Agnes Among the Gargoyles (10 page)

   "If a fire breaks out, they'll smell you from here to Teaneck," he cautions them.

   Bezel swallows the last of his drink and, after two weeks of cataclysmic drunkenness, experiences an alcohol inversion—a strange moment of clarity. Suddenly, he feels sober. The door to the bar opens and he looks over the Frenchman's shoulder—will that man ever stop talking?--at the young couple who comes in. They obviously don't belong here. They both wear black. The girl is an eyeful, a densely packed little bundle. The Frenchman stops talking, but only for a moment.

   "It's commerce, you see," he says. "Commerce and the power of television...."

   The boy and girl look around timidly. The boy strokes the bar as though it were alive. The girl picks up a coaster and reads it. Bezel picks up one, too. Same damn beer mats Jackie's been using since the Fifties. He must have gotten a deal back then and bought a million of them.

   Jackie greets them, wiping his hands. "Can I do something for you?"

   The boy speaks. "Two beers, please. Draft."

   Jackie snarls. He has a face like a beefsteak tomato and small suspicious eyes. He has a mean way about him. The Frenchman says that Jackie read somewhere how many drinks the average bartender pours in a lifetime, and now he's counting, and he doesn't like how high the numbers are getting.

   "What kind of beer?" asks Jackie.

   The boy holds up a coaster. He points to the name of the beer advertised on it. "Old Gestorben."

   Gretchen, the rheumy old lady at the end of the bar, laughs and coughs and almost chokes.

   "Listen, kid, I got a hot flash for you," says Jackie. "They haven't made Old Gestorben since 1960."

   "Oh."

   "But you ain't missing a thing," says Jackie. "Old Gestorben was a rotten beer. It tasted like it was giving you cancer. I don't mean cancer like in twenty years, I mean cancer right then, while you were drinking it, before you even got off the stool,
if
you got off the stool."

   "They still brew it in Europe," says the Frenchman.

   "Who gives a shit?" says Jackie.

   "Okay," says the boy. "Two Buds."

   "How about this?" says Jackie. He gets two Coronas from the back of the cooler. "I got a salesman who's hot on this Mexican shit. Same price as a draft."

   "Okay."

   "Lemme do this right," Jackie mutters. He slits the flesh of two slices of lime, then perches the fruit on the lips of two glasses. "I believe that's how it's done."

   The couple takes a corner table. They drink and whisper and laugh. The girl asks if she can play the jukebox. Jackie of the cast-iron heart softens a little. He gives her the change she asks for plus a few quarters from the till. She and her boyfriend bring their beers over to the jukebox. They know almost none of the songs on it. Jackie has had the same records since the Blarney Castle opened. He owns the jukebox outright, and he is as cheap about records as he is about beer mats. If he could find a way to play the beer mats he would.

   Undaunted, the boy and girl push buttons at random. Is it just Bezel's strange feeling of clearheadedness, or does the mood in the Blarney Castle lighten? It feels as though there is a party going on. Even the Frenchman doesn't seem quite so malevolent.

   "I Need A Man Tonight," comes on the jukebox. The grooves are worn out. You can barely make out the music. But you can hear the voice.

   "Who's that singing?" the boy asks no one in particular. He consults the jukebox listing. "Who's Cass Hardy?"

   "Tell him, Bezel," says the Frenchman.

   Bezel has to clear his throat. He hasn't been doing much talking. "Only one of the greatest singers ever."

   The boy's lip curls with skepticism. "I've never heard of her."

   Bezel leads the boy and girl over to a wall of photos. Cass's picture is right in the center, surrounded by ballplayers and racehorses and gamblers and Broadway actors and boxers, including an almost unrecognizable John Bezel.

   Bezel takes her picture off the wall. "Do you know what they said about her? That she could sing like an angel—an angel who had slept with the devil."

   "She's beautiful," says the girl "Is she dead?"

   "For many years."

   The record stops. The boy plays another by Cass Hardy. Bezel tells the story of how Cass started out in the chorus on Broadway. "But she could never keep a job," he says. "She couldn't blend in." She started working clubs in Harlem and the Village, a white woman singing the blues.

   "This was her home," says Jackie. "She had no family but us. We told her she was gonna be famous, but she didn't believe it. She said, 'Jackie, I'm not gonna make it, I like this bar too much.'"

   Bezel tells how she hooked up with a manager, Philo Canfield. He got her career going.

   "She fell in love with Philo," says Bezel. "Just when she found out she was having a baby, it came out that he was involved with another singer."

   "What did she do?" asks the girl.

   "She didn't have to do anything," says Bezel. "She fell down some recording studio stairs and was killed. Some said that Philo was involved, but nothing was proven."

   Jackie studies his reflection in the bar. "And that's the saddest story ever."

   The boy pauses a respectful moment. "What happened to Philo?"

   "Died in a crap game," says Bezel. "Shot through the heart."

   Jackie corrects him. "Through the chest. Wild Bill Hickok couldn't have hit his tiny heart."

   The song playing is called "Under A Creole Moon." It is an accompaniment waiting for a vocalist. The melody can only be imagined. "This was the last song she recorded," says Bezel. "She couldn't make herself sing it. Once she was dead Philo put it out anyway. He said it would add to her mystique." The rhythm is hypnotic. The song ends raggedly, and just before the needle lifts you can hear the sound of a woman's sobbing.

   "Philo used to say, 'I had a white woman who could sing black. We could have made millions.'" Bezel's drunkenness is returning. The boy looks nervously around. Where is his girlfriend? Bezel hasn't seen her for a while. The boy checks the bathrooms. Empty. Bezel notices that the Frenchman isn't around, either. Bezel makes his way awkwardly to the back of the bar. He pushes open the back door. There she is. The Frenchman is menacing her. She isn't sure if she should scream.

   "Stop," Bezel orders.

   The Frenchman leers. "I was just telling her how you and Miss Cass were to be married. You were devastated when she died, weren't you, Bezel? Now
that's
a story."

   The girl breaks away and runs to her boyfriend.

   "Let's get out of here," she says, shaken.

   "What happened?"

   "Let's just go."

   The boy tosses a tip onto the bar and they are gone.

   Bezel hobbles back to his seat. His limp is worse when he drinks. The Frenchman follows.

   "What's wrong with you?" says Bezel. "All they wanted was a glass of beer."

   The Frenchman fires his pipe. "This is no place for that. This is a place of missing fingers and mangled lives."

   "Please."

   "But I suppose they found us all picturesque enough," says the Frenchman. "You have something hanging out of your nose."

   A tall, thin black man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and wavy processed hair pasted down to his head comes into the bar and looks around uncertainly. He orders a Screwdriver and joins Bezel and the Frenchman.

   "This is our man," says the Frenchman.

   "Our man?" says Bezel in confusion.

   "Mr. Parker, meet Mr. Bezel. Mr. Bezel, Mr. Parker."

   The new arrival gulps his drink in a panic. "I didn't know we were using names."

   "We're all friends here," says the Frenchman. "We will get to know each other very well. There will be no secrets."

   "I'd be more comfortable with a code name."

   The Frenchman smiles generously. "As you wish. Did you have something in mind?"

   The chance to pick his own code name pleases him. "Let me get back to you."

   The Frenchman's eyes sparkle. "Bezel, we shall be very interested in what Mr. X has to say."

   "Hey, I like that," says Mr. Parker. "But make it just X."

   Bezel and the Frenchman have been drinking a bottle of Seagram's. It is nearly finished. The Frenchman pounds it on the bar.

   "Jackie!" he cries. "A fresh one, sir. And the keys to the cellar."

   "What for?" says Jackie. "You feel like a nap?"

   "Not at all. The three of us have business to discuss."

   Jackie bursts out laughing. "Business my fucking ass. You're a piece of work, you know that?"

   "The keys?"

   Jackie takes them out of the register and throws them at the Frenchman. Always a stickler for accuracy, Jackie says, "There you go, you Belgian cocksucker."

Agnes settles back into the dull routine of
Infertility.
Her attention keeps wandering from the job. Not that she has anything else so compelling to think about. Her mind traverses familiar ground: her mother's finances, her own failure to achieve, the deterioration of New York City. (There are gargoyles falling off the sides of the Grunberg Building in Gramercy Park; no pedestrians have been hurt, but the mayor is calling for condemnation of the property; Clark Ho is crowing about his buildings' lack of what he terms "lethal doo-dads.").

   Agnes thinks about all this and she thinks about her growing loneliness, about her love life's failure to thrive.

   It's galling to think that Hannah may have been right all along.

   "Of course you know who that is," Hannah once said, showing Agnes a dustjacket photograph.

   "Margaret Mead. What about her?"

   "Notice anything?"

   "Like what?"

   "Like the fact that she's wearing rouge. And I'd have to say it really does help her."

   There is a strange quiet in the
Infertility
offices. The top editors are nowhere to be found. No one has seen the publisher for a while. Systems that have always worked well seem to be breaking down; ten cases of Xerox paper, which would normally be delivered to the supply room, appear in Agnes's office. The cardboard is damp, and leaves marks on her rug. Jeff Tetter's pearl-handled umbrella (it was his father's, bought during the war) disappears from a closet.

   
Infertility
is sold.

   "I'm kicking myself," says Agnes. "It's like when you're really in a bad mood for a few days, and you keep dropping and spilling things, and then you come down with the flu. Suddenly, everything makes sense."

   A veil has been lifted.
Infertility
is now owned by Grinnel Publishing of Phoenix, Tampa and Des Moines. The staff is assured that no one will be laid off, at least for the time being. However, several new people—good, sharp new people— will be brought on board from other magazines in the Grinnel stable.

   The new editor-in-chief is named Margaret Eden. Jeff Tetter shows Agnes a copy of the last magazine she put out,
The Granary.

   "Look at all those threshers and combines," he says snidely. "Look at this advertorial for Ralston-Purina. We're really in the big time, now."

   "What's the difference?" says Agnes. "Tractors, petri dishes--it's all the same anyway."

   "To you, maybe. I can already feel the noxious influence of the Midwest. I've heard they're building a staff canteen. Good Lord."

   "I won't be here anyway," says Agnes. "Who gives a shit?"

   "Where are you going?"

   "I'm sure to be fired, my friend."

   "Well, yes, if there's any justice," he says. "You've been doing an awful job."

   Agnes is given a promotion. Jeff Tetter is fired within the week.

   "You wished this on me," he says to Agnes. He's ready to cry.

   The next day Agnes gets a frantic call from Mrs. Blair Stanhope. She must see Agnes immediately. She directs Agnes to meet her at a restaurant, The Cupping Room, in Soho.

   "It's a nice neighborhood place," says Mrs. Blair Stanhope.

   Agnes waits for Mrs. Blair Stanhope at the bar. The bartender has a ponytail and a superior attitude. When Mrs. Blair Stanhope arrives, she is out of breath. A few strands of hair are alluringly out of place. The bartender becomes much more civil. She has a white wine. Agnes has a beer, a Theakston Old Peculier. Mrs. Blair Stanhope, making small talk, shares with Agnes a few morsels of Theakston family gossip.

   "But on to Madelaine," says Mrs. Blair Stanhope. "I don't think I've ever seen her quite this upset."

   "What happened?"

   "Sarah's been expelled from Miss Clavelle's."

   Agnes drinks her beer. "What did she do? Smoking after lights out? Did she miss chapel? Did she have a boy in her dorm room?"

   "Miss Clavelle's isn't quite that Neanderthal an institution," says Mrs. Blair Stanhope testily. "This was much more serious. I don't have all the details, but apparently there are criminal charges being filed."

   "I'll bet it was shoplifting," says Agnes. And so another rich, psychotic teenager cries out for attention by ripping off a K-Mart.

   "Oh, no!" says Mrs. Blair Stanhope. The very notion affronts her. "Sarah's not that way at all. No, this was criminal trespass-something about breaking into an office."

   "I'm sorry to hear it," says Agnes. "But what's it got to do with me?"