Manhattan Love Song Read online

  Then it was five o’clock and I was still standing in the crowded car aisle, only now the train was going in the opposite direction. And the luster had been trodden from my shoes and I had about sixty kilowatts less energy, that was all. I got out finally and pulled my clothing after me. Luckily, it still stayed on. Going up the steps, still in a crowd, the man in front of me missed a step and went down on his knees. I picked up his hat for him. A girl on the other side of him picked up the halibut steak he was bringing home to his wife. I could tell it was halibut steak by the smell. And the impact against the steel-rimmed step didn’t help it any, either. “Maybe,” I said to myself unfriendly, “that’s some of your business too. Are you going to eat it?”

  She wasn’t in when I got there. There I was, back where I had started from. “Now, what the hell did I get out of that?” I thought morosely. “Just so they won’t cut off the gas and electricity on us at the end of the month!” I picked the gin bottle up from the floor of the broom closet, poured two inches into a glass, went in and took a shower. One that could be heard out on the street, I’m sure. I thought I heard the doorbell ring, but wasn’t sure. But when I was through toweling and had my shirt on, I went out to see, and Maxine had come in. She had deposited a big brown-paper bag full of stuff on the kitchen table and was sitting on a chair alongside of it, elbow on the table, holding her head in her hand. She lifted it to remark, “You couldn’t even let me in, could you? I stood out there ringing away for fully five minutes, doing a juggling act with this stuff in one hand and my key in the other!”

  “How was I going to open the door?” I said. “I was all wet.”

  “What was that?” I thought I had heard her say, “You always are.” “Anyway,” I went on, “you believe in giving delivery boys a swell break, don’t you? What are they getting paid for?”

  “Oh, don’t bother me,” she groaned. “I’m too tired to answer any deep questions right now.”

  I turned to leave the room; at the door, though, I turned a second time to answer this, hands in my back pockets. I evidently felt it needed answering. “Tired from what?” I sneered, “sitting around on your fanny all day? That’s about all you do, as far as I can make out.” Which, I figured, should have held her for awhile. Expecting me to answer doorbells in the nude! Even if she was my wife, there might be other people using the hallway at the same time.

  “That’s consideration!” she said. “How do you know what I’m doing? Television hasn’t come in yet, has it?” She walked very close to me, and there wasn’t much friendship in our glance. “So you think I’m sitting around all day doing nothing. Who do you think washes up the dishes after you’ve gone?”

  “What’s there to that?” I assured her. “Park ’em in the sink, turn on the water, and let evaporation do the rest—”

  “Who do you think keeps the place clean, the Board of Health?”

  “Maybe that’s why I find our four-legged friends in the bathtub every now and again.”

  “Who do you think sends out the laundry? Who do you think makes the beds? Who do you think—”

  “Oh, keep your funnies,” I said. “I’m not end man in a minstrel show.”

  She was still standing close to me. It got on my nerves. “Don’t crowd,” I said, and gave her a push.

  “Yes.” she said, “that’s what you’re best at!”

  “As long as I’m good for something, that’s a help.”

  “Well,” she cried, pointing rapidly at this and that, “there’re the chops and there’s the stove and there’s the table — so if you want to eat, go to it! I’m going in and have a good cry. You can go to hell.”

  “I’ll stop off at a restaurant on my way,” I called after her. “I’m not pansy enough to get a kick out of doing your work for you!” And picked up my hat and went.

  And sitting in state at a table in the “Original Joe’s Restaurant” with a veal stew in front of me, I addressed the image in my mind in this wise: “And I don’t have to have you, either. I can get along without any one. I can get along by myself.” The image was Bernice’s, not Maxine’s. But with the dessert before me, I suddenly stood up and walked into a phone booth, dropping my napkin midway on the floor, where it lay like a challenge.

  I pulled the glass slide after me, a light went on, and I got out my little book. “Tha-a-at’s right,” I assured the operator. It started to ring at the other end. It kept on ringing at the other end. I changed the foot I was standing on. Then I changed back again. I was so nervous I felt like going to the men’s room. Wouldn’t it ever stop ringing at the other end? Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seven—. Suddenly the operator got on again. “Your party hasn’t answered yet.” As though I didn’t know that! “Shall I keep on ringing?”

  “Do that little thing,” I said, “if it takes all night.” Meantime the dessert out there was getting warm and the coffee getting cold. No one had picked up the napkin yet, either.

  And still it rang. “The dirty stay-out!” I commented. I started to work the little hook up and down to get the operator back. I wanted my nickel back. I had given up hope, you see. And suddenly the ringing stopped and there was a faint click at the other end. The receiver had been lifted. But there wasn’t a sound. Whoever it was was waiting to hear my voice first. And she had told me not to open my mouth, not even to say hello, unless I heard her voice first. So a new kind of endurance contest began then and there. But I wasn’t good at it, I had too much at stake. I gave in. “Hello?” I said formally.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice answered. “Who do you want?”

  I couldn’t’ve gotten off the line if I had wanted to. “Miss Pascal there?” I said mildly.

  “Who’re you?” was the immediate result of this.

  “Is she or isn’t she?”

  “You a friend of hers?”

  I knew I’d never get past him to her even if she was there, and why make it tough for her? There was always another day.

  “I’m the repair man,” I said, “for the City Service Radio Corporation. We’ve had a call from her saying her instrument needed looking over.”

  “Seven in the evening,” he told me, “is a peculiar time to be going around repairing radios.”

  “The slip I have here is marked ‘Urgent,’ ” I answered, “and we guarantee our customers day and night service, so I called to find out if it was all right for me to come up.”

  “The closest you’ll get to here,” he assured me, “is where you are now.”

  “It’s up to you,” I said philosophically. “If you prefer static to good reception, we ain’t gonna cry about it.”

  “And thank the City Service Radio Corporation for me,” he remarked emphatically. “It’s darn sweet of them, considering I got the instrument at Landay’s.”

  “Y’ dirty punk!” I exploded, and hung up.

  So you see the call wasn’t exactly a success.

  I went back to my table and started to think it over. The bisque tortoni was just whey by now, anyway. I told myself I might’ve known it would go wrong, I should have waited until some other night. I went over the conversation word by word, and the more I went over it, the more something struck me. About his voice. Especially in the opening phrases. He had sounded more scared than I was. As though he had no right to be where he was, and as though he were afraid of being caught there. “But still, if he bought the radio,” I reminded myself, “he has every right to be there.” There was no getting around that. And yet he hadn’t seemed at all at home, at all at ease.

  Just as I stuck my hand in my pocket to get out some money to pay for my dinner, a bell rang, and then a waiter came over to me and asked if I had just put in a call from the middle booth.

  “One of ’em, anyway,” I answered. “Yeah, I think it was the middle one, the stuffiest of the lot.”

  “Well, they’re calling back,” he said. “You’re wanted on the line.”

  “Who they asking for?” I said cautiously, noting my hat within grasping distanc
e.

  “All they said was ‘The party that just got off this wire.’ The cashier told me it was you.”

  I knew how it had happened: whoever hangs up first on a telephone makes it possible for the other party to trace the call through the operator. In the intrigue racket it’s a good rule to always let the other fellow hang up first, if you don’t want your whereabouts known. He had evidently stayed on after I did, and found out it was a restaurant. I thought I’d go back and give him hell.

  But when I got in the booth and picked up the loose receiver, it was Bernice herself.

  “Hello,” she said immediately, “is this the manager of the City Service Radio Store?”

  “No,” I said, “it’s Wade.”

  “Well, I’d like an explanation,” she went on, as though she hadn’t heard me. “Some one just rang my apartment claiming to be a repair man for your concern. And used insulting language—”

  “Who was he, honey?” I said softly, “the big stiff that answered the first time?”

  “Now, I not only never sent you people any calls, but my radio didn’t come from you in the first place. I want that distinctly understood—”

  “Keep on talking,” I said. “Gee, your voice is beautiful!”

  “If I’m annoyed like this again,” she threatened, “I’ll notify the police. It’s very embarrassing, to say the least.”

  “Have you missed me?” I crooned, “Have you been thinking about me like I’ve been thinking about you?”

  She went on improvising beautifully. “Oh, he was drunk? Well, he certainly acted it, my dear man. And I’m surprised at your firm for employing people like that. Now, would you mind telling me just how he got hold of my telephone number and my name?”

  “Baby,” I agreed, “that’s going to be a hard one for you to answer.”

  But she had ideas of her own. “I beg your pardon, I am not listed,” she contradicted.

  “When am I going to see you again? When are you going to give me a break? Tomorrow night? Wednesday night?”

  “Oh, he was formerly employed by Landay’s and has a list of their customers? So that’s it! That explains it.”

  “How about tomorrow night?” I pleaded. “Just say yes or no, can’t you?”

  “No,” she said, and went on, “I don’t want you to discharge him. I’d be afraid he’d hold a grudge against me. Especially if he drinks.”

  “The night after, then?” I said. “How about that?”

  “Yes,” she said, “please see that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “You swell thing!” I gasped.

  “Thank you,” she said briskly. “Good-bye!”

  I was mopping my forehead when I came out, the bulb had heated the booth until it felt like an incubator, but I was happy, all right. I even went back to my table and almost left the waiter a fifty-cent tip. Almost, but not quite. I changed it to a thirty-five-cent one at the last moment. If a man has no more ambition than to be a waiter, why encourage him by letting him think there’s money in the game?

  So I left that little restaurant I’d never been in before and never went to afterward, like so many other places I’ve only gone to once in life. But afterward, whenever I heard the word “restaurant,” my mind saw that one place and not any of the others, saw the phone booth lighted from within and the napkin lying on the floor and the glass case full of cigar boxes with a cash register sitting on top of it.

  Then immediately afterward, it seemed as though I had hardly stepped out of the door, I was in another phone booth and it was Wednesday.

  “This is me, honey,” I said.

  “Well, Wade,” she said, “I don’t know what to say to you. I’m going out.”

  Forty-eight hours’ anticipation went smash. “You told me you’d be in tonight,” I answered. “What kind of a chiseler are you!”

  “Don’t get fresh, Wade,” she suggested docilely. “It isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

  “It’s going to get me where I want to be,” I told her, “and that’s with you.”

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  I gave my necktie a tug. “If you don’t want to see me, well—”

  “I didn’t say that I don’t want to see you. I said I’m going out. This came up all of a sudden, and — there it is.”

  “Business before pleasure,” I said poisonously.

  “I’ll hang up if you say anything like that to me again,” she threatened.

  I waited a moment to see if she would, afraid that she would, but she didn’t.

  “When do you expect to get back?” I said finally.

  “I may get back at twelve — and I may get back at dawn. Why?”

  “Make it twelve. Leave the key with the doorman, and I’ll wait up for you. What’s your favorite flavor sandwich? I’ll bring some in with me.”

  “Just a minute!” she protested. “Not so fast. How do you think that’s going to look?”

  “Swell to me.”

  “Yes, but to the doorman?”

  “I’ll tell him I’m your big brother.”

  “You’d better think up a better one than that,” she said sharply. “This isn’t 1910.”

  “Well, how about it, lovable?”

  “Wade, I’d like to see you awfully,” she assured me, “but I’m afraid — suppose someone insists on seeing me home?”

  I knew that was what was really troubling her, not the doorman at all. She probably had him well fixed. “Oh,” I said negligently, “if any one does, tell him you’re having the place repapered, tell him anything, lose him in the lobby. You’re probably good at that, anyhow.”

  “Well—” she said.

  “If you don’t leave the key,” I said, “I’m going to wait for you downstairs anyway, so take your choice.”

  “Now see here,” she flared, “who do you think you’ve got here? You can’t order me around like that! If I feel like leaving the key, all well and good. And if I don’t, you’ll stand for it and like it. You made enough trouble for me the other night as it was.”

  “We can get away with murder, honey,” I assured her dreamily, “we’re both young and have our health. Oh, how I wish this phone were out of the way and there was nothing between your lips and mine!”

  She sighed good-naturedly and said, “I’ll leave the key. But, Wade, please be careful what you do. I don’t want to have to go around looking for a job.”

  “You’re as sweet as you are good-looking,” I groaned elatedly. “You can count on me, I won’t go near the phone, I won’t even light the lights if you don’t want me to—”

  “All right,” she said, “then that’s that. What you’re really doing is spoiling the whole first part of my evening, but I know that doesn’t cut any ice with you as long as yours is all set.”

  “Oh,” I said, “so that’s where I stand! Just knowing that I’m waiting for you up at the place is enough to spoil your evening for you, is it? I sure stand in thick with you and no mistake.”

  “Now wait,” she said, “don’t jump down my throat like that. What I meant was simply this: if I let you wait for me up at the place, you’ll be on my mind. I’ll be afraid something’ll go wrong, that you’ll give yourself away or give me away; I can’t relax with something like that on my mind.”

  “Suppose you save your relaxing until the end, when we’re alone together,” I suggested.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, and laughed. “Let’s get this straight now — you want me to leave the key with the downstairs doorman and tell him that a gentleman will call for it, Then you want to go upstairs and wait for me in the place until I get in. Is that it?”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  “Okay, then,” she said by way of good-bye, “and try not to get ashes all over the rugs, will you? I’ll be seeing you.”

  And then, where her voice had been there was only silence and insulated wire and an invisible gum-chewing individual with earpieces clamped to her head, and I was alone once more. I dropped anot
her nickel in and had Maxine.

  “Oh, is that you?” she said at once. “It’s ten after six; hurry up, will you? I’ve got the chops on already. Where you talking from?”

  “You mean where’m I listening from, don’t you?” I corrected. “I haven’t had a chance to say a word so far. Shut up a minute and I’ll explain where I am and why I’m not coming home.”

  “Not coming!” she squalled. “Well, this is a fine time to let me know about it! I just got through spending seventy-nine cents at the butcher and the grocer—”

  So I didn’t go home that Wednesday evening, but I went to a barber shop and got a shave, and the setting sun shining through the plate-glass window struck gleams of emerald, garnet, topaz, and amethyst from the bottles of tonic standing in a row on the counter and made the barber shop seem a jewelry shop to me. And the radio over the door hummed ever so softly about love, the world’s one great interest, saying, “Here I am with all my bridges burned, just a babe in arms where you’re concerned; oh, lock the doors and call me yours—”

  And I kept thinking, “Yes, make the part straight, her eyes are going to look at it. Yes, put talcum on the back of my neck, her fingers may rest there for a minute. Yes, wipe my forehead clean with your towel, it may lean against hers. Sure, hold up the mirror in back of me, so I can see what she sees, and wonder if the love shows through the way it should, like a candle in a paper lantern.” All this and more. And to him I suppose I was just another customer, not the man who loved Bernice Pascal!

  So I came out of there smelling sweet, looking neat, and striding wide, one hand in my pocket jingling coins, the other at the back of my neck to make sure he hadn’t overlooked any little hairs. He hadn’t, but what difference did it make? A few days from now they’d all be back there again anyway. But tonight was tonight, and it was sure a sweet night, that was all that mattered. The whole city seemed full of others like me, coming out of barber shops all dolled up to keep their dates with their little loves. Men in gray suits, men in blue suits, men in brown suits, all looking alike, all in love with someone, all heading for where that someone was. And some were whistling, and some were intent on the ground before them, and some glanced into every mirror along the way to catch their own reflections, and some bumped into you and apologized with a friendly smile, others bumped into you and gave you a scowl, still others bumped into you and didn’t even know you were there at all — all according to their various temperaments. And out of all the beauty parlors came an endless stream of those little someones whom this was all about, with brand-new permanent waves and glistening water waves, with shimmering manicures and rose-leaf facials, with orange lips and cherry lips and mauve lips, all wearing little skullcaps and little kilts for skirts — some looking at their wristwatches and some at their mirrors and some at the heavens above (as though to judge just how long he had been waiting by now). All the players were ready for the game of love, and the endless file of taxicabs bobbing through every street, so repetitious in all their motions, were like a chorus of unlovely but agile Tiller dancing girls to the rest of the proceedings.