She took the last peg out of her mouth, and then glanced down and saw him. Instead of blushing, or hurrying inside the house, she planted her hands on her hips, and said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Algernon? Never seen anyone doing their laundry before?’ But her tone was more provocative than snappy.
Henry raised his hat. ‘I’m sorry. I was just thinking how charming you looked.’
‘Oh, charming, is it? Well, I’ve been called this and that, and even delicious, but charming’s a new one.’
‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘You didn’t, don’t worry about it. But you’re a bit early, aren’t you?’
‘Early for what?’
The girl blew out her cheeks in amusement. ‘Early for what,’ she mocked him. She opened the door of her house and then looked back at him. ‘Come on up,’ she said. And then, ‘Early for what. Pfff.’
Henry was left in the dusty street, holding his hat. He hesitated for a moment, but then the door opened again, and the girl demanded, ‘Come on then. You may be early, but I haven’t got all day.’ Henry climbed the stairs, and went into the house after her.
Inside, he found himself in a small lobby, with a coatstand, and an ugly brown china pot for umbrellas. Beyond that, through a curtain of red glass beads, he could see an overfurnished sitting-room, crowded with occasional tables, and red plush armchairs, and a huge chaise-longue covered in tiger-skin. In the far corner, there was a patent organ; although it was difficult to make out much else because of the density of the curtains that hung at the windows, layers of lace and swags of velvet, all beaded and bobbled and elaborately drawn up into gathers. At the opposite side of the room, the door was slightly ajar, and as he rattled through the bead curtain, Henry glimpsed the corner of a large iron-framed bed, and the interior of a bedroom that was just as excessively furnished. Plaster cherubs and lamp-fringes.
The girl came directly up to Henry in her bare feet and smiled up at him prettily. She was so small that the top of her head reached only up to his third waistcoat button. ‘You must have come in last night,’ she said. Her accent was very Eastern, and cultured. ‘I suppose they took you to the Pottawattamie. Well, they usually do, and so they should. Mrs Newell’s a very respectable lady. Most of the time, anyway. She does have her moments, though; if you like your romances on the gigantic scale.’ She pronounced ‘gigantic’ in a deep, droll voice.
‘My name’s Henry,’ said Henry, holding out his hand.
‘Well, how do you do. My name’s Annabel. Would you like some coffee now, or afterwards.’
Henry shrugged. ‘I don’t think there’s going to be any after-wards. You see, the truth is, I can’t even afford the before.’
‘I haven’t even told you what the rates are yet. Morning rate is more economical than evening rate.’
‘Annabel, I’m sorry. I’m stony. You want me to pull my pockets inside out, and show you?’
Annabel stood looking up at him with an expression of complete disbelief. ‘You don’t have any money at all? A smart fellow like you?’
He shook his head.
‘Well, what the hell did you come up here for?’ she snapped, although she didn’t seem to be particularly cross.
‘You invited me.’
‘I know I invited you,’ she retorted. ‘But not for free. What do you think I am, a charity for penniless emigrants? How can you possibly not have any money?’
Henry said, ‘I could use that cup of coffee, if that comes free.’
Annabel let out two or three exasperated pffs, and said, ‘if that comes free,’ two or three times; and then smiled. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Hang up your hat, and take a seat. It should be ready by now.’
She went through to a small sunlit kitchen and made a lot of noise with a copper coffee-pot. Then she came back with a tray, on which there were two delicate demitasse cups, and a faience coffee-jug, and a plate of lace cookies, which looked home-made.
‘Very genteel,’ nodded Henry.
‘Naturally,’ said Annabel, with defiance. ‘I’m a very genteel person. Gentility herself.’
She poured coffee. The steam curled up into the gloom of the room. ‘Have a cookie,’ she said. ‘I bake them myself. All kinds, I adore them. You should taste my sand tarts.’
‘I’d love to.’
Annabel sat back, tugging her nightgown demurely over her knees. ‘I don’t generally work in the mornings anyway. I did once, when there was a whole waggon-train of prospectors leaving for Sacramento. In fact, I worked all day. But, generally, I don’t.’
Henry sipped his coffee, and looked around the room. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’
‘Well, it wasn’t expensive to furnish, I can tell you that. That chaise-longue you’re sitting on, I found that by the side of the road, a little way back towards Oakland. Same with the organ. There it was, all alone, in the middle of a field, and the wind was blowing down its pipes, so that it was playing all by itself. Abandoned, you see. They carry all their prized possessions out from the east, and it’s only when they start to cross the prairie that they realize that some solid oak sideboard they prized in Pennsylvania is just so much dead weight when they’re trying to get to California before the snows set in.’
‘And you?’ asked Henry, over the rim of his cup. ‘How did you get here?’
‘That’s my business,’ said Annabel. It was quite plain from the look on her face that she wasn’t going to tell him; that she never told anybody.
‘You’re schooled, though.’
‘Certainly. Providence Ladies’ College, Rhode Island.’
‘And now?’
‘I’m happy. I hope that doesn’t bother you. I live by myself but I get all the gentlemen I want and nobody ever does anything to hurt me. Not inside here, at any rate,’ she said tapping her forehead.
Henry sat for a while, saying nothing. Annabel nibbled her lace cookie, and watched him. Outside, two dogs began to yap at each other.
‘Did somebody rob you?’ she asked, at last.
Henry glanced up. ‘Yes, well, you could say that.’
‘Nobody here, I hope. Not in Council Bluffs.’
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t want to hear it.’
‘Well, I would, as a matter of fact,’ said Annabel. She looked at him brightly, and smiled. ‘You’re not used to talking about yourself, are you? You think a lot, but you don’t talk. Well, you should try it. I make a lot of men try it. It’s as good as a fuck, sometimes, if you’ll excuse my Iowan.’
Henry looked back at her with curiosity. Even Augusta had never spoken to him like this. He slowly set his coffee-cup back on the tray, without taking his eyes off Annabel, and then he said, ‘All right. If you really want to hear, I’ll tell you.’
He told her everything; and while he did, she repeatedly replenished his cup with fresh coffee. He told her about Doris, and how Doris had died. He told her about Alby Monihan, and William Paterson, and Augusta, and most of all about Augusta. He even told her how Augusta had encouraged him to take her from behind; and this was something that he never would have believed that he would ever tell anybody, but Annabel listened without a qualm; interested, encouraging, and unabashed.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ she asked him. ‘Are you going to go after her?’
‘I thought about it. But, no. I think it’s better the way it is.’
‘You’re going to go on to California instead?’
Henry nodded. ‘If I can raise enough money to join an emigrant waggon-train; or if I can persuade a guide to take me by mule. The nigger at Mrs Newell’s said that a man called Edward McLowery was the best.’
‘Ted McLowery? I suppose so. But Ted McLowery’s not your usual run of fellow. I don’t know whether you and he would get along very well. He charges a high price, too. Nearly as much as me.’
‘Well, once I get my trunks out of the baggage-store at the depot, I’ll have quite a bit to sell. Stone-working tools, cloth
es, boots; a rotary grindstone. I should make a hundred dollars at least.’
‘You’re going to make a hundred dollars out of stone-working tools in the middle of the prairie? There isn’t a stone for two hundred miles.’
‘I’ll get whatever I can,’ replied Henry, a little petulantly. ‘Anything’s better than nothing at all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Annabel coaxed him, ‘I didn’t mean to be smart.’ There was another long pause, and then Henry said, ‘I don’t suppose you could lend me 75 cents.’
Annabel burst out laughing, a high peal of a laugh, like a very young girl at a party. ‘What a cheek you’ve got! Coming up here without a penny in your pocket, drinking my coffee and eating my cookies; and now you want a tip!’
‘Well, listen, I’m sorry,’ said Henry. He was past embarrassment now. ‘But my trunks are in the depot, and 75 cents is what it’s going to cost to get them out. I’ll pay you back, I promise.’
Annabel came over, and leaned forward, and kissed him on the forehead. Henry found himself looking straight into those blue cornflower eyes of hers from very close up, and smelling coffee and cookie-sugar on her breath. He glanced down into the open neck of her nightgown, and he could see the deep cleavage of her heavy breasts.
‘Henry,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll lend you 75 cents, for as long as you like, without interest. There’s only one condition.’
Henry said nothing, but stared back into her eyes, so near to her now that he could see the little flecks of brown in her irises.
‘Come to bed,’ she said. ‘That’s my one condition.’
Afterwards, he would remember that morning as if he had read about it in a book, because it seemed so separate from the rest of his life; an event that had its own beginning, its own middle, and its own ending. Nothing more crucial to the course of his career came out of that morning than 75 cents, with which he was able to redeem his trunks from the railroad depot; and yet he would never forget it. It haunted him for years to come, because in spite of its separateness, he always saw it as a painful illustration of the right people meeting at the wrong moment, of lives out of joint. Annabel had been here too long, and she had experienced too much, in spite of the fact that she was probably two or three years younger than he was. Henry on the other hand was on his way east, with a destiny ahead of him, a destiny which he couldn’t afford to keep waiting. Annabel had suffered something in her past which she couldn’t talk about, not on the first meeting; and while Henry had suffered enough to be able to understand it, when she eventually felt that she could trust him, that time would never come, because she had to stay and he had to go, and both of them knew it.
She knelt up on the big iron-framed bed, on the tousled sheets in which she had slept last night, and lifted her nightgown. Heavy white thighs, a dark bush of pubic hair, a soft rounded stomach. Her nightgown caught on her breasts as she lifted it, but one after the other, with a tantalizing tumble, her breasts came free, big and wide-nippled, and lightly decorated with pale blue veins.
Henry untwisted the buttons of his waistcoat, loosened his cufflinks, stepped out of his britches. Then he stood naked watching her: a tall, quite muscular young man, with just a suggestion of a belly from too much beer, and rounded buttocks. There was a white scar on the left side of his chest where a maul had slipped.
Annabel lay back on the bed and opened her thighs for him. The lips of her vulva parted moistly. He climbed on top of her, and with both hands she guided him in. She felt very hot inside, as if she were running a fever, hot and wet on the cool thermometer of his hardened penis.
Like a book, the morning had a series of its own illustrations: Henry bowing over Annabel, clasping her breasts in hands that were scarcely able to contain them. Henry and Annabel kissing, and the sun through the half-drawn curtains just catching the thin thread of saliva that joined them, lip to lip, a spider’s-web at dawn. Annabel with her eyes closed; her cheeks flushed up like flowers. Henry lying on his back, with Annabel bridging his body with her thick white thighs, her neck arched back so that her long plaits brushed the bed.
It seemed to take hours and yet it took no time at all. At last Henry found himself lying alone on the bed, while Annabel clattered in the kitchen. There were sounds of splashing water. Annabel hummed, and sang snatches of popular songs, never quite finishing a line. After a while she appeared in the doorway, naked, and smiled at him. She had taken the rags from out of her hair, and she was brushing it out, a huge mass of soft clean dark brown curls.
‘Well?’ she said, sitting down beside him, and kissing him.
‘I don’t think I know what to say,’ he told her.
‘You don’t have to say anything. It’s the best way. Say nothing; and do nothing; and always trust to luck.’
He cupped her breast in his hand, and lightly rubbed the nipple with his thumb, so that it crinkled and stiffened. ‘You’ve done something very important for me today,’ he said, in a hoarse voice.
She kissed him again. ‘I know.’
He looked up at her, and she smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Every man has the same problem. I think they call it vanity.’
Henry slowly nodded in acknowledgement. He knew that he could never have her. He knew, too, that even if he could, he would never want her. He kept thinking of all those other men who had climbed into this bed; last night, and the night before, and the night before that; and all those other hands that had caressed these same breasts. The same would happen tonight. And, given a week, she would forget altogether the young man from Carmington in the smart linen suit who didn’t have a penny; and what he looked like, and even what his name was.
‘You want 75 cents,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it for you.’
‘Annabel,’ said Henry.
She turned; but then she realized what he was going to say, and shook her head. ‘Come back here one day,’ she told him. ‘Then you can pay me. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I won’t let you.’
‘Is it always like this?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But that’s no business of yours.’
‘But why?’
Annabel got up off the bed again, and reached for her robe, sapphire-blue silk with Chinese lions embroidered on it, a gift from a Chinese railroad worker.
‘You see this writing?’ Annabel asked Henry. ‘This says, “The way is like an empty bottle.”’
‘Do you know what that means?’ Henry asked her.
Annabel shook her head. All those soft brown curls. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But the fellow who gave it to me, he said you shouldn’t have to know what it means. It’s one of those things that you either understand, or you don’t. Like intuition.’
He walked back to the railroad depot through the dusty, bleached-out street; jingling three quarters in his hand. Back at the baggage office, he retrieved his trunks; and then persuaded a grizzled old porter to lend him a hand-barrow on the promise of a drink when he returned it. Trundling the barrow behind him, he made his way to Seforim’s Pawn Shop on Third and Quick. It was a dark, musty shop, smelling of camphor and furniture polish; and it was crowded like a bizarre indoor forest with bureau mirrors, hatstands, clocks under glass, stuffed eagles, armchairs, pianos, and chandeliers. This was all the debris of disappointed pioneers: the luxuries they could no longer afford to keep, the treasures they couldn’t carry any further.
Mr Seforim sat behind his counter, a round-faced bespectacled Russian Jew wearing a red flannel shirt and a wide-brimmed cow-puncher’s hat. Like so many Orthodox Jews, he had cut off his payess, his long side-curls, when he had arrived in the New World, and had turned his back on most of the old traditions. But a mezuzah still hung next to the door-frame which led into his living-room, a small box containing a scroll from Deuteronomy, which Mr Seforim would habitually touch as he entered that part of his shop he called home.
‘What’s on the barrow?’ he asked, as Henry climbed over a stack of Home Doctors and Family Encyclopedias.
‘Do you want to co
me and look?’ asked Henry.
‘As long as it isn’t evening-wear. You’d never believe the evening-wear. I could dress a thousand people in evening-wear; the shirt-fronts I’ve got. The spats. What do you do in the middle of the prairie with two hundred pairs assorted spats?’
He followed Henry outside into the sunlight, sniffing and squinching up his eyes. Henry opened his three trunks, one by one, and said, ‘There. Clothes, tools, books. Whatever you want.’
‘What are all these tools?’ Mr Seforim wanted to know, indicating Henry’s chisels and hammers with an irritable sweep of his hand. ‘What do you do with tools like these?’
‘These are the finest that money can buy,’ said Henry. ‘Look at that sledge, that’s crucible cast steel; worth a dollar-fifty. Then there’s a whole set of chisels, and six different spalling hammers.’
‘Yes, but what for? Fixing teeth?’
‘No, stonework. I’m a monumental mason. I carve grave-markers, you know? Tombstones. Anything from a luxury granite sarcophagus to a budget-rate stump in the ground.’
‘And how are you going to make a living if you pledge me your tools?’
‘I’ll work that out when I get to California.’
‘Maybe you’re going to break stone with your bare hands?’
Henry wiped sweat from his forehead. In spite of the wind that was blowing across the prairies of Nebraska, and over the breadth of the Big Muddy, it was uncomfortably hot and dusty in Council Bluffs, and he began to feel that he could scarcely breathe; especially now that his life depended on how much Mr Seforim would offer him for all of his possessions.
‘You know what I have to do?’ said Mr Seforim. He hauled out a large green handkerchief and blew his nose, wiping it afterwards from side to side as if he were challenging it to a duel. ‘I have to say to myself, when is this man likely to come back and redeem these tools? That’s what I have to say. And then I have to say to myself, supposing he never comes back, then who is going to buy them, and when, and for how much? Now, how many monumental masons do you think are going to come travelling through Council Bluffs in the next two or three years or so, looking for tools and eager to pay me their best dollar?’
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