Entrapment and Other Writings (19 page)

He pretended not to hear. “Maybe everybody in the world just got so many daily doubles to hit and, being in the racket, I used up mine faster than most. But people like Virgil—or is it Vince?—save theirs up like good little boys. So that by the time everybody else is forty-four and lost their hair, here comes Virgil out of the barrier. He got all
his
hair. He skipped the hard times, he skipped the war,
he’s saved himself up for the time when everyone else has run out of hair. He got all his doubles still to hit. He got all his hair. Some Virgil.”

And all you got is a petty heart … hair a little thin, teeth getting bad … You didn’t want to be the one to do the rejecting, and she did it for you instead. That’s all there is to it
.

The clock on the TV ticked on and on.

That’s why she was so careful not to say where she was going
, he decided,
she’s coming back up here to pick up her clothes, and she doesn’t want to have to see me even for a drink when she does, because she would either have to bring Virgil, and that would be awkward, or she would have to see me without him, and that would be fatal. We never had a drink together yet but we didn’t end up making love
.

She would say, “Don’t let me go,” and this time I wouldn’t let her go, ever
.

And the clock ticked on.

He had a flash:
she would see me now without being tempted, and that’s what’s eating me. I thought I had her where I wanted her, and I didn’t have, didn’t have … now she has me, and she’s decent enough not to want to rub it in. I wouldn’t take care of her, so someone will and I have no beef, no beef at all
.

Well
, he told Virgil,
start saving up on your sleep now, Pops. You ain’t marrying Sister Kenny you know
.

“I knew all the while,” she broke in softly from somewhere far, “it would be tougher for you than you knew. I knew that for you it was Baby or nobody. But you let me go all the same.”

If I couldn’t hold you, Baby, nobody else can. Leastways nobody my side of forty. Leastways nobody named Vincent for God’s sake. Or is it Virgil? Anyhow, who does Pops think he is? Sonny Wisecarver?

Maybe some wisecarver your side of thirty could hold you, Baby. But no wisecarver on mine. What is your move a month from now, Baby? Whistle up the Reserves? Let the Marine make his own beachhead?

You tried that route once already, Bookie. All it comes to is you got a petty heart. Baby, you were the luckiest kind that youth ever chiseled. Myself, I got the real chiseler’s heart
.

I need a shot to help me by
.

With the bar below closed four hours more and with an empty fifth standing at attention, I get real sick of my kind of heart
.

They’ll run in the mud today at Hawthorne. They’ll run in the mud at Fairgrounds. They’ll run in the mud at Santa Anita, they’ll run in the mud at Jamaica. Let them run in the mud. I got a petty heart
.

Baby, you deserved a better break than me and you’ll get it April 8
^th
.

I think I need a shot but what I really need is orange juice, two eggs and a cup of black coffee. And get the suit pressed. All I need is to pick up the morning bets and tell all the people they’ll run in the mud. They can’t see out the windows for themselves
.

Hell with the orange juice. The hell with my suit. I need a lot
because
I got a petty heart
.

Now we’re really getting somewhere
.

He rose and went to the window and, peering out from behind the shade, saw the rain pause a moment, then begin again. The shade hung like lead.

I got most of my hair, got all my teeth, got all my doubles still to hit …

Well, nobody had to tell me—I also got the real chiseler’s heart
.

But I used to have the soldier’s heart. A real good soldier told me so
.

The rain paused again as if to hear better.

What makes a soldier’s heart, what makes him perspire? I’ll tell you what I just found out on
you,
Bookie—you been on the side of the house too long. For it isn’t standing up to fight or lying down to fire …
and the petty heart gave a slow, sick turn. Traffic rolled below. Rain on all the roofs around and on all the landscaped lawns
of Baby’s country. He had never seen that country. Yet he knew, from knowing Baby, that in that land it was always enough just to be whoever you happened to be. Where everyone had a lawn big as the infield at Santa Anita. Out there you were born with the winning stub in your diaper pocket. Here in his own patch between billboard and trolley, everyone tried, their whole lives long, to be somebody they never were. Somebody they’d read about, someone they’d heard about, someone they never could be. Someone like George Raft, someone like Frank Costello, someone like Myrna Loy. It was a world full of big shots where everyone saw clean through everyone but himself.

It was also a world of electrified forests stretching out endlessly from one tiny hub. He had a secret place on the hotel roof fashioned out of potted palms long missing from the lobby. He had tossed his G.I. blanket over a bench and pulled it between the palms. And in the whole city then no one could find him. That was his place in the forest.

Baby, this is the selfsame bed
.

Baby, the selfsame pillow
 … from which her eyes had made a lamp to burn a deeper yellow. Eyes whole sea-green miles deep … a white blouse and a gray skirt … she bathes, she sleeps, she speaks.

While the selfsame clock ticked on. Ticking at this moment exactly as it had when he’d kissed one of her breasts and she said “now the other.” And the tiny nipples hardened, each in turn against his breath.

And the smell of the freshly bathed girl returned, and faded down to no more than a sliver of Lifebuoy left on the sill beneath the shade.

The
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung on the wrong side of the door. The house-rules above it hung unframed forever. Seven a.m. pinpointed the dark drawn shade and the shade itself hung heavy.

In early October the weather had gone backwards a whole week just for them.

She had always let him know she was parking downstairs by swinging a spotlight once across his window. Two minutes after he would see her striding through the night-blue glow cast by bar after bar below. As if saying with every step, “Here comes Baby and it feels just right.” She could press the button for a self-operating lift as though feeling certain that whoever might be riding would skip out between floors if they guessed it was Baby. Why should anyone keep Baby waiting?

It felt so right to be Baby.

The week the weather went backwards they had sat up there every night. Monday had been cool, Tuesday warmer, and every day after warmer than that. And the weekend balmy as June.

They had lived with a bottle of Chianti between them, the scent hanging like a little purple veil between the roof and the million-candled carnival beyond—the window lights of the late office workers, piled one upon another above the river, the tavern lights that had bloomed like lilies touching each to each across the city’s lawless deeps, the auto lights in one long forevering curve down miles and miles of boulevard where one dark driver after the other bore down the streets of the big night world … she had been born on the bright side, he on the black. Yet his own side was usually better lighted at night.

Baby, remember all the lights on the boulevard, reflecting billboard and bar forever in the river? How one night the stars walked for us, two by two. Like lovers in the water seeking each other across the city’s drunken deeps?
Night when all hours were one.

He could not go to her country, so she had come to his. Through a bookie door.

“You couldn’t bear those squares I have to put up with for a single hour,” she had convinced him. “I wouldn’t want to ever put you through that.”

Baby, things are getting clearer
.

I hope they never get too clear
.

Love in October. Love in the night-blue hours. Love in the hub of the electrified forest. Love by the yellow moon, love wan by the ashes. Love when the hands of the little clock faltered yet stood erect and ever so tender on the stroke of twelve.

Whether the moon was white or yellow, whether the night sky was cloud or clear—who remembers now? It was morning, love past eleven and not yet twelve, and the chambermaid’s voice telling some good-morning porter, “I’m still in the land of the living, Charlie.” That had come to them over the transom at the best of all possible moments; beneath him she had given up the smile that went sea-green miles deep: “I’m still in that land too,” Baby had told him.

Like the time she had told him, with her breath coming faster, “
Now
—for all you’re worth.”

And after that it had always been
Now
for all he was worth,
Now
for all she was worth,
Now
for all they had ever been worth together. For the nothing they now were worth apart.

Baby, how could you need me so fast, so bad, so hard, right away, the very first night like nobody had ever needed anybody before—and then not need me at all? Can it be everything to me now and nothing at all to you?

Baby, how long is this going to take? Tell, how long will I have to go on longing while you don’t remember at all?

One night she had walked in and without so much as a “hello” sat on the bed bundled in her raincoat and studied him like a child. “Just give me a cup of coffee,” she had told him, “then I have to be running along.” Stunned by disappointment, for he had been waiting for her for hours, he began fumbling around the gas-plate. “And when you have the water on,” she added, “tell me where you want me.”

The sudden switch had caught him holding the kettle of water in the middle of the room.

“Did you
hear
me?” She kept up that imperious tone. “Where do you want me?”

“I heard,” he told her, “I’m getting the coffee.”

She had laughed—that wild happy laugh that made him forgive anything. For in the whole ceaseless city to the ends of town and back, nobody but he and Baby had known what a storm of love could rise and rage between a woman and a man.

Baby
, he recalled wistfully now,
you never did drink that coffee
.

That had been the same night she had said “hurt me.” But he was a man whose whole world was made up of winners and losers. Pain was for losers, pleasure for winners. Pain was pain and pleasure, pleasure. No one wanted any part of the loser’s end. “I don’t know how,” he had told her then.

For she had not wished to be hurt really—she had wished to put a stop to a joy so prolonged it was turning into anguish. Yet now it came to him he had missed something important in not somehow hurting her then, in not knowing how.
I’d never needed to hurt anyone before
, he assured himself.

But I’d know how now all right
, he decided,
I’d cross your wrists under your head and haul your goddamned head back by your hair
—but at the thought of that face, clouding with pain, his heart proved petty once again.

I still wouldn’t know how
, he confessed sheepishly, and everything in him melted as it once had when her passion would meet his own. For all he was worth and all she was worth. And now …

Not for him. Never again …

Baby, the very bed
.

For pain was pain and pleasure, pleasure. One was for losers and one for winners, and the land between a mystery he had never trod.

II. The Yellow and the Wan

Inside the big cage with him, so dim he could scarcely make them out, the lions kept moving and moving. They were females by their smell, and as long as
he
kept moving he was all right. It was early morning, dark and close. Something was going to happen any second. He was wearing a fire-alarm-red robe with a yellow belt,
but underneath had never been so naked. Something was going to happen all right. There was nothing between him and the ones with the manes …