by Alfred Hayes
Aurora and I came in out of the cold snow. Snow was on us. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Michael. I was going to denounce him. He needed denouncing. But as what? A thief? That didn’t seem quite the definition of the crime. He looked up from the table.
“Well,” he said. “Baby’s out of bed.”
The snow melted in the apartment’s heat. Smoke lay above the green cardtable. I think, now, that Michael expected us. Aurora would look into the manila envelope. She’d be furious. I think he expected her to tell me. It wasn’t the money he wanted.
I didn’t have to denounce him. Aurora stormed to the cardtable.
“Where is it?” she demanded.
“What?”
“Are we playing poker?” the fat, asthmatic one said. He wheezed. “Jacks to open.” He started to deal the cards.
“The money, you rat,” Aurora said.
The cards splayed out across the table. They had anted. The girl with the deformed leg looked unhappy.
“Asher doesn’t need it, do you, Asher?” Michael said. He looked about the table. They had picked up their cards. The stakes weren’t high. It was a weekly game. “Do you know,” Michael said to the cardplayers, “what my cousin Asher used to make some years?” He looked at me. “Tell them, Asher,” he said. “Impress them. Tell them what you used to make some years.”
“You tell them, Michael,” I said. “They’re your friends.”
“All right,” Michael said. He ignored Aurora now. He looked at the cardplayers again. He put the proper amount of respect into his voice. He said: “Why, some years, old Asher here used to make a hundred and twenty-five grand a year. Before taxes, of course.”
He paused. Maybe they were impressed. They just looked at their cards. Michael’s voice clotted. “And I made shit,” he said. “Before, during and after taxes.”
“Jesus, does anyone open?” the thin nervous player with the green eyeshade said.
“Asher’s come a long way,” Michael said, “through the snow and all. He’s been duped. Is that the word? Old Asher’s been taken, and he detects, he suspicions a little malice in the taking, and he’s come up here through the howling snow for an explanation. Isn’t that right? Well: I think old Asher here is entitled to an explanation so let’s just hold up on the game a few minutes while I explanation my aging and put-upon relative here,” Michael said.
The game was interrupted. It was definitely interrupted. The analyst in the checkered vest shrugged. The lady in the flowered wide-legged hostess pajamas looked interested. She was the only one. The girl with the deformed leg looked unhappier.
“Old Asher here hired me,” Michael said, “at a neat little fifty a week to sort of voyage through yesterday with him in good old New York. Shut up, baby, and just listen,” he said to Aurora. He wasn’t going to be interrupted by her. He was going to tell me all. I could see it coming. All was what I had come for. I was going to get all.
“Yes, sir,” Michael said. “Old Asher here loves New York. Her imperial buildings. Her windswept corners. Her conglomerate crowds. He loves her oysters and he loves her rack of lamb. He loves her up and he loves her down. Her in and her out. New York is a vital shot in the ass to old Asher here. So we journeyed, he and I. We trekked. Past her memorable tenements. Her imperishable garbage cans. Yes, sir. Because old Asher’s soul is intertwined with this magnificent city, gentlemen. He is warp of her woof, or something. And ain’t we all. Ain’t we all. Because, old buddies, she isn’t a city at all, she’s an ancestral curse, she’s the haunted castle by the polluted sea, she’s the malarial mother of us all.”
I said, slowly: “I don’t care about the money, Michael, but I do want to know why you hate me. Is it because of Aurora?” Because if it was, he had no cause to. I hadn’t taken her away from him, I couldn’t possibly, and I hadn’t at any time pretended to myself I could. I’d not wronged him. If I’d insulted him, once, I’d sufficiently apologized. If I had not sufficiently admired his poems, surely I’d a right not to admire them. If he felt bitter and deprived, surely I, as much a victim as he thought he was, and an older victim, and surely the recipient of more real blows than he had yet endured, surely the one who’d done the realer bleeding, had at least an equal right to feel bitter and deprived. If he stood, black with anger, outside the edges of his world, I, too, who’d been inside, was being slowly forced out. We shouldn’t be enemies: couldn’t he see that? We should, if anything, be allies. And if not allies, then a détente of some sort, a patched truce, a wary coexistence of a kind, should surely be the thing between us. We were of the same family. Had he forgotten? The same family: cruddy or not, the bond was there.
It was a plea, I suppose: the last I’d make. The poker players looked at their cards. The analyst’s wife smoked her mentholated de-tarred, de-nicotined cigarette in the long holder. Only the girl with the terrible shoe looked as though she could not bear to listen to it. The others waited for their interrupted game to be resumed. They were behind, and wanted to get even: they were ahead, and wanted to retain their winnings.
But Michael wasn’t having any détentes, any patched truces: not with me. For I was, he said, sitting there, intolerable to him in mysterious ways. My hands enraged him. The way I wore my collar, the fact of my neck itself inside my collar, the half-inch of cuff protruding from my coat sleeves, filled him, he said, with loathing. Sitting or standing; walking or breathing; my mouth open or my mouth shut: he couldn’t abide me. Counseling him, advising him, aiding him: it was all a bag o’.
“God. Asher on art,” he said. “Asher on politics,” he said. “Asher on the state of the world.”
I should be listened to: by whole communities; I belonged in the history books. A whole chapter to myself. The besieging of the city of Asher. How Asher was taken. Overrun by. Factional disputes during the reign of. Agrarian problems in the first presidency of.
Asher.
My name convulsed him. Born from the Ashers, Michael said. The phoenix rising from the Ashers, he said. Asher thou art and to Asher returneth. He could have gone on endlessly.
“Perjury, cowardice, the easy accommodation: why, old Asher here thinks of those as his sins, and the sins of his generation,” Michael said. The player with the green eyeshade got up and went to the john, the analyst yawned, nobody really cared, nobody was really listening. “He’s got all these problems of guilt and expiation on his mind. Yes, sir. He just worries his little old self sick that the stuff out there has to have a meaning. Down at the bottom of the crackerjack box there’s a little old prize and that’s what all the crackerjacks are for. Old Asher here, he likes things to be real. Don’t you, Asher?”
“Do I?” I said, stiffly.
The boy nodded.
“Real theatre,” he said. “Real people. Real life.”
He looked around the table: at the fingers idly counting the stacked chips, at the eyes irritated by the smoke, at the indifferent and impatient faces.
“And you know what?” he said. “Old Asher here believes he has a built-in reality detector. A little old gadget, battery-powered, that just tells him when the stuff’s authentic.”
He shook his head.
“Man,” he said. “Imagine going around with a gizmo like that inside you? I mean: giving you the absolute lowdown on everything. A thing like that has to be the greatest little gadget since the invention of french ticklers. Yes, sir.
“And I’ll tell you how you get one of these little reality detectors that tells you what’s what,” Michael said. “You can’t just go out and buy one and have it fitted. No, sir. That would make the thing available to everybody and the whole point is old Asher here thinks he’s got it exclusive, if not the world rights at least the American franchise. Him and his generation: they got the rights. Manufacturing and distribution. And the way they got the franchise is that they got themselves born at one of the great moments of historical truth. Gentlemen: I give you the Depression. That moment in America when everything was real.”
“Doc,” he said to the analyst, “I think we’re going to have to operate.”
The green eyeshade came back from the john.
“For what?” the analyst said to Michael.
“Asher’s got an obstruction,” Michael said. “A jammed-up reality detector. Nurse!” he barked at the analyst’s wife. “Get Kildare out of the shit house and tell him I want him in surgery at sixteen hundred hours.”
He looked at me.
“There’s nothing to fear, sir,” he said, gently. “You’ll never miss it once it’s gone.”
“Won’t I?”
“You’ll be a new man. No melancholia. No delusions of guilt. No indigestible moral crimes. I’ll send you a bill in the morning.”
“For how much?”
“Five hundred. That includes the anesthesia, drugs, and allowing you to hold Aurora’s divine twat.”
“You filthy-mouthed little bastard.”
“Okay already,” the fat asthmatic bushy-browed player said. “Let’s cut out the Grand Hotel and play cards.”
Michael looked at Aurora. “Asher doesn’t like me,” he sighed. “I try, but I can’t make myself likable.”
“I don’t like you much either,” Aurora said.
“Really, baby?”
“Give Asher back the money you took.”
“I said I didn’t want the money,” I said.
“He doesn’t want the money,” Michael said to Aurora. “Asher has a fine contempt for money. I can’t say I blame him. Very corrupting, money. He doesn’t want it. He wants my girl.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure she’s your girl,” I said.
His eyebrows went up. “Why don’t you look at her ass?” he said, politely. “She’s got my name tattooed on her right cheek. Isn’t that so, darling?”
“You scum.”
“Isn’t that so, Aurora baby? Tell this creep. He still doesn’t believe you’re my property.”
“Oh, shut up, Michael. You’re disgusting.”
“Okay. Everybody ante up?” the fat asthmatic bushy-browed player said. He counted the pot. “Who’s shy?” The cigarette smoke drifted. Michael picked up the ashtray in the slot of the cardtable beside his chips.
“Are you my property or not, honey?”
I prayed she wouldn’t say it. Not now. Not among these friends. Not with the sullen and annoyed faces bent over their cards.
She said, softly: “Yes.”
He didn’t smile. He’d have been a fool to smile now when his victory was so complete. He extended the ashtray toward her.
“Here, baby: empty it.”
He was ready to play poker again.
I prayed she wouldn’t take the ashtray. Not for my sake since I’d already lost but for her own. She took the ashtray.
There wasn’t any point in staying now. She’d taken the ashtray and she’d obediently empty it. I did not want to stay and see her empty it and return with the ashtray and possibly sit on his knee to make his possession of her evident to all. I started for the door. Asher, as he departs, a broken man: he was making me see myself as he’d made me see the soup-eater in the cafeteria. She watched me walk toward the apartment door. I heard the green eye-shade say: “I open for a half.”
“By me,” said the violinist. They were happier. The game was on again.
“Honey? Let’s go with the ashtray.”
So she hadn’t emptied it yet. His fouled and broken cigarettes. I was at the apartment door.
“Asher,” the girl said.
She meant me to wait. I turned at the door.
Michael was looking up at her, the cards fanned open in his hand.
“Empty it, baby,” he said gently.
I watched her go to the table. “I’ll empty it, Michael,” she said. She turned the ashtray upside down and a dust arose. Michael didn’t move.
“There,” she said. “It’s emptied.”
37
“Shall I open the window?”
“Yes.”
“Enough?”
“The snow’s blowing in.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll be buried. Oh, God. The chambermaid will come in in the morning and find us buried in the snow.”
“She’ll just change the linen.”
“I’m freezing, Asher.”
“Shall I close the window?”
“B-r-r. Y-e-s.”
I closed the window. I went back to bed. I left the drapes open so we could see the snow.
“The bed’s cold.”
“It’ll get warm.”
“Your feet are ice.”
“Warm them.”
She did. I watched the snow. The swirls were not as thick.
“He looked so funny.”
“Who?”
“Michael.”
“We agreed not to talk about Michael.”
“But he looked funny. Didn’t he? Ashes. In his hair. Is that a pun?”
“Michael exhausted all the puns there are.”
“I just couldn’t stand him humiliating you.”
“He was humiliating you, too, darling.”
“Oh. That’s different.”
“Yes? Well. I’m more sensitive to it, I guess. It has a tendency, apparently, to wind up for me in some peculiar humiliation.”
“Don’t talk like that, Asher.”
“Oh: it’s my kind of pillow-chat.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like to think of you thinking of yourself as humiliated.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“You should.”
“Possibly. It’s just that in thinking about myself I’ve gotten willing to accept the idea that my life has consisted of nothing but a succession of humiliations, some more disguised than others. It’s very possible, darling, that I’m ridiculous and don’t know it.”
“You’re not.”
“Oh, there’s nothing so terrible about it.”
“There is. I don’t like it.”
“Because you’re young and you don’t have cold feet. Or cold anything.”
“No.”
“Yes. Growing old is just growing afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Oh. A pain here: a pain there. Portents. You wait for them.”
“This is nicer than being afraid, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Being in bed. In a big hotel. And it’s snowing.”
“That’s among the nicest.”
She snuggled closer. She sighed. The bed was all warm. I looked at her.
“What eyes you have, granddaughter.”
“I’m nearsighted.”
“So smooth. Smoother than Noriko.”
“Noriko?”
“A girl. In Japan. At a place called the Cherry Club. I thought of her recently.”
“She was smooth?”
“She shaved. All over.”
“Ugh.”
“Well: it was sort of odd. There should be hair, I suppose. Are you warm?
“Yes.”
“Warm, and beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“Eyes like a what? I never can think of a simile.”
“Eyes like big.”
“Yes. And breasts like marvelous. And legs like wonderful.”
“They’re short. For my torso.”
“Well yes: a trifle. Oil, that’s it.”
“Oil?”
“A dark oil. Weightless. With just a touch of pale light in it. That’s what your skin is like.”
“I sound like something to fry in.”
I lay back on the pillow. Her head was on my arm. It was so quiet with the snow.
“Were you as pretty little?”
“How little?”
“Oh: eight, nine.”
“At eight I looked like a dago. At nine I looked like a dago.”
“Were you happy?”
“Why?”
“I’ve begun to collect life’s happier m
oments.”
“Now you sound like Michael.”
“Do I?”
“He’d say that.”
“I must avoid, hereafter, sounding like him.”
“Everybody does. A little. Have you noticed it?”
“Too bad for everybody.”
“I wonder.”
“Why?”
“Well. He isn’t so wrong, is he? Oh, he’s a bastard. But he isn’t so wrong, is he?”
“You don’t sound quite as mad at him as you were.”
“Don’t I? Oh, damn Michael. Let’s not talk about him.”
“Let’s not.”
“Was I happy?” She repeated my question to herself. “Well, Mama dressed me nice.”
“And?”
“Well. There was Papa.”
“Oh?”
“They weren’t divorced. Papa had a small restaurant. He lived in back of the restaurant after he stopped living with us.”
“Did he love you?”
“Oh. Well. Yes. He used to wait outside the house every morning when I went to school. In his blue suit. And black hat. Across the street. And I’d be afraid to wave at him. And he’d be afraid to cross the street.”
“Why?”
“Oh. Mama was in the window. Watching. To see I went straight to school.”
“Was he afraid of your mother?”
“Of Mama. And Uncle Carmine. And Uncle Angelo. So he’d just watch.”
“And you?”
“I’d get to the corner. And when I got to the cornear I’d turn around quickly. Mama couldn’t see me. Then I’d wave.”
“And Papa?”
“He’d smile. Just a little. And look up at Mama. In the window. Triumphantly.”
“He knew you loved him.”
“From a distance.”
“Oh. From a distance.”
“Is it significant?”
“We don’t really know, do we?”
Pause. She moved closer. Her head was on my breast.
“Am I the only young girl you’ve gone to bed with, Asher? I mean, since?”
“Since my wife or since my dentist?”
“Is your dentist a young girl?”
“No. My dentist is an elderly philosopher who pointed out to me that I was past fifty and on the toboggan.”
“Well, am I?”
She seemed anxious to know. The gift (it was a gift) would have a larger value.
