Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  She lay slackmouthed in sleep and not unlovely. He laid his face against her full breasts and slept again.

  When he woke she was sitting on the edge of the bed in one of his shirts smiling down at him, her ashblond hair tumbled about her face. She was holding a cup of coffee for him.

  Hi, he said.

  Hello lover. Are you ready for liquids?

  Mggh.

  Yes, I know. Just sit up a bit. She fluffed the pillow with one hand and then held the cup to his lips.

  What time is it?

  Noon.

  Do you have to go?

  Yes. She brushed back his hair.

  He drank the coffee.

  I copped one of your shirts, she said.

  You wont leave those bumps in it will you?

  No, she said, taking the cup. She leaned over him. I wont leave anything messed up or marked on except you. She kissed him. She tasted of mint. She ran her hand down his belly. Oh my, she said.

  What do you want? said Suttree grinning.

  When he woke again she was dressed and sitting at the table combing her hair. He watched her. She put the comb in her purse and snapped it shut and turned around and came over to the bed.

  I've got to go, baby.

  Well.

  Is that laundry tub what you bathe in?

  Yes. Such as it is.

  I was stripped off out there washing my pussy when some spade came in. An old guy. He almost fainted.

  Marvelous, said Suttree. What did he say?

  Well, he had on this crazy hat and he took it off and began to bow and to back out the door saying: Scuse me mam, scuse me mam.

  God help him. He'll be more peculiar than ever.

  She brushed his hair back. When will I see you?

  I dont know.

  What are you doing tonight?

  Nothing. Are you asking for a date?

  Do you mind?

  No.

  May I see you this evening?

  It'll have to be someplace cheap.

  I've got some money. Baby dont. I've really got to go. Baby.

  She left in midafternoon. He lay in the bed a depleted potentate. He felt very good.

  A wan midwinter sun hung low and oblong under the leeward fishshaped clouds. A sun hotjowled and squat in the seeping lavender dusk. Down this narrow street where the chinese sign glows green. She is waiting, cupboarded in one of the high booths. A congenial oriental to bid good evening. Suttree saw her smile from a far corner.

  No. With the young lady there.

  The waitress smiled.

  Hello baby.

  Hello.

  He slid into the seat opposite but she took his hand. Come sit by me.

  He stood up again. Come over here, he said. So we dont bump elbows.

  You're a southpaw.

  Yes.

  She rubbed past him. Nice, she said.

  She was wearing a pale yellow knit dress that fit her all over and she looked very good. They sat and looked at each other and she leaned and kissed him.

  How long have you been here? he said.

  I dont know. Half hour.

  I didnt know I was so late.

  I dont care. I dont mind waiting for you as long as you come.

  Did you get wet?

  No. I got a cab. Is it still raining out?

  No. What shall we eat?

  Do you want me to make a suggestion? She was smiling at him and she had taken his elbow in both hands.

  No, he said.

  They sat together in the booth looking over the newspapersize menu.

  The butterfly shrimp are good.

  Why dont you order for us.

  Okay. What about the combination platter.

  That sounds good. Does it have the sweet and sour pork?

  Yes. And let's get some eggrolls.

  With hot mustard.

  You like hot mustard?

  Yes. Do you?

  I love it. They have some here that will completely remove your sinuses.

  I'm hip.

  There was no one else in the restaurant. It grew dark outside the window and she held his arm and they sipped tea and waited for the food to come.

  They went to a movie. He smiled at the memories induced. Sitting rigid and frightened alongside some girlchild trying to muster the courage to take her hand.

  The two of them whispering sexual slanders concerning the actors into each other's ear, vying to elaborate the most outrageous perversions. They had coffee at the Farragut coffee shop and they walked through the streets in the small rain and muted lights and looked in the shopwindows, wrapped in their coats and huddled close and the smell of her good perfume and her hair. And she who had not stopped smiling like a happy cat the evening long took him by the arm down Gay Street to her hotel and through the steamed glass doors into the lobby, the old white tiles and potted plants and polished brasswork. She sauntered to the desk and got her key and came back and took him by the arm and they went to the elevator with a small tancolored bellhop who had been reading the paper at a table in the lobby.

  The old brass lattice door clicked shut and they began to rise. A dim hum of mechanisms, cables that slithered in a steep brick well.

  You getting any of this white pussy, James? she said.

  James shook his head that he wasnt.

  She held Suttree's arm. They got off at the fifth floor and went down a long corridor, a black rubber rug. Past door and door alike with metal numbers nailed on them or missing or askew. She put the key in her door and opened it and held out her hand for him to enter.

  Go ahead, he said.

  He followed her in and she shut the door and took off her coat and hung it on the back of the door and turned to him and began to unbutton his peacoat. The room was neat and orderly with a great sprawl of cosmetics across the dressing table and bureau top and a portable hairdryer and curlers and some expensive looking clothes hung from the walls. A great stuffed ape with long arms and orange hair sat on the bed.

  That's Og, she said.

  Who named him that, you?

  My girlfriend. She gave him to me.

  Margie?

  No. Chick in Chicago. Christ, this thing weighs a ton.

  Let me get it.

  I've got it. You're not wet are you? Your head's wet.

  It's all right.

  She had a towel and was tousling his hair with it. You look like a little boy, she said. Here. Sit down. Let me see if there's any music on the radio.

  Suttree unzipped his shoes and kicked them off and scooted back on the bed and crossed his feet and lifted one of the ape's arms and let it fall again.

  You like hillbilly?

  Anything.

  I used to hate it.

  Find something else.

  There was a knock on the door and she went to answer it. The elevator man stood with a tin bucket of ice and a pint of whiskey in a paper bag.

  Baby, she said, do you want a Coke or something? I didnt think to ask you.

  I dont need anything.

  She paid the stolid yellow James and shoved the change back at him and shut the door with her elbow. She set the bucket and the package of whiskey on the bedside table and took a pair of glass tumblers from the shelf above the sink and brought them over and filled them with ice. She sat on the edge of the bed and started peeling at the seal on the bottle until Suttree took it from her and twisted the cap loose with his teeth. He poured the drinks and they sat on the bed opposite each other and sipped and looked at each other and smiled.

  I wonder if I'm already hungry again or if it's something else, she said.

  They say that's the trouble with chinese girls.

  What?

  An hour later and you're horny again.

  She smiled and sipped from her glass. There was altogether too much of her sitting there, the broad expanse of thigh cradled in the insubstantial stocking and the garters with the pale flesh pursed and her full breasts and the sootblack piping of her eyelids, a gau
dish rake of metaldust in prussian blue where cerulean moths had fluttered her awake from some outlandish dream, Suttree gradually going awash in the sheer outrageous sentience of her. Their glasses clicked on the tabletop. Her hot spiced tongue fat in his mouth and her hands all over him like the very witch of fuck.

  He woke later in the night alone in the bed. She was sitting at the dressing table engaged in alchemic rituals with creams and lotions, she was at brushing her hair. In the dark window and partly obscured by the old lace drapes a red pulse of watered light bloomed and faded and the sound of the rain and the traffic in the wet streets made him sprawl deliciously in the sheets. She was watching him in the glass. She winked. Hi lover, she said.

  Hello baby. What time is it?

  She bent to see her watch. It's quarter to one, she said. Did you have a good nap?

  Mmm.

  Would you like a drink?

  Yes. I can get it.

  No.

  She rose and came over to the bed. She was wearing a pale blue negligee that flowed lightly behind her. She came and bent and kissed him and he stroked her breasts and she propped him up with both pillows and fixed the drink and sat on the bed for a moment.

  What was all that racket a while ago?

  Goddamned Ralph came up here trying to get room rent. You wouldnt believe it. Said you were supposed to be in the date room.

  Did you get him straightened out?

  She smiled. I told him you were no goddamned date. I think I called him a nigger cocksucker.

  How did he go for that?

  He didnt say. That fucking James has got a big mouth too.

  Was that Margie in here?

  Yeah. She's jealous.

  What, of you or me?

  Silly. Her old man put her down I think. She's jealous of me, sure, but that chick is almost fifty years old for Christ sake.

  I dont see how she makes it.

  She's a hundred dollar a night girl.

  Her?

  Sure. All she has to do is turn fifty tricks. That's mean isnt it?

  What brought you down here?

  Money what else. Anyway I cant go back to Chicago for a while.

  You said you were under indictment. What for?

  Selling my pussy.

  Her impish grin. Watching him. He sipped the whiskey. Where's Og? he said.

  Oh, he's over here on the floor. I guess his nose is out of joint too. She tucked the covers about Suttree's naked chest and went back to her things at the dresser. He had finished the drink and almost drifted into sleep half sitting there in the sagging bed when she turned off the light and climbed in beside him, her warm soft scented body length to length against his own and her breath in his ear whispering obscene endearments.

  The hammering of steampipes woke him in the small hours of the night and he lay in the strange room with the red neon flicker of the hotel sign silent at the window. Silence in the streets. She sprawled like a child, one hand loosely clutched by the side of her sleeping face.

  In the morning it was still raining or raining again. Alone in the room, brailed in the soft and springshot bed he listened to the traffic below the window, the muted slicing of tires in the wet. Looking up at the ceiling, the petals of wallpaper hanging, the old and ornate gas fixture with brass cherubs. He eased himself up. Gray rain leaned past the window. There was some sort of horrendous foundrywork going on about the hotwater pipes and a little poppet valve on the radiator was hissing like a kettle. He crossed the cold buckled linoleum with puckered feet and stood naked by the window and watched the Monday morning traffic in the streets below. A different slant on life here. Old whiskey bottles with their bleached labels lying on the wet tar of the rooftops. A glass skylight covered with chickenwire. The cold winter rain failing everywhere over the city.

  He put on his clothes and went down the hall to the bathroom. A door with MEN stenciled across it. A tall narrow hall of a room in domino tiles. A yellow tub on clawfeet, a sink and a toilet. Suttree pissed long and loud, peering out through the patterned glass of the window at the winter day.

  When he got back to the room it was still empty. He took a towel and a bar of soap and went back down the corridor and had a hot bath. When he returned to the room he tried shaving himself with her electric razor. He looked through her things, careful to leave each as it had been. An eclectic tale of gewgaws, the fine with the shoddy. He borrowed her toothpaste and brushed his teeth with his fingers.

  She came in smiling and bearing packages and smelling of perfume and rain. She took off the plastic babushka she wore and shook out her hair and came to him unbuttoning the belted raincoat and looking like a movie whore. She kissed him and said hello.

  You havent eaten? I brought you some coffee and the paper.

  What time is it?

  It's about eleven. Why dont we go over to Regas and have lunch.

  Okay.

  I'm starving, arent you?

  I'm about to faint. What time did you stir out this morning?

  I dont know. Nine. Here. Be careful, it's hot.

  Thanks.

  She took off the coat and shook it and laid it on the bed and went to the dressing table to repair her makeup. She seemed ladylike and efficient in her spikeheeled shoes and her tweed suit. Suttree sat on the bed and sipped the coffee and looked at the paper. She watched him in the mirror. She gave him a big sexy wink.

  They went down in the elevator with a young black who kept his eyes averted and she made obscene signals above the back of his small neat head. They crossed the lobby arm in arm like a honeymoon couple and she spoke cheerily to the lolling porter and turned up her collar and they crossed the wet street and ducked into Regas.

  The next day they got thrown out of the hotel. Suttree hadnt been back to his room in McAnally and they had bought him new clothes to wear and she had picked out a pigskin shavingbag for him and fitted it with all manner of things that he hardly knew the use of, the powders and colognes and lotions and little chrome tools for the care of the nails. They packed all their things down and into a cab and went to the other end of Gay Street where she talked and gestured by the desk with the black bellcaptain and he sat in the back of the cab half buried in dresses and boxes.

  She's wavin you on in, the driver said.

  Suttree got out of the cab and entered the little dingy lobby that he'd passed a hundred times or more. The cadaverous keeper of the place knew him from the Huddle across the street. Suttree nodded to him and went over to the bellcaptain.

  Bud, this is Jesse, she said.

  Hello Jesse.

  Jesse's head moved very slightly.

  Listen baby, do you want to stay here?

  What do you mean?

  I mean move out of that cellar and stay here. Look, Jesse is an old friend. He knows me and he knows I'm not interested in turning five dollar tricks with these brokendown whores he runs in here. He's got a room up on the top floor we can have if you want. I think I'm going to Athens tomorrow.

  Athens?

  Yeah. I talked to the guy down there this morning. He said I could come for two weeks at least. Baby, I could come away from there with a grand if I had someone to take care of it for me.

  Suttree, who wasnt all that sure what she was talking about, said that he would.

  She was very businesslike. She gave him five dollars and he went out and he and the cabdriver carried in their things and stacked them on chairs and on the desk and draped clothes over the banister rail. The driver fumbled around for change but she waved him off and they went up the stairs with armloads of varied finery.

  This place is a real rat trap, she said, wheezing back at him from the third landing. But they dont hassle you.

  Suttree muttered into a mound of perfumed garments. They were going past gaping fist holes in the stairwell walls and places in the balustrade ripped bare and mended back with raw twobyfours. Down a narrow ill lit hall to a door where she leaned and held the key for him to take.

  It looked lik
e the room they'd left, somewhat smaller, a bit more shabby. They piled everything on the bed and went down to get the rest of it. They strung a piece of wire across a corner of the room to hang the clothes on, fastening one end to the doorhinge and the other to the curtainrod bracket above the window. Suttree looked out on the street below.

  She woke him in the cold dark of morning among the pipeclang and the stridence of whores passing in the hallway drunk and she was whimpering with fright. He stroked her naked back while she breathed out a dream in the darkness. We were in a car and they dragged you out, they were taking you away it was awful.

  You dont have any little friends I should know about do you?

  She stroked his face. It was just a dream, baby.

  In the morning he put her on the bus, kissing her there at the steps where the driver stood with his tickets and his puncher and the diesel smoke swirled in the cold, Suttree smiling to himself at this emulation of some domestic trial or lovers parted by fate and will they meet again? She went along the aisle with her overnight bag and sat by the window and made elaborate gestures of enticement at him through the glass like a whore mute or in such outland port as christians reck no word of speech there. Until he blew her a kiss and hunched his shoulders to say that it was cold and went up the steps.

  Now at noon each day he wakes to the gray light leaking in past the gray rags of lace at the window and the sound of country music seeping through the waterstained and flowered walls. Walls decked with random flattened roaches in little corollas of oilstain, some framed with the print of a shoesole. In the rooms the few tenants huddle over the radiators, flogging them with mophandles, cooking ladles. They hiss sullenly. The cold licks at the window. In the bathrobe and slippers she has bought for him and carrying his pigskin shavingcase he goes along the corridor like a ghost through ruins, nodding at times to chance farmboys or old recluses with skittish eyes emerging from assignations in the rooms he passes. To the bathroom at the end of the hall that no one used save him, the yellow bowl spidered with cracks, the paintstained tub, the diamond panes in the window looking out on a ledge where pigeons crouched in their feathers lee of the wind. A gravel roof where a rubber ball lay rotting. The city a collage of grim cubes under a sky the color of wet steel in the winter noon.