Girls In 3-B, The (9 page)

Raised eyebrows. "Sure. Why?"

"Oh, no reason." She flounced inside, slamming the front door. That goofy janitor, Rocco, was loitering in the front hall, doing nothing as usual. She didn't know why he was hanging around at that hour of the night, but she gave him a dirty look and went on up. A good-looking fellow if you like the bold, fresh type, but she was peeved at all men, since Alan was out of her reach. I'll get even with him, she promised herself.
If
he ever calls me for another date I'll turn him down so fast.

The thought that he might not call chilled her to the bone.

But he called, and they went to the ballet. Dutch. Alan said there was no reason why a man should pay a woman's way any place in this day and age; women earned as much as men. There was no reason why a man should support a woman unless she was gestating, and maybe not then. It was a racket women had been working for hundreds of years, and he was against it. He would go so far as to pick up the check if he invited a girl to eat with him, and that was a sop to bourgeois morality that he was ashamed of. On the other hand, he said, he hardly ever asked a girl out, and if he did it was to some cheap joint
--
a drugstore or the Four Arts Grill. If it was her idea in the first place, she could damn well pay her own way.

"If a fellow and a girl go out together, she ought to enjoy the evening as much as he does. Why should he pay for it?"

"Well, but
--
"

All the way home from the theater
--
not as far as she would have liked, but far enough for him to develop any ideas he might have
--
she sat well away from him, wondering miserably if he was angry with her and why; and if he was angry, why had he asked her to go out? She suspected it was a kind of cruelty, or at best curiosity; he was the kind of boy who torments a frog to see it jump, or pulls the wings off a butterfly and watches it flop. At the door, she moved tentatively closer. He ignored the movement. He said, "Good night," leaving her to open the car door, get out and walk to the house by herself. She supposed that was a matter of principle too. Why wait on a healthy able-bodied woman?

She lay awake far into the night, angry at him and hungry for the touch of his hands on her body and the pressure of his mouth against hers, determined to win him back. Back from where?
He's a stranger,
she thought in her mother's cool rational way. And then, hot with longing,
oh, no, you don't go as far as we did that night unless you like each other.

Or do you?

Are there people who take excitement any way they can get it, whether the other person means anything to them or not
?

This morning he had called at seven o'clock, while she was drowsily making coffee. Penny Williams was having a party, and how about it? Bring somebody if she wanted. "I’ll bring a boy from school," she said to show that she was independent, didn't need him. "Fine. We can all eat together."

He could at least have been jealous!

She called Pat at noon, thinking that a foursome would at least look like a date, and Pat hesitantly agreed to go. She was glad. Pat was no competition in this kind of crowd, where exotic ugliness rated higher than cornfed prettiness. It was hard to believe that she had ever been envious of Pat's freedom of her romance with Johnny.

Jack put his hand on her shoulder; she turned, startled, and then smiled at him. "Hi. We'll have to eat downtown after all. Pat's going."

"How come?"

"I thought she'd like to. She doesn't have much fun."

"The idea is I make like Pat's boy friend, so you can come home with Lover Boy."

Damn him, he was too bright. That had been in the back of her head from the beginning, although she wasn't admitting it even to herself. She looked away. "We can all go together, can't we? Do we always have to be in twos like Noah's Ark or something?"

"Oh hell, Annie, let's have a nickel's worth of honesty for a change."

"And don't call me Annie."

He grinned, taking her hand kindergarten style. "What's the matter you're so mean
?
Don't you feel good
?
"

"None of your damned business."

It was a bad start for an evening, and from there it went on and on in the same key like an amateur composition. Pat was abstracted, and left most of her fettuccini on her plate. Annice knew she was trying to lose weight, but it wasn't like her to order more than she could eat when she was paying for it herself. Jack was polite and remote. Alan didn't show up until they were almost through eating, and there was an air of excited expectancy about him that made her sniff suspiciously. He hadn't been drinking. Some other girl, then? The idea made her feel leaden.

Alan finally put down his fork. "Come on, let's show these kids from the sticks a slice of real life."

Annice scowled at him. "Oh, when you've seen one of these imitation Greenwich Villages you've seen them all."

"You don't have to go, baby," Alan said, grinning. "The rest of us can get along without your company."

Jack said anxiously, "Look, I don't think you ought to talk to Annie
--
Annice, I mean
--
like that."

She turned her scowl on him. "You keep out of this. Just because we've gone out together three or four times you don't own me."

Pat sat drinking water, turning her fork over and over in the messy plate. Jack looked around. "What a cheerful bunch."

"Oh, come on."

Whatever was wrong, the meal set the tone for the evening. The party was a replica of others she had gone to, except that this was basically a gathering of musicians. The guest of honor seemed to be a short, very dark brown boy with long sideburns, who played the drums. It wasn't that she had any race prejudice
--of course not,
she assured herself, trying not to stare when a hard-looking blonde threw her arms around the drummer and hugged him possessively. Alan looked at her coldly. "Matter, you-all, you in favor of segregation or something?"

"Of course not. I don't like his type, that's all. He looks like he ought to be wearing a black leather jacket and carrying a switchblade."

"What do you want him to wear, a tuxedo
?
"

She squinted through a milling drift of people and cigarette fumes and alcoholic fog. Several boys in a corner were smoking brown-paper cigarettes, not talking, simply standing with half-closed eyes and fixed smiles. She nudged Alan. "Reefers. For Christ sake, didn't you ever get high?" She had supposed people who smoked marijuana did it in private, not out in the middle of a crowded room where everybody could see. "God almighty, everybody does it. Where you been?"

Everybody was talking, with the volume turned way up. Words beat against her eardrums without making sense, like the pounding of surf on rocks or the blowing of wind in a tree. The drummer, Snap Kennedy, had stopped for a drink. He had one arm around the blonde, leaning on her
--
she was a head taller than he. He was wearing, actually, a canary-yellow tweed jacket and a light blue bow tie, and in addition to the sideburns he sported a neat moustache. His eyes glinted around from face to face, and he smiled widely now and then, in recognition or in answer to a greeting. Annice had the sudden idea that he is making fun of everyone, the whole party; that he was putting on an act
--
this was how they expected a jazz musician to be, how a hep cat should look, so he was playing the part and getting along okay. She wondered what he was like in real life.

"He's a fake," she said wonderingly.

Alan nodded. "So'm I. So are you."

"Maybe you are, but I'm not."

"Oh, cut out the crap, Miss Miliary. How long is it since you've really written a poem?”

"Not so long."

"When?"

She shook her head. It was months, actually. That foggy day last spring, when she had gone walking in a dream world of mist and muted sounds, completely alone, and had come home to throw herself on her bed and weep because life was so sad and beautiful. Later, she had put down five short lines, a cinquain, about the fog and the loneliness.

That was six months ago.

"See, you're outgrowing it. All kids are going to be writers. I was going to be Henry Miller and do another
Tropic of Capricorn,
only in a more modern idiom."

"That's not the same thing."

"Why isn't it? You can't stand it to face the truth, that's all. You can't face yourself without any pretenses. You're like everybody else, a human being who has to eat and sleep and sh
--
"

"Oh, stop." His accusations didn't bother her as much as his choice of words; he used words she had never heard anybody say out loud before, although everybody knew what they meant and tough kids wrote them on walls and fences. She couldn't help blushing when he brought them into the conversation, and she was never sure whether they were part of his regular everyday vocabulary or whether he was trying to upset her. "You don't need to say those words."

"Which words?"

"You know what you were going to say."

"If you know it, you don't have any business being shocked by it."

She said coldly, "I'm not shocked. I simply think it's vulgar, that's all."

“Sure it's vulgar. So's life." She stood up, stepping over the feet of a sprawling girl in black leotards. He said, "This is a lot of crap. Let's get out of here."

"I ought to go home."

"Come on up to my place. I've got something to show you."

She felt herself redden. "Uhuh," Alan said, "not what you think. My, you've got a dirty mind." "I wasn't thinking any such thing." Pat had found an aspiring author to talk to and was giving him professional advice on how to write a book, although so far her closest contact with literature had been to unwrap arriving manuscripts and enter their title, author and date of arrival on index cards. She caught Annice's eye and raised inquiring eyebrows. It was impossible to be heard above all the racket, so Annice pointed to the door and to herself, indicating departure, and Pat nodded good-by. Jack was nowhere in sight. Annice wrapped her thin coat high around her throat and followed Alan out into the night, feeling alive with curiosity and at the same time terrified.

She was surprised to learn that he lived only a couple of blocks from her own apartment; he had never mentioned it. She wondered if he was ashamed of the shabby rundown building, but it wasn't like him to be ashamed of anything. She followed him up the front steps and into a dimly lighted vestibule, then across a large downstairs living room where a sleeping figure lay on a folding cot. The room was in shadow, but the street light shone in through the dirty panes of a vast bay window and picked out of the details of a forest of potted plants. "African violets," Alan said in a loud whisper. "The landlady's nuts about African violets. She won some kind of a goddam prize from some garden club for 'em."

"Is that she on the cot
?
" She leaned against the smudged wallpaper at the foot of the stairs, waiting for him. Alan snickered. "Hell, no. That's Jenni. He's been out of a job as long as I remember, but Madame feels sorry for him because he's a refugee from the Iron Curtain and such a good-looking bastard besides. So she lets him sleep in the front room for nothing. I think she thinks he's going to lay her. She keeps thinking up errands to go down there in the middle of the night and cover him up or some damn thing, but I don't think it's going to get her anyplace. She's about ninety."

"Oh, come on."

"Might as well be." They were at the top of the stairs now; he fumbled for his key. "He doesn't mind sleeping in the parlor. In fact, he's doing a scientific experiment." He swung the bedroom door open. "Every night he gets up in the middle of the night and pees on those damn flowers."

"You're kidding."

"No, honest. One died the other day," Alan said, very pleased, "a white one. Jenni says the white ones haven't got as much stamina as the blue ones."

So this was where he lived. He turned on the overhead bulb. She sat down on the bed, although she wasn't exactly invited, and looked around. The room was small, and probably looked even smaller because it was so cluttered. There was no inch of floor space that wasn't covered with records, paperbound books, clothes, sheets of paper both blank and written-on. A saucepan and spoon stood in one corner. A plate sat on the bed. At some distant time the bed had been made up, but now sheets and a depressed-looking cotton blanket trailed on the floor. There was a record player in one corner of the room, and a pair of socks hung over a wire hanger from a picture frame. Cigarette butts were everywhere.

"Don't say it," Alan warned her. "Get that little-woman look out of your eyes. Anything I can't stand it's a little housewife who bustles around and picks everything up and makes the joint all clean and sanitary, making life hell for some nice, normal, sloppy guy."

"Hush, don't make so much noise."

"Why not? In this place, who cares?"

"I can't stay long."

"Bull." He jerked open a drawer, rummaged through a stack of underwear and more written-on papers and finally came up with something in his hand. She wondered what he was looking for, cigarettes or a bottle or
--
shrinking from the idea
--
one of the things the girls whispered about, that fellows bought in drugstores. For the first time she felt immediately involved, in personal danger. Her nerves tightened. She sat with her feet primly side by side, her bands clenched in her lap.

"Look."

She stared, puzzled. The thing in his hand was a roundish disk, plainly vegetable and green-white. For a moment she thought he was joking. Then a look at his face, intent and excited, convinced her that whatever this was, it was no joke. It had some special meaning to him
--
he looked both excited and frightened, like a man about to make a high jump. "What is it?"

"Mescal. Peyote. Mitch Patterson brought it back from Mexico with him. He used it there."

"Wh
--
what do you do with it?"

"Baby, you go into another world with it, another life." His hand was tight on her shoulder; he turned her so that the light shone on her face. His look scuttled over her like the feet of running insects. She shivered. "This is our night to dream dreams and see visions, baby. You and me together."