Manhattan Love Song Read online

  I turned south on Sixth Avenue and stared up at a passing elevated train for inspiration, but all it gave was a shower of sparks and someone’s saliva.

  I went to Connie’s on Sixth Avenue. After he had let me in, Connie went back behind the bar and said, “Hello, Wade. What can I do for you?” So I looked at the ceiling, I looked at the floor, I looked at the wall in back of me, and I looked at the wall in back of Connie. I spoke, and when I spoke, I put it in the worst possible way, like you always do when you want a thing badly. I said, “I didn’t came in here to buy anything. I’m a punk, Connie. I want to borrow a hundred dollars.” Connie smiled and said, “You’re no punk, ’cause you’re not going to get it.” So I smiled back and said, “I’m no punk; you are,” and I went out again on Sixth Avenue.

  It had started to rain while I was in there, and the shimmer of the lights looked like yellow torches blazing up out of the wet pavement. But that didn’t mean a thing to me; if it had been raining dimes and nickels that would have been a whole lot better. I turned my collar up and shoved my hands into my pockets and thought. I thought of some one I knew: Rapper, the stage manager of the show that had been running the past few months at the Cort. That was near there, too.

  Before I was through thinking about him, I was there. My feet must have done it by themselves. I guess they loved Bernice too. I asked for him at the stage door, and the doorkeeper told me I had just missed him, he’d gone home only a minute ago. I thought of chasing after him, but the doorkeeper told me he’d broken his heart and taken a taxi because it was a wet night. Then I asked him where Rapper lived, but he said they weren’t allowed to tell things like that. So I said, “What’s he afraid of, the Board of Health?” and went out on the sidewalk again.

  While I was standing there, the last stragglers of the company came out and went home. A girl by herself, still fixing her garter as she came out of the doorway, and then two girls and a natty fellow who looked as though he’d had his clothes poured over him hot and then allowed to harden.

  I thought he was going to get into the taxi with them at first, but after he already had one foot on the running board, he glanced around and seemed to change his mind. He shut the door and they drove off, and he remained standing where he was and staring idly down the street. Then all at once, without even turning to look at me, he said, “Did you want to see Rapper?”

  “Why?” I answered hostilely.

  “I work with him,” he said, “maybe I could do something for you.”

  “You nor nobody else,” I told him, “unless you have a hundred bucks you can fork over for the time being.”

  He looked up at the sky, which was dry now and full of little silvery clouds, and said: “The gin at the drugstore goes right to one’s head.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” I remarked coldly.

  So he said, “It may be the effect of the full moon, but you appeal to me to the extent of five dollars. Come along with me and get it.”

  I felt like saying, “Go on away from me,” and help him do so with the end of my foot, and then I thought, “Somebody else has the hundred for her in his pocket right now; oh, don’t waste time!” So I took him by the lapel, which seemed to please him, and I said, “Let’s go, will you! I don’t want a drink, and I don’t want any incense burning in Woolworth Buddhas — I only want to go.”

  We went in a taxi, and every minute my heart said sixty prayers. “Keep her there for me until I get back. I don’t know Who or What — but Somebody, Something, keep her there for me until I get back!” We went up a flight of steps, and every step my heart ticked off a prayer.

  When he had lit the lights and locked the door, I hit him in the face. He went back into an easy chair that happened to be behind him, and stayed there, with his legs almost at right angles and two ribbons of blood, one from each nostril, dripping down his chin. I went all over the place, and then I came back to where he was. He’d gotten over his dizziness, and he drew his legs in to get up and said, “I’m going to get a policeman.”

  “Try it,” I advised him, “and you’ll be telling your story at the stage door of hell.”

  I went all over the place a second time. I was nervous, and the second time was as much of a waste of time as the first. By the time I got back, he had managed to get out of the chair and was fumbling at the door, trying to get it open without attracting my attention. I said, “Get away from there! I don’t want to hit you any more; you’re all squashy as it is.” He dodged aside and quavered, “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Where is it?” I said. He asked me what I meant, and when I told him, got kind of wise and answered, “In the National City Bank on Seventy-Second Street, and the doors don’t open till nine on Monday.”

  “You better pray you got some stuck around here some place,” I told him, “ ’cause if you won’t tell me where, I’ll hit you, and if you tell me the wrong place to look, I’ll hit you, and if you tell me there isn’t any, I’ll hit you anyway just for luck.” He went a little whiter (or whatever color comes after white, ’cause he was white already) and faltered, “I don’t know how much you want.”

  “All,” I said.

  He struggled with himself, and I drew my elbow back, and he said, “I have a little in the bathroom, in the crevice behind the tissue paper.”

  I went right in there, and instead of using his head and getting out the front door while he had the chance, he came right at my heels, whining, “I was saving it for the rent. The show closes Saturday. What am I gonna do?” I was too busy to answer him at the moment. In the little built-in niche, between two tiles, where the putty or whatever it is they use had fallen out, there was a wad of fives and tens. While I was counting them over, he suddenly and belatedly made up his mind to quit the scene and get help. I got him by the shoulder with one hand just in time, and said, “You wait’ll I’m out of here before you do your act, get me?” But the interruption had made me lose count and I had to start over again at the beginning. It came to one hundred and fifteen altogether. I was going to leave the last three fives with him, but I reasoned that to get back to the party as quickly as possible I’d have to take a taxi, so I shoved the whole amount in my pocket. He gave a little moan of futile protest and lifted the handkerchief he’d been stopping his nose with to the side of his head. At the same time I caught sight of a lot of sooty water lying in the tub with bits of pink and white underwear floating around in it, and toyed momentarily with the notion of giving him a push into it. But there was no reason to do so, so instead I buttoned my coat, went through the large room, got the door open, and took a quick run down the steps, ending in a vault over the last five or six. He called down after me, “You dirty crook, you’ll get yours for this someday!” and then quickly slammed the door of his apartment shut, as though expecting me to turn around and come running back at him. He could have called me much worse than that, for all I’d have cared; he’d just been a means to an end, and I didn’t have any more time for him by now. And anyway you look at it, the epithet certainly fitted me. Dirty or otherwise, I had become a crook now for her sake. And did I regret it? I was the happiest crook that ever ran away from the scene of the burglary as I came out into the open and threw my arm at a taxi. Of course, it had some one in it, and the driver snubbed me majestically. I got a free one a moment later, and rearing down the street on what felt to be no more than two wheels, took a look back through the rear pane; there was no one in sight, no sign of commotion, not a whistle had sounded. It was almost no fun.

  The driver was one of those nervous New York types who believe in round comers and can only see green, never red. That was all right. No matter haw fast he went, he couldn’t go fast enough for me. I had a feeling then that if we had gone into something and I had been smashed up, my heart would have leaped out of my breast and gone on to her alone, with the hundred dollars wrapped around it. But we got there with me still all around my heart, and the hundred in my pocket. The driver took half of the extra fifteen, and I
realized that I had no right to argue with him, because after all, I was paying with another man’s money. “I could’ve got ten tickets on your account.” he explained. I contented myself with remarking, “I only wanted to hire your cab, not buy it,” and ran in the doorway. He seemed to think I was running indoors because I was afraid of him, and called after me, “Come back and say that to my face.” I answered by making a noise with my mouth that really belonged someplace else. Thus we parted dissatisfied with one another.

  The young, rotund doorman was busy on the floor with a pail and mop. He looked up with an impersonal scowl and complained, “You tell those ladies up there, if any more of ’em are gonna get sick, to get it over with up on the roof or else wait’ll they get out on the street, and not make any more midway stops. This is the third time tonight I’ve been over this territory!”

  “Is the one I brought with me, the one that did the dance down here, still there?” I asked him eagerly.

  “Don’t ask me to keep tabs on ’em,” he said aggrievedly. “They’ll be coming down in parachutes yet! The only tenants in the building that haven’t complained about the noise is the couple that went to Greenwich over the weekend. The station house on Fifty-Third is so tired of getting calls from here that they won’t even answer any more.” Which argued either that the party had gotten beyond all control since my leaving it or else that he was subject to flights of vivid imagery.

  I got the elevator, which unfortunately he had not been able to attend to yet. A vanity compact had been stepped on and burst open in the corner, spraying flowery pink powder over everything. There was also an empty bottle rocking about the floor like on the deck of a boat at sea. And one of the mirrors and the plush seat at the back of the car had something much worse the matter with them. All of which did not make for a pleasant upward journey.

  I crossed the roof and entered the bungalow expecting to see some Babylonian orgy in progress, according to the doorman’s account. But either he had been carried away by righteous indignation or the chief offenders were those who had left, because there was far less noise than when I had left three-quarters of an hour (or was it a couple of years?) before. Two or three nondescript males of the parasitical variety were still present as long as the last bottle of liquor remained. One had already drunk himself into a doze in a chair in the comer, and the other two, without wasting any unnecessary words, were fast approaching that stage. Jerry was sitting on the floor with her head thrown back resting against the seat of a chair, and her co-hostess Marion was standing quietly looking out of the window.

  They turned and looked when I came in. Marion stayed indifferently on at the window, but Jerry scrambled up and came over to me. “What happened?” she said in a low, amused voice. “Couldn’t you get the money?”

  “I got it, all right,” I said ominously. “Where’s Bernice?”

  “She’ll be right out,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, catching her by the arm. “Tell me first — what went on? She... she waited for me, didn’t she?”

  Jerry screwed up her eyes and smiled at me indolently. I never saw her again after that night, but whenever I thought about her, I saw that lazy, murky smile she gave me then. “Oh, she got tired of that game,” she said. “And a hundred years from now, it won’t make a bit of difference, anyway.”

  I took her hand in both of mine and wrung it. “Oh, thanks, Jerry!” I whimpered. “You’re swell! Now I feel like I was alive again.”

  But she kept on smiling, didn’t stop smiling a minute, and all the way to the door she kept looking back over her shoulder at me, smiling, still smiling. “A precious little thing called love,” I heard her say.

  Marion came over to me then and said: “By the way! Does Bernice ever get any letters postmarked Detroit?”

  “How should I know?” I shrugged. “I’m not her janitor.”

  “With handwriting like that of a ten-year-old kid?” she went on.

  “What’re you getting at, anyway?” I said gruffly.

  “If you’re ever sore at her,” she persisted, “and you want to get her all scratched up by a girlie that knows how, just you pick up the phone and tell me you found a letter postmarked Detroit in her mailbox.”

  “Since when is the population of Detroit just one?” I wanted to know.

  She turned around and stalked away again, as Bernice came out, followed by Jerry. My eyes lighted up as they found her, as though I had two batteries in my head for just such an occasion and, like a spotlight on a stage or like a lighthouse at sea, threw a halo around her to the exclusion of everyone, everything else, in the room. And every peach-colored flower on her dress seemed to glow back at me in the iridescent haze of love that drenched her. But she must have had an impalpable umbrella up, for she was as cool and arrogant as could be. “Well, Wade,” she said, “back on the job again?”

  I felt as though I had lost the Bernice I knew in the shuffle and was taking a stranger home.

  “Good night, Marion,” she called out politely, “and thank you for the swell party.”

  Marion never even turned her head, but her answer came at once, as though she had been plotting it for some time. “You’re welcome,” she said huskily, “and that goes for anything I’ve got. And if you’re in touch with Sonny Boy at all, why, tell him I was asking for him.”

  Jerry, who had stayed behind at the door Bernice had just come through and seemed to be standing there listening carefully to something, raised a finger warningly and said, “You’d better go, Bernice. See you some more.” So we walked out of the bungalow together.

  While we were standing out on the roof waiting for the elevator, I heard a sound of hammering coming from inside. It was not very distinct, quite muffled. “Sounds like they’re beginning to tap-dance again,” I remarked. Bernice said, “No, that’s some drunk who fell asleep in there; someone must have locked the door on him accidentally.” But she moved around to the other side of me and kept digging at the elevator door with her fingernails before it was ready to open.

  Bernice didn’t say a word to me going down in the elevator, which the indefatigable doorman had rendered habitable once more, nor in the lobby either, although she turned and playfully blew a kiss to his recumbent, inanimate form.

  On the sidewalk she inhaled the fresh air, which the rain had made cool and sweet, deeply and blissfully. “Wade,” she said, “have you got enough money for a taxi? I mean to ride around the park in a couple of times? I’m afraid I can’t go home just yet — there might be some one still up at the place.”

  We got a taxi at the next corner, went up to Sixtieth, and cut into the park from there. The gasoline fumes from all the other cars doing the same thing that we were hung over the trees like a diaphanous mantilla, and along every driveway stoplights were strung like a necklace of little red beads.

  “Honey,” I said, “what’s the matter? Don’t you own the place you live in?”

  “I do.” she said, “Wade, but it’s all mixed up—”

  “Why should any one be there if you don’t want them to?”

  “I just furnish the background,” she said. “They’re having a conference.”

  “Who is?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” she answered, and turned her head away.

  I reached out and brought her hand over to me and kissed the fingers one by one. “Bernice—” I started to say.

  She turned her head my way again and said through clenched teeth. “If you say one word about love to me right now, if you put your hands anywhere near me, if I feel your breath on my neck, I’m going to swing out with all the strength God put in my arm and hit you so hard in the eye you’ll never forget it!” And she threw her head back, stared glassily up at the roof of the cab, and moaned like a person in unbearable pain, “Oh, God, how I hate love! I hate it, hate it!”

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked alarmedly, “what are you getting hysterical like this fo
r?”

  But I couldn’t make her stop crying, panting through a shower of tears that she hated love, wanted to die, wished she hadn’t been born.

  The driver kept turning his head around anxiously, wondering what I was doing to her, I suppose. Finally, when I saw that I couldn’t control her in any way, I asked him to take us out of the park by the nearest exit and stop at the first drugstore he came to.

  When he did, I had him go in and bring her out a glassful of spirits of ammonia mixed with water, being afraid to let her sit in the cab alone if I went in myself and being unable to get her to come in with me, no matter how I coaxed.

  When she was quiet once more, I had him take the empty glass back and I sat with my arm around her. “I’m not making love to you, Bernice. Just lean against my shoulder like this until you feel better.”

  “You’re a good scout, Wade,” she said, still shuddering a little from the sobbing.

  I took a chance and said. “Wade loves you, anyway. You know that, don’t you?” But the phobia or whatever it was had passed, and she just lay there quietly in my arms without attempting to “swing at my eye.” Her knees were drawn up close to her body, and I covered them for her, and gave her form a little tug nearer me.

  “I’m sorry I let it all out on you,” she said, as the driver started the engine again. “If I hadn’t been pawed to death the whole evening long, I wouldn’t have gotten into a state like that.”