Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 6

Once, long ago, a girl had let me kiss her on a darkened stone stairway on a quiet street. Now she was letting me hold her hand, but she wasn’t the same girl, and my hand was any old hand. She would have held Iago’s, if he was the guy she happened to have to go to the station house with.

We had the statements to make. That sent us back past Vinnie’s and around a corner, then up a flight of worn concrete steps between two concrete pillars with green globes at their tops. And then we were in another country.

Cop Country. As bleak as picked bones, as dismal as the floor of the sea. DiMaggio had been and gone, and a young patrolman took down what we had to say in shorthand he had probably learned in hope of a promotion. He was no more than twenty-five, and a promotion was the only thing he would ever hope for in life. He had a face which had already seen everything twice, and had been bored the first time.

Cop Country. As cheerful as a leg in traction, as inviting as a secondhand toothbrush. Other cops came and went while we sat on a bench waiting to sign the typed copies. Cops with faces like wet gray sand, cops with eyes like whorls in hardened wax. One of them passed us carrying what might have been an undershirt. “He still bleeding?” I heard somebody ask him. “You need boots in the squad room,” he said.

Cop Country. It was pushing three o’clock when we got out. It hadn’t taken long. It had only seemed that way. It always will.

That corner of the Village was even more quiet than before. We had not spoken fifty words in an hour, but I stopped her when we came back past the Chevy. She was still wearing that work shirt, and there was a Band-Aid on her wrist.

“Listen — you don’t want to spend the night home alone. Is there some girl you can call? I’ll drop you anywhere you say.”

She stared at the pavement, animated by all the spontaneous gaiety of Joan of Arc on her way to the stake. “I don’t want to call anybody, Harry. Not to have to tell them about it, not tonight.”

“I know. Play it again, Sam.” I opened the door at the curb. “Come on,” I told her.

We got in. Halfway uptown she said, “Damn, oh damn,” and then nothing else. I lived on 68th and used a garage on Third, but there was an empty slot a few doors down from the apartment on the side which would be legal in the morning. I locked the car and we went up the one flight.

I had two and a half rooms. I’d gotten the place as a sublet five years before and the original tenant had never come back. He’d sold me the furniture by mail after a year, most of it battered and masculine, and then a girl named Cathy had added a few things in the ten months she’d used my name. Fern saw that. I’d turned on a Japanese lantern and she fingered its shade, not looking at me. “A woman bought this,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A mess?”

“A mess.”

She slouched to the front windows. The blinds were separated and she stood with her back toward me in the shadows.

There was nothing to look at out there. Her hair glinted, highlighted by a streetlamp down below.

“I guess I know without asking,” she said. “Are they always so rotten? God, but mine was.”

I didn’t say anything, but I did not care if she talked. I could not think of many things she could do or say that I would mind. I might have wished it were another night, when she would not be so vulnerable, but there was nothing I could do about that.

“I was twenty when I married him,” she said. “He was a writer, older than I was. I thought he was a good one, too, and I had all the proud dreams about giving up my own absurd ambition so he could fulfill himself. I quit college and got a job so he could stay home and work. Selfless, dedicated little Fern. It took me two years to discover that he hadn’t done two fall months’ writing in all that time. When he wasn’t in the bars all day he had women in. In the apartment I was paying rent for—”

She let it die, standing there. She did not expect an answer. After a while I crossed behind her and went into the bedroom. I put on another small light.

She followed me. She was toying with the adhesive.

“That hurting?”

“Not at all. It’s almost strange.”

I punched her lightly on the cheek. “It’s just chance, but a maid comes in on Tuesdays. Everything’s fresh. Towels and stuff* in the closet in the John. I’ll throw a sheet on the couch.”

“Breakfast in bed in the morning?”

“Go ahead, be merry. I know how you feel.”

“No, you don’t—”

The way she said it stopped me. I had been headed toward the closet. She was staring at me, and her hand was at the lamp. The light snapped off.

I went across. The girl had hit me hard, but it was still the same bad night. I put a hand on her sleeve. She was shaking.

“Oh, God, does it make me terrible if I want — if I need—?”

I kissed her so hard that my mouth ached. I had to, once at least. Then I picked her up with one arm behind her knees and the other at her shoulders. I put her down on the bed.

I touched her hair. “Get some sleep, Fern.”

She didn’t say anything. Something caught in her throat, but it was only a sob. I went out of there.

It was easy. Like walking out of the Kimberly mines with nothing in your pockets. I tried to remember when I had held a girl as breathtaking. It had been the week before they knifed Julius Caesar. It was when they were starting the Pyramids. I got myself a drink. I managed not to spill too much of it.

I needed a pillow and a couple of sheets. I waited fifteen or twenty minutes, until I was sure she would be asleep. I couldn’t come out of there a second time if she wasn’t. Martin Luther couldn’t have.

She had not gotten undressed. She was breathing softly. I untied the tennis shoes, hardly touching them, and eased them off.

“Do I get a bedtime story also?”

“Oh, hell. Oh, sweet hell.”

She laughed, reaching toward me. “I’m all right now, Harry.”

“You’re all right now,” I said. “That’s fine. I mean I’m glad. You’re sure you’re all right now—”

“I think you’re a little crazy.”

“Yes. I may well be. Yes, indeed. And you’re being a great help. You’re all right now—”

“Oh, heavens, come here. Will you come here—”

We weren’t in another country anymore.