I Could Go on Singing Read Free Page B

night. Transportation is being arranged for you,Jason. All expenses of course. Our man in London is Tommy Bird. Use him, but don’t trust him. I would go myself, but of course Jenny despises me. A word of advice, Jason. Think of it as something you are doing for her. It will make you much happier.”
    “Does Jenny know I’m coming?”
    “Be a surprise.”
    Now, on the jet six miles above the black Atlantic, Jason Brown knew he most certainly would be a surprise to Jenny Bowman. And he vowed that he would take Wegler’s advice at its face value. Do it for Jenny. And if what seemed best for Jenny Bowman seemed to run counter to what was best for Sidney Wegler, then no one need ever know in what gentle direction he had urged her, if indeed he could exert any influence over her at all. Jenny Bowman, with the bit in her teeth, was a fearsome thing indeed.
    He thought of her and felt a little residual quiver of old longing in the pit of his stomach. He remembered what a friend had said of her once. He said Jenny had yare. The word had needed much explanation. It is something a boat has when it turns out to have that little indefinable something the marine architects never built into it. A special rakish style to its buoyance, that wondrous hell-with-you flavor that the very true and very special boats have.
    The handsome stewardess brought him his third drink and gave him the menu for the Air France midnight snack. Something bland, he thought. Traditional offering to the sneaky Goddess of Ulcer. She had not made herself apparent in some time, but he had the dreary expectation that this trip would bring her out of hiding.
    (In Acapulco, on the morning beach, they had eaten the hot boiled shrimp and stuffed the shells into the sand, drunk the icy Dos Equis, swum, touched, smiled, looked deep into each others eyes, then hurried to the little rented car to clatter up the long hill to the cabana at the Americana, and she had laughed aloud on the way up, at joy anticipated, at the good tastes of food and heat and love.)

two
    Time moved five hours and the clock moved ten, and Jason Brown smiled a crinkled good-by at the stewardess and came down the boarding steps, fusty with sleep, his legs uncertain with stiffness, light topcoat slung over one shoulder, a rather shapeless felt hat on the back of his head. He came down to a welcome solidity of concrete, a misty, watery sunshine, the guile and calculated confusions of France, mildly cursing the efficiency of Wegler’s people who had arranged this trip. He found the area for passengers in transit, not subject to French customs, recovered his single suitcase, found his reservations on the London shuttle flight in order, checked his bag through and had forty minutes to kill. He killed it with some extraordinarily bad coffee, with exercising an implacable resistance against all the efforts—from the exceptionally clever to the clumsily grotesque—of the French to remove from his person any available number of dollars, and with composing and sending a cable to Bonny, styled to make her laugh. At four years old she seemed far more willing to accept the knowledge of having an aunt instead of a mother than she was to comprehend that all the daddies seemed to go off to work except hers. He imagined it would please her to be able to tell her small friends that now, for a change, as a special bonus added to the three weeks of his having gone to the studio each working day, her daddy was on a business trip.
    Tommy Bird met the London plane. He was a pouched, balding, fidgety man with tan, nervous eyes, a man a little too elegantly dressed, a man whose eyes would wander to look at something off behind you when he was talking most earnestly. He helped Jason Brown through the swift, grave politenesses of customs and led him off to a shiny gray Humber driven by one of his younger associates in the London office.
    Tommy Bird was one of the immutable characteristics of a very volatile industry. The