by Alfred Hayes
She stood there as though she had a bitter task to perform and had determined she was going to perform it. At both our expenses. Yesterday, she’d looked unhappy: today, she looked as though she’d committed a crime.
“What’s that mean?”
I gestured at the check there on the desk.
“I’m returning it.”
“Aren’t you going to pay your school bill?”
“No.”
“They’ll drop you.”
“My tuition’s paid.”
Like that. I was stopped cold. Her mother didn’t have a tumor; her tuition was paid. It was like the insomnia. A nagging question about something in the dark that I couldn’t phrase.
“But you told me that it wasn’t paid. You said you needed the money to pay it.”
I sounded stupid even to myself.
“I lied.”
“About the tuition? And about your mother?”
“Yes.”
A pale admission. An artichoke of lies. But why? She’d returned the check. That was incomprehensible; there was the check, returned.
“You don’t need the money?”
“Not for school.”
“Take your coat off.”
Because she hadn’t. She and the boy: nobody took their coats off when they came to visit me.
“I’m leaving.”
“Isn’t it a short visit?”
“I only came to return the check.”
“Why?”
“I told you.”
“You told me you didn’t need it for school. You didn’t say you didn’t need it.”
She didn’t answer.
“Why did you bring the check back?”
“It’s yours.”
“I gave it to you.”
“I’m a bitch. I take things. Then I bring them back.”
“Something’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense. What’s the matter with you, Aurora?”
“I’m this year’s queen.”
“Queen of what?”
“The Bowl. What else?”
“What Bowl?”
“Why, the Fuckup Bowl,” she said. “That’s what I’m queen of.” And she sat down and she started to cry.
Oh, she cried as she intended to cry and let me take her fur coat off as she intended me to take it off and allowed her shoes to be removed as she intended to allow her shoes to be removed and let herself be persuaded into a drink as she intended to be persuaded. I bustled about. I am, as Michael would say, a great bustler-about.
It was, as I said, about three o’clock. The electric numerals on the great clocks attested to this. Downstairs, in the main ballroom, the Danbury Hatfitters and Suspension Hose Association was gathered in conference. A hansom cab clattered by in the park: the jovial cabman had wax sunflowers in his top hat. Somewhere the first drink of the day was being mixed. Softly in their vertical shafts the recently repaired elevators hummed.
And I bustled about. I hovered, anxiously. She had chosen a distant corner of the green couch to cry in. I vanished; I reappeared; the ice-filled glass tinkled. She nursed its coldness. I persuaded her to drink; she drank. I urged her not to cry; she stopped crying. I thought it a victory. She sat in what seemed a self-accusatory silence.
“Aurora.”
“Yes?”
“Please.”
There was a pit. Of some sort. She stared down mockingly into it.
She had gone to a party. One of those parties. It had happened that night at the party.
What party?
Oh, some jerks she knew. Recently married. He did singing commercials. They had all his tapes. And did they but play them. She hadn’t had any dinner.
When was the party?
Exactly long enough ago.
It must have been the party. She got stinking. Was she but loaded. Six martinis. Real bombs. And people kept coming in. Stifling. Of course, she should have eaten something. She was going to upchuck any minute. So she went into the bedroom. Had the whirly whirlies, and all. Plopped down on all the coats. Furs and suede, and all. And passed out. Absolutely the whole bit.
And?
And. And. Well: and woke up. Some faceless creep all over her. Dress up to her belly. That was a picture, wasn’t it? She ought to get the door prize for the best costume. Never even found out who the son of a bitch was. Boff and gone. In the dark. What a hangup. Laid. By Henry the Turd. Could I refill her glass, please?
Most slowly, with a soft desire to beat my hands despairingly together, I went into the kitchenette and refilled her glass.
Returned.
Silently extended it.
Was as silently taken.
Sat.
Stared at her.
Children: really, children; and these terrible games.
St. Patrick’s tolled. Electronically, of course. Christ was polystyrene, too.
31
The cafeteria was in a cavernous basement beneath an office building. One felt oppressively the weight of all the stories. A metal plaque identified it, should the bomb fall, as an air-raid shelter. I went through the revolving door. At a square formica-topped table, in the sick light, I saw Michael. Aurora had said this was where he would be. In the late afternoon he was always here with his friends. Those, evidently, at the table with him, were the friends. The light in the cafeteria, as though exhausted by the weight of the office building above, was pale and grayish. Steam rose from the meats at the steam tables. It was after five and the huge cafeteria was empty except for Michael and his friends and, here and there, a few isolated and hunched-over figures eating silently in the grayish light. A bus boy mopped the tiled floor. I watched a counterman turn with a tongs the veal cutlets in their pans. He was keeping the meat moist. There was a hollow persistent clatter of dishes and a sort of dull drifting movement in the weak light. The place might have been the commissary in a large modernized prison. I saw Michael look up at me as I moved toward the table.
“This is Asher,” Michael said to the table. “We’re relatives.”
“Disown him,” one of the friends said to me. He wore a large woolen muffler. “The family’s doomed.”
“Can I speak to you?” I said to Michael.
“Sit down.”
I sat down. There were emptied or half-emptied cups of coffee on the table. Some of the coffee had slopped into the saucers and they had put their cigarettes out in the slopped-over coffee. I looked at the friends. One had a nose, large and violet. One was bald. One was black. One wore the woolen muffler. Michael was smiling. I was about to be entertained.
“Did you hear about the fag chapter of the B’nai Brith?” the bald one said.
I confessed, stiffly, I hadn’t.
“They call it the B’nai Gay,” the bald one said. “Dearie, what fights they have at Purim. Everybody wants to play Queen Esther.”
Laugh.
“Listen,” said the one with the incredible nose. “You want to invest in a good thing? I got it.”
Really?
“Viet Nam Heights. A condominium. So all right it’s got shell-craters. But look at the view. All them rice paddies. Beautiful. I’m putting in a drive-in cat-house.”
“How about drive-in reform temple?”
“With a Chinese rabbi.”
“Why Chinese?”
“What are you, a bigot?”
“Where’s the supermarket?”
“Down the block.”
“Fuck that. Too far.”
One of them, a fifth one, in a suit that hung loosely on him, loped toward the table from somewhere in the rear of the cafeteria.
“Who did you call, Herbert?”
Herbert had been, apparently, on the telephone.
“My broker.”
“How’s the market?”
“Fluctuating.”
“Did you hear the one about the investor who jumped out of the sixteenth floor of a brokerage house the day his stock went down twenty points?”
“No.”
“
Before he hit the turf he was a millionaire again.”
I smiled, a little painfully. They were Michael’s friends and this was where he spent his late afternoons.
“Is it raining?”
“Why?”
“I think I’ll get laid if it’s raining.”
“Sheet.” It was the Negro. You could barely hear the Carolina accent. “You know my problem? My problem is I ain’t got a problem.”
“Which one of you bastards dropped ashes in my coffee?”
“That ain’t ashes. That’s the coffee.”
I felt I’d been sufficiently entertained. I had to talk to Michael. Away from the wit. He disengaged himself slowly from the chair and we moved to a more secluded table. I looked back.
“Are they all your friends?”
He considered that.
“I wouldn’t say friends,” he said. “What I’d say is each figures the other is a worthless shit and will never make it. Yes. That would approximate the bonds that bind us.”
“Aurora’s in trouble, Michael.”
Apparently he didn’t hear. Or was pretending not to hear. He was slouched in the chair, in that posture of his I detested, and he was staring past me. A fixed, a fascinated stare. I turned abruptly. There wasn’t anything to see except a man eating soup. At a table. Alone.
“What are you looking at?”
“Incredible,” he said, softly. He might have been staring at the discovery of fire. “Watch the spoon.”
“What?”
“Dip, lift, swallow,” he said, amazed. “Repeat. Dip, lift, swallow. Repeat.”
I was compelled to turn again, to look again, to find myself, in irritated disbelief, actually watching the damn spoon go up and down.
“The man’s eating,” I said, exasperated.
“That is what it is, isn’t it: eating?” He sounded awed. He stared. The man was indefinitely aged. And gray. The profile slanted, the dry lips sucked. Michael seemed riven with astonishment. “The pea soup,” he said, leaning conspiratorially toward me, “is the special today, are you aware of that? Ham hocks in the stuff, today.” He looked back at the mute man, at the mechanical spoon. I was becoming uneasy. “Yesterday,” he said, in the same soft voice as though I were being given some vital military secret, “it was the halibut. Baked. But he wasn’t here yesterday. He doesn’t care for halibut. It’s the pea soup. With the ham hocks.”
“Michael, listen—”
He ignored me. The soup-eater engrossed him. “Are there pea-soup men?” he said. “I mean a species. Evolved in furnished rooms. It’s a study worth anybody’s academic year. Dip, lift, swallow. Repeat.” He chanted it softly. It might have been the basic rhythm of the universe.
“Michael, listen. Aurora—”
“She’s knocked up,” Michael said. “She’s got a bun in the oven. Is that the message from Garcia?”
My lips went stiff.
When had she told him?
Oh, she hadn’t exactly told him. It had sort of revealed itself to him, taking, as you might say, its ultimate form. He insisted on smiling. I’d have forgiven him everything except that damn impenetrable smile. The girl was in serious trouble; it wasn’t a joke: not one of the sleazy jokes that went on there at the other table among what he called his friends. She needed help; what was he going to do about it?
He considered.
“Put an ad in the Village Voice?”
“Very funny.”
“As comedians go,” he said, modestly.
Christ: at a party. Drunk. Asleep among the discarded coats. It wasn’t even rape. It didn’t even have the anguish or the terror of rape. It was something that happened among them: their kind of accident. A slight fatality. He looked at me. My indignation was ridiculous.
“She got stoned,” he said, “and somebody scored.”
That was it. The barest synopsis. The distillation. She got stoned and somebody scored.
“She can’t have the kid.”
“It’s been done.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“She’d make a great mother. Terrific pelvis.”
“Why that girl loves you I’ll never understand.”
He smiled.
“Suppose I do know a doctor? Do you know what it’ll cost?”
“I’ve written her a check for two hundred dollars.”
“Dad: the whores get two hundred now. And they don’t stay all night.”
“All right.”
“It’s the cost-of-living spiral.”
“Where is he?”
“Who?”
“The doctor.”
“Over in Jersey.”
“I’ll write another check for five hundred.”
“Where am I going to cash a check for five bills?”
“All right. I’ll cash it at the hotel. Will you take her to Jersey? If she’s going to have it done, it should be done now. She mustn’t wait.” I stood up. I was coldly sick. “You don’t give a crap, do you?” I said. “For anything that happens. To anybody.”
The eyes hooded. As though to say: what I give a crap for you’d never understand. It would be a waste of time, the hooded eyes said, here or anyplace else, to explain the private pantheon of what he cared for to me. At the table, the spoon of the soup-eater dipped, lifted. He’d made me conscious of the spoon. A blob, elongated and palely green, fell from the spoon back into the bowl. At the other table were the friends. And the cigarettes, drowned in the saucers. He was right: I wouldn’t understand. I didn’t want, any longer, to try to understand. She’d have the money. I’d see to that. I was used to seeing to that.
32
Then it snowed. It snowed and snowed. Even before you awoke you sensed the snow. The light was different. A kind of white darkness was in the bedroom. I went to the window. Swirls. The air was thick with them. An obliteration had taken place in the night. The sky had fragmented. It was falling down. I felt exhilarated. Evidently I’d been waiting for the snow. I went out. I crunched through the snow. It was difficult to see. New York was blinded. The blizzard looked like it would never stop. The city was silenced. The snow fell on it and soundproofed everything. You felt alone. The snow thickened on my coat. The snow kept falling, more snow than anyone could remember, all the snow there was. Abruptly, an umbrella conjured itself out of the storm. You moved aside; into the drift. The umbrella vanished. You went on, exhilarated and blind. In the kiosks the snow melted; the overcoats smelled wetly. Galoshes crunched. It was marvelous to see all the abandoned cars. Now the ferries stopped. Snow had softened a cornice. Snow padded the metal edges of the neon signs.
Snow.
And in the snow, I thought, early this morning, Michael had taken Aurora to Jersey.
33
I sat in the one chair in Michael’s studio and I listened. She was in the bed.
A Lithuanian: that’s what he was, over in Jersey, she went by tube, ha ha, joke.
And he was dirty: not the instruments; he was careful with those, boiled, sterilized, lifted in a forceps in his gloved hands: not the instruments were dirty but his talk.
“Talk?” I said. “What do you mean, his talk?”
Examines you. You have (probing) a Lithuanian cunt. Chuckle, chuckle. See? Doc’s witty. He knows the nationality of cunts. Spends more time down there than he does up here. Says: a girl came in. English. He looked. She had a Scotch cunt. Repeat chuckle. He could tell. Meanwhile: shaving you.
“Shaving you?” I said.
Medical precaution. God you felt dirty. He had rimless eyeglasses on a black string. A jacket unbuttoned over a vest with a thick silver watch chain. She said: will it hurt? The Lithuanian peers over his eyeglasses. Vas you so scared (she imitates his accent) ven you vas vit your boyfriend? Grunts. No: dot vas fun.
And finds herself (oddly now) almost flirting with the Lithuanian. It might hurt less somehow, she thought, if she flirted. Neutralize the pain. The window of the office is slightly open. She hears the voices of children playing in t
he snow. Eight o’clock. Michael has left her at the doctor’s. Michael is off somewhere having breakfast. She is on the surgical table with its iron stirrups and its leather straps. The doctor shows you an instrument. Now I am going to use this, he says. The window’s open so don’t scream. She wants it over quick but it isn’t. He shows her the instrument again. It is discolored now. She is sweating and she has bitten the inside of her cheek.
When it is over she is covered with sweat and nauseous. He lifts her from the table and carries her across the room and puts her down on a leather couch. The Lithuanian is strong. She wasn’t to move.
The doctor went out. You know what that bastard with his jokes went out for? While I waited to get dry and the pain to stop he went out to get a plum. A plum! she said. He hadn’t had any breakfast either.
She was bleeding into the thing he’d packed into her.
The Lithuanian ate the plum and talked. He’d been a G.P. Made as a G.P. maybe six thousand a year. Now his wife drove around in a Cadillac.
She lay there. No solid food. Take a dose of castor oil. Stay in bed forty-eight hours. Have somebody stay with you.
She looked at me from the bed. She’d finished the story. I’d brought her flowers. Through the snowstorm. That was very sweet of me. The flowers were on Michael’s desk. Michael wasn’t there. She had let Michael go. She was feeling all right and she didn’t need Michael. Michael was out playing poker. It was Michael’s poker night.
34
“Bring me the flowers,” she said. They were hothouse roses. She had settled down comfortably in the bed. She looked astonishingly well for a girl who had been through the ordeal she had described. The room was warmly lit. On the skylight the snow had piled up. Now she had the roses in bed with her.
