The Collected Stories

  This was one of Carson’s special talents, the ability to find and convey an unashamed enjoyment in trivial things. Many people could not have described the IBF to a jazz musician without breaking off in an apologetic laugh to explain that it was, of course, a sort of sad little game for lonely tourists, a square’s thing really, and that its very lack of sophistication was what made it fun; Carson told it straight. In much the same way he had once made it fashionable among some of the more literary undergraduates at Yale to spend Sunday mornings respectfully absorbed in the funny papers of the New York Mirror; more recently the same trait had rapidly endeared him to many chance acquaintances, notably to his current girl, the young Swedish art student for whom he had stayed in Paris. “You have beautiful taste in everything,” she had told him on their first memorable night together. “You have a truly educated, truly original mind.”

  “Got that?” he said into the phone, and paused to sip his Pernod. “Right. Now if you’ll give me your full name and address, Sid, I’ll get everything organized on this end.” Sid spelled it out and Carson lettered it carefully into the membership book, with his own name and Ken’s as cosponsors, while Mr. Baldinger watched. When they were finished Ken’s voice came back to say a reluctant goodbye, and they hung up.

  “That must’ve been a pretty expensive telephone call,” Mr. Baldinger said, impressed.

  “You’re right,” Carson said. “I guess it was.”

  “What’s the deal on this membership book, anyway? All this barfly business?”

  “Oh, aren’t you a member, Mr. Baldinger? I thought you were a member. Here, I’ll sponsor you, if you like.”

  Mr. Baldinger got what he later described as an enormous kick out of it: far into the early morning he was still sidling up to everyone at the bar, one after another, and buzzing them.

  Carson didn’t get to Cannes on Saturday, for it took him longer than he’d planned to conclude his affair with the Swedish girl. He had expected a tearful scene, or at least a brave exchange of tender promises and smiles, but instead she was surprisingly casual about his leaving—even abstracted, as if already concentrating on her next truly educated, truly original mind—and this forced him into several uneasy delays that accomplished nothing except to fill her with impatience and him with a sense of being dispossessed. He didn’t get to Cannes until the following Tuesday afternoon, after further telephone talks with Ken, and then, when he eased himself onto the station platform, stiff and sour with hangover, he was damned if he knew why he’d come at all. The sun assaulted him, burning deep into his gritty scalp and raising a quick sweat inside his rumpled suit; it struck blinding glints off the chromework of parked cars and motor scooters and made sickly blue vapors of exhaust rise up against pink buildings; it played garishly among the swarm of tourists who jostled him, showing him all their pores, all the tension of their store-new sports clothes, their clutched suitcases and slung cameras, all the anxiety of their smiling, shouting mouths. Cannes would be like any other resort town in the world, all hurry and disappointment, and why hadn’t he stayed where he belonged, in a high cool room with a long-legged girl? Why the hell had he let himself be coaxed and wheedled into coming here?

  But then he saw Ken’s happy face bobbing in the crowd—“Carson!”—and there he came, running in his overgrown fat boy’s thigh-chafing way, clumsy with welcome. “Taxi’s over here, take your bag—boy, do you look beat! Get you a shower and a drink first, okay? How the hell are you?”

  And riding light on the taxi cushions as they swung onto the Croisette, with its spectacular blaze of blue and gold and its blood-quickening rush of sea air, Carson began to relax. Look at the girls! There were acres of them; and besides, it was good to be with old Ken again. It was easy to see, now, that the thing in Paris could only have gotten worse if he’d stayed. He had left just in time.

  Ken couldn’t stop talking. Pacing in and out of the bathroom while Carson took his shower, jingling a pocketful of coins, he talked in the laughing, full-throated joy of a man who has gone for weeks without hearing his own voice. The truth was that Ken never really had a good time away from Carson. They were each other’s best friends, but it had never been an equal friendship, and they both knew it. At Yale Ken would probably have been left out of everything if it hadn’t been for his status as Carson’s dull but inseparable companion, and this was a pattern that nothing in Europe had changed. What was it about Ken that put people off? Carson had pondered this question for years. Was it just that he was fat and physically awkward, or that he could be strident and silly in his eagerness to be liked? But weren’t these essentially likable qualities? No, Carson guessed the closest he could come to a real explanation was the fact that when Ken smiled his upper lip slid back to reveal a small moist inner lip that trembled against his gum. Many people with this kind of mouth may find it no great handicap—Carson was willing to admit that—but it did seem to be the thing everyone remembered most vividly about Ken Platt, whatever more substantial-sounding reasons one might give for avoiding him; in any case it was what Carson himself was always most aware of, in moments of irritation. Right now, for example, in the simple business of trying to dry himself and comb his hair and put on fresh clothes, this wide, moving, double-lipped smile kept getting in his way. It was everywhere, blocking his reach for the towel rack, hovering too close over his jumbled suitcase, swimming in the mirror to eclipse the tying of his tie, until Carson had to clamp his jaws tight to keep from yelling, “All right, Ken—shut up now!”

  But a few minutes later they were able to compose themselves in the shaded silence of the hotel bar. The bartender was peeling a lemon, neatly pinching and pulling back a strip of its bright flesh between thumb and knife blade, and the fine citric smell of it, combining with the scent of gin in the faint smoke of crushed ice, gave flavor to a full restoration of their ease. A couple of cold martinis drowned the last of Carson’s pique, and by the time they were out of the place and swinging down the sidewalk on their way to dinner he felt strong again with a sense of the old camaraderie, the familiar, buoyant wealth of Ken’s admiration. It was a feeling touched with sadness too, for Ken would soon have to go back to the States. His father in Denver, the author of sarcastic weekly letters on business stationery, was holding open a junior partnership for him, and Ken, having long since completed the Sorbonne courses that were his ostensible reason for coming to France, had no further excuse for staying. Carson, luckier in this as in everything else, had no need of an excuse: he had an adequate private income and no family ties; he could afford to browse around Europe for years, if he felt like it, looking for things that pleased him.

  “You’re still white as a sheet,” he told Ken across their restaurant table. “Haven’t you been going to the beach?”

  “Sure.” Ken looked quickly at his plate. “I’ve been to the beach a few times. The weather hasn’t been too good for it lately, is all.”

  But Carson guessed the real reason, that Ken was embarrassed to display his body, so he changed the subject. “Oh, by the way,” he said. “I brought along the IBF stuff, for that piano player friend of yours.”

  “Oh, swell.” Ken looked up in genuine relief. “I’ll take you over there soon as we’re finished eating, okay?” And as if to hurry this prospect along he forked a dripping load of salad into his mouth and tore off too big a bite of bread to chew with it, using the remaining stump of bread to mop at the oil and vinegar in his plate. “You’ll like him, Carson,” he said soberly around his chewing. “He’s a great guy. I really admire him a lot.” He swallowed with effort and hurried on: “I mean hell, with talent like that he could go back to the States tomorrow and make a fortune, but he likes it here. One thing, of course, he’s got a girl here, this really lovely French girl, and I guess he couldn’t very well take her back with him—no, but really, it’s more than that. People accept him here. As an artist, I mean, as well as a man. Nobody condescends to him, nobody tries to interfere with his music, and that’s all he wan
ts out of life. Oh, I mean he doesn’t tell you all this—probably be a bore if he did—it’s just a thing you sense about him. Comes out in everything he says, his whole mental attitude.” He popped the soaked bread into his mouth and chewed it with authority. “I mean the guy’s got authentic integrity,” he said. “Wonderful thing.”

  “Did sound like a damn good piano,” Carson said, reaching for the wine bottle, “what little I heard of it.”

  “Wait’ll you really hear it, though. Wait’ll he really gets going.”

  They both enjoyed the fact that this was Ken’s discovery. Always before it had been Carson who led the way, who found the girls and learned the idioms and knew how best to spend each hour; it was Carson who had tracked down all the really colorful places in Paris where you never saw Americans, and who then, just when Ken was learning to find places of his own, had paradoxically made Harry’s Bar become the most colorful place of all. Through all this, Ken had been glad enough to follow, shaking his grateful head in wonderment, but it was no small thing to have turned up an incorruptible jazz talent in the back streets of a foreign city, all alone. It proved that Ken’s dependence could be less than total after all, and this reflected credit on them both.

  The place where Sid played was more of an expensive bar than a nightclub, a small carpeted basement several streets back from the sea. It was still early, and they found him having a drink alone at the bar.

  “Well,” he said when he saw Ken. “Hello there.” He was stocky and well-tailored, a very dark Negro with a pleasant smile full of strong white teeth.

  “Sid, I’d like you to meet Carson Wyler. You talked to him on the phone that time, remember?”

  “Oh yes,” Sid said, shaking hands. “Oh yes. Very pleased to meet you, Carson. What’re you gentlemen drinking?”

  They made a little ceremony of buttoning the IBF insignia into the lapel of Sid’s tan gabardine, of buzzing his shoulder and offering the shoulders of their own identical seersucker jackets to be buzzed in turn. “Well, this is fine,” Sid said, chuckling and leafing through the booklet. “Very good.” Then he put the booklet in his pocket, finished his drink and slid off the bar stool. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I got to go to work.”

  “Not much of an audience yet,” Ken said.

  Sid shrugged. “Place like this, I’d just as soon have it that way. You get a big crowd, you always get some square asking for ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas,’ or some damn thing.”

  Ken laughed and winked at Carson, and they both turned to watch Sid take his place at the piano, which stood on a low spotlighted dais across the room. He fingered the keys idly for a while to make stray phrases and chords, a craftsman fondling his tools, and then he settled down. The compelling beat emerged, and out of it the climb and waver of the melody, an arrangement of “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home.”

  They stayed for hours, listening to Sid play and buying him drinks whenever he took a break, to the obvious envy of other customers. Sid’s girl came in, tall and brown-haired, with a bright, startled-looking face that was almost beautiful, and Ken introduced her with a small uncontrollable flourish: “This is Jaqueline.” She whispered something about not speaking English very well, and when it was time for Sid’s next break—the place was filling now and there was considerable applause when he finished—the four of them took a table together.

  Ken let Carson do most of the talking now; he was more than content just to sit there, smiling around this tableful of friends with all the serenity of a well-fed young priest. It was the happiest evening of his life in Europe, to a degree that even Carson would never have guessed. In the space of a few hours it filled all the emptiness of his past month, the time that had begun with Carson’s saying, “Go, then. Can’t you go to Cannes by yourself?” It atoned for all the hot miles walked up and down the Croisette on blistered feet to peek like a fool at girls who lay incredibly near naked in the sand; for the cramped, boring bus rides to Nice and Monte Carlo and St. Paul-de-Vence; for the day he had paid a sinister druggist three times too much for a pair of sunglasses only to find, on catching sight of his own image in the gleam of a passing shop window, that they made him look like a great blind fish; for the terrible daily, nightly sense of being young and rich and free on the Riviera—the Riviera!—and of having nothing to do. Once in the first week he had gone with a prostitute whose canny smile, whose shrill insistence on a high price and whose facial flicker of distaste at the sight of his body had frightened him into an agony of impotence; most other nights he had gotten drunk or sick from bar to bar, afraid of prostitutes and of rebuffs from other girls, afraid even of striking up conversations with men lest they mistake him for a fairy. He had spent a whole afternoon in the French equivalent of a dime store, feigning a shopper’s interest in padlocks and shaving cream and cheap tin toys, moving through the bright stale air of the place with a throatful of longing for home. Five nights in a row he had hidden himself in the protective darkness of American movies, just as he’d done years ago in Denver to get away from boys who called him Lard-Ass Platt, and after the last of these entertainments, back in the hotel with the taste of chocolate creams still cloying his mouth, he had cried himself to sleep. But all this was dissolving now under the fine reckless grace of Sid’s piano, under the spell of Carson’s intelligent smile and the way Carson raised his hands to clap each time the music stopped.

  Sometime after midnight, when everyone but Sid had drunk too much, Carson asked him how long he had been away from the States. “Since the war,” he said. “I came over in the Army and I never did go back.”

  Ken, coated with a film of sweat and happiness, thrust his glass high in the air for a toast. “And by God, here’s hoping you never have to, Sid.”

  “Why is that, ‘have to’?” Jaqueline said. Her face looked harsh and sober in the dim light. “Why do you say that?”

  Ken blinked at her. “Well, I just mean—you know—that he never has to sell out, or anything. He never would, of course.”

  “What does this mean, ‘sell out’?” There was an uneasy silence until Sid laughed in his deep, rumbling way. “Take it easy, honey,” he said, and turned to Ken. “We don’t look at it that way, you see. Matter of fact, I’m working on angles all the time to get back to the States, make some money there. We both feel that way about it.”

  “Well, but you’re doing all right here, aren’t you?” Ken said, almost pleading with him. “You’re making enough money and everything, aren’t you?”

  Sid smiled patiently. “I don’t mean a job like this, though, you see. I mean real money.”

  “You know who is Murray Diamond?” Jaqueline inquired, holding her eyebrows high. “The owner of nightclubs in Las Vegas?”

  But Sid was shaking his head and laughing. “Honey, wait a minute—I keep telling you, that’s nothing to count on. Murray Diamond happened to be in here the other night, you see,” he explained. “Didn’t have much time, but he said he’d try to drop around again some night this week. Be a big break for me. ‘Course, like I say, that’s nothing to count on.”

  “Well but Jesus, Sid—” Ken shook his head in bafflement; then, letting his face tighten into a look of outrage, he thumped the table with a bouncing fist. “Why prostitute yourself?” he demanded. “I mean damn it, you know they’ll make you prostitute yourself in the States!”

  Sid was still smiling, but his eyes had narrowed slightly. “I guess it’s all in the way you look at it,” he said.

  And the worst part of it, for Ken, was that Carson came so quickly to his rescue. “Oh, I’m sure Ken doesn’t mean that the way it sounds,” he said, and while Ken was babbling apologies of his own (“No, of course not, all I meant was—you know . . .”) he went on to say other things, light, nimble things that only Carson could say, until the awkwardness was gone. When the time came to say goodnight there were handshakes and smiles and promises to see each other soon.

  But the minute they were out on the street, Carson turned on Ken.
“Why did you have to get so damned sophomoric about that? Couldn’t you see how embarrassing it was?”

  “I know,” Ken said, hurrying to keep pace with Carson’s long legs, “I know. But hell, I was disappointed in him, Carson. The point is I never heard him talk like that before.” What he omitted here, of course, was that he had never really heard him talk at all except in the one shy conversation that had led to the calling-up of Harry’s Bar that other night, after which Ken had fled back to the hotel in fear of overstaying his welcome.

  “Well but even so,” Carson said. “Don’t you think it’s the man’s own business what he wants to do with his life?”

  “Okay,” Ken said, “okay. I told him I was sorry, didn’t I?” He felt so humble now that it took him some minutes to realize that, in a sense, he hadn’t come off too badly. After all, Carson’s only triumph tonight had been that of the diplomat, the soother of feelings; it was he, Ken, who had done the more dramatic thing. Sophomoric or not, impulsive or not, wasn’t there a certain dignity in having spoken his mind that way? Now, licking his lips and glancing at Carson’s profile as they walked, he squared his shoulders and tried to make his walk less of a waddle and more of a headlong, manly stride. “It’s just that I can’t help how I feel, that’s all,” he said with conviction. “When I’m disappointed in a person I show it, that’s all.”

  “All right. Let’s forget it.”

  And Ken was almost sure, though he hardly dared believe it, that he could detect a grudging respect in Carson’s voice.