‘That porter was very rude,’ said Miss Marrow reflectively.
‘Yes,’ said Walker, ‘it’s a violent country.’
‘I quite hated them all there,’ she went on. ‘The customs men were terrible, I wonder whether they treat everyone like that.’
‘Probably,’ said Walker. ‘I don’t think it was personal.’
‘What do you think it was, then?’
‘I think they just hate people,’ Walker replied. ‘And their jobs. And foreigners. But apart from that they’re probably very good folk.’
‘But why should they? Our customs aren’t like that, are they? They’re polite. Why can’t these be polite too?’
‘Well, the problem is they’re afraid it might be mistaken for servility. They think we’re so polite to one another because we think other folk are our superiors.’
‘And are we?’ asked Miss Marrow.
The driver turned right round in his driving seat and looked at them both. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I finally figured out what it is that’s so funny about Europeans. You’re limeys, aren’t you? Well, I’ll tell you. You talk like I ain’t here.’ They shot through a changing light. ‘Actually, back there at the terminal – most folks give those guys sompn.’
‘There was a sign up there saying tipping was forbidden,’ said Walker.
‘There’s a sign up there saying you’ll feel better in a Maiden-form brazeer.’
‘They get good wages, don’t they?’ said Miss Marrow.
‘Sure,’ said the cabbie, ‘they’re like most of us. They like loot.’ He drove hard at a small old man who was crossing the street at an intersection; then braked hard. Walker and Miss Marrow tipped forward together and went on to the floor. ‘Be careful,’ said Miss Marrow.
‘Lady, you can do it better, you drive and I’ll sit in back.’
‘You’re frightening me,’ said Miss Marrow.
‘We all need a thrill once in a while,’ said the cabbie.
They must be getting near Miss Marrow’s hotel, and Walker turned to her and asked about her plans. She was leaving New York the next day. ‘Perhaps we could meet and you could see me off,’ she said. The city by now had grown so formidable a thing that the prospect of meeting anyone he knew delighted Walker; he arranged the occasion with pleasure, and found that Miss Marrow’s prim Anglicanism only faintly extended beyond his own uncertainty in the new world he had entered. Could he bear it? Could he grow to it? He was still trying to rationalize the interlude at the dock, to equate it with his new life, and all he could come up with was the feeling that fear and dislike of violence and aggression was an English middle-class trait that had somehow survived in him, a part of his bad self. He ought, he felt, not to have minded, to have welcomed it, and being thrown on the floor, for the truth it told about the thinness of what he was trying to leave.
‘Hey, don’t talk, look out the window,’ said the cabbie. ‘This is Times Square, centre of the universe. You can go to Grand Canyon, Death Valley, them places, believe me, you won’t find nothin’ like Times Square. Everything happens here. You know there ain’t one important person in the world never been in Times Square and looked up at the Camel guy blowing smoke-rings. Right up there, take a look. You got anything like that in Europe?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Miss Marrow. The taxi now twisted through a few back streets and came to a stop outside an hotel, the one Miss Marrow was staying at.
The cabbie turned round and looked at them. ‘What’s a matter, lady, ain’t you got legs?’
‘I’ll open it,’ said Walker; and he got out and carried Miss Marrow’s luggage inside.
‘Thank you, Porker,’ she said.
‘All right now?’
‘I hope so.’ She leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek, and Walker leaned right back and met her on the lips. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said.
The cab was still waiting. ‘Thought you’d maybe stay,’ said the cabbie. ‘She your lady-friend?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Walker.
‘Is it right what they say about English women?’
‘What do they say?’
‘You know,’ the cabbie said, ‘they’re frigid, don’t feel nothing down there.’
‘I hardly think so.’
‘Tell us what you know.’
‘Well, that’s not been my experience.’
‘That’s what I like to hear. A guy whose had experience. Lot of experience?’
‘Not terribly.’
‘How many?’
‘How many what?’
‘Different girls.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s it, who’s counting?’ said the cabbie. ‘Know that joke? That’s a Jewish joke. Well, I’ll tell you, you’re a guy likes experience, there’s plenty of it over here. All you gotta do is look a little. There’s no girls like American girls, once you got ’em excited. I can fix you up any time.’
‘Oh, I can manage,’ said Walker.
‘Yeah, an experienced man,’ said the cabbie, pulling out into the traffic. ‘I thought you English didn’t go for that kinda thing much.’
Walker saw that he was being ribbed; at the same time he could feel the city; the most citified of cities around him, with its wings, its shirt-sleeved cops, guns in holster, its clash of races – they were moving through the east side – and knew its violence, its blankness, its hostility. It was all for the viewing. He saw – an experienced man – the temptations of sex, titillation, violence; they came stronger than he had ever felt them. He was isolated, without connection, without substance; love recommended itself. Shouldn’t he at least have tried to spend the night with Miss Marrow? She was a half-willing woman; restoration of affections seemed in the air; perhaps she, though tougher, coping better, felt the new world as abrasively as he felt it. Perhaps she was missing him. And there was a kind of love that would have helped, warm, cosy, enveloping, comfortable, a welcome of breasts and breathing. An experienced man probably wouldn’t even have wished it; but experience was draining from him; he was the provincial in the city.
They were on the expressway, coming up to Brooklyn Bridge, its wires rising high above them. Tenements and waste ground showed; then the detritus around the river. The traffic slipped by them, fast, drivers white and negro, young and old. Teenagers in a hotted-up car with MURDER INC painted on the side in rough red letters pulled round them and cut in again. ‘Hoods,’ said the cabbie. Downriver, the Statue of Liberty came into sight, apparently rocking a little on the water, and he caught a glimpse of the freighters and ferries moving through the glinting sea of the harbour. Then they were off the bridge and into the tenements on the other side; the cab twisted off the highway and entered the density and business of Brooklyn, turning around through narrow streets and moving back toward the sea again.
Finally they reached the hotel, a small, dark tower. Walker got out. ‘Now it’s all yours,’ said the cabbie, as Walker paid him off from his bundle. ‘Enjoy yourself.’ Walker picked up his cases. ‘And hey, muscles – lay ’em and leave ’em, huh?’
‘That’s right,’ said Walker.
Inside, on the desk, a tired old man in his shirt-sleeves looked up Walker’s reservation and directed him to a room. There was no porter (bellhop?) and the lift (elevator?) wasn’t working; he trudged sadly up the staircase, and in the dark red-carpeted corridors wandered about until he came upon his room. A negro chambermaid listening to the radio in the bedside table got up from the armchair as he went in, and left without speaking. The furnishings were old-fashioned; in the bathroom the shower was an old one with a great many levers; and SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION said a strip of paper across the seat of a very unsanitary-looking lavatory bowl. Walker wandered back into the bedroom. ‘Headache?’ said the radio. ‘Feel like a drill was boring into your brain?’ Then followed the noise of a drill. ‘Could be that time of the day, that time of the month? Friends, don’t suffer. Listen to this.’ Fizzing noises. ‘That’s the sound of an as
pirin that won’t burn the delicate lining of your stomach, won’t hurt those miles of intestine every human body contains . . .’ Walker switched it off and went to the window. Below were ceaseless kerbside lines of car-roofs, kids and dogs playing among the traffic; opposite, on a construction site, demolition and construction were going on simultaneously. As he watched, a wall fell down. Beyond, through girders and buildings, he could see the glint of the harbour, prodded with islands. He pulled down the blind and lay on the bed, exhausted with New York, with himself. Being, after all, a sensitive man, bound up more with himself than with the world about, all he demanded of that world was a certain affability, a certain sympathy, a certain tolerance. He knew how to stand up in nature, and even in the small city, so that each got their fair share of what was going, Walker and surrounding universe. But now the circuit seemed broken, the wiring faulty. He lay on top of the green covers and looked up at the pink shade on the light, and felt that all colours and all experiences had turned sour on him, curdled in the heat like cream. In his tweedy suit he lay and bemoaned himself. Had he come to the end of his hopes for the future? Would the power be restored? Could it be that time of the day, that time of the month, or was it going to be this for ever? Friends, don’t suffer, said New York; but Walker suffered, just the same, and didn’t in the least know where the blame was to be apportioned.
‘Good morning, Mister Wukker,’ said the telephone the following morning, speaking his name carefully to reassure him he had one. ‘Time’s a half after seven, and the weather report promises a new high in heat and humidity. Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles; and speaking of cookies, a word in your ear about the facilities of our Serbian Breakfast Room, now serving, including breakfast specials at attractive prices. Wow!’ It was too much after a virtually sleepless night. Walker put down the receiver without hearing the rest of the message. He got out of bed, looked nervously at the shower and decided against it, went through his toilet routine and then dragged on his clothes. His demeanour as he did so was plaintive, and the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else’s desert. The day lay ahead of him, long, thin and bleak, ready to be worn out and thrown away. Uneasy sensations possessed him; that his mind was slipping, that the emotional content of his life was draining away, that he no longer existed. But down in the lobby the clerk, reading a newspaper among his keys, said, ‘Good morning, Mr Wacker!’ If America was good at making you lose your identity, it was also good at helping you find it again, even though the one they gave you wasn’t exactly the one you’d lost. Walker asked for, and was provided with, the way to get uptown by subway.
‘Had breakfast?’ said the clerk.
‘No,’ said Walker.
‘Stay away from dis Serbian room,’ said the clerk, ‘boy oh boy.’ Walker wandered outside into the day.
Through the buildings he could see a small park on the heights, overlooking the harbour; he went there and looked down, over the water, to Manhattan, where the buildings stood high. A dog peed on his shoe. The wind, blowing off the water, ruffled him a bit and got inside his jacket, as if searching for the correspondent breeze within. There was nothing there, he had to tell it; that’s how it was today. Turning on his heel, he nipped through the traffic and walked along the sidewalk, past the drugstores full of beachballs, to the St George’s Hotel, where the subway station was. Loneliness made him smoke more, so he bought two packs of cigarettes, and then went down the elevator on to the platform, which smelled equally of dust, urine and blood. Along the platform, in the noxious darkness, delinquent youths jimmied the gum machines. A wild express flashed through on the middle line, packed with souls, glaring with light. Walker read his matchbook, which told him how to cure athlete’s foot, until the local came, a row of drab, green old cars. Walker poked his head inside and asked if this was his train; no one answered. He got in and sat down, between a midget man, legs dangling off the floor, a straw-hat on his flat-faced head, and a negro in a smart brown Madison Avenue suit. He began to feel hungry, and craved a banana. He sat and looked at the wall while the train dived into the long dark section under the East River; then, above the windows, he saw a row of advertisements – SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH, said one. HELP A JUVENILE DELINQUENT, said another. AID YOUR NEAREST SCHOOL, said a third. Several advertised diseases – BEAT CANCER WITH A CHECK-UP . . . AND A CHECK, and HEART DISEASE STRIKES ALL THE TIME. Beside him, the front page of the tabloid the midget was reading was covered with a photograph of a horrifying car accident, showing in some detail people bleeding to death. His bowels began to churn and there was heart disease moving around inside him, looking for a foothold. The turning fan in the roof of the car flapped his hair and even dislodged his heavy English clothing. The car stopped again and filled up. A fat Jewish woman stepped on his foot. He got up and offered his seat. ‘Cut it out,’ said the Jewish woman. Walker sat down again, yearning for elsewhere.
When he reached Times Square, he rose and went along the platform, past the booths where you could photograph yourself, an ingrown occupation the direct opposite of what he was looking for. The turnstile that let him out of the system nearly castrated him. He went up the steps, the air stinging his sinuses; then the New York heat hit him like a blow as he reached the street. He was on the town. DON’T WALK said a flashing sign. Air-conditioners dripped in the doorways of stores. The crowds, forests of dresses and shirt-sleeves, passed back and forth. The occasion had a historical quality; the trouble was to do something that lived up to it. He walked about aimlessly, glancing in the windows of the stores, comparing the prices of ties, looking at miniature binoculars in cutprice jewellers. He went into Macy’s and bought a pair of spotted undershorts for 99c., his first American purchase. His feet were getting hot, there was more than an hour to go before he was to meet Miss Marrow at Pennsylvania Station, he kept trying to remember his name and where he was born and approximately why. The Horn and Hardhart automat reminded him he had not had breakfast, so he went inside, bought a handful of nickels at the desk, and looked in through the glass-fronted boxes at the rows of delectables within, sealed off until purchased. He strove to choose, and finally put in coins for a packet of individual cornflakes and a blueberry pie; the glass doors yielded and he brought them forth. There were spigots for iced tea, iced coffee, hot coffee and milk; for ten cents he released a downpour of milk into a glass, and took them all to a table. As he went he caught sight of his image in a mirror on one of the marbled pillars; it came as something of a surprise, for he had forgotten that he had one. At the table he broke open the packet of cornflakes into a dish, and poured the milk on top of them. As he did this a thought occurred to him; it was the thought that the only things he had been capable of making over, of possessing, of bringing within the range of his own experience, out of this full, varied and cosmopolitan world, were three items of food and a pair of spotted underpants. All the rest stood outside, tangential, beyond his powers, remote from his imagination, outside his activated universe, like the goodies sealed in their glass cases in the walls all around him.
When he had finished, he put some sugar cubes in his pocket, went outside into the heat, and found a cop who coolly directed him to Pennsylvania Station. He walked along 42nd Street, where crowds of men and youths jostled under the marquees of the girlie-show movie-houses, and then went down one of the avenues, where traffic ran fast, until he found the station, a noble classical pile, multi-levelled like all the rest of the city. Miss Marrow, standing by one of the ranks of luggage lockers, was unmistakable; she was big, sure and English, and Walker at once felt about her as colonial officers in India felt about the club. New York had not destroyed her authority. On the ship she had been small; here, amid all the nullity and hostility and foreignness, she took on heroic stature. He felt an overwhelming desire to nuzzle her, to take her clothes off on the spot, to retire with her into the luggage lockers and pull the door shut on them both, in short
, to bind her to him. Instead, he said, ‘Had a nice time?’
‘Smashing,’ said Miss Marrow.
‘What did you do?’
‘Oh, I met a man in the hotel who took me to the theatre, I forget what the play was called. People hating one another in the south, that sort of play. Then we went to a sort of pub and heard some black men playing jazz. Then this morning I’ve been shopping. I’ve bought a dress and some marvellous gloves. It’s a magnificent place to shop, isn’t it? What did you do?’
‘I bought some undershorts,’ said Walker.
‘Let’s see, ooh, spotted ones. Adulterer’s undershorts, just the thing for you. Come in this dinette place and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.’
Stepping Westward Page 15