One thing was bothering him, though. The rubber in his pocket. It worried him. He wasn’t sure how to go about the necessary operation of slipping into it. The little package hadn’t come with instructions as Rinso did. All that was on the package—and in very small letters, like whispers—were claims of how thin the rubbers were and how sensitive and highly recommended by doctors who, apparently, took off a lot of time to try them out. There were no names of satisfied customers on the packages. Nobody in Cleveland, Ohio, whom you could call up and ask, “Did you really say this?” Nobody even in Altoona, PA, whom you could do an FBI check on to see if he really existed. Hermie removed the rubber from his pocket, tossing away the tattered remains of the blue package. He examined the rubber, and it didn’t look all that exciting. As a matter of fact, it looked kind of dumb all rolled up like a yellow worm and held in place by something that looked like a tiny cigar band. It looked dirty. It seemed like a dirty thing to do, to excuse yourself and then come back wearing the thing like it was a lollipop wrapper. It also wasn’t foolproof. Sometimes they broke. Oscy once told him how the jokers who made them sometimes used to put pinholes in them just for kicks. Hermie’d sure hate to get one with a hole in it, a dud, so to speak, maybe even signed by the name of the factory worker with a message on it like “Surprise! You’ve been fucked!” Hermie’d sure hate to end up with a baby that his mother would want to send to the pound or that his father would want to just put in a burlap bag and drop off the pier. And there was another thing to consider. Using it on Dorothy, correction, in Dorothy, first flashing it in her presence, could only indicate to her that he had planned on screwing her long before he came a-calling and very long before the foreplay had even begun. And that was bound to take some of the magic out of it for the both of them. A woman like Dorothy wants her screwing to be unplanned and accidental. She wants it to be a spontaneous act of love. Yet how the hell can it be spontaneous if the guy arrives at her door all suited up? Which brought up another question. Should he put it on before he got to the house and therefore eliminate a lot of embarrassment? After all, if the damned things were really so thin and transparent and if it were a dark evening, which it was getting to look as if it would be, maybe she’d never even know he had it on. Also, to help things along, he’d be getting her drunk. Hermie began to think that that theory had merit, real merit. And so he slowly slid off the cigar band, and the rubber opened in his palm like a tiny flower, moving around like a bug taking shape in the new world. He studied it. It was about the size of a quarter, give or take a dime, and he had to admit that it felt smooth and strangely exciting. He wasn’t sure, however, just how he was supposed to get it on. To do anything with it, he would, of course, have to learn more about it. And so he began to unroll it, pushing his finger gently into it and rolling down the sides of it the way you’d do in putting on a pair of gloves. His finger got pretty damned excited and carried away with passion, and before Hermie could stop it, it had unrolled the whole rubber. Hermie’s heart stopped when he looked at the rubber unfurled. His heart stopped because he knew he’d gotten the wrong size. The rubber he was looking at was meant for Primo Camera, and Hermie was more of a Tom Thumb. He held it by its ring, at its open end, and he let the rest of it dangle in the breeze like a small windsock. It was no longer yellow. It was transparent. Damned if he couldn’t see practically right through it, even in the lousy light. It was true, a guy could wear a rubber and a girl didn’t even have to know he had it, like a glass eye. So the question was answered. Yes, you put it on beforehand and nobody need be the wiser, provided you can fill the damned thing and that it didn’t gather up at the bottom of your pole like a bellows. Hermie unbuttoned his white ducks and groped around for himself; only he wasn’t getting any cooperation. His once-enormous shaft not only was not in the mood, but might even be not in his shorts. When he finally found it hiding in a comer under a pocket flap and brought it out into the lovely evening air, it was such a pitiful thing that Hermie almost wanted to cry. And you’d cry, too, if you were a 28 short and some salesman was trying to get you into a 46 extra-large. Hermie stiffened his shoulders, which was about all he could get stiff under those conditions. And he held the rubber in front of his pecker the way you’d hold a twig in front of a dog just before you tossed it and yelled “Fetch.” But the dog wasn’t buying; it just sulked some more. Hermie looked at the rubber; it appeared so large that he knew if he put it on his pecker, most of it would hang over the side like Santa Claus’ stocking cap. He put the theory to the test and proved himself to be correct, except there was no pompon at the end of it. Hermie removed the rubber before the crickets could laugh at him. It had felt sensational, he had to admit, and maybe, with a little help, he might just be able to fill up the goddamn thing with maybe just a little slack. But a new thought sprang into his mind, and it troubled him. He had been carrying that rubber around in his pocket; he had sat on it, strained it, exposed it to so much dirt that maybe it was no longer sanitary. And how could he, in good conscience, stick so unsanitary a thing into sweet Dorothy? The whole idea revulsed him, and he grew annoyed with himself for having broken the hermetically sealed package just so’s Oscy could screw Miriam, who, as it turned out, was probably already alive with appendicitis germs and God knows what other filthy diseases. Hermie looked at the germ-ridden membrane in his hand and at the way his fingers recoiled and kind of let it drop to the ground as though it had already been used by Tony Galento. He knelt down beside it, knowing that there was no chance in the world that he could ever make use of it, especially since it had just been dropped in the sand. Had he not dropped it, yes, there might have been a chance but now—forget it. Reverently Hermie dug a little hole in the gritty turf and nudged the rubber into it with his shoe. Then he covered it with sand, and covered with sand it would remain, for years and years, like the Time Capsule at the World’s Fair. He turned his head to the sky, inhaled a lot of good clean air, and immediately accepted two rather irrefutable facts. First, he could no longer lay Dorothy because if he did so without wearing protection, she ran the risk of having a baby. Not immediately, but soon enough. And second, by getting rid of that particular germ-crawling device, he had nobly eliminated all chance of Dorothy’s becoming contaminated by the filthy thing. Conclusion? He had unselfishly arranged that there be no screwing of Dorothy that night. Following the acceptance of the two facts and the one conclusion, there came a summation, but in two separate waves. The first wave was one of sadness, for he was being denied Dorothy’s sacred insides. The second wave was rather remarkable in that it was one of boundless joy, owing to the fact that an inhuman obligation had been removed from his shoulders, a huge obstacle taken from his path, a choking lump wrenched from his stomach. And the truth of it all, and he knew it, and he wanted to die because of it, except he also wanted to live—the truth of it all was that by not trying to get laid, he was not risking humiliating failure. It was as the prophets had once stated, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until next week.” Fear had overcome desire, and self-deception had proved stronger than both. And so when he advanced on her house, it was with elation at the prospect of a nice social call, a man calling on a lady of a summer’s evening, a laugh or two over a lemonade, a few jokes, a couple of songs around the pianola…and the icy fright that had gripped his heart all day relaxed its hold, and he walked blithely down the road, absolved of all the responsibilities of both man and boy…floating somewhere within the confusion between.
But something was very definitely out of whack. Something about that house. For one thing, it was dimly lit. Maybe one or two lights were on, but if they were, it was in the back. And then it was quiet, oddly quiet. Not that Hermie had expected Ben Bernie and all the lads to be playing on the front porch, but she might at least have had the radio on, or even the Victrola, some kind of music, Xavier Cugat or even a hymn. And as he drew closer, he would have settled for Kate Smith because it all was so desperately quiet. He could sense the foreboding, feel th
e foreshadowing. Quietly he passed beyond the screen door, and he heard his own footsteps thumping across the slightly sagging porch. It was four steps to the door that led into the living room. The door was open, but Hermie, ever one for protocol, knocked on the door frame just the same. There was some light in the room but no response to his knocking. “Hello?” The sound of his voice stopped everything; his walking, his breathing, his heartbeat, even the summer bugs shut up and laid low. Again, no answer. He knocked again and called again. “Hello?” Nothing.
He stepped into the tidy living room, immediately becoming aware that it wasn’t as cheery and as chipper as he had remembered it. “Hello?” No answer, no sound, not a blessed thing. Except for an odd rhythmic scratching. Sker-ratchety, sker-ratchety.
He stood dead center in the room and looked around, pleased that he could be so calm in so strange and unexpected a situation. On a table there stood a bottle of some kind of scotch whisky, half-empty. Beside it was a glass, completely empty. And beside that there was an ashtray, totally full, cluttered with half-smoked cigarettes that had been crushed out and abandoned. “Dorothy? It’s Hermie. Hermie from the beach.” No answer.
He continued to look around. There was the framed photograph of smiling Pete, beaming out at Hermie, the pipe still clenched between the strong, straight teeth. And the writing: “All my love, forever, Pete.” Hermie took a few steps farther into the room and the sound grew louder. Sker-ratchety, sker-ratchety, sker-ratchety. It could have been a cricket but not likely because crickets didn’t drink or smoke. Ha-ha.
It was the portable phonograph, its lid swung back in an open position as in an alligator yawn, its arm moving back and forth like an admonishing finger saying “no…no…no.” The record on the turntable kept rotating. It had finished, but the phonograph arm hadn’t been removed and returned to its starting position. Hence the sker-ratchety, sker-ratchety, sker-ratchety. Hermie lifted the phonograph arm and placed it gently back upon its receptacle, letting the record continue to spin because it wasn’t hurting anything. He studied the label of the spinning record but couldn’t make it out and was only getting himself dizzy. The room was now deadly quiet, too quiet. Hermie tried to whistle “Pistol Packing Mama,” but his mouth was too dry.
The dull yellow of the telegram caught his eye. It was behind the bottle and had been cruelly crumpled and then painfully smoothed out. “We regret to inform you that your husband…”
The cold message sank sickeningly into Hermie’s mind like rain on a sponge. There was a sound behind him, a door opening. He turned.
Dorothy was in the room. She smiled at him, a smile of recognition. But her eyes were damp and red, and she wore a look of lonely vulnerability. So much so that Hermie wanted to take her to his arms and cup her cheek in his hand, as his mother used to do with him whenever he came home crying over something that was too much for him. Slowly, regularly, she kept running a brush through her hair, a small gesture of femininity, something to hang onto, to do, to stay sane. “Hello, Hermie.”
“Hi.”
“I don’t look very nice, do I?” She moved past him, tragically beautiful. Little Girl Lost in a fluffy pink robe.
“I think you do.”
“Oh, I think I don’t.” She smiled at him again, a searchlight in the dark. A moment of endless silence drifted by, during which she brushed her hair to a princess luster. Then she was over at the phonograph, placing the needle back at the beginning of the still-spinning record. The voice was a woman’s, and for a moment, because her back was turned to him, Hermie thought it was Dorothy singing. The song was soft and torchy, conjuring up every vision Hermie had ever had of those sad ladies singing, of love gone by or lost, accompanied only by the aging male piano player whose fingers idled the ivories while a cigarette dangled dry on his lips and while a shot of booze sat waiting for him on top of his piano. And, from time to time, a silent but understanding waiter would pass by and keep the booze glass full. Real. Unreal. Real. Unreal.
Last night I started out happy,
Last night my heart was so gay,
Last night I found myself dancing
In my favorite cabaret.
You were completely forgotten,
Just an affair of the past,
Then suddenly something happened to me,
And I found my heart
Beating, oh, so fast.
It was their song. Dorothy’s and Pete’s. And if Dorothy was beyond crying, Hermie had not yet arrived at that point, and his vision turned blurry because he was looking at her from somewhere in the rain. He watched her lay the hairbrush aside and begin to sway back and forth, over and again, as if the song were a measure of the distance between love and death and she the calculator of the impossible separation.
I saw you last night and got that old feeling,
When you came in sight I got that old feeling…
She moved away from the phonograph and began to straighten out the small disorders within the room. She picked up the glass and the ashtray.
The moment that you danced by I felt a thrill
And when you caught my eye my heart stood still…
She smiled again as she passed him on little pink scuffs that made no noise. He watched her go through the doorless opening and into the kitchen.
Once again I seemed to feel that old yearning,
And I knew the spark of love was still burning…
Hermie gravitated toward the kitchen, watching her at the sink as she let the water run over the ashtray. A display of vacuous female activity that was in defiance of the truth. It was a thing that women did so that men could never know their minds.
There’ll be no new romance for me,
It’s foolish to start,
For that old feeling
Is still in my heart.
She continued to wash the ashtray, running her fingers over it. It was never meant to be that clean. The piano player took the next few bars, allowing his own miseries to gain expression. Somehow it was Hermie’s turn and he spoke over the piano. “I’m sorry.”
She turned to him, her flowing hair preceding her wan smile. Then she turned back to the sink and continued to wash the ashtray. She turned off the water just as the vocalist returned to the song.
Once again I seemed to feel that old yearning,
And I knew the spark of love was still burning…
Dorothy faced Hermie. She was standing with her back against the sink, supported by her hands, only the thumbs of which were visible over the enamel edge. She looked at Hermie and bravely shook her head as if to say, “Well—easy come, easy go.” When she walked toward him, it was just to touch someone who was alive and caring. And when the little pink scuffs arrived at the stalwart saddle shoes, Hermie could see that he was taller than she was. He knew that there were tears on his face, but he also knew that he needn’t be ashamed, for even the best of men were known to cry. She reached up to his face, catching one of his tears on the point of her finger, and it ran to her because she was then the rightful owner of all the tears on earth. She captured another and another, letting the salty little things trickle across her nail and drop off the side like men overboard. All the tears thus gone, she moved to place her head within the hollow of his shoulder, just to rest, just to be with. Instinctively, Hermie put his hand to her cheek and pressed her closer to him, his other arm slipping about the small of her back, where he could feel the soft crying and hold the gently racking figure.
There’ll be no new romance for me,
It’s foolish to start,
For that old feeling
Is still in my heart.
The piano played and the voice sang sadly, and without knowing quite how or just why, Hermie found that he and Dorothy were moving, easily, dancing. But shouldn’t the record have been played out? Had she managed to escape his arms long enough to start it over, leaving only a faint echo of herself in his grasp? Could she really have done that without his knowing it?
Last night I
started out happy,
Last night my heart was so gay…
Or had they done it together, dancing past the phonograph just as the record was spinning out and starting it anew?
Last night I found myself dancing
In my favorite cabaret…
Or had he done it completely by himself, reaching over without her being aware of it and placing the needle back at the beginning because he wanted to hold her forever and ever?
You were completely forgotten,
Just an affair of the past…
And were those his feet down there, saddle shoes in the night, pretending to know what they were doing? And was it Dorothy he held, truly Dorothy, clinging to him as though he were Pete come home, smiling even as the tears escaped from under her lovely lashes?
Then suddenly something happened to me,
And I found my heart
Beating, oh, so fast.
The lyric threaded up into air and took physical form, hanging down into the room like barrage balloons over Britain, NIGHT. OLD. SIGHT. FEELING. He danced her between them, steering her in and out of them, trying to keep them from touching her, from hurting her more than they already had. They hung there wickedly, swiveling left and right on gnashing steel cables, DANCE. THRILL. CAUGHT. STILL. Hermie and Dorothy weaved between them, baseless shadows, weightless silhouettes unhindered by floor, by wall, by time. Slowly her face turned up to look into his. She studied him seriously, running her fingers over his features like a blind woman, trying to place him, to recall him. A moment—and quickly she cocked her face a half turn sideways, never removing her eyes from his, and an impish smile of recognition told him not to try to fool her, for she knew who he was. A child’s laugh followed, and she tossed her hair like a wet puppy. And the hanging words took to the wind, and a new music inhabited the room, a Dorothy music, all sunny and bright. And her arms, unembarrassed, stretched toward him, and her face came up at his, and the kiss that happened caused the room to circle the people. Colors shifted in and out like slides on a microscope, and there was a small game of Touch and Whisper in which she disappeared from his arms only to reappear behind him, her hands over his eyes with guess who, darling, and welcome home. Words took shape in Hermie’s mouth, protest words, not even words—sounds. But they flew away, unformed, unsaid random vowels barely strung.
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