The mermaid drifted past, and he tried turning to follow, but now the waters were against him, heavy as some terrible door. He gathered all his strength, and in a single effort awakened once more—an old man on the nod on a rented bed, weak, blind, sweating, disappointed and cold, saying you with a fading smile.
Then saw the note had fallen to the floor. Are you still in the land of the living, Baby?
His heart gave a slow, sick roll.
Everything was as it had always been. Except that the night-lamp, which had burned with such a steady fury when yesterday’s races had all been run, now burned on wanly …
He couldn’t throw the note away.
Don’t do it, he begged her. Just don’t do it.
But she was going to do it.
You didn’t trust me enough … It was why I didn’t … It wasn’t the twenty years, Baby, it was your holding out on me, as you’ll hold out on Virgil. If you’d meant everything you said before you said, “Don’t let me go,” I never would have let you go. But when you said, “Don’t let me go,” you were only telling me half the story. I waited for the other half, and all you added was “never let me go.” When I took my arms from around you that night, it wasn’t because I wanted to let you go, Baby. It was because you didn’t trust me enough to be straight with me.
That’s telling her, he congratulated himself.
Can’t you realize, he reproached himself, that what the girl is thinking now is that, if she had played it straight with you, if she had given you nothing with which to stand her off, she would have been hooked to a day-to-day bookie instead of a forty-foot cruiser and a Pops?
And don’t forget the Marine.
Only—he got up—of course … she has to come back to town to get her clothes and introduce Virgil to her people. Why, he realized, there’s only one place she could be right now—that’s why she had been so vague …
Yet she’d be expecting his ring. Because that’s how women are. They wanted you to see through their ruses yourself. There might not even be a Virgil.
He reached for the phone.
Are you still in the land of the living, Baby?
He heard the downstairs operator reach the suburban operator. Silence, then from out in the green fields, a voice asking, “Who will accept the time and charges, Madam?”
“I’ll accept the charges,” he told the desk.
The phone was ringing. Baby, shine your big white light just once more on me. Baby, I think wherever you are, the daylight must be coming down through the roof. I think when you open your eyes in the morning, the sun outside your door feels stronger for that.
“This number has been temporarily disconnected at the subscriber’s request,” the suburban operator abruptly reported. Someone walked past the door; the wind mocked the windowpanes. The heartbroken mermaid never stirred. And the man in the mirror hung up slowly.
He sat back with a fixed grin. It was fixed as hard as he could fix it because it was the only way of holding himself together.
You don’t want much, Bookie. All you want is to be trusted, without trusting. All you want is a sure thing, then you’ll bet. But it doesn’t matter …
No, it matters more than anything, he realized. I trusted her all the way. I trust, I …
I can buy another fifth and call that lunch. I could go back to sleep. He laid the note carefully in the wastebasket where he could read it again in case he needed something to read. Sometime.
Just like me … can’t I get it through my head she’s feeling she just had a narrow run?
How can I still be in love with the broad, for God’s sake?
Then he heard the elevator click, knew the red diamond said IN USE, and knew it could never be Baby.
“We both want to thank you for letting me go.”
On the margin of his mind he saw a car trailing paper ribbons, circling around and around a city block followed by a line of honking cars, each driver leaning on his horn against the bridegroom and bride in the leading car. Baby, when you lay against me, it was the first peace I ever had.
And borne on the traffic’s cry, he heard the one name too dear for losing.
Belled by some wind that kept blowing from home, that had blown his way too late. And found nobody home.
Love in the iron rain going farther and farther. Taking back love-dreams that could never come true.
And he seemed at that moment to feel her arms, the fire in the sweetness and the sweetness in the fire when love went out and love came back, the way they used to hold each other. She had two fingers back of his neck and her thumb touching the dead center of his throat. He had waited, yet she did not press. Though he knew she could have pressed the life out of him.
Something has happened to her—he had the swiftest of hunches—Baby, it feels as if something really has happened to you. If feels as though you really have died.
And didn’t try to hold her longer, or be held by her. By her or anyone.
Still, all the girls he’d ever meet would be named Baby in his heart.
Baby, he told her sternly, you were much too easy. The first night was much too soon.
He put it to himself: Why didn’t I say, “It’s much too soon”?
You throw that out, too, he brought himself back to earth. You can throw it all out … sitting on the edge of the bed, he talked softly into his palms that had cupped the green-shaded lamp’s light. After all, it wasn’t some childhood sweetheart deal the way you’re trying to make it out. It wasn’t so long ago you didn’t even know her name.
And you don’t know her name again. Mrs. Virgil somebody. Making travel plans to somewhere. Will write occasionally.
If I were on her side of thirty, I would reconcile myself and call up another number. And begin again at a different bar.
Shall we keep trying or will you concede? he put it again to himself. He went back to the window. Much too easy. You were too easy.
You didn’t think it was too soon, that first night, he reminded himself. You didn’t say then, “Baby, it’s much too soon.”
Love in the hub of the night-blue hours. Love by the yellow moon. Morning love was the love he now remembered best. And a lazy chambermaid’s voice. Love past seven and not yet twelve.
Now I’ll tell you something I never told you—he tried another route—because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But they told me you were easy. You know who I mean, he jeered, the boys. If it hadn’t been me that night it would have been somebody else. Somebody else for you, somebody else for me. So all’s well that ends well and God bless you, Baby. Instead of it being you who said, “I can hear your heart beating,” somebody else would have said it. They all say that. Or did you think it was the first time I’d heard it?
Then he looked for nail holes in his palms, but all he could see in the one was a little handful of light, and all he could see in the other was a small handful of dark.
When she came back to pick up her clothes, she was going to have to phone him all the same, because unless he missed his guess, her own key was lost. Perhaps they’d have a drink together, for old times’ sake, no hard feelings, goodbye and God bless you. And that was how everything was sure to begin all over again. They’d never yet been together two hours without making love in his room or hers.
But this time, when they came to the part where she says, “Don’t let me go,” he would have lines he had not been given before. “I’ll never let you go” is what he would tell her, say it just like that, like Humphrey Bogart. He heard himself say it, and it sounded just like Bogart. “You’re the one thing that happened to me that made all the rest of it worth the while” was another something he’d say.
I don’t feel too bad, he told her, I don’t feel too good. I just feel as if you’d died is all. So long as you lead a full, rich life, what does it matter if you’re dead the while? All I have to do is get things under control. After all, nothing happens to you that you don’t let happen, and if it doesn’t happen to you, it doesn’t
really happen to anyone. Besides, anybody is just somebody who happens to be around …
All day long, the bettors passed and re-passed, traffic cried out or was still. Everyone was a winner, everyone was a heavy loser. You had to have something to get through the day and something going somewhat faster to get you through the night (where everyone was a small loser, everyone a heavy winner, and all broke even in the end).
This is how things would always be, for this is how they’ve always been.
What makes you so salty when your worries are finished? he asked himself. After all, I have everything I want. Why am I exalting this nutty broad so? Why am I letting her give me fits? It makes no difference whether it would have worked out or not in the end, so long as we played the string out and had it.
What is it I almost had that I ducked?
But he felt safer letting untried doors stand locked.
IV. Nothing Happens in the Heart
He rose, turned the tap, and let the water run in the room’s corner till it ran cold. It was running so hard, he was splashing so, that at first he did not hear the tap at his door.
At the second rap he paused, then came to the door drying his face in a green-striped hand towel.
And was relieved to see it wasn’t John the Bookie standing there.
It was only the skinny little hillbilly hustler from Enright’s he’d fixed a few weeks before—for the sake of a watch he had pitied her too much to keep. As she came in, he saw she wasn’t wearing it.
O, the boundless nerve of these Chicago whores, he thought as she came in simply high-heeling it. Whatever the trouble was this time, it wasn’t gambling debts.
“You got a good load on, Honey,” he assured her. She perched herself on the edge of his bed. And by the way her narrow shoulders leaned, by the way her chubby hung, and by the way her handbag swung, Honey was in a huff.
She was about the age Baby had been when they’d met. But right there the resemblance ceased. The only wonderful thing about this poor thing was how she kept living without food or sleep …
Then he awoke to find himself still on the rented bed. What had just happened? Had someone been here, or had he dreamed it?
If I’m going to wake up feeling like this, I might as well drink whiskey.
Six p.m. An iron traffic rolled below. It was the hour of the little heels. Behind the closet door, stained with Chianti, a sleeveless white batiste blouse draped itself emptily across a trench coat for which she’d never call. In the lights and glooms of the little room he saw the sad medallion of her face. Once, in the big dark middle of an autumn night, he had felt her lips cool as her passion drained from her. Now the hall beyond the door was like a hall with no season at all.
Baby, he told her, still pale with the wonder of it, Baby, you damn near saved me.
Beneath the sound of the ceaseless rain, he knew that something had begun in him that he had no way of halting. And how much was because of Baby and how much was his own doing he could not tell because he was not a man who lost …
Suspicious tips were being traded in the light and suspect laughter in the dark. Where up a green stairwell or down a green stair, when music was muted and laughter half-heard, glass clinked upon glass in a promise of light. And carpet and transom, keyhole and key, beheld vows holy to daybreak’s bell fade into love-words to any hall broad after both sheets are changed.
Early to the post or late, all things careened without a sound past a desk where other bachelors’ keys awaited other bachelors. Track slow or track fast, all gates, all doors, opened at last to a one-way street.
Where sidewalks dry or sidewalks wet, great trackless buses swung or waited.
Where bettors passed and re-passed and nothing was as it used to be. For nothing shook down straight, no coin rang true.
Across the bed, yesterday’s Form still lay strewn. He put the guilty gin fifth to his lips for the final drop, but the thing was dry, and he set it carefully on the window sill. On the wall, narrow Christ looked down. At a respectable distance to one side, the Esquire mermaid was impaled.
That seaweed exchange had been disconnected for years. The mermaid line, like the bookie trade, was washed up years ago. Why can’t some people face up to facts and go to work?
He heard the muted ticking of the clock above the darkened TV screen, and the wind off that darker country tolling the news of some name too dear for losing. Borne on some wind blowing away from home. The clock had a heart-shaped face. It glinted a bit as if with an emotion all its own. The man on the bed caught that glint, as if the narrow Christ had stirred. When he looked, Christ seemed to be thinking, “Look who’s hung up again.”
He examined the Christ derisively. “Look who’s talking. You don’t even know what line you’re in. You’re in the meek-and-lowly trade and you’re supposed to be on the forgiving side. You ain’t supposed to crack wise. I’m meek and lowly, but I ain’t that meek. I don’t have to take that off nobody.”
He waved Him off. “Hang it up, buddy. You’ve had it.”
Yet looked as if he’d had it himself. He felt his grayish stubble, and the hand shook. His eyes went here and there, seeking someone, anyone, to accuse. Somebody’s going to pay, and pay dearly, he promised the world.
The world that, moving in the rain, cried havoc in the traffic.
Six twenty-two, the small clock told him. You’ll never make seven, he told the clock.
Flung face down on the rumpled bed, he felt his own breath quickening. To mix with the impatient traffic’s cries.
Everything ought to rock more. The harder things rocked the less phony they got … I liked it best when it rocked fast, he recalled like a child remembering times of yesterday. That was the whole trouble with things down the hall—neither hotel walls nor hotel halls rocked like they used to. Especially that corridor where the music, classical or jazz, was piped in for two bits an hour.
I been suspecting as much for some time now.
Sitting up, he swept his hands before his chest like a man throwing away something useless, then brought his hands back to his chest and looked at each, turning the palms up curiously in turn, as though not having seen them before today.
All he saw were two palms full of empty light—the left one for the short night he had passed and the right for the long day not yet done. He turned them over and let the light spill.
It fell without a sound.
Chicago’s electrified evening had begun, like no other city’s night. The pennants of the car lot whipped like colored fancies on a line in the dying light, bare yellow bulbs festooned across the street above cars with windshields chalked PRICED TO SELL. STRICTLY A STEAL. I NEED A HOME.
The little square windows of late office workers lit up so neatly, row over row, while tavern lights came on carelessly, first here, then there, as though whoever was pushing the buttons didn’t really care. Yet when all the beer signs down the side streets and on the corners were lit, they bloomed from walk to walk like water lilies tethered each to each, and each with a certain pride, as if its owner had just invented electricity. They blinked at each other in such mild surprise to see that someone else had been thinking along similar lines. The blue and white Hamm’s, the Schlitz burning straight ahead as if disdaining the Edelweiss … it would go dry before it would drink Edelweiss. Down the street other signs, though none quite as bright. The ladylike Chevrolet legend that burned as if saying, “Now, boys, I don’t want you to quarrel over me.”
When she arrived, she would toss the spot of her car up the hotel wall. Didn’t everyone live in a spotlight, night-blue or moon-white? Didn’t everyone do just as he pleased?
He wished all the damned bulbs would burst.
Across the curve from the Loop the endless headlights: one little dark driver behind each pair and all drivers seemingly, from the hotel’s height, more driven than driving, like the monkeys at the amusement park strapped into little cars driven by hidden machinery along their appointed track. The ceaselessly chan
ging combinations of headlights lengthening, shifting, widening as if moving through a steady current—you could see all sorts of things like that with Baby up in the rainbow forest.
Till the big homecoming stars came down, floating on the river’s stilly waters where they leaned like drunken lovers, each to each.
Neither he nor Baby had known how deep the water was getting. All shores were forgotten. He had slipped a big plastic novelty ring with big red plastic dice onto her wedding finger, and they took their vows on a Chianti bottle. The joke helped for an hour, then all the gags fell flat: there was no joking any more. The very air had married them.
Then love, too, had passed, and nothing could be like that again and nothing could bring it back.
The mystery he couldn’t get around was why that single thing with her should make all the rest of his life worthwhile, and now that she was gone, not worthwhile at all. How can the life that was lived before we met be good or bad, wasted or sensible depending on whether you are here or not? You had nothing to do with my life before, and you have nothing to do with it now. So it can’t be, it just can’t be, that what went on before was no good, wasted, because it wasn’t bad before I met you. And it can’t be that it’s all bad and senseless and pointless and useless now because I let you go … everything is going to be just like it always was. Because that’s how things have always been.
The green mermaid smiled, as she had smiled since Esquire’s hours had first begun. The black and silver crucifix looked down. It knew something.
“I can’t imagine what,” he said out loud. “I just can’t imagine it.”
The trouble was he could imagine it too well, even if he said he couldn’t. The picture came clearer. Turning off the light wouldn’t darken it, and turning on the TV wouldn’t drown out her voice saying, with his arms around her, “Don’t let me go.”
Behind the closed door, in the gloom of the little room, he remembered the night-blue hours, night when all hours were one. Night of the slow-stroke-and-holding hours when the little prude of a clock put both hands up and pretended not to see, yet hadn’t missed a thing.