Midnight Cowboy (24 page)

Joe scanned the doorways and theater lobbies and penny arcades of Times Square in search of a moneymaking opportunity, and for the first two hours nothing much happened. It was too cold to stand still for long periods. He wasted some fifteen minutes in Duffy Square on a prospect too frightened to speak up, and another even larger piece of an hour was squandered in following a pretty woman all the way over to Grand Central Station only to watch her board the train for New Haven. He walked back to Times Square and all the way up Broadway to 50th Street, over to and down Eighth Avenue and across 42nd again, then covered the same ground a second and a third time, warming up between trips in a dirty-books shop and at a gameroom called Fascination where he lost a dollar and twenty cents.

And then along about eight o’clock, having forgotten for the moment the object of his hunt, he was looking idly in the window of a Seventh Avenue magic shop when he realized that the liveliest possibility of the evening had shown itself less than three feet from him and was looking in the same store window.

This was a red, white and blue person of about fifty. He was stocky, almost fat, with very black eyebrows. He had a pleasant, round face that seemed always to be smiling, even in repose, and his eyes were anxious and uncertain of every single thing in the world. But the most vivid aspect of the man were those colors of a musical comedy American: the red of his complexion, the pure white of his hair and his silk muffler, and the lively blue of his eyes and his overcoat.

Joe had been taught that you weren’t supposed to be the first to speak. You had to let them do that. There were a number of theories in support of this policy: For one thing, speaking first showed a certain eagerness that was apt to lower your price, and for another, if your prospect turned out to be a policeman in disguise, he would arrest you for soliciting.

But Joe felt the necessity of making a strike before the cold really got through to him. At a certain point on these winter nights in the doorways of Times Square his face became numb and pale and he was unable to think clearly or behave with any ease at all; from then on he would begin to look and act like a loser and no one would want anything to do with him at all.

And so he threw caution to the winds and screwed up a good big smile and swung his eyes onto that red, white and blue face, and was about to speak when the man himself spoke up.

“How are
you?”
the big face broke open in the middle, showing still more red and white in the gums and perfect teeth, and he clasped Joe’s hand in both of his own.

From his first words the man succeeded in establishing an atmosphere of extraordinary intimacy. A stranger observing the scene might have said that two friends of long standing had come together in a surprise reunion after years of agonizing separation.

His voice—he started talking at once in a way that suggested he might never stop—was deep and rich and vigorous and at the same time oddly prissy, giving him the aspect of a hysterical, somewhat sissified bull. Introducing himself as Townsend P. (for Pederson) Locke of Chicago (“Call me Towny”), he said he was “in paper” and had come to New York to attend a manufacturers’ convention. “And frankly, to have a little fun, dammit,” he added, like a person who has decided to put his foot down.

“This is my first night and I’ll consider it a ghastly omen, clouding my entire ten days, if you don’t consent to have dinner with me. Please! It’s awfully important to me. You will? You’ll say yes?”

Joe found that his assent wasn’t really needed. For he had hardly begun to nod when he found himself being almost forcibly conducted up 42nd Street. Towny did not once stop talking. What’s more, he wasn’t the kind of talker who required any sign of listening. He flitted from topic to topic in butterfly fashion: Chicago, food, his mother, the convention, New York, people in general, cowboys, the need for “fun,” his mother again, the Midwest, restaurants, religion, Michigan Avenue, the art of conversation. (“That’s what I like about you, you’re such a wonderful conversationalist,” he said at one point, causing Joe to open his eyes wide and nod in amazement.)

“Now where would you like to eat? I give you your choice of all the restaurants on the island of Manhattan. No, no, on the entire East Coast. If there’s some place in New Jersey or Long Island or even Philadelphia that you absolutely hanker for, we’ll hire a car. Now you say! Chambord? 21? The Luau? Never mind how you’re dressed. They know me. I’ll tell them you’re with the rodeo, there’s always a rodeo in New York. Besides, you look very elegant, and these places, the really good ones, never fret over neckties or any of that
nouveau
chichi crap. Oh!”—a snap of the fingers—”But dammitall, I’ll tell you what we’ll have to do, we’ll have to eat in my room because I have this phone call coming at nine-thirty. My mother always calls me at her bedtime and I’ve got to be there. She’s ninety-four and at that age it seems to me you can just damn well be there when they call up to say good night, don’t you agree to that? So won’t that be nice? To have dinner sent up? I’ve got a very modest, perfectly pleasant suite at the Europa near Ninth Avenue. All my fancy friends stay at the Pierre or the Plaza and they can have it! ‘Why do you stay down there, Townsend, please?’ Well, of course, I know and you know that fifty years ago the Europa was the only hotel in Manhattan: those high ceilings, all that marble in the bathrooms.
We
have an eye for real quality.” He squeezed Joe’s arm. “As opposed to mere fashion. Here! Look!”

As they turned into the lobby, a young man with a thin, cold, dedicated face pressed a piece of paper into Joe’s hand. It said,
You are in a burning building and
Jesus is the only possible fireman
. He crumpled it and put it in his pocket.

“Look
at this magnificent lobby!” said Townsend P. Locke.

The lobby of the Europa had become a kind of arcade for small enterprises. One corner had been partitioned off for a passport photographer, another piece had been given over to a health club, and so on; and there were a number of vending machines for candy bars, soft drinks and cigarettes. The floor was of cracked tile and had been recently scrubbed in a slapdash way, leaving streaks of dried dirt and a faint smell of ammonia in the air. The room clerk, a gray, small, not-really-there-at-all person, seemed to have been selected for his ability to project to the guests a profound lack of interest in their comings and goings.

They stepped onto a creaking, slow, self-operated elevator, and Townsend P. Locke talked all the way up to the fifth floor and kept on talking all the way down the hall “… Macy’s, the Park, the Village, the lights, the millions of strangers from every possible part of the world …” He was listing the aspects of New York that delighted him most. “… the utter and total privacy, the sort of, I don’t know, madly forward thrust of everything; do you understand that? I mean, how shall I put it? My sense of
time
here is completely altered. And Chicago, mind you, is no mere cow town. But here, you see, there’s this grinding forward of every second. Listen! Listen! Hear it for yourself! Time is a Colossus, and he’s marching up Broadway! Can’t you hear him coming?”

They were in Locke’s sitting room, standing at the window, looking out over 42nd Street. The sound he tried to name could be heard. It was an all-pervasive, throbbing roar, as if all the millions of machines and people on the island were united by a central rhythm and spoke with one voice and could be felt and heard as a single being of tremendous force. “You and I,” Locke said, “contribute to it. Yes! Isn’t that exciting? Think of it, your heart goes tum-te-tum-te-tum, and the projector in that theater goes clickety-clickety-click, and each one of those cars goes
ggggrrrrrhhhhhoooooommmmmmmmm
, and
oh!
Just thinking about it is more than I can stand. Would you like a drink? I’ve got some nice gin. But if you prefer something else, they’ll send it up. Maybe you drink only
añejo
, or Irish, or saki. Do speak up.”

“Gin’s fine.”

“And I really do find it unbearably exciting,” Locke continued, “this time thing in New York. But on the other hand, the identical awareness can hurl me straight into the abyss. I’m manic, you see, and I have these
hairy
depressions, and they all have to do with time. For instance, in Chicago, I often have this feeling that time really stopped about
twenty years ago!
And that everything that happened since is some hideous mistake. Isn’t that morbid?
Par exemple
, in that mood it seems to me absolutely grotesque that there should be in the world
anywhere
this white-haired gentleman you see before you. He doesn’t
exist!
There was a war, there was a young man in uniform, handsome as handsome can be, with quite black hair—and he was
supposed to die in the war!
But he didn’t. There was some idiot mistake in heaven, and he’s still here! Isn’t that amusing?

“All right, that’s enough about me. I am through talking for the evening. Here’s your drink. Now I want to hear all about you and conditions out West. I mean, what’s happening in cattle, for heaven sake? But first let me confess something to you: The West holds a tremendous power over me, the vastnesses there and the romance, that whole society of tumbleweed and leather. So you see, even if you weren’t an exceptionally fine person—which I know you are, I knew that at once, gifted and sensitive and unusual in many ways—but even if you weren’t all that, I would still undoubtedly have felt this, this, this …” he waved the palm of his hand back and forth over his heart as if it were a magnet that would draw out the word he wanted “…
rapport!”
He thrust the hand forward now as if rapport were displayed upon it. “Simply because you come from the great West. My mother shares this with me, indeed she does, she would absolutely adore you, and when she telephones—” he looked at his watch “—at about nine-thirty, I want you to get on the wire and say, ‘Hello, Estelle, I’m—’ What
is
your name?”

“Joe.”

“ ‘Hello, Estelle, I’m Joe. And Townsend’s being a very good boy.’—Or something, anything. I’ll introduce you, I’ll say you’re a cowboy and she’ll be
so
thrilled. Ninety-four years old! And a mind? Like a steel trap! May I tell you what I did for her on her birthday? Oh, listen to me! You can’t possibly care what I did for a very dear old lady you’ve never even laid eyes on on her birthday, can you?”

“Oh hell yeah,” Joe said. “I want to hear all about that.”

Joe sensed there was some advantage to himself in keeping the man talking. He needed to think. There was some sort of money connected with the man, not millions perhaps, but plenty. Joe guessed he had chosen this hotel over the better ones because it afforded him the freedom to indulge his special appetites. They were seated now, Joe on the couch, Locke in an overstuffed chair. Joe wondered how long the talking would continue, how long before the man made the inevitable trip to the couch, lowered his hand to the knee, etc., and what would be the best strategy to follow at that point. Make a straightforward business proposition? Launch into a do-me-a-favor speech? There was something likable about the man, but he tried not to notice it. Straight business was easier to manage.

“… and there stood this string quartet. Picture it, an old lady propped up in her bed, pale-blue lace coverlet, hair all in tiny curls—I do her hair myself twice a week—and the Vienna String Quartet standing at her feet playing
Happy Birthday to You!”

Locke sang a chorus, ending in
Happy birthday dear Es-te-ulll, Happy birthday to you
. “Oh God!” There were tears in his very blue eyes. “And the night before, they’d played Beethoven to twenty-five-hundred people! That’s the kind of thing I do for her. I mean how else can you amuse a woman who’s
twenty years older than time?
And of course it makes
my
life so rich. People say, oh, you’re so good to Estelle. Nonsense, I tell them, I’m good to myself!” This was spoken with a kind of savage force. Proceeding more quietly, he leaned forward and said, “Let me explain: My mother happens to be an exceedingly rare human being of the most extraordinary sensibilities. The privilege of enjoying her company is worth any sacrifice. I don’t wish to overstate the case, but if I were to describe my mother in such a way as to do her the most meager justice, I would seem to be guilty of the grossest excesses. Therefore I am usually silent on the subject, silent as a stone, for the simple reason that the average person, having a very limited concept of the real possibilities of the human spirit, is unable to grasp … For instance, let me interrupt myself, I am often told, and even by very close friends—oh, this is so sad, and such a comment on the poverty of—you won’t believe it, but this relationship that I describe, these persons call it ‘sick.’ And do you know why? Because I haven’t married! Well, I haven’t chosen to and why in heaven’s name should I?”

This thought silenced the man. He seemed to have forgotten Joe’s presence, and he sat staring at an arm of the couch, frowning, teeth clenched. Then, suddenly aware of the drink in his hand, he raised it, so suddenly that he spilled part of it on his trousers, smiled, wiped it off, proposed “a toast to the Wild West!” and began to speak again.

“You see, I happen to be passionate on the subject, and of course we live in an age in which all passion is suspect. All the old values have these ugly little clinical names now: Loyalty is fixation, duty is guilt, and all love is some sort of a complex! You should hear Estelle, she’s
so
amusing on the subject! And you see, it’s rarely the psychiatrist himself who talks such nonsense, it’s your best friends! But don’t you think it takes a
tiny
mind to hand down such judgments on the secret heart of another? Would you be so impertinent? Of course not. Let me tell you what a real analyst says, may I? And this man is fifty dollars per hour, need I say more about his qualifications? Well, he says it’s an extremely successful relationship. And why? Because it works!