"What happens there?"
"Oh, that sort of hells along all night. But it's solid fags, Norm."
"We're on our way."
A piano bar, surrounded three deep by men, stood in a wide curved bay window in the shabby mountaintop guest house called Casa Encantada. The view was a thrilling one of crags and sea in moonlight, but the room was so jammed and smoky that Norman caught only a glimpse of it. Cries of friendly greetings to Iris rose from the men around the bar. A lean handsome white lad, hardly twenty years old, was at the piano, playing the score of a new musical with nervous skill. He wore a buttoned-down tieless pink shirt and tight chino trousers, and he had an intense, troubled look. A paunchy barefoot man in sagging shorts, with a gross red face, bulging bloodshot eyes, and an absurd flat-top haircut, emerged from a knot of men and embraced Iris. "Hello love. Where's your UDT boy?"
"On duty, Felix. This is Norman Paperman."
"Oh my gawd. The competition! Well, a belated welcome to paradise! How long has it been? Three weeks? Being measured for your strait jacket yet? Ha ha ha! Isn't it a gas, playing mine host in the glamorous Caribbean? Isn't it heaven! Everyman's dream come true."
"When are you going to play, Felix?" Iris said. "We can't stay long."
"Oh, soon, poopsie. I just got off. Isn't he good? That's Arthur, from Minneapolis. Just loaded with talent, and his folks want him to run an electric-appliance wholesale business. Ain't it awful? Sit down here, Iris. Sit ye down, Norm."
He ordered drinks for them and a double brandy for himself.
Iris said, "Well! And when did you fall from grace?"
"Why, about four days ago, love, when that butch lawyer of mine, Chunky Collins, gave me the shaft. I thought he was selling the Casa to Norman's friend Mr. Williams from New York, and what do you know? By some silly accident he sold him Hogan's Fancy instead!" Felix giggled, showing large yellow buck teeth. "Of course, it's a mistake anybody could have made. But me, I was all set for the health kick, can you bear it? I was going to go home to Toledo, dry out, lose eighty pounds, get my old job back, yes sir, my poor old mother had my room all fixed up, she's always kept the candle burning in the window-ah me! But it's just as well, dearie. It gets damn cold in Toledo, and let's face it, the health bit is so dull, you know? I mean for me, honey, at this point, health would be a sort of neurosis."
He soon displaced the boy in the pink shirt at the piano, sang two ribald numbers, and changed to a solemn, husky manner for a few folk songs. Then he played tunes from old shows. This was his specialty. He appeared to know a hundred scores from the thirties and forties by heart. Somebody would throw him a title, or just a line, and he would say,
"Yes, aha, Band Wagon, 1931," and he would play and sing it without an error, his eyes agleam with lewd mischief even when the song was innocuous. Iris delighted in the performance; she knew many of the songs herself, and sometimes she and Felix improvised little duets, to giggling applause all around the bar. Norman found the proprietor amusing, and he was enjoying the songs of his youth. But the Casa Encantada made him uneasy. Men were flirting with each other all around him; some were cuddling like teen-agers in a movie balcony. The boy in the pink shirt, biting his nails and constantly looking around in a scared way, sat at a small table with one of the rich pederasts from Signal Mountain, a pipe-smoking gray-haired man in tailored olive shirt and shorts, with young tan features carved by plastic surgery, and false teeth. Norman was glad when the proprietor finished a run of Noel Coward songs and left the piano, so that he and Iris could politely get out of the place.
"Horned he said, starting up the Rover, and taking gulps of sweet air scented with night-blooming jasmine to get the fetid Casa Encantada atmosphere out of his nostrils.
"No place else to go, sweetie. We've done Amerigo. Paris it ain't."
After a silent downhill ride of a few minutes he said, "The cops don't bother them? I mean, that kid in the pink shirt-and then, some of those native boys there looked like high school kids. Nobody cares?"
"There was a fuss here, I understand, about five or six years ago," Iris said. "Some gay boys staying on the third floor of the Francis Drake had a brawl, and one of them fell naked off a balcony, and sort of spattered all over the cobblestones."
"Good God," Norman said.
"Yes, some senator introduced a bill in the legislature to run 'em off the island. Then when they got to analyzing it, the trouble was that if just half a dozen of the queens up on Signal Mountain were included-just five or six of the richer ones-Kinja would lose about half a million a year in income taxes. Now, Norm, how do you go about writing a nice moral law that exempts local tax-paying citizens? Cooler heads prevailed, and the only thing the cops ever care about to this day is sailor boys. The navy's been in here once or twice raising hell with the government, and the word is really out on that. No sailors. I've never seen one in the Casa."
"How about Bob Cohn?"
"Oh, the UDTs never in uniform off duty. Anyway, Bob's with me when he comes."
Iris said after a glum pause filled with the Rover's rattling, "I'm getting dismal waves from you. What's up, darling?" She sat with folded arms, regarding him with wry, knowing amusement, her hair tossing in the breeze from the open window, her face lovely in the moonlight.
"I don't know, Iris. Too many songs of the thirties. Or too many queers."
"I'm having the only good time I've had in months, maybe in years, so please stay happy, Norm."
"Truly?" He looked at her again, and she was not smiling.
"Really and truly."
Her tone dispelled his mood, and warm excitement ran in his veins.
4
When they came to the Pink Cottage, Iris opened the door, and with a look and a smile invited him in. One floor lamp burned by an armchair. Norman was reminded of the first time he had entered this room, more than a month ago, and had been surprised by the smart furnishings, the mass of books, and the long table with the amateur sculptures. The distinctive odor-exquisite woman tinctured by doghouse-was strong tonight, but Meadows himself was not in evidence. In the silence Norman could hear the steel band thumping away on the terrace, Boom-da-hoom-boom..
"I'll be damned," he said, pausing just inside the door and looking around.
"What, dear?"
"Dingley Dell."
Iris broke into a wonderful female laugh, deep, intense, and rich. "I've been a very good girl all evening. You will now fix me a light Bombay gin and tonic, with a slice of lime."
"With pleasure, and I'll make it two."
In the kitchenette, he heard her putting a stack of records on the phonograph. The power hum of the big machine started up, followed by the loud high surface hiss of an old recording. He was slicing a large aromatic lime.
"By yon bonny banks And by yon bonny braes Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomondr."
The high sweet voice, slightly muffled by the obsolete recording, shocked him like the voice of a dead person once dear to him, and needling thrills rippled down his backbone. It was the Negro singer Maxine Sullivan, who more than twenty years ago had had a bright vogue, among young lovers in New York night clubs, with her jazz arrangements of Scottish songs. It startled Norman to perceive how thin and antiquated the instrumentation was; but Maxine's voice was unchanged. A flood of old sensations broke on him. He could feel the pressure of a girl's soft thigh jammed beside him at a table in a smoky crowded cellar; he was drunk, young, happy, totally alive, vibrating with appetite and with hope. Dazed, he walked out of the kitchenette, holding the knife and the cut lime. Iris was not there. He sank on the divan and listened.
'You take the high road, and I'll take the low road, And I'll be in Scotland afore ye. But me and my true love Will never meet again On the bonny banks On the bonny, bonny "banks-"
The song ended. It was astonishing how short the old records were; had it played more than a couple of minutes? The machine clicked, slammed, crackled, and another record began to play, an old show tune that meant nothing to him. He sat there, smelling the sharp perfume of the lime in his hand, tears trickling down his face. He was not thinking of any girl he had ever slept with. He was thinking of Hazel, standing up in her kiddie bed in a pink sleeping suit, smiling at him. The record had touched the spring in his mind, whatever it was, that released the pure absolute impulse of love. His tears were for Hazel, and for the passing of time, and-with no self-pity, quite unbidden-for young Norman Paperman, and what had become of him.
"Norman, sweetie, for heaven's sake what's the matter?" The phonograph stopped. Iris strode to him, and brushed his cheeks with light fingers. "Ye gods, you're worse than I am. Does Maxine do that to you?"
"Got caught unawares," Norman said very hoarsely.
She took the knife and the lime from him and put them in the kitchenette, then came and sat beside him, scanning his face. "Want a drink?"
"I don't think so. Not this minute."
"Neither do I."
He took her in his arms, and they lay on the divan and kissed. She was not responsive.
"What is it?" he said after a while.
"I don't know, Norm. Tears-really, a big boy like you-" She smiled up at him, compassionate, willing, pretty, and terribly melancholy.
"It just happened to hit me that way."
"Who were you reminded of?"
"Nobody."
Iris leaned up on an elbow. "I have a feeling, somehow, all of a sudden, that this is one hell of a lousy idea."
"It's a great idea," he said, pushing her shoulders down. "It's the only idea."
"You're sure, now? The last thing I want is to make you miserable."
"Then stop talking."
"Norman Paperman," she murmured, and she put her arms powerfully around him. "Honestly, what a name."
It was exquisite, kind, peculiarly familiar love-making. It was Iris instead of Henny, a larger woman with some different ways. It was as shockingly, unexpectedly familiar and poignant as the old record; and like it, too brief, too soon over.
Iris left him, and after a while she came back wearing a white silk robe trimmed in green. She brought two tall gin and tonics with slices of lime.
"I want mine now. Do you?" Her voice was low and vibrant.
"Sure."
"How are you?"
"Great. Marvelous. Very happy. A little sleepy."
She laughed. "Big night out. Conscience?"
"No. I have a large callus where that used to be."
She sat beside him on the divan, leaning against the black cushions; put up her feet, tucked the robe around her thighs, and took a long pull at the drink. "The hell with it. I'm happy too. I'm truly happy, tonight, completely, deeply happy for once, and there's only the present moment. That's the simplest idea in the world, and the hardest to grasp and hold on to. I don't know why." She drank again, and looked slyly at him. "Why should Henny be bothered? How have we hurt her? One more slice off a cut loaf, they say."
"It won't hurt her if she doesn't know."
"God knows 1 have no conscience pangs about Alton," Iris said. "I don't owe him a damned thing, and as a matter of fact I think I'm getting some of my own back, and high time-What's the matter now? Why the funny face?"
"Alton?" Paperman said.
"Of course. His Excellency himself, damn his tricky hide." She stared at Paperman and he stared at her, and she laughed. "Oh, look here, Norman. I've appreciated your delicacy, really I have, but at this point I guess you can drop it. You know I'm the governor's girl friend, and I know you know it, and I really don't mind any references to it, if they're not ill-mannered. It's a very old story to me, after all, dear."
"Alton Sanders' girl friend? Honestly, Iris?" Norman stammered, too dazed to be smooth.
"Of course, dear, and of course you know."
"Why, no, Iris. I didn't. I suppose I've been stupid or blind, but I actually didn't."
Iris's face changed. It became tense, serious, and guarded. "You're not being polite? Because truly, Norman, that's unnecessary and even a little embarrassing, and I'd be happier if you wouldn't keep it up."
"I'm not kidding you. To tell the truth I sort of thought that Bob Cohn-maybe"-Iris's eyebrows shot up, and she smiled most incredulously-well, Iris darling, take my word for it, I didn't know anything about you. I met you for the first time with Bob, and-" Paperman was growing rattled and shaky, trying to maintain a light tone over his shock, and the dizzying ugly sickness at his heart-"and if I've ever seen you with a fellow it's been with Bob, so-"
"But darling, Bob is a hoy. He's clever and wonderful, he's been a lifesaver, a shoulder to cry on, Bob Cohn couldn't be nicer, but-gee whiz, Norm, did you really think of me as one of those old bags who screw boys?"
