Little Casino

The dark and iron world

THE CLIPPER, BOWLING THROUGH HEAVY glassy seas, all sails set, straining and singing in the wind, holds still, as always and ever, on the side of the laminated cardboard wastebasket. Just as still as the clipper is the woman, paralyzed drunk, athwart the hotel room bed. She is in her mid-fifties, and her face is attractive, though her blond hair is clearly too yellow to be natural. Her skirt, which has ridden up revealingly but not quite immodestly to mid-thigh, allows her legs to be seen as strong, straight, and well-made, with generous thighs, superbly shaped calves, and slender ankles. She is wearing a hat, cone-shaped, of shiny purple paper, which declares, in a sadly blatant red, HAPPY NEW YEAR. The hat is askew, and she snores, quietly, her mouth open. The young man, sitting at the little secretary on a hard straight chair in dim lamplight, finishes the whiskey in a thick bathroom glass, pours the last of a fifth of Ballantine’s scotch into it, and drinks that too.

He’ll maybe put her to bed, but he won’t, God, undress her. He is upset because he has allowed himself to think that she has very good legs. Maybe he’ll just put a blanket over her. Maybe he’ll go get another bottle, maybe he’ll leave and go to one of the bleakly frenzied parties he’s been invited to, or go to a crazed bar, or go for a walk, or go get laid. Maybe he’ll jump off the fucking pier or in front of the Fourth Avenue Local. Maybe he’ll just sit there until she wakes up and then ask her who she thinks she is, who she thinks he is to say what she said to him, and then to say it again. Love? she said, love? For Christ’s sweet sake, don’t make me laugh, I’m the one who said she was nothing but a tramp. Now you’re surprised?

Somebody on that clipper ship is probably looking at him from its shuddering deck, yo-ho! He knows this to be a fact, oh Christ, yes, he knows many things, he does, except why he’s here with his drunken mother in dark and sleety Brooklyn, in the dark and iron world.

There has been a great deal written on clipper ships, and “the Age” of the clipper ship, none of which information is of any interest to this young man.

At the time of this particular New Year’s Eve, disco had not yet been invented. One less thing for white, middle-class, suburban heroes of irony to mock.

Speaking of hotels: The chances that a meat-cutting-machine salesman, let’s call him Lester Peck, in, say, a Binghamton cocktail lounge, might strike up a conversation with a comely middle-aged businesswoman, take her to his room in the local Sheraton, and there discover her to be wearing nothing beneath her tailored business suit, are so small as to be virtually nonexistent. As we speak, there sits Lester, at the Sheraton bar, talking man-talk with the bartender about, oh yes! the heroic NFL.

It’s love, love, love, all right, but not for lonely Lester, the football enthusiast.

That the woman lying athwart the hotel bed is a bleached blonde is, all right, a cliché of sorts, but what is one to do?

What One Is To Do: “ … her face is attractive, though her hair is gray”; “… her face is attractive, though her hair needs a shampoo”; “… her face is attractive, though she is no longer the crack sales representative for Pfister & Sons Restaurant Products, Inc., that she once was.”

“Bright Night, I obey thee, and am come at thy call.”

Come, though, to what?