Towns saw that the boy was really saying he had loved being away with his father, eating together, going places with him, anyplace at all, sleeping in the same hotel room. All that did was make Towns feel worse; he hated himself for not having shown the boy a better time, for having the crabs, for calling up Bryn Mawr girls in the middle of the night, for not knowing how to get back with the boy's mother. When they were packed, Towns settled his account at the front desk and noticed that the doctor's bill had been tacked onto it. They got a cab in front of the hotel and Towns told the driver to take them to the airport. “Oh hell,” said the driver, his shoulders slumping. “I don't want to go to the airport.” The boy looked at his father with a dumbfounded expression and then began to laugh so hard that Towns got worried about his cheekbone. “Where would you like to go?” Towns asked the driver, playing along for the boy's benefit. This time the child laughed so hard he had to hold his face which must have pained him. Towns knew the boy was on to a story he would talk about for years, a driver who only liked to go to places he wanted to go to. Towns and his son shared a whole bunch of those. The driver finally turned on the ignition and started off along the Strip. Towns put his arm around the child and asked him how he felt, and the boy said not too bad, but that the day he turned twenty-one he was going to come out to Las Vegas, maybe with a friend or two, so he could gamble. “That's a ways off,” said Towns, but when he said it he realized it wasn't that far off after all. And that there wasn't too much time. Before he turned around, the boy would be in his teens, away at college, maybe in the service, and God knows what after that. With a divorce coming up, the time with the boy would probably be lumped into weekends and maybe a little bit of the summer. He wished, at that moment, he could start the Vegas trip all over again. If he could only do that, he would forget about the casino entirely and spend every second with the boy, and really show him a time. Maybe they would go camping. He'd buy a couple of sleeping bags and figure out a way to put up one of those fucking tents. When they got to the center of town and began to drive past some of the cheaper casinos, Towns suddenly told the driver to stop in front of one of them. “What for?” asked the driver. “Just stop,” said Towns. He made sure to say it in a measured way so the driver would make no mistake about how serious he was. When the cab stopped, Towns got out with the boy and walked up to the cashier of a corner casino where he changed the boy's twenty-five dollars into quarters and halves.
“What's that for?” asked the boy.
“For you,” said Towns. “To play the slots.”
“I thought I wasn't allowed to,” said the boy, standing in front of a quarter machine.
“Just play,” said Towns.
“I don't know, Dad,” said the boy. “What about him?” He pointed to a uniformed man approaching them from the rear of the casino.
“I see him” said Towns.
“I don't feel right, Dad,” said the boy, putting in his first quarter and pulling the lever.
“It's all right,” said Towns. “Play.” And he took a position with his back to the boy, his legs a fraction bent, his elbows close to his sides, as though he were cradling a machine gun and would kill any sonofabitch that dared to come within ten feet of the two of them.
Whenever Harry Towns ran into a new girl, sooner or later he would tell her that he lived in “a tower of steel and glass high above Manhattan.” There is no record that any of them were impressed by this phrase. But he certainly liked the sound of it. The apartment was on the thirtieth floor of a new building in the middle of the city. The monthly rent was absurd, but Harry Towns took the place all the same, figuring he would worry about one month at a time. He would have the apartment and something would always come up to get him by. He had been in it nine months and something always had. “The only time I get into trouble,” he would say, justifying his extravagance, “is when I bite off less than I can chew.” He would say that to girls too, and they liked it about as much as the “tower of steel and glass” line.
He was a little afraid of being up so high. What if he got excruciatingly lonely one night or if he gave a little party and some freak dropped acid in his drink? He might want to make a leap for the pavement. So one of the things he did before signing the lease was to see if he could fit through a window. He tested one in the living room, getting an arm and part of his shoulder through, but that was as much of him as would fit. When he took the place, he noticed that you could see three bridges from the apartment and this was thrilling, but once he moved in the only time he ever checked the bridges was when the rent was due. He would look at them and feel a little better about the high monthly figure. Then there was the early-morning light. When the sun came up, it crashed through the dining alcove with such brilliance and ferocity you might have thought it would tear off a corner of the apartment. Harry Towns would like to have seen someone try to be gloomy in the face of that white and dazzling spectacle. Once he moved in, however, he saw very little of that time of day. He kept shaky hours and was usually dead asleep in the bedroom dark until noon. He loved the apartment so much he knew they would have to come in with guns to get him out of there, but it wasn't especially the light or the three bridges that turned the trick for him.
The furniture was part of it. He had never selected furniture before and his style in picking it out was fast and giddy. He would tell the “tower of steel and glass” girls that he had wrapped up the furniture purchase in five minutes and the truth was it probably had not taken him more than ten. When it was time to select a bed, the salesman winked and said, “I've got one big as a ballfield.” It was, and Harry Towns grabbed it. In helping Towns with the decorative colors, the salesman used the first-person style of fight managers in describing their strategy to the press. “I'm going with basic white on the walls and then I plan to move my hot colors into a few of the living-room pieces.” Towns left it all to him. The salesman said not to worry about the money, but on the day the furniture was delivered, he got very worried about it and would not leave without a check. Towns had enough money for it, but not much more. The furniture really was steel and glass with plenty of leather thrown in. It brought a clean smell to the place which had stayed in the air for all of the nine months he had lived there. Towns could not remember a day he hadn't enjoyed his furniture all over again. He would come in each day, smell it, sit in some of the chairs, and generally check around to see that the furniture was all right. Years back, when Towns worked in an office, he and a homosexual copywriter used to spend their lunch hours together in furniture stores, Towns's friend saying he would love to move right into one in particular and Towns agreeing it was a fine idea. It was Towns's most serious brush with homosexuality and it occurred to him that all of his new interest in decorating might be an echo of the old homosexual furniture-store lunches coming back to haunt him.
When a new girlfriend came up to his place, Towns put a lot of emphasis on what she thought of the way he had set it up. If she had some reservations, he would give her a low mark. It would take him a long time to warm up to her. An old friend, known for his savage honesty, appeared one night and, after looking around, said, “I have to tell you straight out, I don't like your furniture. You know me, I'm honest.” Amazingly, Towns was not that hurt. He knew the fellow had a house in the suburbs with a black welcoming jockey on the front lawn. But throughout the evening he got the friend to try out different chairs, saying it was probably the kind of furniture that took some getting used to. “I'll bet you've changed your mind about the stuff,” he said to the friend as he saw him off. “Not really,” said the brutally honest fellow.
It was not just an apartment, of course; it was a whole building, with a sea of doormen, sub-doormen, and handymen, all standing around, none of them with that much to do. There were probably one and a half in help for each tenant and Towns felt an obligation to dream up assignments for them. One fellow would spot Towns approaching the building, as far as a block away, and dash out to help him with his packages,
even if they were little ones. The fellow was whipped and hooked-over like an old bullfighter and Towns, strong as a mule in the shoulders, felt foolish accepting his help; but he sensed there was a point of pride involved and let the fellow have his head. Another doorman, who got cabs for Towns, leaped back and smacked his head in shock each time Towns gave him a tip, as if to say, “Holy God, I never expected this.” There were special night men, too; the one who usually admitted Towns at four in the morning would clutch his collar tightly around the neck as he opened the front door, falling back as though a blizzard had swept in with Towns. He did this even on calm summer nights.
The building had a garage below it where Towns kept a car for the weekends when he hung around with his son. You could go from your apartment right to the garage and then sweep out into the night, all in one motion, without ever having the air hit you. That part made Towns feel like a racketeer. As a security measure, you got a special key to summon the garage elevator. If you didn't have the key, no soap, and you would be trapped out there in the hallway, presumably to be captured by building authorities. Towns liked the special key, but did not feel he needed all that security. As a matter of fact, he had often thought of mugging someone himself, just to get the feel of it and to turn the tables on the crime-in-the-streets issue. He actually picked out a little old man one night, but did not follow through. In any case, he felt he could take care of himself and wished the building would drop a little of the security and lower the rent a couple of bucks. Just after Towns moved in, a black garage man banged up his car. When Towns went to see him about it, the fellow said, “One thing I want with all my heart is to get into the FBI.” Thrown off balance, Towns said, “I'll check around and see what I can do.” For weeks, the assignment took up a space in Towns's mind and he was sorry he hadn't told the fellow straight out that he had no handle at the security organization. Each time he came for his car, the fellow asked, “Anything break yet?” to which Towns answered, “I'm still working on it.” After a while, the fellow stopped asking and got Towns his car in a very sullen way. Towns finally gave him the number of a man who covered crime for a small New Jersey daily. “That's about as close as I could get,” he said. “It won't work,” said the garage man, handing back the number. But after that, he was a little more cheerful.
* * *
The first girl to visit Towns in his new apartment was an actress who took one look around and began to do musical-comedy production-number kicks in and out of the furniture. She took off her clothes and sat around on his new chairs naked; Towns could not get over his good fortune, but before long she was slumped over, weeping because she was unable “to get her shit together.” She said the city had “put her into a heavy.” All of this was acceptable to Towns so long as she didn't put her clothes back on. But the next day, he found little clumps of hair all over his new furniture. He kept finding them for a week after she was gone and even spotted some on the top shelf of his glass bookcase, wondering how they had gotten up there. Even though he loved her kicks, he decided not to have her back.
There was something about the apartment, no question about that. A friend of his, in the sweater business, who had once confessed to Towns that he could get it up but couldn't get it off, arrived one day, sat down on the couch and said, “If I lived here, I'm positive I could get it off.” Towns was fond of saying that once he got a girl up to the apartment she was a dead duck. The truth is, he never knew. One girl, a secretary who took parts in porno flicks, turned up in a leather outfit and Towns was certain she was a shoo-in. But she sat in a corner, crossed her legs like a vise, and began to pump him for sexual fantasies she could act out with her boyfriend. They had done every one they could think of. When Towns said he never bothered with them, she angrily accused him of holding some back. He made one up about a Mandarin king and his concubine which seemed to tickle her and then he got her out of there.
Whenever a new girl came up to the apartment he would snap shut the double lock and then stand at the door while she sniffed around like a puppy and got used to the place. No matter what her reaction to the setup, Towns would say, “I haven't really finished it yet.” Then he would put on some saxophone music that sounded like the apartment to him. It was cool, dry, very much like the effect of cocaine. He had never come across a girl who didn't react well to the music; some jotted down the names of the selections so they could buy the records for themselves. He knew the saxophone player personally, a plain-looking, scholarly fellow who had admitted to Towns that he was very lonely. Sometimes Towns felt funny about using the lonely fellow to supply the musical background while he coaxed girls into bed. It bothered him, but it never really shook him up, so he used the music anyway.
Once a girl kicked off her shoes and got settled in, he would arrange the lighting in a soft way, sit down beside her on one of the soft leather chairs, and put his arm around her shoulders; together they would admire the view. Most of the girls lived in small apartments that faced out on back alleys and were trying to get rid of their roommates on the grounds of sloppiness and insensitivity. In a sense, Towns knew he was lording it over them with his view and his fine apartment, but he could not resist doing it anyway. If a girl said she was hungry, he would bring out a trayful of play foods—pâté, caviar, Camembert, English biscuits. He associated the apartment with that kind of food and never kept anything normal around, like a head of lettuce or a loaf of white bread. He did his actual eating on the outside. If a girl said she wanted to tidy up, he would direct her to the powder room. Inside was a very feminine mirror and some light, summery colognes. It made him wince that he had turned into the kind of fellow who had a powder room with colognes in it; surprisingly it did not go over that well with the girls. They used it, but never reported getting any particular kick out of it.
Once he had eased a girl into the bedroom, he would align the speakers of his stereo so that his friend's saxophone music could curl around and follow them in there. He had a drawerful of drugs for girls who preferred them, everything from simple grass right up to ones that were in the big leagues. Cocaine, for example. The evenings each represented new adventures to him and at the same time had a lovely sameness to them. It probably dated him, but he would always hold his breath and wait to be stunned by that magical time when a girl began to take off her clothes. Though his expression ranged from neutral to bored, he would say to himself, “Great God in heaven, she's actually taking them off.” When was he ever going to get past that? He liked girls who took all their things into the bedroom with them and didn't spread themselves all over the apartment. The neatness promised a neat and quick getaway in the morning. At that time, many of the girls, stewardesses in particular, would stretch out their arms and expect to have long, delicious, stretchy breakfasts which they would prepare for him. In his way, Towns loved every girl who had ever been to his place, but he passed up a great many breakfasts because the truth was he wanted to have his apartment back again, all to himself.
To his knowledge, he had never done anything cruel to any of his visitors. Anyone in pursuit of being smacked around mentally or physically got pointed in another direction. Unless you wanted to call that cruel. hid a wavering stewardess's blue jeans, but if she had really insisted on having them back, he would have produced them. On occasion, he would simply ask a new arrival, “Do you feel like fucking?” just as casually as he might ask her to try a new white wine. But he had to be in the mood to say a thing like that. If he ever planned it ahead, it wouldn't work out. A remark like that was about as close to an attack as he ever came. Unless his apartment was supposed to be an attack. But there were no locks on the doors that couldn't be snapped open. And he didn't lasso women in the street and smuggle them up there. If a girl didn't like one of the blunt remarks, she could just wheel around in a huff and take off. Some did. And a surprising number didn't. There was only one sure-fire time when Harry Towns could tell that a girl was going to slip away. Those were the times when he was down on himself. Women
sniffed that out and didn't want any part of it. They still wanted men to be confident. Quietly confident, the way they were in the ads for small cigars. Towns was starting to like women who were confident, too. Everyone was looking for confidence and trying to grab onto it.
He tried not to make promises. All he had to offer was himself, whatever that was worth. And his apartment. For an evening or two. He wasn't delighted with that state of affairs, but that's the way it was for the time being. He tried to think of someone who could alter all that, someone he would want to stay on and on, but even in his mind, where all bets were off, or drawing from the films, he couldn't come up with anyone. The perfect woman would be a terrific one who would show up and leave and then reappear when he wanted her to. He couldn't see why anyone truly first-rate would want to go along with that.
Once he heard the line, “I'd like you to get to know me as a person,” an alarm bell went off. He might just as well have been asked if he was a Capricorn. He wasn't ready for that quite yet. And the person he would like to get to know as a person wouldn't ask him quite that way. She would figure out another style. She would say, “I'd like you to get to know me as a yak.” Something along those lines.
Only one friend got to hang around in the morning and to come back at least once a week, the Bryn Mawr girl who ran a laugh-sweetening machine at a TV studio, sliding laughs into comedy series with the machine. Towns felt he knew her as a person. He let her keep her slippers in his bedroom closet, though he kicked them deeper in when other girls came over to visit. The only trouble was that this special girl was afraid of his apartment. The first time she saw it, she rocked back and forth in a chair, holding the leather arms so fiercely that the veins on her arms bulged out. At first he was annoyed and said, “How can you be afraid of an apartment? I never heard of that.”
About Harry Towns Page 5