To offset Alfred, the Spic put a couch in the hall for Rebecca and George. The couple spent most of their time on this couch, leaving it only to boil an egg or comply with the midnight curfew. They thanked Arnold for the eggs. He couldn’t chat with them. He had his chores to do.
He passed the group of unemployed actors (men without jobs for fifteen years), who played Monopoly with matchsticks and odd buttons which Arnold supplied as best he could. He was without buttons today. “Amigos, you’ll have to wait. Schiller downstairs promised me a fresh batch. Adios.” He signed compensation forms for Cookie, the blind-man in 305. He fed Miss Watson’s baby, Delilah, a girl of two. He was saving the dollmaker for last.
Ernesto had arranged puppet shows for the sons and daughters of a sugarcane magnate in Santiago de Cuba. He couldn’t find work in the United States. The norteamericanoa had no love for Ernesto’s dolls; they were creatures with big hands and bulbish leering faces; some of them wore tails. The cubano wouldn’t name his dolls. He couldn’t alter their costumes if they had fixed personalities. He owned an assortment of lipsticks and rouge, which he would smear on the dolls, then wipe off. Arnold pitied Ernesto’s unemployability; the cubano was lacking in friends at the hotel. He spit on the dogs, whom he believed were conspiring to chew his dolls. He wouldn’t gossip with prostitutes, winos, or unwed mothers. Occasionally he prowled the streets, returning to the hotel with tar on his sleeve or mud in a shoe. The cubano had picked up scraps of English from the children of the sugarcane man, but he wouldn’t speak this language inside the hotel. He was intolerant of Puerto Ricans. He gave the Spic a hard time. Arnold could ignore the cubano’s irritable looks. He brought Ernesto gumdrops and Spanish comic books; mostly he came to visit the dolls.
He took pleasure in the lines Ernesto used to articulate a knuckle; these joints were frighteningly real to the Spic. He couldn’t afford to settle too long on any doll’s face. The face might disappear by the next visit, and show up in Arnold’s sleep. He picked out isolated features, rouge on a flat nose, burrs over an eye, then progressed to a new doll. Arnold swore that he had seen identical dolls as a boy, during witching ceremonies outside San Juan. He stayed with Ernesto five minutes, no more.
The security guard accosted him in the hall. He held his billy club high, and wouldn’t let Arnold go around his chair. He sat under a lightbulb wearing shades.
“Brother, you owe me a piece. You been collecting from dudes on every floor. The blindman give you a quarter for copying his signature. How much you gross pimping for Betty?”
“Alfred, look again. You’re mistaking me for one of your dollar-a-week customers. I’m not hiding babies in my pants.”
Arnold might have been harsher with the man, but he didn’t have a lease, and Alfred was in direct communication with the owners of the hotel.
“You’re my competition, Spic. This place can’t hold two sheriffs. Watch yourself on the steps, hear? I’d have to write me a report if somebody put a stick up your ass and sent you to China.”
“I’m grateful for your worrying, Alfred. A First Deputy man’s coming tomorrow to investigate the dude that’s been selling rotgut wine mixed with wood alcohol.”
Alfred’s rump crept along the seat of his chair, the billy going slack in his hand.
“There’s a badge in my pocket. I aint afraid of no supercop.”
Arnold took advantage of this lapse to hobble over the billy club before he could be tripped. Alfred lunged for the handcuffs. Arnold reached his room. The newsprint on his foot was shredded in spots from the amount of dragging he had done. He took more socks out of his closet (donations from Betty), and made another temporary shoe.
10 He couldn’t fall asleep in Schiller’s back room. It wasn’t the odor of asparagus that kept him up. Coen had snored through other bakings and fries. Arnold had once shown him the way to exorcise an enemy by spitting on a wall until your lungs pounded and your face went dark, and Coen might have tried some of this, but he didn’t have murderous feelings today. The Guzmanns weren’t on his mind. He was thinking about uncle Sheb, and a question that had been nagging him these thirteen years. How come Shebby stayed alive? Coen understood his father’s narrow logic. Albert wasn’t a neglectful brother. Whatever his madness, no matter how many Guzmanns plagued him or the number of eggs he stood to lose, he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of getting out of this world and not take Sheb along. The Coens were fastidious people. They went into the oven with starch on their clothes. What did Shebby put on when he climbed out the fire escape to sing Albert’s (and Jessica’s) death? A neighborwoman found him in Albert’s old smock, store clothes, with bloodclots on the sleeves and the smell of eggs. Jessica wouldn’t have tolerated such a garment inside her house. She was in charge of grooming Sheb, plucking ratty scarves and underpants out of his wardrobe, so he could smile at widows and stray wives, Albert and Jessica didn’t throw Sheb at the customers. Uncle’s successes came on his own. But they wanted to drape his odd behavior, to remind Boston Road how handsome Sheb could be, even if he stooped and made bubbles with his teeth. And what about an uncle deprived of Albert’s eggs? Avoiding the oven didn’t cost Sheb. Coen grew permanent lines, scatter marks, along his cheeks, his knuckles ached in rotten weather, his blondness was dulling fast, but Sheb hadn’t aged in thirteen years.
Should he dispatch himself to the rest home and question uncle Sheb? He couldn’t go. Try Isaac’s techniques on his uncle? Quiz him? Bully him? Make him cry? What could Shebby say about money matters? Albert never trusted him with anything over a dollar. And Sheb couldn’t have gotten between Albert and Papa Guzmann. There were certain chivalries on Boston Road. Papa, who raised Jerónimo by himself and knew what it meant to have a slowwitted boy, wouldn’t have used Sheb to frighten Albert out of his egg store. Coen had no inclination to ride into the Bronx and settle on Papa’s door. What would the Guzmanns admit to him now? He changed into street clothes, finished with his nap. He would go Isaac’s way, roundabout.
Observing Coen’s concentration marks, Arnold didn’t bother to wave. He had his feelers on Coen; the cop was into something personal. And Coen took the No. 10 bus down to this girls’ bar, The Dwarf, to wake Odile. He couldn’t say why. Maybe he was in a downtown mood, and he thought he could find César under Odile’s skirts and get to Papa from there. Or maybe he was hungry to see girls dance. But this time Coen wasn’t working for the First Deputy in drag. And the bulldikes at the door, huskier than him and with wider shoulders, peered down to scorn at his maleness and ask him for his membership card.
“I’m a guest,” Coen muttered into the piping on their doublebreasted suits.
The girls, cousins Janice and Sweeney, weren’t fooled by any Coen. “Who would invite a thing like you?”
“Odette. Odette Leonhardy,” Coen said, recalling Odile’s professional name.
But the cousins still wouldn’t buy him. “Odile knows the rules. She isn’t supposed to solicit in here.”
Coen was going to test his stamina against the girls on stiff ping-pong knees when Odile poked her nose through the curtain. She recognized Coen, and she tried to soothe the cousins. “Sweeney, this one’s mine. Belongs to my uncle Vander. He’s a regular firecracker. He pulls girls out of Argentina. He takes starlets to the movies. He’s a very particular cop.”
The cousins divided on Coen. Sweeney would have taken him in if he promised not to dance with Odile, but Janice, with all her seniority at The Dwarf, refused to have him around. So Odile took him to Jane Street. They sat in her room-and-a-half, Odile in plain cotton, a highcheeked girl with gorgeous fingers and a sturdy profile, and she asked him what he wanted of her. “Straight talk,” he said.
“Oh, the ambitious little cop. First we have some breast beating, confessions from Odette, then a seduction number, with your pants on my chair. Mister, I’m not so crazy about men this season.”
“Don’t tense up on account of me, Odette. I’m not much with the girls any more. I get most of it off on the
ping-pong table.”
“Odile,” she said. “I’m Odile. Odette is for the hard-ons. I remember the ping-pong. You played Vander with your tie off. Why’d you come?”
“Because I’m getting bullshit in both ears, and maybe the same people who are fucking my brain are also fucking yours.”
She decided he was no great shakes of a cop, and she warmed to him considerably. She mashed two lemons and made him a hot buttered drink in a tall glass. She opened her icebox for him, spared him the canapés of luncheon meats and triangular party breads, which she served to male clients and Vander’s friends, and fixed him one huge, unnatural pancake with primitive utensils and her own private awkwardness. It was the pancake, filled with egg fluff and clotted bits of sugar, that galvanized Coen’s affections, fastened him to Odile. He would have a hard time questioning her now. And Odile, used to acrobatics on a couch as the nimble Odette, playing nymph for uncle Vander’s movie company since her sophomore year at high school, smearing herself with jelly in front of Child’s cameramen and grips, felt nervous with this Coen. He wouldn’t leer at her, wink, or force her to sniff his cologne. He wouldn’t say baby and lick around with his tongue like the other cops she had known. She couldn’t figure out such a serious man. She fed him one more pancake. Her arm was sore from shaking the pan. She wanted to tell him off, advise him to scratch elsewhere. He had a vein under his eye with the thickness of a scar. The vein splintered on his cheek, spilled sullen blue lines. She wished she could blanket him, put him to sleep, and measure the splits on the side of his face. She wouldn’t have dared touch an unsleepy Coen. He was even prettier with an open mouth.
“Odile, do you work for Vander or César Guzmann?”
“Both.”
The vein twitched on his cheek like a finger stuck under skin. She didn’t know what to say. But she’d go on deviling him like this if she could make more veins come out. “César was my boyfriend for a while.”
“How did you meet him.”
“Through uncle Vander.”
“Bastards,” Coen said, his face dug with blue. “What have they pulled you into, Odile?”
“Cat films,” she said. “Uncle’s the producer, César’s the distributor, and I’m one of the stars.” Weary of her own confessions, she got kittenish with him. “You saw uncle’s studio, Mr. Coen.”
“Where?”
“His ping-pong room. The table’s just for fun. The lights are in the closet.”
“It figures,” Coen said. “What about César’s marriage bureau?”
“Oh that.” Odile puffed disapprovals through her nose. “The bride shit, you mean. The little novias.”
“How did they get the brides into Mexico? César’s too hairy-looking to do it himself. And his trigger, Chino Reyes, isn’t much of a chaperon.”
“Vander flew with them. Sixteen to a plane. He dressed them in schoolgirl clothes. Pretended he was on an archaeological trip. Taking young ladies to the pyramids. A Jewish man met them at the airport with the rings. César arranged for a cockeyed wedding ceremony.”
“Mordeckay,” Coen muttered. “The name of the marriagebroker is Mordeckay.”
“César didn’t say. Vander collected from the bridegrooms and took off. But he was getting into heavy stuff, and he wanted out.”
“So César stole Caroline off Child to keep him in line.”
“No. That was my idea. César was doing me a favor. His Chinaman put her on a plane.”
“You sold Carrie to the Mexicans? Why?”
“It was only temporary. I had to move fast, Mr. Coen. She was getting itchy to be in her daddy’s films. And Vander might have obliged her.”
“Prick father,” Coen said.
“Vander’s not so bad. He spoiled Carrie and me. I’m the one seduced him, rubbed his nose in incest.”
Coen sat on his fist, contemplating in a green shirt. His father and mother may have been open-minded, his uncle might hold secrets under a dirty smock, but the Coens had simpler ways than the Childs. “Odile, if your uncle Vander’s involved up to the tit in César’s marriage bureau, why does he pal around with police inspectors?”
“Because he wants to preserve his own skin when it’s time for César to get squeezed.”
“Is Vander working for Inspector Pimloe?”
“Not Pimloe. There was a second man.”
“Isaac?” Coen said. “Chief Isaac Sidel? A short man with sideburns.”
“I don’t know.”
Coen slumped in Odile’s long chair, his nostrils wide with frustration, and Odile risked a touch on the face before he had the chance to recover. With fingers on his cheek she expected him to cry something and push over the chair. He didn’t move. She followed the curve of his eyebrow, tracked him from his ear to his lip, thinking love bumps, a cop with a sinuous face. And Coen let her explore. He had never been so passive under the sway of a finger. He felt like some grateful old dog. Seeing she could have her way with him, she got reckless and bit all the furrows in his cheek. They sank into the chair nuzzling hard. They swam in pieces of underwear. Having her fornications mostly in the studio, with cameras grinding in her ear, she was suspicious of foreplay. So she took a prophylactic out of a box and told Coen to put it on. The cold skin gave him the twitters. Both of them struggled to fit Coen. He hadn’t worn a rubber in eighteen years, not since his last fumblings as a senior at Music and Art. “Stupid scumbag,” he said. And Odile, who was nonchalant about her acting career and swore she couldn’t feel a man inside her (none of her girlfriends at The Dwarf had ever been below her waist), quivered and felt thumbs in her belly when Coen had his climax and dropped spit on her neck. She didn’t know what to do about his shriek. Her studio lovers had grunted once and climbed off. “Coen,” she said. “I lied to you before. César isn’t anything to me. The Chinaman asked me to be his old lady. I said no. César warned him not to sniff.”
She found her pants in Coen’s pile. She dressed before he did. Odile didn’t appreciate nakedness out of bed. She accepted occasional clients from César, setting a half-hour limit (Odile supplied the prophylactics, party bread, and cordials), but she hadn’t spent the night with any of these men, and she wouldn’t break a habit for Coen. She slept with a furry animal, an old bear from Vander, with shallow paws and buttons for eyes, Odile in simple headdress (she hated sun on her face) and two full gowns. She scratched around on the chair, having no idea how to kick Coen out. She pulled her mouth into a yawn. He wouldn’t leave.
“César wants to keep me single,” she said, pouting hard. “He looks after my interests.”
Coen fiddled with his shoe, digging for the tongue. “Odile, does César ever mention me?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Did you meet Papa Guzmann?”
“Once or twice.”
“What about Jerónimo?”
“The baby? He stayed here a week. The Chinaman got him into Mexico with Caroline. She fixed his menu on the plane. Ordered extra sodas for him.”
“Did you hear the name Albert from Papa or César? Albert and Jessica?”
“No. But Jerónimo said, ‘Sheb Coen, Sheb Coen.’”
“What else, Odile? Please.”
“I can’t remember. Something about a head in the fire.”
His crumpled cheeks aggravated Odile again, and she took him into her bed. Coen stared at the wall. Sheb got out of the fire. Did Jerónimo find him, bring him to the candy store? Did the Guzmanns undress him, hide his Sunday clothes, sneak him back upstairs in rags, point him to the fire escape so he could sing his death songs for Boston Road? Odile had to duck her head under his armpit to find a piece of Coen. She couldn’t get comfortable with so contrary a man. She slept against a shoulderblade, listening to the beat of Coen’s ribs. She longed for the bear.
Sweeney, the number-two bouncer, lived over a dress factory in SoHo (off Broome Street), when she wasn’t on call at The Dwarf. She had three miserably lit rooms with the feel of a rabbit hutch; tiny, thinwalled, with crooked
floors and low, low ceilings. Hot air from the pressing machines downstairs smoked through the walls and warped Sweeney’s woodwork. Short of labor, the factory employed retarded girls bussed into SoHo from an institution near White Plains. The girls wore blue cotton uniforms and highbacked shoes in neutral brown; they hunched over their sewing machines like monkeys with mottled blue skin. Sweeney fell for these girls, and she would sit with them in a Greene Street luncheonette during the half hour they were free, telling them stories about the iron buildings of SoHo, and the rats who lived in the buildings and could take metal into their systems until they died from the rust that clogged their ears. Sweeney had to tolerate the mistress of the girls, a contemptuous woman who interrupted the stories to frown at her and drive the girls out of the luncheonette and into the factory. Otherwise Sweeney existed at The Dwarf.
She was in love with Odile. The bartendresses knew this. Girls who danced regularly at The Dwarf would laugh into the sleeves of their denim shirts watching Sweeney moon over Odile. Sweeney had a seriousness about her that Odile’s partners couldn’t understand. She didn’t clutch Odile’s bosoms in the back room, like Dorotea, like Nicole, or nip Odile behind the ear, like Mauricette. Nicole and Mauricette came to The Dwarf to taste Odile, not to goggle. They would pair off with fresh “sisters” if Odile wasn’t around. Dorotea had more of a devotion to Odile, but even Dorotea grew weary of Odile’s fixation on men. It was Sweeney who endured Odile’s wavering attitudes, her defilement with male customers, her reticence at The Dwarf. Odile was still “chicken bait” to all the sisters. Those swiny men didn’t count. Odile might perform for a swat of little gangsters from the Bronx, but she hadn’t slept with Dorotea, Nicole, or Mauricette. The sisters were more careful than Sweeney. They could worship Odile, but they kept girlfriends on the side.
She was born Abigail, Abigail Ruth McBean, and she remained Abigail until her eleventh year, when she took the name Sweeney from a tavern in Providence, Rhode Island, where her father worked and played the pianola; none of the regulars at The Dwarf came from Manhattan, except for Odile. Her cousin Janice was a refugee from Montauk; Nicole and Mauricette were Connecticut girls. Sweeney would be thirty in a month. She meant to celebrate her birthday with a present for Odile. But she anticipated certain difficulties. Odile wouldn’t wear clothes from Spike’s or one of the huskier leather shops. Sweeney would have to go to Bergdorf’s or Henri Bendel, where the salespeople were too high-minded to be simple cashiers, and they would only handle your money long enough to stick it in a wire cage for some invisible teller (checks were better than cash at Henri Bendel’s). The store frightened Sweeney, who seldom went up to Fifty-seventh Street. She would have to enter Bendel’s in an Army field jacket, the cold weather type that could button around your ears; this was the one coat she had (unless she borrowed Janice’s chesterfield).
Blue Eyes Page 12