Then Billy found the thing for her, just as he was about to leave the bar, embarrassed and annoyed beyond endurance; he noticed the sparkle of it almost under his shoe, the one on the opposite side from the ducking and puffing “old bag.” With the sort of schoolteacherish austerity that he assumed when annoyed, when righteously indignant over something, an air that he had picked up during his short, much earlier, career as an English instructor at a midwestern university, he picked up the clip and slammed it wordlessly down on the bar in front of her and started to walk away. Two things happened to detain him. Three sailors off a Norwegian vessel came one, two, three through the revolving door of the bar and headed straight for the vacant stools just beyond where he had been sitting, and at the same instant, the woman, Cora, grabbed hold of his arm, shouting. Oh, don’t go, don’t go, the least you can do is let me buy you a drink! And so he had turned right around, as quickly and precisely as the revolving door through which the glittering trio of Norsemen had entered. Okay, why not? He resumed his seat beside her, she bought him a drink, he bought her a drink, inside of five minutes they were buying beer for the sailors and it was just as if the place was suddenly lit up by a dozen big chandeliers.
Quickly she looked different to him, not an old bag at all but really sort of attractive and obviously more to the taste of the dazzling Norsemen than Billy could be. Observing the two of them in the long bar mirror, himself and Cora, he saw that they looked good together, they made a good pair, they were mutually advantageous as a team for cruising the Broadway bars. She was a good deal darker than he and more heavily built. Billy was slight and he had very blond skin that the sun turned pink. Unfortunately for Billy, the pink also showed through the silky, thin yellow hair on the crown of his head where the baldness, so fiercely but impotently resisted, was now becoming a fact that he couldn’t disown. Of course, the crown of the head doesn’t show in the mirror unless you bow to your image in the glass, but there is no denying that the top of a queen’s head is a conspicuous area on certain occasions which are not unimportant. That was how he put it, laughing about it to Cora. She said. Honey, I swear to Jesus I think you’re more self-conscious about your looks and your age than I am! She said it kindly, in fact, she said everything kindly. Cora was a kind person. She was the kindest person that Billy had ever met. She said and meant everything kindly, literally everything; she hadn’t a single malicious bone in her body, not a particle of jealousy or suspicion or evil in her nature, and that was what made it so sad that Cora was a lush. Yes, after he stopped thinking of her as “an old bag,” which was almost immediately after they got acquainted, he started thinking of Cora as a lush, kindly, yes, but not as kindly as Cora thought about him, for Billy was not, by nature, as kind as Cora. Nobody else could be. Her kindness was monumental, the sort that simply doesn’t exist any more, at least not in the queen world.
Fortunately for Billy, Billy was fairly tall. He had formed the defensive habit of holding his head rather high so that the crown of it wouldn’t be so noticeable in bars, but unfortunately for Billy, he had what doctors had told him was a calcium deposit in the ears which made him hard of hearing and which could only be corrected by a delicate and expensive operation—boring a hole in the bone. He didn’t have much money; he had just saved enough to live, not frugally but carefully, for two or three more years before he would have to go back to work at something. If he had the ear operation, he would have to go back to work right away and so abandon his sybaritic existence which suited him better than the dubious glory of being a somewhat better than hack writer of Hollywood film scenarios and so forth. Yes, and so forth!
Being hard of hearing, in fact, progressively so, he would have to crouch over and bend sidewise a little to hold a conversation in a bar, that is, if he wanted to understand what the other party was saying. In a bar it’s dangerous not to listen to the other party, because the way of speaking is just as important as the look of the face in distinguishing between good trade and dirt, and Billy did not at all enjoy being beaten as some queens do. So he would have to bend sidewise and expose the almost baldness on the crown of his blond head, and he would cringe and turn red instead of pink with embarrassment as he did so. He knew that it was ridiculous of him to be that sensitive about it. But as he said to Cora, age does worse things to a queen than it does to a woman.
She disagreed about that and they had great arguments about it. But it was a subject on which Billy could hold forth as eloquently as a southern Senator making a filibuster against the repeal of the poll tax, and Cora would lose the argument by default, simply not able to continue it any longer, for Cora did not like gloomy topics of conversation so much as Billy liked them.
About her own defects of appearance, however, Cora was equally distressed and humble.
You see, she would tell him. I’m really a queen myself. I mean it’s the same difference, honey, I like and do the same things, sometimes I think in bed if they’re drunk enough they don’t even know I’m a woman, at least they don’t act like they do, and I don’t blame them. Look at me. I’m a mess. I’m getting so heavy in the hips and I’ve got these big udders on me!
Nonsense, Billy would protest, you have a healthy and beautiful female body, and you mustn’t low-rate yourself all the time that way, I won’t allow it!
And he would place his arm about her warm and Florida-sun-browned shoulders, exposed by her backless white gown (the little woolly-looking canary yellow jacket being deposited on a vacant bar stool beside her), for it was usually quite late, almost time for the bars to close, when they began to discuss what the years had done to them, the attritions of time. Beside Billy, too, there would be a vacant bar stool on which he had placed the hat that concealed his thinning hair from the streets. It would be one of those evenings that gradually wear out the exhilaration you start with. It would be one of those evenings when lady luck showed the bitchy streak in her nature. They would have had one or two promising encounters which had fizzled out, coming to a big fat zero at three A.M. In the game they played, the true refinement of torture is to almost pull in a catch and then the line breaks, and when that happens, each not pitying himself as much as he did the other, they would sit out the final hour before closing, talking about the wicked things time had done to them, the gradual loss of his hearing and his hair, the fatty expansion of her breasts and buttocks, forgetting that they were still fairly attractive people and still not old.
Actually, in the long run their luck broke about fifty-fifty. Just about every other night one or the other of them would be successful in the pursuit of what Billy called “the lyric quarry.” One or the other or both might be successful on the good nights, and if it was a really good night, then both would be. Good nights, that is, really good nights, were by no means as rare as hen’s teeth, nor were they as frequent as streetcars, but they knew very well, both of them, that they did better together than they had done separately in the past. They set off something warm and good in each other that strangers responded to with something warm and good in themselves. Loneliness dissolved any reserve and suspicion, the night was a great warm comfortable meeting of people, it shone, it radiated, it had the effect of a dozen big chandeliers, oh, it was great, it was grand, you simply couldn’t describe it, you got the colored lights going, and there it all was, the final pattern of it and the original pattern, all put together, made to fit exactly, no, there were simply no words good enough to describe it. And if the worst happened, if someone who looked like a Botticelli angel drew a knife, or if the law descended suddenly on you, and those were eventualities the possibility of which a queen must always consider, you still could say you’d had a good run for your money.
Like everyone whose life is conditioned by luck, they had some brilliant streaks of it and some that were dismal. For instance, that first week they operated together in Manhattan. That was really a freak; you couldn’t expect a thing like that to happen twice in a lifetime. The trade was running as thick as spawning salmon up
those narrow cataracts in the Rockies. Head to tail, tail to head, crowding, swarming together, seemingly driven along by some immoderate instinct. It was not a question of catching; it was simply a question of deciding which ones to keep and which to throw back in the stream, all glittering, all swift, all flowing one way which was toward you!
That week was in Manhattan, where they teamed up. It was, to be exact, in Emerald Joe’s at the corner of Forty-second and Broadway that they had met each other the night of the lost diamond clip that Billy had found. It was the week of the big blizzard and the big Chinese Red offensive in North Korea. The combination seemed to make for a wildness in the air, and trade is always best when the atmosphere of a city is excited whether it be over a national election or New Year’s or a championship prizefight or the World Series baseball games; anything that stirs up the whole population makes it better for cruising.
Yes, it was a lucky combination of circumstances, and that first week together had been brilliant. It was before they started actually living together. At that time, she had a room at the Hotel Pennsylvania and he had one at the Astor. But at the end of that week, the one of their first acquaintance, they gave up separate establishments and took a place together at a small East Side hotel in the Fifties, because of the fact that Cora had an old friend from her hometown in Louisiana employed there as the night clerk. This one was a gay one that she had known long ago and innocently expected to be still the same. Cora did not understand how some people turn bitter. She had never turned bitchy and it was not understandable to her that others might. She said this friend on the desk was a perfect setup; he’d be delighted to see them bringing in trade. But that was the way in which it failed to work out…
That second week in New York was not a good one. Cora had been exceeding her usual quota of double ryes on the rocks and it began all at once to tell on her appearance. Her system couldn’t absorb any more; she had reached the saturation point, and it was no longer possible for her to pick herself up in the evenings. Her face had a bloated look and her eyes remained bloodshot all the time. They looked, as she said, like a couple of poached eggs in a sea of blood, and Billy had to agree with her that they did. She started looking her oldest and she had the shakes.
Then about Friday of that week the gay one at the desk turned bitchy on them. Billy had expected him to turn, but Cora hadn’t. Sooner or later, Billy knew, that frustrated queen was bound to get a severe attack of jaundice over the fairly continual coming and going of so much close-fitting blue wool, and Billy was not mistaken. When they brought their trade in, he would slam down the key without looking at them or speaking a word of greeting. Then one night they brought in a perfectly divine-looking pharmacist’s mate of Italian extraction and his almost equally attractive buddy. The old friend of Cora’s exploded, went off like a spit-devil.
I’m sorry, he hissed, but this is not a flea-bag! You should have stayed on Times Square where you started.
There was a scene. He refused to give them their room key unless the two sailors withdrew from the lobby. Cora said. Fuck you, Mary, and reached across the desk and grabbed the key from the hook. The old friend seized her wrist and tried to make her let go.
Put that key down, he shrieked, or you’ll be sorry!
He started twisting her wrist; then Billy hit him; he vaulted right over the desk and knocked the son-of-a-bitch into the switchboard.
Call the police, call the police, the clerk screamed to the porter.
Drunk as she was, Cora suddenly pulled herself together. She took as much command of the situation as could be taken.
You boys wait outside, she said to the sailors, there’s no use in you all getting into S.P trouble.
One of them, the Italian, wanted to stay and join in the roughhouse, but his buddy, who was the bigger one, forcibly removed him to the sidewalk. (Cora and Billy never saw them again.) By that time, Billy had the night clerk by the collar and was giving him slaps that bobbed his head right and left like something rubber, as if that night clerk was everything that he loathed in a hostile world. Cora stopped him. She had that wonderful, that really invaluable faculty of sobering up in a crisis. She pulled Billy off her old friend and tipped the colored porter ten dollars not to call in the law. She turned on all her southern charm and sweetness, trying to straighten things out. You darling, she said, you poor darling, to the bruised night clerk. The law was not called, but the outcome of the situation was far from pleasant. They had to check out, of course, and the hysterical old friend said he was going to write Cora’s family in Alexandria, Louisiana, and give them a factual report on how she was living here in New York and how he supposed she was living anywhere else since she’d left home and he knew her.
At that time Billy knew almost nothing about Cora’s background and former life, and he was surprised at her being so upset over this hysterical threat, which seemed unimportant to him. But all the next day Cora kept alluding to it, speculating whether or not the bitch would really do it, and it was probably on account of this threat that Cora made up her mind to leave New York. It was the only time, while they were living together, that Cora ever made a decision, at least about places to go and when to go to them. She had none of that desire to manage and dominate which is a typically American perversion of the female nature. As Billy said to himself, with that curious harshness of his toward things he loved, she was like a big piece of seaweed. Sometimes he said it irritably to himself, just like a big piece of seaweed washing this way and that way. It isn’t healthy or normal to be so passive, Billy thought.
Where do you want to eat?
I don’t care.
No, tell me, Cora, what place would you prefer?
I really don’t care, she’d insist, it makes no difference to me.
Sometimes out of exasperation he would say. All right, let’s eat at the Automat.
Only then would Cora demur.
Of course, if you want to, honey, but couldn’t we eat some place with a liquor license?
She was agreeable to anything and everything; she seemed to be grateful for any decision made for her, but this one time, when they left New York, when they made their first trip together, it was Cora’s decision to go. This was before Billy began to be terribly fond of Cora, and at first, when Cora said. Honey, I’ve got to leave this town or Hugo (the hotel queen) will bring up Bobo (her brother who was a lawyer in Alexandria and who had played some very unbrotherly legal trick on her when a certain inheritance was settled) and there will be hell to pay, he will freeze up my income—then, at this point, Billy assumed that they would go separate ways. But at the last moment Billy discovered that he didn’t want to go back to a stag existence. He discovered that solitary cruising had been lonely, that there were spiritual comforts as well as material advantages in their double arrangement. No matter how bad luck was, there was no longer such a thing as going home by himself to the horrors of a second-or third-class hotel bedroom. Then there were the material advantages, the fact they actually did better operating together, and the fact that it was more economical. Billy had to be somewhat mean about money since he was living on savings that he wanted to stretch as far as he could, and Cora more than carried her own weight in the expense department. She was only too eager to pick up a check and Billy was all too willing to let her do it. She spoke of her income but she was vague about what it was or came from. Sometimes looking into her handbag she had a fleeting expression of worry that made Billy wonder uncomfortably if her finances, like his, might not be continually dwindling toward an eventual point of eclipse. But neither of them had a provident nature or dared to stop and consider much of the future.
Billy was a light traveler, all he carried with him was a three-suiter, a single piece of hand luggage and his portable typewriter. When difficulties developed at a hotel, he could clear out in five minutes or less. He rubbed his chin for a minute, then he said, Cora, how about me going with you?
They shared a compartment on the Sunshine Special t
o Florida. Why to Florida? One of Cora’s very few pretensions was a little command of French; she was fond of using little French phrases which she pronounced badly. Honey, she said, I have a little pied-à-ferre in Florida.
Pied-à-terre was one of those little French phrases that she was proud of using, and she kept talking about it, her little pied-à-terre in the Sunshine State.
Whereabouts is it, Billy asked her.
No place fashionable, she told him, but just you wait and see and you might be surprised and like it.
That night in the shared compartment of the Pullman was the first time they had sex together. It happened casually, it was not important and it was not very satisfactory, perhaps because they were each too anxious to please the other, each too afraid the other would be disappointed. Sex has to be slightly selfish to have real excitement. Start worrying about the other party’s reactions and the big charge just isn’t there, and you’ve got to do it a number of times together before it becomes natural enough to be a completely satisfactory thing. The first time between strangers can be like a blaze of light, but when it happens between people who know each other well and have an established affection, it’s likely to be self-conscious and even a little embarrassing, most of all afterwards.
Afterwards they talked about it with a slight sense of strain. They felt they had gotten that sort of thing squared away and would not have to think about it between them again. But perhaps, in a way, it did add a little something to the intimacy of their living together; at least it had, as they put it, squared things away a bit. And they talked about it shyly, each one trying too hard to flatter the other.