But she’d only flung out her chest, flung up her hands.
The rocker between them rocked.
She brought her hands down, long and two-colored. Maybe the only consensus to be made on her was that she was beautiful—and that there was no knife in them.
“You’ll have such a very nice long couch over there to sleep on, nuh? And a cozy little office fridge, like ours here; Ollie copied one of those.” The accent came out hard for what it had been all along—British West Indian. “In your little office suite. Maybe large enough for a party of ten studs and their girls—but they always like to call it the little one. It occupies that part of their lives.” She squeezed her shoulders forward in that hoarding way she had. “Maybe this is my little apartment, huh? Maybe I play that game with myself.” She shrugged. She tossed her head. “‘Come right to the office marked President,’ they say. ‘Forty-fifth floor. I am not the President, of course. But I have a key.’”
“I have a key,” he said.
“But you don’t aim to take women there,” she said low. “You aim to go with them. I saw.” Suddenly she pursed her double-curved figure into a simper, tiny-footed it up to him in exact imitation of a pross making like a chorine, tickled his lapel—and before he could move slid his wallet out and handed it to him, straight-arm.
Sick—a little—he opened it.
“Professional, nuh?”
“Yes.”
“Put it away.”
Waiting, she clasped her hands behind her neck. He saw how the waterways on her skull ran toward it. “When I was a kid, Ollie used to take me along with him, evenings. To deliver the goods. While Vivie was at work. She didn’t know.” Her speech was suddenly straight New York. “All they did when he and I got up there was sometimes to give me a Coke—just a black kid tagging along. Ollie only books white. But when I got home, I used to mime in the mirror everything I’d seen—like coming out of a movie. Vivie caught me at it, slapped me to the floor. So after that she took me with her.”
“What’d she work at?”
“Cashier, in night clubs.”
He stole a look at the diplomas.
She laughed. “Vivie framed those. I must be the only girl went through Hunter High doing her homework in a ladies’ lounge.”
“But you went back. To the Islands?” University of the West Indies, the college diploma said. A.B. English Literature.
“I got too—” Looking down at herself, she closed the housecoat. “Tall.”
He reached over and pushed the coat open again, exposing a nipple, stroking it until it swelled forward through the silk like a muzzle. “So they sent you back. To be safe. But you still got to—Cuba.”
She pushed down his hand. “Ollie’s not mean. Not really mean. But he’s foolish.”
“He doesn’t come in here, you said.”
“No. But his friends come to this house.”
“Puerto Rican, some of them?”
“You crazy? Bad boys from Brooklyn, they are. Warehouse Brooklyn.” Her lashes were short but thick; they could veil. “Or don’t you know.”
“No Cubans?”
“You mean political? Ollie? When Vivie used to talk about when Stokely was in the islands, Ollie could never keep in mind who he was.”
“Stokely?”
“Carmichael.”
“Who was he?”
“You never heard of him?”
“I only have a B.S.”
She laughed. He still didn’t like the sound of it.
“He was a black radical. Of the sixties. Married to Miriam Makeba, once.” She saw he didn’t know who that was either. “A singer.”
“Oh?”
She stared down at his hand, hers, interlocked at her waist. Only his hair made him the taller one. He felt her breath flow on his cheek. “You’re so white.”
Nobody move, he thought; this is where nobody moves. Not even the belly, retracting in. He had only to nuzzle in, in order to kiss her. Not appropriate. Simply stand here. Hold.
Under his glance, below the two of them, the desk. On it a couple of books—a thin clothbound one and what looked to be a dictionary, and the typewriter, in it a page inkily typed single-space, much crossed out. He was farsighted. Jaggedly irregular lines, with ink interpolations. Stanzas. He craned to read:
Miss Lacey’s nightspot is gone from Carnegie Hall.
The Times printed her soul food on the women’s page.
Come dinner-sinner time
The pimps brought her black girls at a crawl,
Revving up around the corner, turning on a dime.
The last word was blurred. Turning on a—Of course. Dime.
“Miss Lacey’s!” he said.
She broke from him, backing up, grasping the corners of the desk behind her. “You knew it?”
“Never was inside.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Were you?”
“Me? Did all my homework there.”
“That some of it?”
“Some old stuff.” She edged in front of it.
He was quicker. Holding her down, off, with his left arm, he grabbed up the sheet of paper with the other hand and held it at arm’s length, reading out:
“Half-ass time—” the tires whisper “—Oh, Miss Lacey,
Gas cost something awful, girls blow your—”
He bent. “You have an awful habit. Of blotting the last word. Mind—that’s it. ‘Girls blow your mind.’” He angled his head down at her, squirming hard and slow there under his arm, not kicking. Slowly turning his torso, he dropped the paper, to secure her with both arms. “Yours are longer; mine are stronger.” He held her off, opposite him. “‘Half-ass time’—I like that.” He shook her gently toward him, toward his kiss—and let go like lightning. She’d bitten him.
On all fours, she smoothed the paper as if it were silk, got up jointedly, cradling it, and flashed it into the desk drawer, the thin book after it. Would she force in the dictionary, too? No.
“Good thing you didn’t have the gun.” There were tooth marks on his thumb. “So that’s what you do, eh?”
She didn’t raise her head.
“Didn’t mean to be nosy. But I sing a little.”
She stole a look at him. As if he were nuts. He supposed he didn’t look like a singer.
“Tenor, in the college choir. Baritone now.” A good voice, a cappella trained, but not above soft jazz. He thought of singing a phrase or two of the oratorio he still sang in the shower. Fac mē-ay, cruc-é ay, cus-to-di-eri…and then, high: Mortē—ay Christi-i, prae-mu-ni-iree. No, he couldn’t make the Morte anymore. Maybe “Mountain Greenery?” In uh, a uh, moun-tain greenery, where uh, God uh, paints the—No, not her style—or his either; it was this room had reminded him. “So is that it?” he said. “In the little midtown hideaway? Your job?”
There was no piano, but probably they didn’t do that anymore. Used a Moog synthesizer, for all he knew; no more thumping it out one finger, chopstick style. Maybe she simply sent in so many words per weekly retainer. Sweeping out to have her picture taken for an airlines magazine afterward?
Or—she was looking at him so blankly—was a job altogether too old-fashioned an idea? These days the young ate air and farted music, living meanwhile on borrowed mare’s milk, quite successfully. Or only taking on a job to support a supremer habit. For this room didn’t lie. He whistled under his breath. In his travels, whose evenings could sometimes veer remarkably from industry, though money made the connections, he’d recently bought one daughter a requested present in a painter’s studio in the Marais in Paris, had dined with a playwright in Ireland who’d had cattle to sell, had had a concert on the viola da gamba tendered him and his “party” (a pliant girl brought along by his host) in the rooms of the celebrated Swiss player, and only last week had had a predinner drink in the Via Margutta flat of a plane mate who dubbed for the movies—and he knew that there was always something scrappy yet indivisible about the rooms of those who were in the business of art.
“So that’s what you’re so—terrorist about,” he said. “You write songs.”
Was she going to drop on all fours again? “I what? What did you say?”
What had he? If a pair like them were to spend a year together, there might be whole lists of things that were inappropriate, except for bed. Maybe even in bed.
She had a good, slow smile, pulled from each side, like when a bow of ribbon was being made. He’d done that, for daughters. Her eyes went wet. “Guess that’s what I do, yes, I write songs. Always the same one.” She put her bare foot on a stool, leaning an elbow on the bent knee and chin on elbow, the robe’s hemline stretched taut as a toga, her scrolled head forward like a fish with one ravishingly neat gill. In bed, too, any attitude she fell into had seemed new to his eye. He watched that ear of licked bronze. Suddenly she crossed her lips with a finger. “Shhh.” Was she going to sing?
Then he heard a familiar mechanical sigh.
“Didn’t know you had an elevator.” An old one, rumbling in its cage.
“In the back. I don’t use it.”
“Who does?”
“Ollie. His girls.”
They heard the elevator door slam closed. Uncertain steps came nearer, a woman’s. Or a small man, he thought, one of those jockey types in narrow, high-heeled boots?
“One of Ollie’s,” she said.
The steps teetered off. A woman’s, yes. “Drunk?”
“Not Ollie’s. He caters well.”
“Like what?”
“Young widows. Who want a guru. Housewives who want to swing. Staten Island. Queens.”
“Nice girls.” He made it sound as if he knew them. “Normal ones.”
“Some of them don’t know they’re whores, if that’s what you mean. Or not yet.”
“No—barbarics,” he said. To those long, votive feet, the eyes which when startled sprocketed in circles of white.
She still leaned on the stool, chin cupped in her hand. Light struck her eyeball from the side. Where his eyeball sank shrewdly under its ridge of bone, hers jutted. Into another world. But they could meet.
“He tells them I’m his tenant. So they won’t have to know it’s no Indian who’s shoving them.”
She was saying it crudely on purpose. To get his eyes off her. To get hers off him. Like new glue bonding.
“Sing something, why don’t you?” she said. “Before you go.”
“For my supper?”
“For the one you didn’t have.”
“Why not? What’s in a song?”
Hard to start cold, but he did it. He made the Morte without cracking. “Con-fo-ve-ri—” he finished. “Con-fo-ve-ri-ee—gra-a-tia.” He’d never much known what the words meant. Perhaps she does, he thought, from her face. What kind of a song had she thought he’d sing her?
Outside in the hall, running footsteps. The door was beat upon. A woman’s voice, yelling or sobbing incoherently.
He turned up his palms in excuse.
She got up and walked to the door, not tiptoeing. Peered through its peephole. Looking back at him over her shoulder.
“Who is it?” he mouthed.
“Never saw her before,” she said aloud.
Again that hoarse babble.
“All right—” she called through the peephole. “Wait till I unlock the door.” She motioned to him. “Go in the back room.”
“Not my style,” he said.
“When I tell you. In my house.”
He stood fast. “I don’t do well in them.”
“You did well enough.”
He went. Vanishing just as a woman, sobbing again as if on signal, fell through the door.
In the bathroom, the door ajar, at first he heard nothing.
“Yeh look at me,” the woman then said. “Oh, God. Lookit. All down me. I run the whole three blocks from the Plaza like this, what is this town, nobody even stops me…Upstairs, nobody’s there. I figured I could change—there’s always clothes there.” She broke into tears again. “I din know where else.”
“Here. Sit.”
“God, look at it. A bran new outfit.”
“Sit.” There was a sound of water from the kitchenette, a clink of glass. A gulped thanks from the woman. He peered out. A screen jutted between here and the bedroom; he could see nothing. He drew back.
“I’m—a lady who visits Ollie,” the woman said when quiet. “The landlord. I guess you know.”
“How do you do,” the girl said.
“He ain’t come here, huh? Tonight?”
“He doesn’t come in here.”
“Yeh,” the woman said. “This is a neat place. I was going wear a stole from home, last minute I dint, not with this outfit. A designer suit, this is. Ollie said.” The sobs began again, a little forced.
“I understand he gets them wholesale,” the girl said.
A pause.
“Maybe it’ll clean,” the girl said. “What is that stuff on it?”
Silence.
“The gutter,” the woman said then. “They trun me out of the cab.”
“Ollie?” Mulenberg could hear the note in the girl’s voice. “A—cab?”
“Listen,” the woman said. “You got to fix me up. If this dress was clean like an angel is between the legs, I couldn’t go out in it now. Not this color. Listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” the girl said. “Tell me how Ollie came to be using a cab.”
“He wasn’t. Not him.”
Silence.
“We was in the Erster Bar,” the woman said then. “Him and me. You ever seen it? Hah. I work my sister’s bar, Rego Park. Ollie did business my brother-in-law. Till I go out with him. I live with them. ‘Go out with him, Concetta,’ they say, ‘you don’t need to come back.’” She stopped short. “So now. I need to.” Not crying now. Making that bad, gone sound, muscled from the gut, of the self gagging on itself. “So we was there. Us and a third party. This third party likes to eat after—understand what I mean?”
“A—third party?” the girl said.
“I never done that before, I swear. But Ollie says I don’t do his friend that favor—next time, I pay him.” She hissed that, Mulenberg thought. Or spat.
“And what do I know, the guy turns out such a nice guy. More better for me than Ollie. ‘You believe in sympathy on sight?’ he asks me. ‘Not love,’ he says. ‘But sympathy. My wife’s an invalid,’ he says. ‘And you’re a war widow.’ ‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘he’s doing time.’ Ollie give me such a look. ‘I wasn’t supposed to say,’ I said. And the john said, ‘You won’t lose by it.’ Carlo, he said I should call him. He had another name now, but he was christened it.”
Her chair creaked; she must be plump. From twenty-five to forty-odd, she could be. Young for any stage of it. Mulenberg’s head ached and he felt the palpitation that overbreathing brought on him. In small rooms. Claustrophobic tachycardia, his doctor called it. “Other name for it’s ambition, Mulenberg.” But this time, heart pounding, he was breathing for somebody else. As he listened, the rosary of Ventura’s very life was slipping through his own fingers, payed out in jerky film shots he could do nothing to stop.
They’d been eating peach Melba, the woman said, with a caress for it—“You know, raspberry sauce, with a real peach”—when two men walked in and sat down with them. Only the younger, blond one spoke. “Canary-yellow his hair was. Dyed. I never seen nobody so immaculate. Nails like pearls.” Then this man had reached out and overturned the guy Carlo’s cup. To Ollie he’d said, “Swami has to go to the gents’, don’t you, Swami?” And Ollie went. Then—“Mr. Ventura’s cab is waiting.” To the john.
“I said, ‘Ventura—what a lovely—’” the woman said. And a knife had shown, between those nails. “A shiv. He had it under his cuff.” So she and Carlo were led out at knifepoint—“‘Put the bill on my charge,’ that blond kid says to the maiter-dee”—and into a cab. A big Checker. “There wasn’t nobody in it.” The blond and Carlo got in the back.
She’d
been put in front with the other man, and cuffed to keep her eyes closed. “We drove like crazy then, round and round.” But once she heard Carlo cry out. He was making a big killing on Monday, he said. “‘A money killing, I mean. I swear it on my boy.’” The blond one didn’t answer; then she heard a—sound. The cab went on driving until at last they stopped. Then she was thrown out, on her hands and knees. Heard the cab pull off, and opened her eyes. They’d dumped her off half a block below where she and Ollie had entered the restaurant. “That alley the Plaza service trucks must deliver.” Between two of the trucks.
He saw his one hand clutched tight around a towel rack, and beyond it the woman who must be standing up now—he’d heard the chair creak—in the muddied dress. Pink dress.
“Turn around,” Veronica was saying. His own thought.
“I’m—scared to.”
Silence. Veronica padding around her.
“Between my shoulder blades,” the woman whispered. “Not wet anymore. Is it there?…It’s there, isn’t it.”
He could see the dark red spot himself—not Peche Melba.
“No wonder you felt it,” the girl said.
A scream from the woman, as if she herself had been knifed. “He fell against me. Oh, Jesus, Holy Mother—I’m going puke.”
He had to pry his fingers from the towel rack.
In the kitchenette the woman vomited, the water ran.
When he blundered into the room she raised up, covering. In black bra and pants, and gartered stockings, her heavy rear stuck out ostrich-style over thin legs; she was about as he had thought she’d be—above it all a squeezed, once-madonna face. Fortyish. Her mouth gobbled at him, speechless. From now on—the mouth was convincing her—the sight of any man would terrify her.
He wasn’t too sure of that, but he had to look away, and speak with his eyes, if he could, to Veronica. How else could it be said? Explain me.
The woman did it for him, croaking: “Who’s he?”
“A singer,” Veronica said.
“Get her into something of yours,” he said. “I’ll put her in a cab.”
The word “cab” was unfortunate. “Home,” he said to the woman. “I’m sending you home.” His office voice; he felt ashamed of it here. But it worked.
Mysteries of Motion Page 11
