Marijuana Girl (9 page)

Then he tried her on day police court. She had covered the routine arraignments with the elaborate attention to detail of a proceedings-reporter for the Congressional Record, and the enthusiasm for color of a Time-staffer.

So Frank gave her a raise, and told her she could call herself a reporter--although copy traffic was still her proper province.

As the summer wore on, Frank took her repeatedly to the Golden Horn, to the Stuyvesant Ball Room where the greatest of Dixieland musicians held forth weekly in the best New Orleans tradition, to Jimmy Ryan's, to Birdland, to the Three Deuces, to all the places where he was known by the musicians as a connoisseur of jazz. He introduced her to players, famous and infamous, and took a strange pride in the way she took to them and their music, and the way they took to her.

Cautiously, for fear of the police and not for fear of any other consequences, he further taught her the use of marijuana. Solemnly he steered her away from the junkies, users of heroin and cocaine, and solemnly explained the perils of those drugs with a "hook."

"Look," he told her one night when she asked why he regarded marijuana as so right, heroin as so wrong, "heroin has a hook. It's a narcotic. If you take it once you only need a little tiny bit to get high, and it'll give you a lift that takes you right through the ceiling. But the next time you come around it won't do the same thing for you unless you take a little bit more, and, every time you use it if you go at it regularly, you've got to keep adding to the dose. Pretty soon you need two capsules, then three, then five, just to get your regular kick. All right, that might not do any harm. But, suppose you take three caps or five for several days running. One morning you wake up and find you're clean. You can't put your hands on any. Suddenly you get into a panic, because you've got to have it. You chase all over hell and gone looking for it and you don't find it. After a while that panic wears off. Then you get it again, and you're more cautious. You get enough for a longer stretch, and you hoard it carefully. When you come to the end of that supply you're desperate. You'll sell your soul for more. You can't eat. You can't think. You can't do anything but hunt for heroin." He looked at her. "Remember Bang Morley?"

Joyce shook her head.

"Well, Bang was one of the greatest sax men that ever lived. He used to be with Jerry Best. He could do things with a sax that would curl your hair. He started off sniffing heroin--inhaling it up through his nose through a rolled up dollar bill from a little card where he'd spill the powder. At first that was all right. Made him feel like the king of the band. Then it began to get him. He couldn't play as well. His mind was always taken up with where he could get more of the stuff. Jerry offered to pay for a cure for him, but he wouldn't take the cure. He was too much bound up in the stuff. He stopped showing up for work and finally Jerry had to fire him. Yesterday I read in the News that he took a flying jump off the Empire State Building."

Joyce said, "Oh," with a quick little indrawn breath of horror. Then she said, "You're just playing games, Frank. Isn't marijuana just as bad?"

Frank shook his head. "As far as anybody has ever been able to tell, marijuana can't hurt a fly. I don't say it's good. It isn't. Anybody who needs marijuana, or liquor or anything else, such as coffee or cigarettes, to get along in the world--well, there's something wrong with that guy. But marijuana doesn't have a hook. If you can't get it--okay, you can't get it. You wish you had it, then you forget about it. You never lose control of yourself in tea, the way you do, for example in liquor. It doesn't load you down. It doesn't damage your body or your brain. I told you--the New York Academy of Medicine once checked up on that. But good for you? No, it isn't good for you. I know a lot of people who try it and don't like it. The significant thing is, they are always people I'd call mentally healthy. They're the really sane people I know ..."

Joyce learned about other things from Frank. He introduced her to classical music, explaining that the channel through which it could be approached was the same channel which led to jazz--good jazz. He brought her to books, to Chinese food, to modern painting. He introduced her to long, rambling, conversational walks through the byways of Manhattan. He showed her Harlem and the Williamsburg Bridge. He took her to Coney Island and the Lewisohn Stadium. Together they saw ball games, went for a moonlight swim at Jones Beach.

And in time Joyce learned that Frank was jealous of Tony ...

One day he said, "Joy? Every once in a while I see you with that kid Tony Thrine. Do you still go out with him?"

"Sometimes. Don't you like him?"

"Oh, sure. Nice kid. But he drives like a maniac."

"Don't be silly, Frank. Tony's a terrific driver."

"You know best," he said. "But I don't care much for the way he cuts through traffic. He's going to get himself in a sling one of these days."

"Frank, you aren't jealous are you?"

"Don't be dopey, kid. I'm never jealous of anybody. But I wish you wouldn't ride around with him in that car so much."

"But I don't ride with him much. I hardly ever go out with him."

"Aw, forget it." Then, after a moment, he said, "Joy, do you have to wear that dress?"

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Then why did you mention it?"

"Because I hate to see you wearing things in poor taste."

"What are you talking about, Frank. I've worn this lots of times and you never said anything."

"I know. But it's cheap looking. You look like a small town brat trying to look like a loose woman. Don't wear it again when you're going out with me."

And by his anger she understood that he was not put out about the dress, but about Tony.

Joyce was seeing Tony, all right. Sometimes once a week, sometimes twice. If she had asked herself why, she would have said it was because every once in a while she wanted to get out with somebody her own age--somebody who wasn't constantly teaching her things and forcing her to be older than she was.

But she was being pretty intimate with Tony as well. Not always. Not very often. But sometimes. He lacked Frank's maturity, sophistication, sensual tenderness; but his fumbling excitement was sometimes more edifying to Joyce's soul. She could not tell exactly why or how, or what made it that way, but Tony was very important to her. She told herself that she was being sweet to him only to prevent him from suspecting Frank, from spilling the beans to her aunt who would cause trouble for Frank.

But in her heart she realized that she wanted Tony to love her, just as she wanted Frank to love her. She wanted love, love above all--the certainty of male affection.

After a time she became inured to the subtle tensions, the two-way stretch of the problem. She settled into the calm of being the beloved of two men as though it were as normal as corn flakes for breakfast.

Then, in mid-August, the final blow fell ...

Frank left his house, that morning, at peace with the world and with himself. Even the burning heat of the August sun, glaring on the black macadam, could not interfere with the great calm that lay on his soul. The Managing Editor, old Force Dutney, had increased his salary and he was, this afternoon, to collect his first paycheck. Moreover, an article which he had written on tea-smoking had been accepted, the day before, by Esquire Magazine.

God was in his familiar heaven, and Frank Burdette was getting along just fine.

Then he met the postman.

"Hi, Mr. Burdette," the little gray man said. "Don't have much for you this morning. Just this one letter here. Guess it's from your wife."

"Thanks, Mr. Main," Frank said. "Beautiful day, isn't it?"

" 'Sall right if you're in an air-conditioned office, I guess," Mr. Main said, thereby revealing the smallness of his soul and his inability to appreciate the glories of nature. "But, as a carrier of the mail, I kind of prefer autumn. Well, see you tomorrow." He hitched the bag a little higher on his shoulder and plodded up the street.

Frank turned the letter over, as though something new could be revealed by Janice's familiar script on the envelope, then put it in his pocket. He would read it in the office. Nothing should be permitted to distract him from the loveliness of nature this fine August morning.

He did not get to the letter until just before lunch. Then he opened it read the first few lines, put it down, rose to close the ever-open door of his office, and returned to the neat, tight script.

My dearest fuzzyhead:

I can see from your few letters that you are terribly unhappy, and I wish with all my heart that I knew some way to help you.

This has happened before, I know. But never like this. I knew, even before I went away, that it was a mistake for me to go.

It's very hard for me to write this--because it means admitting it to myself as well. But I did see it before I left, and your letters say it over and over again between the lines, even if they don't say it overtly. I'm only putting it down like this so you'll know I understand the facts--not just know them. It's very important, my darling, that you see the difference between understanding and knowing.

You've been having an affair with that lovely little Taylor girl. I don't blame you for it. Every year I go off like this and leave you alone with no one to keep you company and I guess--like it says in the old saying--a man isn't made of wood. I could say that I don't mind, but it wouldn't be true. The thought of you intimate with another girl makes me frantically jealous. Fortunately, for me, I don't really know this in the literal sense. It just kind of comes to me from what you write in your letters. And she is very beautiful. It's like putting two and two together and then saying, well, I won't add them up so I only suspect they make four.

I wouldn't write you like this if it were just for the affair you're having. You've had these summer affairs before. But there is something else. You're probably concealing it from yourself, but you're terribly unhappy without her, and jealous and angry with yourself. That shows in your letters, too. And if you let yourself get more deeply entangled in the emotional problems this thing is making for you, you'll become so involved with the Taylor girl that I'll never get you back.

I don't like to threaten you, my darling. And this isn't really a threat, because I'm so sure of the outcome. But, my darling, you must decide now, before things become worse. You are supposed to come up here the eighteenth anyway, so let's make that the time for decision--a sort of cutting-day for the Gordian knot.

Don't come here, my darling, unless you have finished off this affair. Please don't come. And if you don't come, then I'll know that it's all over and that it has been wonderful being married to you, but that we had to break it off.

And, if you do come, I shan't say a word to you. Not a word, my darling. But I'll know that you love just me ...

P.S. Junior slobbered on the letter. He means he loves you, too.

Joyce met Tony at the corner of Second Street and Madison. She had intended to go with Frank to New York, that evening. But all day long he had been in a strange, tense mood. At noon she had seen him close the door of his office, a thing he never did ordinarily, and he had kept it closed until late in the afternoon.

She had been supposed to have lunch with Frank, but he did not open the office door, did not come out, as he ordinarily would, to ask if she was ready. Finally she had gone by herself. About four o'clock he came to her desk.

"Listen, Joy," he said. "Something's come up, and I won't be able to make it tonight. There's something I have to get straightened out here." And that was when she decided to telephone Tony.

"Want to take me out tonight?"

"Why not? Don't I always?"

"So pick me up at the corner of Madison and Second at six o'clock, Okay?" Tony's car was parked on Madison, just above where it narrowed for the underpass beneath the Long Island Railroad bridge.

She waved at him as soon as she saw him, his spidery legs mysteriously entangled in the steering wheel, his arms stretched back behind his head as he reclined in luxurious ease against the leather seat cushions.

"Hi, lazy," she said.

"Saving up my energy for school," he said. "It's been decided. I'm not going to Harvard at all. I'm registered at NYU. Went in to town this morning to get signed up."

"Good," Joy said. Not really meaning anything special.

"Any particular place you want to go?" Tony asked, as he started the car.

"I got eyes for some sea-food."

"What kind of an expression is that? I've got eyes for some sea-food?"

"It's musicians' talk," Joyce explained. "Jive-talk. All the cats dig it. You mean you ain't hip, man?"

"Cut it out."

"What do you mean, cut it out? I'll talk as I please."

"Not with me, you won't," Tony said. "And another thing, why did you tell me to meet you at the corner of Second and Madison? What's the matter with in front of the Courier building? You do still work there, don't you?"

"Of course I do."

"Then ...?"

"Well ..." She stumbled. "I--I had something I had to see about at the corner of Second and Madison."

"Something important at the ice house, of course ..." His voice was loaded with sarcasm.

"As a matter of fact, it was. I had to see a Mister--Mister Pelley there. It was about an--an Elks meeting."

"Quit lying to me, Joy."

"Don't you dare call me a liar, Tony Thrine. If you ever say that again I'll ..."

"Just what will you do, Joy?"

"I'll never see you again."

"All right. Now I'll tell you a few things. The reason you didn't want to meet me in front of the Courier building is because you didn't want Frank to see you riding off with me. And the reason you didn't want him to is because you've been lying to him just the way you've lied to me. And if you've been lying to him about going out with me, then you've been lying about how--how close we are. And if you've been lying about that, you've been lying because you were close with him and you couldn't let him find out about anybody else--just like you couldn't let me. Is that true?"