To Skin a Cat

TO SKIN A CAT

South Kensington produces London’s best evenings. English ladies appear from the Pakistani grocer heading for residential hotels and recently converted mews. Old church spires preside over the latest generation of buggy English youth trickling through the tolerant neighborhood. They are still outnumbered by the men in bowlers, but many of the latter are modern offshore phonies, completing the destruction of England.

In front of Blake’s small hotel, Bobby Decatur, an American, thirty, helplessly exudes privilege in his tweed jacket, Levi’s, and cowboy boots. He is watching a striking American girl named Marianne climb out of a limousine. He doesn’t know her. The chauffeur cuts his eyes at Bobby. Bobby is steadfast in his examination of her legs. She stoops for her belongings.

Bobby Decatur says, “Need a hand?”

She walks right by him and pulls open the glass door.

Bobby says, “Whore.”

“You wish,” replies the girl. The door closes behind her, and her image shimmers off and evaporates in the glass.

At the desk a Dutch girl named Hildegarde, who wears smart designer clothes every day and who directs the sallow Cockney bellhop, gives Marianne the key and says, “That’s your new room. Away from the noisy landing. A little nicer, that. Room Two-ten.”

Bobby listens from inside the door. When Marianne disappears up the stairs, Bobby approaches Hildegarde, who says, “This one is not for you,” in the voice of a procurer. The American does a burlesque Who-me? And Hildegarde adds, “She is visiting her fiancé. A nice Englishman.”

So Bobby Decatur goes across the foyer and down the stairs into the stainless-steel decor of the lounge. Jack the bartender has a crinkled face and a Prince Valiant haircut. He reminds Bobby that he is cut off. Bobby states that he has a letter from his doctor attesting that an unfortunate side effect of his medication goes a long way toward explaining his erratic behavior. Jack says that we’ve all got one of those doctors.

“Anyway,” says Bobby, “it’s not for me. I’m sending a drink to a friend. My mother, actually.” Bobby sends a boiler-maker to room 210 with a note explaining that English fiancés are undesirable. He invites Marianne to Deadrock, Montana, and signs his name.

“Thanks a million, Jack. Love your haircut. Put that on my room.”

Marianne and her fiancé are sitting in Scott’s Restaurant, off Park Lane. The best of the John Bull atmosphere with professional men of seafood shucking oysters behind a zinc bar. Marianne is just luscious, while her friend seems to have been hand-carved from slabs of cold salt pork.

He says, “You are heroic to have come. A little fish will help with the lag. The wine will make you sleep. I have a meeting with a distinguished do-wop band, after which I’m yours. You do look sleepy.”

“As of yet, Allen, the trip hasn’t gotten to me.”

“I think you are spectacular.”

Through the reversed lettering of the glass front window, Bobby Decatur is holding a sign that reads, THAT MAN IS A CUR. Marianne sees it.

“Darling, are you dizzy?”

“No,” she says, “but I must go to the ladies’. Back in a jiff.”

Outside, Marianne says to Bobby, “Leave me alone, you little shit. And I put that drink you sent in the toilet.”

“The loo.”

“What?”

“It’s called the loo in England. Get with it.”

“I’m going in.”

At the table, the fiancé asks, “Better?” The record industry has given him the remote gape of a rock star.

“Much.”

“You look distressed.”

“I’m being pestered.”

“And by whom?”

“An evidently crazy young man.”

“I’m going to stop him.”

“Actually, he’s back in New York. I’m afraid it’s still on my mind.”

“Shaking his thing in doorways, I suppose.”

“But he’s half charming. Anyway, darling, he’s thousands of miles away. Not to bother.”

“Half charming?”

Bobby is in his clean plain room at Blake’s. There are many very old well-bound books. There are many fine engravings of hunting hawks. On its perch, weathering in front of an open window, is a hooded falcon. Bobby presses his fist forward, and the hawk steps up onto his wrist. He draws the hooded bird close to his face and whispers, “Hello, in there. I’ve met a girl.”

Bobby buys a chicken at the Kensington grocer, a whole chicken. He descends to the underground and rides in silence, carrying the chicken in his lap. He heads for a tattoo parlor near Knightsbridge.

At the end of the day, Hildegarde, at the front desk in Blake’s, hands Marianne a beautifully wrapped box. Marianne takes it to her room and removes her coat. She sits on the bed and opens the box. The chicken lies nestled in excelsior, its breast tattooed Born to raise hell.

Marianne smiles.

A middle-aged couple living on the first floor of Blake’s idly dismembers the morning Times on their patio while eating breakfast. A dead mouse falls on the table. The gentleman lets his gaze travel upward to the falcon pacing nervously on the balcony above, fretting over its own lost breakfast.

At the front desk, Hildegarde says to Marianne, “Never mind the Portobello Road. It’s all queers selling Marilyn Monroe pictures.”

“I need a sweater and souvenir paperweights for my nieces.”

“What was in it?”

“In what?”

“The box.”

“A chicken.”

“A chicken! I think that is the height of rudeness. In my country it is considered inappropriate to send a lady a chicken.”

“It was delicious,” lies Marianne defensively.

The manager is at Bobby’s door. He’s a Midlands fellow with surfacing blood vessels in the points of his cheeks.

“Mr. Decatur, we’ve had a complaint as to the bird. Mr. and Mrs. Tripp downstairs assert that it is dropping mice amid their breakfast.” His right hand illustrates the downward progress of a mouse in air. “The bird,” he adds.

“I have arranged to sell the bird to an Arab.”

“Not because of this small complaint—”

“I’m returning to the United States of America. I’ve met a girl, and it is impractical to transport falcons on commercial aircraft.”

“Actually, there’s an Arab gentleman in the lobby just now, actually.”

“It’s our man. Send him whilst I dust the bird.”

A short time later, a rather bouncy sheikh sits in Bobby’s room, in a leather chair. His kaffiyeh is very well lighted by a standing lamp. He has the carriage of a lazy natural athlete.

“I feel you have overpriced the hawk, Bobby.”

“Say, Sheikh, you need a prairie falcon. The American West, get it?”

“Five thousand is a joke.”

“It’s an Arab’s job to pay too much.”

“If I give this kind of money, I’m compromised each time I try to buy an American hawk.”

“I know what you offered the Air Force Academy for the Arctic falcon.”

“That’s different. I was in Colorado. I was skiing. I was tooted out. And it could have been taken as a political gesture. Exxon was on every slope.”

“What kind of airplane do you have?”

“De Havilland with a custom galley. When it’s on autopilot, the pilot cooks. What does that have to do with it?”

“A week with the plane and the hawk is a gift.”

The sheikh unwinds his rig from about his ears as he thinks. It makes the sheikh’s beard seem wrong.

“Bobby, it’s a deal. You should have been a pimp.”

“It’s never too late.”

In Blake’s small dining room, Bobby and Marianne sit at separate tables, though tiny rippling energy waves connect them. Bobby sends Marianne a Shirley Temple. Marianne sends Bobby a Bionic Boy. These concoctions are like the filaments sent out by warring spiders.

Marianne calls out, “Thank you, it’s fantastic! But don’t drop by the table to discuss it!”

“Can I interest you in a martial-arts film festival?”

“Gosh, no.”

Marianne gets up from her table and walks to Bobby’s.

“Don’t get up. Listen, you’re terribly interesting. But I’m here to see my fiancé, and you’re a vulgar little shit.”

“I have a de Havilland and an MEA pilot who cooks.”

“Right, and then I’m going back to the United States. It’s silly, really it is, to spend your time on something that isn’t happening. Isn’t happening, got it?”

Bobby hears a knock on the door of his room. When he opens it, there is Marianne. He says, “Come in, come in.” No surprise here. Atop her in no time.

“Got anything to read?”

“Sure do. A history of falconry in Persia do?”

“Just right,” says Marianne. Bobby fishes the old volume off the shelf and hands it to her.

“I’m going to the country with my fiancé. I need something to read. Haven’t got your bookplate in here, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good, thanks, ’bye.”

Gone.

“You be sure and bring that book back. It’s — it’s—” Bobby goes to the empty falcon perch. “It’s my book.”

Bobby Decatur is all alone in an unsuccessful tearoom.

“A weekend can be a long time when you’re missing someone. Darling, it was an eternity. I thought of you in the country with an Englishman the color of putty. And I ached. I really did.”

A waiter peers at Bobby from the doorway.

The Silver Cloud cruises from Iver Heath. Do-wop millions, in relatively stable pounds, pay the freight.

“I don’t think you ever took the trouble to get Mummy’s point of view.”

“Mummy has a problem,” says Marianne to her fiancé.

“Which is?”

“She’s an absolute pill.”

“Oh, God.”

“That’s my point of view.”

“See over there? Next to the Hogarth Laundry? That’s where the engraver Hogarth lived.”

“Got a plaque?”

“Yes, Marianne. The house is history, Marianne. Therefore the plaque.”

“Then I want a plaque for us.”

British Airways flashes in the window of the Silver Cloud.

“So, that’s how it is.”

At the desk in Blake’s, Marianne tells Hildegarde she would like to leave the American a message.

“What did you do with that chicken?”

Marianne requests of the Dutch girl that she not be impertinent. They once were friends. Now Marianne stares at her and concludes: a real cluck. Hildegarde.

“I told you once, Hildegarde. I ate it.”

One room of the British Museum contains a Norse ship whose swept dragon-shaped prow dominates the venerable space. Bobby and Marianne, together at last, are in its dusty shadow.

Bobby says, “Look at it, Marianne. I always come to see the Viking stuff. Can you imagine building a boat like that and then invading England, kicking their rotten little monasteries into the Atlantic?”

A glass case holds a Viking skull, splendid in a winged helmet. Bobby is in rapture.

“Now there’s who I want to be.”

A peregrine scatters larks in a vivid diorama.

“Falcons take splash baths in clear water about ten times a day. If they get mites and little parasites other birds take for granted, they lose their edge and can no longer win the game of survival. If they lose one percent of their pure efficiency in killing, they are the ones to die.”

An illuminated Bible from the Middle Ages catches his eye for bright colors. Bobby is explaining everything.

“The only people in the world like Vikings and falcons are pimps. They prey on the world. Look at that God damned Bible. That’s the book that put Joe Blow in the driver’s seat. It’s a regular operation manual.”

“I want something to eat.”

“A pimp doesn’t care if he ever eats again.”

“If we find the right restaurant we can make beautiful music together. What do pimps have to do with it?”

It was an awful restaurant. Both Bobby and Marianne ordered so as not to upset the waiter. Then the waiter was rude. But they were scared of him.

“How did you meet the Englishman?”

“He was in their trade commission. Now he’s a music producer with a specialty in do-wop.”

“What did you lobby for?”

“Meat byproducts.”

“Women have the hearts of assassins.”

“These big statements, Bobby! We’ve got some difficult eating ahead of us.” The waiter brings their ghastly platters, gratuity in the price.

The rakish de Havilland jet has Arabic writing on the fuselage. Bobby leads Marianne aboard. All is luxury-thick aluminum.

“Marianne, meet Abdul. He bombed a kibbutz and can really cook.” Abdul is the first pilot Marianne has seen in a fez. He has twinkling eyes.

The jet heads out over the Atlantic. The navigator serves drinks to Bobby and Marianne. They are keen on the upholstery. Later, Bobby attempts to seduce Marianne by putting his hand up her dress and fiddling awkwardly with her underthings as though he were trying to retrieve a letter through a mail slot. After a good deal of this, he spots America through the window. He also notices Abdul and the navigator watching to see if he’s going to get his thing into Marianne.

When he closes the door to the cockpit, he says, “Watch where you’re going or you’ll ram America.”

Then Bobby does something strange. He pulls a gun on Marianne and yells for her to undress. When she is naked she lies on the floor with her feet on either side of the aisle. Bobby mounts her as the airplane sinks into the atmosphere of America. The wings make an eerie chiming as they angle toward the coast.

In the taxicab, New York goes unnoticed. Bobby and Marianne are discussing her rape.

Marianne says, “If it hadn’t been for the peering Arabs, the airplane would have been a good place to make love.”

“What about when I pulled the gun?”

“I thought it was pretentious.”

At last they take a room at the Pierre. Though the room has a handsome view, they have thus far avoided looking at New York. Only after two orange juices have been delivered does Bobby go to the window.

“There are some very remarkable hawks that live on the tops of those buildings,” he says, “and they bang into the shit-heel pigeons for dinner.”

“I thought we were going to Deadrock, Montana. Even the cur took me to the country.”

“To Mummy’s place, so he could bop you in his old playroom.”

“That’s enough.”

“Spreading yourself thin.”

“Bobby, you’re jealous. How very nice.” Marianne beams without guile, two thousand miles from the chicken.

Then rather strangely, Bobby says, “I don’t know why we came here.”

“I don’t either.”

“I thought coming back to America would give us a sense of starting over.”

“I don’t want to start over. I want to have a nice time.”

“We have to find a place to live, a place with the atmosphere of home. But before that, let’s send out for a whore.”

“For what?”

“Inspirational chats.”

Marianne gazes at him with serene gray eyes.

“Let me ask you this, do you have a mother?”

“Yes, I do,” says Bobby.

“And where does she live?”

“She recently moved to the Carlyle.”

“From where?”

“Deadrock, Montana.”

“Are we going to see her? Is that why we’re here?”

“Yes, one reason.”

“Is it to get money?”

“There is that.”

At the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, Bobby says, “That is it, the best oyster stew in America. Little wonder Lillian Hellman chose this for the site of her soiree. Did she have it at Twenty-one? No, she had it at the Oyster Bar because she knew the city and she knew her oysters.”

“Bobby?”

“What?”

“May we order?”

After Bobby has gone on and on about hookers and they are now in a corridor of the Carlyle Hotel, Marianne states the following in no uncertain terms:

“What you would do with a hooker is your own problem. I have no interest in hookers. And what does that have to do with your mother? Let’s see her first, and please may we get off the subject of hookers. I am increasingly suspicious that you are treating me like one.”

The door swings open and there stands Emily Decatur, Bobby’s mother. She has neatly arrayed silver hair and wears a Dale Evans cowgirl suit.

She says, “Howdy, Bob. And who might this be?”

“Marianne, a sport from Duluth. Mother is a cowgirl from New York, Deadrock, and Santa Barbara.”

“Come in. How do you do. Come right in.”

Amid the French walnut furniture are barbed-wire collections, western bronzes, and mounted arrowhead collections. Leaning against a fine old armoire are a couple of wagon wheels.

“How broke are you, Bob?”

“Fairly broke. It wouldn’t be so bad but I have plans.”

“So, something new.”

“It’s been on the back burner,” says Bobby. “But I’d be in motion, I think, if I had the wherewithal.”

“This is where the rich old broad comes in,” says Emily Decatur to Marianne, a speech which, in the atmosphere Bobby has tried to induce, seems brightly candid.

“I’m afraid it is,” says Bobby, preserving sincerity.

“Would the Deadrock ranch be a help?”

“Would I have to run it?”

“It’s been leased out for twenty years. You’d need to supply an address, though, if you wanted the checks to come to you. Are you up to that?”

“Yes, that would be very nice.”

“Then it’s yours,” says Emily Decatur. “Would you like an aerial photograph of it?”

“Not really.”

“Are you sure? You can see the little homestead, and tiny figures of cows and horses.”

“Thanks, but I don’t really want it.”

“Okay, it’s a deal then,” says Emily Decatur, pumping her son’s hand.

“That’s quite a gesture, Ma. Say, thanks for the nice ranch.”

“The West is where it all begins.”

“I think so.”

“You’re free, Bob.”

“That’s what the West is for, Ma, to make men free.”

“Now what’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to San Francisco to become a pimp.”

Bobby is staring from the window while Marianne does her makeup at a little desk. Bobby opens the door to permit a room-service waiter to push a linen-covered cart in and set up a table.

“How many places shall I set, sir?”

“Three, and keep the entrees in the warmer, as we are not yet ready to dine.”

The waiter sets out melons, cheese, and red and white wines while Bobby signs the check. He wishes the waiter a spirited “Andale, muchacho!” as he goes.

“Hungry, darling?”

“Famished, but I want to get my eyes on first.”

Marianne has made herself up vividly, like a courtesan.

A knock.

Bobby admits Adrienne, a brown-eyed handsome young lady.

“Just right,” Bobby cries. “Oh, goody.”

“Hello, I’m Adrienne.”

“And this is Marianne. I’m Bobby Decatur. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering you some lovely noisettes of lamb. Marianne is having coquilles Saint-Jacques and I–I’m having a cheeseburger, and I really don’t want a cheeseburger but I want to soak in the tub and watch you two dine and chat. I think the cheeseburger will be a little handier. The prospects of the entree floating between one’s knees will be eliminated.”

Adrienne says, “Here’s one with his mind in the gutter.”

“I’m no real animal,” Bobby objects, as he stacks hundreds on the table. “That should cover the eventualities.”

Soon Bobby floats in the tub, idly nipping at the cheeseburger, spurting soap from his free hand, and gleefully peering out through the bathroom door.

“Aw, come on in!”

“No!”

“Adrienne has to!”

“You said we were partners!” retorts Marianne strangely.

At the table, Adrienne says, “He must look like a prune by now. Hey, what do you guys want from me?”

“I think he’s looking for a life story.”

“No chance.”

Bobby asks Adrienne to undress and bring him some french fries. Even naked, Adrienne seems so different that the french fries acquire the status of clothes. At any rate, they soon make a tiny log jam in the tub. Bobby climbs out, scrutinizes Adrienne, touches a thing or two, and wraps himself in a towel. When they come out of the bathroom, Marianne is unclothed.

“Want to see mine?” she asks. “Bobby, you and Adrienne should go to bed together.”

“All it takes is money,” says Adrienne. Bobby is mortified by this burst of actuality. He commands Marianne to dress.

“Adrienne, look! His face is red!”

“I thought this was his idea.”

“He’s full of ideas. It’s quite lovable. He has a big inheritance, and all he wants is to be a pimp.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! I’m leaving,” says Adrienne.

At the door, Bobby and Marianne call out good night to Adrienne. Then, mute, they stare at one another.

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“I didn’t say it was a bad idea.”

“At least it didn’t cost anything.”

Bobby says, “I felt that girl was on the cynical side.”

“Nobody knew what you had in mind.”

“No, no, no. That’s not it. What I was feeling was that you two felt I knew but that I had lost my nerve.”

“You had.”

When Bobby bursts into the hallway, he says, “We’ll see about this!” He goes off in his bathrobe.

Marianne follows him to the elevators. A bellhop is standing there, and Bobby says to him, “I want a whore!”

“This isn’t that kind of hotel, sir.”

“It isn’t? I just sent one off. Now I want another.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No.”

In the lobby, Bobby pushes through clients of the hotel to the front desk. The clerk, in uniform, has seen all of this he wants to.

“I’m in Four-eighteen and I want a whore.”

“That’s out of the question.”

“Gimme that phone. This hotel needs hookers. Do you hear me?”

“Four-eighteen? You have thirty minutes to vacate Four-eighteen or I’ll see to it that New York’s finest do it for you.”

Bobby’s draining face seems to be superimposed on those of the outraged guests. Marianne has subtly blended in among them.

She asks, “Who is that young man?”

Soon Marianne sits atop the luggage outside. Bobby comes out of a phone booth. His spirits are a little droopy.

“Can’t get a room anywhere. We’re leaving this terrible city where even the smallest civilities are nonexistent.”

Bobby and Marianne sit under the vague circles of the reading lights. Rows of sleeping hands, resting upon armrests, stretch down the aisles toward the captain and crew, who cautiously adjust the 747’s triggers for the Pacific.

“When I get tired,” Bobby says, “I get scared.”

“I do too. I think about the plane falling.”

“I think we’re very tired. I’m scared and I don’t even know what of.”

“Don’t say that,” says Marianne. “I’m completely terrified.”

“What do you think it is?”

“San Francisco. I think something is waiting for us in San Francisco. And I don’t know what it is.”

Bobby imagines fog; the airplane penetrates a low ceiling to an eerie groundscape. “We’re just tired,” he says.

“That’s not the whole story. The whole story is, the attraction is getting too — I don’t know — too something.”

Bobby says, “And pretty soon the ghosts of our past will emerge.”

“How terrifying. How foul.”

“We have to wipe it all out before it kills us.”

By Nebraska, Marianne is asleep. Bobby has a reptilian restlessness the magazine rack can’t sop up. He begins to move about the aisles, staring hard at the sleeping faces, avoiding those stunned by air travel, until he catches the eye of a traveler, a man in his thirties who is wide awake.

“How you doing?”

“Fine. Kind of a long deal at night, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. Can I sit down?”

“Do, go right ahead.”

“How come you’re going to San Francisco?”

“I’m a maritime lawyer there.”

“Married?” Bobby asks. He doesn’t seem impertinent.

“Not yet.”

“I’m looking for a kind of nice hotel. Something right in the middle of things.”

“Stay at the Saint Francis. It’s on Union Square. Couldn’t be handier. You on business?”

“I just got out of one.”

“Which was?”

“Hawk sales,” says Bobby. The traveler doesn’t show his bafflement.

“Now what’re you going to do?”

“Kind of an escort service,” says Bobby.

“How do you mean?”

“Arranging for girls.”

“I see.”

“Does that offend the heck out of your sensibilities?”

The traveler goes ha-ha-ha and says, “No, I just wish you had one with you.”

Pause. “I do.”

“Oh, God.”

“You want her?”

“I don’t see how.”

“Let her figure it out. Hey! That’s what they’re for.”

“What’s it cost?”

“You be the judge. Seat Twelve-A. Wake her and tell her the deal is history. I’ll keep your place until you get back.”

The traveler rests his head in deep thought and then says, “Okay.”

The traveler gently awakens the beautiful sleeping Marianne.

“I’m Jonathan.”

“Hello.”

“I’ve been speaking to your gentleman friend.”

“And?”

“He said to tell you that we’ve come to an arrangement. May I sit down?”

Utah.

Jonathan sits and kisses Marianne full on the lips. She neither yields nor pulls away. He slides his hand up her dress.

“May I ask you what you think you’re doing?”

“I should like to interest you … in love.”

“Do you do this with all the passengers?”

“I just thought — I—”

“I know, Bobby told you he was a pimp. It’s his way of passing the evening.”

“I’m very sorry,” says the traveler, rising. “But I must tell you, you left it a little ambiguous yourself.”

“Please go back to your seat.”

Bobby sits alone, his head against the rest, tilted back, in intense thought. He thinks he can make out the lights of Salt Lake City, but his view is abruptly interrupted by a sharp, open-handed slap across his face.

“May I have my seat?” the maritime lawyer inquires.

“Of course.”

Not till the Ramada limo service does Marianne make mention of the odd event on the 747. She says, measuring her words, “Next time you do that, I’m going to go for it. So think about that.”

“I’m going to be decent or know the reason why. My ears are ringing.” Earnestness floods Bobby’s face. He could cry.

“Like how?”

“I’m going to find us a good little house with a garden and a view of the sea. I’ll get you books on Jane Austen and, for me, Ernest Hemingway. We will make war on meat byproducts by elevating our minds. There will be days when we view paintings or relax at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.”

A woman realtor named Jane Adams, who seems distinctly San Franciscan, shows them a hidden gem with a sea view above the Presidio. The city cascades at the feet of Bobby and Marianne. Jane Adams notes that it’s a little bit of heaven for a young couple. Bobby gapes at her ass.

“We’ll take it. We’ve got a couple of books to read and no telephone. Plus, we’re looking for a small business together, something with no overhead.”

Jane Adams laughs, directing her face across the city to the high seas.

“What are you laughing at?”

“I just had a silly thought. I really can’t repeat it.”

At first, Bobby and Marianne love their little house, with its latticed understory and the gleaming bladderworts of its small garden. There are absolutely no fleas in the carpet, and the front window is free of decals that would violate the view of the Pacific.

In the morning, pretty, foggy light reveals Marianne carrying coffee and croissants up the wooden stairs; then, side by side in the bed, the two agree not to turn on the “Today” show.

“I can smell the ocean in the curtains,” says Marianne.

“That Barbara Walters is a real tire biter,” says Bobby. “Is she on that show?”

“Your bathrobe makes me laugh.”

“This marmalade was a good year.”

“I think so.”

“I want a book on the Tong wars. Those old Tongs had this town in knots. Underground tunnels, opium, captive girls.”

“Let’s go to Golden Gate Park today.”

Really, they should never have gone to Golden Gate Park. When they arrive at the casting pools, Bobby gazes at the well-dressed anglers with a certain terror.

“I would like you to note,” he says, “that there are no fish in those waters.”

“Those men are having a good time.”

“Oh, great.”

“It’s not symbolic, Bobby.”

When they get to the buffalo paddock and view the great mementos grazing in the coastal fog, Bobby says, “There you have it. The American West. I feel weak all over.”

Bobby seems serious. He demands they go to a drugstore. “I don’t feel so well.” They buy a thermometer and take his temperature out on the sidewalk: normal. He announces that his hematocrit is out of whack and that he must be losing blood.

“I absolutely know that the ratio of red blood cells to plasma is way off. I felt it the minute I spotted those buffalo.”

After the blood test, Bobby insists on the upper and lower GI series. The radiologist mans the machine in his lead apron while Bobby gulps barium. The radiologist slams plates in and out of the machine. Bobby feels at death’s door in his odd gown.

At length, the doctor says, “Your blood’s fine. Your mucosa patterns are exquisite. You’re fine. Good-bye.”

In the waiting room Bobby tells Marianne, “I’ve had a very close call. I’d like a nickel for every farewell speech I’ve composed. My life passed before my eyes, and I concluded, as anyone would, that there was not a minute to be lost. Let’s hit the streets.” Bobby takes Marianne down Maiden Lane and shows her Frank Lloyd Wright’s initials on a red tile. Then he buys her a pair of silver pumps with bright macaws on their sides. Marianne stretches her pretty legs to smile at her shoes. In Joseph Magnin, Bobby seems hypnotized as Marianne tries on silk dresses. His heart is racing.

They stop at a park bench on Union Square with delicatessen sandwiches and a bottle of red wine or, rather, Pagan Pink. They pass the bottle back and forth as though they were hunkered down in some railroad yard.

Marianne says, “I was engaged twice and ducked out both times. I’ve been worried about life passing me by. I thought if I got married, that would happen, and I would disappear without a trace.”

“I felt that when I saw those buffalo.”

“In college I saw that if I improved my mind, I would always be broke. Then came meat byproducts.”

“Now what?”

“Chance. And you, I guess.”

At the dinner table, Marianne is dressed in her new clothes, her eyes and lips darkened savagely. She wears the silver shoes. The two have sent out for veal piccata. Neither has eaten yet. It’s a matter of who goes for his gun first. Thin green candles burn, and the table is walnut. Bobby wears his Blake’s Hotel clothes: Levi’s, cowboy boots, chambray shirt, and a bottle-green velvet jacket.

“Let’s hit it.”

Despite the yearly deterioration of what used to be known as the passing scene into the current smarmy flux, Enrico’s Sidewalk Café remains a grand spot to view it, whatever it is. There are those who would argue that this is on the order of a front-row seat at a nose-picking contest. But Enrico’s customers don’t feel that way. In any case, Bobby and Marianne sit at one of the sidewalk tables, demand tall, frosty drinks, and join the others on the lookout. Marianne’s eyes fall naturally on a prosperous man in his forties, leaning on one hand and punching away at a calculator with his other.

Bobby would like to meet an astronaut. Marianne loves the breeze through her clothes. She has no interest in the kind of people who would leave a golf putter on the moon. Moreover, they would probably have to go elsewhere to meet astronauts. “Ever since you traded the bird to that Arab, we’ve been on the move.”

A prostitute wanders across the front of the café, her legs slightly in front of her. She glances at the man with the calculator. Bobby watches, then flags down the bartender. He orders second drinks for himself and Marianne, then addresses the bartender.

“Say, is that young lady — is she in the life?”

“You’ll have to ask her.” The bartender grins and leaves for the drinks, ignoring thirty imploring hands.

“Marianne, excuse me a sec.”

Marianne watches Bobby lope toward the prostitute. When he comes back, she wants to know what he said to her.

“Just got her name.”

“And?”

“Some idea of prices. I had to tell her, you know, that I was interested. Her name is Donna. Anyway, she said a hundred. You’re way prettier than she is.”

“Thank you,” says Marianne.

“Now what I’m thinking is, that guy over there with the calculator.”

Slowly and imperturbably, Marianne gazes at the man. She looks back at Bobby a moment and gets up.

“I’ll see you at home.”

Marianne starts off bravely in her silver shoes. From either end of the cafe, Bobby and the prostitute Donna watch Marianne sit down with the man, who smiles and puts the calculator in his pocket. Marianne sips his drink.

Suddenly, down Broadway, with Stetson hats and cameras, comes a mob of Japanese tourists. Bobby, whose heart is already pounding, panics as they flood the area between him and Marianne. He jumps up in complete fear and begins pushing through them. When he gets to the other side, Marianne and the man with the calculator are gone. He goes back to his table.

“Hey.”

Dazed, Bobby looks up. It’s Donna.

“What?”

“You get a price out of me, then send your trick to the guy. I don’t think that’s nice, ’n’ that. Can I sit down?”

“Yuh.”

“How many ladies you got?”

“Just one.”

“What’re you so depressed about?”

“Drinking these things in the sun.”

“I mean, your hands are shaking.”

“I’ve got Parkinson’s disease.”

“You want to stop by my place? You look like you could use a pick-me-up.”

“Yeah, all right.”

They go up Broadway, past the Hotel Du Midi, the Basque restaurant, past the Chinese novelty shops, more or less in silence as Bobby continues to bear his stricken look; then up an alley to a stairway, a catwalk, and a door.

They enter a small neat flat with gridded outside light coming in from above, some books, and, sitting in a Mexican goatskin sling chair, a very bad-looking man named Chino, whose name, a nickname, comes from a correctional facility in southern California. His real name is Donald Arthur Jones. He waves with professional indolence but still manages to look dangerous. He says, “Hey, Donna. Look, am I in the way? Just say so. Who’s our friend?”

“I don’t know, baby. But you assured me Enrico’s was your spot. And this guy and his whore run off a customer on me about five minutes ago, which embarrasses me on your behalf.”

“Gimme your name.”

“Bobby Decatur.”

“Donna, get Bobby the pictures.”

Donna takes a stack of Polaroids off the bookshelf and sets them on the table.

“C’mere, Bobby,” says Chino. “C’mere and sit next to me.” Bobby does; it looks like a piano duet. Bobby looks through a stack of pictures of a man who has been maimed with a knife. Chino begins to speak in a comically deep voice.

“This man took a girl to Enrico’s. This girl was in the life. They turned a few dollars. This is what he got.”

“Is he dead?”

“In some ways. Now this was done with a Buck folding knife, which is very nice for an off-the-shelf knife. It’s stainless steel, and though it’s difficult to sharpen, it will hold an edge indefinitely. Lately, I have my knives custom-made for me in Lawndale, California, by a man who is a craftsman, perhaps even an artist. What is the catch? A two-year waiting list. He’s the only man in the world who can make me wait. So for a while I made do with the off-the-shelf folding knife like some nimrod, Bobby. Donna, show Bobby the Lawndale masterpiece.”

Donna fetches an ivory-handled dagger.

“Bobby, with one motion I could throw your insides halfway up Russian Hill. So why don’t you and Mrs. Scumbag find some fast-food place that would form a more suitable background for your talent and her looks.”

“I saved the best part,” says Donna. “The john she picked up was a cop.” This, thinks Bobby, has become extremely sordid.

All the way to jail, Bobby says, “Oh, God, God, God. Oh, God.” But gradually he draws himself together and does the right thing under the circumstances by posting a bond. Once they’ve gotten into a cab, Bobby attempts to alleviate the chill between himself and Marianne.

“I want to go to the Imperial Palace,” he says. “Or any restaurant with integrity and a serious kitchen. I don’t want some fluorescent-lit noodle pavilion. I want a fine old Chinese restaurant like the Imperial Palace.”

“You God damned son of a bitch.”

“Yes. That’s what I thought you were thinking.”

But they go anyway and fit themselves into the darkness of the restaurant among the silk paintings, cloisonné, and velvet panels. There are long-stemmed roses on the table. Bobby raises his drink and bravely pronounces the following:

“At least you didn’t have to go through with it.”

“Are you joking? The cop had me before the arrest. I thought I was making us money. I thought it was what we wanted.”

The waiter arrives.

“Oh, please no, Marianne. My God, I — let me order for both of us. Waiter! We shall each have Eight Precious soup. I want squab Macao, and my wife will have Five Willows rock cod with loquats, kumquats, and sweet pickles.”

The waiter departs. Bobby says, “I’m just stricken. I’m heartbroken.”

“I thought this was your fantasy, asshole! And I’m not your wife.”

“Oh, right, hang that one on me.”

“Since we met, I broke up with my fiancé, I left a good job, I was raped in an Arab jet, jailed, and taken to a Chinese restaurant.”

Silence. What a dreadful summation, thinks Bobby.

“Is that all you have to say for our romance?”

“Bobby, that is what has happened!”

In the dark hole of their bedroom, Bobby and Marianne watch television.

Bobby says, “When I’m desperate, I love Johnny Carson.”

Marianne says, “When I’m desperate, I love Walter Cronkite. Besides, Johnny Carson is supposed to have a monster coke habit.”

“Let’s plant a garden tomorrow.”

By midmorning, Bobby has spaded a loamy spot in the backyard. Marianne cultivates on her hands and knees. Bobby is a handsome zombie.

“If we could just make one thing grow,” Bobby says. “Well, it would make a difference.”

“What kind of seeds did you buy?”

Bobby fishes the packets from his shirt pocket. “Radishes, peonies, watermelon, and what’s this? Some kind of banana or something.”

“Well, you can count on the radishes. Give me those.”

“You can’t have a garden with just radishes.”

“What’s the matter with you, Bobby? That’s nothing to get upset about. Let me see these. That’s summer squash, Bobby, that’s not a banana. Can’t you see that?”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t you want to have a garden?”

Bobby and Marianne are lucky enough to join the happy browsers at Ghirardelli Square, a place well known for the character of its great chocolate candies, which make one’s fillings ring like a carillon. Bobby’s usual propensity not to be normal seems far away today, and he holds Marianne’s hand in blind euphoria, driving not a few walkers from the crowded sidewalk. It has come time for him to explain it all to Marianne.

“This is one of those places where people pretend that there is no unhappiness. There can be unhappiness at Fisherman’s Wharf but not at Ghirardelli Square. At Fisherman’s Wharf, though you may bump into Joe DiMaggio, that still does not prevent you from toppling into the sea. But here you will never meet anyone bad or have anything happen to you.”

“There is no unhappiness at Neiman-Marcus,” Marianne replies. “Many cities have little areas of no unhappiness. Even the Russians are beginning to build them.”

“Marianne, I’m lucky to have such a smart girl.”

By the time they get home again, Marianne is filled with a cheerful interest in making something of Bobby’s banana garden, while clouds have once more settled on Bobby’s face. In fact, he’s soon indoors unwrapping his Smith and Wesson from an oily rag on the walnut surface of the dining-room table. He loads every chamber with the gleaming copper-and-lead bullets, snaps the cylinder back, and puts the gun in his pocket.

“Babe, I’m going to the store. Back in an hour.”

Bobby scrutinizes the customers at Enrico’s until he finds the hooker Donna. He speaks affably to her, even though she greets him as “the new kid in town.”

“Hey,” he says. “I guess my girl and me stepped all over everybody’s toes. Which we didn’t mean to do. I just wanted to say I sure was sorry. So, this is me saying sure am sorry.”

“That’s all right. Chino came down pretty hard on you.”

“Yeah, he did. But he was right. I was gonna stop by and tell him he was right.”

“Well, he’s there.”

“Should I just fall by?”

“Let me tell him you’re coming.”

Bobby takes this opportunity to leave enough money at the bar to keep Donna drinking until he sees her again. Donna returns from the pay phone. “I told him how you were feeling. He said stop on by. Chino said he don’t hold no grudges if you don’t. But I should warn you: he’s after your lady.”

Bobby heads up the familiar alley, climbs the fire escape, and on the landing is greeted by a really charming Chino, the former Donald Arthur Jones.

He says, “I understand that you are here to prove that you are a gentleman.”

“I like revisiting the scene of the crime.”

“Crime?” Chino grins. “What crime?”

Bobby gazes around the room. “The crime against taste in this creephole you call home. What do you want with those plaster Buddhas? Are you a Buddhist? And that beanbag chair? You make enough money. Is your crud taste necessary?”

Chino stares serenely at Bobby. After a moment, he asks, “Where is the gun?”

“How come lowlifes have always got hippie books on their bookshelf? What’s this, Watership Down? The Hobbit? What a soft heart you must have. Let’s have something to eat.”

In the kitchen, Bobby takes a plate down from the cabinet and gets some silverware out of a drawer. He sets a place. He goes to the refrigerator and takes out a container.

“Mind if I take some of this organic yogurt?”

“Nope.”

“I think it’s wonderful you should be having all these wonderful things. They’re so good for your karma. What do you do, sit down with the Mother Earth News, eat some yogurt, and then go knife somebody?”

“Not quite.”

“Join me,” Bobby orders. He seems possessed. He’s thinking of killing Chino, but he’s modulated that to possession. Chino sits.

“Where are those pictures you showed me the other day?”

“Under the bookend.”

Bobby wanders absently into the other room. He doesn’t remember the bookend. Chino gets up and quietly begins to follow him. He picks up Bobby’s dinner knife. As he clears the corner, Bobby swings the short heavy revolver into his face. Chino drops the silverware and totters around like an old man, holding his face and cooing. Bobby strolls back with the pictures and gestures for Chino to sit down. He sits.

“This is dinner. This is what you’re gonna eat, Chino.”

“I can’t eat those. I can’t eat Polaroids. They’ve got chemicals on them.”

“You have to eat them. If you don’t, I can’t answer for my actions. You can put any seasoning on them you like.” Bobby throws the ghastly pictures on Chino’s plate, one by one.

“What’s this one?”

“My kid. Name of Jesse.”

“How old is he?”

“Ten.”

“He looks about three in this picture. You shouldn’t have this picture in here. Who’s his mother?”

“Used to be one of my girls,” says Chino gloomily.

“You don’t have to eat those pictures.”

Bobby wanders disconsolately out the door. The curtain is falling.

“See you.”

“ ’Bye.”

Donna’s features have grown vaguer since Bobby left. He sits down next to her. She says, “I’ve been cocktailing since you left. Thanks for the drinks.”

“I feel the best thing would be for you to come back to my place.”

“What’d you say to Chino?”

“Not that much.”

“Did you hit him?”

“Once I had to.”

“You hit him …?”

“Had to.”

“I’ll come with you. Will I be able to work?”

“That’s the whole idea.”

“Here’s the thing. You’ve made it so I have to hide out, and, like, I’ve had to hide before. But you’re not necessarily my next guy.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Four.”

“Names?”

“Jan, Marielle, and La Costa. And Donna.”

“All Caucasian?”

“La Costa is Negro. We never see Marielle. She went to college. She has her own clients. She buys municipal bonds.”

“Is this all you guys do?”

“Jan dances. What about your lady?”

“I’m in love with her. I could marry her. It could happen. She’s Caucasian.”

“All the pimps fall in love with La Costa. If you see Chino again, it will be because of La Costa.”

Before they ever get inside the door, Bobby wants to know how Donna likes the view. She says, “It’s great.” Bobby asks her if she remembers tricking him into going to Chino’s the first time.

“Yes.… ”

Bobby slams her across the face. She takes two staggering steps with her arms hanging. “That was the last mistake you’re allowed.”

Marianne opens the door in time to glimpse the blow. Bobby is a bit breathless from the adrenaline; it was like real exposure in rock climbing. Marianne asks what’s going on.

Bobby says, “I was just explaining to Donna that the fastest way to get a low red-cell count is to have someone cut your throat.” He feels the gravity on his noggin.

But Donna is the first to go into the house, introducing herself to Marianne as she passes. When they follow her in, Marianne says, to improve the situation, “I’m afraid Bobby sees himself as dangerous.”

“I’m afraid of what else he sees,” says Donna.

“Have you eaten?”

“Not today. I sat around Enrico’s, and I guess I drank too much. Bunch of mixed drinks.”

In the kitchen, Marianne begins to reheat some homemade lentil soup for Donna, who is applying cleansing cream under her eyes, reverting to the plain midwestern girl she is. The day is done. Soon she is tucked in, in the spare bedroom. Bobby puts cheese melba toast and a glass of wine next to her bed. He works the tiny concerns to the point of dowdiness.

“You might get an appetite during the night. Tomorrow, we get your clothes.”

“Thank you.”

“And maybe we can ring up the other girls for a drink in the evening.”

“Maybe,” says Donna, eyeing his lips for slobber. No sign.

“Y’know what I mean.”

“I know.”

Upstairs, while Marianne lies in bed reading, Bobby stretches out on the floor and sketches the floor plan of the house on a large sheet of butcher paper. Marianne thinks for a moment; then it dawns on her. “If you’re planning on turning this into a whorehouse, count me out. I don’t see that as an intelligent atmosphere.”

“What else could you do?” asks Bobby maladroitly.

“I could go back to work! Working in a whorehouse is not the only option I have! I never had such a discussion until I met you!”

“You were the one who took on that cop with such alacrity.”

“Not alacrity, you bastard, I was fool enough to indulge myself in your wishful thinking.”

“Which I see you now resent.”

“You bet your life! And especially since you don’t seem to have any conviction about it yourself. Listen to me, Bobby, I am reading a nice book by Jane Austen, and tonight I have no further desire to discuss whorehouses. Go talk to the whore downstairs, if you can’t stand the pressure. I’m reading my book.”

“I might.”

I am on probation for soliciting. One slip and I will be jailed or assigned to community service. I prefer Jane Austen.”

“I’m going downstairs to talk to Donna.”

Bobby’s bathrobe trails behind him as he descends. Bobby opens the spare room. It is empty. The drawers on the first floor are all pulled out. Marianne’s purse is upended, looted. He turns his wallet inside out in futile hope. When he treads upstairs and back into the bedroom, Marianne inquires, without looking up from her book, “We been robbed?”

“Yup.”

“Did she eat the little snacks you left by her little table?”

“I guess there wasn’t time.”

Bobby goes to bed, outfitted in disappointment. Yet once the lights are off, he falls into a deep sleep, dreaming of ambulance service in the Ardennes. Then he wakes up and snaps the light. Marianne is already awake, lost, her eyes going nowhere.

“Darling?”

“What, baby?”

“Have you had thousands of lovers?” he asks.

“Oh, babe.”

“Tell me.”

“No,” she says.

“How many?”

“I don’t know, darling.”

“You don’t even know how many?”

“I didn’t count.”

“Count. You mean it would be necessary to start counting?”

“Oh, Bobby, can’t we just sleep?”

“I have to get this off my chest.”

“Why do you have to?”

“I can’t sleep,” says Bobby. “Under fifty?”

“I think so.”

“But close.”

“Bobby, I don’t know! My God, we don’t even make love ourselves lately!”

“What a heartache I’ve got.”

“I’m starting to get mad!”

“Don’t get mad at me. My heart is aching, God damn it!”

“If you’ve got such a heartache, why are you trying to turn me into a hooker?”

“To wipe those aches away!”

“Well, let me tell you right now, I’m not about to reconstruct my past for you. So you can quit worrying about that one.”

“Yeah, but you had one.”

“So did you.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Did you sleep with that English rotter?”

“Obviously yes.”

“I’ll bet he was a bum lay.”

“You’ll never know.”

“I can guess.”

“Let’s put it this way,” says Marianne measuredly. “He beat the hell out of that plainclothesman.”

“Don’t keep running my face in that one!”

“Bobby, honey, you’d better figure out what you’re up to. I mean, this is all very adventurous, but if you can’t handle it, you better think of something you can.”

“Is that some kind of attack on my nerve?” Bobby says sharply. Who is this dumb bunny trying to put on the spot?

Marianne has no trouble finding Donna at her predictable table the next day. The same bartender is in the corner like a heron spotting minnows.

“May we have our belongings back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

“I’m not very nice. Blah, blah, blah.”

“That’s right,” says Marianne. “You’re a useless girl. And your fingerprints are on everything. I’m going from here to the police unless we can have our things back.”

“Better have your boyfriend go. You’ve got a record.”

“That’s fine. Is that how you would prefer it?”

“I’ll tell you something better. All your stuff is up to Chino’s place, ’n’ that. Your boyfriend went up and hassled my guy, and it was a question of my getting back in the first place. I’m not interested in being a house pet with a view of the ocean. Part two, I love my guy. Can you follow that? If you want your stuff, go get it.”

“Thank you very much, I will.”

It must be that Chino can feel the vibration of someone on the fire escape because once more he is smiling on the landing, this time at brave Marianne, who seems primly ascending, like someone distributing leaflets for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Good morning,” she says. “I’ve come to see about my things.”

Chino holds the door for her. Still sleepy, he looks more like Donald Arthur Jones; “Chino” is for as the day goes on. But it does seem the latter is coming on rather rapidly.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “The odds and ends Donna lifted. The money is in my bank and the credit cards are back in circulation.”

“Well,” Marianne says, feeling very much as though she were at the World Trade Center, “start thinking about how you’re going to get them for me.”

“Why?” Chino is narrowing down.

“Because we need them.”

“Who? You and what’s his name, Errol Flynn? Errol Flynn needs them. You don’t.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That means you’re not going anywhere. Errol Flynn is going to have to do his own cooking and washing until he can find some more live-in help. His old lady just found a new job.”

“I’m looking for a girl named Donna. You remember, a tall brunette who sits at that table, that one there, next to the sidewalk?”

“I don’t know her,” says the bartender.

“Come on, she sits right there! I left a hundred bucks with you to cover her drinks.”

“I don’t remember that either.”

“She’s here every day!”

“Lower your voice or I’ll have you bounced.”

“I … I’m sorry. I have a job to do. I want to clean up this neighborhood. I could’ve used your help.”

“Sorry.”

“If it turns out I needed your help bad, I’m coming back to see you.” Bobby’s got his hand on the gun, and he’d like to shoot this fucker’s lights out.

“Whatever blows your dress up,” says the unflappable bartender as he swishes mai tai glasses in the suds.

Bobby stands on Chino’s landing with his ear to the door. He can hear incoherent murmuring from within. He’s got the gun in front of him and he’s turning the knob as slowly as he can. The latch clicks and the door is free. Bobby kicks it wide open, jumping inside with the gun held two-handed, straight in front of him.

Three Chinese house painters babble in abject terror in the completely bare flat. Bobby gapes at the emptiness as he backs out amid the oriental cacophony.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry.…”

“So sorry,” they echo, nervously trying to get with it.

In a regally anonymous condominium, high in the middle of the city, each of whose windows gives onto a merciless view of the ocean and the far bridges of the bay, the silent corridors reach past the sealed doors like a nervous system. A door opens; a well-dressed man backs into the corridor trailing a woman’s arm. It drops away and swings back into the doorway. He says thank you and goes. The girl is not Marianne; she is on the couch beyond in a nightgown. But the door closes.

At the Garden Court the next day, under the splendid green-house roof, Chino is having lunch with Marianne, whose terror and beautiful clothes have made her ravishing, beautiful. Chino is attempting a vain, somehow intimate speech to her. He seems to think only of Marianne.

“My job is to provide the illicit. Is that not so? In recent years I am up against hippies, sluts, and, worst of all, experimenters. And many of our country’s people have become queer. What can I offer a successful man besides mere convenience? I am not McDonald’s! I wish to be something more than a drive-up window. My clients are not … swingers! My clients are powerful, friends of the system. On the level of pure merchandise, they are happy with what I give and they … remunerate me so I can go on as a well-paid, quietly efficient person of crime. But … I think now I have something for the discerning, something which is not now easily obtained, not without crazy and needless risk. My clients have families and concerns; they need to express themselves.”

“What is it you can offer them?” Marianne asks, in terror of this knife-wielding animal playing the gent at the table.

“I can offer them an unwilling lady, an intelligent woman who hates everything that is happening to her.”

“But what if I learn to like it?” Marianne asks him desperately. Learning to like it is the only card she holds.

“Then you are just another one of the girls. You become commonplace.”

“To whom?” A disappearing pulse of courage.

“To me, to yourself. What’s the difference?”

Jane Adams, the lady realtor, a woman of energy and brains, is on the porch of Bobby’s Presidio Heights house running down a rumor. Jane hates this. She wanted to make a living and this is it. The porch is covered with glass from a broken bottle that has been thrown from inside. Jane states as she enters, “Why not say it? I’ve had complaints.”

The place is a mess, with half-finished meals and newspapers slung over the furniture.

“This certainly proves the value of a damage deposit,” says Jane, hating the position she’s in, this real-estate sham. Every time she has said “ranchette,” “bungalow,” “younger couple,” “handyman’s dream,” has been, she now feels, a black mark on her soul. But Bobby’s hauteur helps her through the moment.

“I couldn’t agree more,” he says jauntily.

“I’m thinking in terms of eviction.”

“You’ll need a hot lawyer.”

“I’ll get one. I rather thought your friend would be tidier.”

“She’s been kidnapped. Tough to be tidy, under the circumstances.”

It’s very quiet.

“Have you reported this to the police?”

“On, yes, first thing.”

“And what happened?”

“They said she had merely left. She had a record, which they said indicated that she had simply moved on.”

“A record for what?”

“Prostitution.”

“Well, I would never have guessed that!”

“Please don’t evict me. I’ll get a maid.”

“You look like you could cry.”

“Can I touch you?” Bobby asks.

“We shook hands once,” she said.

“Can I touch your hand again? I’m desperate.”

When Bobby has finished seducing Jane in the sordid shambles of the bedroom, he says, “I want my Marianne back.” His throat seizes. Tears stream onto his wino face.

“You make me feel like a stand-in.”

“You are a stand-in.”

This flings Jane into all the ugliness of her trade, and before she can stop herself she says, “I’m going to have your ass evicted if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll see you in hell.”

But then Bobby begins to cry a little, and once again she hates herself for being mean, a sensation Bobby has not experienced. He whimpers, “Please help me.” He’s beginning to acquire the tiniest bit of a new erection.

During the long day in bed, Bobby tells Jane everything he knows about Marianne, Donna, and Chino. Plus what he heard about Jan and La Costa. He keeps checking to be sure that Jane really knows the town. Too, he likes her hard flat-sided buttocks, her irrational exclamations, and her lingerie. Sometimes he cries a little, but Jane is drawn to him because he is crying less and less. Finally, he has a shower and puts on his striking clothes. How handsome! she will recall thinking.

Chino is in the luxurious living room of his condominium. He is speaking to Max, a hearty mid-forties salmon canner and developer from up north. Chino plays a marvelous new role; compared to the love birds in Presidio Heights, Chino and Max are just plain happier.

“North Beach had grown tiresome, even to me,” Chino explains. “The fire escapes made everything a little vulgar. Would you not say so?”

“I accept your work, Donald.” Max smiles. Chino has gone back to “Donald Arthur Jones.” Max is the only one with manners enough to accept it. The girls keep calling him Chino, as if he were some beaner from down yonder.

“And that one little door with no place to go. And the aging beatniks! Ugh! But that one little door made it seem so much like a drive-up window. I’m no McDonald’s!”

“How much is that fresh face?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

“Rather steep, isn’t it?”

“You know the law. Think of my risk. She’s very pretty, very educated. She has no reason to be here.”

Max pays him, remarking, “Don’t overbook her. A thing like that can lose its bloom overnight.”

Chino looks like a pixie as he opens the door to Marianne’s room. She lies curled up on an enormous bed covered by a huge, wholesome, handmade quilt. She faces the wall. She hears the door close, then Max’s gruff voice: “Get up.”

Three in the morning and the same bed. Marianne is bound, gagged, and naked, eerily delineated by a small amount of light that is sufficient, nonetheless, to reveal her tangled hair, stained face, and sense of all-consuming defeat and pollution. The light snaps on and La Costa stands in the doorway staring expressionlessly at Marianne. La Costa’s large eyes blink regularly until she has taken it all in. Then she goes into sudden motion, freeing Marianne from the knots that bind her face, hands, and feet. Marianne gets up. The new freedom nauseates her for a moment.

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes. Are you La Costa?”

“Uh huh. Why don’t you come here and lie down?” La Costa makes the ravaged bed with deft, efficient movements. The elephantine Max twisted everything in his ardor.

“I want some water. I want to walk.”

La Costa leads Marianne toward the kitchen, slowly and by the arm.

“When I feel like a child, I cry and suck my thumb. Even in front of a john. But never in front of a pimp. The good pimp has only one weakness, which is his desire to kill whores. He is watching and he is waiting.”

“Like a hawk,” says Marianne.

Back in Marianne’s room you can just make out the two faces as they talk like children at a slumber party.

Marianne asks, “What about Chino, though?”

“I think he’s hilarious.”

“Hilarious.”

“He read that more Americans can recognize the McDonald’s hamburger commercial than the national anthem. So he decided he and McDonald’s were in direct competition.” La Costa begins to sing, “You deserve a break today at McDonald’s.” But she is interrupted, at first by Marianne’s rhythmic sobbing and finally, “I’ve been raped I’ve been raped I’ve been raped.” La Costa rests a hand on Marianne’s back and looks out the window, slowly shaking her head.

In front of Melvin Belli’s office, which is a bogus old San Francisco — style place with a theater-set law library in the front window, two whores are using the reflection to improve their makeup. Belli’s occasional appearances on the other side of the glass are of the same order.

About a block away, Bobby gives Jane a send-off. She is dressed pretty much like the girls at the window. They watch her approach warily.

“What’s happening?” asks Jane.

“We’re innocent, officer,” says the first girl, a Chinese.

“I’m looking for a girl I used to know in the life. Name of Donna.”

“Madonna?”

“Donna.”

“Donna who?”

“Donna from Hamtramck with a chipped tooth.”

“Where did you work?” the Chinese girl wants to know.

“Out of a high rise on Sansome. I had a book.”

“What’d you quit for?” asks the white girl.

“I didn’t like the humiliation.” Jane doesn’t have her heart in this. She doesn’t want to find Donna and she doesn’t want to find Marianne. She feels like a dope in this hooker suit Bobby got her. The cheapie sequined pantyhose are squeezing her ass like an anaconda.

The white girl says. “It isn’t no humiliation unless you don’t get paid. You were never in the life.”

“What’s the difference? I’m not going to stand here and argue all night. Just tell me where a person could bump into Donna.”

“Last time we seen her, which was tonight”—the Chinese girl walks off in disgust and casts a satirical wave to Bobby—“she was working the fake ship at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.”

Bobby and Jane glide down Powell Street in a taxi, headed for Bernstein’s. The imitation ship’s bow projects over the sidewalk. And in front of a window full of back-lit swimming fish stands Donna. The street is Atlantis.

“There she is!”

Bobby jumps out and Donna is gone like a deer. He sprints a few yards and quits. Bobby climbs back in and slumps in real depression.

The driver says, “Give her ten minutes and she’ll be in Moar’s cafeteria.”

At Moar’s, Bobby and Jane get out and rush inside. The door nearly slams in Jane’s face. Inside, Donna sits beneath Benjamino Bufano murals that depict brotherly love. She’s drinking a cup of coffee. They go to her table.

Donna says, “A working girl can’t get nowhere today. You’ve got your nerve.”

“I’m Jane Adams.”

“Are you with the law?”

“Let’s just say I’m helping Bobby find his — find somebody.”

“Bobby’s a God damned deviate, and he had her up there working for free.”

“Up where?”

“Look, I’m not telling anything.”

“Would it take money?” Bobby asks.

“No.”

“Something. What?”

“Pain pills. Fifty thousand Percodans.”

“We could land you in jail.”

“So land me.”

“Donna,” Jane asks, “what’s the problem?”

“The problem is I still think my ship will come in. So far, the only one’s been at Bernstein’s. My cousin married a hippie trial lawyer and got out of the life. They adopted a three-year-old Chicano right off of a Hallmark card and live in Pacific Heights two blocks from the Russian Embassy. What’s wrong with that? My only trip to Pacific Heights and I drew a seventy-year-old eye-ear-nose-throat guy and he had a dead monkey in a footlocker. I gave him his money back. You know what? I can’t stand it. And I won’t talk. And if you don’t get out of here, I’m going to start screaming!”

Somehow the next day, by the time La Costa has gotten Marianne to the cable-car stop, Marianne’s vitality has begun to return. Pragmatic La Costa is not interested in how Marianne got herself into this; to La Costa, Marianne is another prostitute, and, for instance, we all have a story. She says to Marianne, “I think it’s time the rotten little kids had a spree. Marianne, let’s go downtown.”

They descend Powell Street gazing upon the beautiful city. When they pass the Bank of America La Costa says, “Many pimps in there.”

They head for Gump’s department store and proceed to its imperial interior, crossing the great showrooms and on to the Kimono Room, where they play at being old-time courtesans amid the exorbitant women’s clothing. La Costa fills their purses with silk scarves. When Marianne looks startled, La Costa says, “If we’re nabbed, yell ‘racist.’ Tell them you’re high yellow.”

On this same day, Bobby and Jane are downtown shopping in a glamorous Maiden Lane pet store, a splendid room full of South American birds, very carefully observed by an ocelot with an aqua collar.

Bobby explains everything. “I can’t have another day without a hawk. And the only thing legal here is a Colombian broadwing, which is not a first-class hawk.”

“I don’t know one from another,” Jane says, shyly gazing at Bobby.

When the shrouded cage rests on the back seat of the cab between Bobby and Jane, she says demurely, “I always thought hawks just killed chickens.”

Bobby sighs. “That’s only part of the story, Jane.”

Inside the Presidio Heights house, Bobby sets the cage on the floor and removes the shroud.

“Open the cage, Jane.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Open the cage.”

Jane gingerly opens the cage and the hawk comes out, flying around the room with terrible beating wings, to settle finally on the back of the tall chair, where it stares with unforgiving yellow eyes at the amateur pimp and his realtor friend.

The middle of the night at Quickee Char-Broil can be lone-some. The chef sweeps the little flaming pieces of meat onto a tray with salad and hands them over to Chino and Donna. Then the cook becomes the cashier and takes Donna’s money. Condominium Donald is Cheapo Chino again.

Donna carries the tray to the table and puts the meals down carefully. She aches with love. The two sit. Immediately, Chino swaps plates.

“I said rare.” He fills his mouth. “That other God damn thing’s like a baseball glove. How’d you do?”

“Four hundred.”

“Give it ta me.”

Donna hands him the money proudly. Now is her opportunity.

“I want to work in the condo.”

“No room.”

“I’m tired.”

“You want to go back to Petaluma?”

“I’m not from Petaluma.”

“I know a big-time Jap chicken farmer. I’ll send your ass to him in Petaluma.”

“I brought you Marianne, and now I’m working the hotels and she’s in the condo. That’s not fair.”

What an outburst. Chino reaches and seizes her steak in his hand. He squeezes it until beef blood runs between his fingers.

“You shit too,” he says. “See that? That’s your Petaluma face. Gimme your napkin.”

Chino puts her steak down and wipes his hands. He continues, upon reflection.

“Don’t give me no eye. Looking at me like you got nothing to eat.” Impulsively, he shoves the steak down her blouse. Tears stream as the steak bleeds through. Chino is on the verge of raving. “ ‘I wanna be in the condo, I wanna be in the condo.’ How much room you think is there? Huh? Look, I’m no McDonald’s.” He stands in total disgust and turns to the staring fry cook. “Hey.” He menaces him. “Try going blind.” He turns back to Donna, his original fury intact. “I’ll give you a condo. Petaluma Jap chicken condo. I give up.”

He upends her purse on the table.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna make sure there isn’t something in here I should know about. What’s this?”

“Herbal Essence Shampoo.”

“What about this crap?”

“It’s for dry-skin relief. It’s by Revlon.”

“This is the biggest bottle of Excedrin I’ve ever seen. What’s this?”

“Silverfrost. It’s an eye shadow. Also by Revlon. That little box? That’s Aziza two-tone luster shadow.”

“What about this?”

“Supernails.”

Chino pulls out an eyelash curler and tries it on himself. Donna is crying, but she thinks he’s cute. Then a green jar. His face is a question mark.

Donna says, “That’s analgesic balm, for small injuries.”

“Let me ask you something, Miss Whore. Why don’t you take your repair kit and get the fuck out of my life?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then bring me Marianne’s boyfriend. Get him drunk first. Otherwise you’re too ugly to get the job done.”

The condo in the gloaming: long blades of bayside light penetrate the cloud-high dwelling. Marianne is in her room with her new friend, who, dressed for the street, turns shining African eyes on getting it while she can. Marianne is dressed in silk pajamas, part of the basic issue, suggesting a youthful housewife caught in an unsavory trap. Thanks to La Costa, she’s confident she can do a walk-through, keeping her mind’s eye on a better day. Meanwhile, she’s trying to explain Bobby. She says he must have caught her at the right time. She thinks maybe she fell in love with him or, as so many young women say, “I thought so at the time.” “Sometimes,” says Marianne, “you find yourself counting how long you’ve been away from home and sometimes you know you’ll never get there again.”

The door bangs open: Chino.

“You want to head out, La Costa? Marianne’s got a visitor.” La Costa makes a little comic rotary wave and leaves. Then Chino leaves, somewhat in La Costa’s wake, and the door is closed like the shutter of a stalled-out camera. When it blinks open again a huge wavering figure appears and closes the door. This is an enormous man. His tiny briefs are lost in the declivity of flesh that is the last fold of his belly. He’s about fifty and has the ponderous face of an oaf and the baleful gazing eyes we associate with martyrs whose stories have been lost.

“Do you like me?” he wants to know. His ring finger hooks the corner of his minute briefs. Desperately, Marianne recalls the buffalo paddock, the fog, the lost, adventurous dreaming of long ago. It was coming at her.

Chino and La Costa are watching a Western on TV.

Chino says, “Guy in there with Marianne?”

“Yeah?”

“He designs golf courses.”

“Is that so.”

“His wife’s a concert pianist, but he made her quit.”

“What’s he gonna make Marianne do?”

“No telling.”

La Costa is staring at the television. “Is that Montgomery Clift?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think he’s about to kick John Wayne’s butt. Don’t he just move his eyes cute, though?”

The golf-course designer appears in a blue suit.

“Highly overrated,” he says.

Chino stares, at a loss for words.

“And this pitch about resistance? I’m glad it’s on your phone bill. I’ll tell you what she is: she’s a whore. I saw through her in a minute. She’s simply a prostitute like Mandy there. Don’t call me again. I can do better at the Masters in Augusta.”

Chino is abashed. This topflight professional has made him feel like a crumbum. Then he’s mad. He’s infected with anger. It’s like some incoherent mind scabies crying for a final scratch. He makes no remark as the golf-course designer shoves open the door and leaves.

Dusty and battered after a long fight, Montgomery Clift and John Wayne are casting glances of new-won respect at each other. There’s a big free sky behind them as well as admiring townspeople to watch them become friends.

Chino stares at the screen, trying to get his bearings.

In the kitchen in Presidio Heights, Jane, pressing out little silhouette men on a buttered cookie sheet, has to dust her hands to answer the door. It is Donna, and she tells Jane how to find Marianne.

La Costa makes up Marianne’s eyes and powders her golden cheeks with a sable brush. Neither of them says a word.

Bobby comes in from the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where he saw a documentary about the end of the elephants. “They had these fabulous aerial photographs of elephants in their death throes. Then there was this terrific shot of an enormous bull who had died long ago, and all he was was like this terrible emblem on the desert floor.”

Jane replies, “You can find Marianne any night after nine in the Room of the Dons at the Mark Hopkins. She’s a whore.” Then Jane says to Bobby, “Stay with me.”

Bobby says, “Stay with you? Without your cross-referenced street guide, I wouldn’t have been with you in the first place.”

The Room of the Dons is a dark, paneled room. Marianne sits at the bar against the backdrop of paintings that depict the mythical Amazons of an imaginary California. Bobby sits next to her and rests his head on her shoulder. He holds her arm in both of his hands.

“Oh, my baby.”

“Hello, Bobby.”

“Has it been awful?”

“No.”

“Can we go?”

“We need a room.”

“Can we go home?” says Bobby.

“I’ve got a place.”

Once they’re inside Marianne’s room in the condominum, Bobby turns his eyes toward her in terrified suspension. He walks to the window and its pricey vista.

“Am I going to have to pay?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Then I think you’re trapped.”

“No, you are,” she says.

Bobby hands her his wallet. “I don’t want to hear the numbers. Take out how much it is.”

Marianne peels the bills into her purse and gives Bobby his wallet back.

“Shall I undress you?” she asks.

“Did you take out for that?”

“I took out for everything,” she says slowly. And for once in Bobby’s life pure desire pours through him like flame. For once.

Having quietly let himself in, Chino waits his turn in the front room. But, as with Bobby, nothing happens quite as he has foreseen it. Because Marianne’s door bursts open and Bobby flings himself into the hallway, a knife plunged in the base of his neck, jetting fatal quantities of blood on everything. Bobby clambers down the hallway toward Chino like a bride in a dream, smearing the walls as he goes, reaching, reaching toward the only man in the place.

The bloody bed is repeatedly ignited by flashbulbs. The officer turns to the press for a moment of candor. The people have to know. A stretcher passes covered with a sheet, the anonymous contents of which constitute a valediction to every long walk off every short pier in America.

The officer says, “We have no clues. Okay? You can see he was well off. He has no record of employment. Y’with me so far? Perhaps he was living on a trust fund. Since we don’t know what was here, we don’t know what was stolen. I think there’s a very real chance that, as a man of independent means, he kept too many valuables around. Okay? Such men are very relaxed about their possessions. You could pick the lock; you could buy the doorman. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. But this much is certain: I cannot offer any encouragement that your readers will ever hear the end of this story.”