by Hawkes, John
Banks listened, looked at the white craven half of his face, the slicked black hair, the fingers hammering. He saw the man lift the bottle several times to his lips.
The jockey’s sleeves were puffing out, the small black boots were hanging limp, one hand snatched down the goggles and through isinglass he peered at the single key and at the two gray fingers he was striking it with— a rider who had a face shot full of holes and shoulders like the fragile forks of a wishbone on either side of the hump inside the silk. Banks put a sheet of the music on the rack and said, “Play us this piece, Needles. …” But the jockey did not reply.
There was a fire in the kitchen and it was Sybilline who told him to take the chair—“Don’t you know what eggs are good for, Michael?”—and stood near him with her smile and the flush creeping up her cheek. They formed a regular crew: his Syb, the widow, the other one who looked as if she wanted to fight. Syb’s throat was bare, the widow had plump hips and she was giggling. He could smell them: above the heat and moisture of the fire, the spice and flour odors of the laden shelves, the sweetness of old tarts and bread, he could smell the women strongest. And Sybilline kissed him immediately —leaning over, putting her face into his and her hand upon his neck—so that the other two could see. Still with mouths together, he found her breast for a moment and opened his eyes, saw the widow smiling—but it was a smile set and strained as if she could hardly keep from offering advice—and the other woman was smiling and Banks didn’t care.
“Get out of here, Sparrow,” the widow said all at once and looked down at him, became dimpled and rosycheeked again. Then Syb left him, stepped away with her compassionate mouth dissolving, becoming part of a pretty face again, and he could think of nothing except the stocking she had left upstairs—though they were roughing it in the parlor next to the kitchen and flinging about, dancing with the widow’s girl, intent, all of them, on a smashing.
“Now, Mike, you’ll have to eat,” she murmured, and put a hand to her escaping loop of hair.
“But you been cheating, Sybilline,” the widow said then, “you been going out of turn. The lady of the house has first prerogative and you been spoiling the order, Sybilline—if you please—you ain’t been allowing me my prerogative.” The little woman, youthfully plump except in the legs—she was standing on wiry, wellshaped legs—was preoccupied: it may have been she alone he smelled.
“Syb’s always been a cat,” said Little Dora, “first at the fellows, first in bed. She’s a sister of mine but she’s irresponsible, she is.” And Banks could tell that this one, a fighter with her violet shadows and loosened boots, was interested: but probably she’d want to kill him first. There were no smiles behind those thick corrective spectacles.
“Well, Syb can do the cooking then,” said the widow, and sat down beside him.
“I’ll cook, I’d do anything for Michael!” There was the light step, the grace, the cheer, as she tossed her head and reached for the pan and the bowl of pure-white oval eggs. She got the butter on her fingertips and licked them, her blouse was untucked again and he could see the skin; the eggs were pearls and she was cracking the white shells with her painted nails. The widow was lighting a cigarette. Though he was watching Syb, he found that he was stroking the little widow’s cheek and coming to like her in the kitchen with no one, except these three, to notice.
Beyond the half-opened door the parlor crowd sang “Roll Me Over in the Clover” and the name of Jimmy Needles was screamed out several times. But the women round him seemed not to hear; he hardly heard himself; the women were ganging up on him, doing a job on him. All three were noticing and he tried to pay no attention. They watched him eat. All three were smiling and taking his measure and he didn’t mind. It was Sybilline who made him use the sauce.
“Here,” reaching, tilting the thin brown bottle, “meat sauce is fine on fried eggs, Michael … didn’t you know?”
The smell of the women—girlish, matronly—and the smell of the meat sauce were the same. As soon as it spread across his plate it went to his nostrils and they might not have bothered with their clothes, with procrastination. He kept his face in the plate and kept lifting the fork that had one prong bent, a prong that stuck his tongue with every mouthful. Brown and broken yellow, thick and ovarian, his mouth was running with the eggs and sauce while the whisky glasses of the women were leaving rings.
“Fetch him a slice of bread, Sybilline, he don’t want to leave none of it on the china. …”
He shut his eyes and did not know whose hand it was, but the hand closed in a grip that made him slide forward on the chair and groan.
“You girls wait for me,” said the widow in a voice he could hardly hear. Then: “You’re a charmer, Mike!” and Sybilline was blowing him a kiss.
With his hands in his pockets, shirt collar open about the windpipe and the two muscles translucent at the back of his skinny neck, frowning and keeping his head down, he followed the swinging shawl into the din, the smoke, the noise of the piano that seemed to be playing on the strength of a grinding motor inside the box, though Larry and the jockey were still side by side on its bench. The widow stopped to fix her daughter’s skirts and he bumped against the softest buttocks he had ever known, and apologized.
“I could love you right here,” she whispered, “I really could. …”
He knew that. It was not the place for him exactly, but there was the sauce all over his lip and he thought that in another moment almost anywhere might do.
They reached the stairs in time. The corner turned, the hat tree with its multiple short arms thrust out in shadow, the carpeting, the widow’s rail, the dust and orange bulb —suddenly the bedchambers were near and he was climbing. Up how many times, how many times back down. And it was merely a matter of getting up those stairs, and taking the precautions, and tumbling in, shagging with the widow as the night demanded. He saw her at the top for a moment; stumbled and paused and, clutching the rail, stared, while beneath the bulb she stood squeezing the tiny plump hands together.
Then she took hold of him, and behind the door at the end of the hall he dropped his trousers in the widow’s sleeping chamber, heard her quick footsteps round the bed and in his hands caught the plumpness of the hips. Then under the wool those softest buttocks he had ever known. And he snapped off a stay of whalebone, flung it aside as he might a branch in a tangled wood; to his mouth drew her down and rubbed the sauce against her. She giggled and there was a dilating in the stomach.
“Go gently, Mr. Banks,” fending, giggling, “go sweetly, please.”
There was no cartwheeling now, no silk-stocking coil, no blushing or line of verse. Only the widow on the comforter and in his mouth the taste of eggs which had done the job for him. The moon had passed by the widow’s room, but a transom was opened to the orange dimness of the hall. And under her three small rocking chairs with cushions, upon her bed—it was narrow and deep—and her rack of short broad night dresses and her stumpy bedside lamp, upon everything she owned or used there fell the rusty and sedentary light that, guiding no one, still bums late in the corridors of so many cheap hotels. The drawers were all half-open in her wardrobe; a pair of silver shears and a babyish fresh pile of curls lay on a table top before which she last had been trimming her dead ends of curls.
How long were the nights of love, how various the lovers. Holding his throat, standing in bare feet and with one hand wiping the hair back from his eyes, he stared down at the widow’s cheeks again. It was her cheeks he had been attracted to and once more beside the bed he saw the tiny china-painted face with the eyelids closed, the ringlets damp across the top, the small greasy round cheeks he had wanted to cup in both his hands.
“Don’t leave,” whispering, not opening her eyes, “don’t leave me yet, Mr. Banks.”
In the hall he put on his trousers and shirt and took the stairs with caution. He was fierce now, dry but fierce. If there were prospects ahead of him he would take them up. There were shadows, tracks worn through t
he carpet by naked feet. More shadows, a depth of shadows, and not a vow to make or sentiment to express now on these old stairs—only the steepness and the wallside to guide his shoulder. Below, in the center of a love seat’s cushion, he could see the outline of a hat and pair of clean white gloves.
“Mister …” He stopped, leaned his head against dusty wall plaster, and saw the big girl’s figure at the start of the bannister below, made out her eyes and heard the moist and childish voice. She wore a sweater round her shoulders now. “Mister,” the voice came fearfully, “there’s someone wants to see you. A lady, Mister.”
“I should imagine so!” He waited, then descended without noise, except for the brushing of his clothes against the wall, until he was only a step or two above the widow’s girl. “I suppose you’re not referring to yourself.” He watched the loose lips, the eyes that brightened, watched the closing and opening of the sweater.
“She’s a lady, Mister. She’s at the other door. She give me half a crown to find you, and she told me not to get the whole house up, she did.”
He nodded, leaned forward, gently kissed the girl.
She did not try to move, as if he had ordered her to remain exactly there by the darkened post with grapes. He paused at the love seat and noticed the red beret beside the hat and pair of gloves. The corridor smelled of water in the bottoms of purple vases and the piano was banging just beyond this emptiness. He kicked something—a cat’s dish perhaps—and it slid down the passageway ahead of him. Then the wall was warm to his touch and he knew that behind it was the width of the kitchen chimney, briefly and in darkness saw the meat-sauce bottle and Syb’s painted nails.
He heard an engine running. He stepped into the pantry, one of several pantries, bare now without hanging goose or cutlery or stores of brandy, and faced the misty dew-drenched opening of the door. There was light coming in the windows—brass rods cut them, but they were curtainless—and he stood so that he was lighted by one of the windows just as she was visible against the sheet of fog. With a coat swinging, hair down to her shoulders, she was leaning in the doorway and her thin legs were crossed. When she heard him she turned her face, white at this hour, and dropped her burning cigarette—not outside, but into the shadows on the floor.
“Annie … good God, is it you?”
She laughed only. One long shank of the golden hair dragged across in front of her and buried the little wet coat lapel. The face then, the cheek, seemed set in gold. Arm hanging, body still tipped and ankles crossed, she made no movement other than a small twisting as if she were trying to scratch against the jamb.
“But you, Annie, I hadn’t expected you!”
“Well,” taking the hair in her fingers, holding it across her mouth, speaking through hair, “I shan’t be bad or deceitful to an old friend. But I can tell a thing or two.” And abruptly, as he smelled the dampness on her shoulders and reached for her, “You’re sexed up, aren’t you? The chap next door’s been kissing and the girl next door has found him out!” She was twenty years old and timeless despite the motor car waiting off under the trees. At three o’clock in the morning she was a girl he had seen through windows in several dreams unremembered, unconfessed, the age of twenty that never passes but lingers in the silvering of the trees and rising fogs. Younger than Syb, fingers bereft of rings, she would come carelessly to any door, to any fellow’s door.
“You’ll have to lift me up,” she cried, “I’ve got this far but I can’t take another step.” Then laughed when he raised her, gold hanging down and legs swinging at the knees, cheekbones making little slashes beneath the skin, eyes big and black and body that had been tipping, leaning, all collected now, wrapped in the coat and carried high against his chest. They sat on the bare pantry floor in a corner and through the adjacent windows came the misty streams like two searchlight shafts touching and crossing just beyond their feet.
“Bottle’s in the pocket. Have a drink if you want to.” He did, though first he put his palms on either side of the chilly jaw and leaned down to Annie’s mouth. With the hair spread out, eyes closed, her head was pressed between his kiss and the hard empty floor. And the searchlights moved steadily, the engine idled—it was smooth, low, indifferent—in the blackness of the roadside and dripping chestnut tree.
“I’m sexed up, too,” she said from the crook of his arm, and he uncapped the bottle with his teeth. The crashing octaves, Needles singing solo, the screams and sounds of boots hardly reached them here, though Annie remarked about the party and, after thinking, said she did not want to go to it.
He opened her coat directly and ran his hand inside, up lisle and tenderness until he found the seam, the tight rolled edge and drops of warmth against his fingertips, and said, “… You want me to, you really want me to?” She stood up then—he hadn’t known that she could stand —and with fingers steadying on his shoulders lifted first one tiny knife-heeled slipper and the other, bending each leg sharply at the knee, swinging alternate thin calves in an upward and silent dancing step, removed the undergarment and the slippers, and came down slowly, slowly, across his lap.
“I want you to.”
Later, when they were dying down and moments before she slept: “That Hencher,” she said, “evict him, why don’t you, Mike … throw the bastard out.” And the jaws, the cheeks, the eyelids all grew colder and he left her there for the driver of the lacquered car.
Slowly, slowly, he went back up the hall with hands outstretched and thinking of all the girls. He saw the hat tree’s shadow, passed the love seat and the staircase, empty now, and thought, she’s gone off looking at her half a crown. Good thing.
He took a breath then and blinking through the smoke, rubbing his lips and blinking, holding Annie’s gin bottle halfway to his lips and then forgetting it, found Larry towering in the parlor and Little Dora shouting up at him. Dora was wearing the jockey’s striped racing cap and the long flat tongue of the visor protruded sideways from her trembling head.
“Take it off,” she shouted, “let’s see what you got!”
Sparrow, Jimmy Needles and the rest were crowded round them, laughing and showing their teeth through smoke and the white light of lamps with the shades ripped off now. But Larry towered, even while Dora caught him by the shirt, and there was the perfect nose, the black hair plastered into place, the brass knuckles shining on the enormous hand, and the eyes, the eyes devoid of irises. Tomorrow he would wear green glasses. For now he was drunk, drunk into a stupor of civility and strength, that state of brutal calm, and only a little trickle of sweat behind the ear betrayed his drunkenness.
“Come on, come on, you full-of-grace,” pushing up against him, tearing the shirt, “let’s see what you got!”
The pearl buttons came off the shirt and Banks stepped no closer, though Sybilline was there and laughing on one of Larry’s arms. “Oh, do what Little Dora says,” he heard her cry, “I want you to!” And there was a bruise, a fresh nasty bruise, beneath Syb’s eye.
It was not a smile nor look of tolerance, but some wing-tip shadow—he was cock of this house—that passed across his face and Banks thought Larry had swayed. Yet he removed the wrinkled coat, allowed Sybilline to pull the holster strings, ungird him, allowed Little Dora to flap against him and rip off the shirt and, after Sparrow had undone the ties, once more waited while Dora took the undervest away in her claws. They cheered, slapping the oxen arms, slapping the flesh, and cheered when the metal vest was returned to him—steel and skin—and the holster was settled again but in an armpit naked now and smelling of scented freshener.
Larry turned slowly round so they could see, and there was the gun’s blue butt, the dazzling links of steel, the hairless and swarthy torso of the man himself. In the process of revolving he looked at Sparrow, who went out then to the hired vehicle parked before the boarding house.
“For twenty years,” shouted Dora again through smoke opaque as ice, “for twenty years I’ve admired that! Does anybody blame me?” Banks listened and amids
t breaking glass, the tumbling of the mauve-colored chairs, for a moment met the eyes of Sybilline, his Syb, eyes in a lovely face pressed hard against the smoothest portion of Larry’s arm which—her face with auburn hair was just below his shoulder—could take the punches. Banks looked away.
He left the gin bottle on a bolster and sprawled out shivering on the love seat. They were finished with the final stanza of poor Needles’ song. He could very nearly taste the dawn, the face peering up out of a basin, becoming old again, his full and wasting twenty-five. But he listened, reached forward through the dark and then the shadow was in front of him, Dora’s bit of beard and a glimpse of the fibrous and speckled hams, and he would have laughed except for the last jump inside of him.
“Got a cigarette,” he asked her softly, and started trembling.
He was alone, finally, all alone and sore and the cartwheeling sheets were piled in a white heap on the planking off the foot of the bed. The last of them was gone; love’s moonlight was no longer coming through the glass; but there was light, the first gray negative light of dawn. The mate of the oven tit had found a branch outside his window and he heard its damp scratching and its talk. Even two oven tits may be snared and separated in such a dawn. He listened, turned his head under the shadows, and reflected that the little bird was fagged. And he could feel the wet light rising round all the broken doors, the slatted crevices, rising round the fens, the dripping petrol pump, up the calves and thighs of the public and deserted visions of the naked man—the fire put out in the steam-bath alley, the kitchen fire drowned, himself fagged and tasteless as the bird on the sick bough. But a sound reached him and for a while he followed it: “Cowles … Mr. Cowles? Mr. Cowles?” The widow’s voice faded down in the direction of the barren pantry and open door.
He let it go. He smelled the pillow touched by too many heads, smelled the dry sweat of a night no more demanding—gone the pale rectangle from which he had plucked the stocking, gone all the fun of it. He thought of water against his lips but he could not move, stretched upon his back and caught. But he must have moved his leg because suddenly he felt it pricked, a sharp little pain in the skin, some bit of foreign matter. He reached down slowly and took it in two fingers, raised it high before his face: a single pearl on a pin that had been bent, but a lovely rose color in the center where it held the light. Idly he began to turn the pearl between his fingers. The hand hovered, fell, and he lost the pearl for good.
