I was in no mood now to aspire to the stars. I gave my name to her obviously newly risen face—before she applied make-up it was difficult to see that she had any eyes at all, though with liner and shadow and mascara in place, one saw little else, and with a certain forward brush and frizz of hair she could resemble a lemur. Of course, with my taste for tall blondes I am admittedly a bigot towards a person of Alice’s breed.
Alice’s coiffure was covered now with an off-white bandanna. My name, which she had also heard from Tomas Villanueve, meant as little to her as my person.
I added: “Natalie’s friend?” But I knew of old that she was impenetrable on any subject but her love-hate relationship with him to whom she habitually referred as “my guy,” a term that in my always questing ear I heard as the title of a Chinese dish, all the more when it was conjoined with the diminutive of his Christian name, Douglas, and delivered, with her perhaps impedimented disregard for the purity of consonants, as Mai gai Duck.
“Natalie?” said she, pursing her lips quizzically as if she had no better memory of her long-time roommate.
Suddenly I was overcome by a sense of the absurdity of my standing there begging for an acknowledgment of my peculiar existence from this little person, I who had but lately witnessed a double murder of the most extravagant kind, in fact a legendary mobster-slaying that might well take its place in the annals of gangster Grand Guignol with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the rubbing out of Crazy Joe Gallo in Umberto’s Clam House; all it needed to be cherished by posterity was a memorable name.
“Out of my way,” I said, and without waiting for Alice to comply, I proceeded through the door Bakewell-style, which is to say, with the intent of forcing her retreat with the threat of my superior bulk. She did not back up, however, and she was a sturdy little thing, plump but firm. Her breasts and belly felt, to the instantly sensitized facade of my own thorax and loins, as if they were nude under the housecoat. And immediately I thought better of her than I had thus far in our remote acquaintanceship.
I took one discreet step backward; however, this did not seem to alter our relative positions; she was quite as fleshly evident as before.
Nor was Alice repulsive of countenance, for that matter. I realized at this point that I had never looked carefully at her in the expectation of being pleased, owing to her habit of appearing at inconvenient times.
So much for that. I still expected, as I looked down, to see an expression of her negative regard for me.
Instead she was grinning, and she said: “Hi.”
It was I who separated us—because, if you must know, I was made uneasy by the sense that my briefs had begun to throttle my left thigh, being no Leopold Bloom, who, if I remember correctly, was atypical in dressing right.
I cleared my throat of the obstruction that had simultaneously formed there, and said, apologetically: “I really must see Natalie on a matter of grave import.”
Alice marched into the living room directly beyond the door, a long, narrow, rectangular enclosure fitted out like a travel agent’s foyer, with very low furniture in neutral colors, hairy throw rugs tanned from the hide of the imaginary animal called the shag, and framed posters. These last, however, though routine in the peripheral vision, were unorthodox when studied closely, showing Red Square during a review of earth-to-air missiles, an obese harlot leering from a window in the red-light district of Copenhagen, and a dog voiding his water on the Left Bank while, across the Seine, Notre Dame serenely flew its ancient buttresses.
Alice’s hands found her hips in the undifferentiated tube of loose housecoat, and she whirled about on tiny bare feet, displaying flashes of dirty soles.
“Wheel” she exhaled. “Peace again. Nat’s gone to Hamburg.”
I suppose it didn’t make much difference, Natalie’s Teddy Villanova having turned out to be his own Tomas Villanueve, and her absence did free me from having to explain where I had spent the night, the absolutely true account of which would, to a rational ear, necessarily sound cock-and-bull.
Alice flounced away, made a right turn at the windows, and entered the kitchen.
I asked: “You wouldn’t have a cup of coffee?” And followed.
The girls had a pitiful garden in the corner: a moribund wandering Jew in a hanging basket, a fern gone to burnt umber, and a sterile avocado supported on four toothpicks above a tumbler full of lacteal water.
As I entered the kitchen Alice Ellish seemed in the act of swallowing a whole lemon. But when she removed it from her mouth I saw it was but a half.
“Without this,” she said, screwing up her face in answer to the astringency, “I could sit on the can an hour without results.” Then she stared as if seeing me for the first time. “You’re a new one, aren’t you?” She threw the lemon half in the sink and gave me a handshake moist with citrus and saliva. “I’m Alice Ellish, Natalie’s roommate, but don’t jump to conclusions. It’s due to the high rents in this part of town. I always feel I have to say that nowadays, or some people would think you were going down on one another just because you share a place to live.”
She made a high-pitched sound, almost a whinny, backing away from me in a partial crouch until her bottom met the refrigerator, at which contact she said: “Oh?” and turned in wonder as if goosed by someone who had stolen up silently.
I lifted the teakettle from the stove and sloshed its contents: an inch of water and, from the sound, also several particles of loosened corrosion and sediment— which is why I don’t like those whistlers, with their strait spouts.
“O.K.?” I asked, already turning the faucet at the sink nearby and, first, rinsing my sticky hand. I ran enough for six cups, but having done so, upended the kettle and let the water gloop out between instants of gasping aspiration. When it was all gone, the particles still rasped within on the shaking of the vessel.
Despite my’ bizarre experiences of late, I was still capable of attending to such minutiae, the recognition of which was somehow comforting. The petty features of my character survived unchanged. I wondered whether the same was true of the bedrock into which my moral pilings were sunk, for when I put the kettle on the stove and ignited a burner, Alice raised the skirt of her housecoat and examined its interior surface in the area of her rump, her trunk twisting as she looked back and down; in front, her pelvis was but scarcely covered, and again I was stimulated in my own.
“I think,” she said, “I got some jam on my tussy.”
One word is often enough to quench my ardor, even though I have proceeded a lot farther towards an expense of spirit in a waste of shame than I had now. I turned to the above-sink cabinet in which, if memory served, Natalie kept her bag of Bokar. I found the coffee makings, including the six-cup Melitta and an envelope of No. 4 filters.
With still-torsioned torso, bare buttock against the stainless-steel lip of the sink, Alice blackened the green of her gathered housecoat-skirt with running water, then blanched it with a two-fisted squeeze so violent as to roll the front hem of the garment above her navel. She was not altogether nude below the waist; she wore the ultimate in minimalist underwear: a pale-green vee whose scope was restricted to the mons veneris, on her so hearty a hillock as to pass muster in a locker room that would have permitted the wearing of pastel jockstraps. From the superior points of this triangular convexity, strings climbed the steep of her belly and, cutting their own grooves through the soft investments of her hips, vanished over those summits. The entire device seemed under the extreme tension of an aimed slingshot.
I decided to await the water whistle elsewhere and left the kitchen, again passing the wretched little garden in the corner just outside its door, where a coleus displayed, with a stalk like the neck of a plucked starling, its last leaf of desiccated purple patent leather. I drifted along to a waist-high bookcase and bent to peruse the spines of the volumes therein, though I knew them of old. As I have said, Natalie’s was not the feeble spirit a bigot might expect to find beneath a stewardess’ cap (or, wi
th her airline, a cloche). I imagine she was the rare bird who had persisted throughout one entire year in purchasing at the checkout counter of a supermarket the weekly pamphlets which, assembled in a stout three-ring binder, constituted the one-volume Cyclopaedia of Universal Knowledge.
She also possessed, as surely a family heirloom, ten small uniform volumes, bound in red, comprising the World’s Hundred Best Short Stories (neither 99 nor 101), with contributions by such eminent scribblers as Count Leo Tolstoy, Honore de Balzac, and Octavus Roy Cohen. She owned An Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire, on the flyleaf of which some wag had written “Miss Jane Austen”; a novel entitled How Grete Was Plagued by Her Husband Hans; a cookbook—
Alice, who had padded up silently on unshod feet, said: “Reading about eating a steak is nothing like eating a steak: it’s just words.”
“Have you ever had to eat your words?” I asked. “In the beginning was the Word, and man is what man eats.” This was one way to fill the time till the water boiled. “In German, that’s a pun: man isst was man ist.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?” asked AliceEllish, bumping me with her hip. “I never fool around with Nat’s guys. You should be aware of that. I ought to warn you, so you don’t get your hopes up.”
“What have I done to deserve that admonition?”
Alice turned away and said to the floor: “I don’t want to embarrass you, but you were staring at my crotch.” She brought back a pout with her face and, furthermore, pigeoned her feet.
“What do you expect if you pull up your housecoat?”
“I wasn’t even thinking about that. Sex means little to me.
“I didn’t stare. I glanced. You would do the same, I’m sure, if I suddenly lowered my trousers.”
“Don’t try it!” said Alice, making a chimpanzee-face to bite her upper lip. “Nothing turns me off more than the bulging pouch of a pair of Jockey shorts, which might be quite yellowed by the look of the rest of you.”
Defensively I rubbed the stubble on my face. She had me on the run. “Look, I’ve had an unfortunate day, an unconscious night, and an unprecedented morning. I’ll drink a cup of coffee and be on my way.” I started for the kitchen, but halted, turned, and said: “I don’t wear Jockey shorts.”
“I hope you wear something,” said Alice. “But don’t tell me what, please. Let’s drop the subject. You’re obsessed with crotches in an infantile way. Everybody’s got one, for God’s sake. Grow up! When I was a kid, the boy next door always wanted to see my underpants, and once he stole a dirty pair and—”
A piercing sound came from the kitchen. “Be that as it may,” I said, “the whistle’s blowing.”
“Don’t expect me to,” Alice disagreeably replied. “And believe me, Nat’s going to hear about the way you’ve behaved behind her back. This is not the first time, either. I wonder if there’s something about me—?” Her wince was speculative. “I always seem to drive her guys off the deep end, when all I do is pass the time of day.”
The steam was protesting ever more maniacally against its constraint. Dashing to relieve it, I seemed nevertheless to be in frozen motion: forever wilt thou run and it whistle. I had time in this interegnum to wonder whether Natalie’s “guys” were invisible concomitants of mine or had been but my predecessors.
Eventually I reached the stove, extinguished the source of the kettle’s agony, applied the filter to the Melitta’s funnel, poured coffee from the bag by estimate of eye, then inundated it with steaming water.
There was Alice again, at my elbow, or rather, as Spenser might say, “with child of” my elbow; the joint of my forearm seemed captive of a soft envelopment. I did not investigate this, being occupied principally with the matter of why I had neglected to grind the beans before submitting them to an infusion, which was, in their state of integrity, futile: clear water dripped through the paper cone into the underlying Pyrex vessel.
Wryly raising my hands to my hips, in the well-known gesture of dismay, I inadvertently did something to Alice with my right arm. Though hardly what she claimed.
She threw herself back against the refrigerator, as if hurled there, perhaps no more than two paces in the narrow kitchen, and said: “You struck me!”
I looked around with no great concern, seeing which deficient reaction she slowly slid down the face of the appliance, with knees that could not have parted company to such an angle had she not raised the skirt of the housecoat to accommodate them, and her strained green groin was once again on display.
As if this were not enough, she sounded a loud click, obviously made with her tongue behind her teeth, and outrageously proceeded, eyes closing, chin falling towards sternum, to pretend her neck had been broken.
Though this act would have rendered me hysterical if it had been performed at any time preceding the Union Square Slaughter, I was unmoved by it now, and turned back to my soaked but whole coffee beans and wondered whether they might be ground though wet.
It took no lengthy period for Alice to rise from the dead behind my back and brazenly make another effort to discomfit me.
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said, “but there’s a bottle of Scope in the bathroom.”
Her ad hominem approach was again effective. Though facing the stove and three feet from her, I spoke through my hand. “I told you I had a bad day and night. If you’ll please let me just drink a cup of coffee, I’ll leave.”
“I’ve got it, at last!” Alice cried. “Wow, am I dense. Sorry. I thought you were one of the straights.”
I spun to see her leave the kitchen. I abandoned the stove and caught up to her at the turn into the short hall that led to bedroom and bath.
“I’m not gay!”
She shrugged. “Why should I care? The day is gone in which it was considered a psychological disorder.”
“I am aware of that. I simply didn’t want you to get an erroneous idea. I have too frequently been the victim of misidentifications lately. Anyway, on several occasions during the last few weeks, I’ve had to leave the bedroom when you came home in the middle of the night from seeing your guy Doug. Don’t you remember that?”
“Duck, not Doug.”
“Oh.”
“A nickname I gave him,” said Alice Ellish. “His real name’s Al Orange. Get it?”
She looked severe for a moment and then her little front teeth chattered in a violent giggle. She was a childish sort, and ordinarily I should not have found that character attractive, but suddenly I was conscious of being alone in a narrow passage with a ripe young woman who was virtually naked under one layer of cloth—and I also remembered my bad breath. I did not uncontrollably desire her, yet neither did I wish, in my current crisis of identity, to be recognized as but a case of morning mouth —for she evidently did not recall me from those wee-hour crossings of paths.
I said, turning my face to the wall, in fact addressing a novelty bullfight poster on which the name of Dominguin’s opponent had been replaced by ALICE ELLISH, “I don’t think I’ll bother about the coffee. I’ll just run along. I need a shower more, and a shave, and…” My voice dwindled to a murmur, reflecting my gradual but utter loss of any purpose but not to breathe upon her.
“You know,” she said, putting her protuberant delta against my right thigh and a cupped hand on the high inside surface of the left, “you’re real shy. I like that. You’re even blushing. Gosh.”
When I tried to return the favor, however, she managed by twists and writhings to elude any embrace that could be called firm, and she seemed at least as strong as I, at least in my current disadvantage.
Still clutching me, she however protested: “You’re Nat’s guy. I told you I don’t fool around.”
“Then what are you doing?” I complained. “And are we in the right place?”
She released me at once and strutted huffily into the living room, where she plumped down onto one of the sofa units. Her little mouth, made smaller by defia
nce, suddenly yawned and produced a wail: “You come right over here!”
“If you have further use for me,” I replied, de haut en bas, “it must take place in the bedroom.”
I took the two paces to the entrance to the bath and the one more that brought me to an open doorway through which I should have stepped had not it been filled with the large naked figure of a man in the process of exiting.
“Wren! Good gravy.” This was pronounced with a certain startled pleasure, but no embarrassment whatever.
“Donald Washburn the Second!” I cried. For it was indeed my client.
10
Behind me Alice Ellish came running and howling. “I tried everything I could think of!”
Ignoring her, Washburn lightly observed: “You’re quite the Javert, old boy. I must say I’m impressed.”
Alice grumbled: “I don’t know what else I could have done,” and plodded with slapping footfalls into the bathroom behind me.
I decided not to reduce my stock with Washburn by admitting I had found him by chance. Again, my reaction might seem odd: there he was, having emerged in the nude from my girl friend’s bedroom—but she had flown off to Hamburg and anyway she shared that chamber with Alice Ellish.
The really important concern was that Washburn represented my only source of income in weeks—and his advance had been confiscated before I could use a penny of it. Washburn was also my only hope of getting more funds: I had been a fugitive from justice, remember, following my liberation from Hus.
“No,” I assured him gravely, “I’m no turncoat.” I went on: “In fact, being involved in other phases of the investigation, I haven’t yet laid eyes on Mrs. Washburn herself.”
His voice now betrayed a faint tone of impatience. “But she is the investigation, old chum.”