The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (67 page)

Tom stopped for a cup of coffee in one of the late cafés near the pier. Looking into the bar mirror, the first thing he did was scrub the lipstick off his mouth with his handkerchief. He couldn't get it all off; it would take soap and water to get rid of the lingering pink glow. Then he saw in the mirror that the two kids were there at a table—Junior and his friend. They had their little white hats shoved down into their eyebrows, trying to look salty, and they were grinning and getting up to come over.

“Look who's here,” Junior said. “Whaddya say, Chief?” He was eager as a young bride. Tom looked around without smiling. “What the hell you kids doing out so late? Too late for nice kids to be out.”

“What happened to your buddy?” Junior asked, grinning. “He find a home?”

Tom looked narrowly at the boy and picked up his coffee. Any kid ought to know better than to talk to a chief that way. What happened to your buddy, for God's sake. But never mind; he'd get squared away quick enough, back on the ship. “How the hell should I know?” he said. “Don't act wise, Junior.”

That shut him up, but the other kid moved right in. “So how'd it go, Chief? You make it?”

Tom put the cup down in its little saucer. “Son,” he said, “any man couldn't make that oughta turn in his uniform.”

They both howled and slapped their thighs. Tom spread out the slip of paper Betty had given him and got out his address book. “One a you kids got a pen?”

Two fountain pens were thrust upon him, opened for action. He selected one and carefully transcribed the address into the book.
Mrs. Betty Meyers . . .
Then he handed the pen back, dropped the paper on the floor and waved the book in the air a few times before closing it, to dry the ink.

“Well, I see you're keepin' her address, anyway,” Junior said. “Couldn't of been too bad, if you're keepin' her address.”

“Sure,” Tom said. “Why not?”

“She got
your
address?”

It was such a stupid question that Tom played it along. “Sure,” he said softly, looking at the kid with a slow smile, raising the cup to his lips. “Why not?”

The boy exploded. “Oh-ho-ho-
ho
! You wanna
watch
that, Chief—you wanna look
out
for stuff like that! Her
hus
band'll be in town one of these days!”

Still smiling, Tom put the cup down and shook his head from side to side. It was hard to believe. The
kids
you got in the Navy nowadays. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Junior. When're you gonna grow up? Whaddya think—I told her my real name?”

“
TALENT
,”
ROBERT BLAINE
said in his slow, invalid's voice, “is simply a matter of knowing how to handle yourself.” He relaxed on his pillow, eyes gleaming, and shifted his skinny legs under the sheet. “That answer your question?”

“Well, now, wait a minute, Bob,” Jones said. His wheelchair was drawn up respectfully beside the bed and he looked absorbed but dissatisfied, begging to differ. “I wouldn't define it as knowing how to
handle
yourself, exactly. I mean, doesn't it depend a lot on the particular kind of talent you're talking about, the particular line of work?”

“Oh, line of work my ass,” Blaine said. “Talent is talent.”

That was how the evening's talk began at Blaine's bed. There was always a lull in the tuberculosis ward after the wheeling-out of supper trays, when the sun threw long yellow stripes on the floor below the west windows and dazzled the silver spokes of wheelchairs in its path; it was a time when most of the thirty men who lived in the ward convened in little groups to talk or play cards. Jones usually came over to Blaine's bed. He thought Blaine the most learned man and the best conversationalist in the building, and if there was one thing Jones loved, he said, it was a good gabfest. Tonight they were joined by young O'Grady, a husky newcomer to the ward who sat hunched at the foot of Blaine's bed, his eyes darting from one speaker to the other. What was talent? Blaine had used the word, Jones had demanded a definition and now the lines were drawn—as clearly, at least, as they ever were.

“Best definition I can give you,” Blaine said. “Only definition there is. Knowing how to handle yourself. And the ultimate of talent is genius, which is what puts men like Louis Armstrong and Dostoyevsky in a class by themselves among horn players and novelists. Plenty of people know more about music than Armstrong; it's the way he handles himself that makes the difference. Same thing's true of a first-rate ballplayer or a first-rate doctor or a historian like Gibbon. Very simple.”

“Sure, that's right,” O'Grady said solemnly. “Take a guy like Branch Rickey, he knows everything there is about baseball, but that don't mean he'd of made a top ballplayer.”

“That's right,” Blaine told him, “that's the idea.” And O'Grady nodded, pleased.

“Oh-ho, but
wait
a minute now, Bob—” Jones squirmed eagerly in his wheelchair, charged with the cleverness of the point he was about to make. “I think I got you there. Branch Rickey is
very
talented—but as a baseball
executive.
His talent is in
that
field; he's not supposed to be a player.”

“Oh, Jones.” Blaine's face twisted in exasperation. “Go on back to bed and read your comic books, for Christ's sake.”

Jones howled triumphantly and slapped his thigh, giggling, and for an instant O'Grady looked undecided whether to laugh at him or at Blaine. He picked Jones, and Jones's smile sickened under the attack. “No, all I meant is that you can't very well hold Branch Rickey up as an example of—”

“I'm not holding anybody up as an example of anything,” Blaine said. “If you'd only
listen,
instead of using your stupid mouth all the time, you might find out what we're talking about.” He turned his head away in disgust, and O'Grady, still smiling, stared at his thick hands. Jones mumbled a small, blurred word of deference that could have been “all right” or “sorry.”

Finally Blaine turned back. “All I'm saying,” he began, with the elaborate patience of a man who has pulled himself together, “is the very simple fact that some persons are endowed with an ability to handle themselves well, and that we call this ability talent, and that it need have nothing whatever to do with accumulated knowledge, and that a vast majority of persons lack this ability. Now, is that clear?” His eyes bulged, making the rest of his face look even more sunken than usual. One meager hand was thrust out, palm up, fingers curled in a tortured appeal for reason.

“All right,” Jones said, “for purposes of argument, I'll accept that.”

Blaine's hand dropped dead on the counterpane. “Doesn't make any difference whether you accept it or not, you silly bastard. Happens to be true. Persons with talent make things happen, put it that way. Persons without talent let things happen to them. Talent, get it? Cuts through all your barriers of convention, all your goddamned middle-class morality. Your talented man can accomplish anything, get away with anything. Ask anybody whose business is sizing people up—any of your qualified psychologists—or for that matter your con men and your gamblers—any reasonably astute person who deals with the public. They'll all tell you the same thing. Some have it, that's all, and some don't. Hell, I'll give you an example. You familiar with those small, expensive men's clothing stores up around Madison Avenue in the city?” They both shook their heads. “Well, doesn't make any difference. Point is, those stores are the best in town. Very conservative, good English tailoring. Probably the top men's stores in the country.”

“Oh, yeah,” O'Grady said, “I think I know the neighborhood.” But Jones giggled: “All I know is Macy's and Gimbel's.”

“Anyway,” Blaine went on, “I walked into one of those places one day when I first came to New York—oh, back around ‘thirty-nine or 'forty.”

All the stories whose purpose was to show Robert Blaine as a seasoned man of the world were laid in ‘thirty-nine or ‘forty, when he had first come to New York, just as those intended to show him as an irrepressible youth took place in Chicago, “back in the Depression.” Rarely were there any stories about the Army, in which he had performed some drab office job, or about the series of veterans' hospitals like this one that had been his life since the war.

“Just happened to be walking by—I don't know; on my way to see some blonde, I guess, and I saw this coat in the window, beautiful imported English coat. Well, I decided I wanted it right on the spot, probably even decided I
needed
it; that was the way I used to do things. Strolled into the place and told the guy I wanted to try it on. Well, the coat didn't hang right on me, too tight across the shoulders or something, and the guy asked me if I'd like to try something of better quality. Said he'd just gotten a few coats in from England. I said sure, and he brought out this
really
beautiful coat—” The word
coat
was all but lost in a sudden paroxysm of coughing that brought one of his hands up to clutch at the place where his last operation had been, while the other groped for a sputum cup. O'Grady glanced uneasily at Jones during the attack, but finally Blaine's crumpled chest stopped heaving under the pajamas and the swollen vein shrank again in his temple. He lay back, regaining his breath. It was impossible to picture him swinging along Madison Avenue on his way to see some blonde; impossible that any coat could ever have been too tight across his shoulders. When he spoke again his voice was very strained and slow.

“He brought out this really beautiful coat. You know, the kind that never goes out of style; full cut, beautiful tailoring detail, rich material. Well, the minute I put the coat on, it was mine, that's all there was to it. Good fit, harmonized well with the suit I was wearing. I told him I'd take it, even before I'd looked at the price tag. I think it was something over two hundred bucks; I'd probably have taken it if it'd been five hundred. But here I am, pulling the tag off the coat when I remembered I didn't have my checkbook with me.”

“Oh Jesus,” Jones said.

“Well, by that time the guy and I are chatting about clothes and everything—you know; big friends—so I decided I'd just bluff it through. Started walking toward the door, wearing the coat, and he said, ‘Oh, Mr. Blaine, would you mind jotting down your address?' I said, ‘Oh, yes, of course; stupid of me,' and laughed—you know—and he laughed, and I wrote down the name of the hotel where I was living then, and we chatted a little more. He said, ‘You must drop in again, Mr. Blaine,' and I took off. Next day I got the bill in the mail and sent him a check. In other words, he didn't know who I was—I could have given him a phony address, anything. But just by the way I was dressed, way I walked, way I didn't look at the price tag until after I'd agreed to buy the coat, he figured it'd be safe to handle it that way.”

Jones and O'Grady shook their heads appreciatively, and O'Grady said, “I'll be damned.”

Robert Blaine lay back breathing hard, a smile hovering on his dry hps. The story had exhausted him.

“Really shows you what a man can get away with just by acting nonchalant,” Jones said. “Like when I was a kid, and we used to lift stuff out of the dimestore down home. Hell, I bet between the gang of us we must of cleaned that dimestore out of'—his lips worked, smiling, as he cast about for a suitable figure—“well, a lot of money, anyway.”

Blaine opened his mouth to explain that Jones had missed the whole point—he hadn't meant
shoplifting
, for God's sake—but he closed it again without speaking, reluctant to waste the breath. It was no use trying to explain anything to Jones; besides, Jones had settled back in the wheelchair now, twisted his mouth to one side and sniffed sharply through one nostril, which meant he was off on a story of his own.

“I remember one time when I was about fifteen years of age—no, must have been sixteen, because it was the year before I joined the Navy. Well, the other kids and I'd pretty well perfected that technique of acting nonchalant, and one day I got to feeling good, and I decided the dimestore was too tame. Decided I'd try my luck in this big Montgomery Ward store we had down home, which naturally was a lot harder. Thought I'd go it alone, see if I could get away with it, have something to brag about to the gang—you know how kids are. So in I walked, taking my time, circulating around . . .” His voice prattled on, almost effeminate in its preciseness, its Tennessee accent all but bleached out by the ten years he had spent away from home (five in the Navy, he would explain, holding up five fingers, and five in the hospital). Once he paused to cough into a neatly folded Kleenex, which he dropped into Blaine's waste bag. All the nurses agreed that Jones was an ideal patient; he never complained, never broke rules, and kept his belongings spick-and-span.

“I remember each item as if it were yesterday,” he said, and spread his fingers to count them off. “One small monkey wrench; one of those jacknives with the five-inch blades; three or maybe four boxes of .22 caliber ammunition; two little sixteen-millimeter Mickey Mouse films—don't ask me why I got
those
—and a stainless-steel padlock. Well, they had this store detective there, and he saw me take the padlock. Let me get all the way to the door and then came over and put the arm on me. Took me upstairs to the manager's office with all that stuff in my jacket and pants pockets. Scared? Brother, I was scared half to death. But the thing was, he'd only seen me take the
padlock,
and neither he nor the manager stopped to think I might have other stuff too. The manager took the padlock and sat there chewing me out for about ten minutes, took my mom's name and address and everything, and all the time I'm standing there wondering if they'll frisk me before they let me go, and find those cartridges and the other stuff. But they never did; I walked out of there with all that stuff in my pockets, and went home. My mom never heard anything from the manager either. But brother, that was the last time I ever tried anything in
that
store!”