Serenade

  "We went over that. I meant to run away, and you knew what I meant. Lying, that was just how we got over it easy. Then when I found out what you meant to me, I didn't lie. That's all...what the hell squawk have you got? You were all ready to sleep with that son-of-a-bitch--"

  "I no lie."

  "What has this got to do with Acapulco?"

  "Yes, it is the same. Now you love man, you lie."

  "I don't--Christ, do I look like that?"

  "No. You no look like that. We meet in Tupinamba, yes? And you no look like that I like, much, how you look. Then you make lotería for me, and lose lotería. And I think, how sweet. He have lose, but he like me so much he make lotería. Then I send muchacha with address, and we go home, go where I live. But then I know. You know how I know?"

  "Don't know, don't care. It's not true."

  "I know when you sing. Hoaney, I was street girl, love man, three pesos. Little dumb muchacha, no can read, no can write, understand nothing like that. But of man--all...Hoaney, these man who love other man, they can do much, very clever. But no can sing. Have no toro in high voice, no grrr that frighten little muchacha, make heart beat fast. Sound like old woman, like cow, like priest."

  She began to walk around. My hands were clammy and my lips felt numb. "...Then the político, he say I should open house, and I think of you. I think maybe, with these man, no like muchacha, have no trouble. We got to Acapulco. Rain come, we go in church. You take me. I no want, I think of sacrilegio, but you take me. Oh, much toro. I like. I think maybe Juana make mistake. Then you sing, oh, my heart beat very fast."

  "Just a question of toro, hey?"

  "No. You ask me to come with you. I come. I love you much. I no think of toro. Just a little bit. Then in New York I feel, I feel something fonny. I think you think about contrato, all these thing. But is not the same. Tonight I know. I make no mistake. When you love Juana, you sing nice, much toro. When you love man--why you lie to me? You think I no hear? You think I no know?"

  If she had taken a whip to me I couldn't have answered her. She began to cry, and fought it back. She went in the other room, and pretty soon she came out. She had changed her dress and put on a hat. She was carrying the valise in one hand and the fur coat in the other. "I no live with man who love other man. I no live with man who lie. I--"

  The phone rang. "--Ah!"

  She ran in and answered. "Yes, he is here."

  She came out, her eyes blazing and her white teeth showing behind something that was between a laugh and a snarl. "Mr. Hawes."

  I didn't say anything and I didn't move. "Yes, Mr. Hawes, the director." She gave a rasping laugh and put on the god-damdest imitation of Winston you ever saw, the walk, the stick, and all the rest of it so you almost thought he was in front of you. "Yes, your sweetie, he wait at telephone, talk to him please."

  When I still sat there, she jumped at me like a tiger, shook me till I could feel my teeth rattling, and then ran in to the telephone. "What you want with Mr. Sharp, please?...Yes, yes, he will come Yes, thank you much. Goodbye."

  She came out again. "Now, please you go. He have party, want you very much. Now, go to your sweetie. Go! Go! Go!"

  She shook me again, jerked me out of the chair, tried to push me out the door. She grabbed up the valise and the fur coat again. I ran in the bedroom, flopped on the bed, pulled the pillow over my head. I wanted to shut it out, the whole horrible thing she had showed me, where she had ripped the cover off my whole life, dragged out what was down there all the time. I screwed my eyes shut, kept pulling the pillow around my ears. But one thing kept slicing up at me, no matter what I did. It was the fin of that shark.

  I don't know how long I stayed there. I was on my back after a while, staring at nothing. It was dead quiet outside, and dead still, except for the searchlight from the building on Fourteenth Street, that kept going around and around. I kept telling myself she was crazy, that voice is a matter of palate, sinus, and throat, that Winston had no more to do with what happened to me in Paris than the scenery had. But here it was, starting on me again the same way it had before, and I knew she had called it on me the way it was written in the big score, and that no pillow or anything else could shut it out. I closed my eyes, and I was going down under the waves, with something coming up at me from below. Panic caught me then. I hadn't heard her go out, and I called her. I waited, and called again. There wasn't any answer. My head was under the pillow again pretty soon, and I must have slept because I woke up with the same horrible dream, that I was in the water, going down, and this thing was coming at me. I sat up, and there she was, on the edge of her bed, looking at me. It was gray outside. "Christ, you're there." But some kind of a sob jerked out as I said it, and I put out my hand and took hers.

  "It's all true."

  She came over, sat down beside me, stroked my hair, held my hand. "Tell me. You no lie, I no fight."

  "There's nothing to tell...Every man has got five per cent of that in him, if he meets the one person that'll bring it out, and I did, that's all."

  "But you love other man. Before."

  "No, the same one, here, in Paris, all over, the one son-of-a-bitch that's been the curse of my life."

  "Sleep now. Tomorrow, you give me little bit money, I go back to Mexico--"

  "No! Don't you know what I'm trying to tell you? That's out! I hate it! I've been ashamed of it, I've tried to shake it off, I hoped you would never find out, and now it's over!"

  I was holding her to me. She began stroking my hair again, looking down in my eyes. "You love me, Hoaney?"

  "Don't you know it? Yes. If I never said so, it was just because--did we have to say it? If we felt it, wasn't that a hell of a sight more?"

  All of a sudden she broke from me, shoved the dress down from her shoulder, slipped the brassiere and shoved a nipple in my mouth. "Eat. Eat much. Make big tow!"

  "I know now, my whole life comes from there."

  "Yes, eat."

  Chapter 11

  We didn't get up for two days, but it wasn't like the time we had in the church. We didn't get drunk and we didn't laugh. When we were hungry, we'd call up the French restaurant down the street and have them send something in. Then we'd lie there and talk, and I'd tell her more of it, until it was all off my chest and I had nothing more to say. Once I quit lying to her, she didn't seem surprised, or shocked, or anything like that. She would look at me, with her eyes big and black, and nod, and sometimes say something that made me think she understood a lot more about it than I did, or most doctors do. Then I'd take her in my arms, and afterward we'd sleep, and I felt a peace I hadn't felt for years. All those awful jitters of that last few weeks were gone, and sometimes when she was asleep and I wasn't, I'd think about the Church, and confession, and what it must mean to people that have something lying heavy on their soul. I had left the Church before I had anything on my soul, and the confession business, to me then, was just a pain in the neck. But I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now, she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble.

  The morning of the second day we heard the church bells ringing, and I remembered I was due to sing at the Sunday night concert. I got up, went to the piano, and tossed a few high ones around. I was just trying them out, but I didn't have to. They were like velvet. At six o'clock we dressed, had a little something to eat, and went down there. I was in a Rigoletto excerpt, from the second act, with a tenor, a bass, a soprano, and a mezzo that were all getting spring try-outs. I was all right. When we got home we changed to pajamas again, and I got out the guitar. I sang her the Evening Star song, Träume,
Schmerzen, things like that. I never liked Wagner, and she couldn't understand a word of German. But it had earth, rain, and the night in it, and went with the humor we were in. She sat there with her eyes closed, and I sang it half voice. Then I took her hand and we sat there, not moving.

  A week went by, and still I didn't see Winston. He must have called twenty times, but she took all calls, and when it was him she would just say I wasn't in, and hang up. I had nothing to say to him but goodbye, and I wasn't going to say that, because I didn't want to play the scene. Then one day, after we had been out for breakfast, we stepped out of the elevator, and there he was at the end of the hall, watching porters carrying furniture into an apartment. He looked at us and blinked, then dived at us with his hand out. "Jack! Is that you? Well, of all the idiotic coincidences!"

  I felt my blood freeze for fear of what she was going to do, but she didn't do anything. When I happened not to see his hand, he began waving it around, and kept chattering about the coincidence, about how he had just signed a lease for an apartment in this very building, and here we were. She smiled. "Yes, very fonny."

  There didn't seem to be anything to do but introduce him, so I did. She held out her hand. He took it and bowed. He said he was happy to know her. She said gracias, she had been at his concert, and she was honored to know him. Two beautiful sets of manners met in the hall that day, and it seemed queer, the venom that was back of them.

  The door of the freight elevator opened, and more furniture started down the hall. "Oh, I'll have to show them where to put it. Come in, you two, and have a look at my humble abode."

  "Some other time, Winston, we--"

  "Yes, gracias, I like."

  We went in there, and he had one of the apartments on the south tier, the biggest in the building, with a living room the size of a recital hall, four or five bedrooms and baths, servants' rooms, study, everything you could think of. The stuff I remembered from Paris was there, rugs, tapestries, furniture, all of it worth a fortune, and a lot of things I had never seen. Four or five guys in denim suits were standing around, waiting to be told where to put their loads. He paid no attention to them, except to direct them with one hand, like they were a bunch of bull fiddlers. He sat us down on a sofa, pulled up a chair for himself, and went on talking about how he was sick of hotel living, had about given up all hope of finding an apartment he liked, and then had found this place, and then of all the cockeyed things, here we were.

  Or were we? I said yes, we were at the other end of the hall. We all laughed: He started in on Juana, asked if she wasn't Mexican. She said yes, and he started off about his trip there, and what a wonderful country it was, and I had to hand it to him he had found out more about it in a week than I had in six months. You would have thought he might have conveniently left out what he went down there for. He didn't. He said he went down there to bring me back. She laughed, and said she saw me first. He laughed. That was the first time there was the least little glint in their eyes.

  "Oh, I must show you my cricket!"

  He jumped up, grabbed a hatchet, and began chopping a small crate apart. Then he lifted out a block of pink stone, a little bigger than a football and about the same shape, but carved and polished into the form of a cricket, with its legs drawn up under it and its head huddled between its front feet. She made a little noise and began to finger it.

  "Look at that, Jack. Isn't it marvelous? Pure Aztec, at least five hundred years old. I brought it back from Mexico with me, and I'd hate to tell you what I had to do to get it out of the country. Look at that simplification of detail. If Manship had done it, they'd have thought it was a radical sample of his work. The line of that belly is pure Brancusi. It's as modern as a streamlined plane, and yet some Indian did it before he even saw a white man."

  "Yes, yes. Make me feel very nostálgica."

  Then came the real Hawes touch. He picked it up, staggered with it over to the fireplace, and put it down. "For my hearth!"

  She got up to go, and I did. "Well, children, you know now where I live, and I want to be seeing a lot of you."

  "Yes, gracias."

  "And oh! As soon as I'm moved in, I'm giving a little house-warming, and you're surely coming to it--"

  "Well, I don't know, Winston, I'm pretty busy--"

  "Too busy for my housewarming? Jack, Jack, Jack!"

  "Gracias, Seńor Hawes. Perhaps we come."

  "Perhaps? Certainly you'll come!"

  I was plenty shaky when we got to our own apartment. "Listen, Juana, we're getting out of this dump, and we're getting out quick. I don't know what the hell his game is, but this is no coincidence. He's moved in on us, and we're going to beat it."

  "We beat it, he come too."

  "Then we'll beat it again. I don't want to see him."

  "Why you run away?"

  "I don't know. It--makes me nervous. I want to be somewhere where I don't have to see him, don't have to think of him, don't have to feel that he's around."

  "I think we stay."

  We saw him twice more that day. Once, around six o'clock, he rang the buzzer and asked us to dinner, but I was singing and said we would have to eat later. Then, some time after midnight, when we had got home, he dropped in with a kid named Pudinsky, a Russian pianist that was to play at his next concert. He said they were going to run over some stuff, and for us to come on down. We said we were tired. He didn't argue. He put his arm around Pudinsky, and they left. While we were undressing we could hear the piano going. The kid could play all right.

  "I see his game now."

  "Yes. Very fonny game."

  "That boy. I'm supposed to get jealous."

  "Are you jealous?"

  "No. Jealous--what the hell are you talking about? What difference does it make to me what he does, once I'm out of it? But it makes me nervous. I--I wish he was somewhere else. I wish we were all somewhere else."

  She lay there for a long time, up on one elbow, looking down at me. Then she kissed me and went over to her own bed. It was daylight before I got to sleep.

  Next day he was in and out half a dozen times, and the day after that, and that day after that. I began missing cues, the first sign you get that you're not right. The voice was in shape, and I was getting across, but the prompter began throwing the finger at me. It was the first time in my life that that had ever happened.

  In about a week came the invitation to the housewarming. I tried to beg out of it, said I had to sing that night, but she smiled and said gracias, we would go, and he put his arm around her and you would have thought they were pals, but I knew them both like a book, and could tell there was something back of it, on both sides. After he left I got peevish and wanted to know why the hell she was shoving me into it all the time. "Hoaney, with this man, it do you no good to run away. He see you no care, then maybe he estop. He know you have afraid, he never estop. We go. We laugh, have fine time, no care...You care?"

  "For God's sake, no."

  "I think yes, little bit. I think we have--how you say--the goat."

  "He's got my goat all right, but not for that reason. I just don't want any more to do with him."

  "Then you care. Maybe not so, how he want. But you have afraid. When you no care at all, he estop. Now--we no run away. We go, you sing, be fine fallow, no give a damn. And you watch, will be all right."

  "If I have to, I have to, but Christ, I hate it."

  So we went. I was singing Faust, and I was so lousy I almost did get stuck in the duel scene. But I was washed up by ten thirty, and we came home and dressed. It wasn't any white dress with flowers on it this time. She put on a bottle-green evening dress, and over that the bullfighter's cape, and that embroidered crimson and yellow silk, sliding over the green taffeta, made a rustle you could hear coming, I'm here to tell you, and all those colors, over the light copper of her skin, was a picture you could look at. I put on a white tie, but no overcoat or anything, and about a quarter after eleven we stepped out and walked down the hall.

>   When we got in there, the worst drag was going on you ever saw in your life. A whole mob of them was in there, girls in men's evening clothes tailored for them, with shingle haircuts and blue make-up in their eyes, dancing with other girls dressed the same way, young guys with lipstick on, and mascara eyelashes, dancing with each other too, and at least three girls in full evening dress, that you had to look at twice to make sure they weren't girls at all. Pudinsky was at the piano, but he wasn't playing Brahms. He was playing jazz. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach as soon as I looked at it, but I swallowed hard and tried to act like I was glad to be there.

  Winston had on a purple velvet dinner coat with a silk sash knotted around it, and he brought us in like it was all for us. He introduced us, and got us drinks, and Pudinsky slammed into the Pagliacci Prologue, and I stepped up and sang it, and clowned it with as good a grin as I could get on my face. While they were still clapping, Winston turned around and began to throw the show to Juana. She still hadn't taken off the cape, and he lifted it off her shoulders, and began going into a spasm about it. They all crowded up to look, and when he found out it was a real bullfighter's cape, nothing would suit him but that she had to tell them all about the fine points of bullfighting. I sat down, and got this feeling it wasn't on the up-and-up, that something was coming. I thought of Chadwick, and wondered if this was another play to show her up. But that wasn't it. Except that Winston would put his arm around Pudinsky every time he saw me looking at him, he didn't pull anything. He put her in the spot, and made her explain the whole routine of bullfighting, and she took the cape to show them, and she was pretty funny, and so was he. Nobody could make a woman look good better than Winston, when he wanted to. Pretty soon somebody yelled out: "How the hell does a man study to be a bullfighter, that's what I want to know."

  Winston went down on his knees in front of Juana.