Midnight Cowboy (21 page)

The banister on the third-floor landing was being used for a coat rack. It was piled high with sweaters and scarves and parkas and every kind of winter wrap imaginable. Ratso left his sheepskin on the stack and looked over the rows of boots and galoshes and rubbers on the floor.

“I’ll pick me out a nice pair of rubbers when we leave,” he said.

The door was wide open. Ratso led the way in. Joe felt painfully self-conscious, not knowing what behavior was expected of him. He walked with a swagger, frowning, not wanting to be caught without an attitude.

The room was enormous; it ran the entire length of the building and it was as wide as a house. There was a good deal of noise but not enough for so large a crowd. Laughter was aware of itself, and so was conversation, and there was a certain timidity in the sounds produced by a bongo drum, a recorder, and a jug, suggesting that the musicians had not yet hit any kind of stride. One couple was making an effort to dance, and an even greater effort to do so without being seen. There were many small groups, some standing, some sitting on the floor, all loosely formed, and many persons standing alone or near the periphery of a group that did not quite include them. One couple—boys of college age, one white, one brown—sat in the middle of the floor holding hands, but it wasn’t so much an interracial romance as a marriage of two shades of despair; they were joined at the hands but not at the eyes; each of them frowned into some distance of his own. Many of the lone persons, male and female alike, seemed to be ashamed of their solitary condition. You could see them casting about for a place to lose it, a way to camouflage it or something to attach it to: a drink, a cigarette, a corner, a conversation, a smile, a stranger, an attitude.

Along one wall was a big table with a good selection of cheese and lunch meat and crackers and bread, and on the floor next to it were washtubs filled with ice, ice water and cans of beer.

At the far end of the room Joe spotted the Mac Albert-sons, sitting on the floor at the feet of a skinny painted lady with long white hair.

Behind this trio, covering a portion of wall from ceiling to floor, were several long strips of butcher paper on which had been painted in black the legend

IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK

and next to the sign was a bucket of black paint with a broom sitting in it, the handle leaning against the wall.

Joe kept looking at the MacAlbertsons. They sat before the sign like figures on an altar, quietly, and with that same unholy tranquillity that had caught his interest earlier at Nedick’s.

The lady behind them was even more disturbing to him. He didn’t like looking at her, but his eyes kept returning to her on their own. There was something wrong with her. But what? She had a blob of dark paint on each eye and a little red mouth. She blinked often. The lids of her eyes seemed to be operated by strings in the control of someone whose attention had wandered. Her head sat upon her neck in a loose way, precariously balanced, bobbing about like a toymaker’s trick. Seen from a distance, she might even have been inhuman, something pasted together by those two silent, sinister children at her feet, an effigy perhaps of a missing parent, made from sticks and straw, candy sacks and Crayolas.

The boy had some jars in front of him, and he was shaking something out of one of them (a spider? a worm?) and handing it to a beautiful Negro girl. Whatever it was, the girl popped it into her mouth, downed it with beer, and then, in a comic imitation of sensual pleasure, she stretched her arms, wiggled her lean, jersey-clad body and danced across the center of the room into the arms of a splendid black giant, gaining and holding the attention of nearly every other person in the place.

But Joe watched the MacAlbertson boy, who was still preoccupied with those little jars. He drew closer, hoping for a look at their contents, when the one called Gretel caught his eye and beckoned to him with her head. Joe turned to get some guidance from Ratso, but Ratso was busy at the refreshment table, looking about furtively and stuffing his pockets with salami.

Gretel MacAlbertson, meanwhile, had risen and come toward Joe. Her face and voice were completely without expression. From close on, she was less sinister, and her tranquillity might even have been simple boredom.

“You’re here,” she said. “Do you need anything? I mean there’s beer and …” She opened a fist and showed him a big brown capsule.”…
This
, if you want it.” Reading the question in his face, she said, “It’s a bomber—good for about four hours.”

Joe looked at the capsule, and then at the girl, smiling to cover his ignorance and wondering what to do.

She frowned slightly. “Well,
take
it,” she said, her tone somewhere between a command and a dare.

Joe took the capsule and popped it into his mouth, worked up some saliva and swallowed it. Proud of himself, he smiled and looked to the girl for some sign of appreciation or approval. But all his bravado seemed only to have deepened her boredom. She pointed a lan-quid hand toward the refreshment table. “Beer’s all right with it,” she said. This time there was something in her voice: gentleness, perhaps.

Ratso was at that moment approaching with two opened beer cans. He handed one of them to Joe.

Joe tried to perform an introduction. “This here is, uh, Ratso Rizzo, and—”

Ratso corrected him.
“Rico!”
he said.

But this sort of routine was clearly too taxing for Gretel MacAlbertson, who had wandered away.

Joe took a good, deep swallow of the beer and wondered what to expect of the capsule.

“If you want the word on that brother and sister act,” Ratso said,
“I’ll
give you the word: Hansel’s a fag, and Gretel’s got the hots for herself. So who cares, right?” He thrust a thumb into the air in the direction of the refreshment table. “They got salami up to here. So put some in your pocket already.”

Joe felt himself being stared at. He turned to look and there, standing in front of the bathroom door, was a girl in an orange dress, smiling at him in a dark, provocative way. She leaned on the door frame in a manner that made the bathroom seem to be her very own tent on a technicolor desert—or perhaps she shared it with other members of the harem. She met his eyes boldly, opening her own even wider, and then bared her teeth and gave a mad little trill of a laugh. Running her fingers through her rich, black hair, she came toward him. Joe liked her body: It was slim-legged but thickly sensual, built close to the ground.

She said, “I can tell, can’t you?”

“Yeah,” Joe faked it. “Hell yeah, I can tell.”

“Well then,” she said, “what’ll we do? Leave now, or what? Have you got a place? Because I’ve got this damned roommate. Well, that doesn’t matter, I can fix it. Because we have this arrangement. Oh
God!
the second I looked at you, I knew. Did you know right awayr

“Did I know, uh …”

“That we were going to make it?”

Ratso spoke up. “You really want to do business, don’t you, lady?”

Obviously the woman hadn’t noticed Ratso; she looked at him with surprise. “Who are
you?
Oh, God! Don’t tell me you two are a
couple!”

“I happen to be his manager,” said Ratso. “And he happens to be Joe Buck, a very expensive stud.”

“Expensive!
Expensive?”
Her mouth dropped open. She looked away, blinked, looked at Ratso again, and then at Joe. “Is this
true?”

“Well, now …” Joe began to hedge.

“Oh
God!”
she cried. “It
is!
I can’t believe it.” She wandered away—not escaping, just stupefied. She opened a beer for herself, then leaned against the refreshment table, looking at the tall cowboy, shaking her head, blinking.

Ratso said, “She’s hooked. I’d say she was good for ten bucks. But I’ll ask for twenty.”

Joe said, “Listen, money or no money, I could
use
some of that.”

“Oh hell yeah, you’re
richl
Go talk to her. I’ll move in later.” Ratso walked away.

Joe was beginning to feel weightless. He rolled his shoulders in slow circles, as if to test his ability to move, and found that he had some new possession of his body: It had become remarkable to him again, a thing of grace and power. And he even experienced that old longing for a mirror.

The black-haired woman was at his side looking up at him as if there were a vast difference in height between them.

“I’m terribly excited,” she said. “This is the first time in my life I’ve ever been confronted by, well, that I’ve ever even heard of the mere existence of this sort of a situation. And I’m frankly terribly excited. I can’t wait to tell my man but I don’t have an appointment till Monday, isn’t that rotten? Listen, I’m just speculating, you know, but what would happen if I said, ‘Okay I’m buying’?
Oooh!”

The woman suddenly shuddered. She had a fine, handsome nose. The nostrils dilated. She was breathing in short gasps. “I am embarrassed,” she said, “and this is
not Dexedrine!
I’ve had my
weight
in Dexedrine, and it never did
this
to me. I should definitely take notes: the breathing, the heart, the stomach, and
look! Goose pimples!”

She showed him her arm; Joe smiled modestly.

“What
is
this? Buying a man, is that it? Well, I guess it’s the most thrilling thing I’ve ever heard of. It’s like, well, you take virginity, that’s
one
end of something. And on the other, absolute opposite, farthest, most utterly distant pole is
buying a lover
, I suppose. Isn’t it? Of course, leave us face this, I am a long way from virginity.
That
was never my problem. It’s just that way way way back,
years
ago, I used to think I had to marry everybody I had an affair with. Primitive?”

She laughed, but her laughter did not interfere with the flow of her speech. “But after three husbands, count ‘em, three, my man finally got it through my thick skull that I had become a perfect, living, walking example of Bronx morality in its most stifling form, are you with me?
Then! Breakthrough!
And what do I do, I begin to act as if I have to have an
affair
with everybody I go to bed with! Don’t you see? Just a
very
transparent extension of the same old morality bit. You have to agree, because what’s an affair but marriage
sans
mumbo jumbo? I mean, emotionally, you’re taking just as much punishment! Aren’t you? From a lover as from a husband? No argument there? Good! So!

“Suddenly it dawned on me:
What
, if you please, is wrong with just plain old s-e-x? I was
sure
this is what my man had been getting at. Of course they don’t say it straight out, it has to come from you. Which if you’re as dumb as I am, and I can be awfully dumb in certain departments, can be
terribly expensive
. Let’s just not
think
about what this thing has cost me in terms of
good hard cash!
Okay? Anyway, I began to, well, walk through a few things,
you
know, just trying my legs, and baby, it was nowhere: I couldn’t even reach a climax!

“Then!
Tonight, when I came out of that bathroom and saw you, pure symbol—that’s what you are, you know, symbol, oh yes, pure symbol, nothing more, nothing less. You didn’t know that? I can’t believe it. Anyway, I
knew
I was going to make a
real
breakthrough. No thinking, either, my dear, huh-uh; feeling, just
feeling
. You
see
the state I’m in, don’t you? And didn’t I walk right up to you? Well, I can tell you I’ve never done
that
before! What do you think I
am?
I simply had this feeling and there was nothing I could do about it, and furthermore I didn’t
want
to do anything about it. Oh, when the time comes, naturally, I’ll have to ask myself
why
do I choose a cowboy, and second, why a cowboy
whore
.

“But not tonight! No, sir. Being analytical
during
is the kiss of death. Your orgasm goes
right
out the window. Kiss me right now, will you? Before we talk the whole thing away?
Hey listen!
Would it embarrass you if I turned on this great big glaring ceiling light over my bed and looked at you
all over?
Because I’ve never really studied a man completely, I mean every square inch of him, and I’m
dying
to. May I? I mean aren’t peculiar requests a part of your profession?

“And incidentally, how much is this going to cost me, anyway?”

Joe watched the woman speak. But his hearing wasn’t working in the usual way. All her talk might have been rain and there was glass between them. He heard her words and he saw them but they never got to him.

What he did hear was something that had to do with the capsule he’d swallowed, a high, thin, private sound, not really a sound at all. You could just as easily
picture
it: say it was a high wire he had flown to, at some altitude that caused a blending of all the senses, sight, sound, touch, making them one.