by Alfred Hayes
“What did Michael mean,” I said to the girl, “by murderous?”
“Ask him. The rat’s sitting right there.”
“What did you mean, Michael?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you mean there’s something you want to kill?”
“Or someone.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter? Any creep will do.”
He had lidded his eyes again, and that crooked smile sat on the corner of his mouth. There was a small silence and I thought: Oh, Christ, melodrama. First, the blunt sex, now the sinister melodrama.
“Would you like to have dinner?”
“I’d love to.”
“Any place you kids like? A steak-house?”
“I hate steak-houses.”
“Well: Japanese?”
“Can we sit on the floor?” the girl said enthusiastically. “You can wear your kimono, Asher.”
“Who told you about the kimono?”
“Michael.”
She’d lied. He did tell her things.
11
We had dinner at the Kobe. It hadn’t changed much. The dark bar was still downstairs, and the waitresses still wore their obis and the wooden clogs and they still gave you a torn piece of paper on which the mamasan scribbled a number for your coat and hat. The lighting, too, I was glad to see, had not been improved on. We had rice wine. I ordered sukiyaki. Aurora had the tempura, and she poured the wine.
“The girl does it in Japan, doesn’t she?”
“What?”
“Practically feeds you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you like Japan?”
I was feeling fine. The Kobe was still there and the lighting was as it had been when I had gone there and it was the only Japanese restaurant on the street. There were others now as there were all sorts of little foreign restaurants that had not been there years ago. Some things hadn’t, after all, been “alterated.” It was reassuring. I had had a few drinks at the Pine Room and we had the rice wine at the Kobe and I was feeling expansive. The misery had retreated, withdrawn, the kids seemed pleased with the restaurant. So I began to tell them about Japan. I told them about a little inn I had stayed at in a mineral-spring resort down the coast. I told them about the carp pool in the courtyard and the sound of the carp leaping in the pool at night and of the huge scalding mineral pool in the inn and how one night, being lonely, I had asked the maid to send a girl to me from one of the geisha houses and how when she came to the inn she had turned out to be possibly the ugliest geisha in Japan and then I couldn’t get rid of her and she sat on the double mattresses on the floor looking reproachfully at me and eating all the hard candies out of a bag of candy I had bought. I told them about the little dwarf who had been the handyman at the inn and about the houses in the bazaar where the girls sat with their lacquered hair and about the hurricanes that blew in from the sea. I told them about a club called the Tennessee Club and about a girl there named Akiko in her sleazy silk dress and about the thick green tea and the fish-houses where they killed the lobster in front of you and sliced it raw and about how when I left the inn everybody went to the railroad station with me and smiled and bowed their formal farewells and I made an awful mistake, I kissed Akiko on the cheek goodbye in public, which no one ever did. As I spoke, Aurora and the boy watching me, and the little cups of rice wine emptying and being filled again, I was surprised to find myself feeling that I actually had been someplace and that my life really wasn’t quite the blank it seemed so much of the time to me. Of course, I’d been in Japan alone and whatever memories there were that were pleasant now to go back to or to talk to others about were those associated, it seemed, with the times I had been alone. Well, I was alone again. Of course, I knew I was trying to make myself interesting. To both of them. Asher, square or hexagonal, had not always been a dull boy. Things had happened to Asher. I could feel myself all warmed by the rice wine. I was drunk. Not very drunk. Pleasantly drunk. And they were both young. The sukiyaki was gone. The pale tea consumed. Michael was smoking a cigarette. It was almost ten o’clock. I did not want the evening to end. I did not want to go back to the hotel. I had begun to have a peculiar insomnia: at about four o’clock in the morning I would find myself awake. Anything would be better than going back to the hotel.
“I know what. Let’s take Asher to see the belly-dancers,” Aurora said.
12
We left the restaurant and took a taxi downtown. It was cold. Aurora bundled into her fur coat. I was assured that going after a nice dinner to see the belly-dancers would be fun. They were very special belly-dancers. The real thing. I could not remember Eighth Avenue being quite this dark. Winter always made the city seem darker. The cab driver knew where the Alexandrian Gardens was. It turned out to be a dilapidated three-story building.
I paid the cab and tipped the driver. A neon sign flashed in the darkness. We went up a flight of stairs. The walls were painted a diseased green. The stairs were uncarpeted.
It was early and the first show of the evening would not start for twenty minutes. We checked our coats. The proprietor, in a dark suit, with a white carnation in his lapel, short, stocky, with a gleam of oil to him, led us to a small table. We were close to the musicians’ stand. The place was not big. A bar was in the rear. I looked at the murals painted on the wall. I looked at the palm trees. The palm trees were papier-maché. The tablecloths were less than a spotless white. Lamps, of the sort found on old horse carriages, hung among the palm fronds.
Allah Akbar, I thought. In the tents of my fathers there are many tourists.
I leaned forward to Michael.
“Would you call those murals the real thing?” I said.
He was sitting, slumped down again, his legs crossed, his feet extending onto the dance floor.
“Why?”
The murals showed a painted Sahara. A peeling oasis. A camel that would never make it across a vacant lot. I looked from the murals to the sad palms. Then at the boy.
“But it’s all fake.”
“Of course.”
Aurora (the tempura could not yet have been digested) had ordered goat’s cheese and olives. The brandy came in minute jiggers.
They smiled at me (she, nibbling the olives, breaking the small coarse loaf of bread) as though I had hardly said anything they did not expect me to say. It was a tourist trap; it was a clip joint. It did not seem to bother Michael or the girl. Rather, they seemed quite contented, waiting for the dancers, as though all of it somehow (my mild irony about the palms or the decor notwithstanding) was about as it should be. The Alexandrian Gardens was gradually filling now, the small identical tables were being occupied. The four-piece orchestra came in and took its place on the wooden platform. Three girls came in, dressed, and sat down in three chairs in front of the orchestra. One had a drum. The music began. Michael listened with a distinct pleasure to the music. I thought about it. When was the last time I had visited an authentic sheikh in his authentic tent out there among the whispering authentic palms of a real oasis? The boy had a point. He had only smiled, and looked at me (goddam it: I was being superior) but I could see he had a point. It was a fake. Okay. A tourist trap. Fine. The jiggers of brandy were minute. Check. I thought about it. Did they (she and Michael) put all this together and get something I did not get? And what did one call it when one got it? The reality of the fake? An inauthentic authenticity? Since only a fool could have expected genuine sand, then painted sand (and the more badly painted, the more obviously painted, the better) was the only thing to be hoped for. A stringed lamentation filled the air. The drum throbbed.
Michael leaned forward.
He said: “Watch her left hand.”
He meant the left hand of the girl playing the drum. The drum was called a drabouka. It was a small hand drum. I watched her left hand. I could see that the fingers of her left hand were performing some deft and intricate accompaniments to the stringed instrument which was played by an old man. It had n
o frets. It was called a blind lute. I now knew the name of the drum and what a blind lute was. The musicians wore white shirts. They were like the tablecloths: not especially white. One of the girls, in a severe black dress, black-haired, rose, put out her cigarette, stepped to the floor, the spotlight centered on her, she sang. She wasn’t young. She didn’t look exotic. She looked like somebody’s rather severe aunt. With an ineffectual husband. She was, astonishingly enough, later, the featured belly-dancer. Soraya of Istanbul.
She posed in the amber spotlight. She wore blue veils now. Her hair was unbound. It hung, a cloudy mass, about her shoulders. A jewel gleamed in her navel. A jeweled brassiere lifted her breasts. Her arms were up-raised. Four brass castanets were looped to her fingers. Her insolent face was turned, chin down, toward her left shoulder, her lidded eyes waited. The old man struck the blind lute. The drum beat. Soraya of Istanbul, transfigured aunt, severe sister glittering with imitation jewels, began to dance.
For us. Munching our olives. Emptying the brandy. The paid admission. With the slight vascular concern. With the gold inlay in the third molar. Down for the weekend. In from the Coast. With the evening’s date or the partner’s wife. Faithful or adulterous. In a party of four or standing alone at the bar.
She circles the floor. The floor is covered with a cheap linoleum. The drum intensifies. The wailing mounts. She discards the blue gauze. She stands, legs spread, the weight of her in her buttocks and thighs. She sweats. She looks insolently into the glare of the spotlight. She thrust her thumbs into the jeweled band about her hips, insinuates it lower. Her arms raise. The brass castanets thrud. She leans back. Her hair streams. The belly writhes. The pelvis grinds. Her armpits are a shaven blue. Coins clink and dollar bills flutter into the amber light. She looks down at the seated men. She ignores the women. The pale blonde. The partner’s wife. The men shuffle, smile. But their eyes are hot. Or heat. Their collars are tight. Or tighten. She sweats. She stands again closer to me on the linoleum of the dance floor.
Again she plants herself. She digs in. She grips the floor. The brass castanets thrud softly. Increase their tempo. Her fingers are like the veins in a throat. Again she leans backward and her hair streams.
I encounter her eyes, which show their distended whites.
Her mouth gapes.
A beat. Held. In some steamy interchange. Slowly, she rises. I haven’t looked at Michael. Or the girl. Soraya of Istanbul, in the smoky light, moves from table to table. The eyes of the women have imperceptibly hardened.
I saw her approach through the layered smoke. Flashing, dark. The palms were silly and the camel couldn’t make it across a vacant lot. She was at the table. She looked insolently down at me. I could smell her. The belly wove circled quivered danced. Something dark, darker than her hair, clotted in me. I was being asked to do something. To be the place’s fool. The castanets went soft and mocking, the belly, with its bedded jewel, laughed at me. It didn’t matter. The sand had another reality. I buried my face against the sweated skin and kissed her belly and the drum thudded, and there was a great ah! from the room. I heard someone laugh: was it Michael, or the girl? The music skirled. Soraya of Istanbul was gone.
13
It was two minutes to twelve. Exactly. The elevator ascended. He was the sort of man who always removed his hat in an elevator. He was short, clean-shaven and my age. Too many men short, clean-shaven, ascending in elevators looking at their wristwatches at two minutes to twelve, were my age.
I said: “You’ll be in your room at exactly midnight.”
He looked at me.
“Yeah.” He even smiled. But dourly. “I’ve got to call my wife. If I don’t, she’ll think I was out, purring.”
He got off at the sixth floor, short, clean-shaven, my age. Dour. I had no wife to call. I had been out, purring. On my lips I could taste the absurd sweaty kiss. Her belly. Jeweled. She would repeat the performance at the second show. I got off at the eighth floor. The corridor was silent. Old Tom the Whipper-In was being buried on the wall. I sat down and read the paper. I had a sense of muffled and furtive voices, of muffled and furtive movements, in the hotel. Room service closed at midnight. On the Drive there had been an odd crime. A couple, playing gin. The doorbell. Three Puerto Ricans. With a toy gun. They’d bound the husband and raped the wife. He’d managed to reach a phone. When the police came one of the Puerto Ricans was in the living room on his knees praying. I went to bed. Nobody knew where I was. I’d fled. A disappearing act. The only one of my life. She’d come home. She’d found the house blazing with lights. She’d gone through the house turning the lights out. From empty room to empty room. The little dour man clean-shaven my age checked in at midnight. To some beneficiary of his insurance. I fell asleep.
It was the first morning sleep had refreshed me. I hadn’t awakened in the middle of the night. I left the hotel early. I had breakfast at the counter in a small place called the Parisian Café though it was hard to see why. I began to walk. Certain questions were before me. Things I’d obscurely felt since looking out of the window I’d watched the chauffeur sedulously polish the Cadillac. They had formed themselves. They had occurred to me without my seeking them out. In the first place: why did I feel this small connection with the time? A round building. Down went the Ziegfeld. Up went the incredible Americana. But down went what with the Ziegfeld? Up went what with the Americana? No. That wasn’t it. Not just simple demolition. A vast iron ball smashing. Debris and excavations. That wasn’t it. Broken off. A disconnection. Something that did not follow. Ah. Closer. What was put up being put up did not resemble did not seem to evolve from did not appear to have a connection with what was knocked down being knocked down. Gaps. Non sequiturs. Something that did not follow. An experience of a different order. What? And what was it I expected it to evolve from have a connection with? My time. My life. My past. I was fifty-one.
My dentist leaned over me: the drill burred in my helpless mouth. After fifty, he said, and the drill burred, it’s all downhill.
The album on the writing desk at the hotel testified to what I’d been. What I’d been what things had been what I was now what things had become. I walked. In a music shop I stared at the gaudy cover of an album of records. The title was French. “Voulez vous venir en surprise-party avec moi?” Did I? Was there one going on somewhere? Was that what I needed? I’d been discarded. They didn’t, as the man said, want me for duck soup. For refried beans. For stale tortillas. I walked on. Girls, as young as Aurora, were everywhere. I looked at the white eyelids; the fantastic clothes. There must be a rock, I thought, somewhere, on which they sit and sing. In the East River? With the slow wash of oil? Did the captains of the barges, over the scummed waters, plug their hairy ears? I took a bus downtown. And then walked. Here was a coffee house. Someone named Dayle was singing these evenings at something called The Blue Guitar. Miss Dayle was billed as “A Child of Hollow Times.” I assumed it was a tiny hamlet not far from Dogpatch. I was in the hat district now. The buildings old, the stores cluttered with sample boxes. I glanced up. A factory. The Ideal Leather Corporation. Occupying the first floor. Presses. Forms. A tubercular blue light. An old man in an undershirt a cigarette suspended from his mouth working at some machine. He trod. The machine hissed, the broad lips closed. A whistle. Somewhere. Past noon. The old man stopped the machine. His shirt and jacket hung nearby on a coathanger. He put them on. Slowly. He buttoned his shirt, slowly. He put on an overcoat. He put on a felt hat with a dark band. An old hat. He turned out the fluorescent tube over the motionless machine. He had not removed the cigarette suspended from his mouth. He disappeared. How many years had he worked for the Ideal Leather Corporation? Was it ideal? I walked on.
14
Coming up the stairs of the three-story brownstone, I heard a child crying. I thought it odd. I hadn’t expected Michael to be living in a place where there were children.
On the third floor, a girl appeared when I knocked at what seemed to be the only visible door and what se
emed to be the top of the house. She had a great scar across her forehead.
I said: “I’m looking for Michael Bey.”
She pointed to a flight of stairs, uncarpeted, narrower than the stairs I had ascended. They seemed stairs that could only lead to the roof. But they led to a door. The door opened into a bare studio. The studio had a huge slanting skylight.
The boy looked as though he had slept badly and had just awakened. Isn’t he the most awful somnambulist? I remembered Aurora’s words. Nevertheless, it was almost noon.
He had gone across the room now, and he was on the bed, squatting on it, hugging his knees. It tightened everything in the room. I had the only chair. The bed was mounted on four bricks. A piece of Indian madras covered it. The chair in which I sat was drawn up in front of a large office desk. The desk was pushed against the wall. The cord of an electric heater lay on the floor under a wall socket. It was not plugged in.
The big room was washed with light. The skylight admitted the day. It would admit, on summer evenings, the moon, too.
“Aren’t there any windows to the street?” I said.
He hugged his knees. “Oh, I know what’s down there,” he said.
I looked again at the skylight. The view went on and on. Vertically.
“Do you know what’s up there, too?”
“Sure. A dead dog.”
I was faintly startled.
“A dog?”
“In the first sputnik. He’s bones now. A dog’s bones: that’s what’s up there.”
“Who was the girl?”
“Where?”
“On the floor below. With that terrible scar on her forehead.”
“My landlady.”
“How did she get the scar? An auto?”
“No. A trumpet player. He threw her across a room.”
