by James Jones
“Thats from Shakespeare,” Sandra said. “A corruption. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.’”
“Yeah?” Angelo said. “Well what do you know. My boy Hal is plenty educated, baby. Very poetic, Hal is.”
“I bet he is,” Sandra grinned. “I bet he’s very poetic. They’re all poetic. I got a couple odd ones that come up to see me every now and then.”
“Well,” Maggio mimed. “Whatever for?”
“You guess,” Sandra grinned.
“I dont have to guess,” Maggio said. “Old Hal,” he said to Prew, “says this Tommy borrows his car to take Bloom out with, ever time old Hal will let him have it. He says Tommy hardly makes enough to live on, says he works someplace downtown and writes stories for magazines on the side. Old Hal says he dont make near enough to spend money on our chum Bloom, says he cant hardly buy our chum Bloom drinks even. Frankly, I am getting so I am wondering who is laying whom.”
“Sure,” Prew said, trying to think of something to say. “I wouldnt doubt it,” he added, finally.
“I had dinner down at Lau Yee Chai’s tonight,” Maggio bragged to Sandra. “Feature that.”
“Lau Yee Chai’s?” Sandra said indifferently. “Thats my favorite hangout. Its a highclass place. I eat there all the time.”
“Will they let you in?”
“Sure,” Sandra said. “Why not?”
“I thought The Law said you gals had to live out of town.”
“It does,” Sandra said. “But at Lau Yee Chai’s they think I’m a rich tourist lady.”
“You ever eat any of this pa-pa-ya?” Maggio asked her.
“Papaya,” Sandra said. “Eat it all the time. I love it.”
“Tonight was a first time I ever had some,” Angelo said. “Looks like mushmelon, kind of, but it tastes like nothin. They got to put lemon juice on it to make it taste at all.”
“Its like olives,” Sandra said. “You have to acquire a taste for it.”
“Same thing as avocado,” Stark said, with authority, “or snails. You got to learn to like it.”
“To me,” Angelo said, “with lemon on it, it smells just like vomit. I am not acquiring any tastes for vomit.” He laughed uproariously half-drunkenly, so hard he almost fell off Sandra’s lap. Sandra looked at him inquiringly.
“God damn,” Stark said, “if you two dont look like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.”
“We had a gook waiter tonight,” Angelo explained, laughing. “This gook waiter stood around behint me all a time like he was scared I’d pick up the wrong fork and shock the customers. So when he brought this pa-pa-ya with a slice of lemon I whispered to him what this was? and he says, ‘Why, thats papaya, Sir.’ So I whispered to him, ‘Angelo Maggio tries anything once,’ and ast him was this how you did it? and squeezed the lemon on it.
“‘Oh, yes, Sir,’ he whispers back.
“‘Odd,’ I whispered to him back, ‘but when you put lemon juice on this pa-pa-ya it smells just like vomit, dont it?’ He just stares at me without a word and I whispers, ‘Its a good thing I’m crazy about vomit, aint it?’”
All of them, excepting Prew, laughed, even Billy laughed, and Angelo seated on his perch grinned as smugly as the parrot who has just four-letter-worded the old maid out of the room in the cartoon.
“I thought old Hal would bust his gut from laughin,” Angelo grinned. “This old waiter dint hover at this elbow no more, after that.”
Little Billy got up from Stark’s lap suddenly, as if the laughter had released her from a hypnotism. She stretched her small voluptuous body feverishly, the firm small uptilted breasts that many a virtuous woman would have envied and considered a rank malfeasance of her office leaping tautly into prominence, their nipples darkly visible under the thin material, almost in Stark’s face.
“Well, how about it, Maylon?” she whispered huskily. “There wont be no more stragglers now, and if there was its too near two o’clock for an all night job like me to take them on.” She arched her back toward him thirstily, proudly. “How about a trip around the world, honey?” she said silkily, “to start off with?”
“I thought that was ony for the pay as you go customers?” Stark said thickly.
“It is,” Billy said.
“Its five bucks, aint it?”
“Thats right. Five extra. But its worth it, Maylon, it is truly worth it.”
Stark sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said, “you made a sale.” His eyes were blooded and very deep and he got up, turning away from all of them toward the jukebox, bending over at the waist to fumble with his fly and adjust himself inside. Then he turned around, grinning sheepishly, to follow her.
“You people comin?” Billy said to Maggio and Sandra. “You got the bottle.”
“Shhh,” Maggio said.
“Nuts,” Billy spat. “To hell with the old bitch.”
“We’re coming,” Sandra grinned at her. “We’re coming, kid.”
Billy laughed feverishly.
“I don’t see how she does it,” Sandra said to Maggio. “It would kill me, or any other normal woman.”
As she passed Prew, Sandra leaned down and spoke. “When Lorene comes back, tell her we’re going across the entryway and back around to the rooms on the hallway above the outside stairs. She’ll know where.”
“Okay,” Prew said indifferently, and watched them all go on across the entryway and disappear around a corner laughing. What the hell, he told himself, it isnt two o’clock yet; Stark is having to pay five bucks extra for that Trip; Angelo aint getting a price reduction for his bottle but them two whores will drink most of it; so what the hell; you got no complaints, he told himself.
He told it to himself repeatedly. But he was alone in the silent waiting room with the darkened Wurlitzer, and there is nothing in the world so lonesome as a silent, darkened Wurlitzer, when the people and the nickels have all gone, and he kept losing count of how many times he said it and having to start over.
When he finally heard Lorene’s low, poised voice out in the hallway he got up quickly. Too quickly, he thought angrily, you better sit back down, you want her to think you’re anxious?
But he did not sit back down. Lorene said goodby to the Fort De Russy surfboard rider friendlily out in the hall. It seemed to him that it took her a very long time, more time than necessary, and that she was very friendly, much more friendly than seemed natural, and he wondered if this was to put him in his place again. But even then he didnt care and he was still standing, by the chair, fumbling for a cigaret and lighting it, when Lorene came in smiling. He was very relieved that she was smiling.
“That was a terrible way to have acted,” she rebuked him, smiling. “What you did.”
“I know it was,” he said. “I didnt mean to do it.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I am,” he said.
“At least you have the money. Poor Bill wanted to stay all night and didnt have the money. I think that this was even his last three dollars, from the way he acted, and now he’ll have to walk clear out to Waikiki.”
“Poor son of a bich,” he said. “I feel for him, and I’m sorry I was bastardly.” He was thinking of himself, broke and on KP, only this afternoon. This afternoon seemed a long way back now, he thought, at least thirty pages back, a thing that happened to another guy. Maybe it happened to poor Bill.
“Before you came over,” Lorene smiled sadly, “poor Bill was so desperate he even asked me to loan him the fifteen dollars until Payday. And then you sit there and try to needle him like that.”
“I was jealous,” he said.
“Jealous?” She smiled serenely. “Over me? A common whore? Dont try to flatter me. You still ought to be ashamed.”
“I am,” he said. “I said I was. But I’m still jealous.”
“You have no right to be.”
“I know it. But I am.”
“Poor Bill even wanted to give me five dollars interest, and o
ffered to teach me to ride a surfboard, free. I wouldnt even have to rent one, I could use his.”
“That takes a lot of guts,” Prew said. “Brass guts.”
Lorene smiled sadly. “Just the same, I felt bad about it, especially when you came over and started picking on him.”
“Why dint you loan it to him then?”
“Well, it wasnt because of you,” she said. “How could I loan it to him? I’m in business just like a grocer. I’m here to make money, not because I love the work. You dont run this business on charge accounts. Where would I be? if I let every fellow I liked or felt sorry for open up a charge account with me? I felt like a heel. And you didnt make me feel any better.”
“I know it,” he said. “But he had to have a brass gut to even ask you a thing like that. These people who have always done everything—surfing, mountain climbing, flying, deep sea diving, anything you mention they’ve done some of it—that kind always got a pure brass gut. And they’ve never done anything. I’ve seen them before.”
“Well he knows surfboarding. Because I’ve seen him on his board at Waikiki, and he’s good. He spends all his money on surfing and spear fishing, and to stay in the Outrigger Club. He’s always in debt three months ahead. Thats another reason I couldnt loan it to him.”
He was getting tired of Bill the surfboard rider.
“Sandra said to tell you they were goin around back, over the outside stairs. She said you’d know. Angelo sneaked in a bottle and we all want to use it.”
Lorene looked at him steadily, her eyes very cool, and very serene. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I know where. Come on.”
“Wait,” Prew said. “Are you still mad at me about this other?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not mad.”
“I think you are. And I had to ask you. Because if you’re still mad I’d just rather we called the whole thing off.”
She looked at him again, steadily, then she smiled. “You’re a funny one. No, I’m not mad. I was, but I got over it.”
“I dint want you to be mad at me. I had to ask you.”
It was hard to say these things, without feeling foolish, hard to make them seem believable. So many fellows probably said them without meaning them.
“Flatterer,” Lorene said coquettishly. It was the first time he had seen her be coquettish and it startled him.
She took his hand and swung their arms together gayly, coquettishly, as they walked across the entryway and around the double corner to the hallway that went back over the stairs, and that had still more doors of tiny bedrooms. She led him gayly, him embarrassed by her sudden gaiety, along the worn carpeting down the narrow dimness that was lighted by a single bare bulb in the ceiling halfway down, to the third door from the end on the street side.
“We never use this part except on Payday,” she told him gayly, “when the big rush is on. The rest of the time we keep it for the all night—friends,” she said, “those of them who are very special. Nobody walks by here at night and it is quiet and the street is outside where you can hear the buses sometimes through the window. The rooms back there dont have any of that,” she said, “and theres no fear of someone barging in on us, like sometimes happens back there.”
“Am I one of your specials?” he asked her thickly.
She stopped at the door and laughed back at him over her shoulder. “Well,” she said, coquettishly, “you’re here, arent you?”
“Sure I’m here. But that could be because of Angelo and Maylon, and the bottle, that they wanted me cut in on,” he said, noticing how very feminine she was when she was coquettish. “Billy and Sandra brought them here, not me.”
“Is it so important?” Lorene teased.
“Yes, its important,” he said urgently. “Important because there are so many of us; thats just faces, to you. So many of you that aint even faces, only just bodies, to us. Do you want to be just a unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we’re remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being always all alike, always unremembered. They die inside. Wives earn their money that way just as much as whores do, with this crappy imitation that aint no good but has to work because usually its all there is. But it dries up the well and leaves it nothing but a mudhole, makes it just rich blood poured down a strawy rathole that stinks afterwards, unless you are remembered. We dont ask to be needed, all we ask is to be remembered. Just to be remembered is . . .”
In the dim halflight he could see her looking at him, very surprised, and he shut it off, the little opening that was his mouth from which this torrent he did not know was there had leaped out at her. Flash and fadeout of boy with tongue in dike, he thought. Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. HERO HOLDS BACK FLOOD THAT THREATENS TO DROWN EARTH!!
In the silence Lorene laughed self-consciously.
“If it is so important to you as all that,” she smiled, “then you are one of my specials.”
Prew shook his head. “Thats no answer,” he said doggedly, and closed it up again with his tongue, the little hole, the little leak, the small Achilles heel.
“Well, what other answer do you want?”
“I dont know,” he said, listlessly. “Forget it. Is this our room?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she put her fine-boned, woman’s hand on his arm and said, “Listen!” half-jokingly, and he could hear the springs squeaking rhythmically in the next room.
“At work already,” she joked, trying to erase the page and write it her way, but the uncertainty in her made it fail, fall flat.
“Work, all right,” Prew said stonily, listening to the hard, unvarying rhythm. “Hard work.” The fine-boned, woman’s hand was on his arm, so delicate to hold such power, and he wanted to grab the thinness of her and constrict the breath out of her kissing her, bring her alive to what he knew, make her feel it. But the tabu said you never kissed a whore, you only fucked them, all you want, and can pay for, but you never kiss them, it was a rooted Law, and she would not feel it, she would only see the broken Law and be angry at the liberty.
“I was joking,” Lorene said apologetically.
She turned on the light then, suddenly showing all of it, baring it to the sight: the thin mattressed bed, the stand in the corner that is just as important here as the broom is in the factory because the assembly line must above all always be kept clean or there might be a breakdown in production. He stood looking at it, time honored by tradition like the memorials to dead veterans that are always the same the cannon on the courthouse lawn whether its the Civil War or the World War or this coming war or any future war and you always knew why they were there By their Cannon Ye shall know Them on the courthouse lawn, and he almost felt like he was coming home.
“I have to ask you for the money,” Lorene said awkwardly.
“Oh. Sure,” he said. “I forgotten it.” He got his wallet out and gave her Stark’s fifteen dollars. Not even your fifteen dollars, he thought, this time.
She tried to hide her awkwardness that surprised her, by getting a couple of cheap quilts out of the high cupboard and tossing them on the bed.
“There. Minerva’s Corps only fixes the beds for the transient trade. But we’ll need covers,” she said gayly, but it was a false attempt that could not be distilled off of her awkwardness and Prew’s granite face that could not smile just now, the Great Stone Face, somebody wrote a story about the Great Stone Face.
“All right,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”
“I wasnt hurrying you. I thought you didnt hear,” she said, noticing curiously how he was not awkward at all getting out of his clothes, which was the time when even the hardest of them were always awkward. But he was not awkward. He was not hard. He just did not even seem to be there, and she felt her bowels stir suddenly.
It was, he thought, like water which, when dammed, creates a pressure, a pressure of power that will pour out flooding, from any little cha
nnel it can find, from any little opening, flooding forth roaring with a long dammed slowly risen energy of pressure that obliterates the earths and moons and stars and suns, subsiding finally into a ridiculous little trickle that will not even roll a pebble, and you wonder foolishly how this thin trickle ever could have generated power and maybe it was all in your own imagination and your eyelids did not really crumble away the firmament into the one single Sun, the one undying Principle. That, he thought, was what its like.
They lay side by side, not touching, in the bed under the two separate quilts and the window was wide open on the night outside and they heard footsteps sound heavily far off like a cop and a streetcar screeked into action against time and somewhere a bus hissed its air brakes menacingly at them. They did not talk because knowing she did not care one way or the other, to talk or not, he did not want to talk, he did not even want to think, of anything but this that had just gone away and he looked out under the crack below the lowered blind at the roofs across the street and wondered dimly if Angelo was in the middle room and if he had the bottle or Stark had it and whether he should get up and put his pants on and see if he could find it because, very badly, he wanted a drink now.
He did not know exactly how long, it seemed a very short time, it also seemed a very long time, before there was a light knock on the door and without waiting the door opened a little and Angelo Maggio’s grinning head (preceded by a naked disembodied arm whose hand had a deathgrip around the neck of a long brown bottle) appeared, and Prew noticed, somewhat absurdly, that Lorene jerked the covers up over her breasts and clutched them daintily about her shoulders.
“I dint hear no sounds of combat,” Angelo’s head grinned. “So I figured you are taking ten.”
“Restin,” Prew said.
“I brung you a drink. Or otherwise old Longlegged Sandra would of drank it all by herself clear up. She’s a good girl,” he said, “a fine girl. But she drinks like a fish. Is it all right I can come in?”
“Sure, come ahead,” Prew said. “I been needin a drink.”