Blue Eyes (16 page)

She found her pants in Coen's pile. She dressed before he did. Odile didn't appreciate nakedness out of bed. She accepted occasional clients from César, setting a half-hour limit (Odile supplied the prophylactics, party bread, and cordials), but she hadn't spent the night with any of these men, and she wouldn't break a habit for Coen. She slept with a furry animal, an old bear from Vander, with shallow paws and buttons for eyes, Odile in simple headdress (she hated sun on her face) and two full gowns. She scratched around on the chair, having no idea how to kick Coen out. She pulled her mouth into a yawn. He wouldn't leave.

“César wants to keep me single,” she said, pouting hard. “He looks after my interests.”

Coen fiddled with his shoe, digging for the tongue. “Odile, does César ever mention me?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Did you meet Papa Guzmann?”

“Once or twice.”

“What about Jerónimo?”

“The baby? He stayed here a week. The Chinaman got him into Mexico with Caroline. She fixed his menu on the plane. Ordered extra sodas for him.”

“Did you hear the name Albert from Papa or César? Albert and Jessica?”

“No. But Jerónimo said, ‘Sheb Coen, Sheb Coen.'”

“What else, Odile? Please.”

“I can't remember. Something about a head in the fire.”

His crumpled cheeks aggravated Odile again, and she took him into her bed. Coen stared at the wall. Sheb got out of the fire. Did Jerónimo find him, bring him to the candy store? Did the Guzmanns undress him, hide his Sunday clothes, sneak him back upstairs in rags, point him to the fire escape so he could sing his death songs for Boston Road? Odile had to duck her head under his armpit to find a piece of Coen. She couldn't get comfortable with so contrary a man. She slept against a shoulderblade, listening to the beat of Coen's ribs. She longed for the bear.

Sweeney, the number-two bouncer, lived over a dress factory in SoHo (off Broome Street), when she wasn't on call at The Dwarf. She had three miserably lit rooms with the feel of a rabbit hutch; tiny, thinwalled, with crooked floors and low, low ceilings. Hot air from the pressing machines downstairs smoked through the walls and warped Sweeney's woodwork. Short of labor, the factory employed retarded girls bussed into SoHo from an institution near White Plains. The girls wore blue cotton uniforms and highbacked shoes in neutral brown; they hunched over their sewing machines like monkeys with mottled blue skin. Sweeney fell for these girls, and she would sit with them in a Greene Street luncheonette during the half hour they were free, telling them stories about the iron buildings of SoHo, and the rats who lived in the buildings and could take metal into their systems until they died from the rust that clogged their ears. Sweeney had to tolerate the mistress of the girls, a contemptuous woman who interrupted the stories to frown at her and drive the girls out of the luncheonette and into the factory. Otherwise Sweeney existed at The Dwarf.

She was in love with Odile. The bartendresses knew this. Girls who danced regularly at The Dwarf would laugh into the sleeves of their denim shirts watching Sweeney moon over Odile. Sweeney had a seriousness about her that Odile's partners couldn't understand. She didn't clutch Odile's bosoms in the back room, like Dorotea, like Nicole, or nip Odile behind the ear, like Mauricette. Nicole and Mauricette came to The Dwarf to taste Odile, not to goggle. They would pair off with fresh “sisters” if Odile wasn't around. Dorotea had more of a devotion to Odile, but even Dorotea grew weary of Odile's fixation on men. It was Sweeney who endured Odile's wavering attitudes, her defilement with male customers, her reticence at The Dwarf. Odile was still “chicken bait” to all the sisters. Those swiny men didn't count. Odile might perform for a swat of little gangsters from the Bronx, but she hadn't slept with Dorotea, Nicole, or Mauricette. The sisters were more careful than Sweeney. They could worship Odile, but they kept girlfriends on the side.

She was born Abigail, Abigail Ruth McBean, and she remained Abigail until her eleventh year, when she took the name Sweeney from a tavern in Providence, Rhode Island, where her father worked and played the pianola; none of the regulars at The Dwarf came from Manhattan, except for Odile. Her cousin Janice was a refugee from Montauk; Nicole and Mauricette were Connecticut girls. Sweeney would be thirty in a month. She meant to celebrate her birthday with a present for Odile. But she anticipated certain difficulties. Odile wouldn't wear clothes from Spike's or one of the huskier leather shops. Sweeney would have to go to Bergdorf's or Henri Bendel, where the salespeople were too high-minded to be simple cashiers, and they would only handle your money long enough to stick it in a wire cage for some invisible teller (checks were better than cash at Henri Bendel's). The store frightened Sweeney, who seldom went up to Fifty-seventh Street. She would have to enter Bendel's in an Army field jacket, the cold weather type that could button around your ears; this was the one coat she had (unless she borrowed Janice's chesterfield).

Wednesday being her night off, she brooded past four a.m., preparing herself for the trauma of uptown fashions. She had eighty dollars to spend, the yearly dividend from a policy her father had opened for her at the age of seven and wouldn't fully mature until Sweeney was forty-five. The doorbell rang. She wanted no visitors to clog her lines of thought “Go away,” she said. “Piss on someone else's dóor. I'm through collecting for the March of Dimes. If you're the Heart Association girl, I'm not here.”

Sweeney was in her cups, the Irish coffee she'd drunk to keep her mind on Henri Bendel was causing her to hallucinate. She wouldn't go near the door.

Then she swiped at the knob, her confidence shot; she could recognize the squeaks of Odile. “Baby,” she said, “why are you cruising so late?”

Odile knocked dust off the crepe rubber heels of her platform shoes. “Sweeney, there's a man in my house. A curry man.”

“That, cop you were with? That blond fish? Odile, you must be slumming tonight.”

“Sweeney, he wouldn't go. The cop wouldn't go. He fell asleep on me. I couldn't breathe. I had to bypass Janice. You know the music she lays on us this time of night. Fox trots and Nicole's hands on my boobs. Not the state I'm in. I didn't even wash his smell off me. I came to you, Sweeney. I had nowhere else.”

“You don't have to explain.” And the image of Henri Bendel, wire cages bumping through the ceiling, stuffed with personal checks, disappeared for Sweeney. She could forget presents, figures on a policy, the dress factory underneath. “Baby, I'll make your bed.”

She wouldn't allow Odile to sleep on the foldaway, a lousy kitchen bed with moldy springs and other works. Odile had to accept Sweeney's own “honeymoon” mattress with springbox and high wooden pegs. She was given cocoa to drive out the cop's taste. She wore Sweeney's corduroy pajamas. And Sweeney tolerated the kitchen bed like a happy dog. She tuned off refrigerator drones, and the mousies in the washtub. She would sweep up the pellets of mouseshit before Odile awoke. She wouldn't have to eat with retarded girls at the luncheonette. She would cook a SoHo breakfast, sausages and symmetrical pancakes in brown sugar syrup, for both of them. She would stay clear of white flour. She wouldn't feed Odile that luncheonette garbage with the papery flavor. She would squeeze the oranges with her own fist.

The springs of the foldaway clawed into her back. She felt a tug in her kidney. She would lie awake for the rest of the night thinking she had to pee. She'd had those spells before. If she sat on the pot, she wouldn't pass any water. And she might disturb Odile. She'd had too many fights at The Dwarf, too many cousins to confront, too many boisterous hens to throw out, too many drunkards with a hatred for women in a man's suit, too many blows to her groin, too many fingers in her eye. She prepared breakfasts in her head over and over again to numb that kidney until some light crept through the fractures in the kitchen blinds so she could begin to cook for Odile.

11
Coen got up from a dreary sleep without Odile. She's fled to her club, he imagined, César's girl. She'd left him a bun on the table and a potful of smelly tea. Coen walked uptown, fire escapes in his head. Hearing his uncle's songs he went narrow in the chest and had to blow air on Sixth Avenue. He was so truculent at the crossings, other early morning walkers avoided his lanes. He marched into the park and arrived at Schiller's with gaunt markings on his face. These were the voodoo hours for Schiller, when most of the ping-pong freaks were in bed, and refugees from the game rooms of certain New York mental institutions would drift in with sandpaper rackets clutched in their hands and volley among themselves, aiming at one spot on the table with a precision that confounded Schiller and drove him into his cubbyhole. He had to close his eyes to them or give up being an entrepreneur. Having nowhere else to go, they played at Schiller's for free. But they weren't allowed near the end table, which served as a message board while Coen was away. Coen found a note stuck in the net; Arnold wanted him. So he went upstairs to the SROs. He climbed over mattresses in the hall. He intercepted an argument between an old wino with crooked lines in his scalp and one of the young bullies at the hotel, a stocky boy in a velveteen undershirt, a head taller than Coen. The boy was crowing for his admirers, who wore similar undershirts and urged him to slap the old man. “Piss,” he said. “Pay me a dollar.” With that first slap the old man's teeth jumped out of his head. Coen clawed the boy on his velveteen. “Lay off,” the boy griped, stupified that any man small as Coen would dare finger him this way. But the boy had an instinctive feel for cops, even blond ones, and he preferred to disappoint his admirers rather than face up to Coen. “Mister, what's Piss to you?”

“He's my dad,” Coen said. He liked the bumps along the wino's skull. Mindful of his benefactor, the old man scrounged on the stairs for his teeth. He was sure he could pluck a dollar out of Coen.

“Miserable,” he said, smacking his gums. “I could get ham and cheese at the deli for a little cold cash.” And he walked on his hands near. Coen, astounding the boys in velveteen with his system for producing hunger pains; he barked with his stomach while he groveled and slimed on his jaw.

These contortions sickened Coen. He abandoned the old man in the middle of his crawl. “Hey,” Piss said, realizing he would be smothered in velveteen without Coen. “Don't leave me here.” But Coen was only a step away from Arnold's room. He closed the door on Piss.

Arnold paraded his orthopedic shoe. He would have worshiped Coen if Coen had allowed it. “Manfred, you did it, you did it. You made him bring it back.”

Coen stood against the door scrutinizing the polish on Arnold's fat shoe.

“Manfred, he was here, the Chinaman.”

“When?”

“Maybe two hours ago. Lucky for him he wanted peace. I had my sword in the hamper.”

“What did he say?”

“Look, he shined it himself. With an expensive cloth.”

“Arnold, what did he say?”

“Nothing. A few crazy words. He smiles, he puts down the shoe, he says, ‘Spic, tell Blue-eyes regards from César and me.'”

Coen already figured César had to be involved in the return of the shoe. The Chinaman didn't give up his trophies so easy. Coen understood the Guzmann way. Papa would hug you, feed you, open his farm and his candy store to you, lend you Jorge or Alejandro for the day, but he wasn't careless about any of his gifts. Perhaps the Marranos who had been shorn of their possessions in Portugal and Spain developed a residual language in the give and take of worldly goods. Coen couldn't tell. But if Papa gave you anything outside his own natural affection, there had to be malice in it. César was the same. Coen would have to determine what he had done to deserve the shoe. Had he corrupted Jerónimo inside the Alameda park? Did he wrong Mordeckay? Odile? Odile must have squawked to César about his visit to Jane Street.

“Manfred, should I take off my shoe?”

“No,” Coen said. “But don't give away your sword.”

“Manfred, does the Chinaman still hate our guts?”

“Not so much. Maybe it's César Guzmann. Or his Papa. Or both.”

They ate American cheese from Arnold's windowsill, Coen moistening the thick slices with some grape water that Arnold kept under the sink. Soon the blondo would fall into one of his silences, and Arnold would have to scour the room for specks of cheese. Spanish had his own ambitions. He didn't want to remain a simple police buff in a charity hotel for the rest of his life, chasing ping-pong balls and gobbling American cheese. Although he said nothing to Coen, Arnold admired the Chinaman's cool and the fringes on his body-shirts. If he couldn't be a cop on account of his foot (he was also nearsighted and shorter than Coen), Arnold wouldn't mind serving César or another Guzmann. Like most buffs, he was wise to the special rhythm that always seemed to mark the seesaw dance between the cops in a neighborhood and all the crooks. He could no longer respond to ordinary citizens, the “civilianos” who frowned at the cops and isolated themselves from the punks and the SROs. Once he had come to love tending the squadroom cage, he couldn't sit on neutral ground. The civilianos were his enemy, and he either danced with the Guzmanns, the Chinaman, and the cops, or he danced alone.

Coen left him there with his knees out, dreaming the Chinaman's shirt. “Arnold, I'll catch you later. Goodbye.”

He found the wino groaning on the stairs. The old man had new lumps along his scalp and red flecks in the slime on his jaw. But he wasn't disconsolate enough not to pose. He walked with his rump in the air, his arms around the railing. Deprived of an audience of velveteen boys, his shufflings seemed miserable to Coen. “Dollar for bandages and coffee,” the wino said. Coen gave him the dollar and put his rump where it belonged, on the stairs. He panicked outside the hotel, blamed himself for the death of his mother and father. He had abandoned Albert and Jessica (and Sheb), allowed the Army to plunk him into Germany. They wouldn't have chosen the oven with him in the Bronx. An only child, he ought to have been shrewder about his father's closefisted nature, the instability behind the calm front. Coens had to lean on Coens to keep the eggs intact.