28
The Gay Nighties looked like just that: nightgear waved in the breeze all over the facade and from over the doorway, flimsy nightgowns, striped sleepsuits, short nighties, some looking from the thrift shop. Jack and Natalia had come from a show in mid-town, and it was now after 11. People stood outside, a few with glasses in hand, all rather weirdly dressed.
Natalia pushed calmly through the doorway.
The place was a ramshackle bar and art gallery, there was a small podium where Jack saw a man seated, dreamily strumming a guitar despite the lack of audience attention. Jack glanced around for Elsie, or Marion, and didn’t see either. Natalia said “Hi” to a couple of people who greeted her, and whom she may or may not have seen before, Jack thought. Getting a table was hopeless, a drink at the bar might be possible. The artwork on the walls was of the kind Jack detested and at the same time was amazed by, kindergarten stuff in heavy oil with crude black outlines, depicting car crashes, explosions, or sexual activities. Amelia’s efforts had grace and design by comparison, and certainly affection. The odd thing was that this crap on the walls was bought by some people.
“Hi!” It was Marion suddenly beside them. “We’re over here.” She pointed to a side wall. “Want me to get you a drink?”
Jack offered to attempt the drinks, but Marion said she knew the bartender.
“Jonathan!” she yelled.
They got scotches, nothing for Marion, and Marion forged a way for them to a table where Elsie sat, dressed again in white, and in conversation with a young man whose back was to the wall. A candle, stuck to the table’s surface, had nearly burnt down in a messy pool of wax.
“Ludo,” Marion said, indicating the young man, who looked Italian or Spanish, and who barely glanced up.
Elsie looked up calmly, and greeted Natalia and Jack in a hardly audible voice. She was often so, manifesting none of the pleasure people were supposed to show, out of politeness, on seeing each other. Jack sat as far from Elsie as possible, the better to see her. Natalia, rather out of necessity, had the corner of the table, next to Elsie.
“How’d the exam go this morning?” Jack shouted to Elsie.
Elsie smiled suddenly, her eyes brightened. “I thought it would be long. But it seemed short. An hour and a half. And I write fast.—I don’t think I failed it.”
Jack smiled. “Good.”
Marion told Jack that she had already played tonight and had stuck her guitar in a safe place, she hoped. “I don’t get a bang out of playing in dives like this—tonight,” she said, tapping a cricket lighter on the table top nervously, idly. “Too many people for anybody to listen and nobody called for order.”
Natalia and Elsie, because they sat next to each other, were not having to shout their conversation.
“Oh, I did want to tell you,” Marion said, leaning toward Jack, “this morning I saw that old guy, you know, with the dog? I was just going home with groceries, a friend was with me, and I forgot to look around till I was at the door, and then I saw him on the opposite sidewalk, walking along slowly. So I went back down the front steps and said to my friend, ‘Let’s walk on, don’t ask why,’ and we went around the corner to his place for ten minutes or so.—I hope he didn’t recognize me, but I dunno.”
Jack recalled the Sunday morning when Elsie and Marion had been walking together from his house.
“I mentioned it to Elsie when she came home today at noon, and she was all upset and angry for a few minutes, because—” Marion glanced at Elsie. “—I hadn’t looked around first. Elsie always looks around before she goes up the steps, even though she’s never seen him in our street.—F’Chris’ sake, you’d think he had nothing else to do with himself but follow people!”
Maybe only Elsie, Jack thought. He was aware of a slow wave of depression. The Greene Street house might have been spotted, connected with Elsie.
“So Elsie went off by herself this afternoon,” Marion continued, “up to the Cloisters to get it off her mind, she said. And I feel like a dope!”
“Oh—” Jack shrugged. The Cloisters. Jack realized why Elsie and Natalia had been talking about tapestries a couple of minutes ago. The unicorn. He sipped his drink, and looked around at the crowd, which was mostly young, white and black. Some were homosexuals, some affected punk gear and hair-dos. Elsie was laughing now. And Jack for some reason still felt depressed. Electronic music started up with a deep beat, Elsie’s style.
Jack reached for a little blank pad in his jacket pocket. He had a black ballpoint pen with him. He started with a lantern-jawed fellow who leaned against a wall and looked as if he might hold still for a few seconds. Jack didn’t like his effort, flipped the page and switched to Elsie, got her hairline and cheek and eyes in the minimum of lines, hesitated until her lips were still, then drew her mouth in two lines, then another line for the white collar of her shirt. He turned the little page. The magic was working. He felt less depressed.
They were clearing the floor for dancing, some people had to move their chairs and tables back. Figures began twirling in the center of the floor. The boy called Ludo, who had been quiet as a mouse, stood up and extended his hand palm upward toward Elsie Elsie got up. A black sash divided her white shirt from the loose white trousers below, trousers so loose that her hips looked fuller than they were, and the effect was charming.
I don’t want to watch, Jack thought, because Elsie’s going to fall on the floor. But she’d never fallen, and why should he think she would now? Jack put his palms against his face for a moment.
“You all right, Jack?” Natalia asked. “Hot in here, isn’t it?”
“Yep. I’m okay.”
Natalia wanted another scotch, and Marion stood up and got Jonathan’s attention. The drink was brought by a girl in record time, and Jack took the opportunity to order a beer. Natalia was watching Elsie on the dance floor. The boy seemed to be a break dancer, and his action near the floor was mostly out of sight. Elsie danced around him. Jack did not want to watch except for a second at a time, to catch glimpses of a white figure in motion, like snapshots that he took when he opened his closed eyes. He overheard Marion saying to Natalia:
“…told me she used to dance at home in her room with the Jack looked as the boy lifted Elsie by the waist and twirled her, nearly horizontal. The boy’s body looked thin, and Jack could see sweat gleaming on his face.
Then Elsie walked toward them, calm, looking at no one, lips a little parted. Elsie took a cigarette, and leaned toward the boy who offered her a light across the table. She did not even look at the boy’s face, didn’t thank him for the light. She gave a big smile to Natalia.
Jack drew his sketch pad from his pocket again. He began drawing a sinister-looking pair of gay girls, who seemed frozen with diffidence, though they feigned unconcern as they leaned against a wall. Then Jack realized that one of them was the tough cookie named—Fran, wasn’t that it? The bullet-headed former girlfriend of Genevieve. The girl with her was not Genevieve but a short-haired brunette wearing an oversized evening jacket and apparently nothing under it. Jack made a cartoon of Fran because he found her spectacularly unattractive. Her short but wide jaw looked capable of taking a heavyweight’s punch, her eyes in his drawing came out like those of an evil pig, with intense dots for pupils, and the mouth was an ungenerous slit. Her eyes reminded him of the eyes of Linderman’s dog God, but the dog at least had that good-natured, apologetic smile when he looked at people. Jack laughed to himself.
“Can I see?” Marion asked, smiling. “Or do you hate that?”
Jack shook his head. “Not just now, Marion. Another time, I promise.” He had his beer and he drank. How to make Elsie laugh? Jack licked the beer from his upper lip. “Elsie?”
She turned from Natalia to him. “Yes?”
“Do you still love me?” he asked wistfully.
Elsie laughed, laughed again, as if the laughter substituted for words. Had her cheeks grown pinker or was he imagining?
Natalia heard him a
nd barely smiled, indifferent.
At home, Jack didn’t say anything about Linderman’s having turned up on Greene Street. If Elsie had mentioned it to Natalia, Natalia might tell him, but she didn’t, at least not that night. Natalia said that three of Sylvester’s paintings had sold, one of them for three thousand five hundred. And Elsie was going away for Easter to a friend’s house somewhere in New Jersey. Marion was invited, but wasn’t going with her.
“For a week or so? Good idea,” Jack said.
Natalia was undressing. She wanted a shower. “Yes, and I think it’s Marion’s idea. Elsie needs a break, and that school has a break at Easter, of course.” Natalia disappeared into the bathroom.
Susanne was staying the night in the spare room, they had seen from the three books neatly stacked on the white table. Jack removed his trousers, peeled off his pale blue T-shirt, and reflected lightly on the vision of Natalia and Elsie opposite him at the table in the Gay Nighties. Their conversation had been earnest, but without any hand-holding that Jack had seen. They might have behaved the same way, he thought, if they had been alone on the sofa here. Tapestries and the unicorn. Sharper in Jack’s eyes were the images of Elsie in the air as she danced, Elsie with eyes lowered as she listened to Natalia, red-nailed fingers propping her head. As ever these bright memories jolted him with pleasure, and at the same time were without sexual stimulation for him.
29
“Dammit to f—” Ralph Linderman restrained himself and shook a fist at the empty air in his hall. He was barefoot and in pajamas, gripping the knob of his apartment door.
“Ah—wah,” was the reply of the tot who had just reached the top of the stairs. It wore little blue shorts over a bulging diaper, and nothing else, and it lived downstairs and had no business up here.
“Or-r—wee!” shrieked the second, even smaller, on its way up on all fours.
“You live downstairs! Both of you! Down!” Ralph made shooing motions with both hands.
A shrill female voice cried out in Italian from below.
Ralph gripped the stairpost and shouted to the floor below: “Madame! Can you kindly get these kids down? The stairs’re dangerous for them!”
“Ah, you mind your own business, Mr Linkman. With your yellin’ it’s worse!” But she was coming up the stairs to collect the brats.
“I’ll get the police if this keeps up,” Ralph told her. “You’ve got no right disturbing the peace like this!”
“Who’s the loudest? Who?” The burly young woman, who was new in the house, threw the smaller of the tots over one shoulder and took the other by the hand.
“Just keep your door shut! That’s all I ask!” Ralph entered his apartment and shut the door with a bang. “Damn the bastards, damn them!” he muttered.
This was the second week of it for Ralph. The trouble had begun when the old lady who lived below and whose door was in the middle of the hall passage, died after a couple of days in a hospital, and her grandson and family had come for the funeral, and were now apparently staying. Since one family, plus a detached brother or uncle, already lived there, all grown-ups, there was plainly not enough room for a new couple with two small children and probably another on the way, and it had occurred to Ralph to report this situation to the housing authorities, because there was surely a law about not more than a certain number of people in a three-room apartment, but he suspected what the authorities would say: if they are related, and so on, they could live like that. And the new family with the two babes would of course say they were not staying long, just visiting after a funeral.
But Ralph hadn’t had four hours of unbroken sleep in the past many days because of the little creepers who seemed to be up all day, wailed at 6 p.m. and also at 6 a.m., and so it seemed to Ralph they existed on no sleep at all, which he could not. In these last days as his nerves had worn thinner, he had yelled and cursed in the halls himself, and made himself more disliked, he realized. He knew he was considered an eccentric, maybe even unfriendly, though he always said “Good morning” or “Good evening” when he encountered anyone in the house, even a rude and sullen youngster. Now because of his yelling at the babes, Ralph feared that the rest of the people in the building might be ready to band together against him. That was the incredible thing, that the other people in the building seemed to be able to stand the noise, maybe it was just like home to them, just like Italy or wherever they came from. But they didn’t have to get their sleep in the daytime, didn’t have to earn their living by night. Half of them didn’t go out to work, anyway, simply didn’t work.
In his small bedroom, Ralph lay down again and tried to compose himself. It was half past 4 in the afternoon. He had been trying to get to sleep since around noon. He had to leave for work by 7.10, and his alarm was set for 6.30.
“Ah, God,” he said, addressing the dog who lay with his chin on his paws, gazing at him, “forgive me.”
Ralph closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe slowly, to relax. The image of Elsie’s house came to him, dark and gloomy-looking by night, four storeys high, its doors looking as strong and impenetrable as those of a bank, and this vision depressed him utterly, even stirred in him a scared or defensive attitude. Into that building the delicate and fair little figure of Elsie had gone and vanished one evening at 6. He had to erase that vision, or he would never sleep. Elsie was of course not in the telephone book at that address, nor was Marion Gill, though her name was pencil-written above another name downstairs outside the big door, and he had not troubled to look up this name in the telephone book and had now forgotten it.
He sighed, and settled his cheek in his pillow.
Rap-rap-rap!
That was a knock right on his apartment door. “Who’s there?” he yelled.
“Sartori!”
Ralph pulled his bathrobe on, shoved his feet into house-slippers for decency’s sake. He opened the door about six inches.
“Hi. Listen, I warn you to cut that yellin’ out or—”
“I have the right to peace and quiet on this floor!” Ralph recognized this black-haired fellow as the father in that new family below.
“You say you got a right, we got a right not to have no screamin’ maniac in this buildin’, see?”
“Then shut your door downstairs!”
“It’s hot and we were cookin’. People have—”
“Yes, and it stinks! Try opening your window!” Liver stench tonight and the inevitable tomato sauce, Ralph smelt from where he stood.
“If I catch you layin’ a hand on one of those kids—” Sartori pulled his right fist back menacingly. He was in shirtsleeves, black brows lowered.
“Sacred cows,” Ralph sneered. “Rest assured, I don’t care to touch them! Scum of the earth! Crawling everywhere like roaches!”
Sartori’s eyes flashed, and he looked about to launch his fist. “Man, you’re nuts! What about that filthy dog of yours, piss—”
“What’s my dog done?” Ralph stood his ground. “Not even barked! You leave God alone!”
“Oh, man,” said Sartori, backing, shaking his head. “You’re for the nuthouse.” He was leaving.
Ralph shut his door. It locked automatically, but he slid the chain bolt as well. God stood on four legs looking at him, puzzled and tense. “It’s all right, my friend. Sh-h,” Ralph said, trying to reassure the dog as well as himself. And the Pope preaching against birth control everywhere on earth! Madness!
Useless to try to get to sleep for a mere hour or so now. Ralph shaved at the bathroom basin, and cut himself. He applied a styptic pencil. Then he opened a can of mushroom soup and heated it, adding a can half filled with milk, half with water, and sliced bread from a hardening loaf. When he reached for the soup, he struck the pot handle with the back of his hand, and the whole thing went on the floor.
“Tum-tee-tum,” he said to himself as he began to clean it up with a floor rag, and he forced a smile that was like a grimace, he realized. He always made himself smile in the face of small mishaps,
in order to try to keep his sanity, when he was angry enough to tear the throat out of somebody, in this case Sartori, the cocky and insolent progenitor of the two little sacred cows. Ralph munched some bread, and promised God his meal and his airing.
Ten minutes later, Ralph was down on the street with God, Ralph keeping his head high, determined not to look at Signor or Signora Sartori if he encountered them, not to look ever again at the remains of that family, the old brother and the uncle or whatever, who lived in the apartment still. A sharp hunger bit at his stomach, but no matter; it would keep him on his mettle. He could grab a frankfurter at the Hot Arch Arcade at any hour. Dismal eight hours, dismal part of his life now, that arcade, that cesspool, and now Elsie, gone the way he had feared she might, and with John Sutherland. The expression on Mrs Sutherland’s face before she entered her house that Sunday haunted him. And then the time—had it been a morning or afternoon?—when he had seen Elsie and Mrs Sutherland walking along Seventh Avenue arm in arm, then Mrs Sutherland had quickly clasped Elsie’s hand as she spoke anxiously to Elsie, begging her probably to leave her husband alone. What madness, what wrongness in the world! And now Elsie in a finer apartment, or so he imagined it, financed by payments from John Sutherland and maybe from others too. Elsie had become a prostitute, she lived with a prostitute, the young woman with short brown hair whom he had seen with Elsie and Sutherland at 6 in the morning that fateful Sunday. The young woman looked older than Elsie, who in fact could look like a child of fifteen sometimes. The young woman, who was probably called Marion Gill, no doubt took a cut of the money that Elsie earned.
And Sutherland had not had the decency or the courage to answer his letter!
Abruptly Ralph turned and tugged God toward home. Frowning, Ralph recalled his polite understatements in his letter in regard to Sutherland’s newly found pastime, reminding him in the gentlest of terms of the irreparable damage he was doing to Elsie. Ralph had suggested the possibility of speaking to the authorities, meaning the police, but even that he had put in calm words. Elsie at twenty might be of “the age of consent”, but a police inquiry would cause Elsie to give her parents’ name and address, the police might contact them, and this Ralph wished, because he was sure her parents would—