Marijuana Girl (10 page)

"How can you talk like that?"

"How could I not have before? That's the real question. There're a couple other deductions I can make, too. I'm just a kid. Joy, but I'm a smart kid, and you aren't so darned brainy you can put it over on me all the time."

"But it's not true, Tony. I swear it's not."

"All right. There's a simple way to test it. We'll drive to Mr. City Editor Burdette's house, and we'll walk in, and I'll ask him."

"You can't."

"Of course I can."

"Think how it would embarrass me."

"I am thinking. And that's just what we're going to do. You've been putting it over on both of us, and I'm not going to stand for it any more. Either we see Burdette, or I know I'm right and it's all over between us. How about it?"

For long minutes Joyce sat silent on the seat of the moving car.

"You can't decide. All right." He swung the car into a street "We'll go to Burdette's."

"No, Tony!" Joyce was crying.

"Don't give me that sob-stuff, Joy. What's it going to be? Will you admit it, or do we go there."

"All right. I admit it. Now take me home."

Tony said nothing. Grimly he drove through the tree-lined streets, all golden and shadow-striped in the setting sun, grimly stopped the car before the Taylor house, set back from the street among its landscaped lawns.

Joyce got out of the car without a word, and stepped across the grass island to the sidewalk. Then she turned to look at Tony. "I hate you," she said, and started to run across the lawn.

"Joy!" Suddenly he could forgive her anything. She half-halted. "Joy!" Then his anger got the better of him. "Go to hell," he said. He jerked the car into low gear and, racing the engine, took off

It was not until the following evening that she had an opportunity to talk to Frank. He stopped by her desk in the morning. "Want to come to the house tonight?"

"Of course." She smiled up at him.

"Good kid," he said, patting her hand, and went on to his office.

That evening they rode uptown together on the bus, but Frank said nothing. Something strange and intangible seemed to have come between them, and it frightened her. She needed Frank, now, needed him desperately.

When they reached the house Frank unlocked the door and let her pass into the hallway. "Let's go out in the kitchen and get something to eat."

"No, Frank. Not yet." She came up close to him, her face tilted up to his. "Frank, darling," she said, her voice husky. "I want you."

Suddenly, almost angrily, he caught her in his arms, crushing her to him. He lifted her in his arms and carried her up the stairs.

Afterwards, she told him.

"I had to be good to him, Frank. Honest I did. He would have told my aunt, and would have--I don't know what she would and you know what he would have done."

"It's all right, honey. I understand." He kissed her tear-streaked face.

The envelope was lying on her desk when she arrived at the Courier next day, and the door of Frank's office was closed. It was addressed to Miss Joyce Taylor, in a handwriting she recognized from memos and notations on copy.

She looked about her to see if anyone was watching. But the scattering of people in the office were bowed over their typewriters, each with its continuous roll of yellow copy paper mounted on the back, or closely attending to the long strips of manila paper on which they were marking the strange hieroglyphs of the copyreader.

She opened the letter and read it through, then read it through again. It was the same, both times--a short, typewritten note.

Joyce:

I have gone to Maine to spend two weeks with Janice and Junior. When I come back, I hope we will both have forgotten the things that happened this summer. Please do not misunderstand me. You are a wonderful person--far too good for me, in fact. But Janice needs me and, in a funny way, I guess I need her.

Go back to Tony. He's a fine boy, and he does love you, no matter how angry he may be now.

Don't quit the paper. You're going to make a terrific newspaper woman. And by the time I get back, you'll see, this whole thing will have worked itself out.

So long,

Frank

That night Joyce packed her things in the stillness of her bedroom. In the morning she waited until her aunt had left the house to go shopping. Then she called a cab, went to the bank where she had deposited her earnings from the Courier, and withdrew all her money while the cab waited. Then she went to the station and caught the 11:20 for New York.

Part Two

THE HORSE

With phantoms and unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife

Invulnerable nothings... .

Percy Bysshe Shelley

10 ~ Introversion

Joyce went to see Jerry Best as a last resort.

She had thought about it a long time--perhaps an hour or so during each of five or six evenings--before she actually got on the subway and rode downtown to Washington Square.

For a while, before that, she had been able to kid herself that things were going very well. For anyone else but Joyce Taylor, in fact, they would have going well indeed. But the desperate forces that drove her demanded something beyond the simple successes of employment, food and a place to live.

She had spent almost no money at all during the summer of work on the Courier, and it had not been hard to get a job--theoretically an editorial job--before her reserves ran out. She was, officially, an assistant editor on the Machine Tool Journal, a publication devoting itself to internal grinders, lathes and other subtle mechanisms of the early atomic age. Behind her official title she concealed the fact that she was one of four employees of the publisher, the others being a myopic baldhead with the entirely surprising name of Eugene Tip, the editor; a stenographer named Myra Feldman, who lived in Brooklyn and had designs on a genuine dentist, and an advertising manager-cum-bookkeeper who hid behind the pseudonym Chauncey Scott Arvin, and was altogether too glorious a person for the Machine Tool Journal.

Her duties were multitudinous and tedious, requiring only a minimum of intelligence--that is, just a trifle more than that possessed by Miss Feldman whose perfunctory performance of them before had necessitated hiring Joyce. She was in charge of mailing out cards inducing manufacturers to provide information on new products, in charge also of the measurement of type, the production of cuts, the reading of galley proofs, and the fetching of innumerable containers of coffee for Eugene Tip--who took his eminent position with great seriousness.

Her salary had been thirty-five dollars a week, and within a month had climbed to forty-five, to the scandalized amazement of Miss Feldman who, after two years of unremitting indolence, was earning only forty.

Thus, in things material, Joyce was a success. But Joyce had conceived of glittering Manhattan as a gay round of night clubs and orchids, an orgy of parties and diaphanous nightgowns, and in this direction she had failed miserably. Mistakenly assuming that she needed, above all things, freedom, she had rented a furnished room instead of going to a girls' residence hotel. She understood that YWCAs and the like prohibited male companionship, and failed to apprehend that acquaintance with women often is requisite to acquaintance with men ...

For men were what Joyce needed.

She had been thinking about Jerry and Don and Ginger and the boys in the band for a long time--but not thinking of seeing them. An unconscious residue of prejudice--which even the months with Frank had not entirely overcome--would not allow her to think of herself as a girl whose only friends in all the great city of New York were colored.

But as September turned to October, and October to November, it became more and more clear to her that she must, must, must make human contacts other than with the trio of gay souls who produced the Machine Tool Journal. The mad round of cinema palaces had now so far palled that she could summon no shadow of sympathetic passion for Gary Grant or Van Johnson, Bing Crosby or Montgomery Clift. No longer could she identify with Elizabeth Taylor or Olivia de Havilland, and she had never liked Frank Sinatra in the first place.

When she finally decided to go see Jerry, the problem became one of finding a reason. It could not be admitted that she wanted to see them just because she wanted to see them. She never for an instant believed that her own personality was sufficient to engage their attention. There had to be an excuse--and the excuse was, of course, the fine thing that she had first discovered with them: the green grass that grew greener where music dwelt.

It was a Friday evening when the impulse finally came that sent her into the hurrying subway, through the rushing tunnels, and out into the piercing winds that swept through the street canyon in which was the Golden Horn. It was almost like a homecoming.

Louie, the Italian waiter recognized her immediately. "Good evening, Miss Taylor. Anyone meeting you?"

"Not tonight, Louie," as though she were an habitue. "I just thought I'd drop in and see Jerry and the boys."

"I'll get you a table right up front," Louie said. "Let me just chase those people over there. Haven't seen you or Mr. Burdette in the longest time." The dark-trousered, white-shirted figure glided through the gloom to a front table where a mildly intoxicated trio were giving a minimum of attention to the music and a maximum to the liquor.

After a moment she saw the three, two girls and a man, get up to move to another table, and then Louie came and led her up to the vacated table only a few feet from where Jerry Best's glittering trumpet was juggling a melody with skill and grace and passion. His face was intense, dedicated, rapt as it always was when he took a riff. But Don, filling in rhythm at the piano, saw her and winked. Then, when the sax took over the melody and Jerry took his trumpet down from his lips, Don reached out and touched Jerry's arm and pointed to Joyce.

Jerry saluted her with a loose, graceful gesture, pointed her out to Louie and then tapped himself on the chest, a gesture that clearly meant put everything on my bill.

Suddenly Joyce was aware that she was the focus of attention in the room. Who, she imagined them saying, is that girl up front? They made some other people move to give her a table. Who is she?

And even this mistaken flattery went to Joyce's head like wine. A homecoming. A welcome.

She felt reinstated in her own respect.

Then, as the piece ended, Jerry pulled the microphone to him, and in a voice that was half a whisper, said, "We got a special request from a charming young lady who ain't even requested it yet So the next number we're going to play is for Miss Joyce Taylor, a very special friend of ours, and it's going to be them Royal Garden Blues."

When the set ended Jerry left the stand and came directly to her table. "Come on out back with us. Ginger's out there. Louie'll hold the table for you," and she followed him through the narrow passageway that led through the kitchen and into the dressing room that was also the office of the club's owner, a man named Michell.

Ginger, in a strapless gown of gold lame pulled high to expose her shapely legs, perched on the corner of a desk. She said, "Hi, Joy! We really been missing you and Frank, kid." And the others came over in genuine pleasure.

Joyce felt her throat constricting with sentiment, and moisture gathering in her eyes.

"Ginger's making it with us, now," Jerry said. "Best damn blues-shoutin' you ever heard, and she don't weigh a pound over a hundred and ten." Ginger nodded happily. "But where the hell you been?"

"Living in town for about three months now," Joyce said.

'And you ain't even come around to see us? Man, you're flippin'!" Jerry expressed complete disavowal of such insanity. "And what ails Frank? He drop dead or something?"

"I haven't seen Frank for months," Joyce said.

"Gee, that's a drag." Then, with an agile tact, "Ginger's got a spot now, and I want you to dig her. Go on, take it Don. I'll sit with Joy at her table."

He led the way outside and they sat down. After a moment Don came out and went to the piano, feeling out a slow introduction.

They didn't give Ginger a spotlight, and she didn't need the microphone in the small room. She just came out and walked on the little space of dance floor carrying a chair. She plunked the chair down and sat down on it, not playing it for sex or anything. Then, as expressionless as, and with the folded hands of a little girl paying strict attention to a Sunday school lesson, she sang St. James Infirmary so it ripped great chunks out of your heart. She had a full contralto voice, with a low range that was almost a moan, but that could become as raw and sharp and edged as a slide trombone, and she made the words really hurt. Then she did other things--ordinary things, the kind of stuff everybody did; things like Georgia on my Mind and Lover Man and If I Can't Sell It, Goin' Sit On It--and each one came out like something new and strange.

Afterward, when Ginger had left the floor, Jerry asked her. "What happened between you and Frank? Something I can fix?"

"No," Joyce said. "Nothing like that. After all, he is married, and it couldn't last forever. In the long run it had to be Janice."

"She's a fine chick." Jerry said. "The greatest. I dig her."

"The funny part is," Joyce said, "I dig her, too, Jerry. But I couldn't go on seeing him and working with him every day after that. So when it happened I came to New York ... Let me tell you the truth, Jerry. First I was going to come down here and tell you I just wanted to see you to make a contact for some charge, but that wasn't really it. I don't know anybody in New York. I'm absolutely alone here and I don't want to let anybody know where I am, but I did want to see some people I know, and have somebody to talk to and everything." She felt the tears coming.

Jerry put his arm around her shoulder, right there in front of all the people in the club, and gave her a firm squeeze. "Cool, Joy. I dig you. Listen, after we get through here we're going up town tonight. After-hours place on hundred 'n twenty-eighth. Got a session all set up. We got plenty of pot and I'll lay some on you before we cut out to keep you straight anyhow, but we'd like you to make it with us ..."