Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (24 page)

She turned the knob and we went in. It was a small entrance hall, with the walls painted dark green.

‘Put your hat there…’ she said.

I put my hat on the console table, taking a look at myself in the girandole that hung from the wall, and now I could see in what particular and in what detail my clothes were cheap and disreputable; the second-hand suit didn’t fit and was unpressed, the white cotton shirt was almost dirty and the collar sagged and the dime store necktie into which you couldn’t get a decent knot was already cracked from only three or four tyings. I needed a haircut and my face was gaunt and undernourished. No wonder the flunkies were shocked. I was shocked myself. I looked like a bum, all right, and in a place like this, as high-class as this, I looked ten times a bum. That a girl of her background could be unaware of this was inconceivable. What the hell was this anyway?

There was a white chenile rug in the living-room and the walls were green and the drapes were white with red fringe, now drawn closed. Thank God, the neighbors couldn’t see me. All the furniture was covered with red and green chintz, and along the mantel a copper pan had been inserted from which a species of ivy grew and trailed: the table lights were big-shaded and improvised from green vases. It was all soft and opulent, spotless and shiny, in keeping with Delages and Cadillacs and gold keys and key-rings from Cartier’s and obsequiousness from flunkies. The only thing it wasn’t in keeping with was I. …

The chief charm of this apartment for me,’ she said, ‘is its convenience. It’s close in. The other place is out from town.’

‘This is nice. Very high-class,’ I said.

‘Miss Dobson …’ a woman’s voice said.

She turned and I turned, jumping a little. A woman of about thirty-five or forty was standing in the doorway that led off to the rest of the apartment, a nice-looking woman who wore a black dress and a small white maid’s apron. ‘Your father called,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Julia. Is there ice in the bar?’

‘Yes, Miss Dobson. He said would you please call him back this time?’

‘Very well, Julia. That’ll be all for tonight…’

‘Yes, Miss Dobson. Good night,’ Julia said, and now with no message to interfere with her looking, she looked. There being no place to hide, I had braced myself for this. The expression that came into her face was just what I had expected, and she turned at once and went out.

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Would you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I think I would. Let’s go in the bar. …’

The bar was next to the living-room. It was a small bar and the walls were done in the same shade of green, and the furniture and the stools and the bar itself were done in red leather. Behind the bar were four rows of mirrored shelves, stacked with bottles.

‘This used to be a closet,’ she said. ‘I turned it into a saloon.’ She lifted the hinged end of the bar, going behind it. ‘Now all I need is to have my liquor license renewed,’ she said, laughing. ‘Scotch?’

‘Cognac…’

‘Any preference?’

‘Well…’

‘Half a dozen kinds here. Might as well have what you’ve been used to. …’

‘I’ve been used to Delamain,’ I said.

‘Delamain?’ She looked on the shelf. ‘No Delamain …’

‘Remy Martin’s all right.’

She looked again, ‘No Remy Martin …’

‘Anything. Doesn’t matter,’ I said indifferently.

‘Otard?’

‘Otard’s fine,’ I said.

She put a bottle of Otard and a brandy glass on the bar and I poured some cognac while she fixed a drink for herself. ‘Me, I like Cuttysark,’ she said. She dropped ice cubes in the glass and raised it to toast. ‘What’ll we drink to?’

‘Flunkies,’ I said.

‘Flunkies,’ she said.

We drank, and she came out from behind the bar, moving to the wall seat opposite, and I slid around on the stool to face her. She sat down and sipped her drink, studiously looking at me over the rim of her glass. It was almost a stare. I looked around the walls, taking another taste of cognac, giving her a chance to take the stare off her face and put on something more polite, but when I brought my eyes back to her I saw that the expression had not changed.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess you’ll miss this place. …’

‘Miss it?’ she said.

‘When you move…’

‘I’m not moving. …’

‘You don’t know it, baby, but you’re moving. Not for long, probably, but you’re moving. She’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’

‘
She’ll
tell me? Who’ll tell me?’

‘That woman, that maid. Julia. Didn’t you see that look in her face when she saw me? She’s having the place fumigated first thing in the morning. She’ll probably burn all your clothes, too.’

She laughed and took a sip of her drink. ‘You’ve got quite a sense of humor,’ she said.

‘Yes, haven’t I?’ I took a swallow of cognac and looked at her. ‘What is this a social experiment? More cosmic consciousness?’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about us,’ I said evenly. ‘Why bring a bum like me to place like this?’

‘This is where I live. I wanted you to come here,’ she said, with some spirit.

‘Doesn’t what your flunkies think of the kind of guests you have concern you?’

‘Certainly not! They’re
my guests
…’

‘Well, I suppose the record now belongs to me. I’m sure you’ve never entertained a more disreputable-looking guy.’

‘What’s the matter with the way you look?’

‘You ought to know,’ I said. ‘You’ve been sitting there staring at me. …’

‘Was I staring?’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ I said. ‘Go ahead and stare. Scientists stare. That’s what specimens are for. It’s not considered rude.’

She got up and came to the bar, standing beside me. ‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ she said. ‘I apologize if I’ve hurt your feelings. I was just looking at you. Do you realize that this is the first time I’ve had a good look at you? After all that’s happened between us, don’t you think I’m entitled to know what you look like?’

‘Well, by God, you ought to know by now, you and your flunkies,’ I said. ‘You’ve done everything but put a microscope on me.’

Her jaw muscles tightened. ‘You’re too self-conscious,’ she said.

‘I told you last night. Inferiority. Now you see it working.’ I took a swallow of cognac. ‘Frightful things …’

‘If you know what it is you should be able to correct it,’ she said.

‘I’ll get it corrected when I can get out of these clothes,’ I said. ‘Cheap shoddy clothes for cheap shoddy people. Typical American stuff. Two ninety-eight shoes and production-line suits. I’ll get it corrected when I can get some Peals and Izods and Milbank and Howse. Mead gabardines and John Hardy flannels and some Godchaux linens.’

‘And some Delamain cognac’ she said thinly.

‘And some Delamain cognac,’ I said. ‘Tell you what you do’ – I said in cold anger – ‘you get all the goddamn connoisseurs you know, for whom you have any respect – connoisseurs isn’t the right word, it isn’t properly shaded, degustateurs is the right word – you get ’em all with me some night and blindfold us and put ten brands of cognac in front of us and see who’s faking. …’

‘I didn’t say you were faking.’

‘Dames like you don’t have the guts to say what they think. Dames like you have to be content with implying what they think.’

‘It seems to me that you’re being very disagreeable,’ she said. She moved slightly to the side of me. ‘Can’t we just talk and be friends? There’s so much I want to talk to you about. There’s so much I have to talk to you about. If you’ll stop being so rough and tough, maybe we can find out why you like being disagreeable.’

‘Nuts,’ I said. I took another swallow of cognac, turning away from her.

‘Are you
that
uncomfortable?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Would you like to leave now?’

‘Yeah, I’d like to leave now,’ I said. I put down the cognac glass and pushed myself off the stool.

‘I’m sorry…’ she said.

‘Forget it….’ I said.

‘I’m sorry it couldn’t have been like last night. …’

‘So am I…’ I said.

‘But it obviously couldn’t,’ she said quietly. ‘The kind of ecstasy that came last night can only come from Brahmanada, and Brahmanada can only be arranged by Fate. Fate arranged last night. Tonight, I – a mere nothing – tried to arrange it.’ She laughed unhappily. ‘A ritual like that cannot be arranged by a nothing, by an amateur, by a dabbler. That’s what I am just a dabbler.’ She held up her drink. ‘This last one’s to me,’ she said. ‘To the Sorcerer’s Apprentice…’

I was thinking, when she first had started talking like that, that she was just spouting the same nonsense other girls did, other girls who had more leisure time than anything else, and sat around before and after rehearsals on the gloomy stages of Little Theatres drinking bad gin and speculating on Kismet and Fate and the true meaning of Leonardo’s loveless life and the importance of Carl Van Vechten and the rightful place in American letters of E. Pettit; girls who were pushovers for smart boys like me – it sounded like the old stuff. But by the time she had finished it dawned on me that this wasn’t the old stuff at all; this was real. She was utterly sincere. Last night on the grassy slope, under that oak tree, she had submitted to me not from desire but because she read into my plainly curious behavior some sort of totemic significance. What followed had not been for her a physical experience, it had been an intellectual experience, a cabalistic adventure. She was a dabbler; a dabbler in the esoteric philosophy of Dr Green, and God knew who else, and once they get off the deep end of this, it is but a short breast-stroke (if they can swim) to the occult and voodoo and black magic and diabolism. … Get out of here, you bastard, I told myself, get out of here fast; and then I became aware of one other thing – I was trembling. Trembling not with fear, but trembling with the sudden realization that last night had not been a true physical experience for me either, for me too it had been a ceremony, ritual-cloaked …

I went to the wall and snapped off the lights and went back to her. There was just enough light reflecting from the hall for me to see the outline of her body and the whiskey glass she had put on the bar. I went close to her. Her eyes were closed and she was standing rigidly, almost cataleptically, her fists clenched, not breathing – exactly as I had asked her to do the last time, trying desperately to summon from her own private Infinite whatever it was that had come last night and prepared her for ectasy.

My eyes were full of her white-white face and her black-black hair, and then the smell of the
Heule de Noche
rolled over me …

That awareness from the Miocene was moving in on me, that infallible awareness that serves the purpose of preserving man’s existence, and was waking fast. Then I caught an enemy scent and heard body movement and in the flash that my eyes were opening I spun my brain trying to remember where in that strange dark room was the chair that held my coat and gun, and the light on her night table snapped on and I saw a man standing there. He was big and baldheaded and aristocratic, a man of about sixty, wearing a blue suit and a bow tie, and he was shaking Margaret, trying to waken her, paying no attention to me. My heart flopped and that red flash hit me in the stomach and, I saw my coat on the back of a chair and I swung my feet from under the sheet, to get my gun. ‘Hold it, son,’ I heard a voice say, not the big man’s voice, but another voice somewhere in the room.

Two other men were standing just inside the door, both of them still wearing their hats. There was nothing aristocratic about them. They were cops. They were in street clothes but I knew they were cops. They just stood there.

‘Midge, dear, Midge, dear…’ the baldheaded man was saying, and it dawned on me that this could only be her father. ‘Midge, dear…’ he was saying.

Margaret muttered some sleepy unintelligible something and then her eyes opened and she saw him. She quickly sat up, holding the sheet under her arms to cover her nakedness, looking at me wildly. But only for a moment was there wildness in her face, and then she got her bearings. ‘You shouldn’t do things like this, Father…’ she said.

‘I thought this was probably why you didn’t return my call,’ he said tensely. He picked up her wrapper and held it over the bed, screening her against the brocaded headboard. ‘Put this on,’ he said. ‘Take this man out of here,’ he said to the cops.

They started towards me…

‘You’d better stop them, Father,’ she said calmly.

They kept coming, but they glanced cautiously at the old man.

‘Take this man out of here,’ he said.

They stopped beside me. I started to get out of bed.

‘Wait a minute!’ Margaret said to the cops. ‘This is ridiculous! Father,’ she said to the old man, ‘I want you to meet my husband, Paul Murphy. This is my father, Paul…’

Jesus, I thought. Holy Jesus!

Ezra Dobson’s jaw dropped and he looked at me with narrow eyes. ‘Husband? Married? Married! When?’ he asked indignantly.

‘Tonight. Earlier…’ she said. ‘We were going to tell you all about it at breakfast, but…’

‘My God, my God,’ the old man murmured in a lifeless whisperation, and I knew then that she’d stopped him. I felt better. I didn’t know where we were going from here, but at least she’d given me time to think.

‘Will you please ask your private policemen to leave?’ she asked.

He looked at them and waved them out. They shrugged and moved to the door.

‘Really, Father,’ Margaret said. ‘You make things so awkward sometimes. I’m sure Paul must be wondering what kind of family he’s gotten into …’

She smiled at me, knowing that he was looking at her, intending it as an apology for him. She was doing great. She was a dame who kept her head and thought fast and also knew where to place the bullet. She had placed it just in time. Those cops looked like tough customers. I didn’t know what they had intended doing with me, but I was very glad to have missed it, not because I was afraid of what they might do to me, but because I was afraid of what I might do to them. This was no time to be killing cops, not hemmed up like this, not with the City Hall fitting so nicely into my pocket.