Maybe some wisecarver your side of thirty could hold you, Baby. But no wisecarver on mine. What is your move a month from now, Baby? Whistle up the Reserves? Let the Marine make his own beachhead?
You tried that route once already, Bookie. All it comes to is you got a petty heart. Baby, you were the luckiest kind that youth ever chiseled. Myself, I got the real chiseler’s heart.
I need a shot to help me by.
With the bar below closed four hours more and with an empty fifth standing at attention, I get real sick of my kind of heart.
They’ll run in the mud today at Hawthorne. They’ll run in the mud at Fairgrounds. They’ll run in the mud at Santa Anita, they’ll run in the mud at Jamaica. Let them run in the mud. I got a petty heart.
Baby, you deserved a better break than me and you’ll get it April 8th.
I think I need a shot but what I really need is orange juice, two eggs and a cup of black coffee. And get the suit pressed. All I need is to pick up the morning bets and tell all the people they’ll run in the mud. They can’t see out the windows for themselves.
Hell with the orange juice. The hell with my suit. I need a lot because I got a petty heart.
Now we’re really getting somewhere.
He rose and went to the window and, peering out from behind the shade, saw the rain pause a moment, then begin again. The shade hung like lead.
I got most of my hair, got all my teeth, got all my doubles still to hit …
Well, nobody had to tell me—I also got the real chiseler’s heart.
But I used to have the soldier’s heart. A real good soldier told me so.
The rain paused again as if to hear better.
What makes a soldier’s heart, what makes him perspire? I’ll tell you what I just found out on you, Bookie—you been on the side of the house too long. For it isn’t standing up to fight or lying down to fire … and the petty heart gave a slow, sick turn. Traffic rolled below. Rain on all the roofs around and on all the landscaped lawns of Baby’s country. He had never seen that country. Yet he knew, from knowing Baby, that in that land it was always enough just to be whoever you happened to be. Where everyone had a lawn big as the infield at Santa Anita. Out there you were born with the winning stub in your diaper pocket. Here in his own patch between billboard and trolley, everyone tried, their whole lives long, to be somebody they never were. Somebody they’d read about, someone they’d heard about, someone they never could be. Someone like George Raft, someone like Frank Costello, someone like Myrna Loy. It was a world full of big shots where everyone saw clean through everyone but himself.
It was also a world of electrified forests stretching out endlessly from one tiny hub. He had a secret place on the hotel roof fashioned out of potted palms long missing from the lobby. He had tossed his G.I. blanket over a bench and pulled it between the palms. And in the whole city then no one could find him. That was his place in the forest.
Baby, this is the selfsame bed.
Baby, the selfsame pillow … from which her eyes had made a lamp to burn a deeper yellow. Eyes whole sea-green miles deep … a white blouse and a gray skirt … she bathes, she sleeps, she speaks.
While the selfsame clock ticked on. Ticking at this moment exactly as it had when he’d kissed one of her breasts and she said “now the other.” And the tiny nipples hardened, each in turn against his breath.
And the smell of the freshly bathed girl returned, and faded down to no more than a sliver of Lifebuoy left on the sill beneath the shade.
The DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the wrong side of the door. The house-rules above it hung unframed forever. Seven a.m. pinpointed the dark drawn shade and the shade itself hung heavy.
In early October the weather had gone backwards a whole week just for them.
She had always let him know she was parking downstairs by swinging a spotlight once across his window. Two minutes after he would see her striding through the night-blue glow cast by bar after bar below. As if saying with every step, “Here comes Baby and it feels just right.” She could press the button for a self-operating lift as though feeling certain that whoever might be riding would skip out between floors if they guessed it was Baby. Why should anyone keep Baby waiting?
It felt so right to be Baby.
The week the weather went backwards they had sat up there every night. Monday had been cool, Tuesday warmer, and every day after warmer than that. And the weekend balmy as June.
They had lived with a bottle of Chianti between them, the scent hanging like a little purple veil between the roof and the million-candled carnival beyond—the window lights of the late office workers, piled one upon another above the river, the tavern lights that had bloomed like lilies touching each to each across the city’s lawless deeps, the auto lights in one long forevering curve down miles and miles of boulevard where one dark driver after the other bore down the streets of the big night world … she had been born on the bright side, he on the black. Yet his own side was usually better lighted at night.
Baby, remember all the lights on the boulevard, reflecting billboard and bar forever in the river? How one night the stars walked for us, two by two. Like lovers in the water seeking each other across the city’s drunken deeps? Night when all hours were one.
He could not go to her country, so she had come to his. Through a bookie door.
“You couldn’t bear those squares I have to put up with for a single hour,” she had convinced him. “I wouldn’t want to ever put you through that.”
Baby, things are getting clearer.
I hope they never get too clear.
Love in October. Love in the night-blue hours. Love in the hub of the electrified forest. Love by the yellow moon, love wan by the ashes. Love when the hands of the little clock faltered yet stood erect and ever so tender on the stroke of twelve.
Whether the moon was white or yellow, whether the night sky was cloud or clear—who remembers now? It was morning, love past eleven and not yet twelve, and the chambermaid’s voice telling some good-morning porter, “I’m still in the land of the living, Charlie.” That had come to them over the transom at the best of all possible moments; beneath him she had given up the smile that went sea-green miles deep: “I’m still in that land too,” Baby had told him.
Like the time she had told him, with her breath coming faster, “Now—for all you’re worth.”
And after that it had always been Now for all he was worth, Now for all she was worth, Now for all they had ever been worth together. For the nothing they now were worth apart.
Baby, how could you need me so fast, so bad, so hard, right away, the very first night like nobody had ever needed anybody before—and then not need me at all? Can it be everything to me now and nothing at all to you?
Baby, how long is this going to take? Tell, how long will I have to go on longing while you don’t remember at all?
One night she had walked in and without so much as a “hello” sat on the bed bundled in her raincoat and studied him like a child. “Just give me a cup of coffee,” she had told him, “then I have to be running along.” Stunned by disappointment, for he had been waiting for her for hours, he began fumbling around the gas-plate. “And when you have the water on,” she added, “tell me where you want me.”
The sudden switch had caught him holding the kettle of water in the middle of the room.
“Did you hear me?” She kept up that imperious tone. “Where do you want me?”
“I heard,” he told her, “I’m getting the coffee.”
She had laughed—that wild happy laugh that made him forgive anything. For in the whole ceaseless city to the ends of town and back, nobody but he and Baby had known what a storm of love could rise and rage between a woman and a man.
Baby, he recalled wistfully now, you never did drink that coffee.
That had been the same night she had said “hurt me.” But he was a man whose whole world was made up of winners and losers. Pain was for losers, pleasure for winn
ers. Pain was pain and pleasure, pleasure. No one wanted any part of the loser’s end. “I don’t know how,” he had told her then.
For she had not wished to be hurt really—she had wished to put a stop to a joy so prolonged it was turning into anguish. Yet now it came to him he had missed something important in not somehow hurting her then, in not knowing how. I’d never needed to hurt anyone before, he assured himself.
But I’d know how now all right, he decided, I’d cross your wrists under your head and haul your goddamned head back by your hair—but at the thought of that face, clouding with pain, his heart proved petty once again.
I still wouldn’t know how, he confessed sheepishly, and everything in him melted as it once had when her passion would meet his own. For all he was worth and all she was worth. And now …
Not for him. Never again …
Baby, the very bed.
For pain was pain and pleasure, pleasure. One was for losers and one for winners, and the land between a mystery he had never trod.
II. The Yellow and the Wan
Inside the big cage with him, so dim he could scarcely make them out, the lions kept moving and moving. They were females by their smell, and as long as he kept moving he was all right. It was early morning, dark and close. Something was going to happen any second. He was wearing a fire-alarm-red robe with a yellow belt, but underneath had never been so naked. Something was going to happen all right. There was nothing between him and the ones with the manes …
I always wake up just in time, he thought, still asleep, sweat just pouring down, shows there’s someone watching over me.
In the utmost country of his brain, the bookie heard a far-off mourning bell of silver so thin-wrought nothing save sleep could make it toll. Gloom and the dark-drawn shade, an iron traffic rolling below. His sleep-drawn breath came slower, at three-to-one, than the muted ticking of the clock. He made up his mind that he wouldn’t bother turning over. And in that darker country the bell began to sound like a name going farther than ever from home, like a name too dear for losing. The breath quickened in his throat and he broke out of the barrier of sleep to lie with eyes unseeing, a rumpled man in a new gray suit flung across a rumpled bed. He sat up, fumbling at the open collar. Post-time still some time away.
I have until post-time to reconcile myself, he decided.
The bar below wouldn’t be open for more than an hour.
His eyes rubbered short-sightedly for the little clock’s prim face. The framed photograph of Native Dancer hung above the party girl as it had always hung. Yesterday’s Form lay open on the dresser and today’s lay folded beside it. His gray felt, neatly creased, hung on the dresser mirror, his tie looped neatly about it. About the room were a dozen signs: DO NOT DISTURB … KEEP OFF THE GRASS … PLEASE LEAVE KEY AT DESK … IF YOU CAN’T STOP PLEASE SMILE AS YOU PASS BY … WE’RE HERE TO SERVE YOU. Everything was as it had always been.
Except the night-lamp that had burned with such a steady fury a few hours before, but now burned on ever so wanly. All night the little bell had tolled a name too dear for losing, and all night the lamp burned yellow. Now the lamp burned white—as if something had happened in the night that could not now be ever undone by yellow light or white. “Baby,” he told the dresser mirror, “don’t, don’t. Just don’t do it.” And seeing, he picked up the note in the gloom of the second-rate hotel room, the note that had fallen from his hand when the lamp turned wan.
He had let the right moment go by. You either take the moment when it’s there or forget it, like a daily double that you’re too damn careful about and it comes through. And will never come again in a million years, and even if it came again in ten, that would still be too late. So let the note go.
The note wouldn’t go. It stuck in his hand, and even if he tore it up, every line would be with him now. Pretty soon he’ll tear it up and toss it in the basket, and in a day or two or a week or two, or a month, the lines, just the way she put it all, would be forgotten. I’ll forget every line of it, he assured himself. My memory will slip.
Yet he knew that though he forgot every line, the note would still be sticking to his palm. Though he forgot her name, it would still be with him.
Then there’s no sense crumpling it up, he compromised.
It’s a combination that can’t come up again, he told himself. You have to be careful in my trade—trying to justify the caution that had cost him more than he was willing to pay, could not afford to pay. All I did was carry caution a little too far.
He sat on the bed with the note in his hand, studying the ceiling. But he didn’t look like he really saw it, looked like he needed the glasses on the stand beside the bed. But he didn’t reach for the glasses. It looked like he had read it already; it looked like he was going to keep on reading it forever; it looked like he had never read it before.
Feel as if you’d died is all, Baby. I thought the broads who had to be coaxed were the sweet kind, but I know they’re only the what-will-everyone-think kind. I thought the girls who slept alone till they got a deposit down were the good kind. Baby, your kind is the only good kind. And you were the best of your kind.
He glanced at the clock: a quarter to eight. I’ll get through the barrel all right now. I’m supposed to send a wire saying, “Good luck and God bless you,” only I won’t. I’d rather count cracks in the mirror. And the sky began to fall.
He got up and looked down the long hall to keep it from falling any further. But the hall looked a hall that had no season at all. The door held a shaky threat: DO NOT DISTURB.
I’ll disturb whoever I’m damned pleased to disturb, he decided. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR VALUABLES NOT CHECKED AT THE DESK, the mirror mocked. You leave me cold, he told the mirror. And I’ll use all the towels I want, he promised. PLEASE LEAVE KEY AT DESK, the management apologized. I thought you’d change your tone. He was satisfied and fumbled in his pockets for a tip, a valuable he’d forgotten to check, a cigarette, or anything at all.
For some reason he caught the DO NOT DISTURB sign between his palms like a man who has trapped a moth and can’t make up his mind whether to crush it or let it free. After a moment he let it free.
“Wait till your goddamn sky falls in. You may get it back in place but it’ll never look the same.”
I could send a wire saying, “Good luck to all three of you,” and have the messenger hand it to the best man.
You tried that route before, he reminded himself. It didn’t work. Just wire, “They’re running in the mud here today too, Baby.”
But they’ll run all the same. Let them all run in the mud. And the rain came on again to make up for lost time, as if fearing there wouldn’t be mud enough by post-time.
I have to go down to the lobby and tell the people they’ll run in the mud …
Maybe I’d better just sit and count the cracks.
Baby, that half-wild look you had in love, and that old-fashioned smile when love was over.
She had loved the great city’s electrified forests stretching out endlessly from the tiny hub of the roof. When her eyes first looked at him, from this same pillow, the light that burned now so wanly had burned a deeper yellow.
And the smell of her nakedness—at once that of a girl freshly bathed and that of a woman of passion so mature … he had felt he held both the young girl and the woman.
For a moment, he had no breath left.
“He says it’s the little girl he loves in me.”
Pops, you’re missing one hell of a woman.
He made his plans for the rest of the morning.
I could go out and get breakfast any time now. One large orange juice, two eggs up, coffee black. Get suit pressed. He prided himself on staying neater, generally speaking, than the suckers. And pick up the bets downstairs. Then I’ll reconcile myself.
Downstairs was the bar where, no matter how riotous the night before had rung, by morning there abided a dusky hush like the muted stillness of a cathedral during early Mass, when only the rasp an
d clink of currency stirred amid the muted organ’s notes.
House odds for both bettors and parishioners were, the bookie knew, forbidding.
I could get a fifth at the drug store and call that breakfast.
I could go back to sleep. I could write a mutuel ticket and tear it up.
No, he changed his plans again, I’ll reconcile myself first. Here I am with all my bridges burned. No use putting it off. Here, right now. Okay, here I go. He stood up to begin but didn’t know how. Breathe deeply, that’s how to begin. He breathed deeply and exhaled. “You made a sucker out of me, Baby,” he said aloud and sat down.
He picked the note off the floor.
Six stories below them the river had reflected whiskey ads and starlight. And never a mail plane or helicopter, beacon or star had found them out, there in their secret place where rainbows of neon spanned the deeps. Where stars were paired, in the river’s deeps, so that each star seemed leaning each to each.
Those first hours together had been no more than those of any side-street solitary, any bar-wise, woman-wise bookie falling in love with any brash young chick from the suburbs wearing white batiste.
It was autumn, but summer came back, a full week, just for them …
Marriage was a bit he had never regarded seriously, one bit in which he had never seen himself. Marriage, he had always felt, was a standing joke. He had mocked it. She had slipped onto her finger a ring that he might have found in a box of Crackerjacks. Its stones, as it were, were plastic dice. He had slipped it onto her finger intending mockery, a mock marriage; instead she had put her lips to it. The mockery failed. The summer air had married them.
Then the rain came on to make up for lost time. All ran in the mud. “You couldn’t bear those squares I have to put up with for a single hour,” she had assured him early in the game. So he had never gone into her country, albeit he had been sufficiently presentable at the time. Beauty had come into his own patch, between billboard and bar, instead.
Beauty, the fog is blowing off. I hope things never get too clear.