Odditorium: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  Frightened, doll-like, she obeyed and, only moments after stuffing herself into the cramped and stifling shaft, passed out. Christo heard a diminuendo moan behind him and felt her grip relax. He had to slither down to a junction point, where a smaller pipe fed into the main line, in order to turn himself around and drag her the rest of the way. It was very noisy work—sweaty, too, since the tin walls were still warm—and he was amazed that no one intercepted them at the other end. He kicked out the grate and pulled Sara free; her eyes fluttered open and she looked like a movie star at the finish of a deathbed monologue.

  “Can we get a bus from here?”

  “Not yet, not yet.”

  Their pyjamas were soaked through but they were too far behind schedule to change clothes now. They’d have to go for it as they were, even though the white garments would practically glow in the dark. At the end of the narrow, carpeted corridor, through a high window in a heavy brown door, Christo could see light glinting off windshields. He put his arm around Sara’s waist and coaxed and carried her forward.

  “Use your legs, dammit.”

  He thought: This is a lot like babysitting.

  She snapped to in the cold air of the parking garage, leaned over the hood of a station wagon hyperventilating.

  “Wait a minute…. Wait a minute.”

  “Don’t fade in the stretch, Sara. We might reach a point where I can’t afford you anymore.” He took the steel bar out of the pillowcase.

  Sara nodded, took his hand. They ran up a cement ramp to the driveway, stopped, looked in unison to right and left like figures in a pedestrian safety film, then briskly but quietly walked across. Christo pulled her down in a bed of ivy; she was trembling. Up ahead, the gate man stared out at the street from his lighted cubicle and puffed on a pipe.

  “Wait here and be ready to fly.”

  With long, low strides, Christo covered the intervening ground in seconds. As the gate man turned toward the sound of his final step with a half smile on his brown, creased face, Christo cocked the bar and brought it down square on the back of his head. The gate man’s cap with the shiny badge in front flipped off and hit the ground before he did. A flash as Christo spun away, blood welling over gray crewcut stubble.

  “Now, Sara. Now!” And he took off like a deer.

  She breathed deep, gathered herself and went after him, her slippers coming off as she sprinted through half-melted snow, the pillowcase swinging wildly at her side.

  Shivering, embracing, they climbed into the janitor clothes behind a hedge six blocks away.

  “Okay, next phase,” Christo said as Sara jumped up and down and crooned at the stars. “Where does your brother live?”

  “In Boston—oh, you beautiful man. I can’t believe I’m out … I’m really out. I could never have done it by myself.”

  “Well, don’t tell the neighborhood about it.”

  “I don’t even care if I get frostbite,” Sara said, wiggling her bare toes.

  “Phase two now, darlin’. Concentrate. You know this town, find us a Western Union.”

  They walked for endless blocks as a cheerless dawn broke overhead. Sara was manic and couldn’t stop talking, even when Christo walked ahead, fingers plugging his ears. He sat, teeth chattering, on a park bench while she wired Pierce collect, asking him to send as much money as he could as soon as he could. The clerk gaped at her in the baggy green work shirt, the impossible balloon pants she had to hold up by the belt loops.

  “Spot of trouble?”

  “My house burned down,” Sara said gravely. “Guess I left the bacon on too long.”

  A large chunk of money was handed over to her within two hours and Sara alternately wept and apologized for being so sentimental. They spent the remainder of the morning shopping for clothes, lingered over a lunch of lobster salad and cappuccino, and touched down at Logan Airport at dusk. A freshman gofer of Pierce’s decked out in chauffeur’s livery was there to meet them and, in a long black limousine equipped with stereo and wet bar, to transport them to an all-stops-pulled welcome home party already in progress.

  The following day Pierce invited Christo’s suggestions as to how he might best demonstrate his gratitude.

  “I could use a job.”

  The exam period preceding spring vacation was but a few days away. Christo was given a car, detailed instructions on how to find five area campuses, a promise of liberal commissions, and a shopping bag full of amphetamines.

  “Sweet and soft as butter, that sister of yours.” Christo held the stem of his empty glass like a cigarette between middle and index fingers. “I can still see her in that sea-blue gown with the tassels at the waist and the whole room levitating when she’d walk through.”

  “That party—” Pierce thumped his elbows on the table. “That party cost me over two grand.”

  “Commerce has made you vulgar, you shithead.” Fractured little smile, head going ruefully from side to side. “I’ve got only one regret from that whole thing. One large regret.”

  “Let’s have it then. By all means.”

  “I never slept with her.”

  “I don’t know about that, jazzbo.” Pierce squinted at him and the lamplight was harsh on his yellow, ruling-class hair. “From what she says in her letters, the only type of sex Sara enjoys is with herself.”

  “You’ve got a real close family, Pierce. That’s nice.” He stood, stretched, moved toward the spiral stairs. “But I’m glad I never did.”

  Pierce spread his arms on the table, seeming to embrace the whole of its dark surface. “You going to retrieve your friend?”

  “Nah, let her float awhile. But I ought to get us a hotel.”

  “Do that anytime.” Pierce waved dismissingly. “The kind of hotels you like are never full. It’s early, for Christ’s sake. Stick around and I’ll tell you about my book, we’ll maybe shoot some dice or something.”

  “Look, man, I’ve been on the road a long—”

  “But it’s early. More gimlets?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, more gimlets. You shithead.”

  8

  THE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING in Room 31 of the Kenilworth Hotel (Transients Welcome). From a thick and muggy sleep Tildy ascended through those first turbid layers of consciousness as in a bubble of gas. She became instantly aware of phlegm dangling like a cord of taffy in her throat, raw from the forty some-odd cigarettes she’d smoked the night before. She forced open her eyes and, bit by bit, pegged her location. Christo. New York. Scumbag hotel. It was impossible to gauge the time of day because the windows were painted the same bile yellow as the walls. Good morning, Naked City, and thanks for everything.

  She lifted the receiver and Christo’s voice rasped in her ear.

  “Hiya, bunny. Ready to roll?”

  Her lips moved silently against the holes in the plastic mouthpiece. She belched at him, whispered, “Where are you?”

  “Seventy-ninth and Lexington. Been hiking around since eight o’clock. I tried to wake you for breakfast but you kicked me.”

  “’M sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. I kicked you back. You all right?”

  “Feel like dough. A big tub of rancid bread dough.”

  “Okay, okay. Get yourself in the shower and let it run awhile. Brush your teeth, run a little sandpaper over your face and get into some clothes. You’ll be meeting me in one hour outside the Planned Parenthood Thrift Shop at Seventy-fourth and Third. There’s doings on for tonight and we need to make some preparations.”

  “Why?”

  “Seventy-fourth and Third. Southeast corner.” And he hung up.

  After retching in the shower, Tildy felt much better. She dosed her dehydrated system with two cans of orange pop from the lobby vending machine and tried to sharpen the focus of her eyes over the morning headlines: a Long Island building contractor had been accused of engaging in deviant sex with members of his scout troop; an off-duty transit cop had shot a Dutch tourist in a dispute over a parking space.

&n
bsp; The man at the desk gave her a couple of cigarettes for the road. He spoke just enough English to tell her how to get crosstown but in the 77th Street station she went up the stairs to walk in an adverse northerly direction for several blocks before realizing her mistake.

  She arrived at the appointed corner a half hour late. Christo took pains to mime his annoyance, flinging the butt of his hotdog at her as she advanced shading her eyes.

  “I thought you’d maybe gone back to sleep.”

  “Who can sleep with all this excitement?”

  “Don’t get snotty.”

  “So I’m here. What’s the project?”

  Christo reported that he and Pierce had drawn up tentative plans for a joint business venture, something that would move him out of the man-Friday class. “He’s finally going to steer me onto something ripe, the bastard. A bit of the long green. After all this time.” An evening of revelry had been scheduled to celebrate their new partnership.

  “Congratulations. I hope you’ll both be very happy, but did I really have to come all this way to hear about it?”

  “Right now we’re looking for uniforms.”

  “Uniforms?”

  “The Canteen has a very strict dress code.”

  The Canteen, he went on to explain, was the nightclub sensation of the nouveau hip nation, a “private” pleasure facility with an exclusivity that hardened Manhattan smarties had not yet fully decoded. Housed in an enormous structure occupying half a block on lower Tenth Avenue (it had been in previous incarnations a furniture warehouse, a television studio, and—briefly—a performance space for the Theatre of Last Resort, a dramaturgic cabal following the teachings of the structural anthropologist Claude Fantomas), the Canteen had with great expense and lavish attention to detail been made into a flyboy’s furlough wet dream of flash and high times circa 1944. In order to have any chance of being admitted, it was necessary to be decked out in scrupulously authentic period costume. Tennis champs and teevee luminaries with their own line of hair-care products had been turned away for reasons of unsuitable clothing. The management discouraged the patronage of celebs anyway. The Canteen was a place to get away from all that, where status licked the boots of style; no amount of juice, no carefully accrued influences and interfaces of the social powerplant could prevail if one was not “aw-reet” and in the swing with the Swing.

  “Marvelous,” Tildy grumbled. “I came a thousand miles to play dress-ups.”

  “Hey, you’re welcome to sit around the hotel all night doing crossword puzzles.”

  The thrift shop aisles were jammed with women on safari for bargains—not that there were any bargains to be had. The shop’s volunteer staff, young debs unable to land a situation on the museum/gallery circuit and marking time until that photographic expedition to Ecuador could be finalized (“Daddy knows someone at National Geographic”), certainly knew the value of things: three-figure price tags on art deco cocktail sets; dinner gowns with designer labels intact at twice the cost of Orchard Street knockoffs; even crayon-defaced editions of Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins were a dollar and up. But money spent to good effect, when you were helping to defuse the population bomb.

  It took them the better part of the afternoon to piece together their wardrobes, flashing in and out of the changing cubicle, posing for one another, rejecting one selection after another. Christo finally chose a headwaiter’s holiday suit, light brown with blue pinstripes and wedge lapels; a lemon-yellow shirt; two-tone wingtips and clocked socks; a hand-painted cravat by Al-Hy Haberdashery of Flatbush Avenue; and a rather decrepit snap-brim hat. Tildy, who was terribly hard to fit, was forced to settle for something rather more cutesie than she’d hoped—a flouncy print dress with Mardi Gras dancers on a mottled field of blue and black. With fishnet stockings, red satin wedgies and an orange chiffon scarf at the throat, she’d look like a real chippie. Blow jobs behind the PX. Hey, Joe, you got gum?

  Six hours later they were traveling downtown in a Checker cab and drinking rye and ginger out of paper cups.

  “Hubba hubba,” Christo said, fortifying his drink from the pint. “I just know we’re gonna sizzle tonight.”

  Her feet propped on the jumpseat in front of her, Tildy gazed at the scene unrolling like a scroll past the window. She was amazed by the level of activity at this late hour, the sheer density of bodies on the avenue. In Houston, previously the largest settlement she’d visited, it had been nearly impossible to buy a box of tampons after ten P.M.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “The last few days have been strange. I feel like I just got out of the hospital after a long series of tests.”

  “But you’re fine, just fine. Look at those nice white muscles. Hubba hubba.”

  Tildy cranked her window down and emptied her cup on the pavement.

  The Canteen was situated in a zone of novelty wholesalers, juke box dealers and distributors of Latin records. The entrance was on a gloomy cross street with its own canopy of smells; spoiled meat, soot, wet newspapers. Tildy breathed through her mouth. In the doorway of a dead luncheonette a man with a bandaged head crooned softly while staring into a brown paper bag.

  Tildy slid her arm through Christo’s. “Is my lipstick on straight?”

  Their clothes passed muster at the door and their “temporary membership” cards were accepted by an Oriental bruiser in a Shore Patrol outfit after examination under an ultraviolet lamp. At the end of a long corridor lined with potted palms, Christo gave a fifty to a combat nurse toying sullenly with her cuticles, and was handed in exchange a book of ration coupons, the only currency recognized inside. They pushed through a pair of tufted leather swinging doors to another checkpoint (a woman in “Rosie the Riveter” masquerade presented Tildy with a heart-shaped box of chocolates, on the house), through a second set of doors, and into the jangle and heat of party time.

  From the top of the carpeted stairs the room looked big enough to hold an aircraft carrier. Velvet hangings along the side walls were pulled back to reveal huge smoked mirrors that swallowed the room and spat it out on the opposite side. An all-white gutbucket combo—two brass, two reeds and rhythm—churned through “Bugle Call Rag” atop the terraced black glass stage, riffing away at vein-popping tempo while mucho authentic kittens and kats jitterbugged, lindy-hopped, trucked and pecked on the dance floor. Figures jostled and bounced in the blue backlighting of the large bar, built to resemble the front section of a medium-range bomber in profile, complete with cockpit and bubble canopy. Girls in Red Cross uniforms distributed coffee and doughnuts from stainless steel carts. Waiters in sailor suits glided among the tables (each with its own bowl of roses and shaded lamp throwing shadows across the damask cloth) on rubber-wheeled roller skates; the more ambitious would execute an occasional leap or pirouette, perhaps hoping that some starmaker in the crowd would notice them, perhaps merely happy in their work.

  It was several minutes before they finally located Pierce sitting at a shadowy corner table beneath a sepia photograph of Joe Louis twisting Max Schmeling’s head around with a right cross. He was negotiating with two rice-powdered dollies who not long ago had made him the target for tonight and, without a word, helped themselves to seats at his table.

  Dodie and Charmaine had known each other since junior high. They shared an apartment in the West Village. They worked for competing ad agencies but met each day on their lunch hour to promenade up Madison Avenue sharing a joint. Their one consuming ambition was to escape this urban anchorage for a brand-new hot blood dimension—a world, as Dodie often spoke of it, of Europe and yachts; and their sensitive antennae rated Pierce as someone with access.

  “Don’t mind the ladies, they’re part of the floor show,” he said and made perfunctory introductions.

  “What a beautiful name.” Charmaine slurred her words, having earlier ignored Dodie’s admonition that Tuinals did nothing for one’s charm. “Are you French?”

  Tildy poked at one of the floating roses. “Not yet.”

  “I was
in France once,” Charmaine said quietly, unable to remember if this was a true anecdote or one she’d invented. “We flew over for a pâté festival.”

  Up on stage the drummer broke into a solo. He was a scrawny kid with a pencil mustache, a propeller beanie atop patent-leather hair and a head full of boogie shuffle licks as plain as a dental chart. The audience whooped him on; it was like a pep rally. Even leaning across the table Pierce had to shout to be heard.

  “Miss Florida is lovely, a bloody vision. I’m forced to say she looks too good for you.”

  “Kiss mine.”

  “Think about it, think about some of the women you were running with in the past. They had the shakes. And black circles around their eyes.”

  “Well, dig it, the past has passed. Mister Christo will be running on the fast track from now on.”

  The drummer was into his windup now. Coming out of a tomtom onslaught, he popped off the stool, keeping the pulse alive on bass and hi-hat, bobbing his head and twirling his sticks. Real gone. He hit a brief mambo rattle on the cowbell and slung the sticks to one side. Only half turned, barely looking up, Tildy speared them both in one hand with two perfectly timed rotations of her wrist.

  She faced Dodie and Charmaine with an ingratiating smile, offered them on an open palm like breadsticks. “Souvenirs?”

  “Zowie.” Dodie clapped both hands to her head. “That was fantastic what you did.”

  “I was alone a lot as a kid,” Tildy said. “Learned to catch insects on the wing.”

  Charmaine looked on adoringly but turned shyly away when Tildy met her eyes, to stare down her own cleavage, plucking at the rounded collar of her black silk pyjamas right out of a Terry & The Pirates panel.

  The band returned for a couple of rideout choruses to heavy applause.

  “Yeah, thank you. Copacetic.” The alto player brought his palms together as he bowed. “We gonna cool off right now, but we’ll be back later to sock you and knock you nonstop.”

  “Hey, black shoes, you oughta hock those instruments.” This from a deep voice at the bar.