The Joyce Affairs

There were two peculiarities about the affairs carried on by Miss Eleanor Stephens in the scalding New York summer of 1953. The first was that each of the two gentlemen involved were very much aware of the other’s existence, and had been from the very beginning. They had no knowledge, however, of the second peculiarity – for which the term perhaps does no justice – which was this: each man had been christened Henry by his loving mother, and both mothers, as it happens, receive mail addressed to Mrs Joyce.

To even her closest confidante – a teenage waitress in a Manhattan diner – Eleanor Stephens did not reveal the intention behind pursuing affairs with two men who were for epistolography purposes the same person. Neither did she reveal if it was instead sheer coincidence, a vagary in Cupid’s capricious aim, that brought the Messrs Joyce to her bosom during that blistering season. What was clear, though, was the unflinching reverence in which Miss Stephens was held by both; of course, it is assumed that for the abrogation of the famously territorial male instincts, the prize must be extraordinary – it is a fact universally known to the fairer sex that men do not share their spoils easily. But to these young lovers, the woman might as well have walked on water.

One evening, as hellish July meandered to a close, and the buildings inched closer together, block by block, compressing the air and the people with it like a piston, two figures made their way out onto an apartment fire escape. The woman, hair in an offset, sun-kissed bun and lips pursed like a ripe cherry, gazed between two rusted steps. The eyes looking back at her, olive-green and narrowed, followed the contours of her face like scripture.

‘Come away with me, Eleanor.’

‘Uh huh?’ She licked her eyes upwards. ‘And go where?’

‘Anywhere!’ A bead of sweat rolled down the edge of his brow. ‘Florida! How about Florida? My aunt has a house out on Key West. We can lay on the beach, under the palm trees, and watch the cruisers and… and…’

‘And suffer more of this heat?’ She was hanging out over the balcony now, cheeks thumbing for any hint of a breeze. ‘Hal, honey, I’m ready for New York in the winter. Snow-covered cabs, and wind that howls like Lady Day.’

Hal, a fresh-faced ad man, had met Eleanor on the corner of West 23rd and 8th, two months after moving to New York from Iowa. Her little pearl earring had fallen to the ground and rolled and rolled and rested gracefully against his shoe; he returned it, and they were in bed together that night. By now, he was ready to quit the job and the city.

‘But Eleanor, baby, aren’t you sick of everybody looking at you? Knowing you? I got enough dough saved, we could get married out in a little church, nobody else there but the priest and the gardener. Hell, then we could take an old beat-up wagon – one that really flies – and get out on that hot road and make friends with the dust. Think of it, you and me and nobody.’

He had worked himself to fever pitch, his tie loosened, his shirt half untucked, his back and arms sprawled in one great bulge across the balcony. Children were playing in the cool jets of a broken fire hydrant on the ground below. Eleanor spun from her perch beside him, and draped her long, slender arms over his shoulders, clasping her hands at the nape of his neck. Furtively, she let one red fingernail edge across his hot skin.

‘Honey, you really think you wanna marry a girl like me?’

His eyes were fastened to hers, and her eyes shot down towards his lips, as if the rest of him wasn’t there at all.

‘And besides,’ She leaned over to his ear, close enough for a loose strand of hair to graze his cheek, and whispered, ‘I love when everybody’s looking.’

Like a spring uncoiling, she whipped her head back from his, straightened his collar, and began descending the steps.

‘I’ll see you Saturday. Our place, don’t be late.’

Later that same evening, the city had become one great, dense ball of sweat and pressure. The streets were quieter now, save for a horde of teenagers outside the stage door of the Paramount Theatre who the heat couldn’t touch, each clamouring for a glimpse of Dean Martin or Jerry Lewis. A few blocks over, a man hung himself against the doorway of a five-and-dime store, and gently lit a cigarette, waiting. He watched cabs drive by, with drivers stuck like gum to their seats. He watched a stray dog wrestle with the emptied guts of an upturned trash can. After a while, he watched a woman in a black polka dot summer dress cruise across the street towards him; he began to rub together the thumb and forefinger of the hand in his pocket.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘You’re looking a little suspicious there, honey, smoking in the shadows. Who do you think you are? Bogie?’ Eleanor played with her words all the time, but in the evening heat they rolled out her mouth like sweet treacle.

‘Maybe.’ He pulled the cigarette from his mouth with affected detachment, glancing to his left and right before returning to her. ‘Which would make you Lauren Bacall?’

‘Tssk, don’t flatter me, Henry darling, I get enough of that from my other men.’ She put a cigarette between her lips and pulled the hand which held his own up to her mouth, taking care to roll her fingers over the sticky palm as she did so.

Henry was a newspaper reporter, who had risen steadily from the bowels of the New York Times to a position of some prominence. He met Eleanor Stephens in a diner on Broadway. She had been sitting at the bar, and he had ruined his appetite trying to catch sight of the face attached to the golden legs that swung from her stool. Having left, but forgotten her purse on the counter, she found it kindly returned to her by Henry, and they were in bed together that night.

‘So what do you need me for?’

‘I don’t need you for anything honey, I want you.’ She blew a pale snake of smoke into his face. ‘But not right now.’

Eleanor turned, and headed back over the street. Henry, disappointed, threw his cigarette to the ground and let the tip of his black boot paste it to the concrete. He stopped when he heard her call back from over her shoulder.

‘Saturday, our place. Don’t be late.’

The record books would show that Saturday evening to be one of the warmest that ever descended on New York. Kids scuttled out of apartment buildings, sent by their parents to secure a quart or two of lemonade at bootleg prices from the diminishing stocks, before scuttling back into the shade before the prize got warm. Out in Greenwich, behind the grounds of some country club he didn’t know the name of, Hal Joyce approached a wooden bench.

He had taken a cab out from the city, but the ride had still seen his blue sports shirt darken under the arms and around the collar. As he walked, he thought that he might never be so thankful to be in the shade. The bench was his destination, as it had been often these past months, and it sat at the foot of a little patch of grass which was walled off from the nearby road by a dense barricade of old maple trees.

Sauntering languidly across the quiet meadow, Hal began to notice two things, both of which he found queer. The first was the little brown box that presently occupied the heart of the bench. The second was the dark figure emerging from mass of green leaves in the background.

With no slight alarm, Hal Joyce came to a stop a few feet in front of the bench; Henry Joyce stood a few feet behind it. As if held in place by some force field emanating from the old planks of Victorian wood, the two men stood in the kind of trance that only shock can compel. A nervous wave furrowed down Hal’s brows, following the sweat to his mouth where it formed the pressing question.

‘Who are you?’

His counterpart having blinked first, Henry shoulders relaxed, rolling backwards like the wheels of a cannon firing a shot of relief.

‘I’ve a mind to ask you the same thing.’

‘Yeah? Well what in the hell are you doing out here anyway?’

‘Different question, same answer, kid.’

The two men had begun to circle around the bench, until separated only by the length of it. Henry politely wiped away a leaf that had landed slyly on the shoulder of his suit during the exchange. Though well aware of his own confusion, the pained expression on the face of the young man across from him afforded him a little control of the situation. He strolled towards the middle of the bench, took a glance at the package wrapped in brown paper and, raising an eyebrow, gently picked it up. A little smirk rolled across his face.

‘What’s that?’ spluttered Hal, as if the words had forced their way out of their own volition.

‘It’s killing me too, kid, it’s killing me too.’

‘Well, who the hell is it for?’ Hal had begun to feel like a little boy.

‘It seems to me that this package belongs to a Mr Henry Joyce.’

‘That’s me!’ Hal scrambled his way past the bench towards Henry, bashing his knee off the ironwork as he did so. ‘I’m Henry Joyce!’

He was halted, like a dog, by the raised palm of the other man. By this time, Henry had sent his fingers around the package, and the fleshy marauders had relayed their findings back to him. The smile had gone from his face.

‘You know, I think I see what’s going on here, kid.’

‘Yeah? Well, whatever it is, it’s for me, so hand it over.’ Hal beckoned with his two hands, both drenched in sweat.

‘Close, but no cigar, kid. What’s in here, it’s for both of us.’

Hardly anybody walked through that little patch of grass out in Greenwich; it’s why Eleanor Stephens, though it was a pain to reach from the city, enjoyed it so much. One of the few who did, was an elderly woman, Mrs Bateman, who lived on the other side of the country club and occasionally walked her dog down in the maples, if she didn’t have the energy to go all the way to the usual park. That Sunday morning, Mrs Bateman took her dog, a little King Charles Spaniel called Toby, out earlier than usual, because heavy rain had been forecast before noon. In the waning hours of that famous New York heatwave, Toby, shortly followed by Mrs Bateman, found the corpse of Hal Joyce, strewn across the grass in front of the little wooden bench, with two bullet holes in his chest. On the ground beside him lay a revolver, nestled in a heap of blood-soaked brown paper.