Manhattan Transfer (23 page)

‘Well?’

‘Well I think Stanford White has done more for the city of New York than any other man living. Nobody knew there was such a thing as architecture before he came… And to have this Thaw shoot him down in cold blood and then get away with it… By gad if the people of this town had the spirit of guineapigs they’d –’

‘Phil you’re getting all excited over nothing.’ The other man took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned back in his swivel chair and yawned.

‘Oh hell I want a vacation. Golly it’ll be good to get out in those old Maine woods again.’

‘What with Jew lawyers and Irish judges…’ spluttered Phil.

‘Aw pull the chain, old man.’

‘A fine specimen of a public-spirited citizen you are Hartly.’

Hartly laughed and rubbed the palm of his hand over his bald head. ‘Oh that stuff’s all right in winter, but I cant go it in summer… Hell all I live for is three weeks’ vacation anyway. What do I care if all the architects in New York get bumped off as long as it
dont raise the price of commutation to New Rochelle… Let’s go eat.’ As they went down in the elevator Phil went on talking: ‘The only other man I ever knew who was really a born in the bone architect was ole Specker, the feller I worked for when I first came north, a fine old Dane he was too. Poor devil died o cancer two years ago. Man, he was an architect. I got a set of plans and specifications home for what he called a communal building… Seventyfive stories high stepped back in terraces with a sort of hanging garden on every floor, hotels, theaters, Turkish baths, swimming pools, department stores, heating plant, refrigerating and market space all in the same buildin.’

‘Did he eat coke?’

‘No siree he didnt.’

They were walking east along Thirtyfourth Street, sparse of people in the sultry midday. ‘Gad,’ burst out Phil Sandbourne, suddenly. ‘The girls in this town get prettier every year. ‘Like these new fashions, do you?’

‘Sure. All I wish is that I was gettin younger every year instead of older.’

‘Yes about all us old fellers can do is watch em go past.’

‘That’s fortunate for us or we’d have our wives out after us with bloodhounds… Man when I think of those mighthavebeens!’

As they crossed Fifth Avenue Phil caught sight of a girl in a taxicab. From under the black brim of a little hat with a red cockade in it two gray eyes flash green black into his. He swallowed his breath. The traffic roars dwindled into distance. She shant take her eyes away. Two steps and open the door and sit beside her, beside her slenderness perched like a bird on the seat. Driver drive to beat hell. Her lips are pouting towards him, her eyes flutter gray caught birds. ‘Hay look out…’ A pouncing iron rumble crashes down on him from behind. Fifth Avenue spins in red blue purple spirals. O Kerist. ‘That’s all right, let me be. I’ll get up myself in a minute.’ ‘Move along there. Git back there.’ Braying voices, blue pillars of policemen. His back, his legs are all warm gummy with blood. Fifth Avenue throbs with loudening pain. A little bell jingle-jangling nearer. As they lift him into the ambulance Fifth Avenue shrieks to throttling agony and bursts. He cranes his neck to see her, weakly, like a terrapin on its back; didnt my eyes snap steel traps on her? He finds himself whimpering. She might have stayed
to see if I was killed. The jinglejangling bell dwindles fainter, fainter into the night.

The burglaralarm across the street had rung on steadily. Jimmy’s sleep had been strung on it in hard knobs like beads on a string. Knocking woke him. He sat up in bed with a lurch and found Stan Emery, his face gray with dust, his hands in the pockets of a red leather coat, standing at the foot of the bed. He was laughing swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet.

‘Gosh what time is it?’ Jimmy sat up in bed digging his knuckles into his eyes. He yawned and looked about with bitter dislike, at the wallpaper the dead green of Poland Water bottles, at the split green shade that let in a long trickle of sunlight, at the marble fireplace blocked up by an enameled tin plate painted with scaly roses, at the frayed blue bathrobe on the foot of the bed, at the mashed cigarettebutts in the mauve glass ashtray.

Stan’s face was red and brown and laughing under the chalky mask of dust. ‘Eleven thirty,’ he was saying.

‘Let’s see that’s six hours and a half. I guess that’ll do. But Stan what the hell are you doing here?’

‘You haven’t got a little nip of liquor anywhere have you Herf? Dingo and I are extraordinarily thirsty. We came all the way from Boston and only stopped once for gas and water. I haven’t been to bed for two days. I want to see if I can last out the week.’

‘Kerist I wish I could last out the week in bed.’

‘What you need’s a job on a newspaper to keep you busy Herfy.’

‘What’s going to happen to you Stan…’ Jimmy twisted himself round so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed ‘… is that you’re going to wake up one morning and find yourself on a marble slab at the morgue.’

The bathroom smelled of other people’s toothpaste and of chloride disinfectant. The bathmat was wet and Jimmy folded it into a small square before he stepped gingerly out of his slippers. The cold water set the blood jolting through him. He ducked his head under and jumped out and stood shaking himself like a dog, the water streaming into his eyes and ears. Then he put on his bathrobe and lathered his face.

Flow river flow
Down to the sea,

he hummed off key as he scraped his chin with the safetyrazor. Mr Grover I’m afraid I’m going to have to give up the job after next week. Yes I’m going abroad; I’m going to do foreign correspondent work for the A. P. To Mexico for the U. P. To Jericho more likely, Halifax Correspondent of the Mudturtle Gazette.
It was Christmas in the harem and the eunuchs all were there
.

… from the banks of the Seine
To the banks of the Saskatchewan.

He doused his face with listerine, bundled his toilet things into his wet towel and smarting ran back up a flight of greencarpeted cabbagy stairs and down the hall to his bedroom. Halfway he passed the landlady dumpy in a mob cap who stopped her carpet sweeper to give an icy look at his skinny bare legs under the blue bathrobe.

‘Good morning Mrs Maginnis.’

‘It’s goin to be powerful hot today, Mr Herf.’

‘I guess it is all right.’

Stan was lying on the bed reading
La Revolte des Anges
. ‘Darn it, I wish I knew some languages the way you do Herfy.’

‘Oh I dont know any French any more. I forget em so much quicker than I learn em.’

‘By the way I’m fired from college.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Dean told me he thought it advisable I shouldnt come back next year… felt that there were other fields of activity where my activities could be more actively active. You know the crap.’

‘That’s a darn shame.’

‘No it isnt; I’m tickled to death. I asked him why he hadnt fired me before if he felt that way. Father’ll be sore as a crab… but I’ve got enough cash on me not to go home for a week. I dont give a damn anyway. Honest havent you got any liquor?’

‘Now Stan how’s a poor wageslave like myself going to have a cellar on thirty dollars a week?’

‘This is a pretty lousy room… You ought to have been born a capitalist like me.’

‘Room’s not so bad… What drives me crazy is that paranoiac alarm across the street that rings all night.’

‘That’s a burglar alarm isn’t it?’

‘There cant be any burglars because the place is vacant. The wires must get crossed or something. I dont know when it stopped but it certainly drove me wild when I went to bed this morning.’

‘Now James Herf you dont mean me to infer that you come home sober every night?’

‘A man’d have to be deaf not to hear that damn thing, drunk or sober.’

‘Well in my capacity of bloated bondholder I want you to come out and eat lunch. Do you realize that you’ve been playing round with your toilet for exactly one hour by the clock?’

They went down the stairs that smelled of shavingsoap and then of brasspolish and then of bacon and then of singed hair and then of garbage and coalgas.

‘You’re damn lucky Herfy, never to have gone to college.’

‘Didnt I graduate from Columbia you big cheese, that’s more than you could do?’

The sunlight swooped tingling in Jimmy’s face when he opened the door.

‘That doesnt count.’

‘God I like sun,’ cried Jimmy, I wish it’d been real Colombia…’

‘Do you mean Hail Columbia?’

‘No I mean Bogota and the Orinoco and all that sort of thing.’

‘I knew a darn good feller went down to Bogota. Had to drink himself to death to escape dying of elephantiasis.’

‘I’d be willing to risk elephantiasis and bubonic plague and spotted fever to get out of this hole.’

‘City of orgies walks and joys…’

‘Orgies nutten, as we say at a hun’an toitytoird street… Do you realize that I’ve lived all my life in this goddam town except four years when I was little and that I was born here and that I’m likely to die here?… I’ve a great mind to join the navy and see the world.’

‘How do you like Dingo in her new coat of paint?’

‘Pretty nifty, looks like a regular Mercedes under the dust.’

‘I wanted to paint her red like a fire engine, but the garageman finally persuaded me to paint her blue like a cop… Do you mind going to Mouquin’s and having an absinthe cocktail.’

‘Absinthe for breakfast… Good Lord.’

They drove west along Twenty-third Street that shone with sheets of reflected light off windows, oblong glints off delivery wagons, figureeight-shaped flash of nickel fittings.

‘How’s Ruth, Jimmy?’

‘She’s all right. She hasnt got a job yet.’

‘Look there’s a Daimlier.’

Jimmy grunted vaguely. As they turned up Sixth Avenue a policeman stopped them.

‘Your cut out,’ he yelled.

‘I’m on my way to the garage to get it fixed. Muffler’s coming off.’

‘Better had… Get a ticket another time.’

‘Gee you get away with murder Stan… in everything,’ said Jimmy. ‘I never can get away with a thing even if I am three years older than you.’

‘It’s a gift.’

The restaurant smelled merrily of fried potatoes and cocktails and cigars and cocktails. It was hot and full of talking and sweaty faces.

‘But Stan dont roll your eyes romantically when you ask about Ruth and me… We’re just very good friends.’

‘Honestly I didnt mean anything, but I’m sorry to hear it all the same. I think it’s terrible.’

‘Ruth doesn’t care about anything but her acting. She’s so crazy to succeed, she cuts out everything else.’

‘Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I’d like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That’s the only sublime thing.’

‘It’s all right if you have a comfortable income.’

‘That’s all bunk… Golly this is some cocktail. Herfy I think you’re the only sensible person in this town. You have no ambitions.’

‘How do you know I havent?’

‘But what can you do with success when you get it? You cant eat it or drink it. Of course I understand that people who havent enough money to feed their faces and all that should scurry round and get it. But success…’

‘The trouble with me is I cant decide what I want most, so my motion is circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging.’

‘Oh but God decided that for you. You know all the time, but you wont admit it to yourself.’

‘I imagine what I want most is to get out of this town, preferably first setting off a bomb under the Times Building.’

‘Well, why don’t you do it? It’s just one foot after another.’

‘But you have to know which direction to step.’

‘That’s the last thing that’s of any importance.’

‘Then there’s money.’

‘Why money’s the easiest thing in the world to get.’

‘For the eldest son of Emery and Emery.’

‘Now Herf it’s not fair to cast my father’s iniquities in my face. You know I hate that stuff as much as you do.’

‘I’m not blaming you Stan; you’re a damn lucky kid, that’s all. Of course I’m lucky too, a hell of a lot luckier than most. My mother’s leftover money supported me until I was twentytwo and I still have a few hundreds stowed away for that famous rainy day, and my uncle, curse his soul, gets me new jobs when I get fired.’

‘Baa baa black sheep.’

‘I guess I’m really afraid of my uncles and aunts… You ought to see my cousin James Merivale. Has done everything he was told all his life and flourished like a green bay tree… The perfect wise virgin.’

‘Ah guess youse one o dem dere foolish virgins.’

‘Stan you’re feeling your liquor, you’re beginning to talk nigger-talk.’

‘Baa baa.’ Stan put down his napkin and leaned back laughing in his throat.

The smell of absinthe sickly tingling grew up like the magician’s rosebush out of Jimmy’s glass. He sipped it wrinkling his nose. ‘As a moralist I protest,’ he said. ‘Whee it’s amazing.’

‘What I need is a whiskey and soda to settle those cocktails.’

‘I’ll watch you. I’m a working man. I must be able to tell between the news that’s fit and the news that’s not fit… God I dont want to start talking about that. It’s all so criminally silly… I’ll say that this cocktail sure does knock you for a loop.’

‘You neednt think you’re going to do anything else but drink this afternoon. There’s somebody I want to introduce you to.’

‘And I was going to sit down righteously and write an article.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh a dodaddle called Confessions of a Cub Reporter.’

‘Look is this Thursday?’

‘Yare.’

‘Then I know where she’ll be.’

‘I’m going to light out of it all,’ said Jimmy somberly, ‘and go to Mexico and make my fortune… I’m losing all the best part of my life rotting in New York.’

‘How’ll you make your fortune?’

‘Oil, gold, highway robbery, anything so long as it’s not newspaper work.’

‘Baa baa black sheep baa baa.’

‘You quit baaing at me.’

‘Let’s get the hell out of here and take Dingo to have her muffler fastened.’

Jimmy stood waiting in the door of the reeking garage. The dusty afternoon sunlight squirmed in bright worms of heat on his face and hands. Brownstone, redbrick, asphalt flickering with red and green letters of signs, with bits of paper in the gutter rotated in a slow haze about him. Two carwashers talking behind him: