Big Money (10 page)

Charley never got a chance to put a word in. The two young men
started to explain the play they'd been to at the Washington Square Players. The girl had a turnedup nose and blue eyes with dark rings under them. The eyes looked up at him effusively while she shook his hand. “Not really. . . . Oh, I've so wanted to meet you, Mr. Holden. I read all your articles.” “But I'm not really. . . .” started Charley. “Not really a colonel,” said the girl. “Just a colonel for a night,” said Al with a wave of his hand and ordered some more whiskies.

“Oh, Mr. Holden,” said the girl, who put her whiskey away like a trooper, “isn't it wonderful that we should meet like this? . . . I thought you were much older and not so good-looking. Now, Mr. Holden, I want you to tell me all about everything.”

“Better call me Charley.”

“My name's Bobbie . . . you call me Bobbie, won't you?” “Check,” said Charley. She drew him away down the bar a little. “I was having a rotten time. . . . They are dear boys, but they won't talk about anything except how Philip drank iodine because Edward didn't love him any more. I hate personalities, don't you? I like to talk, don't you? Oh, I hate people who don't do things. I mean books and world conditions and things like that, don't you?” “Sure,” said Charley.

They found themselves at the end of the bar. Al Johnson seemed to have found a number of other very dear friends to celebrate old times with. The girl plucked at Charley's sleeve: “Suppose we go somewhere quiet and talk. I can't hear myself think in here.” “Do you know someplace we can dance?” asked Charley. The girl nodded.

On the street she took his arm. The wind had gone into the north, cold and gusty. “Let's skip,” said the girl, “or are you too dignified, Mr. Holden?” “Better call me Charley.” They walked east and down a street full of tenements and crowded little Italian stores. The girl rang at a basement door. While they were waiting she put her hand on his arm. “I got some money . . . let this be my party.” “But I wouldn't like that.” “All right, we'll make it fifty-fifty. I believe in sexual equality, don't you?” Charley leaned over and kissed her. “Oh, this is a wonderful evening for me. . . . You are the nicest celebrity I ever met. . . . Most of them are pretty stuffy, don't you think so? No joie de vivre.” “But,” stammered Charley, “I'm not . . .”

As he spoke the door opened. “Hello, Jimmy,” said the girl to a slicklooking young man in a brown suit who opened the door. “Meet the boyfriend . . . Mr. Grady . . . Mr. Holden.” The young man's eyes flashed. “Not Charles Edward . . .” The girl nodded her head excitedly
so that a big lock of her hair flopped over one eye. “Well, sir, I'm very happy to meet you. . . . I'm a constant reader, sir.”

Bowing and blushing Jimmy found them a table next to the dancefloor in the stuffy little cabaret hot from the spotlights and the cigarettesmoke and the crowded dancers. They ordered more whiskey and welshrabbits. Then she grabbed Charley's hand and pulled him to his feet. They danced. The girl rubbed close to him till he could feel her little round breasts through the Bulgarian blouse.

“My . . . the boy can dance,” she whispered. “Let's forget everything, who we are, the day of the week . . .”

“Me . . . I forgot two hours ago,” said Charley, giving her a squeeze.

“You're just a plain farmerlad and I'm a barefoot girl.”

“More truth than poetry to that,” said Charley through his teeth.

“Poetry . . . I love poetry, don't you?”

They danced until the place closed up. They were staggering when they got out on the black empty streets. They stumbled past garbagepails. Cats ran out from under their feet. They stopped and talked about free love with a cop. At every corner they stopped and kissed. As she was looking for her latchkey in her purse she said thoughtfully: “People who really do things make the most beautiful lovers, don't you think so?”

Charley woke up first. Sunlight was streaming in through an uncurtained window. The girl was asleep, her face pressed into the pillow. Her mouth was open and she looked considerably older than she had the night before. Her skin was pasty and green and she had stringy hair.

Charley put his clothes on quietly. On a big table inches deep in dust and littered with drawings of funnylooking nudes, he found a piece of charcoal. On the back of a sheet of yellow paper that had a half a poem written on it he wrote: Had a swell time. . . . Goodby. . . . Goodluck. Charley. He didn't put his shoes on until he got to the bottom of the creaky stairs.

Out on the street in the cold blowy spring morning he felt wonderful. He kept bursting out laughing. A great little old town. He went into a lunchroom at the corner of Eighth Street and ordered himself a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon and hotcakes and coffee. He kept giggling as he ate it. Then he went uptown to Fortysecond Street on the el. Grimy roofs, plateglass windows, grimy bulbs of
electriclight signs, fireescapes, watertanks all looked wonderful in the gusty sunlight.

At the Grand Central Station the clock said eleventhirty. Porters were calling the names of westbound trains. He got his bag from the checkroom and took a taxi to the Chatterton House. That was where Joe Askew had written he ought to stay, a better address than the Y. His suitcase cut into his hand as it was heavy from blueprints and books on mechanical drawing, so he jumped into a taxi. When the clerk at the desk asked for a reference he brought out his reserve commission.

The place had an elevator and baths and showers at the ends of the dimlylit halls, and a lot of regulations on the back of the door of the little shoebox of a room they showed him into. He threw himself on the cot with his clothes on. He was sleepy. He lay giggling looking up at the ceiling. A great little old town.

As it turned out he lived a long time in that stuffy little green-papered room with its rickety mission furniture. The first few days he went around to see all the aviation concerns he found listed in the phonebook to see if he could pickup some kind of temporary job. He ran into a couple of men he'd known overseas, but nobody could promise him a job; if he'd only come a couple of months sooner. Everybody said things were slack. The politicians had commercial aviation by the short hairs and there you were, that was that. Too damn many flyers around looking for jobs anyway.

At the end of the first week he came back from a trip to a motor-building outfit in Long Island City, where they half-promised him a drafting job later in the summer, that is if they got the contract their Washington man was laying for, to find a letter from Mrs. Askew: Joe was a very sick man, double pneumonia. It would be a couple of months before he could get to the city. Joe had insisted on her writing though she didn't think he was well enough to worry about business matters, but she'd done it to ease his mind. He said for Charley to be sure not to let anybody else see his plans until he got a patent, better get a job to tide over until they could get the thing started right.

Tide over, hell; Charley sat on his sagging bed counting his money. Four tens, a two, a one and fiftythree cents in change. With the room eight dollars a week that didn't make his summer's prospects look so hot.

At last one day he got hold of Doris Humphries on the phone and she asked him to come on up next afternoon. At the Humphries' apartment it was just like it had been at the Bentons' the night he went there with Ollie Taylor, except that there was a maid instead of a butler. He felt pretty uncomfortable because there were only women there. Doris's mother was a haggard dressedup woman who gave him a searching look that he felt went right through him into the wallet in his back pocket.

They had tea and cakes, and Charley wasn't sure if he ought to smoke or not. They said Ollie Taylor had gone abroad again, to the south of France, and as Ollie Taylor was the only thing he had in common with them to talk about, that pretty well dried up the conversation. Dressed in civies it wasn't so easy talking to rich women as it had been in the uniform. Still Doris smiled at him nicely and talked in a friendly confidential way about how sick she was of this society whirl and everything, that she was going out and get her a job. That's not so easy, thought Charley. She complained she never met any interesting men. She said Charley and Ollie Taylor—of course Ollie was an old dear—were the only men she knew she could stand talking to. “I guess it's the war and going overseas that's done something to you,” she said, looking up at him. “When you've seen things like that you can't take yourself so seriously as these miserable loungelizards I have to meet. They are nothing but clotheshangers.”

When Charley left the big apartmenthouse his head was swimming so he was almost bagged by a taxicab crossing the street. He walked down the broad avenue humming with traffic in the early dark. She'd promised to go to a show with him one of these nights.

When he went to get Doris to take her out to dinner one evening in early May, after the engagement had been put off from week to week—she was so terribly busy, she always complained over the phone, she'd love to come but she was so terribly busy—he only had twenty bucks left in his wallet. He waited for her some time alone in the drawingroom of the Humphries' apartment. White covers had been hung on the piano and the chairs and curtains and the big white room smelt of mothballs. It all gave him a feeling he'd come too late. Doris came in at last looking so pale and silky and golden in a lowcut eveningdress it made him catch his breath. “Hello, Charley, I hope you're not starved,” she said in that intimate way that always made
him feel he'd known her a long time. “You know I never could keep track of the time.”

“Gosh, Doris, you look wonderful.” He caught her looking at his grey business suit. “Oh, forgive me,” she said. “I'll run and change my clothes.” Something chilly came into her voice and left it at once. “It'll take only a minute.” He felt himself getting red. “I guess I oughta have worn eveningclothes,” he said. “But I've been so busy. I haven't had my trunk sent out from Minnesota yet.” “Of course not. It's almost summer. I don't know what I was thinking about. Wits woolgathering again.”

“Couldn't you go like that, you look lovely.”

“But it looks so silly to see a girl dressed up like a plush horse with a man in a business suit. It'll be more fun anyway . . . less the social engagement, you know. . . . Honestly I'll be only five minutes by the clock.”

Doris went out and half an hour later came back in a pearl-grey streetdress. A maid followed her in with a tray with a cocktailshaker and glasses. “I thought we might have a drink before we go out. Then we'll be sure to know what we are getting,” she said.

He took her to the McAlpin for supper; he didn't know anyplace else. It was already eight o'clock. The theatertickets were burning his pocket, but she didn't seem in any hurry. It was halfpast nine when he put her in a taxi to go to the show. The taxi filled up with the light crazy smell of her perfume and her hair. “Doris, lemme say what I want to say for a minute,” he blurted out suddenly. “I don't know whether you like anybody else very much. I kinder don't think you do from what you said about the guys you know.”

“Oh, please don't propose,” she said. “If you knew how I hated proposals, particularly in a cab caught in a traffic jam.”

“No, I don't mean that. You wouldn't want to marry me the way I'am now anyway . . . not by along shot. I gotta get on my hindlegs first. But I'm goin' to pretty soon. . . . You know aviation is the comin' industry. . . . Ten years from now . . . Well, us fellers have a chance to get in on the ground floor. . . . I want you to give me a break, Doris, hold off the other guys for a little while. . . .”

“Wait for you ten years, my, that's a romantic notion . . . my grandmother would have thought it was lovely.”

“I mighta known you'd kid about it. Well, here we are.”

Charley tried to keep from looking sour when he helped Doris out. She squeezed his hand just for a second as she leaned on it. His heart started pounding. As they followed the usher into the dark theater full of girls and jazz she put her small hand very lightly on his arm. Above their heads was the long powdery funnel of the spotlight spreading to a tinselly glitter where a redlipped girl in organdy was dancing. He squeezed Doris's hand hard against his ribs with his arm. “All right, you get what I mean,” he whispered. “You think about it . . . I've never had a girl get me this way before, Doris.” They dropped into their seats. The people behind started shushing, so Charley had to shut up. He couldn't pay any attention to the show.

“Charley, don't expect anything, but I think you're a swell guy,” she said when, stuffy from the hot theater and the lights and the crowd, they got into a taxi as they came out. She let him kiss her, but terribly soon the taxi stopped at her apartmenthouse. He said goodnight to her at the elevator. She shook her head with a smile when he asked if he could come up.

He walked home weak in the knees through the afterthetheater bustle of Park Avenue and Fortysecond Street. He could still feel her mouth on his mouth, the smell of her pale frizzy hair, the littleness of her hands on his chest when she pushed his face away from hers.

The next morning he woke late feeling pooped as if he'd been on a threeday drunk. He bought the papers and had a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the coffeebar that stank of stale swill. This time he didn't look in the Business Opportunities column but under Mechanics and Machinists. That afternoon he got a job in an automobile repairshop on First Avenue. It made him feel bad to go back to the overalls and the grease under your fingernails and punching the timeclock like that but there was no help for it. When he got back to the house he found a letter from Emiscah that made him feel worse than ever.