Buddwing

9

He went down the steps, quickly, propelled by an anger bordering on revulsion, wanting to get away from the girl as quickly as possible, frightened because he had nowhere to go, furious because he had lost himself again on the tangled sheets of her bed. He did not know what he had expected from this girl, but he knew it was not a coldly mechanical lay in a room with her brother’s picture near the bed. He had felt something fiercely alien emanating from this girl, and it had been contagious so that whatever they did together had become a war — what the hell had they been trying to prove? He recognized all at once that at least part of his anger now was founded in disappointment. He had not expected a practiced woman; he had wanted a young girl shining with truth, rare and awestruck beneath his hands, succumbing to his supplications, the way Doris had been long ago. This girl, this Janet in the clothes and in the body of his Doris, had promised innocence and delivered experience. But more than that, she had brought to him something he did not deserve. She had come to him with a hatred... no, not a hatred, a seeking, yes, a seeking as blind as his own, knowing he would not satisfy her needs, and blaming him for it beforehand. Each grinding movement of her body had become a whiplash, each uttered “Oh, love!” had become an urgent plea, denied in advance each time it was spoken. It could have been otherwise, and this was why he hated her now. And yet, with a calm reasoning that was yet more infuriating, he knew it could never have been otherwise and that he had been a fool to even hope for anything but what had happened.

Hating her, he walked up Broadway angrily, not knowing where he was going, and not caring, striking three matches before he finally lighted his cigarette, and then discarding the cigarette at once as he went into the subway kiosk on 96th Street. He saw no one. He was in a cold and isolated shell of anger and self-pity, and everyone who passed him was an obstruction, something to be overcome, something to push aside, something that stood between him and where he wanted to be.

He did not know what he hoped to find in Central Park, or even whether he could again locate the bench upon which he had awakened earlier that day. He knew only that he thought of that bench as his birthplace, and that his encounter with Janet had shaken something deep inside him, so that now not only his identity was in doubt, but his very existence as well. He wanted to see that bench again. He wanted to reassure himself that he had indeed awakened there this morning, that there was indeed a measure of reality to his life.

To his surprise, he found the bench without any difficulty, but it seemed a little more weatherbeaten than he had remembered it, scarred by time, decrepit. An old man and an old woman were sitting on the bench in bright sunshine. She was reading a newspaper, and he was sitting with his eyes closed, his head tilted back, his gnarled hands resting on the head of his cane. Buddwing looked at the bench and at the old couple, feeling oddly dispossessed, wanting to go to them, wanting to say, “I beg your pardon, but this is my bench, this is where I was born, don’t you see?” He walked past the bench rapidly. The depression was still with him, but now it threatened a vaster gloom. It seemed to him as he passed the bench that he was about to lose even the things that were comparatively fresh and new, that six o’clock this morning was about to recede into an irredeemable past as obscure as the deeper past from which he had come. He sensed that Gloria and Schwartz, were he to see them again, would now be as old as the man and woman who sat on his bench in brilliant sunshine; Eric would be a teen-ager; L.J. and the others would have advanced to middle age; even Janet, whom he had left not twenty minutes ago, would now be a fat neurotic matron. He could not imagine having moved so far and so fast in the space of six hours, and yet he knew that the present was being threatened by the recent past as well as a past that was unfathomable.

It was high noon in New York. Fifth Avenue was alive with tourists and shoppers. Everything had changed; this was not the landscape he had known earlier this morning. Harsh out-of-state accents jangled on his ears and his nerves, people jostled him, the sounds of traffic boomed interminably, the sun hung suspended in the sky directly overhead, a giant unblinking eye. He shoved past a group of excited children coming out of F.A.O.’s, and then quickened his pace, anxious to get anywhere out of this crowd. Snatches of conversation touched his ears, fading into his auditory range as he walked, fading out again as the talkers passed beyond him and out of his life, throngs of strangers he had known briefly and not at all well.

He walked with his head level as the stream of people moved against him, parting before him, the out-of-town women with their spring hats, the New York girls with their perky rapid walk and their darting shopping eyes, the strolling Park Avenue gentlemen with their homburgs and their gloves, the dancers heading for 57th Street, with bowling-ball backsides and muscular calves and a curious identifying duck waddle, the old ladies and the young actresses in mink, the homosexuals strolling with discreet fingertip touches, the idle traffic cop watching the snarl of automobiles and buses and taxicabs, the delivery boys carrying cardboard cartons of coffee, the geographically incongruous whore, the young Boy Scout staring up at the buildings, all of whom he knew briefly in the few seconds it took for their faces and their voices to come toward him, and abreast of him, and then disappear behind him.

You either own this city or you don’t, he thought. There were days, golden days in a bottomless past, when he had walked this magnificent street and felt as though the city were his, he was the sole property owner and this crowd of people rushing past was only leasing the sidewalks from him, the buildings, the very air. On those days, he had wanted to embrace the entire Parisian hulk of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, wanted to kiss Cartier’s glittering windows, run his hand over the sleek thighs of the Tishman Building. You possess this city completely or you don’t possess it at all, he thought. You either know who you are, or you don’t. And when you don’t, they all rush past you like a great ant army intent on their own ant business, and you catch the vibrations of their antennae, but the signals mean nothing. He suddenly realized that De Pinna’s was across the street — had he been heading there all along? The end of doubt, the end of anonymity, was across the street. He would inquire about his hand-tailored suit, and learn his name, and come out again knowing who he was, owning the city.

The light turned from red to green, the DONT WALK changed to WALK. He started across the street. When he was a boy, there were only lights without written directions, and even then the lights were ignored, and you ran across the street whenever there was a break in the traffic. He could remember walking up 120th Street to First Avenue, and then racing across the wide cobblestones and gaining the opposite curb. The coal station with its big green wooden doors would be on his left, and trolley cars would be running along the avenue, the sound of their gongs sharp and strident, sparks flying from the overhead cable. He could remember especially the dead cold winter days of Harlem and all the anticipatory joy that came with the first brisk warning flutter of autumn. He could still recall the sudden appearance each fall of jellied apples and charlotte russes. He could remember Halloween, the chalked sticks and the stockings full of flour, chasing schoolgirls down the narrow gray canyon of a city street 120th Street between First and Second Avenue, that was the scene of his infancy and his childhood, not Central Park. He could remember this all, his knickers falling down over his knees to his ankles, and all of it was somehow intertwined with the image of the tall man with white hair and thick eyeglasses who was his grandfather. There was always steam coming from the pressing machine in the back room, Uncle Freddie grinning at him — “Hey there, how are you?” — and pulling down the padded top of the machine, and then depressing the stick lever, the steam hissing up from beneath the pads and hiding Uncle Freddie in a thick white cloud. He could remember election night in New York when he was a boy, the enormous bonfires in the street, the older boys running into the gutter to feed wood to the flames, the stickers for Alf Landon, which his father had got from the Republican Club and which he and Eric had stuck to parked automobiles all up and down First Avenue. He had worn the maroon plaid mackinaw his grandfather had made for him, and a fleece-lined aviator’s helmet with goggles. Eric, of course, had been the first kid on the block to wear the aviator’s helmet and goggles, and then every kid in the world had them. They were very good for election night when the bonfires threw smoke and sparks into the air.

Quiet, how quiet it was on a winter’s afternoon, walking from the school to the tailorshop near 117th Street — his mother worked in those days, she had a job somewhere in a mailing room, his Aunt Martha would give him lunch — feeling the cold on his cheeks, his cheeks a flaming red, the aviator’s helmet strapped under his chin, and the celluloid goggles pulled down over his eyes, one hand in the pocket of his maroon mackinaw, the other gloved and holding his strapped books, the cobblestones on First Avenue shining and gray. The tailorshop always seemed to beckon intimately. Grandpa would put the light on in the window early in the afternoon, and as the gray of Harlem’s winter turned to dusk, the storefront would glow with warmth. There was a little bell over the door of the shop, and Buddwing would reach up to grab the handle, and the bell would tinkle, and Grandpa would look up from behind the counter, and Grandma would turn from the sewing machine, which was near the front window, and Grandpa would always say, without changing a syllable, “Come in, you must be frozen. Annie, make him some nice hot chocolate.” And then he would follow Grandma behind the counter, Grandpa would ruffle his hair as he went past and into the back room where Uncle Freddie would be running the pressing machine — “Hey there, how are you?” — and he would stand with Grandma near the hot plate while she made him his chocolate. There was a telephone on a shelf over the long cutting table opposite the pressing machine. Grandpa always had orders for Salvation Army uniforms, and the white S’s and A’s he would later sew onto the collars were always scattered on the cutting table. There was so much warmth in that shop. He would stand near the hot plate while the steam of the pressing machine filled the air, and then he would take his chocolate and go behind the counter with Grandpa and tell him what had happened in school that day. Grandpa would always listen very intently, his head cocked to one side. His hair was white even then. Buddwing supposed his hair had been white for as long as he had known him. And Grandpa would cluck his tongue, or say this or that about one or another of the teachers, or nod his head in approval, or ask Buddwing to repeat all the exciting details of a new project, all the while taking care of customers who came into the shop, and gently warning Buddwing not to spill chocolate on any of the clothes.

He knew suddenly why he had taken the job in Di Palermo’s grocery store the summer he was sixteen.

He had taken the job because he owed his mother twenty-five dollars.

Well, that, he thought.

Well, I remember the shop. And I knew who I was then, by God; I knew it every morning and every afternoon, winter and summer, too, the summer I showed Eric how to make a ring from a peach pit, rubbing it on the sidewalk until it was thin and flat, and then scooping out the center with a knife until it fit his finger. Grandpa taught me how to do that; he learned it in the old country. He was a very nice guy, was fifty dollars enough?

Well.

He walked into the men’s department of the store and thought, Well, I was only a kid, I was only sixteen, it was enough, and immediately saw the suits and coats and jackets and trousers hanging in orderly rows on the racks and remembered his grandfather’s rack, with the long hooked pole, and his grandfather stretching up to take down a garment for a customer. He felt intuitively that he was very close to gaining an important piece of knowledge about himself, and he looked around immediately for someone to help him. There were several salesmen on the floor, and one customer, an old gentleman in a tattersall topcoat who kept poking his cane at the sports jackets hanging on one of the racks, as though testing their durability. Buddwing walked to the nearest salesman, a young man in his late twenties who was sporting a brand-new mustache, which he kept twisting in an attempt to train it up and away from his lip. The salesman dropped his hand and said, “Yes, sir, can I help you?”

Buddwing hesitated, He felt again the same queasy uncertainty he had known in the lobby of Gloria’s building, the same dread he had experienced before entering Di Palermo’s grocery store. He wanted desperately to know who he was, but something equally desperate pulled him back from the imminent knowledge; something warned him to tread with care lest he destroy himself.

“Yes, sir?” the salesman said.

Buddwing wet his lips. “This... suit,” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“Was it hand-tailored?”

The salesman looked at him curiously for a moment, and then said, “May I see the label, please, sir?”

Buddwing unbuttoned his jacket. The salesman studied the label for what seemed like an inordinately long time. You are going to tell me in a minute, Buddwing thought. You are going to say, Yes, sir, this is one of our hand-tailored suits, and then you are going to consult your records and tell me the suit was made for that director at Central Islip. You are going to tell me I am Edward Voegler. Then I will know. Then it will be over.

“No, sir,” the salesman said. “This is one of our ready-to-wear garments, made for us expressly in England last year. It was part of our line last fall.”

“Last fall, I see,” Buddwing said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all, sir. Was there anything I could show you, something in a—”

“No,” Buddwing said. “Thank you.” He turned and walked out of the men’s department. He felt nothing at all. Nothing. Neither disappointment nor glee, happiness nor gloom.

Nothing but an overwhelming need to urinate.

He walked toward 49th Street rapidly, and then turned right off Fifth, going past the skating rink, and crossing the street, and continuing on past the RCA showrooms with idiot high school kids making faces on the see-yourself television, and then to the Rockefeller Center Garage where he made an abrupt left as though he had done this many, many times before. He went into the westbound waiting room, and past the newsstand — the afternoon dailies had picked up the story of the escaped madman and headlined it — and then past the cashiers’ booths, and the telephones, and the elevator leading to the ladies’ room upstairs, and the pay lockers, and then took the steps down to the men’s room. A man was washing his hands at the sink as Buddwing entered the room, and another man was at one of the urinals. Buddwing unzipped his fly and was reaching into his pants when the man standing beside him at the urinals turned and said, “This is a stickup, mister.”

The first thing that popped into his mind was the joke about the midget in the men’s room. Then, reacting instantly to the danger, he swung out at the man only to discover that the man had swung first and indeed had struck him on the point of the jaw. He found himself staggering back from the urinal and almost colliding with the sink, and then he remembered the other man who had been washing his hands, because this other man suddenly struck him on the back of the neck with what seemed like a sledge hammer. Okay, he thought, you want to get tough, huh? and the first man slugged him in the face again, and he almost went unconscious.

To him, there was something hilariously comic about the fact that his fly was open while these two assassins continued to batter him back and forth between them. He tried to strike out at each in turn, but whenever he did, it seemed the one behind him got in a blow at just the precise moment he himself decided to strike, so that none of his fierce attacks ever got further than the planning stage. He thought it was funny that General Sarnoff up there in the RCA Building had not the faintest notion that someone was getting his brains beaten out in the men’s room of the Rockefeller Center Garage, and he thought it especially funny that these two guys were exerting so much energy to knock him unconscious when he wasn’t even carrying a wallet, didn’t in fact have more than the single dollar that was all that remained from Gloria’s foundation grant. He also thought it would be comical when the police found him dead and bleeding on the floor of the men’s room with his fly open but without any other clue to his identity. While all these screamingly funny thoughts bounced through his head, his assassins continued to bounce him off the tiled walls of the room and the metal wall of one of the booths and the porcelain wall of one of the urinals, and he was amazed by his own resiliency, and amazed too that he was not out cold by this time. He was vaguely aware that his nose was bleeding, and he thought, All right, already, cut it out, but the two men showed no indication of cutting out anything but his heart perhaps, seemed determined in fact to slug him into oblivion if it took all day, which it seemed to be taking. He was about to throw in the towel, about to tell the referee there was one man too many in this ring, the fight was fixed; when all at once he heard a voice saying, “Hey, whut the hell’s you guys doin’?”

A fist caught him on the side of his head, forcing him to turn toward the doorway, and he saw a short squat man in a sailor’s uniform entering the room with his fists clenched. The image of the sailor blurred in that instant because another fist hit him on the other side of his head, and he fell backward and into the nearest urinal. He got up quickly, his trouser leg wet with a pine-smelling antiseptic, just in time to see the squat sailor hit one of the men on the bridge of the nose. Now we’re talking, he thought, and he sailed back into the fray to collide with the fist of the man who had been standing near the sink, and found himself falling right back into the urinal again. He got up with the seat of his trousers wet this time, and smelling even more of the aromatic antiseptic, and he was about to lend the sailor a helping hand when he saw that the sailor was in no need of a helping hand. The two men were lying unconscious on the tiled floor of the room, and the sailor was clutching at Buddwing’s jacket sleeve and whispering urgently, “Man, le’s get the hell out of here ’fore the shore patrol arrives.”

He followed the sailor up the steps, trying to cup his hand under his bleeding nose so that he would not stain the steps, reaching for a handkerchief in his back pocket, finding none, and then accepting the sailor’s handkerchief gratefully as they came past the pay lockers and into the waiting room. They walked directly into the street, the sailor setting the pace, Buddwing following. When they reached Sixth Avenue, the sailor stopped for breath.

“How’s that nose?” he asked.

“Fine,” Buddwing said, dabbing at it. He looked at the sailor now and saw him clearly for the first time. He was a boy of about twenty, with a square face and jaw, a spate of freckles across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were blue, and he spoke with a thick Southern accent. He had a huge barrel chest and short legs. He wore his hat on the back of his head, and his hair was straight and blond. The rating on his sleeve told Buddwing that he was a second-class signalman.

“Anything I can’t stand,” the sailor said, “it’s a unfair fight. Whut was they after?”

“My money, I guess,” Buddwing said. He pulled the handkerchief away from his nose and looked at it. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.

“Man, in this town you cain’t even take a leak ’thout some-buddy jumpin’ on you. You’re right lucky I happened along when I done.”

“I know,” Buddwing said. “Thank you.” He dabbed at his nose with the handkerchief again, and then handed it back to the sailor.

“Might’s well keep it,” the sailor said. “I stole it from the clothesline, anyways. Your fly’s open.”

“What?”

“I said your fly’s open,” the sailor said again, and then immediately added, “Mah name’s Jesse Salem, whut’s yours?”

Buddwing first zipped up his fly, and then took Jesse’s extended hand. He had a firm grip, and huge hands with large knuckles, the hands of an habitual street fighter.

“I’m Sam Buddwing.”

“Pleased t’know you,” Jesse said. “You know wheah we can find a head that ain’t got no holdup artists in it? I still got to go, man.”

“Me, too,” Buddwing said, smiling. “Up this way.” They turned left on Sixth Avenue and began walking downtown.

“What ship you off?” Buddwing asked.

“The Meredith,” Jesse said. “Tha’s a tin can.”

“I know.”

“How come?”

“Man’s name. Got to be a tin can.”

“You an ole navy man?”

“Yes,” Buddwing said immediately, and without doubt.

“What kinda ship was you on?”

“Same as you. A tin can. The Fancher.”

“I think we ran into her when we was up in Japan,” Jesse said.

“That’s just where I left her,” Buddwing answered, grinning.

“No kiddin’? In Japan? When was that?”

“After the war.” He paused. “World War II. I left her in Sasebo and came back on a transport for discharge.”

“Where’d you put in? San Diego?”

“No, Treasure Island. Off San Francisco.”

“Yeah, nice town, San Francisco. Where’s this head, man? I got to go something fierce.”

He took Jesse into the men’s room of the Automat between 45th and 46th. When they came upstairs again, he asked, “Have you had lunch yet?”

“No, but I ain’t partial to the idea of puttin’ nickles in slots. Tries my patience.”

“There’s a hot-dog joint down the street,” Buddwing said. “Let me buy you lunch.”

“You don’t hafta,” Jesse said.

“I want to.”

“Well, okay, so long as you understan’ you ain’t beholden.”

“I understand that,” Buddwing said.

“Well, good, then.”

They continued walking downtown again. The day was still mild and clear. Buddwing walked with a long quick stride, and Jesse struggled to keep up with him on his shorter legs.

“How’d you like Japan?” Buddwing asked.

“Loved it,” Jesse said.

“What towns did you hit?”

“Well, Sasebo, same as you. And Nagasaki, and Yokohama, and Tokyo.”

“Ever get up north?”

“Ain’t Tokyo up north?”

“I meant up near Russia. Hakodate, up around there.”

“No. Where’s that? On Hokkaido?”

“Yes.”

“No, we never got up that way. We sure had some good times in Japan, though.”

“We sure did,” Buddwing said.

They found the hot-dog joint on the corner of 44th and Sixth, and they stood at the sidewalk counter and each had a hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard, and a cup of coffee. The total came to seventy cents.

Buddwing took the last dollar bill from his pocket. He put it on the counter, and the counterman rang up the sale and then returned a quarter and a nickel to him. Buddwing looked at the unequally divided thirty cents and wondered whether the counterman expected him to tip a nickel, a quarter, or nothing. He would have wanted to leave a ten-cent tip, but the division of the change now made that impossible. He did not want to seem cheap by leaving a five-cent tip on a seventy-cent order, or cheaper by leaving nothing at all. At the same time, this money was all that divided him from complete bankruptcy, and he did not feel he could extravagantly leave a quarter. He was about to ask the counterman to break the quarter for him, when Jesse nudged him in the ribs and said, “Take a look at that, mate.”

Buddwing turned and followed Jesse’s stare. The thing he was being asked to take a look at was a black Volkswagen that had managed to stall itself directly in the middle of the side street approaching the Sixth Avenue corner. As small as the car was, it had effectively blocked traffic on either side of it, and a medley of angry truck and automobile horns was honking all the way up to Broadway. A Chinese girl sat in patient inscrutability at the wheel of the car, trying the starter at judicious intervals while the horns frantically honked behind her, failing to change the situation an iota. A younger Chinese girl sat beside the one at the wheel, and she craned her head over her shoulder periodically to look behind her at the honking vehicles. As Buddwing watched, the younger girl stuck out her tongue at the honkers and then turned back to her companion and said something to her that caused her to laugh and then glanced up and saw Buddwing watching her from the sidewalk, and impulsively stuck her tongue out at him, too. Buddwing smiled.

“She’s giving you the old come-on,” Jesse said. “Why don’t we go see if we can’t just help those sweet little things?”

He moved away from the counter swiftly, walked directly to the driver’s side of the car and, leaning on the door, bent down to the open window and said, “Can I be of some assistance, ma’am?”

The Chinese girl, with her foot on the clutch and her hand on the ignition key, turned to look at Jesse in brief scorn, and then said, “Get lost, sailor.”

“I think maybe you’ve gone and flooded her,” Jesse said, grinning. He turned to Buddwing, who had come from the curb to stand in the middle of the street, and said, “Don’t you think she’s got her flooded, Sam?”

“I think she has,” Buddwing said, and he bent down to look into the car, but Jesse was blocking the window and all he could see was the younger girl’s face, and her solemn brown eyes studying him.

“I’m a machinist’s mate,” Jesse said, lying conversationally. “I can help you get it started, if you want me to.”

The driver studied him again, speculatively, and then said again, “Get lost.”

“Let him try, Sally,” the younger girl said. She kept looking at Buddwing as she said this, her face unsmiling, the slanted brown eyes watching him as she delivered the words to Sally. Sally turned to her and said something in Chinese, and the younger girl answered in Chinese and then gestured with one slender hand thrown back over her shoulder toward the trucks and cars that were creating a powerful din behind them. Sally shrugged and said, “Okay, okay,” and then turned to Jesse and smiled, and said, “All right, mate, go ahead.”

Jesse opened the car door, grinning, and Sally slid over on the seat toward the other girl, making room for him. He gestured with a palm-upward hand at the vehicles lined up behind the Volkswagen and shouted, “Keep your shirt on!” and then slid onto the seat. Buddwing stood in the gutter, watching the three cramped onto the tiny front seat of the car. Jesse studied the instrument panel with the scrutiny of a physician doing a yearly checkup, and then ducked his head below the wheel (Buddwing became suddenly aware that Sally was wearing a dress cut in Oriental style, slit very high on each side) and studied the brake pedal and the accelerator and the clutch and even the knob that turned on the heater, taking what seemed like an inordinately long time with his head bent and with Sally beside him, her leg and thigh showing in the slit of her skirt. Then he raised his head and said, “Yep,” mysteriously, and tried the ignition key. The car did not start.

“I’ll have to look under the hood,” Jesse said, and he opened the car door and stepped into the street again. A crowd had begun to gather now, curious passersby stopping to peer at the small car with the two Chinese girls, and at the sailor who again shushed the honking trucks and cars with an angry wave of his arms. Most of the pedestrians crowded the sidewalk, but some were bold enough to come into the street, forming a loose circle around the car, watching Jesse as he went to the front of the car, hearing Sally as she leaned out the window and said, “No, the engine is in the back.” The beat patrolman stopped on the corner and watched the crowd and listened to the honking horns and some choice bits of truck-driver Anglo-Saxon, but did nothing to relieve either the congestion or the mixture of gaiety and anger that seemed to converge on the corner. The gaiety was undeniable, a holiday mood seeming to settle on the crowd of people who swarmed about the Ismail car as Jesse inspected the engine. The spectators all wore those oddly self-conscious smiles that seem to say, “Aren’t these people crazy? Isn’t this crazy?” but are at the same time slightly embarrassed because the wearers of the smiles are enjoying the insanity and are indeed a part of it. The anger was undeniable as well, a fury in the sound of the horns echoing up and down the street, truck drivers who had delivery schedules to meet, cab drivers who wanted to drop off their fares and pick up new ones, gentlemen in Cadillacs and Continentals who were in a hurry to get crosstown to Sutton Place, all of them leaning on their horns in a frenzied cacophony as Jesse studied the compact engine and then came to the front of the car again.

The crowd, the traffic, the gaiety, even the anger reminded Buddwing suddenly of Japan, where the slightest unexpected incident would draw a throng of Japanese, all laughing behind their white face masks, but laughing with the anger of a defeated people who were now suffering foreigners on their soil. He looked again at the Oriental girl who sat on the far side of the car, and he was surprised to see that she was still studying him curiously, as if she were not really a part of this shameful spectacle, and as if she suspected Buddwing was not a part of it, either. Jesse climbed back into the car, and Sally slid over on the seat again, her leg and thigh winking, and once again he tried the ignition, and the car started.

“There you are,” he said, and at the same moment a cheer went up from the crowd in the street and on the sidewalk, and as though stilled by a sudden and mysterious command, all the horns behind the Volkswagen went silent.

“Where are you girls all going?” Jesse said, sitting behind the wheel and showing no indication of moving.

“Downtown,” Sally said. “Home.”

“To Chinatown?” Buddwing asked, bending down to look into the car.

“Yes,” Sally answered.

“Why, that’s just where we were going,” Jesse said. “Ain’t it, Sam?”

“Yes, sir,” Buddwing answered, and he smiled at the other girl to let her know this was not where they had really been going, but that if it was all right with her, they would make it their destination now. The girl understood the smile completely, it seemed, because she turned to her friend — Buddwing assumed Sally was her friend; she could just as easily have been her sister or her cousin or her aunt — and said, “Why don’t we give them a lift, Sally? They did start the car for us.”

“All right,” Sally said quickly. “But please get in before they start blowing their horns again.”

The trigger-happy motorists behind the car, as if submitting to Sally’s prophecy, began leaning on their horns in renewed fury. Jesse, ignoring them, got out of the car and said, “Whyn’t you two get in the back, and Sally and me’ll sit up front? That okay with you, Sally?”

“All right, all right,” Sally said, sliding over onto the driver’s seat again, and Jesse said, “I’ll drive if you want me to,” and she said, “All right, all right,” and slid back onto the seat the younger girl had vacated. The younger girl was now climbing into the back seat from her side of the car, and Buddwing was trying to get into the back seat from his side, with both front seats bent forward at the same time, and with neither being able to squeeze past the bottleneck. In the meantime, the truck drivers were beginning to lose their patience, and the door of one of the truck cabs opened and a very burly man wearing a cap with a pencil stuck in it and a plaid shirt began lumbering toward the Volkswagen. As he approached the car, Buddwing allowed the young Chinese girl to get into the back seat first, and then collapsed on the seat beside her with an awkward backward-falling motion. Jesse got into the car and, smiling, said, “Well, now we all settled, huh?”

“What the hell are you doing up here?” the truck driver bawled. “Celebrating Chinese New Year’s?”

“Go blow it out,” Sally said in English, and added something probably appropriate in Chinese. Jesse stepped on the gas, crashed the red light on the corner, waved at the startled cop, and turned left on Sixth Avenue.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Sally said.

“I know. This’s a one-way street.”

“Well, do you know where Chinatown is?” she asked.

“Sure,” Jesse replied. “Right near the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“You got the wrong city, mate,” Sally said, and then she turned toward the back seat and giggled, and Buddwing saw the flash of a gold tooth at the side of her mouth and knew with certainty he was in Yokohama. They had stolen a trolley car there... well, not stolen it, simply commandeered it, shoving the conductor to one side, and taking his place at the electric throttle while the passengers around them laughed behind their face masks, hating. There was something about this ride in the Volkswagen that reminded him of that wild trolley-car ride, Jesse turning left again on the next corner, and then hitting Seventh Avenue, and then weaving in and out of the traffic plunging downtown to the heart of the garment district, delivery boys shoving their wheeled dress carts, even on a Saturday, Puerto Rican seamstresses hurrying back from their lunch hour, even on a Saturday, models walking in tight short skirts, crowds pushing their way through Macy’s doors, the imposing monolithic hulk of Pennsylvania Station, and then the relative silence of the dead streets between 31st and 14th, windows reflecting the afternoon sunlight, the long Japanese afternoons, the smell of fish and of flowers, the silent shuffle of sandals on cobblestone streets.

They had come up out of Sasebo by train, he and Jesse, and they had been drunk even before they boarded, loading up on Japanese beer in the USO and then reeling to the train station. They had sung all the way to Yokohama, Pardon me, boy, is this the Yokohama choo-choo? Track ee-chee-nee, we’ve got to be back by three, making up the lyrics as they went along, offering seats to surprised Japanese ladies, staggering and giggling, and searching for words in a language as alien as the landscape, We can afford, to board, the Yokohama choo choo. Got yen to spare, we’ll have an oh-hai-oh there! The roadbed was lined with budding cherry trees, the blossoms opening pink and white and red against the rolling green terraced hills beyond as the train, a Toonerville tinker-town train, chugged and rattled along the track, throwing coal cinders back through the open windows of the car, dirtying their summer whites. The Buddha sat in immense splendor miles from the track, but it seemed close enough to touch, dominating the hillside and the entire landscape, a huge stone idol, unseeing, seeing all, as the train clattered past and they sang the song that linked them with a world they knew.

In Yokohama they drank more Japanese beer in a Japanese dance hall and danced with thirty-year-old hostesses who were wearing Western clothes, the kind of simple cotton frocks twelve-year-olds were wearing in the States. And they commandeered the trolley car, and ran like hell from the shore patrol, two marine bastards in a jeep who sat with their white helmets and white leggings and white clubs, one of them yelling, “Hey, you sailors! Come back here, you hear?” while he and Jesse ducked into a bombed-out alley, eluding them. And then they met the girls, one o’clock in the afternoon, Yokohama in skeletal ruins, rubble piled in the streets, met them on the roof of the servicemen’s club where Jesse posed for his picture with one of them, the older one with the gold tooth. They walked downstairs again later, there were cherry blossoms even in the rubble, and stopped to watch the Japanese street artist who was drawing a picture of an Army sergeant while little girls with straight hair and sniffly noses stood around and watched and grinned, and the girl he had met on the roof of the servicemen’s club covertly slipped her hand through his arm.

“Whereabouts you going, exactly?” Jesse asked.

“We’re going home,” Sally said. “I told you.”

“And where’s that, exactly?”

“Exactly?” Sally said, and giggled. “He wants to know exactly, Tina.”

“Well, now, sure I do,” Jesse said.

“It’s exactly on Mott Street,” Sally said, giggling. “Do you know where that is, exactly?”

“Well, not exactly,” Jesse admitted.

“Do you girls live together?” Buddwing asked. “Tina? Is that your name?”

“Yes, that’s my name,” Tina said. She had a very small voice, faintly touched with an Oriental flavor, a slight musical quality. “What’s your name?”

“Sam.”

“Why’d you want to know if we live together?” Sally asked, turning to face Buddwing.

“I’m just curious.”

“Are you sisters?” Jesse asked.

“No, we’re not sisters,” Sally said, smiling, and then turned again to Buddwing and again asked, “Why’d you want to know if we live together?”

“Because he was hoping maybe you’d invite us in for some tea,” Jesse said.

“Chinee tea velly good tea,” Tina said in a mock Chinese singsong.

“Velly velly good,” Sally said, picking up the phony accent. “Hot and holly.”

“I mean, after all, we did get this jalopy started for you, and looka me driving you all the way downtown. That deserves a cup of tea, don’t you think?”

“At the very least,” Sally said, and she giggled.

“What you like with your tea?” Tina asked. “We got fortune cookie, almond cookie, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry ice cream, orange sherbet, kumquat.”

“I’d just like a nice cup of tea and maybe some soft music and a place to put up my feet,” Jesse said. “Man, I been on the go since four o’clock yesterday.”

“You like we play nice music on samisen?” Tina asked.

“I like you play nice music on record player.”

“Well, we see,” Sally said. “You make turn here, please, this Canal Street.”

They came into the maze of Chinatown and cruised the streets looking for a parking spot. This was not the nighttime Chinatown of red and green neon, of tourists trying to decide which restaurant to enter, of brilliantly lighted souvenir shops with paper dragons and cardboard swords, of teenagers in search of firecrackers. This was a neighborhood, and it happened to be Chinese, the way that side street in Yokohama had happened to be Japanese, with people living here and going about the daily routines of their lives. The neon signs did not shout their intentions at one-thirty in the afternoon. Huge muted Chinese calligraphs stood white and pale against the sides of tenement houses. The souvenir shops seemed gathering the strength of their motley wares for the Saturday evening onslaught, Chinese women dusting porcelain Chinese warriors in window fronts, a Chinese man hanging a colored paper lantern, pulling it taut and testing the light bulb, a feeble glow in an afternoon window. Boys and girls stopped to talk to each other on the street, in English, and old men lingered about newsstands, reading the front pages of Chinese-language newspapers. Women moved in and out of the markets, the food in the windows rare and exotic to Buddwing’s eyes, the water chestnuts and green onions, the ginger syrup and kumquats, the octopus and lychee nuts. As he stepped out of the parked car into the spring afternoon, he found himself looking into the open kitchen door of a restaurant, and seeing the hanging pigs on their great hooked chains rotating slowly over a smoke oven. The pungent smell of roasting pork touched his nostrils, evoking a stronger memory, the cleavers in a neat row hanging above the chopping block, the sea bass marinated and ready to roast, the rows of frogs’ legs tied in neat pairs for hanging in the L-shaped oven, these, these; he took Tina’s hand as she stepped out of the small car.

“Well, do we get the tea?” Jesse asked.

Sally put one hand on her hip and extended her leg, bending it slightly, the pale white length of her thigh showing in the deep slit. Tina was wearing a blue skirt and a white blouse, with a tiny gold pendant watch around her throat, and she looked much less Chinese than Sally in her green silk, high-necked, thigh-slitted dress. Sally was thoughtfully considering Jesse’s last question now, her pale brow faintly wrinkled, her teeth gnawing on the inside of her mouth. Whatever decision was being formed in her inscrutable mind apparently had little or nothing to do with Buddwing or Tina. Buddwing immediately suspected that Sally, who seemed to be close to thirty-five if not over the hill and gone already, had her own apartment here in Chinatown and was now debating whether or not to share humble abode and hot and holly tea with two strange white devils, one of whom was sailing man. The decision, in any case, contrary to the one made in the car where Tina had advised and Sally had accepted, was one that Sally would undoubtedly reach independently, with neither counsel nor debate from Tina. So they all stood on the sidewalk in dumb anticipation while Sally wrinkled her brow and jutted her hip and extended her bent leg and nibbled at the inside of her mouth, and the neighborhood Chinese women came and went with their marketing baskets.

“Well, what the hell,” Sally said at last, “let’s have some tea.”

It was going to be a monumental drunk, one that Buddwing would remember for years to come. It was going to be one of those roaring, boisterous, sex-filled, whiskey filled afternoons where nothing mattered but the wild soaring joy of letting go, and even that was not a conscious thing.

The apartment was not as Oriental as he had thought it would be, not as Oriental as the small wooden hut on the Yokohama side street had been in May of 1946. A Chinese man was sitting on an upended milk box in front of the tenement doorway as they climbed the front steps, following Sally. He looked up in brief disapproval and then went back to watching the street. There had been smoke coming from the shack in Yokohama. It had been in a row of shacks on a street behind what must have been a major thoroughfare before the bombings. A small path led to the door of the shack. They had followed the older woman with the gold tooth, and the younger girl shuffling along behind her, up the path to the door of the shack and then had entered. There was the smell of woodsmoke. A small hibachi burned in the center of the room. Sally opened the door to her apartment, and they followed her into the kitchen where beaded Oriental curtains hung at the far end, separating it from the living room. A calendar was on the kitchen wall, a Chinese girl decorating its face. There were a range and a sink and a refrigerator and an enamel-topped kitchen table. Sally walked directly to the beaded curtains and held them aside for Jesse and Buddwing. They walked into the other room, and Tina and Sally followed them. The décor here was faintly Oriental, twice removed, Sally’s honorable ancestors being honored more in the breach than in the physical actuality. There was a couch bought from one of the modern foam-rubber places on Park Avenue South, and a very low slatted table before it, and on the other side of that a pile of brightly colored cushions. Another calendar — Japanese, not Chinese — hung on the living room wall, and an abacus was on the top of a modern chest of drawers on the opposite wall. There was, too, an open game of mah-jongg and — on the wall above the chest of drawers — two delicate Chinese prints of birds. Aside from these touches — the calendars, the abacus, the game, the prints — the apartment could have been any one of a hundred apartments in the neighborhood where he had been born and raised. No, there was one other thing, and it was this that brought back with peculiar pungency the Yokohama shack: the faint aroma of burning incense.

“Do you really want tea?” Sally asked.

“Well, like what did you have in mind?” Jesse said.

“I thought maybe a drink, but...” Sally shrugged. “You think it’s too early for the fleet, Tina?”

“It’s too early for me, that’s for sure,” Tina said.

“Tina just sniffs the cork,” Sally explained, “and right away she’s back in the Tang dynasty.”

“What’s that?” Jesse asked.

“The Tang dynasty? Before the Ming,” Sally explained.

“The Ming dynasty,” Buddwing said, trying to be funny, “is the dynasty run by the Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon.”

“Who’s the Emperor Ming?” Tina asked.

“A very tall, bald-headed man in a robe, with a pencil-line drooping mustache. Ming. Haven’t you ever read Flash Gordon?”

“No,” Tina said.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“I read Flash Gordon,” Sally said, “and I resented the heavy being Chinese.”

“He wasn’t really Chinese,” Buddwing said.

“Well, he sure as hell looked Chinese. As a matter of fact, I had an uncle who looked just like Ming.”

“Did I hear somebody mention a drink a little while back?” Jesse asked.

“I thought you were the big tea man,” Sally said, smiling.

“I am the big B-Man,” Jesse said. “B for bourbon.”

Sally went into the kitchen, and Jesse knocked over the pile of colored pillows and settled himself on one of them. Buddwing and Tina sat on the couch. The incense was very strong in his nostrils now. It seemed to be emanating from somewhere behind the couch, but he could not locate the burner. Its aroma filled the room. He looked at the girl sitting beside him, the Japanese girl with her painted face and her incongruous garb. In the other room, the woman with the gold tooth was bustling about. The sun slanted through the shack’s one window, touching the glowing coals of the hibachi in the center of the room. Jesse was making himself comfortable on the floor. There was the sound of sandaled feet outside, the babble of Japanese calling to each other, the cries of a fruit peddler wending his way through the neighborhood. There was always a smell of fish and smoke, always; it hung over every Japanese city like something you could touch, a curious smell that was October even when it was May. It came through the open window now, and mingled with the fainter aroma of the incense. A potato was baking on the hibachi. The woman came back from the other room and smiled, the gold tooth flashing in her mouth, and that was the beginning of it.

Sally and Jesse both drank bourbon with a little water, please, while Buddwing and Tina drank Scotch neat on the rocks, and it was along about the third drink that Buddwing realized they were roaring down the pike toward a monumental drunk. The drunk started in the apartment off that side street with bourbon and Scotch, and with music on the record player, and with Sally suddenly getting up and beginning to do a dance alone as if there were nobody else in the room. Tina kept giggling all the while Sally danced, and Buddwing slipped his hand up under her skirt, and she squeezed it between her thighs and then he had another drink while Jesse applauded for Sally, and then they all had another drink — Tina was on his lap now — and that was when Jesse took Sally in his arms and kissed her.

Buddwing was a little surprised when Jesse began kissing Sally because he knew that Jesse was madly in love with a Mexican girl who lived on the outskirts of San Antonio, and who had taught Jesse how to hypnotize people. Jesse was a devout believer in black magic, something everybody on the ship joked about, but nobody made fun of the way he could hypnotize people. They would all crowd into the sonar shack, which was maybe six feet by six feet, and Jesse would fix those blue eyes of his onto the middle of somebody’s forehead, and then just begin moving his forefinger back and forth. “Now, you jes keep a-watchin’ my finger,” his voice would say. “Now your eyes are gettin’ heavy, your lids is gettin’ heavy,” his voice would say. “You cain’t hardly keep ’em open,” his voice would say, and before you knew it, just like in the movies, the guy he was hypnotizing would shut his eyes and do whatever Jesse told him to do. He had Andy Grange jumping around on the deck and barking like a dog one time, and another time he hypnotized Mr. Carver at Mr. Carver’s own request, but then when he had him in a trance he was too chicken to give him any orders, Mr. Carver being the senior communications officer aboard, and not a man to go messing around with.

Jesse loved that Mexican girl with all his heart, and he never stopped talking about her to whoever would listen, which was practically everybody on the ship. His descriptions of her became more intimate each time, so that eventually the tiny sonar shack was crammed with listeners who hung breathlessly on his every word. He started by describing the texture of her coffee-colored skin, and her coal-black hair and eyes, and then he went on to describe each part of her anatomy in painful detail lacing his descriptions with wild tales of the voodoo stunts she had performed. He told them of the time she had bitten into the neck of a live chicken and smeared her naked breasts with blood and then kissed him with the blood still hot on her lips. He told them of the time she had summoned her dead sister from the grave, and of the time he had laid her in the back room of a funeral parlor. He told them of just about everything they had ever done together or planned to do together, sex and black magic mixed, chili sauce and incense, tortillas and smut. He left nothing to the limited imaginations of his shipmates, so that before long the fiery-eyed incantating wench in San Antonio became the girl who was waiting back home for every man on the ship.

And now here he was kissing Sally as if he had forgotten all about his Mexican girl back home, but Sally wasn’t having any of it, not right now she wasn’t. Sally, of the entire four, seemed to sense most clearly that a majestic drunk was being formed and started, and she had no desire to spoil it by hopping into bed with Jesse — not right now, at any rate. Sally had the good sense to know that sex was going to be a part of this free-swinging drunk, but that it had to be a controlled and time-biding sex that permeated the entire afternoon, and not something that would threaten or otherwise mar the shining surface of the high they were all building. Sally was a shrewd and experienced girl, and Buddwing knew immediately that they could not have been in surer hands than hers — hell, he had known that about her the moment they had met on the roof of the servicemen’s club. But even then — even knowing that Sally with her gold-toothed grin was the more experienced of the pair, was the one who would lead the fun and set the pace — he had been drawn to the quietly smiling, secretly amused Tina, mainly because she reminded him of a life he had left back home, a life he desperately missed.

The majestically building drunk was all a part of missing the life back home, of obliterating it, of blurring its edges so that it would not seem like the reality any more. Japan was certainly not the reality. The stupid sailor suit he wore was not the reality. The destroyer sitting in the harbor with its ensign flying on the fantail and its “Request permission to come aboard, sir” was not the reality, but it was all the life there was, and he suffered it with a dull patience because he knew that someday it would be over, someday he would go back home again and see L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest and all the others. No, he would never see Beethoven again because Beethoven had been caught in the underwater barbed wire when the marines invaded Tarawa, and he had been machine-gunned to death by the Japanese as he struggled to free himself. A letter from L.J. had told him what had happened to Beethoven on Tarawa, and he had wept silently in the dim radar-illuminated stillness of C.I.C. aboard the Fancher. There were friends aboard the Fancher, yes, but none of them could compare to the boys he had left at home. And so this drunk, all the drunks, all the stumbling, falling-down, staggering, whorehouse-hopping drunks from Norfolk to Pensacola to Guantánamo Bay to Colón (he had received L.J.’s letter in Panama; he had wept in the radar shack while a balmy tropical breeze sifted through the open bulkhead door) to San Diego to Pearl to Sasebo, and now in Yokohama, all these drunks were only an effort to recreate something real and meaningful in his life, only a meager and foolish attempt at substitution. The something real and meaningful had existed in those Harlem streets when his closest friend was a boy named Eric Michael Knowles whom he had taught to make a peach-pit ring, had existed in that cloistered tailorshop with the tall white-haired man who was his grandfather. He had found reality again in the Bronx after he had moved, found it in a tightly secure structure the nucleus of which was L.J., Beethoven, Red Vest, and himself. And then, somehow, the entire structure had weakened — had fifty dollars been enough? — and had collapsed in the confusion of World War II and the United States Navy. Now, with Tina, he tried to recapture something he had known a long time ago, perhaps the innocence of Doris, the shining innocence of those cycling afternoons, perhaps the serenity of a calm and uncluttered existence that held no responsibilites and no pressures. Now, with a whore he had picked up on the roof of the Yokohama Servicemen’s Club, he drank himself into a lulling stupor. This was not the reality, and he knew with grim certainty that the reality he had known would no longer be there when at last he returned to it. The whiskey was a hedge against recognition — the whiskey and the gently inquiring touches along the inside of Tina’s thigh, the secret promise in her eyes, lust and liquor fumed inside him, drowning all else; this was going to be the longest afternoon in his life. He knew he would be subtly changed before it ended; he knew that once he was discharged from the navy, he would return to a different landscape where he would pad as softly as a stranger — and he knew who would be waiting.

They came roaring out of Sally’s apartment at close to two o’clock, heading for the roof of her building. Jesse wanted to carry the girls up the steps, but Sally — in her good, — sensed, cautious, sex-conscious, drunk-conscious way, wanting to preserve this marvelous high, wanting the high to go on and on and never end until they were joyously exhausted and naked — took Jesse’s hand in her left hand and then grabbed Buddwing’s hand in her right, and the three ran laughing up the staircase together, leaving Tina behind on the landing below. They stopped just outside the door to the roof, and Jesse yelled, “Hey, where’s Tina?” and then dropped Sally’s hand and ran back down to scoop Tina off her feet, struggling and giggling, and then climbed and staggered back with her in his arms to where Sally and Buddwing stood just outside the fire door.

“He’s a kook,” Sally said, and then kissed Buddwing firmly and teasingly on the mouth and laughed again, and kissed Jesse as he put Tina on her feet before them, and it was then that Buddwing realized the four of them would end up in the same bed together. Laughing, they pushed open the door and lurched out onto the tarred roof where the city suddenly opened beneath them like a cracked piñata, spilling its bridges and spires, its ribbons of asphalt and water. The view was overwhelming; it almost sobered them on the spot. But Jesse had thoughtfully remembered to bring a bottle of bourbon from the apartment, and he lifted the front of his jumper now to reveal it where it was tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He pulled the cork and tilted the bottle to his lips, and then passed the bottle to Buddwing. Sally urged him to drink — “Go ahead, sweetie, take a swig” — even though he needed no urging, touching him expertly and casually, never forgetting that sex was a part of this marvelous, experience they were sharing, sex was the ultimate goal, but prolonging the sex in an ever-conscious, hand-touching, thigh-flashing, high-giggling way which Tina shyly approved’ with a faint, excited, drunken smile.

“Hey, looka these birds here!” Jesse shouted, and he ran across to the other side of the roof where a meshed pigeon coop rested against a parapet. “Hey, birdie, birdie,” he said, “hey, sweet birdie, birdie,” poking his finger through the mesh while Tina giggled and Sally fell against him laughing.

“Get away from those birds!” a man on the roof opposite yelled, and Jesse burst out laughing.

“Why? They your birds?” he shouted back.

“They my friend’s birds,” the man answered. He was Chinese and his voice was high and angry, and he waved his fist up at them as he spoke.

“Screw you and your friend’s birds,” Sally said, and she suddenly threw open the door to the coop and yelled, “Shoooooosh! Everybody out! Everybody out!”

Laughing, Jesse plunged his hands into the coop and yelled, “Just for that, ever’body out!” and the pigeons flapped frantically into the air while the Chinese man on the roof below waved his fist and yelled, “I get the police! You see!”

“You get the bird, man, tha’s what you get!” Jesse shouted, they all burst out laughing.

Sally’s hands were in constant motion; she touched, she persuaded, she never let any of them forget what was in store if only they could preserve this miraculous high. Tina’s blouse was unbuttoned — Buddwing had unbuttoned it in the apartment — and she fumblingly tried to rebutton it as they stood laughing on the roof in the glare of the afternoon sun, listening to the angry Chinese man, and then gave up the task and said, “The hell with it.” Sally said, “Attagirl,” encouragingly, and tilted the bottle to her lips, managing to lean against Buddwing at the same time with a strong full-fleshed thigh pressure against his crotch.

His lust was turning to a dull ache inside him, and running beneath the constant ache was an insistent warning. He was very much a part of this drunken spree that he was sure would turn into a drunken orgy, but at the same time the little warning trill kept sounding over and over again, and it told him they must not get into trouble with the police because he had no identification, and because he was Edward Voegler, an escaped maniac. He wanted to get off the roof, wanted to go back to Sally’s apartment before the Chinese man made good his threat to call the cops. He was possessed by the wildest sort of fantasy, wherein Sally stood spread-legged in the center of her living room with the beaded curtains behind her, and he seized the hem of her dress in his hands, and then ripped it upward along the line of the slit, kept ripping it up past her hips and her waist and her breasts until she was standing in only her slim Chinese undergarments. At the same time, drawn to Sally because she made it impossible to forget her, he was intrigued by the drunken, smiling, seeming virginity of Tina, and further excited by the notion of the four of them together in the same bed. The entire feeling, he realized, was somehow wrapped up with L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest, whom he had not seen since the war began. And then, with drunken clarity, he realized that he was much excited by the idea of getting into the same bed with Jesse as he was of getting into that bed with the girls. The notion startled him and almost tore the drunk to shreds. He had awakened this morning knowing nothing at all about himself, and it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he was a fag.

With recognition of the word, with full-bodied acknowledgment of the word and of the image it instantly brought to mind, that of a painted, marcelled, mincing homosexual faggoty fruity queer, the drunk came dangerously close to evaporating entirely. To preserve the drunk, he took the bottle from Sally’s hand and swigged mightily from it, and then to preserve his masculinity, to reassure himself that what he wanted to do was climb onto Sally while Tina somehow climbed onto him, he handed the bottle to Jesse and put his arms around both girls, clear around Sally so that he could touch one small rounded breast under the silk Chinese dress, and only partially around Tina so that he could pat her behind in the tight blue wool American skirt, and he said, “Come on, Sally, let’s go back to the apartment.”

“What do you want to do there, huh, baby?” Sally asked, pushing his hand away from her breast, and then circling out of his arms like a dancer, and looping her arm through Jesse’s.

“I want to tear that slit of yours clear up to your throat,” Buddwing said drunkenly.

Tina giggled and said, “He wants to tear off a piece, Sally, that’s what he wants to do.”

“Yeah, you tear my dress, you bastard, and you’ll pay for it,” Sally said, and then they went down to the apartment.

They tore off her dress, of course.

The three of them, Jesse and Tina and Buddwing, tore her dress to shreds while Sally stood giggling and coaxing and tormenting in the center of the living room. And then they wrapped her naked in the beaded drapes they had pulled from the ceiling, and dragged her into the bedroom where they all fell laughing onto the bed. As the edges of the fine high drunk were turned back by their increasing animal awareness, as their naked bodies emerged and gleamed triumphant through the alcohol maze and the clouded stupor, as the smell of sex enveloped them with its strong and fiercely clinging perfume, as their arms and legs and mouths and hips took on a driving power of their own, almost sentient, moving with a predetermined will as deep as a race memory, until what they were doing finally replaced the alcohol and made them as high and as heady as their earlier drunk had made them — through it all, Buddwing felt himself intricately involved and yet curiously apart. There was something enormously threatening about what was happening. He and Jesse never once touched in the ensuing tangle of bodies and mouths, but he was consciously aware of his friend, though only as an embodiment of L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest, and not as himself, not as Jesse Salem who had a Mexican girl back in San Antonio. The fear of homosexuality dissipated in the stronger glare of their wildly heterosexual performance, and yet he felt threatened in an oddly obscure way, as though all this frantic activity were a screen for something deeper inside him which he was about to lose. It was this knowledge of impending loss that was threatening, he realized, and not what they were actually doing. He felt as if this conglomerate act, this immodest, immoral, and probably unlawful act, were the culmination of a phase of his life, a clearly defined section of his life that had been building steadily and irrevocably toward this confused climax. And therein lay the threat, a threat to the very fabric of his existence, a threat to the core of whatever knowledge he possessed of himself and of the world thus far. He knew that nothing would ever be the same once he left this apartment, once he disentangled himself from Jesse and the two girls. There was enormous security in this bed in this room because whatever they did they were dong together, blameless, anonymous, in their miniature gang structure. The unknown lay beyond this room, down those steps, somewhere outside. He clung to his companions, he held Tina fast to him, he crushed his lips to Sally’s mouth, he felt Jesse’s reassuring nearness. He did not want to lose them. He held them close because he was holding life itself. But his mind could not escape the knowledge that this would end soon, perhaps too soon, and there was sadness in the certainty that from now on, and possibly forever, he would have to walk alone.

He left Jesse and the girls at four in the afternoon.

They said goodbye to each other without any real sense of loss. If they avoided each other’s eyes, it was not because they felt any real guilt for what they had done, but only because their excesses seemed somehow pointless.

He knew exactly where he wanted to go.