She laughed, but her laughter did not interfere with the flow of her speech. “But after three husbands, count ‘em, three, my man finally got it through my thick skull that I had become a perfect, living, walking example of Bronx morality in its most stifling form, are you with me? Then! Breakthrough! And what do I do, I begin to act as if I have to have an affair with everybody I go to bed with! Don’t you see? Just a very transparent extension of the same old morality bit. You have to agree, because what’s an affair but marriage sans mumbo jumbo? I mean, emotionally, you’re taking just as much punishment! Aren’t you? From a lover as from a husband? No argument there? Good! So!
“Suddenly it dawned on me: What, if you please, is wrong with just plain old s-e-x? I was sure this is what my man had been getting at. Of course they don’t say it straight out, it has to come from you. Which if you’re as dumb as I am, and I can be awfully dumb in certain departments, can be terribly expensive. Let’s just not think about what this thing has cost me in terms of good hard cash! Okay? Anyway, I began to, well, walk through a few things, you know, just trying my legs, and baby, it was nowhere: I couldn’t even reach a climax!
“Then! Tonight, when I came out of that bathroom and saw you, pure symbol—that’s what you are, you know, symbol, oh yes, pure symbol, nothing more, nothing less. You didn’t know that? I can’t believe it. Anyway, I knew I was going to make a real breakthrough. No thinking, either, my dear, huh-uh; feeling, just feeling. You see the state I’m in, don’t you? And didn’t I walk right up to you? Well, I can tell you I’ve never done that before! What do you think I am? I simply had this feeling and there was nothing I could do about it, and furthermore I didn’t want to do anything about it. Oh, when the time comes, naturally, I’ll have to ask myself why do I choose a cowboy, and second, why a cowboy whore.
“But not tonight! No, sir. Being analytical during is the kiss of death. Your orgasm goes right out the window. Kiss me right now, will you? Before we talk the whole thing away? Hey listen! Would it embarrass you if I turned on this great big glaring ceiling light over my bed and looked at you all over? Because I’ve never really studied a man completely, I mean every square inch of him, and I’m dying to. May I? I mean aren’t peculiar requests a part of your profession?
“And incidentally, how much is this going to cost me, anyway?”
2
Joe watched the woman speak. But his hearing wasn’t working in the usual way. All her talk might have been rain and there was glass between them. He heard her words and he saw them but they never got to him.
What he did hear was something that had to do with the capsule he’d swallowed, a high, thin, private sound, not really a sound at all. You could just as easily picture it: say it was a high wire he had flown to, at some altitude that caused a blending of all the senses, sight, sound, touch, making them one.
At one such moment, he chose to see the party from this altitude: saw a cowboy, himself, looking past a jumble of faceless party figures toward the end of the room where two young people in black sat on the floor at the feet of a woman.
But from his point of view these three people were not three at all: They were four: and one of them was himself. He belonged there with them. He was Joe Buck, the cowboy, and there was his blonde, sitting with the two beautiful children.
Now of course it was clear to him why he had been invited to the party: He was the missing member of something, always had been, but now everything would be straightened out.
There was a commotion at the other end of the room. Heads turned to watch what appeared to be the introduction of some sort of entertainment. The bongo player produced a drum roll and the girl on the recorder did her best to imitate a fanfare.
The MacAlbertsons, meanwhile, helped their lady to her feet. She seemed to be either drunk or drugged. But once on her feet she was able to walk under her own power, giving the effect of an imperfectly operated marionette. There was the clank and tinkle and jangle of costume jewelry as she pushed dozens of bracelets from her wrists up toward her elbows and made her way to the center of the room.
Joe believed that this was the moment at which the purpose of the evening would be made clear to others as it was to him. A kind of wedding was taking place, a wedding of a somewhat unusual sort, more a reunion in which the principals had a deeper, more mysterious than usual kinship with one another. The fact that he had never actually seen these three people before tonight did not seem at all contradictory: His chimerical vision was such that any rupture in the usual logic of things achieved at once a new and higher order of fitness all its own.
For instance, what happened next was in a certain sense impossible, but nevertheless he saw it take place. The white-haired woman took one sweeping gaze at the people gathered there, and as she did so her eye touched upon Joe’s for a moment and then moved on. He trembled and his entire body went cold with shock. For in that moment he had been looked upon by Sally Buck. She was much older now and more outlandish than he had remembered her. But still she was Sally Buck, and he had had this brief, coldly vivid view of her. And he knew now that it was his grandmother, returned from the grave, who had sent those two sad-as-death, poisonously pretty children into the streets of New York to search for him. And for what purpose? To tell him something urgent, of course. And here it was, the message was about to be spoken:
The MacAlbertsons, looking for all the world like dream children, slender and neuter in their tight black clothing, clearly the sort of young you’d send as messengers from the grave, had drawn close to the old lady, perhaps to catch her if she fell or to lend some other form of support. Now she raised her hands in a bid for attention, and when everyone was quiet, her hands flew to her face and she began to giggle and cough. She seemed to have forgotten what she was supposed to say. There followed a quick huddle with the MacAlbertsons.
Joe’s harem woman, the one in the orange dress, asked him why he was perspiring, but Joe didn’t seem to hear the question. Then she said, “I think you ought to eat something, because the trick is to keep eating, don’t you know that? Shall I get you a sandwich?”
He said something to her and she went away.
Now both the old lady and the girl were pointing at the boy called Hansel. Every eye in the room followed his movements as he painted a great black X on the sign, canceling out the words IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK HE replaced the broom in the bucket and joined his sister. The two of them nodded at the old woman, restoring to her the attention of the room. She made more noises with her bracelets and coughed up some phlegm, which she spat into a handkerchief tucked into her waist. Then she held up one hand for silence, waited for it, got it, and spoke in a loud, flat, shaky, Midwestern drawl.
“It’s not later than y’think, not n’more it idden.”
She paused, sucking in her cheeks and pursing her lips as if they were too dry for more speech: The effect was of a series of quick desperate kisses being sent into the air of the party. Gretel MacAlbertson gave her a sip of beer. The woman licked her lips and gasped, then suddenly shouted: “Time!”—holding both hands motionless in the air and seeming to suspend the very commodity under discussion. There was another series of coughing spasms.
The party waited in silence for a moment, but slowly a murmuring started and grew, and Joe heard a man say, “She’d rather be here than in some doorway. Besides, she’s too far gone to know what they’re doing to her.” And a woman answered: “Oh, don’t tell me she doesn’t know. I think it’s cruel. These people still have minds, no matter how far gone they are!”
The old woman huddled again with the MacAlbertsons, obviously being coached by them. Then she faced the gathering once more and suddenly shouted: “Time is run out on us. They ain’t no more of it!” Her lips rolled back, showing small yellow teeth and a mechanical smile that appeared to have no other purpose than to display the very last trick of the marionette master.
She looked at the MacAlbertsons for approval. They both nodded vigorously. Then, as if
she had broken in the middle, the old woman’s top half fell forward in a jangle of metal. She was taking a bow. The MacAlbertsons applauded. Everyone joined in. The noise grew to absurd, thunderous proportions, was further increased by whistles, shouting, foot stomping and even two or three screams.
Ratso was at Joe’s side, nudging him with his elbow. “How come you’re clapping? What the hell was ‘at sup posed to be, a song an a dance? I thought they were gonna make her bite the head off a chicken at least.”
Joe moved away from Ratso, threading his way through the noise, stepping over spread-out legs and around crossed knees and cocktail tables and benches and musicians, closer and closer to the old woman, who had returned by now to her chair behind the MacAlbertsons.
The dark lady in orange suddenly appeared in his path holding in both hands a big, thick sandwich. “I thought you wanted this!” she said.
Joe said, “Thanks,” but he didn’t take the sandwich. He touched her shoulder, she stepped aside, he continued to move toward the old woman.
He felt that the party had suddenly gone wrong. A moment ago he had known something. Something important about his life had come clear to him, and then he had forgotten it. Or perhaps he had only been on the brink of knowing and it had been withheld from him. By this old lady. Who was she?
He studied her from this close range and found her to be even older than she had appeared during the entertainment. She was apparently in pain, too—seemed to have been knocked silly by it. Her forehead was creased with a network of tensions and lines. The face powder she wore covered some kind of skin eruption. Her eyes, blinking constantly, seemed never to have known rest. They were the quivering blooms of some endless suffering whose beginnings had long ago been forgotten. At odd moments, an inner contraction caused her to wince as if she had been kicked, her eyes would remain closed for a moment, and her face would buckle into a mess of painted creases like an exploded candy sack.
Joe tried to remember just what it was he had come to ask of the old lady—or of the MacAlbertsons, for that matter. He stood right in front of them, but they paid no attention to him whatever: They seemed to have no power to look upon anything or anyone, except one another. And Joe himself was no longer able to see them from high up. His special sense had somehow gone dead on him. He no longer felt any kinship with these people. They were just a pretty boy and a pretty girl and a sick old lady trying to have a party. He had always wondered about parties, and now he was attending one and he didn’t much like it: If this was any sample, parties were even sadder than the streets were.
A big man with a shiny round face grabbed Joe’s arm and said, “Didn’t you hear what Mother Ceres said? She said you’d ticked your last tick-tock. So lay down, baby, you’re dead.” The man laughed and moved on to someone else, saying, “Did you hear what I said to that guy? I said, didn’t you hear what Mother Ceres said? She said …”
Joe went at once into action. He moved quickly to the man’s side, took hold of him with both arms, and said: “Hey, how come you pick me?”
“Pick you,” said the man with the round face. “What do you mean, pick you?”
“I mean, how come you said that to me? You think they’s somethin’ wrong with me, or what?”
“You’re crazy,” the man said. “Let go my arm.”
“I ain’t hurtin’ your arm. I want a answer,” Joe said.
Gretel MacAlbertson was standing there. “Thanks for coming,” she said to Joe, “but we want you to go now.”
Ratso was there, too. He said, “What’re you, bombed?” Then to the MacAlbertsons he said, “He’s just bombed, that’s all.”
As Ratso led him from the room and into the hallway, Joe said, “I’m not bombed. I was, but I’m not.”
Ratso’s coat had got buried; he began to rummage around for it.
Joe said, “I’m in a mess, is what I’m in. I’m in a big mess, and I got to fuck m’way out of it.”
Ratso said, “I feel crummy. I got to lie down.”
The woman with the orange dress appeared in the doorway. “Hey.”
Joe looked at her and she said, “I asked you how much, didn’t I?”
Joe kept his eye on the woman as he said, “Tell ‘er, Ratso.”
Ratso said, “Twenty dollars.”
The woman said, “Sold. Mine’s the dyed mouton. Under the gray herringbone. Let’s go.”
Ratso said, “And taxi fare for me. Twenty for him, and taxi fare for me. Okay?”
The woman said, “You know what I think? I think you ought to get lost, bad lost. Y’know? Like dead!”
“I agree,” Ratso said. “And for that service, I charge one dollar for taxi fare.”
The woman took a dollar from a small roll in her bosom and handed it to him. “When I count ten, begone. One, two, three …”
Ratso started down the stairs.
Joe helped the woman into her coat. “Hey,” he said. “Uh, what’s your name—honey?”
“Oh!” she said. “You don’t know, do you? I love that. But I know yours is Joe. Which is fabulous. Joe could be just anybody. Kiss me Joe, hold me Joe, move over Joe, go away Joe. Marvie! A perfect name for a male, um—person! Sort of like Rose for a girl.”
Below them was the sound of someone falling downstairs. Joe ran down the two flights two steps at a time and found Ratso on the first floor struggling with the banister trying to pull himself to his feet. Then he took a second fall. Joe picked him up and Ratso gave instructions on how he was to be lowered to the floor. Joe lowered him onto his stronger leg. Ratso clung to the newel post, his teeth clenched and his face dead white.
The woman had arrived by now on the second landing. As she descended the final flight of steps, she said, “What’s the matter?”
“He fell,” Joe said.
“Is he all right?”
“What’re you, smart?” Ratso said, then mimicked: “‘Is he all right?’“
“Well, if you’re all right,” she said, “why are you hanging onto the banister? Can you walk or not?”
“Can I walk! Natch’ly I can walk.” He took three steps, catching himself at the door. “What d’ya call that?”
“Yeah,” Joe said, “but to the subway?”
“No no, I’m infirm, I’ll never make it,” Ratso imitated a damsel. “Carry me!”
The woman said, “He’s got taxi fare.” She turned to Ratso. “You’re all right. Right?”
Ratso shouted, “I said yeah already!”
“He’s all right,” the woman told Joe. “Let’s go.”
3
An hour later, the woman, lying with her head supported on her elbow, touched at Joe with her free hand.
“That happens,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I mean, are you worried about it? Well, don’t be. Why don’t we just sort of lie here and—see what happens. Maybe even nap a little, huh?”
Joe reached across the bed and took a cigarette from the nightstand. “That’s something never happen to me before, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. Um, where’s the matches, ma’am?”
“In the top drawer.” While Joe lit his cigarette, she said, “Maybe if you didn’t call me ma’am, things’d work out better.”
Joe lay on his back and blew smoke up toward the ceiling. “First goddam time ‘at thing ever quit on me.”
A short laugh came from the woman.
Joe looked at her quickly. “What? You think I’m lying?”
She made an effort to straighten her face out. “No! Of course not. Something struck me funny, that’s all.”
“Yeah?” Joe said. “Well, what was that?”
“But it’s nothing.”
“Nothing, huh?”
“Oh please now! Honestly.”
Joe nodded his head and looked at the ceiling again.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Suddenly I just put myself in your shoes, and I realized that being a professional, well, that must be what really bothers you about a thing like this. No
t that you should be bothered, because it’s merely human, but I had this sudden awful picture of a bugler without a horn or a policeman without a stick, et cetera et cetera, and I just … I think I better shut up, I’m making it worse!”
Joe’s mind was working hard. He was turning over all the possible reasons for his failure, thinking of all the ways in which he had been weakened and wearied since his arrival in New York. And thinking of it, he felt the weakness, the weariness, like something running through him in place of blood. Little by little, the city had been drawing all that good juice from him, a little here, a little there, everything going out, nearly every second of the day, the sidewalks at every step drawing something out of him through his feet, the traffic noises sucking at his ears, the neon signs pulling something vital from his eyes, and nothing much coming in, coffee here, soup there, now and then a plate of wet spaghetti, a hamburger made of spiced sawdust, a bottle of beer. And none of it nourishing to anything in him except this weariness….
Midnight Cowboy Page 17