The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  And another time it was really my fault because I told him I wanted to eat in a fancy restaurant, and he took me to one in a big hotel called The Plaza. As soon as we walked in I knew it was a mistake. It wasn’t only that the place was even more fancy than I thought it would be; it was the people there. They were like Southard Street in Key West when the President was having a big thing there, and I was just plain Mooney’s Key to them. They didn’t say anything or do anything, but I felt like that. And it got worse and worse. When we came to the table I didn’t know why Egan was standing by his chair so I stood there, too, until I saw he was just waiting for me to sit down. So I did, wishing I could go right through the floor.

  Then Egan sat down and said, “This ought to remind you of those bygone happy days in your daddy’s mansion. Don’t you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’d better. Considering what it costs, you’ll have to make it one ecstatic experience. You know, we don’t pay only for food and drink here. This table is planted right over the most expensive piece of real estate in New York, and we’re paying the taxes on it, too.”

  I said, “Well, I’m sure glad you told me that. You always tell a girl how much it costs when you take her out to eat in a nice place?”

  “No, only when it costs more than a day’s pay. And for that kind of money she’s got to be bright and chipper as a little bird on top of a tree. She can’t sit there and look intimidated. What’s intimidating you anyhow?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “And if you don’t like it you can go someplace else.”

  “Oh, in that case,” Egan said, and before I knew what he was doing he just got up and walked out of there and left me all alone.

  I was sure he’d come back so I sat and waited. First it was just waiting and getting more and more miserable, then I got scared because we had come in his car and I didn’t even know how to get back to Ethel’s place by myself. And I was afraid to get up and walk out because of everybody looking. Finally, when I couldn’t stand it any more I did walk out, and there was Egan in the lobby sitting on a sofa and reading a newspaper. I was all mixed-up then. I was so glad to see him that I could have kissed him and so mad at him I could have kicked him in the leg, but before I could do one thing or the other he looked at me and said, “Well, you’re a lot more bright and chipper now, aren’t you?”

  I said, “Egan, I hate you. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

  “I had to do something,” he said. “You know I’ve got a soft heart. How long do you think I could sit there and watch you be intimidated?”

  “Will you quit saying that?”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it? You were letting this place get to you.”

  “I was not. It was the people. They’re just not my kind of people, that’s all.”

  “You mean they’re better than you are?”

  “You think not? You just go ask them.”

  “I don’t ask,” Egan said. “I tell. And I’ll tell you something.” He pulled me down next to him on the sofa and pointed across the lobby. “You see these ladies and gentlemen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what they’d like to be doing right now?”

  “What?”

  “They’d like to be in Coney Island,” Egan said. “They’d like to be doing everything you can do in Coney Island. Most of all they’d like to ride on the carrousel. They want to ride around and around with the music in their ears and the brass ring waiting to be grabbed at. Around and around they’d go, leaning out from those beautiful horses with the jewels on them, reaching for that brass ring, and when they caught hold of it and felt it in their hands they’d be happier than they ever were in all their lives. And then they want to fill up on hot dogs and beer, and hold hands with each other while they walk barefoot through the sand. And finally when they’re tired they want to lie down on the sand and look at their brass ring and think how wonderful it is and fall asleep thinking that. You remember how all that felt when it happened to you last Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s the feeling they want. But you can have it and they can’t.”

  “Why not? It looks like they got money enough for it.”

  “Oh, they have, but they also have an old aunt who tells them that it’s not for them, and they listen. She’s their old Aunt Hattie, and they do what she says.”

  Now I knew he was just fooling. “You mean all these people have the same old aunt?”

  “Yes, but don’t let her being old give you the wrong picture. She’s old but she looks young. She lives in a fine brownstone east of Central Park and dresses in the latest style, and even in the house she wears a tricky little hat. And she’s always at her desk writing, writing with a quill pen on parchment what the family mustn’t do. Year after year she sits at that desk writing down the rules. She remembers all the old ones and she makes up new ones every day, so you can see what a job it is.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Now you tell me something about old Aunt Hattie, Egan. If she’s everybody’s aunt she’s yours, too, isn’t she? Then what makes you so different?”

  “That’s because I found out her secret. She didn’t know I was looking through the keyhole one night when she was taking off her clothes and that was the end of it for me. Jesus, what a shock it was. She wasn’t made out of flesh at all, she was just rubber and plastic. The shape was there and nothing else. No nipples on those handsome titties, no hair below and nothing for it to hide anyhow. And not even a real brain in that plastic head. Just a printed circuit, an electrical circuit hitched to a little battery that you could buy for a dime in the hardware store. It was a terrible thing to see. I turned and ran like a bat out of hell.”

  I said, “I’ll bet you did,” but I was thinking it was a lot better to run like that than to have Aunt Hattie chase you out of the house with a knife in her hand. But even thinking about that didn’t bother me too much after hearing the way he talked. Egan could do that to me. He didn’t always make sense like other people, but plenty of times when he got going he could make me feel almost as easygoing about things as he did. So I felt a lot better after he spoke his piece, and we went back in the restaurant to eat and it turned out to be very nice.

  It was different with the big Saturday night we had in Greenwich Village. When that went wrong it went so wrong there was nothing anybody could do about it. And it wasn’t my fault either, even if Egan thought it was.

  The way it started was just sitting around a coffee place there and talking to people. The ones Egan knew could talk even more than the college teachers, but they were a mess to look at. The biggest talkers were two fellows, Wesson and Wise. Wesson was about ten foot high and skinny as a fishing pole, and Wise was small and fat and with a little beard all around his face, and they were always together so that nobody ever talked about them separately but always as Wesson-and-Wise. And there was a pretty nice fellow called Otto who wrote poetry. And some girls called Miriam and Thecla and Trish who could talk as much as the men and never combed their hair any more than Avery did. And some other fellows and girls who wanted to be big talkers except that Wesson and Wise wouldn’t let them be.

  It wasn’t easy keeping up with the talk but that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was Egan. Other times when we went out someplace he took care to shave and dress nice and pay attention to me, but this time he hadn’t shaved so that he was all stubbly and he was dressed in the kind of clothes he could wear at the shipyard and he hardly noticed I was there. Not that the other men didn’t take good notice. They were the real friendly kind, and we were all sitting packed around this table so that every other minute an arm would come out of nowhere around my shoulders or a hand would start traveling over me, and I’d have to shove it away. But Egan didn’t even notice. He just sat there sweating and excited with what he was saying, and when Wesson and Wise argued with him he’d hunch forward over the table listening to them with both ears and looking almost like Avery.

>   After that we went out and Egan bought a bottle of liquor and some of the others bought gallon bottles of wine and we went up to Otto’s room. It was a little room with hardly any place to sit, so nearly everybody sat on the floor. Thecla tried to sit next to Egan but I got there first. Then there was more talking and a lot of drinking, and when everybody was pretty high, Wesson started a game they all knew. He would point at somebody and yell, “Oh, make us feel it!” and whoever he pointed at had to say something—I guess whatever came into his head first—and then Wesson would yell, “Do we feel it?” and everybody would yell back if he did or not.

  It was a real crazy game. I knew that right from the start when Wesson pointed at Wise and Wise said, “It is a blind man coming down the stairs. In his mother’s womb he was told how many steps there were, but now he does not remember. So he walks blind and not remembering down the stairs.” Then Wise took a pair of bongo drums and started slapping them bip-bop, bip-bop with a slow beat that was enough to give you the creeps, and when Wesson yelled, “Do we feel it?” nearly everybody yelled, “We feel it!” and only a couple didn’t.

  It went that way from one to another. When it was Miriam’s turn she said, “The cockroach is all. He has been and he will be. When the bomb has fallen and the earth has cooled again, he will crawl out from the smoking ruins of this house and lay the eggs from which all life will come. The cockroach is the future, and I worship him like this,” and she kneeled down and hit her head three times on the floor.

  “Do we feel it?” Wesson yelled, and a lot of them yelled, “We feel it,” but one of the men said, “I’d like to,” and Thecla said, “It looks like Miriam’s fanny is the future.”

  “Penalty,” Wesson said and pointed at her.

  Thecla said, “I won’t tell, I will do. Time is infinite, and I will take you to its far end.”

  Then she kicked off her shoes and did some kind of dance, twisting around and jumping, but had to stop all of a sudden when her foot came down on a lighted cigarette somebody had tossed on the floor. She grabbed at the foot and everybody laughed and she was mad as fury. She looked at me and said, “You goddam fool, why don’t you watch where you throw those things?” but she could see I hadn’t done it, I was holding my own cigarette right in my hand. So I said, “I didn’t do it, but I guess you felt it all right,” and Wesson pointed at me and said, “Penalty!”

  I didn’t know what to do then. I just shook my head but everybody started to yell, “Penalty! Penalty!” and Egan shoved me so that I had to get up. I stood there feeling like a fool, but when I saw the way Thecla was giving me the honey-and-poison smile I got an idea. I took off my shoes the way she had. Then I drew hard on my cigarette so it would have a good light and I put it on the floor. I said, “Time is infinite, but I will bring you back from its far end,” and I put my bare foot down on the cigarette and crushed it out that way. I could do it because of going around barefoot all the time on Mooney’s Key, but I guess they never saw anybody do it before because they yelled, “We feel it!” and some of them threw more lit cigarettes on the floor for me to put out.

  When I sat down next to Egan he said, “Jesus, what a talented girl,” and kissed me on top of the head, and Wesson pointed at him and said, “Penalty! Irony is akin to insult.”

  Egan said, “That wasn’t irony, man. That was the sound of one hand clapping.”

  “Another penalty,” Wesson said. “One for digging up chestnuts.”

  “All right,” Egan said, “I’ll dig up chestnuts for you. Give me those drums.”

  Wise gave him the drums and he put them between his legs. “Hercules, my shipmate, is god,” he said. “Hear me worship him,” and then he said a poem, whacking the bongos now and then so it sounded like this.

  Who has seen the ship—bip-bop

  Neither you nor I—bop-bip

  But when the saints go marching in

  The ship is passing by—bippety-bippety-bop

  Then he leaned forward to Wesson and the way he looked nobody else said anything at all. He was sweating hard, his mouth was twisted up, and he was looking at Wesson as if he was trying to drill him through with his eyes. “Do you feel it?” he said to Wesson.

  Wesson was looking at him right back like that, the two of them all charged up. “It’s here between us,” Wesson said. “But it hasn’t reached me. It’s here, it’s here, but it hasn’t reached me. Push it, man.”

  “Listen!” Egan said, and he whacked away at the bongos, half singing all the time. “The keel is laid flat and the garboard strake to it and the B strake and the C strake and the sheer strake. And the deck over it and the monkey rail like a necklace around it. All this between the stem post and the stern post and the dark holes lying between them. The forepeak and the storeroom and the fuel tanks and the engine room and the lazarette and the afterpeak. All in darkness with the bitter bulkheads dividing them.”

  “And watertight,” Wesson said.

  “And watertight. And on the tank-top plating of the storeroom I cut my hand and it bled. The blood smeared the plate and dried and paint covered it. It is there in the darkness now waiting to be launched. Can you feel it?”

  “I feel it,” said Wesson. “I am in it. It is the moment,” and then he looked around at everybody and said, “Hell, I need a drink.”

  “Man,” Egan said, “you were never in it.”

  “I was in it,” Wesson said. “I’m just all dried up.” And everybody seemed to sit back and take it a little easier. Only Thecla kept looking at me and said, “It’s not really the humidity, Wesson, it’s the heat.”

  I couldn’t believe what she was doing. She stood up and pulled off her sweater and bra and just stood with everybody watching her, her big things hanging there for them to see. Then Miriam did it and some more of the girls, and all the time Thecla was watching me with that look to see what I would do.

  But I couldn’t do it. And then I felt that everybody was looking at me because Thecla was. She tried to make her voice sound like a real cracker’s, and she said, “Barbara-Jean, honey, don’t you feel all sort of hot and inhibited that way?”

  I said, “Why the hell don’t you let me be?” and I pulled at Egan’s hand and said, “You take me home. I had enough of this. I want to go home right now.”

  Egan just blinked at me. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  “I’m sick,” I said, and I really felt I was. “You don’t want me to heave up all over this floor you better get me out of here right away.”

  We had a whole fight about it in the car when I told him what it was about. “It wasn’t from drinking,” I said. “I didn’t hardly have anything to drink. It’s your friends.”

  “What’s wrong with my friends?”

  “They’re crazy. And when they’re not crazy they’re dirty. I don’t like them.”

  “Oh, I see it’s the same thing either way you cut it. If you feel you’re not as good as the people you’re with you get sick, and if you feel you’re better than the people you’re with you get sick. I’m surprised you’re not a permanent invalid.”

  “Why? Because I don’t want to get naked in front of a lot of drunk people?”

  “What harm is there in that? It wouldn’t hurt you to let go once in a while. And don’t pull that married woman stuff on me or I’ll make you get out and walk the rest of the way.”

  He wouldn’t talk to me any more after that, and I got a little scared about it. So when we got home I went into his room with him and I said, “You don’t understand. It’s just that nice people don’t do some things.”

  “Nice people? What nice people? You mean Aunt Hattie’s family? Jesus, I’d like to give you one good dose of them so you’d know ever after what you’re trying to be like.”

  I said, “Don’t be mad at me, Egan. I can’t help the way I am, can I?”

  He said, “Yes, you can.” Then he said, “Oh, how the hell do I know?” and we did a lot of kissing until we said good night. That made it a little be
tter. Not altogether, but a little.

  TWELVE

  Ethel Waterhouse liked to hear all about the places I went to with Egan. When I told her about Greenwich Village the cigarette holder almost fell out of her mouth. She said, “My God, you mean those females got undressed and walked around in front of everybody like that?”

  “Not all undressed. Only the tops.”

  “That was just the beginning. It’s a lucky thing you got out of there when you did, baby. You got any idea what went on there after you were gone? I leave it to you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do. And I bet you Egan does, too. What do you think he had in mind, getting you into such a thing? I tell you he won’t be happy until he gets what he wants out of you, like any man sees a pretty face. But it’s worse with him. There’s a devil in him pushing and pushing, and it won’t stop until he’s got your hide nailed to the wall. It’ll be a good day for you when that barge is fixed and you’re away from him. What else happened at that party?”

  So I told her and she took it in with her ears flapping, but all the while I was thinking of something else. Her saying that about the barge was what started it, and it made me real unhappy. I couldn’t see going back on that barge with Avery. It was bad enough being together the little bit we were now; being together with him all day long, every day of the week, would just about kill me. And I couldn’t think what to do. It was no use figuring on cutting loose from Avery; that didn’t make any more sense than when I used to think of cutting loose from Cole and Lettie. Avery was the kind who’d find me wherever I went, and like as not he’d want to kill me then. Anyhow, when I counted the money I had stuck away in the coat pocket it didn’t add up to much more than five dollars. It was the most I ever was able to put together in my whole life, but it sure wasn’t enough to get me very far.