Manhattan Love Song

Chapter Three

Tomorrow she didn’t love me any more. And tomorrow, and tomorrow. But that was all right; at least I was with her, if only to hear her say so.

“She is in, I tell you!” I barked at Tenacity. “I just heard her say to you, ‘Go see who’s at the door.’ ”

This startling revelation so robbed Tenacity of her presence of mind that by the time she had recovered it, I, at any rate, was in, whether Bernice was or not. “You’re certainly stubborn,” she commented disgustedly, shaking her head after me. “If it was me, I wouldn’t want to come in after they told me—”

“But I haven’t got your finesse,” I interrupted, crossing my legs in the chair.

“I’ll say you haven’t — nor anybody else’s!” Bernice agreed tempestuously from the doorway of her room.

I turned to Tenacity. “You see, she was in after all.” Tenacity scratched her head as though intensely surprised at this fact herself.

“Maybe I am in,” Bernice continued, “but I’m going out so fast that about all you’ll get is the breeze as I pass you by.” Whereupon she commenced putting this threat into operation by entering at one door and crossing the room diagonally toward the other, the outside one. Without looking at me. She was dressed informally for the evening, in something that had big peach-colored flowers printed all over it, and she had a little cap on made up of shiny black discs all sewn together. And she looked good to the eye — but wasn’t kind to the ear. “Never mind, stay right where you are,” she said with false solicitude. “I’ll be seeing you some other time.”

But I got in front of her just the same. “No, you’ll be seeing me now,” I said.

“I knew it would come to that,” she said. “Give them an inch and they take a yard.” And she gave Tenacity a hard, calloused laugh.

I gave Tenacity a hard, dirty look and she ambled out of the room with the cryptic remark, “I’d rather be a nun anytime.”

“What’s the matter,” I said, “ain’t I even good enough to talk to any more?” And I put my hands on her arms and turned her persuasively around the other way, away from the door. She just laughed a little more, and found a chair and sat in it, with her legs crossed up to her waist.

“Oh, it isn’t that,” she said, and waved her head wearily. “What is it, then?”

“You walk in like this, unannounced, and expect me to drop everything—”

“I phoned you first, and you weren’t in.”

“I was in,” she snapped. “I’ve been in since lunch.”

“Well, you didn’t come to the phone yourself, and the room was full of voices—”

She clenched her little fists over the arms of the chair. “They’re coming back, too. That’s why I wanted to get out. While I had the chance. I’m sick of them.” And then she said, like a sad little girl who’s been promised something three Christmases away, “I’ve been invited to a party, and I thought I’d go.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “What do you use this place for, some sort of a hangout?”

She made an upward gesture with her hand, from her chest to her chin, as though she were fed up about something. “Don’t ask me to explain,” she said indifferently.

She seemed so tired all of a sudden, so inert, sitting there like that, all dressed for going out and yet not minding terribly much whether she went or whether she didn’t. Her head was back a little ways, and her eyes were looking up at the invisible line where the ceiling met the opposite wall. She was thinking about something. Her foreshortened upper lip came down over her lower one and hid it, rouge and all, so that her mouth almost disappeared for awhile, leaving just a short pink scratch. I had never seen her like that before; so tired and all. I felt sorry for her. I went over to her and lifted one of her hands to my mouth and began to munch it. Only the slight rising and falling of the big peach flowers across her chest told that she was alive at all.

She took her hand away and let it pass gently down the side of my arm. “You’re nice, Wade,” she said. “I’m never scared with you.”

I couldn’t understand what she meant by that, but then, still without moving, she said, “I’ll have to go. You can’t stay here either.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t. Because I don’t want you to. Because — because I still care more for you than others I know.”

“What’s the good talking, Bernice,” I said gently, “unless you say things I can understand?”

She turned and looked at me with a mocking little smile. “Do you want to go for a ride?” she said.

Thinking she was proposing it, I said, “What do you say we do?” with cheerful alacrity.

She shuddered comically. “God forbid! Just stay here on the premises about an hour longer—”

I had started to say “Will you come back?” when the speaking tube out in the foyer buzzed with alarming vehemence, as though it were about to split in two.

With that, all tiredness left her, fright took its place, and she started up from where she was sitting, caught me by the hand somehow, and had me at the door with her before I could grasp what it was all about. She opened it and listened, although there was no one there. I looked over her shoulder. A little jewel-like white light over the elevator door flashed on and twinkled impudently at us.

“That was from downstairs,” she said. “Come on. If I don’t go now, I won’t get out all evening.” And she edged me aside and closed the door behind us.

“Wait a minute,” I said surlily, “are you giving me the bum’s rush, or what?” But looking at her face, I wondered if it really was paler than it had been a little while ago, or did I just imagine it?

“Don’t fight with me now, Wade,” she pleaded huskily. “Come downstairs with me; it’ll be all right.”

“Yeah, but you’re going to a party; why couldn’t I have waited in the place for you until you got back?” I insisted.

“You come with me,” she said then. “Anything, anything — only don’t stand here!” Suddenly the little white light had gone out.

I suppose that, all unwittingly, I had just practiced a form of blackmail on her; I don’t imagine she had intended me to go to the party with her at all. She crossed the corridor a little to the left of the elevator shaft and flung open the door to the emergency staircase.

“Aren’t you going to wait for the elevator?” I asked.

“Get it from the floor below,” she answered, and started down the cement steps. The staircase door began to drift back after her on its heavy hinges. “Don’t stand there, Wade, don’t stand there!” she called back hollowly. I went after her and down the first five or six steps and then, at shoulder-level to the floor, stopped to glance back over my shoulder. The elevator door, to the right and now hidden from me, shot open and slapped a big gob of honey-colored light across the checkered tiled flooring to the base of the wall, and all the way up it. And set right in the middle of this light, like a design in a stained-glass window, was a shadow that looked like a hydra or centipede or octopus, with many legs, one thick body, and then on top of that, numerous heads. Or in other words, a group of people standing so closely together in the car as to be indistinguishable. Before they could move or separate, the lazy staircase door finally reached the end of its arc and fitted noiselessly back into place, wiping the corridor out. I turned again and went on down and joined Bernice on the floor below. She had been holding the door down there open for me, but more out of anxiety than politeness, I could tell.

“I told you not to stand there,” she said. “People don’t use the emergency staircase — they’d know right away—”

And giving the door into my keeping, she went over and pushed the button, summoning the elevator. It came at once, having only to descend from the floor above, and when we stepped in there were still layers of haze in it and an odor of rancid cigars. I looked down at the floor, but all there was there was a celluloid toothpick some one had dropped.

“I moved down to the floor below,” Bernice explained derisively to the car operator. “Sure; cut a hole in the floor and dropped through with my chum here. And I went out hours ago, get that straight.” And then, turning to me, she said quite audibly, “Give him something.”

I felt like saying, “Why should Harlem fatten on the peccadilloes of Fifty-Fifth Street?” But I gave him a one-dollar bill folded over many times to look like a whole lot more. By the time he got through disentangling it, we would be far away.

“It’s on Fifty-Fourth,” she said to me as we left the door.

“Let’s walk it,” I suggested affably.

She looked at me thunderstruck. “You’re with Bernice, Wade,” she reminded me.

So we got in a taxi and it started west, that being the kind of a street Fifty-Fifth was. And came to Sixth Avenue and couldn’t turn left on account of an opening (or maybe it was a closing) at the Ziegfeld Theater. Then when we came to Seventh, the driver ignored it for reasons best known to himself, and proceeded blithely on to Broadway. “What was the matter with Seventh?” I inquired through the glass shutter.

“If you coulda made a turn there, you’re a wizard,” he informed me.

“Why, I coulda swung a Mack truck and three coal barges around in the room you had,” I said.

“Oh, let him alone,” Bernice said irritably. “What difference does one block more make?”

I could’ve answered that easily, knowing just what amount I had in my pocket, but preferred not to.

When we came to Broadway, no left turns were allowed. We stood there helplessly, while the whole of New York north of Fifty-Ninth Street filed by in conveyances of one sort or another. When the migration had been thoroughly completed, and not until then, we were allowed through. By the time we reached Eighth Avenue, I was fully prepared to lean out and swerve the wheel left with my own hands, even if it caused a collision, but the driver finally turned it himself. He then turned his head, bestowed a glance of approbation on Bernice’s legs, and inquired of them, “What number did you say, lady?”

“Here I am, up here, not down there,” she instructed him, and gave him the address a second time.

“That’s over by Third,” he commented philosophically.

So that to reach Third Avenue from Sixth, we had to go as far as Eighth and then double back. It’s incredible, but then it’s New York.

My money had dropped behind the meter before we had even got as far as Sixth a second time. When we finally got out in front of the place we were going to, I was a dollar and a half short. So I told him to wait, and I went in to find the doorman, because it was one of those new buildings that have their doormen engaged before the steel beams are even up. But none was in sight. Meanwhile Bernice was powdering her face in front of a glass hanging on the wall. So I went out again to the driver and explained matters to him. I did this merely as a matter of form, expecting momentarily to have to repeat the story to a policeman. To my, not only surprise but almost consternation, he didn’t even suggest such a thing. “I know the lady you got with you pretty well by sight,” he explained, “I often pick her up in front of her house.” There was a camaraderie about this that I didn’t exactly like, but my hands were tied, so to speak. “I mean, as a fare,” he assured me. “My stand’s on her corner.” I had to ignore the unintentional impudence of his attempting to reassure me as to Bernice’s loyalty, or whatever you want to call it. I gave him my name and address, and corroborated it by producing a number of envelopes and papers from my inside pocket. He wrote it down and said he would stop by for the balance of the fare the next time he was “out that way.”

“No, no,” I interposed, “this is just to show you who I am; so you’ll know I’m on the level. I’ll give it to you at your stand, on the corner.”

“Yeah, but suppose I’m not there?” he objected.

But I was sick of him by now, so I said, “I’ll find you, don’t worry,” and went in to Bernice. She was doing a tap dance on one leg, holding her dress up to her thighs.

We went up in an automatic elevator to the roof, passed under the open sky for an instant, and then were indoors again in a one-story stucco bungalow. No one came forward to greet us. Bernice suddenly left my side, opened a door revealing a bedroom with white furniture and pink hangings, and went in with the remark, “You go in there.” I couldn’t make out where there might be, so I stayed where I was and waited for her.

Shortly afterward, a beautiful, unprepossessing, black-haired person passed beyond an open doorway at the back of the dwelling and glanced casually out. My presence didn’t register in time to halt her progress at the moment, but a second later she was back again for another look, had turned, and was coming toward me. She bore a length of white stuff sewn with glass along with her, but it didn’t hide anything of much importance. “Didn’t Jerry give you your money yet?” she remarked irritably.

I turned around and looked behind me to see who she was talking to, but there was no one there. By the time I turned again, she was standing before me. “How much is it?” she said then, “I have to do everything myself around here!”

I must have looked blank, because she sighed as one with the patience of a kindergarten teacher and said slowly and distinctly, “How — much — is — the stuff? Or don’t you talk English?”

“I’m not the bootlegger,” I grinned.

“Well, then, who are you?” she said.

“I came with Bernice,” I said.

“Well, who’s Bernice?” she wanted to know.

My nerves snapped and I said, “What’s the matter, don’t you live here?”

“Do I live here?” she echoed. “Are you telling me?” And then turning her head toward where she had just come from, she emitted an appalling quantity of noise, a combined scream and bellow, as though I had attempted to assault her. “Jerry!” I nearly jumped out of my socks.

But instead of a man rushing excitedly out there to protect her, a tawny-haired girl came hurriedly into view and said, “Did you want something, Marion?”

“Yes, I do,” Marion declared positively. “Do you know any one named Bernice?”

“Which Bernice?” inquired Jerry. “I know a Bernice Fairchild and I also know—”

“Oh, for Jesus’ sake, Bernice,” I roared toward the door, “will you please come out here and tell these dumb broads something!”

Instantly I saw a gleam of admiration light each of their four eyes; evidently calling them broads was the “open sesame.” I was the sort of person they were used to having around. Their hauteur dissolved before my eyes; they seemed to relax. Bernice opened the door and came out, her features barely peering forth through snowdrifts of powder. “Oh, hello, Bernice,” Jerry said, “I didn’t know you were here!” Bernice took her aside and said something to her; I had a distinct impression she was explaining my presence in terms of “I didn’t know what to do with him so I brought him along.” Jerry tactlessly allowed her eyes to stray toward me, and I heard her say; “Leave it to me.”

Jerry announced to the other girl, “She knew Sonny Boy,” meaning Bernice. This was evidently by way of introduction, for I saw them shake hands.

“I only met him once,” said Bernice guardedly. “Jerry told me about him and you.”

“Twice, pal, twice,” Jerry reminded her sweetly. “Once in my place and once—”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” the one called Marion said. “He’s gone now. He’s in Detroit.”

“She’s been sharing expenses with me this last month,” Jerry said.

Bernice suddenly without the least provocation whirled around to me and said with a gust of undisguised anger, “For Pete’s sake, do you have to be told where the liquor is! Can’t you find it?”

So I took it for granted she wanted to be left alone with them, and I strolled off with my hands in my pockets and my head bent unhappily.

In the rear room, ignoring the presence of a number of people who were lolling around in the background, I helped myself to a drink from a bottle that stood on a table. Not alone on the table by any means, but I chose it for its label. After a while I tired of going back to it so much, so I brought it along with me to the radiator box I was sitting on and kept it there until it was no good any more. Then I opened the window behind me and threw it out. About ten minutes later every one in the room got up and ran out toward the door, so I grew curious and went after them. The fat doorman was standing there looking unhappy, with a tall policeman beside him. I heard the latter say that an old lady had just been taken to the hospital with a scalp wound from broken glass. That didn’t interest me much; I went back to where I had been sitting and wondered who could have done it. It was only a good while later, after the policeman had been made a present of two bottles of rye and had gone away, that I remembered I had done it. So I stood up excitedly and ran over to Jerry, whom I presumed was one of the hostesses, if you could call them that.

“Listen, do you know who threw that—” I started to say.

She smiled indulgently and said, “Why, you did, of course; everybody saw you do it.”

I left her then, but later we were back together again, and she kept getting her head under my chin somehow. “You’re always looking around the room for Bernice,” I heard her say. “Don’t always look around the room for her; she’s all right.”

Finally I gave her head a strong push, and she fell over on the carpet on her elbows. She stayed there rubbing them, and looked up at me and said, “You’re not so dead, after all.”

“Quit jazzing around me so much,” I told her. “I’m not hot for you.”

She laughed and said, “How do you know I’m not for you, though?”

Then all at once the glass I held in my hand gifted me with momentary intuition, and I saw through the whole maneuver. I remembered how Bernice had taken her aside for a minute when we first came in, and said something to her in an undertone; and how she, this one, had looked over in my direction and answered, “Leave it to me.” So I realized then that Bernice must have asked her to do her a favor and take me off her hands, vamp me or something, anything that would keep me busy and give her a free rein for the evening. And I thought to myself, “Oh, yeah?” But I felt blue and unwanted just the same. And I got up and went out of the place, out into the open air. I went to the back of the roof and sat on the edge of a fire escape with my legs dangling over above a pit a million miles below me. I finished what was in my glass and then I set it down in back of me and lost myself among the lights below, which kept spinning up toward me all the time but never quite reached me. It seemed to me all I had to do was to lean down toward them a little way — and then they would be able to reach me. But I knew better than to do that; so I stopped looking at them, and they all went back to their places far below me. Then I heard a voice say, “Boyfriend, don’t sit there; you scare me.” I turned around and saw a pair of green-silk-stockinged legs standing there slim and straight. And above them was Jerry again, looking down at me.

I got to my feet and said, “What do you want? What are you following me around for?”

“Can’t I like you if I want to?” she said.

I told her that I saw through her, that she was just doing it to do Bernice a favor and keep me away from her.

“That’s how it started,” she admitted. “She did ask me that. But I’m not pretending now; I really like you.” And a whole lot more, including suggestions as to my future sleeping quarters.

I spat over the edge of the roof and said, “I didn’t even hear that. Where’s Bernice, what’s she doing now?”

She flamed up like a skyrocket, and I quickly shifted around to the other side of her, thinking she might try to push me over the edge. “Oh, so you want to know, do you, sweet man? Well, she’s put herself under the hammer in there for a hundred dollars. Just one big happy family!”

I left her standing there and went in, and that lump in my neck wasn’t an Adam’s apple, it was my heart. Bernice was standing up on a chair, just winding up some sort of a harangue she’d been giving. And she was very drunk; her hair kept getting in her eyes. “—All privileges included except leaving marks on the lily-white torso,” I heard her say. “But it’s gotta be in cash, no checks accepted!”

The noise in there was terrific. And at that, not every one was noticing her. But enough were — too many were. I tried to get to her and get her off the chair. Pick it up by one leg and dump her off if necessary. But, like in a bad dream, I couldn’t get to her; they were all in my way, and the harder I’d push this one and that one, the harder they’d push me back. “Don’t fight!” I heard Bernice call out delightedly.

“Bernice!” I shouted over a number of heads, “Do you love me? Don’t do that!”

Suddenly all the printed peach-colored flowers left her, collapsed into a circle of rag around her feet. And she’d done it herself. “Oh, it’s warm in here, so warm in here!” she shouted.

“Bernice!” I wailed agonizedly, “don’t do that! Don’t you love me?”

She heard me then, and looked at me, and said, “Have you got a hundred dollars? If you have, then it’s all right with me.”

“I’ll get it, Bernice!” I almost screamed. “I’ll get it! Only don’t do that!”

I saw her wink at somebody, and she called back, “I’ll be waiting for you!”

Outside in the hallway I came up against Jerry, who was just coming in again. “Make her put her dress on,” I said, ridding my lapel of her hands. “I’m going to get a hundred dollars, so I can get her away from here.”

“You’re not a real man,” she said scathingly, “or you’d know how to get her away from here without a hundred dollars. And you’re not a sweet man, or you’d let her collect and then make her split it with you. I’m wise to you, you’re just some sap in love with her. Real love!” she grimaced, and flung her hands out after me derisively. “She can have you; I’m glad you passed me by!”

The elevator came up to the roof at the rate of a floor a year, but finally it got there, which was something. It went down again like dishwater in a choked-up sink. I tore out of it, and the plump doorman sat up alarmedly on his improvised couch and threw off the plush covering that was a table runner in the daytime. “Now what happened up there?” he said, “a murder?”

There were only two things I wanted to know, and I asked him both of them without bothering to answer.

“Twenty to eleven,” he said, “and there’s a phone right here in the lobby, but the management don’t like people to use it for outside calls.”

I looked at it, but it was right in the open, had no door, and I didn’t want him to listen, so I went out and found a drugstore on the corner. Something told me to get a lot of nickels at the cashier’s desk before I went in the booth; something told me I was going to need them. One call, I knew, would never do the trick; I’d have to keep on and on. I carried a fistful in with me and laid them on the little wooden slab under the phone.

The voices and the laughing were still ringing in my ears. Jerry’s liquor was still in my stomach, the sweat of agony I had shed those last few minutes, with Bernice up on the chair, still dampened the back of my shirt. And here — not a sound, just me alone, by myself, wondering whom to ring up first.

I took the receiver off and I put the first nickel in, and even as the nickel dropped and rang the bell, I had a sinking feeling to go with it; I knew it wasn’t going to be any use. Lending money to friends went out of style with buttoned shoes and mustache cups. But there was nothing like trying. And while I waited, I rapped the back of my hand against the wall of the booth, which was pine. They call that knocking on wood for luck.

Jackie Conway, “the boy who made good,” came to the phone. He had stopped being Jackie Conway quite some time before this, and was John Crandall Conway these days. There was only one stage he still had to pass through — the J. Crandall Conway stage. He had even stopped having his phone listed the last few months, but at least he still answered it himself, provided you knew the number. Forgotten was the time I had pretended to look for a room in his rooming house to enable him to smuggle his valise out while the landlady’s back was turned.

He was in the midst of a bridge game, he told me, but that was all right, it could wait five minutes. One strange thing about him, he actually did, I believe, like to be interrupted by phone calls while he was playing bridge. He thought it gave people the impression that he was much sought-after, a very busy man. And impressions counted for so much in his life.

I told him I had to have a hundred dollars, and could he lend it to me? “Gladly,” he said, “I’ll expect you to give me an IOU for it, that’s all.” It all seemed too good to be true.

“You drop around sometime tomorrow—” he went on. “No, tomorrow’s Sunday, isn’t it. Can you make it Monday morning—?”

I was forced to tell him I couldn’t, that I had to have it right tonight, right within an hour, or it wouldn’t be any good to me.

“You seem to be in a hurry,” he observed. “What’s the rush, what’s it all about?”

I couldn’t tell him that; I know that if I could’ve, I would have gotten the money from him right then and there. It would have been worth that much to him to be able to repeat so piquant a tale to all his friends, as host and as guest, for many months to come. He loves to play the scandal-monger.

“You in trouble of some kind, Wade?” he went on.

“No, I’m not in trouble, Jackie,” I said, “it’s just that I’ve got to have the money.”

So then he answered, a little coolly. “I’m afraid I can’t do it right tonight, Wade, on such short notice. If you can wait until Monday morning, I’d be only too glad to let you have it. Or if you can give me some inkling as to why you have to have it in such a hurry, I could even borrow it on my own responsibility from one of the boys that are up here with me right now (although I don’t like to do that), but I’d really have to know what you want it for before I could do that. It’s only fair, don’t you think?”

I lost patience then, and growled, “Oh, say yes or no, will you, Jackie, and get it over with! Either you will or you won’t. Which is it?”

He said stiffly, “You sound as though I were asking you the favor, instead of you’re asking me—”

“I’m asking you the favor, and you’re turning me down,” I interrupted, “is that right?”

“Unless,” he said, “you—”

“Good night,” I said formally, and hung up.

Next I tried Billy Cumberland, who came in from Duluth over the weekend seven years ago. He never went back to Duluth again. “Billy,” I said, “how’s chances of raising fifty dollars?”

So I put another nickel in and called up Eddie Ryan. He’d had a song out three months before, and they were still playing it on the merry-go-rounds at Luna Park. So I congratulated him about it, and he seemed surprised and said, “Wait a minute, are you sure I wrote that?” And then it all came back to him and he said, “Oh, sure! I remember now.” Upon which I said, “I want to borrow twenty-five dollars from, you, Eddie.” “Bring up your decimal point two places,” he answered tragically, “and I can accommodate you.”

I moved next door into a cooler booth and phoned Phil Broderick, who, being married, is afraid to refuse his friends when they endeavor to borrow money because of what his wife might think and say about him. She used to be a chorus girl. But just that evening, she was either out or out of earshot. He turned me down beautifully, as though he’d been rehearsing what he’d like to say on such an occasion for months past and never had the opportunity to use it before now. Incidentally, I had raised the ante to a full hundred once more, figuring that as long as I wasn’t very likely to get it anyway, I may as well try for the whole amount. People have more respect for someone who tries to borrow a hundred dollars than they have for someone who tries to borrow ten. Moreover, it’s very often less of a risk; they’re likely to get the hundred back, but they’re lucky if they ever see the ten again.

I believe I phoned ten people altogether in the space of about twelve or fifteen minutes. I even lost the little tact I had had left and rang one or two who knew me so little I had to explain to them just who I was before I sprang the question. So you can see what chance I had. When there was just one nickel left, I gave it up as a bad job, left the booth, and bought a phosphate at the soda fountain. My throat was dry from talking so much.

The phosphate brought the jag on again a little. I went out and started to walk west without exactly knowing where I was going. I crossed Park, and then Madison and Fifth, just missing being run over by a Town Nash on the last thoroughfare. After which the jag left me for good, and I just felt drawn around the eyes. But the incident gave me an idea, which I pondered for fully half a block before finally rejecting it. It was to get myself hit by some timid, affluent old gentleman’s car and settle for a hundred on the spot instead of bringing suit later. The main difficulty was: not to get hit by some one who, after I was all knocked in a heap and no good for the rest of the evening, might prove to be anything but timid or affluent and say, “Go ahead, sue me!” And not to be damaged too badly to be able to get right back to Bernice with the booty. And not to be arrested as a would-be suicide. Outside of which the project was a perfectly good one. So I gave it up.

I turned south on Sixth Avenue and stared up at a passing elevated train for inspiration, but all it gave was a shower of sparks and someone’s saliva.

I went to Connie’s on Sixth Avenue. After he had let me in, Connie went back behind the bar and said, “Hello, Wade. What can I do for you?” So I looked at the ceiling, I looked at the floor, I looked at the wall in back of me, and I looked at the wall in back of Connie. I spoke, and when I spoke, I put it in the worst possible way, like you always do when you want a thing badly. I said, “I didn’t came in here to buy anything. I’m a punk, Connie. I want to borrow a hundred dollars.” Connie smiled and said, “You’re no punk, ’cause you’re not going to get it.” So I smiled back and said, “I’m no punk; you are,” and I went out again on Sixth Avenue.

It had started to rain while I was in there, and the shimmer of the lights looked like yellow torches blazing up out of the wet pavement. But that didn’t mean a thing to me; if it had been raining dimes and nickels that would have been a whole lot better. I turned my collar up and shoved my hands into my pockets and thought. I thought of some one I knew: Rapper, the stage manager of the show that had been running the past few months at the Cort. That was near there, too.

Before I was through thinking about him, I was there. My feet must have done it by themselves. I guess they loved Bernice too. I asked for him at the stage door, and the doorkeeper told me I had just missed him, he’d gone home only a minute ago. I thought of chasing after him, but the doorkeeper told me he’d broken his heart and taken a taxi because it was a wet night. Then I asked him where Rapper lived, but he said they weren’t allowed to tell things like that. So I said, “What’s he afraid of, the Board of Health?” and went out on the sidewalk again.

While I was standing there, the last stragglers of the company came out and went home. A girl by herself, still fixing her garter as she came out of the doorway, and then two girls and a natty fellow who looked as though he’d had his clothes poured over him hot and then allowed to harden.

I thought he was going to get into the taxi with them at first, but after he already had one foot on the running board, he glanced around and seemed to change his mind. He shut the door and they drove off, and he remained standing where he was and staring idly down the street. Then all at once, without even turning to look at me, he said, “Did you want to see Rapper?”

“Why?” I answered hostilely.

“I work with him,” he said, “maybe I could do something for you.”

“You nor nobody else,” I told him, “unless you have a hundred bucks you can fork over for the time being.”

He looked up at the sky, which was dry now and full of little silvery clouds, and said: “The gin at the drugstore goes right to one’s head.”

“I’ll be seeing you,” I remarked coldly.

So he said, “It may be the effect of the full moon, but you appeal to me to the extent of five dollars. Come along with me and get it.”

I felt like saying, “Go on away from me,” and help him do so with the end of my foot, and then I thought, “Somebody else has the hundred for her in his pocket right now; oh, don’t waste time!” So I took him by the lapel, which seemed to please him, and I said, “Let’s go, will you! I don’t want a drink, and I don’t want any incense burning in Woolworth Buddhas — I only want to go.”

We went in a taxi, and every minute my heart said sixty prayers. “Keep her there for me until I get back. I don’t know Who or What — but Somebody, Something, keep her there for me until I get back!” We went up a flight of steps, and every step my heart ticked off a prayer.

When he had lit the lights and locked the door, I hit him in the face. He went back into an easy chair that happened to be behind him, and stayed there, with his legs almost at right angles and two ribbons of blood, one from each nostril, dripping down his chin. I went all over the place, and then I came back to where he was. He’d gotten over his dizziness, and he drew his legs in to get up and said, “I’m going to get a policeman.”

“Try it,” I advised him, “and you’ll be telling your story at the stage door of hell.”

I went all over the place a second time. I was nervous, and the second time was as much of a waste of time as the first. By the time I got back, he had managed to get out of the chair and was fumbling at the door, trying to get it open without attracting my attention. I said, “Get away from there! I don’t want to hit you any more; you’re all squashy as it is.” He dodged aside and quavered, “I didn’t do anything to you.”

“Where is it?” I said. He asked me what I meant, and when I told him, got kind of wise and answered, “In the National City Bank on Seventy-Second Street, and the doors don’t open till nine on Monday.”

“You better pray you got some stuck around here some place,” I told him, “ ’cause if you won’t tell me where, I’ll hit you, and if you tell me the wrong place to look, I’ll hit you, and if you tell me there isn’t any, I’ll hit you anyway just for luck.” He went a little whiter (or whatever color comes after white, ’cause he was white already) and faltered, “I don’t know how much you want.”

“All,” I said.

He struggled with himself, and I drew my elbow back, and he said, “I have a little in the bathroom, in the crevice behind the tissue paper.”

I went right in there, and instead of using his head and getting out the front door while he had the chance, he came right at my heels, whining, “I was saving it for the rent. The show closes Saturday. What am I gonna do?” I was too busy to answer him at the moment. In the little built-in niche, between two tiles, where the putty or whatever it is they use had fallen out, there was a wad of fives and tens. While I was counting them over, he suddenly and belatedly made up his mind to quit the scene and get help. I got him by the shoulder with one hand just in time, and said, “You wait’ll I’m out of here before you do your act, get me?” But the interruption had made me lose count and I had to start over again at the beginning. It came to one hundred and fifteen altogether. I was going to leave the last three fives with him, but I reasoned that to get back to the party as quickly as possible I’d have to take a taxi, so I shoved the whole amount in my pocket. He gave a little moan of futile protest and lifted the handkerchief he’d been stopping his nose with to the side of his head. At the same time I caught sight of a lot of sooty water lying in the tub with bits of pink and white underwear floating around in it, and toyed momentarily with the notion of giving him a push into it. But there was no reason to do so, so instead I buttoned my coat, went through the large room, got the door open, and took a quick run down the steps, ending in a vault over the last five or six. He called down after me, “You dirty crook, you’ll get yours for this someday!” and then quickly slammed the door of his apartment shut, as though expecting me to turn around and come running back at him. He could have called me much worse than that, for all I’d have cared; he’d just been a means to an end, and I didn’t have any more time for him by now. And anyway you look at it, the epithet certainly fitted me. Dirty or otherwise, I had become a crook now for her sake. And did I regret it? I was the happiest crook that ever ran away from the scene of the burglary as I came out into the open and threw my arm at a taxi. Of course, it had some one in it, and the driver snubbed me majestically. I got a free one a moment later, and rearing down the street on what felt to be no more than two wheels, took a look back through the rear pane; there was no one in sight, no sign of commotion, not a whistle had sounded. It was almost no fun.

The driver was one of those nervous New York types who believe in round comers and can only see green, never red. That was all right. No matter haw fast he went, he couldn’t go fast enough for me. I had a feeling then that if we had gone into something and I had been smashed up, my heart would have leaped out of my breast and gone on to her alone, with the hundred dollars wrapped around it. But we got there with me still all around my heart, and the hundred in my pocket. The driver took half of the extra fifteen, and I realized that I had no right to argue with him, because after all, I was paying with another man’s money. “I could’ve got ten tickets on your account.” he explained. I contented myself with remarking, “I only wanted to hire your cab, not buy it,” and ran in the doorway. He seemed to think I was running indoors because I was afraid of him, and called after me, “Come back and say that to my face.” I answered by making a noise with my mouth that really belonged someplace else. Thus we parted dissatisfied with one another.

The young, rotund doorman was busy on the floor with a pail and mop. He looked up with an impersonal scowl and complained, “You tell those ladies up there, if any more of ’em are gonna get sick, to get it over with up on the roof or else wait’ll they get out on the street, and not make any more midway stops. This is the third time tonight I’ve been over this territory!”

“Is the one I brought with me, the one that did the dance down here, still there?” I asked him eagerly.

“Don’t ask me to keep tabs on ’em,” he said aggrievedly. “They’ll be coming down in parachutes yet! The only tenants in the building that haven’t complained about the noise is the couple that went to Greenwich over the weekend. The station house on Fifty-Third is so tired of getting calls from here that they won’t even answer any more.” Which argued either that the party had gotten beyond all control since my leaving it or else that he was subject to flights of vivid imagery.

I got the elevator, which unfortunately he had not been able to attend to yet. A vanity compact had been stepped on and burst open in the corner, spraying flowery pink powder over everything. There was also an empty bottle rocking about the floor like on the deck of a boat at sea. And one of the mirrors and the plush seat at the back of the car had something much worse the matter with them. All of which did not make for a pleasant upward journey.

I crossed the roof and entered the bungalow expecting to see some Babylonian orgy in progress, according to the doorman’s account. But either he had been carried away by righteous indignation or the chief offenders were those who had left, because there was far less noise than when I had left three-quarters of an hour (or was it a couple of years?) before. Two or three nondescript males of the parasitical variety were still present as long as the last bottle of liquor remained. One had already drunk himself into a doze in a chair in the comer, and the other two, without wasting any unnecessary words, were fast approaching that stage. Jerry was sitting on the floor with her head thrown back resting against the seat of a chair, and her co-hostess Marion was standing quietly looking out of the window.

They turned and looked when I came in. Marion stayed indifferently on at the window, but Jerry scrambled up and came over to me. “What happened?” she said in a low, amused voice. “Couldn’t you get the money?”

“I got it, all right,” I said ominously. “Where’s Bernice?”

“She’ll be right out,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, catching her by the arm. “Tell me first — what went on? She... she waited for me, didn’t she?”

Jerry screwed up her eyes and smiled at me indolently. I never saw her again after that night, but whenever I thought about her, I saw that lazy, murky smile she gave me then. “Oh, she got tired of that game,” she said. “And a hundred years from now, it won’t make a bit of difference, anyway.”

I took her hand in both of mine and wrung it. “Oh, thanks, Jerry!” I whimpered. “You’re swell! Now I feel like I was alive again.”

But she kept on smiling, didn’t stop smiling a minute, and all the way to the door she kept looking back over her shoulder at me, smiling, still smiling. “A precious little thing called love,” I heard her say.

Marion came over to me then and said: “By the way! Does Bernice ever get any letters postmarked Detroit?”

“How should I know?” I shrugged. “I’m not her janitor.”

“With handwriting like that of a ten-year-old kid?” she went on.

“What’re you getting at, anyway?” I said gruffly.

“If you’re ever sore at her,” she persisted, “and you want to get her all scratched up by a girlie that knows how, just you pick up the phone and tell me you found a letter postmarked Detroit in her mailbox.”

“Since when is the population of Detroit just one?” I wanted to know.

She turned around and stalked away again, as Bernice came out, followed by Jerry. My eyes lighted up as they found her, as though I had two batteries in my head for just such an occasion and, like a spotlight on a stage or like a lighthouse at sea, threw a halo around her to the exclusion of everyone, everything else, in the room. And every peach-colored flower on her dress seemed to glow back at me in the iridescent haze of love that drenched her. But she must have had an impalpable umbrella up, for she was as cool and arrogant as could be. “Well, Wade,” she said, “back on the job again?”

I felt as though I had lost the Bernice I knew in the shuffle and was taking a stranger home.

“Good night, Marion,” she called out politely, “and thank you for the swell party.”

Marion never even turned her head, but her answer came at once, as though she had been plotting it for some time. “You’re welcome,” she said huskily, “and that goes for anything I’ve got. And if you’re in touch with Sonny Boy at all, why, tell him I was asking for him.”

Jerry, who had stayed behind at the door Bernice had just come through and seemed to be standing there listening carefully to something, raised a finger warningly and said, “You’d better go, Bernice. See you some more.” So we walked out of the bungalow together.

While we were standing out on the roof waiting for the elevator, I heard a sound of hammering coming from inside. It was not very distinct, quite muffled. “Sounds like they’re beginning to tap-dance again,” I remarked. Bernice said, “No, that’s some drunk who fell asleep in there; someone must have locked the door on him accidentally.” But she moved around to the other side of me and kept digging at the elevator door with her fingernails before it was ready to open.

Bernice didn’t say a word to me going down in the elevator, which the indefatigable doorman had rendered habitable once more, nor in the lobby either, although she turned and playfully blew a kiss to his recumbent, inanimate form.

On the sidewalk she inhaled the fresh air, which the rain had made cool and sweet, deeply and blissfully. “Wade,” she said, “have you got enough money for a taxi? I mean to ride around the park in a couple of times? I’m afraid I can’t go home just yet — there might be some one still up at the place.”

We got a taxi at the next corner, went up to Sixtieth, and cut into the park from there. The gasoline fumes from all the other cars doing the same thing that we were hung over the trees like a diaphanous mantilla, and along every driveway stoplights were strung like a necklace of little red beads.

“Honey,” I said, “what’s the matter? Don’t you own the place you live in?”

“I do.” she said, “Wade, but it’s all mixed up—”

“Why should any one be there if you don’t want them to?”

“I just furnish the background,” she said. “They’re having a conference.”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Nobody,” she answered, and turned her head away.

I reached out and brought her hand over to me and kissed the fingers one by one. “Bernice—” I started to say.

She turned her head my way again and said through clenched teeth. “If you say one word about love to me right now, if you put your hands anywhere near me, if I feel your breath on my neck, I’m going to swing out with all the strength God put in my arm and hit you so hard in the eye you’ll never forget it!” And she threw her head back, stared glassily up at the roof of the cab, and moaned like a person in unbearable pain, “Oh, God, how I hate love! I hate it, hate it!”

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked alarmedly, “what are you getting hysterical like this for?”

But I couldn’t make her stop crying, panting through a shower of tears that she hated love, wanted to die, wished she hadn’t been born.

The driver kept turning his head around anxiously, wondering what I was doing to her, I suppose. Finally, when I saw that I couldn’t control her in any way, I asked him to take us out of the park by the nearest exit and stop at the first drugstore he came to.

When he did, I had him go in and bring her out a glassful of spirits of ammonia mixed with water, being afraid to let her sit in the cab alone if I went in myself and being unable to get her to come in with me, no matter how I coaxed.

When she was quiet once more, I had him take the empty glass back and I sat with my arm around her. “I’m not making love to you, Bernice. Just lean against my shoulder like this until you feel better.”

“You’re a good scout, Wade,” she said, still shuddering a little from the sobbing.

I took a chance and said. “Wade loves you, anyway. You know that, don’t you?” But the phobia or whatever it was had passed, and she just lay there quietly in my arms without attempting to “swing at my eye.” Her knees were drawn up close to her body, and I covered them for her, and gave her form a little tug nearer me.

“I’m sorry I let it all out on you,” she said, as the driver started the engine again. “If I hadn’t been pawed to death the whole evening long, I wouldn’t have gotten into a state like that.”

“Do you want me to take you home now, Bernice?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said with a melancholy air.

When I was paying the cab she said, “You can stay if you want, Wade. You don’t mind using the living room for tonight, do you?”

“All right with me, honey,” I said.

When we got, in the place looked as though a grand rehearsal of the Battle of the Marne had been staged there. Bernice acted as though she were used to finding it like that, or else she was too tired by what she had just been through to notice. Not a light had been lowered, not a thing put back where it belonged. The drinking glasses had been used for ashes, and the ashtrays for cuspidors. A heart-shaped taffeta pillow still bore the imprint of two heels, and a cigar stump that was now merely a cylinder of fine white ash had burned its way through one of the roses of the embroidered shawl and soldered itself to the varnish of the radio cabinet.

“Nice friends you have,” I commented disgustedly.

“Friends?” she answered cynically. “What makes you think they’re friends of mine?” She took off the little cap she had worn all along, sewn with little shiny things, and let it drop on the floor. Then she braced one foot behind the other, and pulled her heel out of her slipper, and when she had repeated the process with the second foot, she let both slippers stand there where they were and walked into the bedroom in her stockinged feet, tossing her little black silk evening bag at the seat of a chair as she went by.

I picked it up when she was gone and tucked it under my arm, and I took the hundred dollars out of my pocket and put it on the table, and looked around for an envelope. I found a yellow one with a little transparent “window” in it, belonging to a telegram that some one must have opened, lying on the floor, and I took a pencil out of my pocket and leaned over the table and wrote on it: “For you, Bernice, from Wade.” Then I put the money in it and folded it over, and opened her little evening bag to put it in. But the marcasite button that I took to be the catch must have been just an ornament at the bottom of it, because while I was fooling with it trying to get it to work, the bag opened at the other end and emptied itself out on the floor. So I swore softly and got down on my knees and started to pick all her little things up: her lipstick and her key and her nail polish and her rabbit’s foot and Lord knows what else. And four fifty-dollar bills, lying there like yellow autumn leaves. I put everything conscientiously back again and put my envelope in on top of it all, and then I closed the bag and went to the door of her bedroom with it. She had left the door ajar, but I rapped on the frame of the doorway without looking in at all. “What is it, Wade?” I heard her call from somewhere inside the room.

“Come out here and find out,” I said shortly.

Presently the door slipped back, and she stood there looking at me.

“You left your bag out here,” I said, and flicked my finger against it as though it were unfit to be touched.

“Oh, you could have left it th—” she started to say.

“Where’d you get the other two hundred from?” I lashed out at her.

“Why,” she said with a peculiar smile, “don’t you realize? You were gone a long time tonight.”

I hit her with it in the face three times, back and forth and then back again, and then I let go of it and flung it at her, and it fell at her feet. She never moved, and as I turned my back to her, I thought I saw her nod her head ever so slightly, as though she understood, as though she agreed with me.

I walked out of the apartment and went out into the street once more. I remembered how I had nearly done this same thing the night I first met her, because she had insulted me about some ring or other she was wearing at the time. But this was different, this was forever, this was good-bye and be damned to you. There was no word for her any more in my vocabulary after what she had done tonight. You can cherish a loathsome toad, grow fond of a snake, tolerate a buzzard that feeds on the dead — but this! — oh, this was good-bye and never again. She had simply put herself beyond the pale. I stood on the street corner in the moonlight, I remember, and covered my eyes with my hands.