Preminger looked toward the apartment house. “I’ve got to go up for another suitcase, Bertie.”
“Sure,” Bertie said.
He went up the stairs behind Preminger. About halfway up he stopped to catch his breath. Preminger watched him curiously. He pounded his chest with his tiny fist and grinned weakly. “Mea culpa,” he said. “Mea booze, Mea sluts. Mea pot. Me-o-mea.”
“Come on,” Preminger said.
They went inside and Bertie heard a toilet flushing. Through a hall, through an open door, he saw Norma, Preminger’s wife, staring absently into the bowl. “If she moves them now you won’t have to stop at God knows what kind of place along the road,” Bertie said brightly.
Norma lifted a big suitcase easily in her big hands and came into the living room. She stopped when she saw Bertie. “Bertie! Richard, it’s Bertie.”
“We bumped into each other in the hall,” Preminger said.
Bertie watched the two of them look at each other.
“You sure picked a time to come visiting, Bertie,” Preminger said.
“We’re leaving on our vacation, Bertie,” Norma said.
“We’re going up to New England for a couple of weeks,” Preminger told him.
“We can chat for a little with Bertie, can’t we, Richard, before we go?”
“Of course,” Preminger said. He sat down and pulled the suitcase next to him.
“It’s very lovely in New England.” Bertie sat down and crossed his legs. “I don’t get up there very regularly. Not my territory. I’ve found that when a man makes it in the Ivy League he tends to forget about old Bertie,” he said sadly.
“What are you doing in St. Louis, Bertie?” Preminger’s wife asked him.
“It’s my Midwestern swing,” Bertie said. “I’ve been down South on the southern sponge. Opened up a whole new territory down there.” He heard himself cackle.
“Who did you see, Bertie?” Norma asked him.
“You wouldn’t know her. A cousin of Klaff’s.”
“Were you living with her?” Preminger asked.
Bertie shook his finger at him. The Premingers stared glumly at each other. Richard rubbed the plastic suitcase handle. In a moment, Bertie thought, he would probably say, “Gosh, Bertie, you should have written. You should have let us know.” He should have written! Did the Fuller Brush man write? Who would be home? Who wouldn’t be on vacation? They were commandos, the Fuller Brush man and he. He was tired, sick. He couldn’t move on today. Would they kill him because of their lousy vacation?
Meanwhile the Premingers weren’t saying anything. They stared at each other openly, their large eyes in their large heads on their large necks largely. He thought he could wait them out. It was what he should do. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to wait out the Premingers, to stare them down. Who was he kidding? It wasn’t his forte. He had no forte. That was his forte. He could already hear himself begin to speak.
“Sure,” he said. “I almost married that girl. Klaff’s lady cousin. The first thing she ever said to me was, ‘Bertie, they never build drugstores in the middle of the block. Always on corners.’ It was the truth. Well, I thought, this was the woman for me. One time she came out of the ladies’ john of a Greyhound bus station and she said, ‘Bertie, have you ever noticed how public toilets often smell like bubble gum?’ That’s what it was like all the time. She had all these institutional insights. I was sure we could make it together. It didn’t work out.” He sighed.
Preminger stared at him, but Norma was beginning to soften. He wondered randomly what she would be like in bed. He looked coolly at her long legs, her wide shoulders. Like Klaff’s cousin: institutional.
“Bertie, how are your eyes now?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, “still seeing double.” He smiled. “Two for one. It’s all right when there’s something to look at. Other times I use the patch.”
Norma seemed sad.
“I have fun with it,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference which eye I cover. I’m ambidextrous.” He pulled the black elastic band from his forehead. Instantly there were two large Richards, two large Normas. The Four Premingers like a troupe of Jewish acrobats. He felt surrounded. In the two living rooms his four hands fumbled with the two patches. He felt sick to his stomach. He closed one eye and hastily replaced the patch. “I shouldn’t try that on an empty stomach,” he said.
Preminger watched him narrowly. “Gee, Bertie,” he said finally, “maybe we could drop you some place.”
It was out of the question. He couldn’t get into a car again. “Do you go through Minneapolis, Minnesota?” he asked indifferently.
Preminger looked confused, and Bertie liked him for a moment. “We were going to catch the Turnpike up around Chicago, Bertie.”
“Oh, Chicago,” Bertie said. “I can’t go back to Chicago yet.”
Preminger nodded.
“Don’t you know anybody else in St. Louis?” Norma asked.
“Klaff used to live across the river, but he’s gone,” Bertie said.
“Look, Bertie…” Preminger said.
“I’m fagged,” Bertie said helplessly, “locked out.”
“Bertie,” Preminger said, “do you need any money? I could let you have twenty dollars.”
Bertie put his hand out mechanically.
“This is stupid,” Norma said suddenly. “Stay here.”
“Oh, well—”
“No, I mean it. Stay here. We’ll be gone for two weeks. What difference does it make?”
Preminger looked at his wife for a moment and shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “there’s no reason you couldn’t stay here. As a matter of fact you’d be doing us a favor. I forgot to cancel the newspaper, the milk. You’d keep the burglars off. They don’t bother a place if it looks lived in.” He put twenty dollars on the coffee table. “There might be something you need,” he explained.
Bertie looked carefully at them both. They seemed to mean it. Preminger and his wife grinned at him steadily, relieved at how easily they had come off. He enjoyed the idea himself. At last he had a real patron, a real matron. “Okay,” he said.
“Then it’s settled,” Preminger said, rising.
“It’s all right?” Bertie said.
“Certainly it’s all right,” Preminger said. “What harm could you do?”
“I’m harmless,” Bertie said.
Preminger picked up the suitcase and led his wife toward the door. “Have a good time,” Bertie said, following them. “I’ll watch things for you. Rrgghh! Rrrgghhhfff!”
Preminger waved back at him as he went down the stairs. “Hey,” Bertie called, leaning over the banister, “did I tell you about that crazy Klaff? You know what nutty Klaff did out at U.C.L.A.? He became a second-story man.” They were already down the stairs.
Bertie pressed his back against the door and turned his head slowly across his left shoulder. He imagined himself photographed from underneath. “Odd man in,” he said. He bounded into the center of the living room. I’ll bet there’s a lease, he thought. I’ll bet there’s a regular lease that goes with this place. He considered this respectfully, a little awed. He couldn’t remember ever having been in a place where the tenants actually had to sign a lease. In the dining room he turned on the chandelier lights. “Sure there’s a lease,” Bertie said. He hugged himself. “How the fallen are mighty,” he said.
In the living room he lay down on the couch without taking off his shoes. He sat up and pulled them off, but when he lay down again he was uneasy. He had gotten out of the habit, living the way he did, of sleeping without shoes. In his friends’ leaseless basements the nights were cold and he wore them for warmth. He put the shoes on again, but found that he wasn’t tired any more. It was a fact that dependence gave him energy. He was never so alert as when people did him favors. It was having to be on your own that made you tired.
“Certainly,” Bertie said to the committee, “it’s scientific. We’ve suspected it fo
r years, but until our researchers divided up the town of Bloomington, Indiana, we had no proof. What our people found in that community was that the orphans and bastards were sleepy and run down, while the housewives and people on relief were wide awake, alert, raring to go. We can’t positively state the link yet, but we’re fairly certain that it’s something to do with dependency—in league perhaps with a particularly virulent form of gratitude. Ahem. Ahem.”
As he lectured the committee he wandered around the apartment, touring from right to left. He crossed from the living room into the dining room and turned right into the kitchen and then right again into Preminger’s small study. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said, glancing at the contour chair near Preminger’s desk. He went back into the kitchen. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said, looking at Norma’s electric stove. He stepped into the dining room and continued on, passing Norma’s paintings of picturesque side streets in Mexico, of picturesque side streets in Italy, of picturesque side streets in Puerto Rico, until he came to a door that led to the back sun parlor. He went through it and found himself in a room with an easel, with paints in sexy little tubes, with brushes, with palettes and turpentine and rags. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said and walked around the room to another door. He opened it and was in the Premingers’ master bedroom. He looked at the bed. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said. Through a door at the other end of the room was another small hall. On the right was the toilet. He went in and flushed it. It was one of those toilets with instantly renewable tanks. He flushed it again. And again. “The only kind to have,” he said out of the side of his mouth, imagining a rental agent. “I mean, it’s like this. Supposing the missus has diarrhea or something. You don’t want to have to wait until the tank fills up. Or suppose you’re sick. Or suppose you’re giving a party and it’s mixed company. Well, it’s just corny to whistle to cover the noise, know what I mean? ’S jus’ corny. On the other hand, you flush it once suppose you’re not through, then what happens? There’s the damn noise after the water goes down. What have you accomplished? This way”—he reached across and jiggled the little lever and then did it a second time, a third, a fourth—“you never have any embarrassing interim, what we in the trade call ‘flush lag.’ ”
He found the guest bedroom and knew at once that he would never sleep in it, that he would sleep in the Premingers’ big bed.
“Nice place you got here,” he said when he had finished the tour.
“Dooing de woh eet ees all I tink of, what I fahting foe,” the man from the Underground said. “Here ees eet fahrproof, aircondizione and safe from Nazis.”
“Stay out of Volkswagens, kid,” Bertie said.
He went back into the living room. He wanted music, but it was a cardinal principle with him never to blow alone. He would drink alone, take drugs alone, but somehow for him the depths of depravity were represented by having to play jazz alone. He had a vision of himself in a cheap hotel room sitting on the edge of an iron bedstead. Crumpled packages of cigarettes were scattered throughout the room. Bottles of gin were on top of the Gideon Bible, the Western Union blanks. His trumpet was in his lap. “Perfect,” Bertie said. “Norma Preminger could paint it in a picture.” He shuddered.
The phonograph was in the hall between the dining room and living room. It was a big thing, with the AM and the FM and the short wave and the place where you plugged in the color television when it was perfected. He found records in Preminger’s little room and went through them rapidly. “Ahmad Jamahl, for Christ’s sake.” Bertie took the record out of its sleeve and broke it across his knee. He stood up slowly and kicked the fragments of the broken recording into a neat pile.
He turned around and scooped up as many of Preminger’s recordings as he could carry and brought them to the machine. He piled them on indiscriminately and listened with visible, professional discomfort. He listened to The New World Symphony, to Beethoven’s Fifth, to My Fair Lady. The more he listened the more he began to dislike, the Premingers. When he could stand it no longer he tore the playing arm viciously away from the record and looked around him. He saw the Premingers’ bookcase.
“I’ll read,” Bertie said.
He took down the Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller and Ronald Firbank and turned the pages desultorily. Nothing happened. He tried reading aloud in front of a mirror. He went back to the bookcase and looked for The Egg and I and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The prose of a certain kind of bright housewife always made Bertie feel erotic. But the Premingers owned neither book. He browsed through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with his fly unzipped, but he felt only a mild lasciviousness.
He went into their bedroom and opened the closet. He found a pair of Norma’s shoes and put them on. Although he was no fetishist, he had often promised himself that if he ever had the opportunity he would see what it was like. He got into drag and walked around the apartment in Norma’s high heels. All he experienced was a pain in his calves.
In the kitchen he looked into the refrigerator. There were some frozen mixed vegetables in the freezer compartment. “I’ll starve first,” Bertie said.
He found a Billie Holiday record and put it on the phonograph. He hoped that out in Los Angeles, Klaff was being beaten with rubber hoses by the police. He looked up at the kitchen clock. “Nine,” he said. “Only seven in L.A. They probably don’t start beating them up till later.”
“Talk, Klaff,” he snarled, “or we’ll drag you into the Blood Room.”
“Flake off, copper,” Klaff said.
“That’s enough of that, Klaff. Take that and that and that.”
“Bird lives!” Bertie screamed suddenly, invoking the dead Charlie Parker. It was his code cry.
“Mama may have,” Billie Holiday wailed, “Papa may have, but God Bless the child who’s got his own, who—oo—zz—”
“Who—oo—zz,” Bertie wailed.
“Got his own,” Billie said.
“I’ll tell him when he comes in, William,” Bertie said.
He waited respectfully until Billie was finished and then turned off the music.
He wondered why so many people felt that Norman Mailer was the greatest living American novelist.
He sat down on the Premingers’ coffee table and marveled at his being alone in so big and well-furnished an apartment. The Premingers were probably the most substantial people he knew. Though plenty of the others wanted to, Bertie thought bitterly, Preminger was the only one from the old crowd who might make it. Of course he was Jewish, and that helped. Some Jews swung pretty good, but he always suspected that in the end they would hold out on you. But then who wouldn’t, Bertie wondered. Kamikaze pilots, maybe. Anyway, this was Bertie’s special form of anti-Semitism and he cherished it. Melvin Gimpel, for example, his old roommate. Every time Melvin tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven he left the kitchen window open. One time he found Gimpel on his knees with his head on the oven door, oddly like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Bertie closed the window and shook Gimpel awake.
“Mel,” he yelled, slapping him. “Mel.
“Bertie, go way. Leave me alone, I want to kill myself.”
“Thank God,” Bertie said. “Thank God I’m in time. When I found that window closed I thought it was all over.”
“What, the window was closed? My God, was the window closed?”
“Melvin Gimpel is so simple
Thinks his nipple is a pimple,”
Bertie recited.
He hugged his knees, and felt again a wave of the nauseous sickness he had experienced that morning. “It’s foreshadowing. One day as I am shoveling my walk I will collapse and die.”
When the nausea left him he thought again about his situation. He had friends everywhere and made his way from place to place like an old-time slave on the Underground Railway. For all the pathos of the figure he knew he deliberately cut, there were always people to do him favors, give him money, beer, d
rugs, to nurse him back to his normal state of semi-invalidism, girls to kiss him in the comforting way he liked. This was probably the first time he had been alone in months. He felt like a dog whose master has gone away for the weekend. Just then he heard some people coming up the stairs and he growled experimentally. He went down on his hands and knees and scampered to the door, scratching it with his nails. “Rrrgghhf,” he barked. “Rrgghhfff!” He heard whoever it was fumbling to open a door on the floor below him. He smiled. “Good dog,” he said. “Good dog, goodog, gudug, gudugguduggudug.”
He whined. He missed his master. A tear formed in the corner of his left eye. He crawled to a full-length mirror in the bathroom. “Ahh,” he said. “Ahh.” Seeing the patch across his eye, he had an inspiration. “Here, Patch,” he called. “Come on, Patch.” He romped after his own voice.
He moved beside Norma Preminger’s easel in the sun parlor. He lowered his body carefully, pushing himself slightly backward with his arms. He yawned. He touched his chest to the wooden floor. He wagged his tail and then let himself fall heavily on one side. He pulled his legs up under him and fell asleep.
When Bertie awoke he was hungry. He fingered the twenty dollars in his pocket that Preminger had given him. He could order out. The light in the hall where the phone and phone books were was not good, so he tore “Restaurants” from the Yellow Pages and brought the sheets with him into the living room. Only two places delivered after one A.M. It was already one-thirty. He dialed the number of a pizza place across the city.
“Pal, bring over a big one, half shrimp, half mushroom. And two six-packs.” He gave the address. The man explained that the truck had just gone out and that he shouldn’t expect delivery for at least another hour and a half.
“Put it in a cab,” Bertie said. “While Bird lives Bertie spends.”
He took out another dozen or so records and piled them on the machine. He sat down on the couch and drummed his trumpet case with his fingers. He opened the case and fit the mouthpiece to the body of the horn. He put the trumpet to his lips and experienced the unpleasant shock of cold metal he always felt. He still thought it strange that men could mouth metal this way, ludicrous that his professional attitude should be a kiss. He blew a few bars in accompaniment to the record and then put the trumpet back in the case. He felt in the side pockets of the trumpet case and took out two pairs of dirty underwear, some handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks. He unrolled one of the pairs of socks and saw with pleasure that the drug was still there. He took out the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. This was what he cleaned his instrument with, and it was what he would use to kill himself when he had finally made the decision.
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