marge Perkins were a valuable antique or something. Well, maybe an antique, at that. But non-negotiable on today’s market.

“Lanie,” he said, “you’re an athletic woman, you’d have done fine at track meets. Especially if they’d had an event called Jumping to Conclusions. Oh, in that you’d have taken all the medals. Actually I am the unluckiest of men. I think I was born under the Dog Star.”

Her big mobile mouth drooped in a pout. “Oh, Elgar, really. Look at you. You’ve got everything. Looks, money, everything. Still, you’re always complaining.”

He raised a warning finger. “Didn’t you hear me? You should listen more closely when I speak to you. I said my tenants were crazy. I meant it. One of them held a gun on me today. Another one chased me out of the house with a tomahawk.”

She hooted. She whooped. She writhed, kicked, and wriggled in indecent spasms of laughter. So much enjoyment, all at Elgar’s expense. He suffered keenly. But when she noticed his agonized expression hers too became serious.

“Oh, Elgar. Poor Elgar. Are all of your tenants colored?”

He nodded sadly.

“Have you collected any rents from them yet?”

He shook his head.

“None at all? Oh, poor baby.” She got up, came over, took his face in suddenly gentle hands. Her eyes were melting. “Poor Elgar. You do need help.”

He looked up at her, baffled.

“They’ll run rings around you, Elgar. They’ll destroy you. They’ll drive you mad.”

“I doubt it,” he said, “not.”

“Ever wonder how underdogs survive, Elgar? Through cunning. Craftiness and cunning. It’s passed along from generation to generation. By word of mouth, by example, and by heredity. Only the clever ones survive. By now every underdog in this country has it. The necessary talent and know-how for beating the enemy.”

“Who’s the enemy?” he asked.

“Society, you poor bastard. You.” Lanie seemed to have one brightening thought in all this gloom. “At least you have Marge living there. Society’s been good to her. She ought to be on your side.”

“She,” he said, “is the one who met me at the door today with a revolver. And held it on me while I ate my breakfast.” He patted his stomach delicately. “I still have heartburn.”

“Hmmm,” Lanie said thoughtfully. “She must have had a little hard luck lately. Is she still pretty?”

Elgar shuddered. “She’s a great, big, hideous wreck. A monster. She practices witchcraft. And looks it.”

“But the voice, Elgar?” Lanie asked urgently. “Is the voice still there?”

“Clear as a bell. I recognized it the minute I heard your record.” He pondered for a moment. “It’s weird, hearing such a sweet young voice come from such a horny old rhinoceros.”

Lanie, lost in nostalgia, missed the heavy-handed pun. “She was always tall,” she said. “But she used to be elegant. Slim and graceful. Well.” She jumped up suddenly and shook herself like a young mare impatient to be rid of flies. “Let’s get going.”

“Where?” he asked, amazed. It was after three A.M.

“To your house, of course, idiot. I have to look the situation over. And I want to meet Marge Perkins.”

She tweaked his ear painfully as she went by. “Oh, you’re lucky you’ve got me, Elgar. You don’t know how lucky you are. I can save you from a real mess, believe me. Back in three.”

She was moving, in high gear, from her night-time languor to her daytime personality—brisk, efficient, overpowering—and Elgar was being towed along, in spite of vivid visions of tenants wielding deadly weapons with deadly seriousness on being aroused at this hour, and his being unable to blame them.

A managing woman, that was Lanie. A lady Chairman of the Board who had missed her calling.

He’d first seen her in action on the morning after one of his Great Debacles, a night spent barcrawling to postpone Plan S, and had known immediately that she was one of those rare ones who Always Knew What to Do. One crisp look at him and she’d called out, “A Bromo!” before he spoke a word, following it up with “Black and a cannibal!”

It sounded ghastly, and it was—black coffee and a raw-beef, raw-egg-yolk sandwich—but her hangover cure worked. From then on he ate breakfast at the D-R’s counter every morning, and always let Lanie order for him, sensing his wishes from the way he looked. She never failed to distinguish Elgar’s French-toast mornings from his soft-boiled-egg ones.

He was often grateful for her competence, but sometimes he wanted to shake it out of her. Managing women like his mother drew Elgar irresistibly—yet also threatened, like Mothaw, to set him dangling like a pretty golden charm from their bracelets. Large important women lent splendor and significance to conquest, and so he liked them—but he much preferred Lanie’s night personality, languid and permissive, to her awesome daytime self. Much.

In three minutes exactly she was back, terrifyingly transformed.

“I don’t know how I’m going to play it, Elgar. Probably by ear. I may decide to let them think I’m your wife. A heartless Jewish bitch. Do I look the part?”

She did: not the least terrifying thing about Lanie was her ability to look any way she wished.

She had coiled the thick russet hair close to her head, and put on a tunic, a lead-colored thing brocaded in silver, heavy and opulent, flaring over black stretch pants like a coat of mail. She looked medieval and noble, like Joan of Arc in full battle regalia. And also a little like Joan of Arc’s horse. Stowed in her leather saddle bag, in a cellophane envelope, was the next presto-chango outfit: a starched white uniform and sensible white, ripple-soled shoes.

“Lanie,” Elgar said as they got into her struggle-buggy, “I’ve often wondered why you wait tables for a living. You’re smart, you’re good-looking, you could do anything you wanted. Sometimes I wonder if you’re like me.”

“Like you how?” she asked in a tone that rejected all possibility of comparison.

“Doing penance for your crimes. The ones you haven’t committed.”

She laughed—a little nervously, he thought.

“Lanie, I want to shake your hand,” he said earnestly, grabbing it. “I think you live with the horrors as much as I do. But you rate congratulations. On you, they don’t show.”

She laughed again, nasal and cynical. “Look closer, my friend.” Then she pulled her hand away from his and twisted the ignition key, bore down hard on the accelerator. The M.G.’s old horses snorted, coughed, nearly expired, then suddenly roared into life, shattering the night.

“Get smart, Elgar,” she shouted over the wind shrieking past his ear. “Get tough. That’s what you have to do. Encase that soft slob heart of yours in solid steel. Never believe any of their stories. No matter what they tell you, say to yourself, ‘They’re lying. I know they’re lying.’ Get up in the morning and say, ‘I’m tougher. I’ll get them before they get me.’ ”

“Who?” he shouted back.

“Your tenants, of course. Who else, idiot? Pay attention to me!”

“I wish you’d pay attention to your driving,” he complained, for she was attacking the streets like obstacle courses, skimming curbs and corners, narrowly missing parked cars and poles. Finally they skidded to a stop in front of his house, a ten-minute drive in three.

He sat there, stupefied, for another minute.

“Come on, Elgar,” she said, sensing his reluctance, seizing his hand and pulling hard. “I wonder how long it would have taken you to come back here if I hadn’t decided to drag you?”

“Only a hundred years. Or thereabouts,” he said as he was led inside.

But after Lanie’s direct, “Miss Perkins, you’re my absolute idol, I have every one of your records, I was playing them tonight, and I told Elgar, I said, ‘Elgar, I don’t care what time of night it is, I have to meet her right away!’ ” Marge melted like a huge slab of Hershey exposed to intense warmth.

“Well just come right on in, honey. You hungry? There’s some Creole rice on the stove.”

“Oh, your famous perlo. I read about it in somebody’s book, Langston Hughes, wasn’t it? I’d love some. So would Elgar. Wouldn’t you, Elgar?”

She was matching Marge’s sugariness, granule for granule. It was sickening. Elgar thought he might want to throw up instead.

“Naturally he wants some, he’s always hungry,” Marge said, dipping up a rosy bowlful.

“Here, let me do that,” Lanie said, taking the spoon from Marge’s hand. “Don’t you work now. We came to hear you sing.”

“Awww,” Marge said, clasping her hands behind her back. She hung her head and shifted shyly from foot to foot like an embarrassed child. In a rosy-flowered cotton playdress, size 52. “Awww, it’s been twenty years since I sang for anybody.”

“Oh, please,” Lanie coaxed. “Come on. ‘C. C. Rider.’ Nobody can do it like you.”

“Awww,” Marge said again. It was unbelievable, the resemblance to an elephantine toddler asked to recite a Bible verse in Sunday school. “Aw, no, I can’t be playing the piano this time of night.” She winked and added, “Landlord wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, you do have a piano!” Lanie shrieked in delight, bounding coltlike into the next room. She was being unbelievable too; unbelievable and unbearable. Elgar could not tell who was sincere and who was putting on an act around here. Probably a little bit of both apiece.

He followed them morosely into a dim front parlor furnished in early Lumpy-Gloomy, with more crazy scrapbook pages for walls and stiff lace doilies blooming on every flat surface. Squatting evilly in the center was the only item in the world darker and more massive than Marge herself: a square black Victorian piano.

“Hardly ever touch it any more,” Marge protested as she was led to the stool. “Besides, it’s out of tune.”

Finally she said firmly, “No, child, I won’t play. I’ll just sing.” And did so, sitting erect, hands folded in her lap, with odd, childlike dignity.

Elgar, never musical, fought down the urge to headlong flight that had seized him the moment he started to climb his stairs. He hung around bravely until she got to the line that went,

Gonna buy me a shotgun, long as I am tall . . .

Then he found himself edging rapidly toward the door, unnoticed by the rapt pair. What the hell. It was their party anyway, let them enjoy it. He sneaked out into the hall to light a cigarette with shaking hands.

A strong whoosh of wind instantly snuffed out the match for him. A soft flannel bundle like someone’s bag of laundry landed in Elgar’s sensitive middle, knocking his breath away. Thinking that a pillow fight was in progress, instantly angry and ready to retaliate, Elgar gripped the object firmly. But when he raised it from the floor it developed appendages that clawed and kicked and a hard little cannonball that butted him violently in the chest.

The second match he struck revealed the lively bundle under his left arm to be Walter Gee Copee. Dressed in flannel pajamas, feet, drop seat, and all. Eyes screwed tight, and bawling.

“Well now,” Elgar said, lifting the boy to face him, “well now, what have I got here? Feels too solid to be a ghost. Too wiggly to be laundry. Can it be a sleepwalker?”

Walter Gee pummeled all of the accessible surfaces a dozen more times with hard little fists, then flung his arms around Elgar’s neck, sobbing convulsively.

The spasms shaking the tense little body invaded Elgar’s frame and frightened him. Until now his own suffering had kept him distant from that of others. What, he wondered wildly, were the symptoms of appendicitis? Epilepsy? Other seizures with possible brain damage?

All he could manage was a series of gruff there, there, theres accompanied by awkward pat, pat, pats. He was aware of his inadequacy. Yet somehow did not want to call Lanie or Marge, did not want to share this problem with anybody.

“My pop-pop crazy,” Walter babbled. “Say he gone kill my mama. ‘Bang bang,’ he say. ‘Bang bang.’ My mama run away. My bubba, he run too. I all alone. I scared. It’s dark down there.”

This disjointed message delivered, Walter’s shoulders gradually stilled. An incredibly tiny hand found its way into Elgar’s. And held on with incredible strength.

“Well now,” Elgar said, swinging the boy down, supporting the hard little rump briefly in the palm of his hand before releasing Walter Gee’s weight to the floor, but letting the hand hang onto his for security (whose?), “well now, I know about the dark. If you’re afraid of it, the only thing to do is go to sleep. Then when you wake up, it’s light again. Ho. Only thing to do. So. Back to bed we go, ho. Ho. Ho. Ho.”

Wondering, as he heard himself produce this glib patter, how the kid could possibly believe it, since he had never been able to believe it himself. Case in point: tonight, running to Lanie rather than face a dark room.

“Hold tight to my hand, ho. Off to yum-yum land, ho. Where is your room, Walter Gee? Show me where.”

After a swipe of flannel sleeve across sniffles, Walter led the way to a door that opened into the first-floor hall. Inside were a pair of narrow bunkbeds, the top one empty, the bottom one very slept-in. Elgar, smoothing its disorder, was relieved that a trip through Sitting Bull’s council chamber would not be necessary.

“I don’t like my pop-pop,” Walter Gee announced as covers were tucked in tightly under his chin. It felt safer that way, Elgar knew from experience.

“Well now, fella,” Elgar said, “those are mighty strong words. You should think twice before you say them. I always do.”

The next words were very soft and dreamlike: almost, but not quite, soft enough for Elgar to have imagined them.

“You be my pop-pop, Landlord.”

Fortunately no reply was required. A soft, contented snore rose from the pillow. A small hand still clung to his large, dumbfounded one. Elgar, gently disengaging and slipping outside, could not help feeling large and strong in comparison.

He paused thoughtfully at the foot of the stairs and checked himself over routinely. Chest, arms, gut. Yep, solid. Firmer even than on that fine morning, seemingly ages ago, when he had set out to buy sundry items of hardware.

Unearthly voices drifted down to him: two witches, heads together over the rice cauldron, cooking up an infernal stew.

“Elgar needs help around here, Miss Perkins. Really he does. He needs someone like you on his side.”

“Honey, don’t worry, I’ll look out for him. I have to. It’s in the cards.”

“You may even have to collect his rents for him. Oh, I know it’s a lot to ask, Miss Perkins. Especially of a person who’s a great star like you. But do try to let him think he’s done it himself.”

Elgar turned his back on the stairs. Obviously he was the last person they wanted to see at the moment. Well, the feelings at the moment were mutual. His empty apartment suddenly appealed, because there he could be alone in front of the mirror, to check the breadth of the shoulders, the girth of the biceps, the hard, steely glint in the clear blue eyes, and learn, maybe, what it was that the boy had seen in him. Then fall asleep, hugging the knowledge to himself like a comforting old toy that had been lost for years and was suddenly found again.

Girlish giggles rained down on Elgar; giggles at his expense, no doubt. The place sounded like a witches’ dormitory at midnight.

Elgar restrained a last strong urge to charge upstairs, enraged sacred white bull, with the news of who was going to be the boss around here. News of whose house it was, after all.

No, he told himself as he strode outside, he would maintain manly silence. Hereafter he would be contained, and a gentleman. Firm. And when things began to happen around here, as they surely would starting tomorrow, he would stand aside nobly and let them think they had done it themselves.