Manhattan Love Song Page 5

  “What can I say now,” I said, “that hasn’t been said to you in a corner by someone else this evening? Oh, I get the breaks. I’m the only one of them all that really means this thing; they’re all stealing my stuff from me, but they got their innings first — so it must seem to you the other way ’round. Oh, isn’t there someone can tell you for me, make you believe me? Oh, if you only had a girlfriend, I could win her over to my side—”

  “Get up from the floor,” she said; “you have a regular penchant for making passes from your knees.”

  “Oh, I need help — Bernice, Bernice. The touch of your hand on my face is telegraphed all over me. Can’t you see I’m half crazed? You’ve got to get me out of this state—”

  She laughed a little, and then she said, “How am I to blame? It’s in you, and in all of them, to torture the life out of some poor girl. And because you came across me, you react like a caged chimpanzee and then try to tell me I got you into the state you’re in. That’s a laugh!”

  “Ah, but don’t you know it only too well!” I cried, and I reached behind me for my glass, which still had something in it, and pitched the liquor into her face. I saw the whole thing so clearly, like in a slow-motion film, even saw the gin hiss through the air in sort of a funnel shape and break over her face and shoulders in little drops. And even while it was happening, I didn’t know why I had done it, wished I hadn’t done it. I suppose I wanted to kiss her so badly and have her near me, and she wouldn’t let me at the moment, so the effort to make her a part of me took that form on account of the increased distance between us, and I threw the liquor at her instead of throwing my arms around her.

  She started up, but before her knees could quite carry her all the way to a standing position, I was over there and my arms were around her. I squeezed her, and I buried the words she was saying with my lips. She tried to struggle a little at first, and then because (as she herself had said) she loved love, she stopped and stood quietly with her mouth to mine. And all the way from where her fragile spike heels touched the floor up to where her lips shared their rouge with mine, she was a lightning rod of love; she was what she had been born for: something that caused a short circuit.

  And later she said, “Oh, this thing tortures us, doesn’t it? All our lives through we’re never rid of it. And nothing that we say or do can be held against us, can it, because we’re not responsible, are we?”

  In the dawn, the world started over again, carrying New York with it as it rushed eastward to meet the sun. Her eyes, then, catching the light from the brightening skies outside before anything else in the room, were like two white pebbles gleaming upward through fathoms of murky water. She shut them a minute and breathed deeply. She said, “Wade.” I took her hands and clasped them around me, behind my back. She said, “I love you. I knew I would. I told you I would. I do.”

  I had loved her so long, so much, it really didn’t matter by now whether she loved me or not. It was just the third button to a two-button suit.

  “Oh, I don’t know for how long,” she said. “Not forever. Maybe only just for now. But while it’s here, while I’ve got it—!” She kissed me two or three times on the face. “I want to give you the first token of it, the one true token, the only token. Listen.”

  I listened.

  “Will you do something for me? For your own sake?”

  I asked her what it was.

  “Do it for me, Wade. Try to do it.” She seemed so afraid to come to the point. She brushed the back of her hand all around her face, almost exactly the way cats do when they wash. “I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Say it; what are you afraid of? What is it?”

  “Because you won’t believe me; you won’t take it in good faith.”

  I shrugged. “All I can do is try.”

  “You see, I love you—”

  “Lucky me.” She put her hand over my mouth. “Let me finish, or I won’t be able to go on at all. I said I loved you, didn’t I? Well, that changes everything. While I was still in the act of falling for you, I didn’t think about you much, just myself. Now I’m thinking about you more than myself. Wade, will you do me a favor? Don’t see me any more.”

  “So you feel like kidding, do you?”

  She moaned disconsolately. “Oh, I knew it. I knew it. You don’t understand. It’s because I love you!”

  “Well, in that case, how about taking a dislike to me, so I can stick around?”

  She nodded and put her hand on my arm in quick, nervous agreement. “Exactly. If I disliked you, the dirtiest trick I could play you would be to have you around me all the time. Wanna know why?”

  “May as well,” I said, “the show at the Palace is rotten this week.”

  “Oh, if I could only illustrate it concretely,” she said, “but I can’t! It’s just a feeling, a surmise. I know you won’t believe it. But I have a hunch, oh, such a hunch, honey, that if you get in too thick with me you’re coming to a quick, bad finish. You’re different from the types I’ve gone around with. Oh, you do the things that all men do, but Wade, you’re clean, you’re straight. Those are always the ones that get it in the neck!”

  “I don’t follow you,” I said grouchily. “What do you do, associate with crooks?”

  “I don’t, personally,” she said meekly. And then, all anxiety again. “Wade, won’t you break away? I’ll go on loving you. Maybe forever that way and not just for today.”

  “You could tell me that you don’t want me, that would be squarer. Look,” I said, wheeling around toward her, “you tell me honestly that you don’t want me, and I’ll go, I’ll do what you want. Is that a go?” And I slipped the knot of my tie determinedly up to the base of my throat, where it belonged.

  “I can’t tell you that,” she said dismally, “it wouldn’t be true.” Then suddenly she flared up furiously at no one in particular and flung one of her embroidered mules violently across the room by the heel. “What is this love racket? I’d rather have a baked apple! Get this and keep it got,” she said, turning to me. “As I understand love, I love you. I don’t want to have anything to do with your laundry, don’t want you around me every day, but how I love you is nobody’s business!

  “So stay if you must, honey,” she said after a while, “but tomorrow I won’t love you any more.”

  I only laughed. “I’ll take my chances. Who could be a big enough fool to let you slip out of his life?”

  “Poor Wade,” she said pensively, “good-bye to you!”

  Chapter Three

  Tomorrow she didn’t love me any more. And tomorrow, and tomorrow. But that was all right; at least I was with her, if only to hear her say so.

  “She is in, I tell you!” I barked at Tenacity. “I just heard her say to you, ‘Go see who’s at the door.’ ”

  This startling revelation so robbed Tenacity of her presence of mind that by the time she had recovered it, I, at any rate, was in, whether Bernice was or not. “You’re certainly stubborn,” she commented disgustedly, shaking her head after me. “If it was me, I wouldn’t want to come in after they told me—”

  “But I haven’t got your finesse,” I interrupted, crossing my legs in the chair.

  “I’ll say you haven’t — nor anybody else’s!” Bernice agreed tempestuously from the doorway of her room.

  I turned to Tenacity. “You see, she was in after all.” Tenacity scratched her head as though intensely surprised at this fact herself.

  “Maybe I am in,” Bernice continued, “but I’m going out so fast that about all you’ll get is the breeze as I pass you by.” Whereupon she commenced putting this threat into operation by entering at one door and crossing the room diagonally toward the other, the outside one. Without looking at me. She was dressed informally for the evening, in something that had big peach-colored flowers printed all over it, and she had a little cap on made up of shiny black discs all sewn together. And she looked good to the eye — but wasn’t kind to the ear. “Never mind, stay right where you are
,” she said with false solicitude. “I’ll be seeing you some other time.”

  But I got in front of her just the same. “No, you’ll be seeing me now,” I said.

  “I knew it would come to that,” she said. “Give them an inch and they take a yard.” And she gave Tenacity a hard, calloused laugh.

  I gave Tenacity a hard, dirty look and she ambled out of the room with the cryptic remark, “I’d rather be a nun anytime.”

  “What’s the matter,” I said, “ain’t I even good enough to talk to any more?” And I put my hands on her arms and turned her persuasively around the other way, away from the door. She just laughed a little more, and found a chair and sat in it, with her legs crossed up to her waist.

  “Oh, it isn’t that,” she said, and waved her head wearily. “What is it, then?”

  “You walk in like this, unannounced, and expect me to drop everything—”

  “I phoned you first, and you weren’t in.”

  “I was in,” she snapped. “I’ve been in since lunch.”

  “Well, you didn’t come to the phone yourself, and the room was full of voices—”

  She clenched her little fists over the arms of the chair. “They’re coming back, too. That’s why I wanted to get out. While I had the chance. I’m sick of them.” And then she said, like a sad little girl who’s been promised something three Christmases away, “I’ve been invited to a party, and I thought I’d go.”

  “Who are they?” I asked. “What do you use this place for, some sort of a hangout?”

  She made an upward gesture with her hand, from her chest to her chin, as though she were fed up about something. “Don’t ask me to explain,” she said indifferently.

  She seemed so tired all of a sudden, so inert, sitting there like that, all dressed for going out and yet not minding terribly much whether she went or whether she didn’t. Her head was back a little ways, and her eyes were looking up at the invisible line where the ceiling met the opposite wall. She was thinking about something. Her foreshortened upper lip came down over her lower one and hid it, rouge and all, so that her mouth almost disappeared for awhile, leaving just a short pink scratch. I had never seen her like that before; so tired and all. I felt sorry for her. I went over to her and lifted one of her hands to my mouth and began to munch it. Only the slight rising and falling of the big peach flowers across her chest told that she was alive at all.

  She took her hand away and let it pass gently down the side of my arm. “You’re nice, Wade,” she said. “I’m never scared with you.”

  I couldn’t understand what she meant by that, but then, still without moving, she said, “I’ll have to go. You can’t stay here either.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t. Because I don’t want you to. Because — because I still care more for you than others I know.”

  “What’s the good talking, Bernice,” I said gently, “unless you say things I can understand?”

  She turned and looked at me with a mocking little smile. “Do you want to go for a ride?” she said.

  Thinking she was proposing it, I said, “What do you say we do?” with cheerful alacrity.

  She shuddered comically. “God forbid! Just stay here on the premises about an hour longer—”

  I had started to say “Will you come back?” when the speaking tube out in the foyer buzzed with alarming vehemence, as though it were about to split in two.

  With that, all tiredness left her, fright took its place, and she started up from where she was sitting, caught me by the hand somehow, and had me at the door with her before I could grasp what it was all about. She opened it and listened, although there was no one there. I looked over her shoulder. A little jewel-like white light over the elevator door flashed on and twinkled impudently at us.

  “That was from downstairs,” she said. “Come on. If I don’t go now, I won’t get out all evening.” And she edged me aside and closed the door behind us.

  “Wait a minute,” I said surlily, “are you giving me the bum’s rush, or what?” But looking at her face, I wondered if it really was paler than it had been a little while ago, or did I just imagine it?

  “Don’t fight with me now, Wade,” she pleaded huskily. “Come downstairs with me; it’ll be all right.”

  “Yeah, but you’re going to a party; why couldn’t I have waited in the place for you until you got back?” I insisted.

  “You come with me,” she said then. “Anything, anything — only don’t stand here!” Suddenly the little white light had gone out.

  I suppose that, all unwittingly, I had just practiced a form of blackmail on her; I don’t imagine she had intended me to go to the party with her at all. She crossed the corridor a little to the left of the elevator shaft and flung open the door to the emergency staircase.

  “Aren’t you going to wait for the elevator?” I asked.

  “Get it from the floor below,” she answered, and started down the cement steps. The staircase door began to drift back after her on its heavy hinges. “Don’t stand there, Wade, don’t stand there!” she called back hollowly. I went after her and down the first five or six steps and then, at shoulder-level to the floor, stopped to glance back over my shoulder. The elevator door, to the right and now hidden from me, shot open and slapped a big gob of honey-colored light across the checkered tiled flooring to the base of the wall, and all the way up it. And set right in the middle of this light, like a design in a stained-glass window, was a shadow that looked like a hydra or centipede or octopus, with many legs, one thick body, and then on top of that, numerous heads. Or in other words, a group of people standing so closely together in the car as to be indistinguishable. Before they could move or separate, the lazy staircase door finally reached the end of its arc and fitted noiselessly back into place, wiping the corridor out. I turned again and went on down and joined Bernice on the floor below. She had been holding the door down there open for me, but more out of anxiety than politeness, I could tell.

  “I told you not to stand there,” she said. “People don’t use the emergency staircase — they’d know right away—”

  And giving the door into my keeping, she went over and pushed the button, summoning the elevator. It came at once, having only to descend from the floor above, and when we stepped in there were still layers of haze in it and an odor of rancid cigars. I looked down at the floor, but all there was there was a celluloid toothpick some one had dropped.

  “I moved down to the floor below,” Bernice explained derisively to the car operator. “Sure; cut a hole in the floor and dropped through with my chum here. And I went out hours ago, get that straight.” And then, turning to me, she said quite audibly, “Give him something.”

  I felt like saying, “Why should Harlem fatten on the peccadilloes of Fifty-Fifth Street?” But I gave him a one-dollar bill folded over many times to look like a whole lot more. By the time he got through disentangling it, we would be far away.

  “It’s on Fifty-Fourth,” she said to me as we left the door.

  “Let’s walk it,” I suggested affably.

  She looked at me thunderstruck. “You’re with Bernice, Wade,” she reminded me.

  So we got in a taxi and it started west, that being the kind of a street Fifty-Fifth was. And came to Sixth Avenue and couldn’t turn left on account of an opening (or maybe it was a closing) at the Ziegfeld Theater. Then when we came to Seventh, the driver ignored it for reasons best known to himself, and proceeded blithely on to Broadway. “What was the matter with Seventh?” I inquired through the glass shutter.

  “If you coulda made a turn there, you’re a wizard,” he informed me.

  “Why, I coulda swung a Mack truck and three coal barges around in the room you had,” I said.

  “Oh, let him alone,” Bernice said irritably. “What difference does one block more make?”

  I could’ve answered that easily, knowing just what amount I had in my pocket, but preferred not to.

  When we came to B
roadway, no left turns were allowed. We stood there helplessly, while the whole of New York north of Fifty-Ninth Street filed by in conveyances of one sort or another. When the migration had been thoroughly completed, and not until then, we were allowed through. By the time we reached Eighth Avenue, I was fully prepared to lean out and swerve the wheel left with my own hands, even if it caused a collision, but the driver finally turned it himself. He then turned his head, bestowed a glance of approbation on Bernice’s legs, and inquired of them, “What number did you say, lady?”

  “Here I am, up here, not down there,” she instructed him, and gave him the address a second time.

  “That’s over by Third,” he commented philosophically.

  So that to reach Third Avenue from Sixth, we had to go as far as Eighth and then double back. It’s incredible, but then it’s New York.

  My money had dropped behind the meter before we had even got as far as Sixth a second time. When we finally got out in front of the place we were going to, I was a dollar and a half short. So I told him to wait, and I went in to find the doorman, because it was one of those new buildings that have their doormen engaged before the steel beams are even up. But none was in sight. Meanwhile Bernice was powdering her face in front of a glass hanging on the wall. So I went out again to the driver and explained matters to him. I did this merely as a matter of form, expecting momentarily to have to repeat the story to a policeman. To my, not only surprise but almost consternation, he didn’t even suggest such a thing. “I know the lady you got with you pretty well by sight,” he explained, “I often pick her up in front of her house.” There was a camaraderie about this that I didn’t exactly like, but my hands were tied, so to speak. “I mean, as a fare,” he assured me. “My stand’s on her corner.” I had to ignore the unintentional impudence of his attempting to reassure me as to Bernice’s loyalty, or whatever you want to call it. I gave him my name and address, and corroborated it by producing a number of envelopes and papers from my inside pocket. He wrote it down and said he would stop by for the balance of the fare the next time he was “out that way.”