Color returned to Elsie’s cheeks as she ate. “What a crazy day! It’s like a dream. Even sitting here.”
Marion looked at Jack and murmured, “Elsie says this same thing almost every day.”
It was an odd day for Jack too, and in a happy way. He didn’t want to ruin the atmosphere by inquiring if Linderman was letting up, even if the answer might be that Elsie hadn’t seen him in weeks. It was enough to watch Elsie polishing off a brace of lambchops, splashing ketchup on her french fries. She chattered away to Marion. Did Marion think the taxi pictures would be better than the lobby pictures? Elsie thought so, because she thought she was better in action.
“Don’t go to that school this afternoon,” Marion said, wrinkling her nose. “You can afford to miss one session. Let’s just go home, okay?”
While Jack was making coffee, Elsie asked where the bathroom was, and Jack showed her. Then Jack took the coffee into the living-room, and raked the fire.
“Are you from New York, Marion?” Jack couldn’t tell from her accent. She spoke rather slowly and distinctly, as if she might be practicing good diction for her singing.
“Me?” Marion smiled. “Where I’m from I’d rather not say. From all over Pennsylvania, various towns. I’m more or less an orphan. My father—left, and my mother dumped me somewhere. At an orphanage when I was about five. I don’t remember much.”
This sounded sad to Jack. “You seem to be doing all right.”
“Lots of people have had it worse. Old cliche, but it helps and it’s true. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’ve been working since I was seventeen,” she said with a roll of her round, light brown eyes, “and never was a hooker. I can tune pianos. I learned. I could also be a librarian, if I needed a job, because I took a course and I have a diploma.—Hey, where is that Elsie?” Marion stood up. “I don’t want her to faint or something. The bathroom’s back here?”
The bathroom was empty.
“Elsie?” Jack called in the direction of the bedroom.
“She’s gone,” said Marion with resignation. “Her coat’s gone. She went to that four o’clock class.”
Jack felt jolted. The apartment seemed suddenly empty, even with Marion Gill in it. “What class is this?”
“I think it’s English today. Literature—grammar.—Typical of Elsie. I should’ve hung onto her every minute.”
“Could you have?” Jack laughed. “Come on and finish your coffee.”
“Don’t you want to work?”
Jack shook his head. “No.—Tell me about Elsie. How’d you meet her?”
“In a bar. How does anybody meet anybody? Not the Star-Walkers, another place where I was playing one night. Elsie’s just a kid. But she has something. Drive, I think. I hope.”
Jack again thought of Linderman and decided to ask. “I hope you and Elsie—especially Elsie—aren’t being pestered any more by this old guy with the dog.”
“Oh, Ralph!—No, we scared him once. On Minetta Street. Maybe he’s still interested, but thank God he doesn’t seem to know where we live.”
“Where do you live?”
“Greene Street. The SoHo part. A friend’s in Europe, and he rented me his studio, cheap. It’s not one of the big lofts, but it’s still a studio-type thing, big enough for two, and I was living alone when I met Elsie, so—I invited her to move in.” Marion glanced up from her coffee cup.
Jack was thinking that Elsie and Marion must be very happy just now. And wouldn’t Ralph Linderman flip! “This school—”
“Oh, yes! Natalia recommended it. Elsie loves it and now she can afford it, with the money she gets from modeling. It’s ten hours a week and plenty of homework in the reading department.”
“You think she’ll finish the course?”
Marion hesitated, then her calm lips smiled. “Not sure. But she’ll get something out of it. It’ll help her shed some of her inferiority complex—some of her shyness. She’s not really shy when you come down to it. She’s tough as nails and she knows what she wants.”
Jack slumped in the armchair and put a foot up on his knee. “And what’s that?”
“She wants to experiment with everything. Sometimes she talks about being an actress, but I don’t believe that. It’s just that an actress, for a time, plays a lot of roles.—Elsie could be a dancer, for instance, while she’s still young.”
“Boy, could she!”
“Well—” Marion got up. “I better split. Thanks for having us. Thanks for being so nice to Elsie.”
Jack said nothing as he got up.
“I love your apartment. And the pictures.” Marion gazed at the de Kooning, not for the first time. “You work here too?”
“Yes. Want to see?” Jack said on sudden impulse, maybe because Marion seemed now so close to Elsie. He led the way down the hall. “This is it,” Jack said, pushing the curtain to one side. “My salt mine.”
“Well! This looks like a busy little spot!”
She didn’t enter the room as had Elsie, just gazed at his worktable, rimmed with clutter as ever, at the portfolios leaning against the walls and laid on racks. “Is that Elsie? It is, isn’t it?” Her smile grew wider as she looked at the yellow drawing on red paper. “You did that?—Brilliant!” She took a breath as if she might be going to ask if she could have it, or have a photocopy, perhaps, but she said nothing more.
Jack didn’t want to make a copy of that drawing, he realized. He walked with Marion toward the apartment door. “What happened to Genevieve?—Or do you know her?”
“Oh, Genevieve. I met her once. Maybe twice.—You’ve met her?”
“Elsie brought her to a party around Christmas time.”
“Oh, at your friend Louis’.—You asked what about her, I don’t know, but I hope she gets back with her old girlfriend. Fran, I think her name is. I heard Fran was very upset by Elsie. When Elsie came on the scene, I mean.” Marion turned as she reached the apartment door. “Genevieve’s the motherly type and I suppose Elsie liked that for a while.—Fran looks like a tough cookie, but I heard she and Genevieve had been together for two or three years before Genevieve met Elsie.” Marion gave a laugh and opened the door. “Who cares? Thanks very much, Jack. See you again, I hope.”
“Hope so! Thanks for coming.”
Jack decided that he liked Marion Gill. She looked honest, she didn’t take her guitar-playing too seriously, and maybe she was the best kind of girl Elsie could have run into.
The telephone rang around 6, and it was Natalia. Louis wanted her to have a drink with him, and would Jack mind if she wasn’t home till around 8?
“Of course not, darling.—Just a drink?”
“Well—I think so. If not, I’ll call you again in an hour or so. Anything new?”
“No.—Elsie and her friend were here for lunch.”
“Marion too? That’s nice.—Talk to you later, Jack.”
Jack returned to a novel about arson, but not with the same pleasure as before Natalia’s phone call. He hadn’t any idea when Natalia would be home, maybe at 10, maybe not until later. But she’d call him, and that was something. Not like, Jack recalled, several dates he had had with her before they married, when Natalia had either stood him up because she forgot, or had been so fantastically late, you couldn’t call it being late. Natalia at twenty-two hadn’t known night from day. He had never been angry, only anxious, puzzled, walking the floor, or lingering in a restaurant, if the date had been at a restaurant. At first he had suspected that she wanted to tease him, but this was not so. Natalia was quite uncalculating. She had simply been being herself. She still was, but she had improved slightly, because of the teamwork necessary to bring up a child, Jack supposed. “I can’t believe I’ve had her,” Natalia had said a couple of times with a near grimace as she looked at Amelia. Jack remembered Natalia’s terror of giving birth in the last weeks of her pregnancy. He didn’t like to recall that. He had felt guilty, and had feared that she might turn against him, and then at the birth, at which Jack had been
present until Natalia had shouted at him to leave the room, she had been quite brave, Jack thought.
“Ah, Christ,” Jack said with a sigh, and tossed the book onto the sofa. He put his head back and closed his eyes. He’d scrape up something to eat for Amelia, and maybe there was something on TV to amuse them both before he got her to bed, he hoped, by 9. He could call up the Armstrongs and take Amelia and himself over to West Eleventh Street very likely, and stay for dinner, but he didn’t want to go to the Armstrongs’.
Natalia called just before 8, and said that Louis wanted her to stay on for a little while.
“Where are you?”
“We’re in a bar on East Fifty-fourth. It’s a restaurant too. Louis is sort of depressed—you know? Wants to talk for a while.”
Jack knew. Sometimes he thought Louis was rather unconcerned, rude, in regard to him. But now Louis had a fatal disease. Or that was the latest, and Jack had to believe it, had to act as if he believed it. “Yep. I understand. Eat something. Don’t be too late, honey. Tomorrow’s not Sunday.—My love to Louis.”
“I’ll tell him. Thanks, Jack. Bye now.”
Jack felt gloomy for a few seconds. Once he had been annoyed, even slightly angry, when Natalia had stayed out late two nights in one week. Had she been with Sylvia or with Louis? Jack couldn’t remember, but he remembered that Amelia had been small, still crawling more than walking. He had said something to Natalia, and she had replied, “We can afford a baby-sitter, if you want to go out. Or come out with me and (whoever it was). I’m not going to be cornered, Jack, by a household.” He remembered those last words, spoken with a rare flash in Natalia’s eyes, which seemed to illuminate a landscape in her that he hadn’t been aware of before. Well, cornered, and household. Jack had to agree. They weren’t living in some primitive society in which a woman certainly and a man probably were trapped and fated to live forever on a small patch of territory. If Jack had pressed too hard, Natalia would have walked out, Jack was sure. She still would.
Around midnight, Jack got into bed to read, but the arson book had lost its appeal. Jack looked over the bookshelves on Natalia’s side of the bed. A section of feminist stuff. Galbraith, not tonight. Kafka, no. The Unquiet Grave was more like it. Jack pulled out the slender paperback. Natalia had marked a few things with tiny angles at the beginning and end of sentences or paragraphs in her older and stolen copy, Jack remembered. She had talked about the book before they were married. Natalia had already marked the new paperback with a few little right angles.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Cyril Connolly’s two pages under WOMEN Jack remembered reading before. Natalia had again marked:
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman’s desire for revenge outlasts all other emotions.
Jack pondered this. Hard to imagine Natalia being vindictive toward ex-boyfriends, or toward him if they ever broke up. But then Natalia wasn’t like most women; she had more sense of humor than most, more logic as well as insight, he thought, maybe therefore more objectivity. At any rate, primitive she was not. He remembered her remark on feminism: “A lot of girls like to be sex-objects while they’re young and pretty, when they’ve got a job and all, then they’re not prepared for being dropped when they’re thirty-five or so, married or not.” It had gone something like that. Natalia meant that they were often dropped by their boyfriends or divorced by their husbands who often married a woman of the same type, but younger. Natalia had no patience with “angry females” aged thirty-five and forty, who had decided that men were their enemies.
Now Jack was sleepy, and he put out the light.
The faint clunk of the apartment door closing awakened him. He heard Natalia tiptoeing, hanging her coat by the hall light.
“Hey,” Jack said as loudly as he dared, not wanting to awaken Amelia. “You don’t have to pussyfoot.”
“Hi, Jack. Did I wake you? Sorry,” she whispered, gripping the doorjamb.
She looked a bit tipsy and tired, and Jack adored her when she was like this, because she was usually in a quiet good humor and made revealing remarks sometimes. He looked at his watch. Five past 3. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
Jack heard the toothpaste tube fall into the basin, and smiled. The shower gushed, but not for long.
Natalia came in naked, groping for pajamas or nightgown—she wore both alternately and unpredictably—then she put out the bathroom light and fell into bed. “Gosh, what a night!”
Jack waited. “He’s not talking about—death and stuff.”
“No-o. Well, not directly.” She reached for the last cigarette, maybe the last, from the pack that was nearly always on her side of the bed, along with a cricket lighter and an ashtray.
Jack had a glimpse of her profile in the lighter’s glow, her strong and rather thick nose, blond hair damp around her face.
“You don’t mind if I stayed so late with him, do you? After all, he’s not going to be here long.” Her tone was apologetic, with the accent on long.
“Of course, I don’t mind, honey.”
Silence. Then she almost laughed as she said, “There was a man with a little monkey in the bar. A little gray monkey, very lively. He—”
“A real monkey?”
“Yes!” she said through an irrepressible laugh. “The man was teaching him how to pick people’s pockets. He was taking things out of men’s—jacket pockets.”
“That should’ve cheered Louis up.”
“He was cheerful enough. Told me a couple of good jokes. I can’t remember them now, but I will tomorrow.” A very long silence, long enough for Natalia to put her cigarette out. “Louis has Weltschmerz. It’s as if he’s standing on a height somewhere, looking down on life—or the world and noticing certain things. Windmills—white horses—running boys on a beach somewhere.”
“You haven’t asked about Elsie.”
“Oh, Elsie,” she said in a happy, lingering tone. “She phoned just as I was leaving the gallery. Sounded happy as a clam! Louis spoke with her too. He’s very fond of her, you know?”
“I know,” Jack said, eyes closed, enjoying the warmth of Natalia’s body though they were not touching each other, enjoying her soft, sleepy voice most of all.
“Elsie was wondering whether you liked her new girlfriend.”
“I especially do, matter of fact.”
Natalia gave a great sigh. “Oh-h, Jack, wake me up in time tomorrow.”
It might be a Fernet-Branca morning, Jack thought, Natalia’s favorite hangover cure, but he had seen Natalia much drunker and tireder, and she’d always made it if she wanted to.
21
In early March, Ralph Linderman took a job at the Hot Arch Arcade on Eighth Avenue in the 80s. He hated the place, but the pay came out to thirteen dollars more a week than he had been earning. His hours were 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., busiest time for the arcade, which was open “24 hours day & nite”, as a sign proclaimed in yellow lightbulbs under the arched name of the place, also in yellow lights, above it. As arcades went, and this meant video games, slot machines, candy and pop-corn machines, air-rifle range, juke boxes, the Hot Arch was smallish, having a long and narrow form, but by the same token intimate and crowded, with people often elbow to elbow. Incredible the number of idle young men and girls at 2 in the morning, and from the look of them they had been idle all day too. The dregs of humanity, Ralph thought. For a few days, he told himself that he had made a mistake in opting for this site to do his guard work, but gradually—even at the end of the first week—he realized that he relished the atmosphere in an odd way. He told himself that he was learning ever more about people. Though what he was learning was depressing, it might prove useful, might be the kind of lore that would protect him in future. Worst for Ralph to endure was the nonstop music, not plain noise, not merely one banal and blaring song, but two or three
mixed. Even this had a bright side, if he looked at it the right way: the mingling made it cacophony, relieved it of the label of music, which Muzak still had, music with a beginning and an end. This was insane mankind piling disorder upon disorder. If it deafened and killed people, more people were born every day. The cacophony never had to stop, because machines created it.
And the hookers! The variety surpassed that of 8th Street. Red coarse lips, high heels most of them, but some wore oversized blue jeans, army camouflage uniforms, circus gear with black tights, white boots and short jacket straining over bosoms as big as footballs. And the hair! Wigs or blown-up yellow or white mountains of stuff that looked like spun glass, or black hair so lacquered, it looked like freshly laid tar. Then there was a skinhead hooker or two with no hair at all, scalp daubed with pink and blue. The very thin girl in the camouflage uniform was a skinhead, and she looked like a young boy prisoner of some kind at first glance, sad-faced too. The Arcade had a bouncer or shover-awayer at the door, a burly fellow in a mussed white shirt, bow-tie and dark suit, but mostly he chuckled and even greeted the hookers, let them come in and wander around. Why not? They attracted customers for the Arcade.
Ralph sat inside the doorway on the right as one entered. The cash register was opposite him on the other side of the entrance, some twenty feet away. Many articles such as T-shirts, postcards, and toy animals and dolls had to be paid for at the cash register. Drunks or drugged people often protested over “a mistake” at the cash register, but that was the bouncer’s affair, if things got rough. Ralph was to watch out for hold-up attempts, and he had a bell behind him that made a noise and also alerted the police. Also behind him, six or eight photographs of wanted people and known pickpockets and muggers were thumbtacked to the wall. Ralph was to watch out for them.
…and when we do it do it do it…
you’ll make me…yeee-oooo—do it do it
do it do it…
Eight hours of such “music and song” Ralph had to endure daily. The theme was sexual intercourse, the music always the same, a monotonous tempo, poing-poing-poing-poing of electronic tones, apes-in-the-trees stuff intended to bring out the primitive. Ralph imagined the apes blacks, sexually obsessed, crouching in trees and maybe masturbating, or ogling one another in an effort to call attention to their private parts. A dyed blonde worked the cash register most of the nights Ralph was on duty. This woman was heavy-set and tough, her mind strictly on taking in the cash.