by Jeffrey Lent
Jamie nodded again, as if interested. “What was that?”
“Mister Pelham?”
“What sort of assistance did you provide?”
“I took him by the arm.”
“And he left then?”
“He wanted to fight me. Broke away and put up his fists.”
Jamie smiled. “That right?”
Henley smiled back. “It is.”
“What happened then? You don’t look scuffed up.”
“I told him he touched me once I’d pound him into the ground.”
“You told him that.”
“I did.”
“And he left then?”
“Took his hat up off the table and put it on, the rim soaked with beer, and shook his finger at me. Told me he’d hang my rear out to dry and left.”
“Ass.”
“Sir?”
“It was your ass he said he’d hang to dry. Not rear.”
“I was trying to be polite.” Henley’s eyes now floating, drifting away from Jamie.
“I wish you’d thought of that last night. Mr. Arthur Shipley of Schenectady New York. With wife, two teenage daughters and a younger boy. Arthur junior I believe. Two maids. Three rooms, two baths plus the maid’s lodging. The full month of July. This would be his third year in a row. He enjoys golf but stops here instead of the Maplewood because his wife likes the view off the back porches and the flower gardens. Set that tray down before you drop it. And stand here two minutes while I figure your time and I’ll have Stanley cash you out of the register.”
“Mister Pelham.”
Jamie reached and took the tray and placed it on the bar. Then placed his right index finger on the waiter’s breastbone. “If the man had stood on his table and pissed in your face I’d expect you to get off work and go home early and take a bath. Get a bottle of whiskey from Jake or Stanley for your troubles. And that’s all I’d expect. Now you wait here and then we’re done. He pulled his index finger back a couple of inches, curled it at the knuckle and rapped hard, once.
In the office he rewrote the schedule for the next two weeks and underlined the changes in the red crayon he knew to be an alert to his employees. Wrote a note to the hotel accountant diverting Henley’s back wages to the bar till. Rolled a pencil back and forth on the smooth blotter and silently said To hell with it and unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk and poured himself a drink. Dragged the tall standing telephone onto the blotter and took up the earpiece and leaned to speak into the mouthpiece, asked the girl at the switchboard to get him the Maplewood and waited, then asked the girl there for the casino and waited again. Then Gurnsey was on the line, his counterpart at the Maplewood. Each man chipped, inferior to the other. Gurnsey had the plum, the best hotel. Jamie had the liquor business, independence. And so odd equals. Intimacy of respect and isolation; each to the other what no other man was. This didn’t mean they liked each other.
“Eric, things slow down there for you tonight?” Over the rough oceanic quality of the line he could hear the fluid yammer of a crowd, the strains behind that of the orchestra. Pressed the earpiece hard to try and pick out a vocal, a woman in song.
“Shit yes like a cemetery. I stop to consider it’s the end of July already and I’m a dead man. Just doesn’t seem like there’ll be a season this year. I can’t even bring myself to look at the reservation book. And I got help quitting left and right.”
“Don’t hire a man called Henley, he comes looking.”
“Had him last year. Couldn’t haul freight. Slow’s it is, I rather chat of a morning. You need me to run a case of something up there?”
Jamie rolled the pencil. “No. No I don’t need nothing.” Paused again.
Gurnsey said, “What is it, Pelham?”
He wet his lips, remembered Henley doing the same thing. Almost said nothing but his need was greater than the desire of his pride. His voice dropped a register, he said, “Who is it this time, Eric? Is it that horn player?”
Another pause, this one on the line. The burble of static, of distance. Those few miles. Then Gurnsey said, “That cornet man is just a pup. Big sloppy eyes and a grin he can’t get rid of. He’s smitten bad but he’s no problem. For christ sake don’t whop on him like you did that boy last fall. It’s hard enough to get these fellows up here for a three-month contract.”
“I never touched that man last year. I talked to him was all.”
“Jamie.”
“It’s true.”
“You could step back a moment and see it how it is, you’d find some pleasure in it. She reels everybody in, one way or another. Jesus, Jamie, it’s what she’s paid to do. You have to expect some dog-eyed men along the way. It’s just part of the deal. And I do believe she knows that.”
Jamie was nodding. Worked the key in the bottom drawer again even as he leaned into the mouthpiece. Brought the bottle out and set it on the blotter beside him. The label was his own and tonight gave him no pleasure. He said, “You’re jacking me around here, Gurnsey. We’re not just talking about some moon-faced boy in the band here. She’s working somebody, we both know that. It’s what she does. I’m not coming up there with a pissed fit. I just want to know what it all is. This is a woman we’re talking about. She travels around me with whatever she wants to say and when I begin to catch on looks at me like I’ve just shit my pants. A hundred times a week it’s her job to ruin men. All I want to know is what I’m dealing with when there’s one’s got to her. A professional courtesy, Gurnsey. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“I don’t think I can help you with that problem.”
“I understand that. It’s a high roller, I know that much. If he’s gotten to her, he long since left you creamed your pants.”
“It’s your woman. You’re the one should know. You’re good, Pelham, but you’re not good enough to dirty everyone else with your personal problems. None of us is. Maybe you should remember that.”
“Eric, you’re right. I stepped over the line here. It leaves me in a quandary. I can forget all this. Or I could ride up there and see for myself. It’s not what I want. All I want is the who part. Just so I know. You can understand that.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Don’t we both know that.”
“I swear, Pelham—”
“Save it, Eric.”
A long pause then. Jamie pulled the corked stopper from the bottle and turned away from the mouthpiece and drank. His ear still flattened hot to the earpiece, waiting. The liquor was pretty bad but he drank it because it was his. He felt the day he stopped drinking it was the day he would stop selling it. Then the noise over the line grew muffled, went away. For a moment he thought Gurnsey had hung up. Then realized his hand was over the mouthpiece. This was not good. He waited. Maybe it was not good. After a brief time Gurnsey came back on.
“It’s a sporting goods man from Providence. He’s at the end of the first of two weeks. I understand his wife and kids are at the shore. On the Cape. So he’s just another lonely old fart. Nothing to worry about. She’s just doing her job.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“Don’t fuck with me Eric. I’m not coming up there anyway. But I won’t be a fool.”
Another pause, this time with all the noise. Gurnsey then said, as if breathing out, “His name’s Sloane.”
“A Jew?”
“Not here.”
“Sloane.” Turned up the bottle once again. “What’s he look like.” Gurnsey sighed. “Like an old man. Forget it, Pelham. Its nothing.”
“What’s he look like?”
Gurnsey said, “There’s men would be happy to shoot you and have you gone. You know that, don’t you?”
“Fuck off, Eric. What’s he look like?”
A long pause then. “He’s fifty. Maybe fifty-five. A little bald but in good shape. Well-dressed, well-mannered. Like I said, sporting goods man. Hikes daytimes. Has a chest of guns with him. Hired a caddie to tos
s clay pigeons for him. In the early evenings. Every day. He can double if the caddie is fast enough. A fisherman also, up in the mornings. A drinker at night. But not so he doesn’t tuck into his food. That enough?”
“I guess maybe so.”
“Jamie?”
“I’m right here.”
“It’s just her job.”
“I know that.”
Again, quiet. Then Gurnsey said, “Anything I can do.” It was not a question, not quite an offer.
“Not a thing, Eric. Not a fucking thing.”
“It’ll pass, Jamie. It’s just a thing.”
He didn’t go home. He didn’t go looking for her. When the lounge closed at half past two he fired up the Ford and drove over the hill to Franconia and out to the Notch where he found a waitress at the Profile House just getting off work. Together they went the couple of miles north to Echo Lake, where they sat on the sand beach and drank from the bonded bottle he’d lifted from behind the bar and lay back and watched the stars wheel up in the slender wedge of sky between the narrow cleft of mountains and talked about how men and women couldn’t seem to help but do each other wrong and how things should be. Later, when it was too cold to do it, they stripped off their clothes and swam briefly in the lake. When they came out of the water he lifted her and carried her to the picnic table and set her down facing him and took her ankles in his hands and spread her legs and with her saying no he entered her and stood thrusting with his face turned up to the sky and when her arms and legs locked around him and her voice changed from words to other sounds it did not matter. He lifted both hands to cup her head to him and called her darling and sweetheart and love and then came in her, she rising off the table as he came. His hands hooked her buttocks and he carried her around the beach, the soft sand slopping and grasping at his feet. Some nightbird called out from across the lake. A fox barked up in the hills. The stars were still. A lightened sky in the east. Pale, almost no color at all. He stood and watched the girl dress. She was clumsy in the sand, standing on one foot and then the other. He smoked a cigarette. She was slow and he was cold.
Joey was not at the house. It was past dawn and the sun had been out as he came over the hill between Franconia and Bethlehem after taking the girl—Alice was her name—back to the dormitories behind the Profile House. She’d been teary and he was too tired to do more than drive the car. He just wanted to be rid of her. It was nothing to cry over. Before he dropped her off he held her a moment, patting her shoulder, wondering if anyone he knew was spying him out. Then he drove over the hill with the low-spread sun an angled pain running through his eyes to the back of his head. Out of Bethlehem down toward the river he drove into the dense river fog and it wrapped around him like a bandage. And Joey was not there. He’d been prepared to find her sleeping or even sitting up, still dressed from the night, eyes red-shot and her face choked with anger. He stood in the kitchen. The dishes from their breakfast the evening before still in the sink. There was no sign she’d been there and yet he felt she had come and gone. He went through the house and it seemed everything was there as it should be. The only things gone were what she’d taken last night. Too tired to make a fire, he poured day-old cold coffee into a cup and filled it to the brim with whiskey and sat on the small front steps and listened to the fog drip from the trees. His neck ached as if it had been beaten with an iron rod. He finished his drink and went into the house and stripped and washed himself with a cloth and cold water from a basin. His fingers smelled of sex and tobacco, the soap only a thin layer of perfume over the deeper scents, as if those smells were coming from within his skin. He went to bed.
She came in early afternoon. The house smelled scorched, a faint odor of mouse scat and dead flies. She’d slept only a few hours but was restless not tired. She looked in where he lay sleeping on his side, his knees curled up and his hands between his legs like a boy, his bottom lip pouched and slack, a dark spot of drool on the pillow beneath him. She looked at his clothes dropped on the floor and for a moment thought of picking up his trousers to smell the crotch but didn’t. There wasn’t anything she wanted to know. She built a fire and made coffee and then undressed, her clothes stiff and creased with wrinkles, slept in. She took an old shirt of his from the laundry basket and wearing that carried her coffee down to the river. She sat on a boulder and took the shirt off and drank her coffee while her body alternated hot and cool with the clouds sweeping over the sun. Her hands were shaking. It was the coffee she thought.
Her life felt in pieces. Not that she expected otherwise, everything she’d learned tuned her to expect this. But those pieces seemed slight things, fragments too dear or fine to hold. Water ever-passing around the mute boulder shoulder beneath her. She saw herself clearly, in ten years, maybe fifteen, her voice a tailfeather of what it had been, her body grown thick and stout, sitting somewhere, always sitting somewhere, waiting for the night and those few moments when her old self might rise out of her, where again she could stalk some small shabby room, sitting waiting, drinking something. In five years she’d stopped believing in the savior, the one man out there who would hear her and take her to New York or Boston. She was good but not that good. She was good for where she was. And for the time being. Time being, what? Today. Tomorrow if she was lucky. Her mother learned this the hard way. Joey was determined not to find the hard way. The question then was what was the alternative? Trust some man? She spat in the river but didn’t even see her spit land or float or merge. Just gone. Clouds moved off the sun and she was hot. Making the best was what she had. Men could be turned she knew but only for so long. How long she didn’t know, couldn’t say. She didn’t know how an honest wife did it. Perhaps men changed. Perhaps they made accommodations. Perhaps they only learned more contrived elaborate lies. Perhaps they loved their wives and children and went on being men. Perhaps the women even understood it, someway forgave it. She didn’t know. She could see the house across the sheep meadow and through the evergreens. She didn’t know who it was lay there sleeping. The noonday clouds had thickened, the anvils lowered, the towers higher. It would storm by dinnertime. She had an hour, maybe two. She slid down the side of the boulder into the cold water and swam there, fast back and forth against the current, diving down over and over so her whole body was under the surface. She clambered back onto the rock and stood there shivering, the sun out. Herself then as tight and high and young as she ever had been, as she’d ever be again. She stood on the stone to warm but didn’t and finally bent to take up the shirt and carried it up toward the house, walking naked across the pasture and then through the tamaracks, the water drying fast as she went, the stippled flesh still abrupt, erect. Her feet light on the duff.
She heard him before she saw him. Thock. Then a pause and the sound came again. Then she came through the trees. He was sideways, his back to her, dressed just in trousers, barefoot and bare-chested. He had a bucket of golf balls and a driver and was driving the balls one at a time in a high sailing arc out of sight into the puckerbrush behind the barn. He didn’t play golf but bought buckets of balls from the caddies at the Maplewood and time to time would come out with an old driver he’d found somewhere and send the balls one after another into the woods until the bucket was empty. She stood back and watched him. The twist in his back as he drove the ball and his arms followed through with the driver up over his head was a beautiful thing. His body not the boy she’d met five years ago, not so much changed as confirmed, wired muscles taut and lean. His bones and limbs fine as if carved from wood. He would, she guessed, look much the same in twenty years, thirty years. She put the shirt on and as he leaned toward the bucket she stepped from the trees into the small opening of sunlight where he saw her and paused a moment and then set the ball on the tee and drove it off into the woods, watching it go from sight, his head tilted back. Then dropped the club by the bucket and walked to the steps and took up cigarettes and lighted one and smoked, the smoke dribbling from his nose.
“The fuck you bee
n.”
She made a small shrug. “I made it back in one piece.”
“Be hard to tell you wasn’t.”
“What’s that mean?”
He spit tobacco flecks off his lips. “Don’t be pissy at me. You tell me you’ll find your own way home and then come crawling in the middle of the day. What do you figure I’d think?”
“Think what you like.”
“That’s it? Think what I like?”
“Jesus, Jamie.” She shook her head. “Some of us went to a party out toward Whitefield. Some Canadians there playing fiddle music. Reels and jigs and such I hadn’t heard in years. People dancing like they meant it. I had fun was all. I didn’t have to do a thing but have fun.”
“And you couldn’t’ve done that with me?”
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about saying that last night. Sometimes I just feel like I’m all cornered up. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want to corner anybody anywhere.”
“Don’t do that. I didn’t even know about that party until after work and things were winding down at Laird’s and Godchaux was the one had heard about it and brought it up so we all went. That’s all. I don’t know if you’d have liked it or not. That kind of music. But the people were all drinking your whiskey so you’d probably have liked it just fine. But you weren’t there and I wasn’t about to hold things up trying to hunt you down at three-thirty in the morning.”
“He the cornet player?”
“Godchaux?”
“Yuht.”
She nodded.
He waited, then said, “So who’s we?”
She looked at him. “Just Godchaux and Scully and me. Godchaux drove us over there and then Scully and me home. Wasn’t anything more than that. I slept in a chair there at that house a couple of hours.” She shook her head. “You don’t need to worry about that Godchaux. He’s just a horny boy which is the last thing I want. Think about it a second. Though he plays that horn sweet. From New Orleans, Louisiana, if you can imagine. Everything to him’s ragtime or barrelhouse, stuff like that. I can’t figure that music out myself. But I like listening to it. But that’s all. I believe he’s got some nigger blood to him also; you look at him, you have to wonder. Skin like a lemondrop. Maybe he’s just unhealthy. There’s fevers down there in New Orleans I hear.”