by Alfred Hayes
Boxcars on a flatboat. Heavily, parting the tide, a black freighter moved downriver toward the bay. Now the city seemed safer.
The boy leaned over the guardrail. He brooded on the municipal waters. A slow wash broke against the hull of a moored oilbarge.
Twenty-six, I thought: issuing from his mother’s womb when I’d gone into the army. His toys my weapons. What was he thinking? What did they think? He leaned, dark, over the wintry river. Once, I’d spent a week at Aunt Dora’s. I remembered his mother: a long-legged, long-necked, long-nosed girl. She was courting then. The courting went on in the front room. It was mostly lap-sitting in those days, and a lot of exhaustive smooching. She and her beau, the salesman who’d in time become this boy’s father, had emerged afterwards from the front room: I remembered the smeared lipstick on her mouth, the erotic look his vest had. Michael was the result of all that smooching. I looked at him again. Oddly, though I had this vivid recollection of his parents, leaning there he seemed parentless. A child of other circumstances. He sensed my stare. And turned, caught me at it, smiled: then I saw how the smile changed him. The spy he sometimes seemed vanished. He was almost engaging when he smiled.
I said, curious now: “How long have you been away from home, Michael?” and as I asked the question I realized that perhaps the real answer was possibly from the moment of his birth. But he had apparently stayed awhile. “Ten years,” he said, so that made him sixteen when he’d actually left. It was either early enough or late enough, I wasn’t sure. I imagined his parents, wishing other things for him, had violently objected. Well: not exactly, he said. He hadn’t told them. He was sixteen, and one morning, in the spring, he’d left. Apparently, like that. No announcement. No tugging at the silver cord. No setting out with a father’s blessing or a father’s curse. He’d just, he said, casually, taken the subway downtown. An interborough goodbye. That night he’d slept in Grand Central Station. Marvelous flophouse. Just transient enough to please him. The next night, with a bit of money he’d won and saved in an essay contest at school, he’d moved into a furnished room. It wasn’t exactly on the Bowery: contiguous to it, he explained. And it wasn’t exactly a room he’d moved into either: say, a fruitcrate with fascinating wallpaper. He hadn’t even paused long enough, in his irrevocable departure, to take a pair of pajamas with him. He grinned at me.
“I was over the wall,” he said. “Next stop: Freedomsville.”
Well, he got into bed. Kee-rist. Freedomsville jumped. He got up, turned on the light again, the bed was loaded. Mattress rabbits: an army of them. Somebody’d blown reveille. He stood there, and he said to nothing in particular or everything in general: “Baby, it’s the bugs or the Bronx.” He found some string. He tied the feet of his pants and the cuffs of his shirt. Tight. Then he crawled back into the bed and joined the war. “All right,” he said, in the dark, to nothing in particular and everything in general, “bite, you little bastards, but I ain’t going home.” And didn’t. In the morning he heaved the mattress out of the window. Freedoms-ville.
Oh, he’d worked too. I musn’t think this (his accompanying me) was his first job. No, sirree. He’d earned his bread by the sweat of his whatcha-macallit. His whatchamacallit that sweated had been employed in the shipping room of a large, reputable book wholesaler. For an infinite, that is measured in terms of his boredom, period. Four months. But then, there was this sling he made.
“Sling?”
“You know: like a hood’s under-the-arm holster?”
I nodded.
Well: the manager (some acne’d bastard in the shipping room must have seen him and squealed) caught him. He was practically out of the door, too. He sighed. The book weighted in the sling had been so nicely concealed.
“What was the book?”
“Merlin the Enchanter.”
“Oh?”
“Beautiful edition.”
I frowned. Merlin the Enchanter? That sounded like something a bit weird to steal.
“Rimbaud read it,” he said. I was back in the hotel room. Being handed, again, like Pasternak’s laundry mark, some priceless item. Rimbaud read it.
“He did,” I said. “How nice.”
“In Charleville.”
Fascinating. In Charleville. It was on a private map. One of the holy places.
I said: “Did Rimbaud use a sling, too?”
He shook his head. My irony was lame. “The sling was my baby,” he said.
Ten years ago. I stared down into the river. On the deck of the moored oilbarge a man in a pea jacket appeared, scouring a frying pan. Ten years ago I’d dissolved one marriage, begun another: and been caught, ten years later, coming out the door I’d entered. The river went by like time. But I still didn’t know why he had bothered, or why Rimbaud bothered, with something called Merlin the Enchanter. Unless they were both going to make a musical of it.
“Merlin had a wife,” the boy said. He was being patient. “Her name was Viviane.”
“Really?”
“They spent their honeymoon reading a book of magic.”
I waited.
There had to be a punchline. The wick of the wizard. Something.
“And?”
No punchline. He’d made his point. They went to Niagara Falls. The wizard and the beautiful girl. And took along their book. In some remote drive-in they read it together. On the nuptial bed. Dark heads joined. I saw the book. They opened it gently. Magic was inside. And all the great spells. I got the point.
We turned away from the river. It was late afternoon. On the bus, crosstown, I did finally ask him. It had been there, all day, in my mind. Of course, I’d said to myself: why? Still, the muezzin cried in his tower: and we knelt toward the city of young girls. Perhaps that was reason enough. But I wanted his consent. Now that I recall the moment, in the bus, he didn’t say no, but then he didn’t say yes, either. Not a generous yes. What he did say, somewhat enigmatically, when I did finally ask him if he’d mind my seeing Aurora (the seeing being, also, a carefully neutral word) was: “Well, there ain’t but the one spoon,” as though I’d asked myself to dinner and what was on the table was something in a big family dish. Then he turned away to stare at the city, wearing not the white rather boyish smile I’d liked at the river, but the other smile he had, the one that slanted a corner of his mouth and hooded his eyes and made him seem, again, the spy.
18
I sat in the park and I waited for Aurora. It was ten minutes to two. I expected her at two. The sky was overcast. A pigeon strutted close. There were no children in the playground. In the street, in front of one of the administration buildings of the University, a crane, painted yellow, was hoisting a galvanized cabin to the roof of the building. A girl in a cape went by. Someone now had come into the playground and was swinging in a swing. But it wasn’t a child. The pigeons swooped among the leafless trees.
I sat in the park waiting for Aurora, not sure that I ought to be sitting here waiting, and I thought, as I sat, how it had happened that I had gotten married for the second time. You marry once. After ten years, you are convinced that the marriage is a mistake. So you marry again. After ten years, that marriage, too, presents itself to you as a mistake. Well: apparently, what one ran out of was not mistakes, but the years to make them in.
I had lived then in something called the Cheshire Towers. It had towers, too. On top. Battlemented. Quite the fortress. My first wife (she had a dim reality for me now: the alimony payments were a bit more vivid to me than she was) had been a dark, slender creature. She imagined herself to be an actress. We had no children.
I somehow kept marrying women who for one reason or another preferred not to, or could not, conceive children. My first wife would not because she was always about to have a career in the theatre which, of course, she never had: my second wife, with no theatrical ambitions at all, was mysteriously barren. Both marriages, therefore, had this neat sterility about them. Still, I can’t say that for myself there was any driving need to have children. F
ine if they came along: but they didn’t come along for more or less the reasons I’ve mentioned, although it is also possible that my own indifference to children may have contributed to the curious sterility of both my marriages. Anyway: twenty years, and no issue.
In the Cheshire Towers, my first wife, as her theatrical longings went unsatisfied, took more and more to disliking to go out. We lived rather high up, in the building, we had this nice view of the river, and the pyschology of why she found it more and more distasteful (and, finally, almost impossible) to go out was relatively simple: disappointment was down below. She drifted about the apartment, in various costumes, and she drank wine. There is no point in documenting the amount of wine my first wife drank, or the long vague afternoons she spent drifting from room to room, pausing, now and then, for a long abstracted morose contemplation of the river. The important thing is that I began to dread going home. I began to dread the dark falling and the clockhand moving toward the dinner hour. Still, in a marriage, for reasons comprehensible to no one at all, you go on. On! As though it were a direction. I gave up imploring her. Hiding the wine. Buying tickets for openings in the hope she’d leave the apartment. All the damn therapeutics. Frankly, by then, if she’d leaned too far out of the window one summer’s evening I might have hesitated, oh, just fractionally, to rush to her before she started to fall. And yet: and yet: I’d loved her once. A flat rock in the woods, the sunlight filtered through the pines, I’d loved her once.
My second wife was, at this time, my first wife’s opposite: blonde, energetic, self-sufficient. She owned, she ran, she managed, quite successfully, too, since she was a damn good businesswoman, a sort of gift shoppe with the extra “p” and the fancy “e” at the end of it. It was the sort of place you bought, when there was nothing left to buy, such items as goldplated eyebrow tweezers, things like that, and of course to have a woman who could take care of herself, who was, attractively, on her own, as they say, and did not collapse Mondays and Fridays into blind, self-destructive tears was what, at the time, I thought I needed. Someone I did not have to perpetually buoy up, comfort, lead out of dark alleys. Someone I did not have to medicate, someone I did not have to have pumped out not knowing if the damn pills she’d taken were an overdose or not, someone I did not have to wheedle until my own nerves were on the point of shredding.
Well: there it was, the irresistible contrast. And it was a big affair, too, no doubt about that. She made me feel quite the stud. Sex, like the tweezers in her shoppe, was a luxury item. I began to imagine I was better off than I’d been. She flattered me, too, of course, about my own abilities. I actually made an effort, under her prompting, to finish the incomplete thing that lay in my desk, and then, one day, she moved into the Cheshire Towers, too.
Three floors down. Very convenient. I went out almost every night for a prolonged purchase of a pack of cigarettes. Talk about pursuit: she was in full cry, and I wasn’t even running any more.
About this time, my luck is cyclic, my bad luck is cyclic too, I got my first job with one of the big studios. I was about to leave for the Coast. My first wife now had to leave the apartment. My second wife promptly sold her gift shoppe with the extra “p” and the fancy “e.” I bought her a firstclass ticket on an airline of her own choice. I was about to depart for the land of the everlasting avocado when my first wife decided she did not care to risk the career which she did not have to anything so insubstantial as a prop-driven stratoliner so our plans were altered and we went by train. My second wife decided that four days in a compartment in the Superchief with my first wife was too large a risk to expose me to so she promptly refunded her ticket on the airline of her own choice and acquired a compartment, too, on the Superchief, pocketing, of course, the substantial difference in the fare, and we all rattled happily off together into the glowing and, as the man said, orgiastic future. The town, when we arrived, in those early years after the war, was quite different than it is now: the banks weren’t back to back, they were decently separated every few blocks. We all moved into a hotel. A few days after we were in the hotel it occurred to my first wife that the blonde energetic woman who had lived in the Cheshire Towers and the blonde energetic woman who turned up in the same hotel we were billeted in bore a remarkable resemblance to each other, and she actually stopped wino-ing for a day or so to confirm her suspicions. She confirmed them. Or, at least, on a weepy night, full of accusations and counter-accusations, and the discovery on my part that it was her firm conviction that if it had not been for me she would be that very day among the brighter bulbs on Broadway, I confirmed them for her. We agreed to a divorce. I moved out. That is: I packed my bags, shut the hotel door, and walked up two flights. My second wife was two flights up. She was very understanding. I cried a little: ten years shot to hell, etc. I slept in the twin bed that night. And didn’t leave it, either. A commemorative gesture, I guess. We got married in Tijuana. My first wife went back to New York. I once figured out that with what I paid her in alimony I could have bought a sixty-foot yacht and sailed to Tahiti, if I knew how to sail a yacht and I had any desire to go to Tahiti.
The pigeons swooped low over the withered grass. It was two o’clock. In sailor-wide blue pants a girl went by. Her hair was chopped off in a black fringe just over her eyebrows. She stopped to talk to a boy. They were both students. The boy wore a jacket with a fleece collar. They were at the end of the walk near the traffic signal. I couldn’t imagine the conversation. She was laughing. At least the boy wore glasses. The traffic signal changed and they crossed the street together. The crane was hoisting another galvanized cabin to the roof of the University building. Hurrying toward me, in her fur coat, clutching her law books under her arm, was Aurora.
19
“So this man went into the butcher shop.”
“What man?”
“This man.”
“What did he go in for?”
“Will you listen for pete’s sake.”
“I am listening, Asher. I am definitely listening.”
“This man went into the butcher shop.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Is the butcher shop?”
“Oh, boy. Tell you a joke.”
“Is it a joke, Asher?”
“It started out to be a joke. But now I don’t know. It may never make it.”
“Ask Charlie if I can have another one.”
“Of those things? Nobody but a twenty-two-year-old in a goddam mini-skirt would drink anything like that.”
“It isn’t a mini-skirt. It’s a shift. And they’re marvelous.”
“What do you call it?”
“I invented it but I haven’t named it.”
“Charlie?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you make the young lady another one of those things she invented?”
“Yes, sir.”
I watched, fascinated. We were in a bar called Silvio’s. Aurora knew it. It was an actors’ bar. In the rear, under a desk lamp, Silvio was doing the payroll. A big ledger was in front of him. There were photographs on the walls, photographs of celebrities, some of whom I had met, and there was a jukebox, and at four o’clock in the afternoon the place was empty except for Aurora, myself, the bartender and Silvio in the rear writing in the big ledger with a ballpoint pen. The shift Aurora wore was made of yellow jersey and the thing she was drinking and claimed to have invented Charlie was now going to make another one of. He had already made two of them. The first thing Charlie did was take a container of milk from under the bar and pour as he had been instructed to about four fingers of milk into a mixing glass. Then he took a tall thin-necked bottle of Galiano and he splashed about a finger of Galiano into the milk. He corked the Galiano and put it back on the shelf and then he took a square bottle of white crème de menthe and poured maybe another finger into the milk and the Galiano. The measurements weren’t exact. Aurora said about so much and squinted between her thumb and forefinger. She was very offhand
about the crème de menthe. She had invented the drink, she said, because this was the age of invention and here she was, twenty-two, and she hadn’t invented anything yet. The crème de menthe was followed by, and I shuddered, a splash of Kahlúa. Then Charlie put the glass in the blender. With ice.
“My God,” I said. “No wonder it doesn’t have a name.”
Charlie smiled.
“Shall we give it a name, Charlie?” Aurora asked.
“Tell you the truth, miss,” Charlie said, “even with a name nobody would believe it.”
He poured the thing into a cocktail glass. Aurora sipped the drink.
“Marvelous,” she said. “Aren’t I a good inventor?”
“Yes, miss.”
She looked at me. She was happy with her invention. “So,” she said, “this man went into a butcher shop, and?”
“Do you really want to hear the joke?”
“But of course.”
“Well. He goes into the butcher shop and he sees two signs. One sign says: Writer’s brains, nineteen cents a pound. The other sign says: Producer’s brains, seventy-nine cents a pound.”
“Really?”
I waited. She sipped her drink.
“Now you are supposed to ask me,” I said patiently, “why producer’s brains cost seventy-nine cents a pound and writer’s brains only cost nineteen cents a pound.”
“I am?”
“If it’s not too much of an effort.”
“Oh, it isn’t any effort at all, Asher. This one is really marvelous,” she said to Charlie. “When I do ask,” she said to me, “then it’s the joke?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s usually the way it works out there.”
“Out where?”
“Where I come from.”
“I’d love the Coast. Would you take me out to the Coast sometime, Asher?”
“Happy to.”
“They have avocado trees, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
