Bernard Boyce Bennington drained his glass and, with a quick salute to Jack, poured the new bottle.
“Then came the big break, a small ad in the New York Press’s ‘variations’ section.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a folded piece of newspaper, its print smudged in places and the folds starting to tear. He held it out to Jack. “Here, read it yourself.”
Jack took the paper and unfolded it, holding it so Jim and Edgar and McCoy could lean over and read it at the same time. The paper read:
Single White Succubus Seeks Soulmate
Tired of the same old humdrum?
Is one day just like the next and
the one before it? Do you see less in front
of you than what’s gone before? Take a break
and enjoy a relationship you will never forget
But be warned:
once you’ve decided, there’s no turning back.
The ad finishes with a cellphone number.
“What’s a sucker-bus?” Jim Leafman asks.
“A Greyhound headed for Las Vegas,” says Jack, who has never held with gambling.
“A succubus is a female demon,” Bernard Boyce Bennington answers. “Legend has it that they have sex with sleeping men…and,” he adds, “they steal their souls.”
Jim Leafman sits up from the bar, wondering if it’s his imagination or has it suddenly gotten cold in the last couple of minutes. “She the woman you’re looking for?”
The man nods and takes a drink of beer.
“Couldn’t you just call her?” McCoy says.
The newcomer shakes his head. “I tried that, many times since. Just get a solid tone. But the first time, I got straight through,” he says, setting his glass back on the bar. “It was a little before 2 am on a particularly black night during which the wind buffeted my apartment windows and rattled the glass in the casements. A woman’s voice answers—in the background I could hear soft music, and glasses clinking and muted conversation—and, so help me, she says my name. ‘Good evening Mister Bennington,’ she says to me. ‘Where do you want us to meet?’”
McCoy gives out a low whistle. “How’d she know your name?”
“I have absolutely no idea…but, if she was a succubus then one can only presume that she had abilities far beyond our understanding.”
Jack pushes his cloth to one side and leans heavier on the bar. “Did you go meet her?”
“I regret that I did.”
“You regret? What? Was she a dog?”
“No,” the man says to the bartender with a sad smile. “No, far from it. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
“Long story short, I met up with her, corner of 23rd and 3rd, and we walked into Gramercy Park, hand in hand. I remember how cold her hand felt to the touch, but I didn’t think anything of it…at least not then. It was late at night and it was a cool night and I just put it down to bad circulation. Anyway, unusually for me, I became quite…shall we say, stimulated by her—there was something about her, some aura, some intoxicating scent…a mixture of fresh flowers and musk or patchouli, something sweet-smelling and yet old and musty…hard to explain. And I stopped, just inside the park, and suggested that perhaps we could go back to my apartment, but she declined. Or perhaps hers, I suggested…and she laughed. She didn’t have an apartment. She lived out in the city, she told me, in the bars and drinking holes, the hotel lounges and the nightclubs, a different one every evening. She said that she got all the custom she needed from these places and that the newspaper advertisement was simply an experiment. Mine had been the only call, she told me, and she would not be repeating the experiment.
“We carried on into the park and-” He stopped and looked at his beer for a few seconds. “This is a little difficult for me.” He took a deep sigh and a long gulp of beer, draining the glass. “She was very attentive to me. So attentive in fact that by the time we had gone but a few yards into the park, barely out of the glow of the lamps by the street, she had fully removed her clothes, pulling them off in bravura sweeps of crinoline and lace, whisking them up into the night air to expose white flesh which seemed to exude some kind of aroma all of its own. The grass around us became quickly littered with her clothes, a skirt, then her blouse, followed by a satin vest and a brassiere, and finally by her panties.
“Then I removed my own clothes.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Edgar mutters.
Jim Leafman twists awkwardly on his seat.
McCoy says, “That kind of thing can get you locked up.”
Jack Fedogan agrees.
“Believe me,” B. B. Bennington says imploringly, “this is not something I normally do. I was…I was drunk with her, I felt the heavens coming down to meet me and me crashing upwards to meet them; I felt that I could lift a mountain and live forever; I felt so happy I wanted to weep. But that was only the beginning.” He looks up at Jack. “Could I have another of those beers?”
In a flash, Jack reaches behind and pulls a Michelob across, flips the cap and stands it next to the newcomer’s empty glass. Then he shifts his weight to his other leg and says, “Then what happened?”
The man pours the beer, takes a sip and continues with his story. As he does so, he takes something out of his jacket pocket—something in a brown paper bag, folded in a rectangular shape like maybe it’s a book—and he sets it on the counter. All eyes watch the stranger’s hand place the object but no eyes move away with the hand: they stay on the object, four minds wondering what on earth it could be and what significance it could have to the story now unfolding.
Bernard Boyce Bennington shrugs. “Then the inevitable happened, of course. Right there on the grass in Gramercy Park. I…I won’t go into the details here, gentlemen; it is sufficient to say that I have never felt such a feeling before. More than that, I truly never believed such a feeling were possible. She moved with a slow grace, her body lithe and supple, and her mouth…well, it was everywhere. As was her voice.”
It is Jack Fedogan, suddenly aware that there was no music playing, who responds first. He pulls out a Charlie Mingus CD and slips it into the player, keying in track numbers and hitting the play button. As the first strains of music drift into the air, he says, “Her voice?”
“I had my eyes closed, so great was the feeling of elation and spiritual contentment, but all the time we were making love she was speaking to me.”
“What was she saying?” McCoy asks.
“All kinds of things…things about my past, that nobody else could know, and things about comicbook stories, all of which she appeared to have read. She knew everything about me and everything about what I had done or read or hoped for. And she told me that this night, right then and there, lying on the grass in Gramercy Park, was the pinnacle of my life. She told me I would never be lonely again.”
Then he stops speaking.
Jim looks at Edgar and then at McCoy and McCoy looks at Jack and then at Edgar, and then everyone turns to look at the stranger, waiting for him to say something more. Eventually it’s Edgar who breaks the silence.
“And then what?”
“And then she was gone,” comes the answer.
“Gone?” It’s a single word delivered by four voices.
Bernard Boyce Bennington reaches for the brown paper package and all eyes follow his hand. “I must have…I don’t know, blacked out or something. But when I came to and opened my eyes she had left me…no clothes, no note, nothing except this.” And he pulls open the bag and removes a small battery-operated cassette player.
“Listen,” he says, and he presses the play button.
At the same time, Jack Fedogan turns down the volume button on the CD system hidden below the bar, forcing the familiar strains of ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’—in particular John Handy’s flutter-tonguing alto duel with Mingus’s tremolo basswork—off into some ethereal background, like in a party scene in a movie, when the opening pan shot with the loud soundtrack has finished and now th
e characters have something to say.
And it’s fitting. For as one melody—Mingus’s eternal paean to Lester Young, who died less than two months before this legendary 1959 recording—stops, another melody filters into the Land at the End of the Working Day…a melody without notes or words, but rather one with the sound of the wind in the trees, and the distant hum of traffic and occasional muted shouts.
Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the recesses of the newcomer’s cassette player, the far-off wail of a siren hums like a fly, disappearing before it’s hardly gotten started. And then, closer, there’s a grunt. It’s a man’s grunt.
The grunt is followed by another, deeper this time, more drawn out.
Then a sigh, also deep, again unquestionably a man’s sigh.
For several minutes the quartet of regulars sits or stands entranced by the sounds coming from the machine sitting on the counter.
They hear trees rustling and they hear the sound of movement, interspersed with sighs and soft kisses and even an occasional word, always in a man’s voice, an Oh! or an Ah!, and then an Oh, God!, the word ‘God’ drawn right out, long and thin and deep.
They feel they’re intruding, Jim and Jack, and Edgar and McCoy, feel like they’re peeping at another man’s keyhole in the dead of night, and deep within them they feel, to a man, the stirrings of desire and companionship, the feelings forcing away the blight of loneliness that affects so many people in cities and towns and lonely truck-cabs lit only by the orange or green glow of the dashboard dials and the waft of cigarette smoke.
And then it stops.
The stranger reaches out and presses the button, cutting off the silence.
Jim Leafman takes a drink and shakes his head.
Jack Fedogan stands up from the bar, thinks about reaching for his cloth and then decides against it. Instead, he turns up the volume again on his CD player, turns it up without hardly realizing he’s doing it, and the opening strains of ‘Self Portrait in Three Colors’, a song with no solos, the very same haunting music that graced John Cassevetes’s directorial debut movie, Shadows, fills the bar..
Edgar Nornhoevan looks at Jim and then at McCoy, whose eyes are closed, his hands thrust deep into his pants pockets.
And then Bernard Boyce Bennington speaks.
“You didn’t hear her, did you?”
The four men exchange glances and, silently, elect a spokesman.
Shaking his head, the Working Day’s bartender says, “No, there was only you…only your voice we heard.”
“I heard her,” a new voice says.
They turn around and come faces to face with the old man from the booth along the back wall. He must have come across while they were listening to the tape, come across real quiet so that nobody noticed him. And now here he is, sitting propped against the table right behind them, his battered valise by his feet. “I heard her,” he says, shaking his head, a smile playing across his mouth.
“She did me too,” the man says, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small cardboard strip. “Did me in a train station down in Philly, late at night, in one of those booths where you can get four photographs for a dollar, behind a floor-length curtain oblivious to the world and the night. I fell asleep afterwards—right there in the booth, which was the only place we could find that offered any kind of privacy—and when I woke up, curled up on the floor like an abandoned child, there on top of my clothes was this.”
He hands the strip across to McCoy who accepts it and takes a look.
The strip has four photographs on it, each one with a man in the foreground, his back to the camera. The man appears to be naked, though the camera has only caught him to the small of his back, and his face, though it only appears in profile in just one of the shots, looks enraptured.
But more than that, tufts of his hair are sticking up no matter which way he moves his head…like someone is holding them, tugging them. Only there’s nobody else in the photographs.
Bernard Boyce Bennington lets out a stifled moan. “That’s her,” he says, “Oh my God, that is her.”
As McCoy Brewer hands the strip across to Jack Fedogan, the old man says, “But you don’t see her, do you? You see only me.”
“There isn’t anyone else on this except for you,” Jack says. “If it is you. Fella here looks a lot younger and, well…in a mite better shape than you look right now. No offense,” Jack says as he hands the strip across to Jim Leafman.
“None taken,” the old man says. “It was a long time ago, almost 20 years. She left me with that-” He nods at the strip of photos. “-and she took everything else that I had. My job, my home…and my sanity.
“I was getting a late train, going home after an all-day meeting that had gone on into one of those corporate dinners that offer only headaches and indigestion. I wasn’t looking for excitement, wasn’t looking for adventure—at least not right then, though I’d been getting a bit down, you know…lonely…wondering what life was all about. Maybe that was it: maybe I’d gotten the scent of vulnerability about me…because that’s what loneliness is, isn’t it? Being vulnerable.
“Then, out of the shadows, she came up to me. There was hardly anyone else in the station, just a couple of bums sleeping off the booze, and a guy sweeping up the concourse way down away from me. And she says to me, ‘Mister Yordeau, where can we go to be private?’”
“She knew your name, too?”
The man nods to McCoy. “Knew everything about me. Said she usually hung out in bars and clubs and so on—here in New York—same thing she told him.” He nods to Bernard Boyce Bennington. “And that was it. I went with her, may God have mercy on my soul…I went with her, looked around for someplace we could be alone, my heart thumping in my chest, and I saw the photo booth. We went inside and clothes started coming off right away, no questions asked, no conversation, no nothing.” The man stopped and shook his head. “I had never felt anything like that before in my life and I’ve never felt anything like it since.”
“So what did you do?” Jack asks, passing the old guy a beer and handing bottles out to everyone…like it’s a private party.
“Well, everything went to hell…like I said. I left everything behind me—and I mean everything. And I started hanging around in bars trying to find her…to get her back…to-” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I was wanting—wanting her back, I guess…wanting to do it again.
“And I had conversations with bartenders and their regulars, showed them the photographs. And nobody could see her. Pretty soon, I realized she’d done something to my head. And after a few years, I changed.”
“Changed?” says Edgar. “Changed how?”
“Oh, I still looked for her—and I still do, even now—but not with the idea of getting her back again. I stopped showing people the photographs. Now I just go to a few bars every night…and I watch. And when I find her…” He turns and glances down at his bag, then stoops and picks it up, runs the zipper along and pulls it open.
“Jesus Christ!” says Jack Fedogan.
The man pulls out a wooden-headed mallet and a fistful of sharpened stakes, each one about a foot long.
“I mean to end her power,” the old man says, dumping the mallet and the stakes back into the bag. “I mean to free myself, free others—like him—and I mean to make the world safe from her, whatever she is.”
Bernard Boyce Bennington lifts the brown paper bag from the counter, having returned the player into it, and slips it into his pocket.
Jim Leafman says, “So how come you both end up in here…tonight?”
The man shrugs. “Coincidence. Nothing more. I guess it had to happen one day in one bar…two of the people she’s tainted coming together in the same place at the same time.”
“You followed me,” says Bernard Boyce Bennington, backing away now, backing towards the stairs.
The old man shakes his head, eyes closed.
Jack, also shaking his head…and waving his arms around, says, “Hey, hold on now�
�this guy was in here bef—”
“You followed me and you want me to lead you to her.”
And right about now, there’s a sound from up the stairs…maybe even from out on the street, and jack feels a breath of fresh air on his face.
The four men facing the stairs look up at the first footstep, then Jack looks too, and Horace Parlan lets his fingers drift along the piano keys in Jack’s CD player, lost in that long-ago impossibly wonderful session with Mingus. They look up the stairs, suddenly aware of the silence contributed to the scene in classic western style, the way any good honky-tonk ivories man would do when someone walked in through the saloon doors…aware of that and the foot on the wooden stairs, hearing another step, leaning over to try get a glimpse of whoever’s coming down into the bar, but they can’t see anything.
Then Bernard Boyce Bennington stops right where he is, his heels jammed up against the bottom stair, his brown paper bag clasped in his hand, and he breathes in deeply.
McCoy Brewer notices that there are tears running down B. B. Bennington’s cheeks, and he breathes in again, savoring the smell of the outside must be, McCoy thinks and he takes a step forward.
The man turns and looks up the stairs.
The others lean still further, like vaudevillian stuntmen or Keystone Kop fallabouts, still trying to see up the stairs. The feet have stopped, and all they want to see is an ankle…a shapely ankle, maybe…in a high heeled pump, standing in that narrow right-angle triangle of a gap between the upstairs floor and the banister rail leading downstairs…but then whatever made that foot-stepping kind of noise turns right around before they can see anything at all, never mind put a leg to the imagined ankle, and a waist to the leg, and a torso to the waist, a neck to the torso and, most desired of all, a head to crown off their creation. It turns and moves back up the few stairs its come down, back to the outside world and the mischievous air that waits there.
Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream Page 3