Manhattan Love Song Read online

  “Do you want me to take you home now, Bernice?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said with a melancholy air.

  When I was paying the cab she said, “You can stay if you want, Wade. You don’t mind using the living room for tonight, do you?”

  “All right with me, honey,” I said.

  When we got, in the place looked as though a grand rehearsal of the Battle of the Marne had been staged there. Bernice acted as though she were used to finding it like that, or else she was too tired by what she had just been through to notice. Not a light had been lowered, not a thing put back where it belonged. The drinking glasses had been used for ashes, and the ashtrays for cuspidors. A heart-shaped taffeta pillow still bore the imprint of two heels, and a cigar stump that was now merely a cylinder of fine white ash had burned its way through one of the roses of the embroidered shawl and soldered itself to the varnish of the radio cabinet.

  “Nice friends you have,” I commented disgustedly.

  “Friends?” she answered cynically. “What makes you think they’re friends of mine?” She took off the little cap she had worn all along, sewn with little shiny things, and let it drop on the floor. Then she braced one foot behind the other, and pulled her heel out of her slipper, and when she had repeated the process with the second foot, she let both slippers stand there where they were and walked into the bedroom in her stockinged feet, tossing her little black silk evening bag at the seat of a chair as she went by.

  I picked it up when she was gone and tucked it under my arm, and I took the hundred dollars out of my pocket and put it on the table, and looked around for an envelope. I found a yellow one with a little transparent “window” in it, belonging to a telegram that some one must have opened, lying on the floor, and I took a pencil out of my pocket and leaned over the table and wrote on it: “For you, Bernice, from Wade.” Then I put the money in it and folded it over, and opened her little evening bag to put it in. But the marcasite button that I took to be the catch must have been just an ornament at the bottom of it, because while I was fooling with it trying to get it to work, the bag opened at the other end and emptied itself out on the floor. So I swore softly and got down on my knees and started to pick all her little things up: her lipstick and her key and her nail polish and her rabbit’s foot and Lord knows what else. And four fifty-dollar bills, lying there like yellow autumn leaves. I put everything conscientiously back again and put my envelope in on top of it all, and then I closed the bag and went to the door of her bedroom with it. She had left the door ajar, but I rapped on the frame of the doorway without looking in at all. “What is it, Wade?” I heard her call from somewhere inside the room.

  “Come out here and find out,” I said shortly.

  Presently the door slipped back, and she stood there looking at me.

  “You left your bag out here,” I said, and flicked my finger against it as though it were unfit to be touched.

  “Oh, you could have left it th—” she started to say.

  “Where’d you get the other two hundred from?” I lashed out at her.

  “Why,” she said with a peculiar smile, “don’t you realize? You were gone a long time tonight.”

  I hit her with it in the face three times, back and forth and then back again, and then I let go of it and flung it at her, and it fell at her feet. She never moved, and as I turned my back to her, I thought I saw her nod her head ever so slightly, as though she understood, as though she agreed with me.

  I walked out of the apartment and went out into the street once more. I remembered how I had nearly done this same thing the night I first met her, because she had insulted me about some ring or other she was wearing at the time. But this was different, this was forever, this was good-bye and be damned to you. There was no word for her any more in my vocabulary after what she had done tonight. You can cherish a loathsome toad, grow fond of a snake, tolerate a buzzard that feeds on the dead — but this! — oh, this was good-bye and never again. She had simply put herself beyond the pale. I stood on the street corner in the moonlight, I remember, and covered my eyes with my hands.

  Chapter Four

  “I came back to return your key to you,” I said.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said. “You could have left it downstairs with the doorman just as well, couldn’t you? I happen to know you stopped by twice yesterday and once the day before — asking about the weather, I suppose.”

  I laid the key down on the table beside me.

  “I wanted to be good and sure you got it yourself.”

  She sighed. “In the face, I suppose, like the pocketbook the other night.”

  “You got off easy,” I told her. “I should have broken your arms for you.”

  “Houdini,” she remarked to herself.

  “No — just one of those that are born every minute.”

  “And since this seems to be the day for returning presents or what have you,” she went on, “I have something for you, before I forget it.” She opened a drawer and took out the folded telegram envelope I had put the money in three nights before. “Returned with thanks,” she commented, and held it out to me.

  I made a pass with my hand at it. “Give it to Tenacity.”

  “Tenacity gets paid good wages.” she informed me dryly. “It’s yours; you can’t pull that millionaire-playboy stunt while you’re wearing that kind of a suit — every time you turn around, I can see my reflection on the back of it.” And stabbed the envelope toward me once again, less patiently than before.

  “It isn’t mine,” I scowled ungraciously.

  “You gave it to me, didn’t you?” she told me.

  “I gave it to you, all right,” I said, “but if you must know, I held somebody up for it Saturday night, so either keep it or stuff it down the sink. I don’t care what you do with it!”

  She didn’t say anything for such a long time, just looked at me, while I kept thinking: “Dumbbell! What’d you have to tell her that for? Now wait’ll you hear the flock of insults she’s getting ready to unload on you.”

  Finally she said in such a funny, quiet way: “Is that true, Wade?” I didn’t answer. “Is that how you got that money? You did that for me, Wade?” And kept looking at me with eyes that weren’t hard any more.

  She spun the envelope away over her shoulder with a reckless sort of gesture, as though it wasn’t important any more one way or the other, as though there was something else she wanted to talk about now. She came closer, and put her hands on my arms and shook me a little bit back and forth, just a very little, hardly noticeable bit.

  “If I could only live up to you,” she said, “what a girl I’d be!”

  I could feel little pinpoints of sweat coming out on my forehead, and I said, “Don’t fool me anymore; you’ve fooled me so much — I can’t stand it if you fool me anymore! It may be fun for you, but it’s awful for me. It’s inhuman and unkind. We should only suffer pain in dentists’ chairs and on operating tables, Bernice, and not day and night, night and day, without a letup ever. It can’t be done; it shouldn’t be done.”

  She was the maternal Bernice this time; a madonna of tenderness and consolation. Oh, I found all things in her. She seemed older than me for a little while that afternoon; our profane love took on a semblance of sanctity. Her cheek was pressed to mine, cool, caressing, reassuring; our intertwined fingers were held before our faces in what unconsciously resembled an attitude of prayer. From the sky outside, the sun pierced the windowpanes and shot downward toward our feet in thin, golden tubes that were like the pipes of an organ. We neither of us moved, we each of us heard music and were fanned by benign wings.

  “Bernice, Bernice, I’m not afraid any more. My love for you is stronger than anything you can do. That was the crisis, just past. Now it’s immune, now nothing can affect it ever again; it goes right through to the end. So live as you’ve lived and do as you’ve done, and don’t think twice about it — ’cause always, always, from now on, you’ll be ri
ght and I’ll be wrong. And if you do things that seem strange to me or new to me, the error is mine, not yours. Just give me a moment’s breathing spell each time, and then the strange won’t be strange and the new will be customary. Vice and crime and all those other words — how do I know when to tack them on and when to leave them off? There’s just you, and just me, and the rest is none of my business.”

  “My baby,” she hummed, “my boy, my lover. I’ve loved you on and off now since I first began to really know you. Even Saturday night, when all that happened, I still loved you, Wade, I still loved you. In that room, up on that chair, I saw your face looking at me. Across the whole room I saw your face and no one else’s; saw you trying to get near me, knew that I was torturing you — and yet, Wade, I couldn’t get off that chair. No one made me get up there, no one would have stopped me from getting down. And yet I couldn’t, I tell you, I couldn’t! There was a scream way down inside me, a louder scream than all the noise in the room — oh, you would have heard it so clearly. “Wade! I am going to get down. Look! Watch! I am getting down.” But it couldn’t get to my lips, I couldn’t bring it to my mouth. I didn’t want to smile — and yet there I was braying with laughter. I didn’t want to take my dress off — oh, God, I didn’t want to after I saw your face — and yet I felt my own hands reach up to my shoulders and snap open the fasteners. Oh, Wade, are there two of us in each of us, a good and a bad — or what is it? What makes us do the very things we don’t want to, know we shouldn’t?”

  We were silent for a long time, both of us. Almost it seemed as though we didn’t have to speak to know what we were saying to each other. Then she went on: “The moment after you’d gone out the door, the moment after you couldn’t see me any more, the moment that it was too late to ease your pain a little — I pulled up my dress around me like a flash of lightning, I got off that chair with a jump! Ask Jerry, ask Marion, ask anyone who was there what I said; they all heard me. I called out, ‘All bets are off!’ Some of them thought I was just trying to save face, I guess. One or two came up to me later on, on the sly, when they thought no one was looking, and tried to speak their pieces. I took a hundred dollars from the first one just as a joke and faked an appointment with him for the next evening, which I never kept. The second one followed me into another room when I went to get my things just before you came back. He took my pocketbook from me, opened it, and put the hundred in. He was drunk and couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, so when Jerry came to tell me you were there, I sneaked out and locked the door on him. That was the hammering you heard, remember? That’s all there was to it,” she said. “It was bad enough; but it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”

  I was convinced — that it wasn’t true as she told it; that the true version was the one that had gnawed at my vitals for three whole days — from the moment I had found the money in her pocketbook until the moment I had come back here today. But how easy to forgive her when the lie was for my sake!

  Or maybe this was the culminating irony of it all — that having believed her each and all of the many times that she was lying to me, when it didn’t matter much to her whether I believed or not, now at last, when she was telling the truth and wanted to be believed (for there were tears in her eyes) — she failed utterly. I was inalterably convinced that she had lain with some one in that side room in Jerry’s apartment.

  But whether I believed her or not had nothing to do with my loving her; my love for her had now reached a stage where it could forgive anything she did. Only, perhaps, it was forgiving her once more than she needed to be forgiven.

  “Other things, too,” she said, “aren’t as bad as they seem. Or maybe they’re worse, but not in the same way. I know you know I’m not paying for the things I have here. You’ve known that because I’ve told you to be careful about phoning me, and all the rest. But you think I’m some one’s mistress. You’ve never said it, but I know you’ve thought it all along, ever since the night you first set foot in here. Then get this: I’m not being kept by one man — I’m being kept by a clique. I’m not being kept because I’m loved — I’m being kept because I’m useful. I can’t tell you any more than that. It isn’t good if I talk. Bad for me, maybe bad for you too.”

  “Tell me you love me. That’s all that matters, not who your friends are or what you’ve done.”

  We were sitting now on the divan in one another’s arms, where one night I had found her handkerchief when I came in here alone, and where the other night that taffeta cushion had lain with the print of some one’s heels bitten into it. “Wade,” she said, “you complete the circle for me; by loving you, I’ve come around again to where I started from. Eight or nine years ago I used to go with a boy like you — you know, a boy who really loved me; it was only when I’d had the opportunity of comparing him to those that came later that I realized he must have been a pretty decent sort after all. Oh, he wouldn’t have been healthy for a good girl to know — and yet when I told him I’d been drugged and kept locked up in a roadhouse overnight, he went out and got blind from wood alcohol. Since then I’ve been dragged through cage after cage of gorillas, and now once more I’m with some one who loves me. It seems so strange to hear those words ‘I love you’ and know they’re really meant, really mine.”

  “They’re no good,” I said, “how can they tell you what I really want to say?”

  “It’s funny, it can’t be explained,” she murmured, “I feel sometimes as though you were sent my way to remind me now that it’s too late; as though someone were shaking a finger at me and saying, ‘See what you’ve missed, Bernice!’ Oh, it’s not you so much, honey, it’s what you stand for in my mind; there’s really nothing to you, you’re just a man no different from a dozen, from a thousand, others — like that song that goes, ‘Along came Bill, you’d see him on the street and never notice him at all.’ But you love me for myself, that’s what counts — and you’re honest and you’re not too cruel. The kind of girls that get your kind wouldn’t understand me; they’d say. ‘Who wants Bill? The world is full of Bills’; they’re looking for romance, the saps, for sheiks and mysterious strangers. Wade, darling, I’ve had a man die in my arms — I’ve had to pretend to dance back to my table when I knew I was holding a corpse in my arms, so that people would think he was just drunk — with the blood coming out of the little holes where the bullets went in and soaking into my dress in spots the size of dimes. Maybe that’s romance; to me it was just obeying instructions. They can have it; I want what you stand for. I want to take up your ways and drop my own. And it’s just a little too late, I guess.”

  So the Plan was born then, as we sat there, and we talked it over ever so indefinitely at first, just skirmishing around the edges, afraid it would rise up and vanish like a mirage if we dared to look it too closely in the face. We were like two people bending over a pool of water and seeing our dreams in there, afraid to breathe on it for fear of causing a ripple. And what we said was set to the key of “If I had a million dollars” or “If I were the mayor of New York”; in other words, as though we both knew it could never be, but as though there were no harm in plotting and planning it just the same. Children often play that game: “If you could have just three wishes, what would they be?”

  “—And if the worst came to the worst,” Bernice said, “Lord knows, I’d have enough money to tide us over the first few months until you could find the right kind of job—”

  “Oh, no,” I said virtuously, “I wouldn’t let you do that; whatever you have, you’d put away for yourself.”

  She drew her legs deliciously up under her and suddenly went down a notch or two lower on my arm. One additional little squirm of supreme comfort, and the game went on. “Let’s see, now! I’ve got some rings and things in a safe-deposit box downtown — I haven’t looked at it in years. I really ought to go down one of these days and find out just what’s in it — I bet I could get enough on them to chip in with you on a car, some kind of a little Chevy, say.”

  “I’ve
got a compound-interest account in a bank over in Brooklyn, it must come pretty close to three hundred by now. That would be so much to the good—”

  “Wait a minute, don’t interrupt,” she said absorbedly, “I’m trying to remember things. Then there’s that wristwatch with the platinum-and-diamond case — if I were going to do something like that with you, the first thing I’d do would be to get rid of all that junk; cold cash always is the handiest after all.” She looked up over her head, and said, “Oh, God, I feel so happy this afternoon!”

  I took her open hand and smeared it over my face. “Why don’t we do it, Bernice? Why don’t we do it? If it goes wrong, you could always take up again where you left off.”

  “No,” she turned to me and said, “that’s one of the main reasons why it’s so out of the question. There’d be a lot more to it than just — changing over, if you want to call it that. To begin with, I’d have to get right out of New York. And I’d have to do it like that!” And she smacked her palms together and threw one arm up and the other down, like a person playing the cymbals. “I couldn’t stay on here a minute once I did anything like that. Well, to speak quite plainly to you, Wade, I’d have to duck — and stay under cover for weeks, and maybe months.”

  “Why?” I said. “This is a big city.”

  “I’ve seen what happens too often,” she assured me. “You wouldn’t get me to stay here. Or come back within two years, either!”

  “Well, okay, then we’d quit New York; it’s not the only town in the country—”

  “Believe me, we’d have to,” she said doggedly, “it’d be either that or the observation ward at Bellevue for me; I wouldn’t want to have kittens every time the doorbell rang while you were out.”

  “Ah, honey, that sounds sweet,” I grinned. “One roof, four walls, and you and me!”

  “And to be like other people are,” she said, “and love each other, and to read the morning papers for the weather and the style hints and not — not for anything else. I’d give anything if a thing like that could only come true.”