“My . . . the boy can dance,” she whispered. “Let’s forget everything, who we are, the day of the week . . .”
“Me . . . I forgot two hours ago,” said Charley, giving her a squeeze.
“You’re just a plain farmerlad and I’m a barefoot girl.”
“More truth than poetry to that,” said Charley through his teeth.
“Poetry . . . I love poetry, don’t you?”
They danced until the place closed up. They were staggering when they got out on the black empty streets. They stumbled past garbagepails. Cats ran out from under their feet. They stopped and talked about free love with a cop. At every corner they stopped and kissed. As she was looking for her latchkey in her purse she said thoughtfully: “People who really do things make the most beautiful lovers, don’t you think so?”
Charley woke up first. Sunlight was streaming in through an uncurtained window. The girl was asleep, her face pressed into the pillow. Her mouth was open and she looked considerably older than she had the night before. Her skin was pasty and green and she had stringy hair.
Charley put his clothes on quietly. On a big table inches deep in dust and littered with drawings of funnylooking nudes, he found a piece of charcoal. On the back of a sheet of yellow paper that had a half a poem written on it he wrote: Had a swell time. . . . Goodby. . . . Goodluck. Charley. He didn’t put his shoes on until he got to the bottom of the creaky stairs.
Out on the street in the cold blowy spring morning he felt wonderful. He kept bursting out laughing. A great little old town. He went into a lunchroom at the corner of Eighth Street and ordered himself a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon and hotcakes and coffee. He kept giggling as he ate it. Then he went uptown to Fortysecond Street on the el. Grimy roofs, plateglass windows, grimy bulbs of electriclight signs, fireescapes, watertanks all looked wonderful in the gusty sunlight.
At the Grand Central Station the clock said eleventhirty. Porters were calling the names of westbound trains. He got his bag from the checkroom and took a taxi to the Chatterton House. That was where Joe Askew had written he ought to stay, a better address than the Y. His suitcase cut into his hand as it was heavy from blueprints and books on mechanical drawing, so he jumped into a taxi. When the clerk at the desk asked for a reference he brought out his reserve commission.
The place had an elevator and baths and showers at the ends of the dimlylit halls, and a lot of regulations on the back of the door of the little shoebox of a room they showed him into. He threw himself on the cot with his clothes on. He was sleepy. He lay giggling looking up at the ceiling. A great little old town.
As it turned out he lived a long time in that stuffy little green-papered room with its rickety mission furniture. The first few days he went around to see all the aviation concerns he found listed in the phonebook to see if he could pickup some kind of temporary job. He ran into a couple of men he’d known overseas, but nobody could promise him a job; if he’d only come a couple of months sooner. Everybody said things were slack. The politicians had commercial aviation by the short hairs and there you were, that was that. Too damn many flyers around looking for jobs anyway.
At the end of the first week he came back from a trip to a motor-building outfit in Long Island City, where they half-promised him a drafting job later in the summer, that is if they got the contract their Washington man was laying for, to find a letter from Mrs. Askew: Joe was a very sick man, double pneumonia. It would be a couple of months before he could get to the city. Joe had insisted on her writing though she didn’t think he was well enough to worry about business matters, but she’d done it to ease his mind. He said for Charley to be sure not to let anybody else see his plans until he got a patent, better get a job to tide over until they could get the thing started right.
Tide over, hell; Charley sat on his sagging bed counting his money. Four tens, a two, a one and fiftythree cents in change. With the room eight dollars a week that didn’t make his summer’s prospects look so hot.
At last one day he got hold of Doris Humphries on the phone and she asked him to come on up next afternoon. At the Humphries’ apartment it was just like it had been at the Bentons’ the night he went there with Ollie Taylor, except that there was a maid instead of a butler. He felt pretty uncomfortable because there were only women there. Doris’s mother was a haggard dressedup woman who gave him a searching look that he felt went right through him into the wallet in his back pocket.
They had tea and cakes, and Charley wasn’t sure if he ought to smoke or not. They said Ollie Taylor had gone abroad again, to the south of France, and as Ollie Taylor was the only thing he had in common with them to talk about, that pretty well dried up the conversation. Dressed in civies it wasn’t so easy talking to rich women as it had been in the uniform. Still Doris smiled at him nicely and talked in a friendly confidential way about how sick she was of this society whirl and everything, that she was going out and get her a job. That’s not so easy, thought Charley. She complained she never met any interesting men. She said Charley and Ollie Taylor—of course Ollie was an old dear—were the only men she knew she could stand talking to. “I guess it’s the war and going overseas that’s done something to you,” she said, looking up at him. “When you’ve seen things like that you can’t take yourself so seriously as these miserable loungelizards I have to meet. They are nothing but clotheshangers.”
When Charley left the big apartmenthouse his head was swimming so he was almost bagged by a taxicab crossing the street. He walked down the broad avenue humming with traffic in the early dark. She’d promised to go to a show with him one of these nights.
When he went to get Doris to take her out to dinner one evening in early May, after the engagement had been put off from week to week—she was so terribly busy, she always complained over the phone, she’d love to come but she was so terribly busy—he only had twenty bucks left in his wallet. He waited for her some time alone in the drawingroom of the Humphries’ apartment. White covers had been hung on the piano and the chairs and curtains and the big white room smelt of mothballs. It all gave him a feeling he’d come too late. Doris came in at last looking so pale and silky and golden in a lowcut eveningdress it made him catch his breath. “Hello, Charley, I hope you’re not starved,” she said in that intimate way that always made him feel he’d known her a long time. “You know I never could keep track of the time.”
“Gosh, Doris, you look wonderful.” He caught her looking at his grey business suit. “Oh, forgive me,” she said. “I’ll run and change my clothes.” Something chilly came into her voice and left it at once. “It’ll take only a minute.” He felt himself getting red. “I guess I oughta have worn eveningclothes,” he said. “But I’ve been so busy. I haven’t had my trunk sent out from Minnesota yet.” “Of course not. It’s almost summer. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Wits woolgathering again.”
“Couldn’t you go like that, you look lovely.”
“But it looks so silly to see a girl dressed up like a plush horse with a man in a business suit. It’ll be more fun anyway . . . less the social engagement, you know. . . . Honestly I’ll be only five minutes by the clock.”
Doris went out and half an hour later came back in a pearl-grey streetdress. A maid followed her in with a tray with a cocktailshaker and glasses. “I thought we might have a drink before we go out. Then we’ll be sure to know what we are getting,” she said.
He took her to the McAlpin for supper; he didn’t know anyplace else. It was already eight o’clock. The theatertickets were burning his pocket, but she didn’t seem in any hurry. It was halfpast nine when he put her in a taxi to go to the show. The taxi filled up with the light crazy smell of her perfume and her hair. “Doris, lemme say what I want to say for a minute,” he blurted out suddenly. “I don’t know whether you like anybody else very much. I kinder don’t think you do from what you said about the guys you know.”
“Oh, please don’t propose,” she said. “If you knew how I
hated proposals, particularly in a cab caught in a traffic jam.”
“No, I don’t mean that. You wouldn’t want to marry me the way I’am now anyway . . . not by along shot. I gotta get on my hindlegs first. But I’m goin’ to pretty soon. . . . You know aviation is the comin’ industry. . . . Ten years from now . . . Well, us fellers have a chance to get in on the ground floor. . . . I want you to give me a break, Doris, hold off the other guys for a little while. . . .”
“Wait for you ten years, my, that’s a romantic notion . . . my grandmother would have thought it was lovely.”
“I mighta known you’d kid about it. Well, here we are.”
Charley tried to keep from looking sour when he helped Doris out. She squeezed his hand just for a second as she leaned on it. His heart started pounding. As they followed the usher into the dark theater full of girls and jazz she put her small hand very lightly on his arm. Above their heads was the long powdery funnel of the spotlight spreading to a tinselly glitter where a redlipped girl in organdy was dancing. He squeezed Doris’s hand hard against his ribs with his arm. “All right, you get what I mean,” he whispered. “You think about it . . . I’ve never had a girl get me this way before, Doris.” They dropped into their seats. The people behind started shushing, so Charley had to shut up. He couldn’t pay any attention to the show.
“Charley, don’t expect anything, but I think you’re a swell guy,” she said when, stuffy from the hot theater and the lights and the crowd, they got into a taxi as they came out. She let him kiss her, but terribly soon the taxi stopped at her apartmenthouse. He said goodnight to her at the elevator. She shook her head with a smile when he asked if he could come up.
He walked home weak in the knees through the afterthetheater bustle of Park Avenue and Fortysecond Street. He could still feel her mouth on his mouth, the smell of her pale frizzy hair, the littleness of her hands on his chest when she pushed his face away from hers.
The next morning he woke late feeling pooped as if he’d been on a threeday drunk. He bought the papers and had a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the coffeebar that stank of stale swill. This time he didn’t look in the Business Opportunities column but under Mechanics and Machinists. That afternoon he got a job in an automobile repairshop on First Avenue. It made him feel bad to go back to the overalls and the grease under your fingernails and punching the timeclock like that but there was no help for it. When he got back to the house he found a letter from Emiscah that made him feel worse than ever.
The minute he’d read the letter he tore it up. Nothing doing, bad enough to go back to grinding valves without starting that stuff up again. He sat down on the bed with his eyes full of peeved tears. It was too goddamned hellish to have everything close in on him like this after getting his commission and the ambulance service and the Lafayette Escadrille and having a mechanic attend to his plane and do all the dirty work. Of all the lousy stinking luck. When he felt a little quieter he got up and wrote Joe for Christ’s sake to get well as soon as he could, that he had turned down an offer of a job with Triangle Motors over in Long Island City and was working as a mechanic in order to tide over and that he was darn sick of it and darned anxious to get going on their little proposition.
He’d worked at the repairshop for two weeks before he found out that the foreman ran a pokergame every payday in a disused office in the back of the building. He got in on it and played pretty carefully. The first couple of weeks he lost half his pay, but then he began to find that he wasn’t such a bad pokerplayer at that. He never lost his temper and was pretty good at doping out where the cards were. He was careful not to blow about his winnings either, so he got away with more of their money than the other guys figured. The foreman was a big loudmouthed harp who wasn’t any too pleased to have Charley horning in on his winnings; it had been his habit to take the money away from the boys himself. Charley kept him oiled up with a drink now and then, and besides, once he got his hand in he could get through more work than any man there. He always changed into his good clothes before he went home.
He didn’t get to see Doris before she went to York Harbor for the summer. The only people he knew were the Johnsons. He went down there a couple of times a week. He built them bookshelves and one Sunday helped them paint the livingroom floor.
Another Sunday he called up early to see if the Johnsons wanted to go down to Long Beach to take a swim. Paul was in bed with a sorethroat but Eveline said she’d go. Well, if she wants it she can have it, he was telling himself as he walked downtown, through the empty grime of the hot sundaymorning streets. She came to the door in a loose yellow silk and lace negligee that showed where her limp breasts began. Before she could say anything he’d pulled her to him and kissed her. She closed her eyes and let herself go limp in his arms. Then she pushed him away and put her finger on her lips.
He blushed and lit a cigarette. “Do you mind?” he said in a shaky voice.
“I’ll have to get used to cigarettes again sometime, I suppose,” she said very low.
He walked over to the window to pull himself together. She followed him and reached for his cigarette and took a couple of puffs of it. Then she said aloud in a cool voice, “Come on back and say hello to Paul.”
Paul was lying back against the pillows looking pale and sweaty. On a table beside the bed there was a coffeepot and a flowered cup and saucer and a pitcher of hot milk. “Hi, Paul, you look like you was leadin’ the life of Riley,” Charley heard himself say in a hearty voice. “Oh, you have to spoil them a little when they’re sick,” cooed Eveline. Charley found himself laughing too loud. “Hope it’s nothin’ serious, old top.” “Naw, I get these damn throats. You kids have a good time at the beach. I wish I could come too.”
“Oh, it may be horrid,” said Eveline. “But if we don’t like it we can always come back.” “Don’t hurry,” said Paul. “I got plenty to read. I’ll be fine here.”
“Well, you and Jeremy keep bachelor hall together.”
Eveline had gotten up a luncheonbasket with some sandwiches and a thermos full of cocktails. She looked very stylish, Charley thought, as he walked beside her along the dusty sunny street carrying the basket and the Sunday paper, in her little turnedup white hat and her lightyellow summer dress. “Oh, let’s have fun,” she said. “It’s been so long since I had any fun.”
When they got out of the train at Long Beach a great blue wind was streaming off the sea blurred by little cool patches of mist. There was a big crowd along the boardwalk. The two of them walked a long way up the beach. “Don’t you think it would be fun if we could get away from everybody?” she was saying. They walked along, their feet sinking into the sand, their voices drowned in the pound and hiss of the surf. “This is great stuff,” he kept saying.
They walked and walked. Charley had his bathingsuit on under his clothes; it had got to feel hot and itchy before they found a place they liked. They set the basket down behind a low dune and Eveline took her clothes off under a big towel she’d brought with her. Charley felt a little shy pulling off his shirt and pants right in front of her but that seemed to be on the books.
“My, you’ve got a beautiful body,” she said. Charley tugged uneasily at the end of his bathingsuit. “I’m pretty healthy, I guess,” he said. He looked at his hands sticking out red and grimed from the white skin of his forearms that were freckled a little under the light fuzz. “I sure would like to get a job where I could keep my hands clean.” “A man’s hands ought to show his work. . . . That’s the whole beauty of hands,” said Eveline. She had wriggled into her suit and let drop the towel. It was a paleblue onepiece suit very tight. “Gosh, you’ve got a pretty figure. That’s what I first noticed about you on the boat.” She stepped over and took his arm. “Let’s go in,” she said. “The surf scares me, but it’s terribly beautiful. . . . Oh, I think this is fun, don’t you?”
Her arm felt very silky against his. He could feel her bare thigh against his bare thigh. Their feet touched as they walked out
of the hot loose sand onto the hard cool sand. A foaming wide tongue of seawater ran up the beach at them and wet their legs to the knees. She let go his arm and took his hand.
He hadn’t had much practice with surf and the first thing he knew a wave had knocked him galleywest. He came up spluttering with his mouth and ears full of water. She was on her feet laughing at him holding out her hand to help him to his feet. “Come on out further,” she shouted. They ducked through the next wave and swam out. Just outside of the place where the waves broke they bobbed up and down treading water. “Not too far out, on account of the seapussies. . . .” “What?” “Currents,” she shouted, putting her mouth close to his ear.
He got swamped by another roller and came up spitting and gasping. She was swimming on her back with her eyes closed and her lips pouted. He took two strokes towards her and kissed her cold wet face. He tried to grab her round the body but a wave broke over their heads. She pushed him off as they came up sputtering. “You made me lose my bathingcap. Look.” “There it is. I’ll get it.” He fought his way back through the surf and grabbed the cap just as the undertow was sucking it under. “Some surf,” he yelled.
She followed him out and stood beside him in the shallow spume with her short hair wet over her eyes. She brushed it back with her hand. “Here we are,” she said. Charley looked both ways down the beach. There was nobody to be seen in the earlyafternoon glare. He tried to put his arm around her. She skipped out of his reach. “Charley . . . aren’t you starved?” “For you, Eveline.” “What I want’s lunch.”
When they’d eaten up the lunch and drunk all the cocktails they felt drowsy and a little drunk. They lay side by side in the sun on the big towel. She made him keep his hands to himself. He closed his eyes but he was too excited to go to sleep. Before he knew it he was talking his head off. “You see Joe’s been workin’ on the patent end of it, and he knows how to handle the lawyers and the big boys with the big wads. I’m afraid if I try to go into it alone some bird’ll go to work and steal my stuff. That’s what usually happens when a guy invents anything.”
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