Manhattan Love Song

Chapter One

First she was just a figure moving toward me in the distance, among a great many others doing the same thing. A second later she was a girl. Then she became a pretty girl, exquisitely dressed. Next a responsive girl, whose eyes said “Are you lonely?” whose shadow of a smile said, “Then speak.” And by that time we had reached and were almost passing one another. Our glances seemed to strike a spark between us in midair.

I retraced my steps while she continued hers. It had been too sudden to be crude, or even noticeable at all. And I had raised my hat. You raise your hat when you meet some one. And I had met her, as any one could see. Not at all new under the sun, all that. But it was she and it was I. That made all the difference imaginable.

She was dressed almost entirely in blue, but her stockings were the color of a rifle-barrel glistening in the sunlight, and their texture was so thin that it merged into the pink of her skin, which showed through. She had eyes with sprites in them that came and went: little capering symbols of whimsicality and amusement, dancing figurines of mockery. And at times she drawled, “If you see what I mean,” and a horrible expression that she had, “On the level?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s Third Avenue.”

“Well?”

“You’re — at any rate, Madison.”

“That,” she said, “is a thing I’ve never done before in all my life.”

I smiled and asked her what that was.

“That, back there,” she explained.

“You mean, meeting me this way?”

“Meeting any one this way. No, really—”

“Wade.”

“No, really, Wade, I could tell by looking at you—”

It seemed absurd for her to think me nice. “You ought to know me!”

The street was gone now, and the lights of the street, and the taxis and the dangerous crossings, where one had to start forward and then shrink back, and stay close beside one another. We sat for a while somewhere along Seventh Avenue, and every so often a monstrous top set in the ceiling, all tin and bits of broken mirror, would begin spinning and throwing off a fine spray of drops of light that got in our eyes and rained down the walls like a new plague in a newer Egypt.

She extinguished her cigarette in the remains of the chop suey. “So much for that. To go back: Is there love at this table?”

Probably at every one of these tables, I told her, except perhaps the one at which the Cantonese cashier was sitting by himself. I already knew one could use a term like “Cantonese” in speaking to Bernice.

“Here, I’ll put it this way. I don’t feel love; now is there love at this table?”

“Half-love,” I remarked. Said she, “I’d rather have a baked apple.”

The whining music ebbed into the distance, the dancers melted away, the lanterns and the prismatic top faded from view, and in the tall, white apartment house Bernice said, “Put your hat down any place at all.”

One knee was bent and her leg folded under her. Up and down the other, which touched the floor, coursed a mobile silvery gleam, oily as mercury. That was the electric light in the room, come to a head upon the silk that encased her calf. She alone could have lent grace and relaxation to so grotesque a posture.

The noises that came to us from the world outside were fewer now, but more distinct, meaning it had grown late. The lights were like planets now, ringed with luminous disks that were not there at all. To swallow was more stringent now, not as cool and grateful to the palate. I set a glass down, and the sound rang and then hummed in my ears for a long time afterward. This, like the halos about the lights, was not there at all, I realized.

“My birthstone,” she said, showing me a ring. “I was born in May.”

And then she looked at me more narrowly and did a strange thing. She took the ring off and dropped it on the inside of her dress.

“Once I had a ring,” she explained, “and a friend. I lost them both at about the same time. If you see what I mean.”

“Oh, I’d better scram,” I told myself disconsolately. Only my feet wouldn’t move.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Well, go, then!” she answered.

But once I read about a flower that looks very harmless and sweet, yet when an insect comes near it, it suddenly folds around it and captures it; that’s how it lives, by capturing the things that come too near it.

I took one of her hands and slowly disengaged it to hold it in mine. I studied it as though I had detached a part of her and the rest of her wasn’t there any more. It was very soft, it was graceful, tapered and unlined, and ended in five little glazed ovals, like porcelain baked in an oven. It had, no doubt, stroked kittens, puppies, possibly a man or two. A lucky man or two. It had, no doubt, clasped playing cards in fan shape, roadsters’ wheels, tall beaded glasses, and maybe even, in jest or white-faced deadliness, a purse-sized automatic revolver. How did I know, how could I tell? I pressed it to my lips, as though to assimilate at a stroke all its past experiences that I had had no share in. Then I grew weary and desperate with the kind of loneliness I had known so often and so well before now. The room, like a clumsy, improvised carousel, began to revolve about me, as though I were its pivot. For calliope it had my heart. Bernice shared in the general flux of everything I beheld. I was gazing up at her now from the floor.

“Loosen your collar,” she murmured. “I’m a little afraid of you,” she said. “You are the most perfect actor in New York, or else — I’ve met you eight years too late.”

She laughed, as though in derision of some long-established value of her own which had just been set aside. “And I thought I knew them all! Oh, I was so sure at twelve o’clock that there was nothing could surprise me any longer and now, at three, I find myself back where I was eight years ago, believing that it could happen like this and should happen like this. That it should make the room reel around you and your knees play you false. Yes, that is what it should be; not clammy hands under tablecloths and laprobes, and checks in scaled envelopes handed to you by the colored doorman downstairs the morning after.”

Her eyes sank to the level of mine as she dropped down beside me; our checks were pressed together now.

“The past is a lie. The past is something that no longer exists.”

“Yes,” she said docilely.

“And can you call a thing that no longer exists, true?”

“No.”

“And has the past ever existed? Hasn’t it always been just something in your mind?”

“Oh, no!” she contradicted. “For instance, eight years ago the past was still the future.”

“You mustn’t try to think like a man, that’s one thing,” I informed her sullenly. “Eight years ago the past was just as nonexistent as today. There never is a past, don’t you see?”

“Because you don’t want there to be any. Oh, Wade, what blows you’re letting yourself in for!”

“Did you ever know any one before you knew me? Did any one ever love you before I did? Then why aren’t they here beside you, as I am?”

“The room would be filled with people,” she breathed.

“Where are they?” I persisted. “How can you prove you knew them, prove they loved you, prove they really existed?”

“Oh, Wade,” she cried piteously, “I can’t! All I have to show for it is canceled checks!”

Rebelling, I kissed the past away from her lips. I kissed her eyes, and saw them droop. We were like two frantic, dying things, suffocating in a catastrophe of our own unchaining.

The sunlight, when at last I saw it, was diluted to the impotency of a pale lemonade washing over the floor and the walls. And the blur of sleep in my eyes made even this seem no more than a faraway gleam, imperfectly realized, like the flash of an oar far off at sea.

Beside me, she stirred and her eyes opened.

Her toe made a tiny pyramid of orchid taffeta for a moment. Then the pyramid sank from sight.

She bunched her shoulders and yawned. Then quickly covered her mouth with her hand, looked askance at me, and breathed, “Excuse me, I forgot you were here.”

This took my breath away. My mouth dropped open.

"When I’m alone,” she explained, “I can yawn all I want to. I forgot.”

I looked around, but there was nothing to put over me except the fuming cataract of peach stuff she had affected toward the end of the night before. I put it around me, and incidentally made an armhole where there had been none before by the simple process of thrusting my hand in the wrong direction. I glanced covertly at her. She had not seen it happen. I left the room, and in the other room came face to face with a colored woman who was emptying cigarette-ashes with an air of extreme disinterest. She looked up and said “Good morning!” without an instant’s hesitation, and even after I had seen her limpid eyes rest for a moment on the negligee I had around me like a toga, one bare arm hanging limply out, she did not smile, so self-controlled was she.

“Leave it outside the door when you go in,” she said in the whisper of a fellow-conspirator. “I’ll sew it up so she won’t notice.”

But this may have been simply policy on her part, this wish to conciliate every one, especially some one whom she had just seen for the first time.

Called Bernice all at once, in a voice that carried well: “Turn the warm water tap for me, Wade, and dump a lot of those pink crystals in.”

The colored woman answered in gentle remonstrance, “I’m here, Miss Pascal.”

“Let him do it,” she ordered. “You can wash last night’s glasses.”

I at once adopted her own unmannerliness. “You can wait,” I shouted hoarsely. “I’m in here now. And I don’t suppose you have a razor?”

“Oh, order me about some more,” she replied languidly. “It sounds so good. No, only a curved one for the arms. But there’s a barber’s shop downstairs in the building. I can call down for you and have them send some one up here.”

“No, you better not do that, Miss Pascal,” the colored woman interposed hastily. “It don’t look right.”

“Oh, but they know anyway,” Bernice called back candidly.

“But that’s a little bit too brazen,” her mentor assured her.

I heard a startled gasp. “Well, I like that!” But nothing more was said about it.

At noon I extinguished my cigarette with a gesture (and a mental attitude to accompany it) of finality in the coffee dregs at the bottom of the cup, rose, and looked at her.

Once more, inevitably, she was different. She was lazy now, languid, plump. She was less intriguing, less desirable than she had been at any time since our meeting the evening before. She was moistening the tip of a finger with her tongue to remove a little imaginary sweet taste left by the brioche she had eaten a few minutes ago. When she got through with that finger, she went on to the next, and so on down the line, but fairly rapidly, so that the whole proceeding had an aspect of that insulting gesture made with the thumb to the nose. For a moment I even harbored a suspicion that this might be the case, but I noticed that her hand was pointed sidewise and not at me. The little rite concluded by her drying her fingers on a napkin and then tossing it down. “Good-bye.” I said, “the whole dozen of you.”

“Are there as many of me as all that?” she laughed, “Which aspect did you like best?” And then she looked at one of the pillows and hit it with her fist.

“Wrong again,” was all I said.

She gave a toss of her head.

“For heaven’s sake,” I said irritably, “you were right about the calories last night. Look at those shoulders!” And I gave them a slight disdainful push. And then somehow I kissed her. And at once I was in love again, the reaction away from love was at an end, and she was lithe again and slim and all things attractive.

“And before I go,” I said, crouching down with my hands on my knees so that our faces were on a level, “won’t you tell me one thing? Who is he?”

“Who is who?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“I know you don’t make hats or take in washing.”

“No,” she said, “only stupid people do. But then, also, only stupid people are ever completely happy.”

“I’ve been stupid,” I assured her, “ever since nine last night.”

Her cigarette quivered between her lips as she spoke. “What a swell set of sides you’ve had handed you. What’s the name of the show going to be?”

“Good-bye,” I said, straightening up.

“Can you find your way out all right?”

“It’s all right about my finding my way out. The thing is, can I find my way in again?”

“Well, can you? I don’t hand out road maps.”

“You’re the boss,” I informed her philosophically.

“Suppose,” she said, pinching her lower lip meditatively, “you take this number here—” And she struck the base of the little cream-colored telephone with her thumbnail, “but first you’ve got to promise something. Don’t ever stay on if any one’s voice but mine answers. Get right off without saying a word. Will you do that? Don’t ask for me, and don’t even say hello. Now, you know my voice, and Tenacity isn’t here in the evenings. The jig,” she explained Tenacity. “So it’s really quite simple.”

I started to whistle the minute I had shut the door behind me. To be in love, why, it was swell!