Midnight Cowboy (12 page)

“Your room,” he said to his radio. He went over and turned it on, hoping its sounds would give him the feeling of having truly arrived in this new place.

A woman’s high-pitched, somewhat hysterical voice was saying: “And that’s my system!” Then she giggled. A man’s voice with a special electronic fervor in it said: “Well!
That
beats anything
I’ve
ever heard! When you have insomnia, you simply get out of
bed?” “Yes!”
shrieked the woman, losing control of herself.
“What
on earth do you
do?”
the man urged. “I turn on my
lights!”
she said breathlessly. “And I get dressed! And I do my work, maybe even cook something! Or
bake!”
Seemingly overcome, the woman was unable to continue speaking. The man said, “Aren’t you very
tired
the next day?”
“Oh, no!”
the woman swore, suddenly in dead earnest as if she had been accused of something dreadful, like malingering. “Honestly, I’m not;
honestly!”

Joe felt sorry for the lady but at the same time he was delighted by what he’d heard. For it seemed to bear out all those rumors about Eastern women. Aloud, he said, “What’s wrong with you, lady, is perfickly clear to me. Get
me
over t’that radio station, I’ll put you in shape.”

“Of course,” the woman said, “I’ll probably col
lapse
right here at this microphone!” Then she gave way to utter, breathless hysteria.

“Well!” said the announcer, chuckling fatuously, “I hope you won’t collapse until you’ve
sung
for us!”

He played a record on which the woman, in a quieter mood and through an echo chamber, sang
My Foolish Heart
.

While she sang Joe opened the desk drawer. He found a ballpoint pen and two post cards picturing this very hotel. After some study he was able to determine which of the windows was his own. Encircling it with the pen, he turned the card over and wrote “Dear” in the message space. Then he stopped writing, wondering dear
who
. Unable to think of a name to place there, he tore the card in half and dropped it out the window.

The lady on the radio sang that this time it wasn’t fascination, this time it was
love
.

Joe picked up the second card, encircling his own window again, and wrote: “This is me,” across the sky. And on the message side, skipping the
dear
part entirely, he wrote: “Well I am settled in here—new york is not so much but I have got my own place and very clean too—” In the space intended for an addressee, he printed the word
SHIT
. Then he tore the card in half and said, “I’m fucked if I come to this town to write post cards.” Just as he threw the pieces of the card out the window, he thought of someone to whom he might have addressed it: his Negro colleague in the scullery of the Sunshine Cafeteria. He put his head out the window and saw the fragments still floating toward the street. For a moment it looked as if one of them might drop right into the cap of a loitering sailor, but the sailor moved on, joining a stream of early-evening pedestrians.

Joe adjusted his pace so that he and the rich lady might arrive at the corner at the same moment. With luck, the light would be red and they would wait there together and somehow a conversation would begin in which the rich lady would be afforded an opportunity to place a bid on his wares. Park Avenue was not what he had expected: Of the few persons walking here at twilight, not one had given him a second glance. His faith in himself and in his project was a delicate thing at best, and he had now to be especially agile in avoiding any doubt that might bump up against it and wreck it entirely.

For instance, there was no single aspect of this rich lady he followed that might suggest any hunger for what he had to offer. But he knew that if he pondered even for a moment her flawless, elegant self-sufficiency, evident in every detail of her appearance and in ever)’ step she took, his own resolve would be lost to him at once.

She was a small-boned, brown-haired lady of medium height. As she preceded him down Park Avenue, Joe admired her ankles. They were slender, beautifully formed., and they seemed to say: “We are not very strong, but we are strong enough—and rich.”

At the corner of 39th Street, waiting for the light, Joe removed his hat and held it over his heart. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, putting many facial muscles to work on a powerful smile. “I’m new here in town, just in from Houston Texas, and lookin’ for the Statue of Liberty.”

The rich lady continued to present him with a perfect view of her profile, a fine, delicate, pretty thing to behold, but she gave no sign at all that she had heard him speak.

When the light was red, the rich lady crossed Park Avenue. Joe followed. On the east side of the street she stopped and turned to him, saying: “Were you joking? About the Statue of Liberty?” Her tone was direct, neither friendly nor hostile.

“Joking? No, ma’am.
Oh
, no! I mean business!”

“Do forgive me, then,” she said, clearly unconvinced, but going along with it for reasons of her own. “I thought you were making some sort of—never mind.” She smiled and Joe was touched suddenly by the very special beauty of a lady at the far, far end of her youth—old age just under the surface of her skin, but not yet emerged, not yet—and by the still-young blue of eyes that were more deeply sympathetic than truly young eyes could ever be.

She faced south. “I’ve never actually seen it, except from the boat. But what you do, let me see, you take the subway, I’m almost sure of this, the Seventh Avenue Subway, and you get off at the end of the line. Oh, but I’m not really certain. You’d better ask someone else, play it safe, don’t you think?”

Joe was so taken with the lady he hardly listened to the words she spoke, but each of them, as formed by her lips, seemed to him a miracle of beauty. “You sure are a pretty lady,” he said, surprising himself.

The lady turned to him quickly, taken aback and blushing in a way that thrilled him.

“Oh!” she said, trying to frown—but she was clearly not a frowner. “You’re not looking for the Statue of Liberty at all!”

“No, ma’am,” he said, “I’m not.”

“Why, that’s—that’s perfectly dreadful. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

She began to smile, increasing the number of lines in her face and intensifying the blue and the twinkle and the sympathy of her eyes. This face, especially these remarkable eyes, seemed to be saying: “You and I are wonderful people who understand all the beautiful things of the world that are lost to others, but now that we have had this greatly amusing and secret moment, it is time for us to part.”

Aloud, she simply said goodbye. And walked away from him.

He watched her leave, noting that her trim rear end was now intensely conscious of itself. This pleased him. It also caused a disturbance in his stomach. He had always been an appreciator of the walking-away of certain women, the way they had of switching the fanny from side to side in such a carefully measured way and yet holding the head so high you were supposed to believe the thoughts in it were seven thousand miles north of the Arctic Ocean, and as cool. But now, along with the enjoyment, Joe Buck felt this weakness, an anxious churning deep in his body; he had to tighten the muscles in his thighs in order to remain standing, and his toes gripped the soles of his boots.

“Cute lady,” he said aloud but very softly as he watched her proceed up 37th Street. “Rich, too,” he said, following her slowly on the opposite side of the street and admiring her more with every step she took. “Too bad she ain’t the buying kind,” he said, watching her turn and walk up the steps of a great brownstone house.

He watched her open the front door. And he watched her enter the place. And then he made a sound that was not a word at all, as something cold and awful touched his heart: Her door had closed.

He sat on a nearby stoop and continued watching the place, wondering at the nature of his sudden new suffering. And then the dark windows on the parlor floor silently and softly exploded into light. This light was the color of amber and warm as flesh, but Joe had no notion of why it hurt him so to look at it. He only knew for certain that the twilight had ended and it was time for a good long drink of liquor.

He forced himself to his feet and began to walk. And pretty soon he came upon another kind of rich lady altogether.

The second rich lady was walking a white French poodle on Lexington Avenue in the Thirties. Joe found her looking at some yellow pompoms in front of a florist’s window.

The poodle was so small it looked like a windup toy; but the lady herself was very large. She was like some movie star you’d read about who had wrecked her career with food. She was brunette, her eyelashes stuck out a good three-quarters of an inch, and there was a lot of paint on her face and fingernails. Altogether this ornamentation gave her the look of a marionette inhabited not by a mere hand but by an entire person: you saw those little green eyes peering out of this big doll and wondered who in the world the tiny person inside could be.

While she studied the pompoms, Joe pretended to look at the roses until it was clear to him that the lady was keenly aware of his presence.

“Hurry up, Baby,” she said in animated irritation, addressing the dog, who was crouching and straining under the florist’s table. “Do-um goody-goods for mama. Go on, do-um goody-goods.”

Joe held his Stetson over his heart. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, “I’m brand spankin’ new in town, come from Houston Texas, and hopin’ to get a look at the Statue o’ Liberty.”

The woman looked at him, eyebrows raised and mouth open in disbelief. “You’re hopin’ to get a look at
what?”

“The Statue of Liberty,” he said, putting out a smile to dazzle the moon. He had a way of twitching his mouth slightly that made the smile appear to be involuntary; this somehow increased immeasurably its worth.

The rich lady met his eye and held it like a man. “It’s up in Central Park takin’ a leak,” she said. “If you hurry, you’ll make the supper show. Now get lost.” Her voice was harsh and loud.

But then,
just as she
walked away, Joe’s second rich lady winked at him. And she smiled in a distinctly provocative way. Perplexed, he watched her shimmy away up Lexington Avenue in her tight black dress and pink high-heeled shoes, the little dog racing to keep pace with her.

At the traffic light she looked back, held the cowboy’s eye for the count of four, smiled, and then stooped to pick up the dog and disappeared around the corner, mouthing elaborate baby talk at the tiny beast trapped in the crook of her arm.

Joe hurried to the corner, where he could see her waiting for him under the canopy of an apartment house. The lady, confident that he was following, proceeded into the building.

In a moment, Joe passed through a pair of solid-gold doors—perhaps not solid-gold, but covered with some gold-colored metal that made you feel once you’d passed through them that money was no longer a problem. He stepped into a carpeted elevator, where the rich lady was looking straight ahead of her as if she had no notion of his existence. But the minute those doors had made their soft, expensive little
kllooosh
sound of closing, Joe’s lips were being licked by the long tongue of the rich lady, who was also rubbing her stomach against his. Then, even though she was a very large person, she smiled as if she were very small, and said, “Hi.” Joe shivered.

The poodle yapped, there was another
kllooosh
, and they stepped off the elevator into a private apartment with fluffy white carpets.

The rich lady took hold of his hand. “I got to make a couple phoney-phones,” she said, pulling him along behind her toward a white-and-gold desk where there was a telephone. Dialing with one hand, she unbuttoned Joe’s trousers with the other and began to work with the zipper.

The entire episode was taking place with a speed and style far more amazing than Joe’s best fantasies.

“Cass Trehune,” said the rich lady into the telephone, her left hand by now busy inside Joe’s trousers. “Any messages? Who is this? Imelda? Hello, sweetheart. Anything for me? Needleman, right. Got it. How long ago? I said
when
. Okay, what is it, the Murray Hill five? No, no, never mind, I’ve got it. I’ve
got
it. Imelda, I’ve
got
the damn thing, honey, you know?
Thanks!
Bye.”

Still holding the receiver, she disengaged the connection with her thumb. Then she looked down to examine what she had found with her left hand.
“Ye gods!”
she said, impressed, and hung onto it as she dialed the Murray Hill number.

“Mr. Needleman, please.”

There was a pause in which she let go of Joe, lifted her skirt, turned around and backed against the front of him, guiding his arms around her waist.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Palmbaum, what are
you
doing there? Fine thanks. Sensational in fact. Put Morey on, would you?” There was another pause: She put her ear in Joe’s mouth. “Oh stop oh God,” she said, “I can’t stand that, I just die.
Morey?”
Her voice went soft and sweet: It seemed to be luring some small child into a gas chamber with promises of candy. “Aw, Morey. Hi-ee. I got your call. I was walking Baby. No, sweety, I haven’t been out but just that once. I mean, himth got to do himth goody-goodth, right? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did walk him once earlier. About three. But, sweety, I checked with the service and there wasn’t a thing, honest. Well, you didn’t leave a message, did you? All
right!
That’s what I
said!
Oh, now you’re making me mad. Mad and sick. I’m gonna hang up and then I’m gonna heave all over this rug. Morey, you make me
quite annoyed
, do you know that? All you think is just one thing about me, so how would you like to go screw yourself?”