Rich and Famous (9 page)

“Oh, well,” he said, “I'll tell you. My father said it didn't make any sense. Why would your father send you up here if you were supposed to go to summer school? Why couldn't you have stayed with some friend in New York?”

“I would have, Sinclair, but Stanky was going to music camp and his parents were going to California.”

“Is that the only friend you have?”

“No, I have lots of friends.”

“And I suppose they were all going to music camp.”

“I don't want to talk about it anymore, Sinclair. I don't care if you don't believe me, it's true anyway.” I got up from the chess table. “I'm going to read,” I said. And so that ended the conversation; but I knew I had better do some practicing on my lies—they weren't good enough.

Chapter

On Monday I took the train down to New York
again. The train ride was beginning to get boring. There wasn't anything very spectacular about the sights along the way—just trees and roads with cars humming along them faster than the train, and closer into the city, a lot of buildings, about half of them slums. On top of it, there was something wrong with the tracks, so the train bounced and jounced so much that sometimes you couldn't even read, you just had to sit there being bumped around and wishing they would fix whatever was wrong. So when the tracks were bouncy, I'd look out the window at the trees and when they were smooth, I'd read some S-F, but still, it was boring, and I was always glad to get into New York. There are a lot of things wrong with New York, but at least it isn't boring. But on that Monday it wasn't very exciting, either. For one thing, it was drizzling. For another thing, the meeting I was supposed to come in for had been canceled. “I would have called you, babe,” Woody said, “but I don't have your phone number, remember?”

“Oh,” I said. “I forgot. I'll bring it in next time.”

“I'd have thought you'd have learned it by this time.”

“I guess I should have,” I said. “I have trouble memorizing phone numbers sometimes.”

“Bear it in mind, babe. But be here on Wednesday. We're meeting with Fenderbase and the biggies.”

So there I was stuck in New York. I couldn't go back up to Pawling, because I was supposed to be in tutoring school. Oh, I suppose I could have said that classes were canceled for some reason, or there'd been a fire in the boiler room, but I didn't want to add any more lies to the ones I'd already told: I was having trouble enough keeping them straight already.

I decided to go down to Greenwich Village. I figured I might run into somebody I knew. There was always a chance that some friend of mine would be shooting baskets at the West Fourth Street courts, if it wasn't drizzling too hard. Anyway, it would feel kind of good to be back in my own neighborhood for a few hours. I could go to Crespino's, which is a lunch counter Pop sent me to a lot when he was too lazy to cook, and have a hamburger. It would make me feel
at
home. So I walked over to Times Square and took the Seventh Avenue local down to Sheridan Square, and then just by habit I started walking down West Fourth Street, just sort of idling along, and all at once I found myself standing in front of my own building. Our apartment is on the front, on the fourth floor. I crossed over to the opposite side of the street and looked up. There were some lights on in the living room. I didn't know who Pop had rented it to, whether it was some single person or a family, although a little apartment like ours wouldn't hold a very big family. Of course, with these sublets, sometimes they cram in more people than usual. I mean it might be some professor from New York University, which was only a couple of blocks away on Washington Square, and maybe he had his wife and his kid there, too. I'll admit it, I was getting pretty curious. I mean suppose some kid was sleeping in my bed, where I'd slept all my life, and doing his rock collection or enameling kit or whatever his thing was, on my desk. It gave me a kind of funny feeling to think about that, as if I had a sort of twin, like in that doppelganger movie where this guy had a double who was just like him, only in another world. I wondered if he was using any of my stuff. When I'd gone up to Sinclair's I'd taken pretty near all of my clothes, mainly because I didn't have very many, and my acoustic guitar, and some of my records, because I knew Sinclair didn't have any rock, and my bathing suit and stuff like that. But most of my junk was still in the apartment. I mean like my camera and light meter, from the time when I had a hobby of photography. It was a secondhand Nikkormat that Stanky sold me for twenty-five dollars which was a pretty cheap price, mostly because he wanted somebody to do his photography with. I didn't last at it very long. For awhile Stanky and I went around taking shots of addicts nodding out in doorways and the Empire State Building through fire escapes and stuff like that which was supposed to be artistic. But then came having to develop them and print them in this dark room Stanky had rigged up in the basement of his building. That was pretty boring, and I gave up photography as a hobby. Stanky was disgusted with me, but I explained to him that I didn't have much stick-to-it-ive-ness. He said, “I know that, but you have to get over it, George,” I said, “I don't think I ever will.” He said, “You ought to try,” and I said, “Sorry about that,” and that was the end of the photography. But I still had the camera and the light meter and some other dark room stuff, and I wondered if whoever was living there was fooling around with it. It would make me sore if he was, even if I never used it anymore.

And all of a sudden I decided to go on up and see. It made me kind of nervous. I knew that Pop wouldn't want me bothering the people who were subletting. He'd say that they were
paying
good money for the privilege of living there, and we didn't have any right to come barging in. But I decided to do it anyway, I'd say I was somebody else. I had my own key, so I let myself in the front door, climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor, and knocked on our door. I waited for a minute, and finally a woman's voice said, “Who is it?”

“It's George Scampi,” I said. The Scampis lived just below us, only they didn't have any George; their children were all grown up, Agnes Scampi used to babysit me when I was a little kid.

“Scampi?”

“I live downstairs.”

She opened the door a crack and looked out. “I didn't mean to bother you,” I said, “but there's some water leaking down. It might be from your radiator. It happens a lot.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, come on in.” She opened the door up. She was around twenty-two or something, and she was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt which was smeared up with paint.

I walked in. “They're always having leaks up here,” I said. “Sometimes it's from the radiators, sometimes it's from the toilet or the sink. You never can tell where it's coming from.”

“Well, have a look around,” she said. She had some drawing paper tacked onto Pop's drawing table, and she was doing some kind of water color sketch, but from where I was standing I couldn't see what. She went back to the drawing table, but she didn't work. Instead she sort of watched me. I went into my bedroom. The bed wasn't made, and there was a lot of women's underwear flung all over the place. It made me kind of sore to see my room all messed up—I mean I didn't keep it so neat myself, but at least it was my mess. I fooled around in there for a minute, and then I went into the bathroom and pretended to look at the sink pipes. It was kind of funny to see a lot of lady's pills and stuff in there instead of our toothbrushes and Pop's razor and shaving cream and all that. So then I checked the kitchen, which had strange foods in it, too, and finally I went back into the living room.

“Well, I can't find anything,” I said. “I guess it must have stopped by itself.”

“Stopped by itself?”

“Yeah, it does that sometimes.”

“Well, okay,” she said.

But I didn't want to go. I was still curious to find out if anybody else was living there. I mean maybe her husband was at work and her kid was riding his bike in Washington Square.
Besides,
I didn't have anything else to do. “I guess you're a painter,” I said.

“After a fashion,” she said.

She wanted me to go, I could tell that, so she could get back to her painting. “I'm kind of interested in painting,” I said. “I take art in school.” I walked over to her picture, and then suddenly I saw something out of the corner of my eye that stopped me. It was my little teddy bear key chain. It was hanging from one of the knobs on the swivel lamp Pop had over his drawing table, just sort of dangling down over the table. It made me feel kind of creepy to see it hanging there, I mean considering that it was my special thing and didn't have anything to do with her. So I blurted out, “I see you have a teddy bear key chain.”

“What? Oh that.”

“The kid who lives here has one like that.”

“It's his, I imagine,” she said. “It's sort of cute.”

There wasn't anything more I could say about it. If I'd admitted who I was in the first place maybe I'd have been able to say it was my lucky charm or something, and she'd let me take it, but it was too late for that. “Well,” I said, finally, “I guess I'd better go. Maybe I'll see you again.”

„Fine,” she said. “Although I usually don't like being interrupted when I'm working.”

So I left; there was nothing else to do. I checked out the West Fourth Street courts, but it was still drizzling too much for basketball, so I went over to Crespino's and ate a hamburger and a milkshake, and then I killed some time up on Eighth Street in the record stores; and finally it was time to go up to Grand Central and take the train back to Pawling. What a boring day. And to make it worse, halfway up to Pawling on the train I finished my Heinlein book and had nothing to do but stare out the window at a lot of wet trees.

Of course every time I got back to Sinclair's I was faced with a new worry—had Uncle Ned caught onto something? He didn't say anything when I came in, except his usual “I guess it's time to wash up for dinner,” and he didn't say anything about it at dinner—we just carried on a conversation about Isaac Newton's theory and how it was different from Einstein's theory of relativity. Uncle Ned didn't believe in wasting the dinner time with a few jokes or some interesting story about what happened that day, the way Pop and I did, which I guess is one reason why Pop never spent much time up there. Uncle Ned's idea was that you were committing a sin unless you launched right into some lively topic like Isaac Newton or air
pollution.
I wasn't in favor of air pollution, mind you, but I didn't see why we had to have it along with our pot roast every night. But to be honest, so long as he didn't bring up anything about my summer school I wasn't going to be too upset, even if the conversation wasn't much more fun than looking at wet leaves for an hour.

But as it turned out, he was only playing it cool. After dinner, when I was sitting out on the porch reading, so as to escape from being beaten at chess by Sinclair, which I would have to have done if I'd hung around his room, he came up and sat down next to me. “Well, tell me, George,” he said. “How's your school going?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “I mean it's just at the beginning, it's sort of confusing.”

“I suppose so. What exactly are you taking?”

He was trying to trap me, that was clear. “French and math. They didn't have enough for American history or I would have taken that, too.”

“That sounds like enough,” he said. “It isn't sensible to try to do too much at once. I suppose they've really loaded you down with homework.”

“I guess they will,” I said. “Only we haven't got our books yet.”

“That seems like bad management. Perhaps if you told me the name of the books I could get them for you.”

I was beginning to sweat around my eyebrows. “Well, they said they'd have them next time.”

“I see. You mean Wednesday—day after tomorrow.”

“That's what they
said—but
maybe something will go wrong.”

He stood up. “Let's hope not, George.” Then he went into the house.

Chapter