The young man who was playing the piano was about medium height with slightly stooped shoulders, and if he had been naked she could have counted far too many of his bones, and he had black hair and an ugly, thin, dark face with a slightly twisted nose and twisted mouth. She thought with a kind of strange despair that he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen in all her life.
CHAPTER 2
Piano and the drum were lovers. After giving thanks to a dark psychotic god, they laughed and wept and made erotic love. What had been in the beginning a jam-session psalm became, in an instant, jazz pornography. The young man with bewitched eyes leaned above the drum, and the young man with the beautiful ugly face leaned above the piano, and the girl from Park Avenue leaned above the bar and listened and held an empty Martini glass, and the superior bartender leaned against the backbar opposite her and felt in his heart a rare and reluctant bitterness.
For a while she had sat sidewise to the bar with her eyes fixed on the piano player, but then she had turned slowly back to face the bar squarely, and that’s the way she was sitting now, in a posture of intent listening, with her shoulders folded slightly forward and her pale hair falling down over her eye on the heavy side. The bartender from his position could see directly past pale hair and short nose and soft mouth into the cleft between her resilient breasts that were half exposed, even when she sat erect, by the décolleté gown that had probably cost more than he made in two long months of mixing drinks and drawing beer. Watching her, he was aware of an exorbitant emotional reaction, but it was not the view of her breasts that stimulated it. He was used to nudity, resistant if not immune, and he was no longer subject as he had once been in his youth, to the hard thrust of instant desire at the sight of suggestive flesh. It was her face that disturbed him and made him feel the reluctant bitterness, for it was a small, sad, lovely face of fine structure in which sadness and loveliness would survive as a shadow of themselves after the erosions of gin and promiscuous love and nervous breakdowns. It was a face, in fact, which he would surely remember, and remembering was almost always the worst kind of mistake. This was something he had learned from a long time of tending bar. A man was a fool to take anything home in his head.
Well, he had learned a lot tending bar, and it had been, on the whole, a good and satisfying kind of life. Maybe it wasn’t the thing he would have done if he could have done what he wanted most to do, but just the same it was far from being the worst thing he might have done, and he had no complaints, no bellyaches, no futile regrets for not having become something more than he was. The only thing he wished: he wished he were not so vulnerable to the faces. Not specific faces. Not the face of this person or that person as distinguished from all other faces that had stared at themselves in the mirror behind the backbar. Composite faces. Type faces. The face of the old man who sat nursing his bourbon and water in the silence of his own dissolution as be listened to the relentless ticking of the metronome of God. The adjusted face of the pro whore who exploited love, and the sick face of the amateur whore that love exploited. The faces of the lost and the tired and the damned. And now, to disturb his peace for an hour or two, the specific, haunting face of a Park Avenue tramp who had stopped in to find out where she’d been. The rare face of a dissolute child.
• • •
She was holding the brittle bulb of her glass in the palms of her cupped hands, and pretty soon she looked up with an odd expression of supplication, as if she wanted desperately to have the bulb filled but somehow did not think it would be proper to ask. The bartender moved across the narrow space between the back and front bars.
“Another Martini, lady?” be said.
“Yes, please.”
She pushed the glass toward him and continued to sit in the posture of intent listening while he measured and mixed gin and vermouth. The drum and the piano were now angry with each other. The piano was speaking with censurable profanity.
“Have you remembered where you were?” the bartender said.
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “Not exactly, that is, but in a general way. It was a very noisy place with a band that was much too big and a dirty ladies’ room. I went there with this particular man I know who wanted me to go home with him, but I decided that I wouldn’t. I went outside and leaned against the front of the building and took several deep breaths of air, and that’s all I remember until I was suddenly walking along the street. Do you have any idea what place it was?”
“It could be one of several. Anyhow, it must be near. I can have someone help you look for it, if you like.”
“No. That won’t be necessary. I don’t care to go back. If I did, I would have to explain to Milton why I don’t want to stay with him, and he would probably be difficult. Besides, to tell the truth, I’m not quite sure myself why I don’t.”
“I see. How do you propose to get home?”
“I’ll take a taxi or something. It’s entirely possible that I may not bother to go home at all.” “Well, you’ll have to go somewhere.”
“That’s true. It’s always necessary to go somewhere. I wonder why.” “I don’t know, lady. It’s just expected of us, I guess.” “Yes. You’re right, as usual. We’re always doing what’s expected of us. The trouble is, however, I’m not. I get into quite a bit of trouble that way.” “I can imagine.”
“You’re very understanding. I can see that. Don’t worry about me, though. I’ll go somewhere else when it becomes necessary, but right now I’m happy to be exactly where I am. I like this place very much. We’re compatible. I believe that I was guided here. After all, I didn’t have the least idea where I was coming, and here I came. Isn’t that logical?”
“You blacked out, lady. You might have wound up anywhere, and you ought to be careful. Something might happen to you some time.”
“Something’s always happening to me. I seem to be the sort of person that things just happen to. Can you believe it?”
“Yes, I can. I believe it.”
The piano was now contrite. It was filled with guilt and sorrow for having been profane. It wept softly, and the drum consoled it, and the sad lovely face of the girl to whom things happened was the compassionate mourner for all the troubled drums and pianos in the world.
“Who is that beautiful guy?” she said.
“What beautiful guy?” the bartender said.
“The one on the platform.”
“There’s no beautiful guy on the platform, lady. There’s only Chester Lewis on the drum and Joe Doyle on the piano.” “That’s the one. The piano.”
“Joe’s not beautiful, lady He’s only a so-so piano thumper with a twisted nose and a bum pump.”
She lifted her glass in both hands and drank from it and stared at him sadly over the edge. In sadness and disappointment she shook her head slowly from side to side, the pale hair moving back and forth with the motion over the eye on the heavy side.
“I thought you were an understanding and perceptive bartender,” she said, “and I still think so. But now you are being disappointing. The piano is easily the most beautiful guy I’ve ever seen in all my life.”
“Excuse me, lady. Everyone to his own taste.”
“Are you being tolerant? I’m not sure I like that. It means I’m being tolerated, which is not particularly pleasant.”
“All right, lady. Joe’s beautiful. He’s the most beautiful guy in the world.”
“Well, you don’t have to be too agreeable. I admit that the piano has a twisted nose, and I admit that he might even be considered ugly by many people, but that’s because many people are not perceptive, which I was inclined to believe you were. What I mean is, he’s beautiful because he’s so ugly. Do you understand that?”
“Sorry Explain it to me,”
“At first it may seem paradoxical, but a little thought will show you that it isn’t paradoxical at all. What you must realize is that everything goes in circles by degrees. The moon and the sun and the earth and all the planets. This has been de
monstrated. I’ve thought a great deal about this, and I’m certain that everything else goes the same way. Every single thing.
Ugliness and beauty, for example. If one becomes too beautiful, he has gone too far around the circle and becomes ugly. If one becomes too ugly, he has gone far enough around the circle to become beautiful. Isn’t that reasonable? Don’t you agree?”
“Sure, sure. I get it. Joe’s so damn ugly he’s come around to being beautiful. It’s simple.”
“That’s right. Now you are being the perceptive person I thought you were.”
• • •
He looked at her, at her fine grave face and nearly bare breasts, and he thought tiredly that this one was surely gone. If not gone, going, going. All her life, he thought, she had been doing by compulsion in desperation all the significant things that required the sacrifice of herself, some part of herself, and after they were done, after the sacrifice, she had tried to explain and justify, by circles or squares or Omar Khayyam or almost any too-late God-damned rationalization, whatever she had done, whatever sacrifice made, and in the future she would go on drinking too much gin and sleeping in too many beds and blacking out between bed and bottle, and in the end, if she was lucky, she would wind up jumping off a high place, or taking too many soporifics, or having shock treatments and lying on a couch in an expensive sanitarium trying to remember where she’d been and how she’d got where she was, and weaving bright little rugs on a hand-loom for therapy. The worst of it was, she hit him in his vulnerability; she had a face he would remember, and he would see it in the darkness above his bed, tonight and possibly nights afterward, and a long time from now, between a beer and a bourbon, he would wonder suddenly if she were dead or alive and what the diagnosis had been.
“What did you mean by bum pump?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”
“You meant something. Of course you meant something.” “All right. A pump’s a heart.”
“I know a pump’s a heart. I know all sorts of slang. Once, just for fun, I took two tests. You know. These multiple choice things that you get in school and places. One of them was about highbrow words, and the other was about lowbrow words, to find out which ones you knew best, and I came out knowing a lot more about lowbrow. Would you believe it?”
“And you from Park Avenue? Not quite.”
“It’s true. I came out a much better lowbrow. I was quite proud of myself.” “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. You’re very kind. Tell me, however. Why does this beautiful piano have a bad heart?”
“It started as a kid, I guess. Rheumatic fever. I don’t know, really. It’s just something I heard about”
“What’s rheumatic fever?”
“It’s something you get as a kid that gives you a bad heart.”
“I don’t know about this. Is it serious?”
“Anything that gives you a bad heart is serious.”
“I mean the heart. Is the heart serious?”
“Not so much. He may live another year or two.”
She drank what was left of her Martini and looked at the empty glass as if it had somehow deserted her when she needed it most. He thought for a moment that she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She hadn’t cried for a long, long time. Not since crying for a reason that he couldn’t know and she wished to forget. It wasn’t likely that she would ever cry again.
“I love him,” she said.
“Sure,” he said
“It’s true. I thought I loved him because he was so beautiful by being ugly, and now I know I love him, because he has a bum heart from having rheumatic fever as a small boy. Do you honestly think he will die soon?”
“Not before tomorrow. It’ll be long enough if you love him until tomorrow.”
“Maybe I could give him a little happiness in the end.” “I doubt it.”
“Why? I’ve given several people a little happiness, I believe. It’s not impossible.”
“Leave him alone. You’d probably only make him more aware of what he’s about to be missing.”
“I feel compelled to try. At least, he should be allowed to accept or reject the proposition for himself. We have no right to make the decision.”
At that moment, the drum and the piano became silent, and she sat silently listening to the silence of the drum and piano that was like an empty space in the sound that continued, and then, after a minute or two, the piano began playing again by itself, and she revolved the half-turn on the stool and looked that way. The drum, whose name was Chester Lewis, was gone. Only Joe Doyle, the piano, remained. Joe Doyle, the piano, was not now playing the clever stuff, the jam stuff. He was playing tunes, the little melodies that reminded people of things that had happened. At the moment of her looking, he was playing something that she remembered by sound but not by name. It had no particular associations.
“What’s he doing?” she said.
“He’s winding it up,” the bartender said. “It’s the routine. Every night, last thing before closing, he plays a few of the little tunes. Requests. It sets people up for whatever they have in mind.”
“Is anyone allowed to make a request?”
“Sure. Anyone. It’s free.”
“In that case, I must make one.”
“I’ll deliver it, if you like. Just name the tune.”
“No. I don’t think so.” She lifted her glass and tipped it, and the olive rolled out onto the bar with two amber drops. “Thank you very much, but I think it would be better if I delivered it myself.”
CHAPTER 3
Slipping off the stool to the floor, she stood for a few seconds in precarious balance. Then she walked back carefully among the tables to the small platform and took the enormous twelve-inch step upward with elaborate caution and leaned against the piano with a vast feeling of relief and pride in having arrived safely. She looked down at Joe Doyle and smiled, and he looked up and grinned a professional grin in which there was the slightest touch of bitterness.
“Hello, Joe Doyle,” she said.
“Hello, baby,” he said.
“Do you know something? You’re wonderful.” “Do you know something else? You’re drunk.”
“No. I’ve drunk a number of Martinis in a number of places, and for a little while I was drunk, or at least blacked out, but now I’ve recovered and become perfectly sober.”
“You’re drunk, baby. If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t think I was wonderful.”
They were always drunk, he thought, always drunk. That was the way he got them, when the night was running out. Out of a glass in the tail of the night to lean against his piano and ask for the slight and shabby little tunes that had achieved permanence and an exorbitant importance in their minds because they were associated with something that had happened or had not happened or might yet happen, with good luck or bad, some place and time. Mostly they were just women with faces you never saw and names you never heard, and they came and went and in effect had never been, no strain whatever on even a bum heart, but once in a great, great while, a time or two in a couple of thousand nights, there was one with a face and a name who left a memory, and you looked up and saw her leaning over the piano in her expensive gown with her pale hair over her eye on the heavy side, and you felt it suddenly in the bum heart, and you wished it were possible for you to live a little longer than the prognosis, at least long enough to learn in your own way that it would have been better if you hadn’t lived so long.
“If it embarrasses you to be called wonderful,” she said, “I apologize. You’re good. Do you object to that? You’re very good.”
“No, baby. Not even good. Jelly Roll Morton was good. Fats Waller was good. The Duke’s good. Not me. I’m just a thumper.”
“I can see that you’re determined to belittle yourself, and I don’t want to hear it. You’d be surprised to know how sad it makes me to hear it. What I want to hear instead is a particular tune. Will you play me a particular tune, Joe Doyle?”
Sure, he thought, sure. Play me something, Joe. Play me something for me alone. They all came out of a glass in the tail of the night to hear the particular little tunes that stood for a time or a place or a man, and afterward they went away with someone or anyone to someplace or anyplace, and you let them go and remembered them at most for a minute. Even this one who had a face and was felt in the heart and had come, from the looks of her, down into the mean streets from a steel and stone tower, for kicks. Even this one? Especially this one. She was a tramp at best and a nut at worst and probably a lush in either case, and nothing could come of her but trouble in the unlikely event that anything could come of her at all, and whatever she made you feel in the heart in a minute or two of the tail of the night, you had better play her a tune and let her go if you had any concern for what was left of your life.
You name it, baby,” he said, “I’ll play it.”
“ ‘Rippling Waters,’ “ she said. “I want particularly to hear ‘Rippling Waters.’ “
He looked down at his fingers that had gone on playing softly the tune they had been playing and were now lightly running scales between the last tune and the next one.
“That’s Willie Smith,” he said. “What do you know about Willie Smith?”
“I know lots of surprising things,” she said.
“I’ll bet you do.”
“It’s the truth. You may ask any of my friends, if you care to. I’m always surprising them with things I know.”
“I don’t know any of your friends, baby. It isn’t like that I ever will.”
“That’s all right. I don’t think you’d like them much, anyhow. Most of the time I don’t like them very much myself.”
“That’s rough. Real rough. What do you do when you don’t like even your friends?”
“I don’t know. It’s a problem that I’ve often thought about myself. When you stop to think seriously about it, it doesn’t seem quite natural, does it? Do you suppose there’s something wrong with me?”
“I suppose there’s something wrong with all of us in one way or another.”
Park Avenue Tramp Page 2
