Park Avenue Tramp

Chapter 5

He was awake. He had wakened, as a matter of fact, before she left. Waking instantly, he did not instantly open his eyes. When he did open them, he thought for a moment that he was not awake after all, but had only drifted on the verge of waking into a dream, for the first thing he saw was a naked girl who seemed to be performing the second duty of Islam. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and the girl was still there, but now she was erect on her knees, her buttocks resting on her heels, and she was apparently thinking intently about something important.

He was not having hallucinations. Neither had he died in the night and gone to an unlikely paradise with blonde houris. He was Joe Doyle, relatively sane, alive in his own bed, and he was, though not crazy, a fool. In the tag hours, in the recurring span of a man’s greatest vulnerability, he had acquired a fancy dame on a dipso prowl, and he had brought her home, and here she was. Charity. Charity Farnese. Here she was in his bed with the taste in her mouth of the night before, and she was probably wondering for the umpteenth desperate time why she had done what she’d done, and how in God’s name she would account for it to her friends or husband or confessor or whomever she might, in her need for catharsis or shriving, make her accounting to. Watching her through eyes so narrowly open that her body was blurred by his lashes, he felt, as she had in watching him, a stirring of excitement, but he did not move speak, and the reason he didn’t was essentially the same reason she had decided to slip away. Even when it was felt in the heart, there was no percentage in going farther with what had already gone too far because it couldn’t go far enough.

In a little while, she eased back and lifted her legs and swung them off the bed, and she did this carefully and quietly with the obvious purpose of not disturbing him. He couldn’t see her for several minutes after that, but he heard her open the closet door, and then the door to the bathroom. She want into the bathroom, and everything was completely quiet for the time that she was there, and as a matter of fact he did not hear her come out or know that she was near until she was suddenly standing beside the bed looking down at him. He had not opened his eyes any wider than the slit, and so she didn’t know he was awake and had been watching her when she was in sight and listening to her movements when she was not, but now, seeing again so suddenly her slim and nearly perfect body blurred by his lashes, he almost betrayed himself by the minor violence of a reaction that caused his own body to jerk involuntarily and his breath to break off in his throat. Startled, she stepped back and began at once to dress, which was quickly accomplished, and then she walked to the door and hesitated and went out.

After she was gone, he continued to lie in bed, not because there was any possibility of his sleeping again, but because there wasn’t anything he could think of that was worth getting up to do, and after a few minutes he began to listen to his heart. He couldn’t actually hear it, of course, but by placing his right hand flat on his chest above it, he could feel it beating in his palm. By the beat of it, the feel of it, he achieved a sense of the sound of it. He often did this. It prompted in him a morbid speculation, which had also become a kind of morbid pleasure. The speculation was on how many tens or hundreds or thousands of beats were left to go, and the pleasure was derived from his pride in having learned that he could speculate on this without fear of self-pity. It had occurred to him once that it was rather like testing a car for mileage. You put a certain amount of gas in the tank, and then you ran the car until it quit running, and as the mileage meter came closer and closer to what you thought would be the end, you kept waiting more and more expectantly for the cough, the missed beat, the silence. The analogy was adequate only to that point, however. When the car engine stopped, you just gave it more gas and started it again.

Another thing he often did while listening to his heart was to go back over his life and try to find something, a direction or a pattern, that would convince him that he had been significant or essential to some plan or purpose, but he could never find anything. It was not that he felt that his life was a waste, just time pulled for nothing, but only that the most you could say about any ordinary life was that it had been lived. He was only a fifth-rate piano thumper, of course, but this was not the point, for practically everyone was a fifth-rate something or other, and if there was any plan or purpose, the fifth-raters were as much a part of it as anyone else. He was not especially bitter about anything, he decided. It was better to live a short time than no time, and he was glad to have been what he was, since he couldn’t have been anything better.

Once he had tried to be. He had wanted to be a really good pianist, if not concert at least jazz, but he didn’t have the big talent that it took, and he had accepted this, once he was convinced of it, as readily as he had accepted the later understanding that he was going to die before he had lived very long, as average lives went. After high school, he had worked his way through three years of fine arts in college, piano especially, and it was then that he had accepted the reality of what he wasn’t and would never be, and he had left after the three years and played around the country with a fair dance orchestra that finally got to New York in a small spot. In New York, after a while, he began to feel the pain in his heart, and it reminded him for the first time in many years of the pain he had used to feel in the joints of his arms and legs when he was a boy.

He went to a doctor, who examined him and made an appointment for him at a hospital. At the hospital he was examined more thoroughly and asked detailed questions about the diseases he had had as a boy and as a man, but particularly as a boy, and then he returned to the doctor he had consulted originally. Previously the doctor had been noncommittal, but this time, his tentative diagnosis verified by the hospital, he was as clinically precise and as sympathetic as professional detachment permitted him to be.

“You have rheumatic heart disease,” he said. “It’s caused by fibrosis and scarring of the valves. Usually the mitral valve is affected. Sometimes the aortic valve is also affected. This is true in your case.”

“What does that mean?” Joe said.

“It means that your heart’s been working too hard for too long to do its job.”

“And now it’s wearing out, breaking down. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“How long will it last?”

“That’s hard to predict. Cases vary, of course. Average expectancy from the time of the damage is thirteen to fifteen years.”

“You mean this was caused by the sickness I had as a boy? The time I had the fever and the aches in my bones?”

“That’s right. Rheumatic fever.”

“I’d almost forgotten it,” Joe said.

He went away and began to think about what he would do. He knew he was not living the right kind of life for a heart cripple; there was too much tension and too little rest. Too many late hours and too little sleep. Too little eating and too much drinking and smoking. Too much of all that was bad for him and far too little of what was good. But playing the piano was about all he knew, the only way he had to earn a living, and he decided deliberately that he might as well go on with it for all the difference in time it would probably make. Not with a dance orchestra that was always moving around, however. He wanted to stay put, to get used to a place to die in, and New York, so far as he could see, was as good a place as any other.

He started off playing for living expenses in a couple of different bars in the Village, and then he met Chester Lewis, who had just come out of a special kind of hospital where he had gone to get a monkey permanently off his back. Chester was a pretty good drummer who needed a job drumming, and they’d got together, mostly just for fun in the beginning, and developed some of the little conversation pieces between the drum and the piano, and they’d been surprised and delighted by the things that could be said in this way. They’d tried it on the customers one night in the bar where Joe was playing, and it had gone well, and later they’d moved to a better job in the club where they now were, which was about as far from Sheridan Square south as Joe’s room was from Washington Square north.

This was just the outline, of course, the stripped pattern of his life as he saw it, but it was the pattern that would mean something if anything at all meant anything worth knowing, and nothing seemed to. It gave him a very strange feeling to think that he had been dying since he was twelve years old, when he’d had the fever and the aches, but it wasn’t really so strange after all, when you thought about it a while longer, for everyone started dying the instant he was born. The only difference was that Joe Doyle had only been dying a little faster than most others. Anyhow, he had already passed the average that the doctor had mentioned, the thirteen to fifteen years, and this was somehow a monstrous deception, a kind of preternatural con trick to assure him that he was living, from a special point of view, a long life instead of a short one....

And now, lying in bed after the departure of Charity Farnese, he was thinking too much and becoming depressed. Getting up abruptly, he showered and shaved and dressed and went downstairs. He had not eaten since the middle of the afternoon yesterday, and it was past time to eat again, but he was not in the least hungry and knew that the sight and smell of food would only make him sick. What he needed was a couple of ounces of rye, after which he would feel better and possibly able to eat at least a sandwich, and where he might as well go to get both was the club where he worked. Besides, Chester Lewis would probably be there, or would come in later, and they could make a little talk with the piano and the drum before the bar opened at four.

When he reached the club, Chester wasn’t there yet, but Yancy Foster, the superior bartender, was. Joe sat down on a stool at the bar, and Yancy looked at him sourly.

“Hello, beautiful,” Yancy said.

“That was last night,” Joe said.

“You said it, it was last night,” Yancy said. “Did you find Milton?”

“Not a trace. I think Milton was someone who happened to her some other night.”

“Lots of others have happened to her other nights. Lots of others have been left over.”

“Sure, Yancy. Sure.”

“Oh, she had something, all right. Something special. I admit that. She drifts in here out of a black fog, looking like a delinquent angel and talking like a schizy intellectual, and you keep watching her and talking with her and wondering what the hell will finally become of her, and you wish that it wouldn’t.”

“Yeah. That’s right, Yancy. You keep wishing that it wouldn’t.”

“A man’s a fool. He thinks he’s got his immunity built up, and then some little tramp comes along and starts a fever in him.”

“You talking to me or yourself, Yancy?”

“I’m just talking, sonny. Anyone can listen who wants to. Probably nobody will. Not even me.”

“I’m listening, Yancy. Hanging on every word.”

“I can see you are. I can see you’re real interested. Well, what I say is, they’re all a little different from each other in one way or another, but the difference isn’t important, whatever it is, and what’s important is the way they’re alike. These fancy, crazy dames! They come here on the prowl from their plush nests on MacDougal Street or Park Avenue or wherever they happen to live, and they may have different faces and answer to different names and have different fancy names for the crazy things wrong with them, but what they all are without exception is more trouble than any man with any brains would ever want.”

“You’re eloquent, Yancy. You should have been a missionary or something.”

“Sure, sure. I know. You mean I should go to hell.”

“No, Yancy. What I mean is, I was with you before you started. I don’t need the lecture.”

“You don’t think so? Well maybe not. You need something, though, sonny. You look like the wrath of God.”

“I need a couple ounces of rye, Yancy. I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Like hell you need a couple ounces of rye. What you need is food. How long since you’ve eaten?”

“I don’t remember, Yancy. I eat when I’m hungry.”

“There’s some good beef. I’ll fix you a sandwich.”

“All right, Yancy. While you’re fixing the sandwich, I’ll drink the rye.”

Yancey poured the rye and handed it to him, and he sat hunched over the bar with the strong fumes rising into his nostrils. He looked ahead into the mirror at the reflection of the room behind him, the oppressive litter in stale shadows of tables and chairs on a worn tile floor still wet in spots from mopping, and it didn’t seem at that moment a particular misfortune that he was going to die before long.