by Alfred Hayes
8
I think of the afternoon the boy came to visit me. I see him coming down the corridor toward my suite. He is shaved for the occasion, since he is about to meet his affluent relative, and he resents the fact that he has shaved. The corridor is silent. He moves past the vacuum cleaners abandoned by invisible chambermaids. He can see in some of the suites, the doors of which are open, the bedlinen being changed or the food carts being wheeled out. On the carts are halved eggshells, stained napkins, the rinds of grapefruit. He is playing an ironic game with himself as he comes down the corridor. He is in enemy country. The abandoned vacuum cleaners are a weaponry left on the field of action. Troops are deployed here by elevator. He keeps close to the wall. He is infiltrating the enemy lines.
I was dozing fitfully on the couch when he knocked on the hotel door. His knock interrupted a rather queer dream. I was in an office. A large office. The executive with whom I had an appointment had not appeared. I opened a door in the rear of the office. There was an apartment, strangely, beyond the door. Rather, a large bedroom. It was hung with white gauze. There was a huge bed. In the bed was the executive. His left arm was raised and bound by straps. From the ceiling a bottle of plasma was suspended. A tube ran from the inverted bottle. A needle pierced the executive’s arm. Plasma flowed. He was being given a transfusion. He was a large, pale man. His right hand held a silver microphone. He was dictating, while the plasma flowed, soundlessly into the microphone. Then I saw, in a sort of adjacent alcove, his wife and three children. They were asleep. The wife was dark, the children very blond, the executive himself quite gray. The plasma flowed, the dictation went on, the wife and children slept, I stood there, then the knock on the door interrupted the dream. I got up, not fully awake, and opened the door.
Outside, in the corridor, the boy said: “I am Michael Bey.”
Why did I think of him as a boy? He wasn’t a boy. Rimbaud was a boy. Chatterton was a boy. Michael was twenty-six. He wasn’t a boy. But you simply didn’t think of them as young men. They were boys. And then they were thirty-five.
It was about five o’clock. Dusk, a kind of soot, seeped down from the sky. I remember he looked out of the hotel window at my view of the park. Then at the illuminated clock above one of the great buildings. It was 5:01. He seemed to wait, fascinated, for it to be 5:02. I had already seen the almost surreptitious way in which he had examined my suite. It wasn’t that Neronian. I wasn’t living in that much luxury. And besides: he didn’t take his hands out of the pockets of his overcoat, and he didn’t remove the overcoat, either. He consented to turn the collar down. Then a plane appeared, high up, beneath a bank of cloud. He said, not really to me, I happened to be there in the room:
“Pasternak said it looks like a laundry mark.”
“Who?”
“Pasternak.”
“What did Pasternak say looks like a laundry mark?”
He gestured, but with one of his shoulders, toward the darkening sky.
“The plane.”
So that I was forced to look up, at the sky, over the expanse of the park, at the plane. Height made it seem transfixed to the bank of cloud. The thing did look sort of like a laundry mark. On a sort of vast shirt-tail of sky.
I wouldn’t have minded that so much, except that I idiotically said: “Did he say it in Zhivago?”
“No. In a poem.”
The tone implied, of course, that all I knew of Pasternak was Doctor Zhivago and that I knew that only because they had made a movie of the thing. The fact the boy happened to be right and that I hadn’t read Doctor Zhivago and had seen the movie didn’t help at all. He finally got away from the window and sat down.
“Why don’t you take your overcoat off?”
“I’m all right.”
Well, I wasn’t. I made a Scotch. He held the glass uncomfortably in his hand. The other stayed in his pocket.
“Aunt Dora says you write poetry.”
He just looked at me. That flat guarded brown gaze. Was he sneering? I saw his eyes go to an armchair in a corner of the room. My Japanese kimono was over the back of the chair. His eyes lingered on the silk.
“Where did you buy that?”
“In Kyoto.”
“You been in Japan?”
“Five years ago.”
The eyes went from the silk of the kimono to me and then back to the silk.
“Can I feel it?”
“Of course.”
He got up. He finally took the other hand out of his pocket. He walked across the room to the kimono and he fingered the silk. The silk was a fine gray with a chrysanthemum pattern. I could remember when in the mill in Kyoto I had tried it on. How marvelously light it had felt. The pleasure it gave. One’s texture changed putting it on. He came back and sat down again in the chair. At least he didn’t put the hand back in the overcoat pocket.
Silence.
He was waiting for me, I supposed, to begin. To begin what? Tips on the literary market? Sound advice on work habits? How one got rich? How one got famous? How one triumphed? He and Aunt Dora. How I had done it, and the manual that went with it explaining how it was done. And he could keep all six hands in his pockets and look at me with that flat brown look all he wanted to, this Michael Bey, and quote me Pasternak to put me in my hack’s place all he wanted to, but that’s why he was here, he thought there was a manual, too, this Michael Bey. I looked out of the window. A laundry mark! The bloody Russian looking up at the sky and shouting I’ve got it! It looks like a laundry mark! and running into his dacha or something to file away the priceless, the deathless little image, and then this boy quoting it. A goddam conspiracy. That’s all it was. He wrote. Christ almighty: who didn’t? I shouldn’t have told Aunt Dora to have him come to the hotel at all. The silence deepened. The last light departed. We were in the dark. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. Some thirty years separated us. And he wore that damn overcoat. As though I were a bus station. Did he remove it only under direct orders from a superior? Superior what? Superior who? His figure had become indistinct. We couldn’t see each other. Now and then there was a minute tinkle of the ice in the highball glass. He was vanishing. I was vanishing. You could hear the city. That much we had in common. The malaria of traffic. The golden minute on the huge illuminated clock. Help? Oh, God: I was more in need of it than he was. He had thirty years to get to where I was: to that cul-de-sac for which there was no manual. What a bore they were: the defiant, the ambitious young. With their flat jeering guarded looks. Their goddam slender wrists. Their half-reluctant knocking on the door. Admit me! Into what? Betrayal. Whorishness. Failure. That’s all the room beyond contained.
There was a stir. I could hear him stand. I couldn’t see him.
“I guess I’ll be going.”
I could hear the contempt in the boy’s voice. But there was nothing I could do. No way I could lift the enormous despairing silence that had settled on me. I heard him open the hotel door and I heard the hotel door close.
9
Well, I thought, Michael Bey baby, that was that. But it wasn’t, because in the morning when I awoke I was ashamed of myself. Contrition set in: one of the milder infections I suffered from. I’d been (padding about tousled in the suite with a stale taste of myself in my mouth, looking somewhat haunted) unkind, a snob, and after all he was young (as youth went nowadays) and I owed something to his youth. It was not clear precisely what I owed his slender wrists or sullen eyes but I could feel somewhere in myself, now in the soft glare of the morning, buttering my toast, this undischarged debt. And there was, of course, Aunt Dora: he’d tell her; the story of his cold visit would make the family rounds. Asher, void of family feeling; Asher, preoccupied and encased in his success, even though the success was bogus and I had fallen from a state of professional and marital grace. The monstrous paralysis had lifted: the world was somehow less bleak the following morning, and I felt less maimed. Besides, I’d been frightened. The immobility, the almost total withdrawal, the paralysis into
which I had fallen, had frightened me. Was I drifting out of human sight? The room had darkened: I had vanished, the boy had vanished: I did not want everything to vanish. Later in the day, when I felt I could talk almost humanly to someone else, I telephoned Aunt Dora. She had a number for Michael at the place he lived in downtown. The old lady was delighted. Blood was thicker, etc. One hand, etc., should help the other. If he ever took it out of his pocket. What I thought I would do was apologize to the boy (I had, after all, been wrong and should make some amends) and explain to him that I had been exhausted by the plane trip east. If he’d like or if he’d care to, we’d have cocktails. I suggested the Pine Room downstairs in the hotel. At about five. Five seemed the fated hour for Michael Bey and myself. Over the phone (was there again in his voice that faint derisiveness? that shadow of a jeer?) he agreed.
10
The girl swore that was her name. Her actual name. She was with Michael. It was five o’clock and we were in the Pine Room.
“But nobody has a name like that. Strippers, maybe. Are you a stripper?”
“No.”
“Aurora d’Amore. The dawn of love? Impossible. Unless your mother’s a classical scholar.”
“My mother’s a classical dago. Isn’t she, Michael?”
“Her mother has wens.”
“Wens?”
“And plays poker.”
“Does she?”
“Yes. Isn’t it awful? She got me instead of an inside straight.”
“She’s got two uncles, too. Uncle Carmine. And Uncle Angelo.”
“What do they do?”
“Scare shit out of me, mostly,” Michael said.
The girl laughed.
“What are the books?”
Two thick books lay on the table beside the foamy Alexander she had ordered.
“Law books,” she said.
“Law books? I don’t believe it. Aurora d’Amore—and law books?”
“I go to law school. Don’t I, Michael?”
“She goes to law school.”
“Really?”
“From ten to two.”
“And afterwards?”
She looked at Michael. He wasn’t wearing the overcoat. She smiled.
“What do I do after school, Michael?” she said.
“She plays in Westerns,” Michael Bey said.
“Westerns?”
“Bang, bang, bang.”
Aurora laughed. She didn’t seem to mind at all. She was, I guessed, about twenty-two. Or three. Somewhere in there. She wore a fur coat. She was nearsighted. She put her glasses on when she wished to look like a law student. She had worn the glasses when she had entered the Pine Room but, evidently, she had decided not to look like a law student now. I hadn’t expected a girl. But of course I was delighted that Michael had brought one. And a pretty one. She wasn’t tall. She had immense dark eyes. The lids were whitened; the lips had been administered to with a pale lipstick. She wore her hair caught up in a rich, somewhat loose, coil that threatened if she laughed too hard (and she did, she always laughed too hard, she laughed, if I may amend Michael’s more graphic description of her laughter, vaginally) to come down in a disorderly mass. I wondered, then, how far it would reach: her hair. Down to where. Down to what. The skin was marvelous. And she was Michael’s girl.
“Oh, on the East Side,” she said.
I’d asked her where she lived.
“The new East Side?”
“Ha. The new. No. The old East Side. Don’t I, Michael? The old smelly East Side.”
She kept doing this: referring my questions to the boy. Who’d smile. Who’d slouch in his chair. Who’d push his drink about on the table as though to link the wet concentric circles the bottom of the glass made. Who appeared indifferent to her or to own her, if he owned her, with a calm slightly arrogant possession. At least, that was how I had interpreted the bang, bang, bang.
I thought about it again. Bang, bang, bang. Like that. And she hadn’t minded. She’d laughed. I was being told what she did with her afternoons when school was out and who, unmistakably, she did it with. Well, I thought: why not? If she’s his girl. I’d asked and they’d told me. She played in Westerns: there was a shoot-out, of a fascinating kind, every afternoon. She with her soft holster, he with his durable .45. I wasn’t to suppose they went to the corner drugstore for a phosphate.
The girl looked at me.
“Do you know you insulted Michael?” she said, severely.
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. When he visited you. He was very insulted.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you, Michael. I’ve got, as they say, problems.”
“Where do they say that?” the girl said, brightly. “In Hollywood?”
“Yes.”
“You have to be very careful with Michael.”
“Why?”
“Oh, he’s a fink.”
“Really?”
“Can’t stand being ignored. Isn’t that true, Michael?”
I looked at the boy. He was still linking wet circles to wet circles. She didn’t mind the bang bang bang and he didn’t seem to mind being discussed like this.
“Are you contrite?” the girl said.
“Contrite?”
“Penitent. That’s what Michael predicted you’d be. That’s why he said you asked us here for cocktails.”
“Michael’s right.”
“You are penitent?”
“Yes.”
“There,” the girl said to Michael. “He’s penitent. Now you can forgive him.”
“I’d like to be forgiven.”
“He never does, you know,” the girl said.
“What does he never?”
“Forgive. He’s terrible. He just sits there and gnaws away at it. Are the cocktails an atonement?”
“For yesterday?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I suppose they are.”
“How did you insult Michael?”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Asher darling, can I call you Asher darling?, Michael never tells anybody anything. I tell him but he never tells me. He just gnaws on it.”
“Well, we sat. In a dark room. Then Michael said: I guess I’ll go. That’s all that happened.”
“Oh?”
She looked at the boy.
“Is that all that happened?” she said. She looked back at me. She seemed just a little surprised it was no more than that. “You didn’t say anything to him like for example if he applied himself he might be a good writer one day? You didn’t patronize him?”
“Not consciously.”
“Well: unconsciously?”
“Perhaps. I didn’t intend to. I apologize for the unconsciously.”
She looked again at me. Then at the boy.
“But Asher’s nice, Michael,” she said. “He isn’t a shit at all.”
The word produced its small expected shock.
“Is that what Michael said I was?”
“Not exactly. Exactly, he said: a rich shit.”
“I’m not rich,” I said, stiffly.
“Aren’t you?” She looked very disappointed. “Michael says you’ve made scads of money.”
“Once. Not any more.”
“Isn’t that exasperating? I always meet them in their not-any-more period. Are you asleep, Michael?”
“No.”
“You look asleep.”
“It must be the dialogue.”
“Well, wake up. Asher’s apologized. Isn’t he the most awful somnambulist?”
“Are you tired, Michael?”
“Oh, he isn’t tired. He’s just bored. Are you going to observe us, Asher?”
“Observe you?”
“Michael said you were going to observe us.”
“I’m not quite sure yet what I’m going to do with either of you.”
“But you will observe us, won’t you? Michael says it’s a whole
school. The observers, or something. Are you observing us now?”
“Minutely.”
“That’s terrif. Michael, he’s observing us. Isn’t that terrif?”
“Terrif.”
“Well, if you’re observing us, minutely and all that, I think I’ll tell you what Michael said to me this afternoon just before we came to the hotel.”
“What did Michael say to you just before you came to the hotel?”
“Shall I tell him what you said, Michael?”
“Hoof and mouth disease,” the boy said. “It’s sweeping the land.”
“Well,” Aurora said, “Michael had a funny look on his face after you called him.”
“Were you there when I called?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What was the funny look on Michael’s face?”
“Oh, so peculiar.”
“Chock full of nuts,” the boy said. “That’s what I am. Loaded with wheaties.”
“I said: Is something wrong, Michael? Don’t you feel well?”
“Was I supposed to be feeling well?”
“I should think so. You should have felt all relaxed. It’s supposed to relax you, isn’t it, Asher?”
“What?”
“It.”
“Naturally.”
“And there Michael was, positively unrelaxed. There’s just so much a girl can do, isn’t that right, Asher?”
“Jesus!”
“You are a fink.”
“What did Michael say?” I asked patiently.
“He said he felt murderous.”
“Murderous?”
“She’s an idiot. The law books are just a front.”
“One of these days, dear heart, I’m going to get awful mad at you.”
“And when you do?”
“Watch out. I’ve got a real dago temper.”
The boy looked at her, lazily, smiling. I wasn’t going to stop them. Besides, they were doing it only because I was there, and being there was an audience. To be shocked, if they intended to shock me. To be intrigued, if they intended to intrigue me. It wasn’t altogether clear what they did intend.
