Foul Matter (21 page)

Again, Arthur shut his eyes, flapped his hands, made a little moue of distaste. “No names. Describe them.”

“I can’t. I’ve never seen them. Sammy knows them. Says everyone does. In the business, I mean.” His voice even lower, Paul said, “Kar—”

But Arthur was adamant and even put his hands over his ears.

“Oh, for God’s sakes! Wait a minute.” Paul rose and walked over to the glass-enclosed counter by the register. To the girl attending it, he said, “Give me one of those, will you?”

She plucked the Mars bar from a box and took the money.

Back at the table, Paul set it down before Arthur.

“How delicious! I love chocolate.”

“Chocolate what?”

“With almonds and marshmallow.”

Paul shut his eyes against such thickheadedness. “No, Arthur. I mean as a class of things.”

Arthur raised his translucent brows in question.

“It’s a clue, Arthur. The whole thing, not the separate ingredients.”

Arthur bit his lip, then snapped his fingers. “
The Big Sleep.
Don’t you love Hammett?”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“The villain. Eddie Mars. Isn’t that who you’re talking about?”

Paul jumped up again and returned to the counter and came back with a Butterfinger and a Hershey bar. “Okay. Take all three together. What do you call them?” Paul glared.

Arthur shrugged, looking at Paul with an expression that begged Paul’s forbearance. “Chocolate bars?”

Paul brought his fist down on the table, jumping the Butterfinger. This was harder than writing a fucking novel. The couple at the table next door jumped at the thud. Paul marched back to the counter and purchased a roll of Necco wafers.

This he slammed down on the table and waited.

After a moment or two of earnest thought, Arthur said, “I’ve got it! Can—”

Paul waved his hands this time. “You know the name of the second one?”

“I should say
so.
Those two. Somebody must really have wanted a button—you know. And had the money to get it. Those two do not come cheap.” Arthur studied the photo. “What the devil’s he—No, don’t tell me. I’m just naturally curious, I guess. How long have they been, you know, on the job?”

“I don’t know. A week?”

“Well, that’s a good sign. At least they didn’t hate him on sight.”

Paul rolled his eyes ceilingward, studied the eccentric fan. “Praise be.”

T
hey headed for the Old Hotel whenever they got serious, or desperate (which amounted to the same thing). It was a place which, unlike Swill’s, was a destination, not, like Swill’s, a stop along the way. It was actually two different places, the bar and the swank restaurant above it, where the diners could look down and measure the success, or lack of it, of the various customers.

They could not afford the restaurant. That is, Ned and Sally couldn’t. Saul had taken all four of them there several times to celebrate birthdays and holidays, and Jamie had taken them whenever one of her books was published, so they ate at the Old Hotel fairly frequently. It was odd, Sally sometimes thought, that these three were not jealous of one another. More than odd; it was extraordinary. They appeared to know and appreciate one another’s worth.

What the four of them often mentioned, as if freshly surprised, was that none of this looked phony or faux hotel. It was a large prewar brownstone and they wondered if it had actually been a hotel once. That perhaps it was a hotel turned into a bar and restaurant, rather than a bar and restaurant called a hotel.

Ned liked to talk about what might have gone on here and make up stories about guests who might have come here. “Manhattan in the forties, the thirties.”

The bar, the Lobby, had its name written on a small wooden sign above its doorway. It did resemble one. There were a lot of easy chairs and love seats covered in linen and faded cretonne, and gathered around small tables. The wallpaper was dark red and flocked, and a dozen or more Gibson Girl tinted drawings hung against it. And then there were the
Godey’s Lady’s
prints, women in wide hats, cosseted waists, rucked sleeves. Clouded light diffused from shell-like wall sconces. There was a fireplace and big, brass-knobbed andirons. The air was scented with mint, and they had attempted to track it to its source, but couldn’t, until Ned, going up to the bar to get another drink, reported back that the bartender had a reputation for the best mint juleps just about anywhere, and customers from Kentucky, Georgia, and the Carolinas pronounced this to be true.

Then they had all ordered mint juleps and had gone to the bar to sit on stools and watch them being made. It was a prodigious undertaking, and no wonder they cost more than twice as much as any other drink.

The last one to be told of this place was Jamie. She had walked into the Lobby’s minty environs, looked around with large, wide eyes, and had said she had never seen anyplace so much like her aunts’ rooming house in Savannah. “It’s awesome; it’s uncanny. I mean, of course this is bigger and there’s a lot more furniture and stuff, but it still looks just like Aunt Eloise and Aunt Jeb’s.”

Her eyes wide and wondering was a look rarely seen on Jamie’s face, whose sense of wonder had been vastly depleted by the unwondering, squint-eyed, skimpily clothed worlds she inhabited every day.

(It was Saul who had talked about Jamie’s writing worlds in this way: romance, mystery, science fiction. It was very strange, he’d said. Here was subject matter—murder, romance, altered reality—that should free up any writer’s imagination, subjects to bring the muse to heel, and yet it didn’t work that way.)

Ned had often said he bet Jamie worked harder than he did, possibly harder than any of them did. It infuriated him when some hack over a pint of Corona at Swill’s said all Jamie had to do in her mystery series was toss the characters up in the air and record their descent. It was said, of course, with a contemptuous smile.

But Saul said, no, that’s not what he was talking about. Far from enjoying the wide-open spaces of country where no rules applied, Jamie was stuck in a small airless room with the constant threat of the walls’ closing in. “That’s what makes it genre fiction, not the subject matter itself. It’s writing in the service of nothing. The world is hedged and trimmed back until it fits whatever generic rules you’re applying.”

Saul had got wound up and drunk and harangued on this subject. His voice was rich and deep and soothing, even more so after he’d poured a good deal of single malt whiskey down his throat. Ned stopped listening, getting drowsy with bourbon and thinking about Nathalie. Thinking about what she was doing and feeling and realizing he didn’t have to worry whether what she did would “fit.” He opened his eyes, then, and said to Saul, “You’re right.”

Yes, they quarreled and occasionally ranted but it was different. Jamie might criticize Ned’s revisionist theories about early days in Pittsburgh, but she didn’t carry such criticism over into his work, into his plans for Nathalie. (She did not know this name because Ned never talked about what he was writing. Jamie had to refer to his “protagonist, or whatever.”)

Tonight, there was a quarrel, and it was started by Sally. Ned (who, Sally noted, seemed to have entirely forgotten her bad news) said he was going to Pittsburgh. He was to take three or four days off from writing and do this. And they’d better not (he warned) lay on him a lot of sentimental or pseudocynical crap about not being able to go home again.

“That’s not what Wolfe meant, anyway,” said Jamie.

Saul took his cigar from his mouth as if that would make him see her better. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course that’s what he meant. Wolfe was a sentimentalist. I don’t mean that necessarily as being wrong.”

“Oh, stop being such a pompous ass,” exclaimed Jamie.

Saul blushed a little. He did tend to be pompous, he knew.

Jamie turned to Sally, sitting there stuffing cashews into her mouth. “Why are you so mad?” Jamie asked, snapping shut her old Ronson lighter.

Sally inclined her head toward Ned. “Something’s going on at the house. I think they’re going to try to get out of their contract with him.” Sally told Jamie about what she had overheard in Bobby Mackenzie’s office.

Jamie found it hard to believe. “That’s crazy. Ned?”

He had been studying the Gibson Girl drawings, wondering if the one with the upswept red hair had been his model for Nathalie a long time ago and he’d forgotten.

“Ned!”

He lurched in his seat. “What?”

Sally put her head in her hands and moved it back and forth. “He won’t listen; he won’t take it seriously.” This came muted from behind her hands.

“Sure, I do. I sure as hell do. Yes, I do.”

“If you have to say it three times,” observed Saul, “you probably don’t.”

Ned said, “There’s nothing much I can do, is there? All I can do is ask Tom Kidd.”

“Tom wouldn’t know.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because if he was supposed to”—Sally said this through gritted teeth—“he’d have been there.”

“He’d have to know sometime.”

Sally was about to respond when the waiter came over to take their order. He knew what they wanted; they always had the same thing, the same drinks, except for that fling with the mint juleps. Saul and Jamie martinis, Sally some icky-looking cordial, Ned bourbon. The waiter smiled and left. Saul always left him extravagant tips.

Perhaps one reason they liked to come here was that things seemed muted in the Old Hotel. It was not an “arty” hangout. It was on some lesser known street on the fringe of the Village, a half street that dead-ended at a whitewashed church. But the patrons only sometimes looked as if they came from Chelsea or the Village or SoHo. And as a group they changed nightly, or seemed to. Sometimes they looked like they came over from Queens, blue collar and conservative. And then there were the nights filled with the Uptown people: Central Park West, the East Sixties, Sutton Place. It was always switching. It looked tonight as if they’d all organized themselves in the lobby of the Dakota and come downtown en masse.

How had they found the Old Hotel, these Uptown emigrants? These thin and high-strung women in their filmy, flowing clothes; like butterflies, with their iridescent lips and nails? The dining room wasn’t even—heavens above!—in
Zagat.
How it could have been missed was a mystery. Its food was good and not too expensive, but it was the ambience that was thrilling. Saul said it was because Nina and Tim Zagat had been turned away. That’s what he’d heard.

They all thought that was screamingly funny.

Yet it was never crowded. People weren’t stacked up around the bar on a Friday evening the way they were at Swill’s (where they muscled one another out as if they were trying to put down a bet before the window slammed down).

They had tried, as had just about everybody, to get information about the Old Hotel. Each of them had at one time or another tried to talk to the owner-manager to get answers to these questions. But he always seemed to have “just stepped out” for a moment. They knew (or supposed they did) that there actually was a manager for he had once been pointed out by the bartender to them as he was walking through the Lobby. His name, the bartender had told them, was Duff. That’ll be him, sir. I’m sure he’ll be glad to answer your questions. I would do myself, but I haven’t been here very long myself.

Duff fascinated Saul.

(“He would,” Jamie had said, inscrutably.)

Duff was a question mark; he was unfinished; he was pure potential.

So they stopped trying to track down the manager because they apparently weren’t supposed to know. Oedipus didn’t, did he? Sally had said. There was something that smacked of fatalism in the whole encounter—or rather the lack of one.

“Pittsburgh’s changed a lot,” said Ned, as if they’d been discussing this since he brought it up. He finished off the silver bowl of cashews.

“Why’re you going, anyway?” Whenever Ned left Manhattan Sally got anxious.

“Research,” he lied.

Jamie sighed heavily to let him know her estimation of this move. “Just for fuck’s sake don’t go to McKees Rocks and come back and run things by me. Do I remember this? Do I remember that? I’m warning you.”

“Remember Duquesne Incline? And the steps up the side of Duquesne Heights? You know how long a trail of steps that was? I went up them.”

Jamie looked as if she could spit. “No, you didn’t! You
didn’t
because they were torn down sometime in the sixties. The early sixties. You wouldn’t have been more than a day-old baby, for God’s sakes.”

“Maybe my father carried me up.” Paying no attention to Jamie’s pained look, he said, “Order me another drink, will you? I’m going to the gents.” Which was what it was actually labeled here. GENTS and LADIES . They thought that fit in perfectly with the Old Hotel’s diverse styles.

Sally watched him walk away and turned to Jamie. “You shouldn’t ride Ned all the time about Pittsburgh.”

“Why not?” Jamie seemed genuinely surprised at Sally’s criticism. She was used to criticism, but only in her professional life, where she got three or four bad reviews to every good one. “He’s so stunningly sentimental about the place.” She saw Saul looking at her. “Why are you looking daggers at me?”

“Because Pittsburgh’s what he is; it’s what he has.”

Jamie felt abashed far more by Saul’s tone than she had by Sally’s. With her, Saul really counted. This only served to stoke her irritation.

Sally said, “You can be really arrogant sometimes, Jamie.”

Jamie ignored this as she could think of nothing to say in her own defense. “Ned remembers things that weren’t there and things that never happened!”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I looked them up!” Too late did she think of the depths of animosity and even jealousy that might be ascribed to such a thing. Quickly, she added, “I lived in McKees Rocks, remember. That’s right by Pittsburgh.”