Barbary Shore (6 page)

“Do you make things there?”

“No. I …?” I realized that he had forgotten. “No, I write.”

“Oh, well that’s a clever occupation.” He followed me toward the door, and stood talking to me in the hall.

“I’ve been in New York for two months,” he said suddenly, “and do you know I haven’t found any of the evil quarters. I
understand that Harlem is quite something, although they say that the tourists have ruined it, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know.”

“It takes all kinds to make a world, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

He leered at me suddenly. “I’ve had some interesting experiences with the lady downstairs. Mrs. Guinevere. She’s a fine lady.” The leer was shocking.

“I’ve heard a lot about her,” I said.

“Oh, yes. She’s an experience. Something to put into one’s memoirs as they say.”

“Mmm.” I shuffled a step or two away. “Well, back to work for me.”

“Oh, yes, I understand,” he said in his soft voice. “One has to work, doesn’t one?” He sipped his beer reflectively. “Sometime I’d like to talk over my experiences with you, would you mind?”

“No.”

“It’s been very enjoyable having this little discussion.” He retreated almost completely into his room. As I left, he said one last thing. “You know that Mrs. Guinevere?”

“Yes.”

“An extremely colorful person. Typical of New York, so I’ve heard.”

I had no idea at all what to think of Hollingsworth.

I
F
I was a very lonely young man in New York that summer, it could be only my fault. Outside the rooming house I had not many acquaintances, but still there were people I could have visited. Yet as time went by, a week and then another, the tenuous circle of my acquaintances withered and fell apart. Entering Dinsmore’s room with the intention to see no one until I had completed some work, I did not realize that actually I was feeding a wish, and in effect making it more difficult to break the bonds I fashioned myself.

This may sound extreme, and in fact it was. I did not have to disappear so completely, nor was I obliged to feel an insuperable weight at the prospect of seeing some indifferent friend for a few hours. A man in such a pass is hardly interesting, and there is no need to recount the hours I spent imagining a series of rebuffs and insults. In my mind I would telephone to somebody and he would invite me to his house, but from the moment I entered I would know it had been a mistake. Conversation would languish, I would stammer, I would be in an agony to depart. And so, in thinking of those people I knew in the city, I would discard them one by one, convinced as I considered each person that he was without interest, or without friendship.

Across the blur of the past, I have a memory which returns over and over again, and I am almost certain it happened. Perhaps it was during a furlough from the Army, although that is not important. I knew a girl then who was in love with me and I very much in love with her. We spent a week in a tourist home at some seashore resort, and that week provided more happiness and more pain than I could have thought possible. For the girl love had always been difficult and clothed in a hundred restrictions of false delicacy. She had been ashamed of her body and almost indifferent to men. What combination of circumstance and myself could bring it about I no longer know, but I adored her, so completely, so confidently, that my admiration seemed to accomplish everything. The room we shared burgeoned for her. She came to love her flesh, and from there it was but a step to loving mine. We lay beside each other for hours on end, brilliant with new knowledge. I had discovered magic to her and reaped the benefit; I could shine in the reflection of her face. Never, as she would assure me, had a man been more ardent, more thoughtful, and more desirable. She blossomed in that week, and I was so proud of myself. We were very close. We fed upon one another, we talked, we made love, we ate sandwiches she brought to the room, and we stole out to the beach for long solitary walks. We lived under the shadow of the war and perhaps that furnished its spice.

While I was with her I was very happy, but the moment I had to talk to someone else, an agony of shyness beset me. To order a meal from a waitress became a minor ordeal, and I remember that I could not bear to talk to the woman who owned the tourist house. Once on a hot afternoon we had wanted some ice water, and I had pleaded with the girl to go for it herself because I sensed myself incapable of managing such a transaction.

“But, Mikey,” the girl had said—if I had another name it is not recollected now—“Mikey, why don’t
you
get it? You make so much of it.”

And I had refused, actually sweating at the prospect. “No, I can’t,” I had said. “Please, you go get it. I just don’t want to talk to her.”

I had won and therefore lost, and the girl got the ice water. When we parted, and I believe I never saw her again, she whispered a phrase not devoid of literary ambition, “Mikey, you know the room is the trap of the heart,” and the extravagance of the words was not completely without meaning.

This is one of the few memories I possess, and I offer it for what explanation it may provide. If I lived in a close relation with the few people I knew in the rooming house and became progressively less capable of doing without them, there is after all a precedent. I was a dog on a chain, and the radius circumscribed a world in which I was able to provide for many of my wants and most of my needs. I had begun again to think about my week with that girl, but the image of Guinevere, no matter how incongruous, often accompanied her, and I find it hardly surprising that a few days after seeing Hollingsworth I felt compelled to make the trip downstairs and ring the bell of Guinevere’s apartment.

It was after three o’clock and Guinevere was in the midst of lunch. I was greeted at the door with a surprising reception. “Oh, Mr. Lovett, you’re just the man I want to see. Come in, won’t you, please?” I shall not bother to describe her costume in detail; suffice it that she was clothed with enough variety to suggest everything from breakfast in bed to a formal evening. “I had an idea you might be coming down,” she said, her voice lilting through high notes and modulated carefully through the lower tones. “I’m just finishing eating. Won’t you have coffee with me?”

“Well, all right. I’d like to talk to you about a business matter.” As the pretext for visiting, I intended to ask her again to clean my room.

We walked through the hallway of her apartment into the
kitchen whose sink and stove were covered with what seemed all the unwashed pots of all the meals of the last week. Upon the kitchen table was the litter of this repast: a half-eaten sandwich, a sliced tomato somewhat squashed upon the oilcloth, and meandering through it a pool of spilled coffee.

“A business matter?” she repeated belatedly, and it was obvious my words had a poor effect. Business was reality. “Oh, you got to excuse this place,” she groaned. “I never can get in gear. Here, sit down, have some coffee.” The open sleeve of her imitation Japanese kimono trailed through bread crumbs. She reached over to the sink, found a rag, and flopped it upon the table to wipe a clear space for me. “Monina,” she bawled abruptly, “say hello to Mr. Lovett.”

“Dello Ditter Luft,” a voice piped at me. In an alcove between the refrigerator and the window, a child was sitting in a high chair, a child of exceptional beauty. The sunlight illumined her golden hair and steeped her face and arms in a light so intense her flesh appeared translucent. In one small hand she grasped a spoon and was in the process of transferring some oatmeal to her lips. The maneuver was difficult and swatches of cereal mottled her tiny mouth and pouting cheeks. I had for a moment the whimsy that she was an angel come to earth, but a sullen angel, perplexed by the mechanics of living.

“Why, she’s lovely,” I exclaimed.

“Oh, she’s got the looks,” Mrs. Guinevere told me. “And don’t think she don’t know it, that little bitch.”

Monina giggled. A sly expression formed beneath the oatmeal. “Mommie said dirty durd.”

Guinevere groaned again. “Oh, that kid, you can’t put nothing over on her.”

“How old is she?” I realized she was big to be in a high chair.

“Three and a half going on four.” As if she guessed the reason behind my question, Mrs. Guinevere said with no attempt
to conceal anything from the child, “I want to keep her a baby. I’ll tell you, I’ve got it all figured out. In about another year or two, I’m going to have enough money put together to head for Hollywood, and Monina’s a cinch. Only she’s got to remain a kid. There’s not so many roles for kids five years old as there is for infants, you know, one year old and up. So I want her to stay young.” She raised her forearm and kissed the flesh above her wrist. “Oh, is it chafed. I got to get my watch fixed. Here, look at that.” And Mrs. Guinevere gave me her arm to examine. “Just touch it there. Gee, it’s sore.”

I could see a faint red mark. I pressed it and trailed my fingers over her arm. “It’s very smooth,” I murmured.

“Yeah, I got good skin.” Her eyes closed and she leaned back, a look of sentience upon her face.

Abruptly, she whipped her arm away. “Oh, hell, I forgot.”

“What?”

“You ain’t supposed to tell anybody.”

“Tell what?”

“That Monina is three and a half. That’s a secret. You promise you won’t tell.”

I shrugged. “Yes, I promise.”

“Well, I guess you got something on me now.” Her painted mouth in its broad sensual curves grinned at me provocatively. “You could hurt my chances if you wanted to.”

“Monina don’t want doatmeal,” the child said.

“You shut up and eat it,” Guinevere screeched. “I’ll get the strap if you don’t.”

But Monina had made her bid for attention and was temporarily content. She sighed like an old woman and applied the back of the spoon to her cheek.

“You know I’ve missed opportunities with her. When I think of the money I could be making now.” Guinevere shook her head, and sipped her coffee. “You just can’t trust nobody. I’ve
had promises galore, and where did it get me?” She extended her hand. “Let’s have a cigarette, Lovett.”

We smoked in silence for a moment. “Why do you want her in Hollywood?” I asked.

Guinevere’s bald blue eyes stared at me, and she said in a mysterious voice laden with self-love, “What do you know, Lovett, of what a woman goes through? Do you think it’s fun taking care of a household with a no-good husband, and behind me I’ve had conquests after conquests, lovers and night clubs and gay exciting times. I could’ve been married to a Maharajah, do you know that? And what a lover he was. The whang he had on him.” She paused as though talking to a foreigner, and said, “That’s what I always call it, a whang.”

But I was becoming accustomed to conversation with her, with leaping up stairways and tumbling down them. “Yes, I know.”

“He begged me to marry him, and I turned him away, you know why? His skin was dark. I could have been a Maharajess, but he had odd ways about him, and so I missed the boat. I tell you if I met another nigger with as much money as him, I wouldn’t make the same mistake. I’m a young woman, Lovett, and I’m wasting my life. Boy, there was a time when I could pick and choose among you characters.”

“How can you go to Hollywood?” I persisted. “What about your husband?”

“I’ll leave him. I only married the sucker out of pity.” She stared about the kitchen, surveying the dirty dishes. “I’ve got too good a heart, that’s my only trouble. If you saw me dressed up, you’d realize how easy it is for me to make a man. There isn’t one of you I can’t get if I want to lift a finger.”

“Lift a finger for me,” I essayed.

“Oh, you, what do you want with an old woman like me? I’m twenty-eight you know.” She drew a design in the bread
crumbs. “Boy, if I told you my husband’s name, you’d fall out of the chair.”

“Who is he?”

She smiled secretly. “Catch me telling you.”

Through the open kitchen window a warm breeze drifted into the room, carrying with it the smell of leaves and tar from the streets beyond. A delicate anticipation stirred through my body. Somewhere people were making love, the heat moistening their fluid limbs, the balm of summer carrying them through this languorous hour. I almost stretched out my arm in a caress.

“Lovett, you want to do me a favor?”

“What?”

She placed a hand confidingly on mine. “Look, I got a taste for some root beer. Be a good guy, and go out to the store, and get me a bottle. And I can give you the empties to return at the same time.”

“I don’t see why I should.” I was annoyed at the way she had shattered my mood.

“Aw, come on. Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a nickel if you do it.” She said this with some reluctance.

I laughed. “How young do you think I am?”

She shook her head. She was quite serious. “Fair’s fair. You go out in the sun, you’re entitled to it.”

“I don’t want your nickel.”

“Come on, do it anyway.”

This was childish. “All right, all right.” I picked up her quarter, and left with ill-humor. I was furious with myself for doing her errand. She was absurd, an overblown woman whose attractiveness was almost submerged by the rubble about her person. Yet I wanted her. We could be alone in my room under the baking heat of the roof, and all through this summer we could have a succession of trysts.

I bought two bottles of root beer and a candy bar, and
hurried back. “Here’s your quarter,” I told her. “It’s a present.”

“Aw, that’s swell of you.” She accepted the quarter greedily as an unexpected bounty. “See, I changed for you.”

She had, indeed. My heart leaped. She wore a tropical halter and short pants, and her flesh bulged wantonly.

“Dressed for me, huh?”

She guffawed. “I can’t stand wearing clothes in this heat. If there’s nobody around I’d like to be without a damn thing on.” She thought about this. “You know those nudists got something.”

Monina was out of the high chair, and walking about. Once or twice she examined me with the unabashed stare of a child. “Ditter Luft doodooking,” she said to her mother.