“Well, I’m waiting for you,” I said. “We’ll leave here together.”
“How can we?” she wailed, snapping a row of little hooks closed over her ribs with the agility of someone playing a musical instrument. “I’ve got to throw some things into a valise, and it’s twenty-five to five now! The banks closed an hour and a half ago — and you’ll need some money, won’t you! What are you going to do?”
“Gee, you’re right!” I yelled. “I never thought of that! I can get in if the manager’s still there — otherwise I’m sunk!” And I bolted for the door. “I’ll pick you up here in less than an hour.”
“No, don’t come back!” she called after me. “I’ll meet you at the station at train time. I’ll be through before you most likely, and I don’t want to wait alone here in the apartment. But for God’s sake, see that you get there!”
“Grand Central — lower level — eight-thirty or quarter to nine!” I babbled wildly, half tearing the door from its hinges.
In the foyer I was fleetingly aware of Tenacity’s presence in the background, standing before the mirror pretending to put on her hat or something. “Mister Wade,” she said querulously, “is Miss Bernice fixing to fire me, or what—?”
“Look it up in the almanac,” I said roughly, and was gone.
I jumped into the first taxi I came across — this was no time to count pennies — and made a beeline for the Corn Exchange, my branch. It would be much further away from where Bernice lived than two or three of the other branches!
I had no time to be happy that we were going away together at long last; there was too much to do first. I could be happy later on, on the train. But how glad I was (I told myself) that she was high-strung, neurotic, or whatever you want to call it, and imagined all sorts of dreadful things would happen to her if she stayed in New York after I made no more than a casual remark to some girl who was somebody’s sweetie; how lucky for me. Otherwise I never would have got her to go with me. Too vivid an imagination and perhaps too much liquor and too little sleep over too long a period of time had accomplished what no amount of love and devotion could have.
But at the moment there were other things I was just as glad about, too. I was glad I had struck up an acquaintance with that insipid trombonist in the jazz band at the Pier the first summer Maxine and I were down in Atlantic City seven years ago, never dreaming that he would outgrow his insipidity, discard his trombone with his white flannel trousers, and become first a teller in a bank and then the manager of that bank — or at least, of the branch I dealt with. Otherwise, what chance would I have had of withdrawing money from a three-o’clock bank at quarter to five in the afternoon?
When we got there, the doors were closed, but I rang the bell and motioned frantically to the watchman through the glass. He motioned back to me that the bank was closed (as though I didn’t know that!), that it was too late, to go away, or something to that effect.
I thought I was sunk for a minute, and felt myself beginning to wobble, like a concertina left standing on end. But I went back to motioning again, with the added device of shouting through the glass and getting it all misty with my hot breath.
He finally indicated a side entrance, met me there, unlocked it, and thrust his head out.
“Mr. Plattner go home yet?” I demanded breathlessly. If he had, curtains!
“Who are you?” he said.
I gave him the name and said, “Ask him if I can come in and speak to him for a minute.”
He locked up, went away, stayed away, came back, and unlocked once more.
“We gotta be careful, these days, y’know,” he said, by way of invitation to enter.
I found Fred in his office, the whole place very solemn-looking under green-shaded lights. I’d come in like this after-hours once or twice before, but that was because we were going to have dinner together or something. And that had been the first year he had the job, not lately. But at least my barging in now wasn’t an utter innovation. “Hello, Wade,” he said, shaking hands with me across a glass desktop. “Where you been keeping yourself all these years?”
I didn’t tell him that, but instead I told him I wanted to close out my account.
“Kind of late in the day, isn’t it?” he mentioned. “Tomorrow suit you just as well?”
“I’m taking the nine-thirty train to Chicago with my bundle of happiness,” I told him, “and I haven’t a nickel in my pocket.”
“Oh, you’re taking Maxine with you?” he said interestedly.
“Maxine doesn’t spell happiness for me any more,” I told him point-blank. “Do this thing for me, will you, Fred?” And I said to myself: “If he gets moral all of a sudden and tries to talk to me like a father, I’m gonna throw the inkwell right in his eye — even if I get held up for damages!”
But he didn’t say a word, just looked at me attentively for a minute, then asked me if I had my passbook with me, and told me to write out a check for the full amount. I had the check written almost before he was through speaking, but I told him I didn’t have my passbook with me. They had a duplicate there, though, so that didn’t make much difference; he told me to mail the other one in the first chance I got. He okayed the check, and then I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone, so I showed him the other one I’d gotten from my late firm earlier in the week, which luckily I hadn’t deposited yet over in Brooklyn as I had planned to, and he okayed that too. Then he shook hands with me, wished me a lot of luck, and said, “Let me hear from you some day, Wade.”
I went outside to the cashier’s window and cashed the two checks — the cashier still being there, fortunately, and being occupied in separating dollar bills that had gotten wrinkled from dollar bills that hadn’t gotten wrinkled, or something like that. The watchman let me out the side entrance, and I found my taxi driver pacing back and forth, aged with worry and impatience. I looked at the bank clock through the window — it was just five, to the minute. As long as I wasn’t going to meet Bernice until eight-thirty, there seemed to be no reason why I should ride all the way home in a taxi when the subway “gets you there just as quickly too.” So I paid him off and bade him Godspeed — or the modern equivalent of it, which is a fifty-cent tip.
I went over to the station next and got the tickets — which made the wad of money I’d gotten at the bank much less conspicuous to carry around with me. I glanced across to the other side of the big, vaulted place, echoing with hundreds of footsteps all at one time, and picking out a certain spot under a light, said:
“There’s where she’ll be standing three hours from now. I can see her now, so neat, so sweet, so all-around complete, with her big valise beside her on the ground and one little foot pointed out ahead of the other. Waiting for me, lucky stiff!” And I tipped my hat to the empty place against the wall and half closed my eyes for a minute, with reverence and ecstasy.
I realized there was no chance of getting at the compound-interest account I had over in Brooklyn any more; even if the bank had been open, you have to take a blood test and let yourself be fingerprinted to get money out of one of those accounts. So there was nothing left to do now but go home. I wasn’t going home because I wanted to say good-bye to Maxine — I could’ve done that over the telephone from here just as well. I was going because I wasn’t in awe of her enough to go all the way to California without my shirts and socks and handkerchiefs. And since there was still nearly three hours’ time left and nothing else to do, why not go home, take a bird’s-eye inventory of my things, and pack a grip? I got on the subway and went.
In the act of putting the key in the door, I stopped and looked down at it, held in the flat of my hand. “Last time I’ll be using it,” I said thoughtfully. “I’ll take it off the ring on my way out and leave it in the door.” I opened the door and went in.
Maxine wasn’t in yet. “The breaks!” I chuckled to myself. “I can get all my packing done calmly and systematically, without having her yell blue murder over my left shoulder all the w
hile.”
So I dropped my hat over the telephone, stripped off my coat and vest and draped them over a chair, and rubbed my hands briskly together in token of anticipation. Then I took a minute off to turn the radio on, and as I left it, I was unconsciously mimicking the brazen noises it gave out. “Shouldn’t,” I reproved myself, and stopped. “I’m leaving her tonight.”
I went into the bedroom, and the evening sun made the walls of it look like the inside of a wicker box that has been full of crushed strawberries. I threw open all the drawers of the bureau one after the other — bang! slap! bang! — and then I pulled my valise out of the closet and opened it on the floor. I hadn’t used it since the last trip to Atlantic City, the summer before. There was still an old bathing shirt rolled up in the corner of it. I got it out of the way and flung it unceremoniously into a far comer.
Then I began to pile shirts in like one of those three-decker sandwiches, colored ones on bottom and on top and white ones in the middle, where they wouldn’t get dirty so quickly. When the shirt angle was through, my other suit came to mind — at the dry cleaner’s, two blocks away. The other suit. “Too bad,” I sighed. “Have to get a new one out there; I’m not going out after it now any more, save my strength for the trip.”
The socks I packed last, after everything else had gone in, because I knew by experience they could be rolled up in balls and wedged far down into the corners of the thing. The neckties I left out altogether, because there was no way of folding them or anything, and they kept sticking out all over like thirsty tongues each time I shut the lid down on them. So I tossed them all back where they came from. “Get new ones,” I said recklessly. “Starting a new life, so I’ll get everything new to match it!” I locked the valise at last and stood it up against the wall, where I wouldn’t trip over it. Then I pushed all the drawers back in again, and tried not to look at Maxine’s silky, fluffy things, left all to themselves now that mine were gone.
It was quarter to six by the time I was through, and she hadn’t come yet. “Wouldn’t it be just like a movie show,” I thought grimly, “if she didn’t get back on time and I had to leave her a note!”
And ridiculous, fantastic, or insane as it may sound, I found myself growing actually impatient and fretful over her lateness, as though my going away depended upon her being there to say good-bye to. “Just tonight she has to be late!” I caught myself saying with a scowl, “Every other night she’s always around here hours before I get home! I suppose she’s standing chewing the rag over the counter with the A and P manager’s wife—”
It never occurred to me to make my getaway bag and all, now that the coast was clear. Because somehow I didn’t look upon this as deserting her. It was almost as though I was too proud of my love for Bernice, thought too much of it, to sneak off without a word.
I looked at myself in the glass and, with that immemorial gesture of the hand on the chin, decided that a shave wouldn’t hurt me any. Although tonight wouldn’t be the first night that I was with Bernice, Lord knows, still, with every passing minute I felt more and more like a young lover ready to start off on his honeymoon. Anxious to make a good appearance, giddy with love and the attainment of an ideal, impatient, deliciously nervous, shivery like a person about to dive from a height into unknown water — I was even a little shy and diffident at the thought of facing her, as I never had been before now.
I stripped off my tie and shirt preparatory to shaving. At which point the door opened, and Maxine at last came home. “You there, Wade?” she called the length of the apartment. That, it occurred to me, was a needless question; the busily vibrating radio should have told her someone was home, and there were only two of us, so it must be me. Most women talk before they think.
“Yeh,” I said curtly.
“I had the worst time getting spaghetti,” she said, still from a distance.
“Don’t tell me they’re running short of cans!” I said hopefully.
“Every one had that kind with the cheese and tomato,” she continued absorbedly. “I had to walk blocks before I came across the kind you like, with the mushrooms.”
“I suppose I ought to feel bad, now,” I told myself unwillingly, “now that she’s put herself out to get something I like the last night I’m with her.” I had decided long ago that I was going to eat at home.
“I’ll be ready for you in a minute, now,” she promised, still trumpeting her remarks from the kitchen.
“No hurry,” I assured her. “I’m going to shave first.”
“Oh!” she called back disappointedly, “do it afterward, Wade, there won’t be time; I’ve put the can in the water already.”
But it would have taken more than a mysterious symbol of speech like that to deter me from making myself presentable for the woman I was wild about. I went ahead in the bathroom.
Chapter Six
I stood there in a cubicle of white tiles that gleamed like milk, and my shoulder blades, still shiny from the dregs of last year’s tan, caught the light like copper epaulettes. Beyond that there was not much to me; a man who stood and carefully scraped his check and rinsed the blade under the faucet and was thinking: Bernice!... Bernice!... Bernice! For there had never been anything to me at all until now, but now there was this to me: that I loved her. And that made it all understandable to me; my being born, my swallowing certain quantities of food each day, my aimless roaming from one room to the next, out one door, in the other. I was given my body, and for twenty-odd years all I could find to do with it was put underwear on it once a day, park it in an enamel tub now and then, shove it in a bed at night and let the life slip out of it. I was given my hands, and the most they could do was make that little upward curve and down again, striking a match to a cigarette, when they should have been, oh, should have been, around her waist all the time. I was given my voice, and all I ever used it for was to say things like “Scramble two and a cup of Java” to Swedish waitresses, and “What are we waiting for, come on, let’s get married and get it out of our systems” to poor Maxine, with my heart in cold storage all the time. But now all this was changed; now I got a break at last. Now rooms were not empty and food was not sawdust. Now body, hands, and voice knew what to do. Now she had appeared on the scene at last. The fog had lifted and a star shone through; now all was clear to me at last. And was I glad I hadn’t given up too soon! Was I glad I hadn’t ever tried to do a leap off some bridge with bricks in my pocket! Was I glad I hadn’t patronized strange bootleggers! Was I glad I’d still been in short pants in 1918, and was I glad I’d let that gunman have that ten-dollar bill without a word of protest under the Sixth Avenue L that night! Was I glad I’d lasted till I met her, never knowing she was on the way!
Now I was pressing my face between the two ends of a towel. Then I pushed open a little gadget on the stopper of a powder flask, and five little pinpricks appeared where there hadn’t been any before. A few white grains dropped out of each pinprick when I shook, and onto my face to turn into complexion. I was through now, and I poked at the wall, and the lights fled. And with them went the gleam like milk, and the bathroom had turned blue all around me. Blue, that badge of the nineteen-twenties. A hundred years ago it was just a color; today it was a mood, the soul of a generation.
Maxine came to the door and rested her palm high up against it, near the top. She clutched a dishcloth in her other hand; there was something pathetic about her in that loincloth she called a dress, reaching from her armpits to her hips, with a little rubberized apron across the front.
“Be right with you,” I remarked absently, and passed by her and went into the bedroom. I heard her turn around and go away again. “I’m not going to call you any more,” she warned me. But I didn’t even turn my head.
I plunged my hand into a drawer that was like a nest of vivid tropical snakes. Neckties. And finally pulled out a dark-blue one with little green spearheads set far apart. I shut the drawer and never saw the rest of them again after that night. When I had tied it, I put o
ut the lights and went in to her.
She was already seated at the table, and though one part of her would have liked very much for my food to be cold and unpalatable now that I had kept her waiting, the other part of her that wanted me to be happy no matter what the cost had made her put the dishes back on top of the stove and cover them over. She herself had already begun to eat, but she jumped up and got my portion from the stove as I sat down. Our heads were both slightly bent, as though we were two children not quite sure of our table manners as yet.
I looked at the plate before me, and my mind told my hand to take a fork and put food in my mouth, but my stomach told my hand not to, so I lit a cigarette instead.
“What’s the matter, aren’t you hungry?” Maxine said.
“Sure I am,” I lied to her, “just give me time. Don’t rush me, see?” And if she pulled that old reliable one beginning; “After I went to all the trouble of cooking—” I knew I would hit her. But fortunately something distracted her attention just then, and the matter of food was allowed to drop. Above us, there was a flourish vaguely resembling music, and then the radio began to articulate one of Kern’s pieces from Sweet Adeline. A moment later the one under us had joined in and was whinnying forth the same number. “Wait a minute, I must get this!” Maxine cried, jumping up from the table, and turned on our own instrument in the next room. Then she came back to me with her eyes sparkling. It took it a moment or two to warm up; by that time the station had gone through one chorus. Just as the voice came in, ours caught up with the other two, so that some girl, who was miles away from there, was singing in three apartments at once, one above the other. Maxine had clasped her hands under her chin and was looking at me across the dishes of food; the words seemed to come out of her eyes. “Here am I — here I’ll stay — in your way — until you notice me—” I tried to turn my eyes away; hers followed mine and would not let them go. Her lower lip was quivering. Her eyes grew brighter, brighter, and suddenly were wet and glistening. She didn’t say a word; just looked at me, as though she would never get through looking at me. “Here am I — here is love — don’t pass us by.” Suddenly I couldn’t stand it any more. My eyes had tried to escape in every direction, and still she held them within her own. And didn’t say a word, a word. “Why do I try — to draw you near me? Why do I sigh — you never hear me—”
Manhattan Love Song Page 13