The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (40 page)

“Am I free?” she said, meeting his eyes for less than a second. “Honey, I've been free all my life.”

The first thing she wanted him to agree on, before they'd walked half a block, was her price—steep, but within his means; then she asked if he would mind taking a short cab ride. And in the cab she explained that she never used the cheap hotels and rooming houses around here, as most of the other girls did, because she had a six-month-old daughter and didn't like to leave her for long.

“I don't blame you,” he said. “I have a daughter too.” And he instantly wondered why he'd felt it necessary to tell her that.

“Oh yeah? So where's your wife?”

“Back in New York.”

“You divorced then, or what?”

“Well, separated.”

“Oh yeah? That's too bad.”

They rode in an awkward silence for a while until she said, “Listen, it's all right if you want to kiss me or anything, but no big feely-feely in the cab, okay? I really don't go for that.”

And only then, kissing her, did he begin to find out what she was like. She wore her bright yellow hair in ringlets around her face—it was illuminated and darkened again with each passing streetlamp; her eyes were pleasant despite all the mascara; her mouth was nice; and though he tried no big feely-feely his hands were quick to discover she was slender and firm.

It wasn't a short cab ride—it went on until Warren began to wonder if it might stop only when they met a waiting group of hoodlums who would haul him out of the backseat and beat him up and rob him and take off in the cab with the girl—but it came to an end at last on a silent city block in what he guessed was the northeast of London. She took him into a house that looked rude but peaceful in the moonlight; then she said, “Shh,” and they tiptoed down a creaking linoleum corridor and into her room, where she switched on a light and closed the door behind them.

She checked the baby, who lay small and still and covered-up in the center of a big yellow crib against one wall. Along the facing wall, not six feet away, stood the reasonably fresh-looking double bed in which Warren was expected to take his pleasure.

“I just like to make sure she's breathing,” the girl explained, turning back from the crib; then she watched him count out the right number of pound and ten-shilling notes on the top of her dresser. She turned off the ceiling light but left a small one on at the bedside as she began to undress, and he managed to watch her while nervously taking off his own clothes. Except that her cotton-knit underpants looked pitifully cheap, that her brown pubic hair gave the lie to her blond head, that her legs were short and her knees a little thick, she was all right. And she was certainly young.

“Do you ever enjoy this?” he asked when they were clumsily in bed together.

“Huh? How do you mean?”

“Well, just—you know—after a while it must get so you can't really—” and he stopped there in a paralysis of embarrassment.

“Oh, no,” she assured him. “Well, I mean it depends on the
guy
a lot, but I'm not—I'm not a block of ice or anything. You'll find out.”

And so, in wholly unexpected grace and nourishment, she became a real girl for him.

Her name was Christine Phillips and she was twenty-two. She came from Glasgow, and she'd been in London for four years. He knew it would be gullible to believe everything she told him when they sat up later that night over cigarettes and a warm quart bottle of beer; still, he wanted to keep an open mind. And if much of what she said was predictable stuff—she explained, for example, that she wouldn't have to be on the street at all if she were willing to take a job as a “hostess” in a “club,” but that she'd turned down many such offers because “all those places are clip joints”—there were other, unguarded remarks that could make his arm tighten around her in tenderness, as when she said she had named her baby Laura “because I've always thought that's the most beautiful girl's name in the world. Don't you?”

And he began to understand why there was scarcely a trace of Scotch or English accent in her speech: she must have known so many Americans, soldiers and sailors and random civilian strays, that they had invaded and plundered her language.

“So what do you do for a living, Warren?” she asked. “You get money from home?”

“Well, sort of.” And he explained, once again, about the Fulbright program.

“Yeah?” she said. “You have to be smart for that?”

“Oh, not necessarily. You don't have to be very smart for anything in America anymore.”

“You kidding me?”

“Not wholly.”

“Huh?”

“I mean I'm only kidding you a little.”

And after a thoughtful pause she said, “Well, I wish
I
could've had more schooling. I wish I was smart enough to write a book, because I'd have a hell of a book to write. Know what I'd call it?” She narrowed her eyes, and her fingers sketched a suggestion of formal lettering in the air. “I'd call it
This Is Piccadilly
. Because I mean people don't really
know
what goes on. Ah, Jesus, I could tell you things that'd make your—well, never mind. Skip it.”

“. . . Hey, Christine?” he said later still, when they were back in bed.

“Uh-huh?”

“Want to tell each other the stories of our lives?”

“Okay,” she said with a child's eagerness, and so he had to explain again, shyly, that he was only kidding her a little.

The baby's cry woke them both at six in the morning, but Christine got up and told him he could go back to sleep for a while. When he awoke again he was alone in the room, which smelled faintly of cosmetics and piss. He could hear several women talking and laughing nearby, and he didn't know what he was expected to do but get up and dressed and find his way out of here.

Then Christine came to the door and asked if he would like a cup of tea. “Whyn't you come on out, if you're ready,” she said as she carefully handed him the hot mug, “and meet my friends, okay?”

And he followed her into a combination kitchen and living room whose windows overlooked a weed-grown vacant lot. A stubby woman in her thirties stood working at an ironing board with the electrical cord plugged into a ceiling fixture, and another girl of about Christine's age lay back in an easy chair, wearing a knee-length robe and slippers, with her bare, pretty legs ablaze in morning sunlight. A gas fireplace hissed beneath a framed oval mirror, and the good smells of steam and tea were everywhere.

“Warren, this is Grace Arnold,” Christine said of the woman at the ironing board, who looked up to say she was pleased to meet him, “and this is Amy.” Amy licked her lips and smiled and said, “Hi.”

“You'll probably meet the kids in a minute,” Christine told him. “Grace has six kids. Grace and
Alfred
do, I mean. Alfred's the man of the house.”

And very gradually, as he sipped and listened, mustering appropriate nods and smiles and inquiries, Warren was able to piece the facts together. Alfred Arnold was an interior housepainter, or rather a “painter and decorator.” He and his wife, with all those children to raise, made ends meet by renting out rooms to Christine and Amy in full knowledge of how both girls earned their living, and so they had all become a kind of family.

How many polite, nervous men had sat on this sofa in the mornings, watching the whisk and glide of Grace Arnold's iron, helplessly intrigued with the sunny spectacle of Amy's legs, hearing the talk of these three women and wondering how soon it would be all right to leave? But Warren Mathews had nothing to go home to, so he began to hope this pleasant social occasion might last.

“You've a nice name, Warren,” Amy told him, crossing her legs. “I've always liked that name.”

“Warren?” Christine said. “Can you stay and have something to eat with us?”

Soon there was a fried egg on buttered toast for each of them, served with more tea around a clean kitchen table, and they all ate as daintily as if they were in a public place. Christine sat beside him, and once during the meal she gave his free hand a shy little squeeze.

“If you don't have to rush off,” she said, while Grace was stacking the dishes, “we can get a beer. The pub'll be open in half an hour.”

“Good,” he said. “Fine.” Because the last thing he wanted to do was rush off, even when all six children came clamoring in from their morning's play down the street, each of them in turn wanting to sit on his lap and poke fun at him and run jam-stained fingers through his hair. They were a shrill, rowdy crowd, and they all glowed with health. The oldest was a bright girl named Jane who looked oddly like a Negro—light-skinned, but with African features and hair—and who giggled as she backed away from him and said, “Are you Christine's fella?”

“I sure am,” he told her.

And he did feel very much like Christine's fella when he took her out alone to the pub around the corner. He liked the way she walked—she didn't look anything at all like a prostitute in her fresh tan raincoat with the collar turned up around her cheeks—and he liked her sitting close beside him on a leather bench against the wall of an old brown room where everything, even the mote-filled shafts of sunlight, seemed to be steeped in beer.

“Look, Warren,” she said after awhile, turning her bright glass on the table. “Do you want to stay over another night?”

“Well, no, I really—the thing is I can't afford it.”

“Oh, I didn't mean that,” she said, and squeezed his hand again. “I didn't mean for money. I meant—just stay. Because I want you to.”

Nobody had to tell him what a triumph of masculinity it was to have a young whore offer herself to you free of charge. He didn't even need
From Here to Eternity
to tell him that, though he would always remember how that novel came quickly to mind as he drew her face up closer to his own. She had made him feel profoundly strong. “Oh, that's nice,” he said huskily, and he kissed her. Then, just before kissing her again, he said, “Oh, that's awfully nice, Christine.”

And they both made frequent use of the word
nice
all afternoon. Christine seemed unable to keep away from him except for brief intervals when she had to attend to the baby; once, when Warren was alone in the living room, she came dancing slowly and dreamily across the floor, as if to the sound of violins, and fell into his arms like a girl in the movies. Another time, curled fast against him on the sofa, she softly crooned a popular song called “Unforgettable” to him, with a significant dipping of her eyelashes over the title word whenever the lyrics brought it around.

“Oh, you're nice, Warren,” she kept saying. “You know that? You're really nice.”

And he would tell her, again and again, how nice she was too.

When Alfred Arnold came home from work—a compact and tired and bashfully agreeable-looking man—his wife and young Amy were quick to busy themselves in the ritual of making him welcome: taking his coat, readying his chair, bringing his glass of gin. But Christine held back, clinging to Warren's arm, until the time came to take him up for a formal introduction to the man of the house.

“Pleased to meet you, Warren,” Alfred Arnold said. “Make yourself at home.”

There was corned beef with boiled potatoes for supper, which everyone said was very good, and in the afterglow Alfred fell to reminiscing in a laconic way about his time as prisoner of war in Burma. “Four years,” he said, displaying the fingers of one hand with only the thumb held down. “Four years.”

And Warren said it must have been terrible.

“Alfred?” Grace said. “Show Warren your citation.”

“Oh no, love; nobody wants to bother with that.”

“Show him,” she insisted.

And Alfred gave in. A thick black wallet was shyly withdrawn from his hip pocket; then from one of its depths came a stained, much-folded piece of paper. It was almost falling apart at the creases, but the typewritten message was clear: it conveyed the British Army's recognition that Private A. J. Arnold, while a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Burma, had been commended by his captors as a good and steady worker on the construction of a railroad bridge in 1944.

“Well,” Warren said. “That's fine.”

“Ah, you know the women,” Alfred confided, tucking the paper back where it came from. “The women always want you to show this stuff around. I'd rather forget the whole bloody business.”

Christine and Warren managed to make an early escape, under Grace Arnold's winking smile, and as soon as the bedroom door was shut they were clasped and writhing and breathing heavily, eager and solemn in lust. The shedding of their clothes took no time at all but seemed a terrible hindrance and delay; then they were deep in bed and reveling in each other, and then they were joined again.

“Oh, Warren,” she said. “Oh, God. Oh, Warren. Oh, I love you.”

And he heard himself saying more than once, more times than he cared to believe or remember, that he loved her too.

Sometime after midnight, as they lay quiet, he wondered how those words could have spilled so easily and often from his mouth. And at about the same time, when Christine began talking again, he became aware that she'd had a lot to drink. A quarter-full bottle of gin stood on the floor beside the bed, with two cloudy, finger-printed glasses to prove they had both made ample use of it, but she seemed to be well ahead of him now. Pouring herself still another one, she sat back in comfort against the pillows and the wall and talked in a way that suggested she was carefully composing each sentence for dramatic effect, like a little girl pretending to be an actress.