by Alfred Hayes
“Is it different, Asher, under an avocado tree?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She thought a moment.
“What about my fur coat?”
“What about your fur coat?”
“I couldn’t wear it out there, could I? I mean: it’s sub-tropical or something, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“But I couldn’t exist without my fur coat,” Aurora said. “Oh, God, Asher, you’re never going to lay me under an avocado tree.”
I felt myself flush. Just a little.
“I’ll plant one.”
“Where?”
“In the bedroom at my hotel.”
She brightened.
“Asher,” she said, “that’s practically an invention.”
“How about the end of my joke? Are you up to it?”
“I’m sorry, darling. I was supposed to ask, wasn’t I, why a producer’s brains cost seventy-nine cents a pound and a writer’s brains cost only nineteen?”
“Well, the butcher said, do you know how many producers you have to kill to get a pound of brains?”
Aurora laughed.
I was gratified that she laughed and that the joke had been, despite its convoluted telling, some sort of a success.
“Did you have a big house in California?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And a wife?”
“And a wife.”
“Whom you no longer have?”
“Whom I no longer have.”
“Poor Asher.”
“I don’t feel like an object of pity at the moment.”
“Why?”
“It must be the company.”
“Does your wife know you’re in New York?”
“No. I just up’d and fled.”
“In the dead of night?”
“About.”
“Have you written to her?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
“What will you do?”
“Hide.”
“Forever?”
“Longer than that.”
“Where?”
“In a hole. Like a mole.”
“She’ll worry, won’t she?”
“Let her worry.”
“Give me four quarters, Asher,” she said.
I gave her four quarters.
She got off the high stool and went to the jukebox. I watched her. The fur coat was bundled on another stool. It was astonishing what one of those simple-looking shifts did for them from the rear. They came at you from the front and they didn’t look like anything at all, a bit flattened and almost demure, and then they turned around and walked away from you and that was the reason they hung in all the shops. I drank my Scotch. She was standing at the jukebox with the cocktail glass in her hand considering the selections. She smiled a little and I watched her slide all the quarters into the slot and punch the white keys. She came back to the bar. The machine glowed, the record moved out and laid itself on the turntable, the arm traveled to its groove. Music. She sat back and looked at me over the rim of her glass and I wondered why she was smiling and why the smile seemed the smallest bit mocking. Then I heard the music. Sinatra was singing. Then I realized what the selection was she had chosen on the squat multi-colored machine.
“You skunk,” I said.
“I did something?”
Wide-eyed.
Sinatra was singing “In the Warm September of My Years.”
“Not so warm, and a month or two later,” I said. I turned to the bar. “Can I have another Scotch, Charlie?”
“Are you hurt?”
I was. I shouldn’t have been. A damn song. But she had done it so deliberately.
“I told a joke. So you told one.”
She looked contrite.
“Please. Was it mean?”
“Forget it.”
“Sinatra’s your age.”
“I wish I were yours.”
“Why?”
“So I could wear white boots and a shift like that.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s a tricky piece of fabric.”
“Tricky?”
“From the stern.”
“There. See? You’re not so old.”
“What do you think of me?”
“Why?”
“Asking.”
“You’re a fink. A lecherous fink.”
“Why?”
“Watching young girls from the stern.”
“It’s a beautiful stern.”
“You say that to all the boats, don’t you?”
“What does Michael think of me?”
“Michael?”
“Our poet.”
“Did you read his poetry?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“Well, what does he think of me?”
“Michael thinks you’re a creep.”
“That’s nice.”
“Don’t feel badly. Michael thinks the world is divided into creeps.”
“Creeps and what else?”
“Nothing. Creeps. That’s all. He doesn’t exclude himself.”
“He ought to go to work.”
“He is working. He walks up and down New York with you. Doesn’t he?”
“Yes. Charlie, can I have the tab?”
I never did hear what the other selections were she had chosen on the jukebox.
20
I took a bath. She came into the bathroom, chewing an apple, and sat down on the edge of the tub.
“What are you thinking of?”
“Michael’s poems. Some of them are about you, aren’t they?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Funny.”
“Why?”
“Well, they’re damn explicit.”
“Yes, aren’t they?”
“He sure likes the good old four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, doesn’t he?”
“Michael says they’re good old four-letter Bronx.”
“They strike me as a little silly.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The insistence, I guess. On a kind of pornographic truth.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“So it’s a pornographic truth. So what?”
I was irritated.
“Oh, come on, Aurora,” I said. “It’s not that public yet. You wouldn’t lay Michael in Grand Central Station, under the big clock, during the Christmas rush, would you?”
“At Christmas? During the rush? No.”
She went out of the bathroom.
I got out of the bath, dried myself, put the kimono on. I combed my hair. In back the gray was very visible.
She was sitting in a corner of the couch. She had my album. She was looking at the photographs.
The photographs were all the things I’d been. Or imagined I’d been. I leaned over her shoulder.
“Is this when you were in the army?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“Pompeii.”
I was squatting on my heels. Mendenhall was beside me. The House of the Vettii, I think it was, was in the background. I was very dark, very thin. I vaguely remembered the photographer, a little wizened man saying: Ridi, signore, ridi! Because I’d looked so grim. After the war, Mendenhall sold International Harvester machines.
“And this?”
“Palm Springs.”
A mountain. A white convertible. Myself, in slacks. A bit stouter. Not so dark. Not so grim.
“Is she the one you married?”
“Yes.”
She squinted at the picture. Picked up her purse. Extracted her glasses. Put them on. She wanted a good look.
My wife was blonde, small, tight-mouthed. She wore a dirndl. She ran an efficient house.
“I don’t like her.”
“Nor do I.”
“Why did you marry her?”
“Oh. She was a very competent bi
tch.”
“She was your second wife, wasn’t she?”
“I do everything twice.”
She turned the page.
“Japan!”
“Yes.”
I was feeding the pigeons. It was the porch of a shrine in Kyoto. I was definitely older. But I didn’t look unhappy. Nor finished. There were no pictures of me finished. Not yet.
She closed the album.
Took her glasses off.
Considered me.
“Poor Asher. So many pictures.”
“Aren’t there.”
“Don’t be depressed.”
“I’ve forgotten what not being depressed feels like.”
“Come here.”
“Where?”
“Beside me.”
I settled on the couch beside her.
“You’re funny.”
“Am I?”
“Will you take me to the movies?”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“All right.”
“An old movie.”
“I’ve never seen any other kind.”
“I mean a real old movie. Like they made in the thirties or the forties.”
“From my time.”
“Yes.”
The smallest of silences.
“You can put your head in my lap,” she said.
I did.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Yes.”
She pushed aside the lapel of the kimono.
“You have gray hairs on your chest,” she said.
“So I have.”
“May I touch them?”
“The pleasure’s mine.”
She touched them. I wasn’t all gray. A few: half a dozen, perhaps. Evidences of the oncoming winter. The beginnings of a general whitening. They could declare me open for skiing soon.
“Poor Asher.”
“Why?”
“Is it difficult growing old?”
“ ’Tain’t easy.”
“Sad?”
“Like Aunt Dora says: What can I tell you, dear child?”
“Do you hate it?”
“I guess so.”
“Do the pubic hairs turn gray, too?”
“Everything, baby.”
“No.”
“Yes. Everything. Gray and shrunken and old.”
“No.”
“Everything. You, too.”
“I’ll never.”
“Yes you will.”
“I’ll never. Never. Never. Never. Never.”
It was dark now. The lights came on. The radiators clanked. I hoped it would be never.
21
The cinema was small. The lobby was rugged, downstairs in the lounge they served coffee, the art on the wall was abstract. The film was a French thriller, done in the French style. There was a rapid series of murders. The detective was dyspeptic. We hadn’t been able to find a movie of the thirties.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, in the litter of corpses, while the detective was questioning a transvestite at police headquarters, Aurora leaned toward me, and said: “Asher, if you committed a murder, would you trust me with your secret?”
“Shh.”
I was engrossed in the film.
“Would you?”
I looked at her. Her face was close, across the armrest between us, I saw the dark gleam of her skin, I could smell her perfume. She seemed very solemn. The whites of her eyes, those immense eyes, were a solemn white. She breathed conspiratorially.
“Would I what?” I whispered.
“If you committed a murder,” she whispered, “would you trust me with your secret?”
“Of course.”
I was anxious to get back to the cross-examination of the transvestite.
“No you wouldn’t,” she whispered.
“But of course I would.”
“No you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t think I was devoted enough.”
“Shh.”
“You’d think I was too frivolous. You’d think I was too scatter-brained.”
“But you’re not scatter-brained.”
“Of course I am.” Her voice was a trifle louder. The transvestite was cleared of suspicion and was leaving police headquarters. The detective took another pill. I was distracted. “Of course I am,” she whispered, louder. “I’d get drunk at a party or I’d be in the wee-wee room and I’d reveal your secret. You’d be right not to trust me, I’m untrustworthy.”
She was holding my arm, riveting my attention. I’d miss all the clues. I gave up.
“Well, yes, all right,” I whispered. “I won’t trust you with my secret.” I thought it was some sort of game and to placate her I’d play it. “You’d probably turn me in. For the reward money.”
I was trying to end it with a compliant joke.
“I knew you wouldn’t,” she said. She sounded absolutely tragic. “Nobody trusts me with anything.” And she started to cry.
I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t tell what was going on. Everybody else was having a perfectly normal time watching the accumulation of interesting corpses. Was she acting? Were the tears genuine? I was in a small panic. She was sitting there, in the comfortable seat, with that marvelous face of hers, and there were apparently real tears, quite huge, and glistening, issuing from her eyes and rolling (I watched the progress of one huge teardrop with fascination) over the curve of her cheeks. The particular tear I followed settled at the corner of her mouth, and her tongue darted out, the sweetest of adders, to lick it away. I was sure it wasn’t salt. We were being looked at now in the theatre, and in a flush of embarrassment I hastily said, mostly to stop or at least dam up the tiny reservoir that threatened to overflow: “But, of course, darling, if I do commit a murder some day, I’ll certainly trust you with my secret.”
“You would?”
She brightened. The delicious lips trembled ever so slightly.
“Word of honor.”
The tears stopped. The great eyes glowed.
“Who would you murder?” she whispered. “Anybody I know?”
I thought desperately of the soonest victim.
“An old pawnbroker,” I said. “With an axe.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart.”
“And then you’d come and trust me with your secret?”
“Yes.”
She sank back into the warm upholstery of the theatre seat. She huddled happily into her fur coat. She seemed immensely satisfied. She looked up at the screen where police cars wailed along the quais of the Seine and a fictional murderer was being brought to bay by a triumphant fictional detective. Then once again, fractionally, her head moved. She whispered sepulchrally:
“Asher?”
“Yes, dear?”
“May I have some popcorn?” Aurora said.
22
She was delightful. I had been married twice, and each time for a considerable length of time. Worms, of one sort or another, had always eaten at the hearts of the women I’d known. I could remember the dissatisfied faces; the ill-temper; the quarrel that had no beginning and no end. I had quarreled, and reconciled, and the reconciliations were perhaps the bitterest thing of all. It was impossible to trace the course by which love, or what had seemed to be love, had soured and gone wrong. But it had always soured and it had always gone wrong.
The years after my divorce from my first wife were the years that were identifiable I suppose as my successful years. They were the years of the big, or at least large, money. It is astonishing how much more easily the large money comes to you in that time than the small money did in the other years. I could remember how, somewhat clownishly, I had celebrated the occasion of my first big paycheck by having it split into ten-dollar bills and covering the top of an office desk from corner to corner. Money made a marvelous blotter.
My second wife had a passion for houses. We didn’t stay long in the hotel after my first wife agreed to the divorce and went back East. Our first
house was modest. It was on a hilltop. It was the year for hilltops. We acquired a boxer: the first of our dogs to go with the first of our houses. We had this marvelous view: you know, lights? And horizons? But then the view, magnificent as it was, began to pall. Oh, just a little. My second wife had a look that always preceded the palling of something: a certain pinched look. About the mouth. And at the edges of her fine nostrils. You know: the mute evidence she was deprived of something. So the slope outside our house was terraced. And after the terraces came the pool. And after the pool, the enlargement of the living room. The boxer got extremely nervous. When it was all completed, the slope bordered with flowers, the pool filled, the living room extended its ten imperative feet, then the hilltop revealed itself as being the true source of her dissatisfaction. She complained it was too isolated, that friends hesitated to drive up its steep path, that we were too much alone though, at the time I’d bought the house, it was this isolation and the no friends and the opportunity to be alone that had seemed so desirable. So the hilltop was exchanged for something flat and ranchy: with trees down a driveway: and the boxer got a lady boxer because, I supposed, he too was a victim of the isolated view. We now looked out to a neighbor’s wire fence, his horses, his children’s treehouse, his luau parties, his searchlights over his patio. He kept guns, this neighbor, and owned a string of pizza parlors. I lived in the hope, rather strong in the beginning but diminishing as the years went on, that something would one day erase forever that pinched look from my second wife’s fine nostrils. Nothing did. Our third, and as it happened final, house was I think almost satisfactory to my second wife: it was the former home (albeit run down a bit) of a sugar millionaire. You know: spacious? Imitation high-beamed Spanish, and all. Porte-cochere, and all. Guest cabañas, and all. A frigidaire (she kept cold grapes, guavas, fruit juices from her indispensable blender in it always) squatted beside the pool, larger and squarer than our pool on the hilltop had been. The sugar heir’s home represented, if anything represented, the apex of my success. A success, naturally, reflected in our friends: my second wife always tactfully acquired the sort of friends that went with the sort of house. Equal, a little less than equal, a bit more than equal: those were the criteria. She was really still in business: it was simply I was now her gift shoppe. Oh, she ran the house well. The servants (from Negro to Spanish Mexican to young Swedish girls) didn’t stay too long. Madame was, frankly, a pain in the ass. Still, there we were: married. And still, I said to myself: what she is doing is, of course, for my own good. I needed pushing. I needed organizing. I needed being run. And was obscurely flattered still that I’d been chosen by her to be run. For marriage, I told myself, was surely a partnership. So the textbooks said. So the experience testified. Articles of incorporation, monthly balance sheets, mutual indebtedness, and all. Anyway, I’d certainly acquired a partner though going into business with a woman wasn’t exactly what I had in mind those nights when I’d gone out for a pack of cigarettes and took so long in opening the pack.
