Gee, honey, said Cora, you’re a wonderful lay, you’ve got wonderful skin, smooth as a baby’s, gee, it sure was wonderful, honey, I enjoyed it so much, I wish you had. But I know you didn’t like it and it was selfish of me to start it with you.
You didn’t like it, he said.
I swear I loved it, she said, but I knew that you didn’t like it, so we won’t do it again.
He told Cora that she was a wonderful lay and that he had loved it every bit as much as she did and maybe more, but he agreed they’d better not do it again.
Friends can’t be lovers, he said.
No, they can’t, she agreed with a note of sadness.
Then jealousy enters in.
Yes, they get jealous and bitchy…
They never did it again, at least not that completely, not any time during the year and two months since they started living together. Of course, there were some very drunk, blind drunk nights when they weren’t quite sure what happened between them after they fell into bed, but you could be pretty certain it wasn’t a sixty-six in that condition. Sixty-six was Cora’s own slightly inexact term for a normal lay, that is, a lay that occurred in the ordinary position.
What happened? Billy would ask when she’d had a party.
Oh, it was wonderful, she would exclaim, a sixty-six!
Good Jesus, drunk as he was?
Oh, I sobered him up, she’d laugh.
And what did you do, Billy? Take the sheets? Ha ha, youll have to leave this town with a board nailed over your ass!
Sometimes they had a serious conversation, though most of the time they tried to keep the talk on a frivolous plane. It troubled Cora to talk about serious matters, probably because matters were too serious to be talked about with comfort. And for the first month or so neither of them knew that the other one actually had a mind that you could talk to. Gradually they discovered about each other the other things, and although it was always their mutual pursuit, endless and indefatigable, of “the lyric quarry” that was the mainstay of their relationship, at least upon its surface, the other things, the timid and tender values that can exist between people, began to come shyly out and they had a respect for each other, not merely to like and enjoy, as neither had ever respected another person.
It was a rare sort of moral anarchy, doubtless, that held them together, a really fearful shared hatred of everything that was restrictive and which they felt to be false in the society they lived in and against the grain of which they continually operated. They did not dislike what they called “squares.” They loathed and despised them, and for the best of reasons. Their existence was a never-ending contest with the squares of the world, the squares who have such a virulent rage at everything not in their book. Getting around the squares, evading, defying the phony rules of convention, that was maybe responsible for half their pleasure in their outlaw existence. They were a pair of kids playing cops and robbers; except for that element, the thrill of something lawless, they probably would have gotten bored with cruising. Maybe not, maybe so. Who can tell? But hotel clerks and house dicks and people in adjoining hotel bedrooms, the specter of Cora’s family in Alexandria, Louisiana, the specter of Billy’s family in Montgomery, Alabama, the various people involved in the niggardly control of funds, almost everybody that you passed when you were drunk and hilariously gay on the street, especially all those bull-like middle-aged couples that stood off sharply and glared at you as you swept through a hotel lobby with your blushing trade—all, all, all of those were natural enemies to them, as well as the one great terrible, worst of all enemies, which is the fork-tailed, cloven-hoofed, pitchfork-bearing devil of Time!
Time, of course, was the greatest enemy of all, and they knew that each day and each night was cutting down a little on the distance between the two of them running together and that demon pursuer. And knowing it, knowing that nightmarish fact, gave a wild sort of sweetness of despair to their two-ring circus.
And then, of course, there was also the fact that Billy was, or had been at one time, a sort of artist manqué and still had a touch of homesickness for what that was.
Sometime, said Cora, you’re going to get off the party.
Why should I get off the party?
Because you’re a serious person. You are fundamentally a serious sort of a person.
I’m not a serious person any more than you are. I’m a goddam remittance man and you know it.
No, I don’t know it, said Cora. Remittance men get letters enclosing checks, but you don’t even get letters.
Billy rubbed his chin.
Then how do you think I live?
Ha ha, she said.
What does ‘Ha Ha’ mean?
It means I know what I know!
Balls, said Billy, you know no more about me than I do about you.
I know, said Cora, that you used to write for a living, and that for two years you haven’t been writing but you’re still living on the money you made as a writer, and sooner or later, you’re going to get off the party and go back to working again and being a serious person. What do you imagine I think of that portable typewriter you drag around with you everywhere we go, and that big fat portfolio full of papers you tote underneath your shirts in your three-suiter? I wasn’t born yesterday or the day before yesterday, baby, and I know that you’re going to get off the party some day and leave me on it.
If I get off the party, we’ll get off it together, said Billy.
And me do what? she’d ask him, realistically.
And he would not be able to answer that question. For she knew and he knew, both of them knew it together, that they would remain together only so long as they stayed on the party, and not any longer than that. And in his heart he knew, much as he might deny it, that it would be pretty much as Cora predicted in her Cassandra moods. One of those days or nights it was bound to happen. He would get off the party, yes, he would certainly be the one of them to get off it, because there was really nothing for Cora to do but stay on it. Of course, if she broke down, that would take her off it. Usually or almost always it’s only a breakdown that takes you off a party. A party is like a fast-moving train—you can’t jump off it, it thunders past the stations you might get off at, very few people have the courage to leap from a thing that is moving that fast, they have to stay with it no matter where it takes them. It only stops when it crashes, the ticker wears out, a blood vessel bursts, the liver or kidneys quit working. But Cora was tough. Her system had absorbed a lot of punishment, but from present appearances it was going to absorb a lot more. She was too tough to crack up any time soon, but she was not tough enough to make the clean break, the daring jump off, that Billy knew, or felt that he knew, that he was still able to make when he was ready to make it. Cora was five or maybe even ten years older than Billy. She rarely looked it, but she was that much older and time is one of the biggest differences between two people.
I’ve got news for you, baby, and you had better believe it.
What news?
This news, Cora would say. You’re going to get off the party and leave me on it!
Well, it was probably true, as true as anything is, and what a pity it was that Cora was such a grand person. If she had not been such a nice person, so nice that at first you thought it must be phony and only gradually came to see it was real, it wouldn’t matter so much. For usually queens fall out like a couple of thieves quarreling over the split of the loot. Billy remembered the one in Baton Rouge who was so annoyed when he confiscated a piece she had a lech for that she made of Billy an effigy of candle wax and stuck pins in it with dreadful imprecations, kept the candle-wax effigy on her mantel and performed black rites before it. But Cora was not like that. She didn’t have a jealous bone in her body. She took as much pleasure in Billy’s luck as her own. Sometimes he suspected she was more interested in Billy having good luck than having it herself.
Sometimes Billy would wonder. Why do we do it?
We’re lonely people, she said,
I guess it’s as simple as that…
But nothing is ever quite so simple as it appears when you are comfortably loaded.
Take this occasion, for instance.
Billy and Cora are traveling by motor. The automobile is a joint possession which they acquired from a used car dealer in Galveston. It is a ’47 Buick convertible with a brilliant new scarlet paint job. Cora and Billy are outfitted with corresponding brilliance; she has on a pair of black and white checked slacks, a cowboy shirt with a bucking broncho over one large breast and a roped steer over the other, and she has on harlequin sun-glasses with false diamonds encrusting the rims. Her freshly peroxided hair is bound girlishly on top of her head with a diaphanous scarf of magenta chiffon; she has on her diamond ear-clips and her multiple slave bracelets, three of them real gold and two of them only gold-plated, and hundreds of little tinkling gold attachments, such as tiny footballs, liberty bells, hearts, mandolins, choo-choos, sleds, tennis rackets, and so forth. Billy thinks she has overdone it a little. It must be admitted, however, that she is a noticeable person, especially at the wheel of this glittering scarlet Roadmaster. They have swept down the Camino Real, the Old Spanish Trail, from El Paso eastward instead of westward, having decided at the last moment to resist the allure of Southern California on the other side of the Rockies and the desert, since it appears that the Buick has a little tendency to overheat and Cora notices that the oil pressure is not what it should be. So they have turned eastward instead of westward, with a little side trip to Corpus Christi to investigate the fact or fancy of those legendary seven connecting glory-holes in a certain tearoom there. It turned out to be fancy or could not be located. Says Cora: You queens know places but never know where places are!
A blowout going into New Orleans. That’s to be expected, said Cora, they never give you good rubber. The spare is no good either. Two new tires had to be bought in New Orleans and Cora paid for them by hocking some of her baubles. There was some money left over and she buys Billy a pair of cowboy boots. They are still on the Wild West kick. Billy also presents a colorful appearance in a pair of blue jeans that fit as if they had been painted on him, the fancily embossed cowboy boots and a sport shirt that is covered with leaping dolphins, Ha Ha! They have never had so much fun in their life together, the colored lights are going like pinwheels on the Fourth of July, everything is big and very bright celebration. The Buick appears to be a fairly solid investment, once it has good rubber on it and they get those automatic devices to working again…
It is a mechanical age that we live in, they keep saying.
They did Mobile, Pensacola, West Palm Beach and Miami in one continual happy breeze! The scoreboard is brilliant! Fifteen lays, all hitching rides on the highway, since they got the convertible. It’s all we ever needed to hit the jackpot, Billy exults…
Then comes the badman into the picture!
They are on the Florida keys, just about midway between the objective, Key West, and the tip of the peninsula. Nothing is visible about them but sky and mangrove swamp. Then all of a sudden that used car dealer in Galveston pulls the grinning joker out of his sleeve. Under the hood of the car comes a loud metallic noise as if steel blades are scraping. The fancy heap will not take the gas. It staggers gradually to a stop, and trying to start it again succeeds only in running the battery down. Moreover, the automatic top has ceased to function; it is the meridian of a day in early spring which is as hot as midsummer on the Florida keys…
Cora would prefer to make light of the situation, if Billy would let her do so. The compartment of the dashboard is filled with roadmaps, a flashlight and a thermos of dry martinis. The car has barely uttered its expiring rattle and gasp when Cora’s intensely ornamented arm reaches out for this unfailing simplification of the human dilemma. For the first time in their life together, Billy interferes with her drinking, and out of pure meanness. He grabs her wrist and restrains her. He is suddenly conscious of how disgusted he is with what he calls her Oriental attitude toward life. The purchase of this hoax was her idea. Two thirds of the investment was also her money. Moreover she had professed to be a pretty good judge of motors. Billy himself had frankly confessed that he couldn’t tell a spark plug from a carburetor. So it was Cora who had examined and appraised the possible buys on the used car lots of Galveston and come upon this ‘bargain’! She had looked under the hoods and shimmied fatly under the chassis of dozens of cars before she arrived at this remarkably misguided choice. The car had been suspiciously cheap for a ’47 Roadmaster with such a brilliantly smart appearance, but Cora said it was just as sound as the American dollar! She put a thousand dollars into the deal and Billy put in five hundred which had come in from the resale to pocket editions of a lurid potboiler he had written under a pseudonym a number of years ago when he was still an active member of the literary profession.
Now Cora was reaching into the dashboard compartment for a thermos of martinis because the car whose purchase was her responsibility had collapsed in the middle of nowhere…
Billy seizes her wrist and twists it.
Let go of that goddam thermos, you’re not gonna get drunk!
She struggles with him a little, but soon she gives up and suddenly goes feminine and starts to cry.
After that a good while passes in which they sit side by side in silence in the leather-lined crematorium of the convertible.
A humming sound begins to be heard in the distance. Perhaps it’s a motorboat on the other side of the mangroves, perhaps something on the highway…
Cora begins to jingle and jangle as she twists her ornamented person this way and that way with nervous henlike motions of the head and shoulder and torso, peering about on both sides and half rising and flopping awkwardly back down again, and finally grunting eagerly and piling out of the car, losing her balance, sprawling into a ditch, ha ha, scrambling up again, taking the middle of the road and making great frantic circles with her arms as a motorcycle approaches. If the cyclist had desired to pass them it would have been hardly possible. Later Billy will remind her that it was she who stopped it. But right now Billy is enchanted, not merely at the prospect of a rescue but much more by the looks of the potential instrument of rescue. The motorcyclist is surely something dispatched from a sympathetic region back of the sun. He has one of those blond and block-shaped heads set upon a throat which is as broad as the head itself and has the smooth and supple muscularity of the male organ in its early stage of tumescence. This bare throat and the blond head above it have never been in a country where the sun is distant. The hands are enormous square knobs to the golden doors of Paradise. And the legs that straddle the quiescent fury of the cycle (called Indian) could not have been better designed by the appreciative eyes and fingers of Michelangelo or Phidias or Rodin. It is in the direct and pure line of those who have witnessed and testified in stone what they have seen of a simple physical glory in mankind! The eyes are behind sunglasses. Cora is a good judge of eyes but she has to see them to judge them. Sometimes she will say to a young man wearing sunglasses. Will you kindly uncover the windows of your soul? She considers herself to be a better judge of good and bad trade than is Billy whose record contains a number of memorable errors. Later Cora will remember that from the moment she saw this youth on the motorcycle something whispered Watch Out in her ear. Honey, she will say, later, he had more Stop signs on him than you meet when you’ve got five minutes to get to the station! Perhaps this will be an exaggerated statement, but it is true that Cora had misgivings in exact proportion to Billy’s undisguised enchantment.
As for right now, the kid seems fairly obliging. He swings his great legs off the cycle which he rests upon a metal support. He hardly says anything. He throws back the hood of the car and crouches into it for a couple of minutes, hardly more than that, then the expressionless blond cube comes back into view and announces without inflection. Bearings gone out.
What does that mean, asks Cora.
That means you been screwed, he says.
What can we do about it?
Not a goddam thing. You better junk it.
What did he say, inquires Billy.
He said, Cora tells him, that the bearings have gone out.
What are bearings?
The cyclist utters a short barking laugh. He is back astraddle the frankly shaped leather seat of his Indian, but Cora has once more descended from the Buick and she has resorted to the type of flirtation that even most queens would think common. She has fastened her bejeweled right hand over the elevated and narrow front section of the saddle which the boy sits astride. There is not only proximity but contact between their two parties, and all at once the boy’s blond look is both contemptuous and attentive, and his attitude toward their situation has undergone a drastic alteration. He is now engaged in it again.
There’s a garage on Boca Raton, he tells them. Ill see if they got a tow truck. I think they got one.
Off he roars down the Keys!
One hour and forty-five minutes later the abdicated Roadmaster is towed into a garage on Boca Raton, and Cora and Billy plus their newfound acquaintance are checking, all three, into a tourist cabin at a camp called The Idle-wild, which is across the highway from the garage.
Cora has thought to remove her thermos of martinis from the dashboard compartment, and this time Billy has not offered any objection. Billy is restored to good spirits. Cora still feels guilty, profoundly and abjectly guilty, about the purchase of the glittering fraud, but she is putting up a good front. She knows, however, that Billy will never quite forgive and forget and she does not understand why she made that silly profession of knowing so much about motors. It was, of course, to impress her beloved companion. He knows so much more than she about so many things, she has to pretend, now and then, to know something about something, even when she knows in her heart that she is a comprehensive and unabridged dictionary of human ignorance on nearly all things of importance. She sighs in her heart because she’s become a pretender, and once you have pretended, is it ever possible to stop pretending?