Short Stories: Five Decades (121 page)

Jirg proudly held up the bottle. “See,” he said, “I remembered.”

It was a drink she loathed, a Tyrolean home product made up of odds and ends of herbs and poisonous weeds that grew in dank spots near precipices in the Alps. Jirg imbibed it in huge quantities, like a giant intake valve. She had pretended to be one of the boys in Austria and had expressed her enthusiasm for the foul stuff. He twisted the cork and offered her the bottle. A smell came out of the neck of the bottle like old and ill-cared-for animals.

She took a ladylike sip, managing not to gag.

He took a huge swig. “Ach,” he said, nostalgically, “the nights we drank together.”

“Hey, lady,” the taxi driver half turned his head, scowling. “No drinking allowed in this cab.”

“You’ll have to put the bottle away, luv,” Beulah said. “He says it’s against the law.”

“It is not believable,” Jirg said. “Drinking against the law. He is making fun of me. I believe he is a Jew.” Jirg’s face turned a sudden Master Race purple. “I haff heard about New York.”

“He isn’t a Jew, luv, he’s an Irishman.” She looked at the driver’s ticket, stuck in its frame at the back of the front seat. The man’s name was Meyer Schwartz. “Put the bottle away, luv. We’ll drink it later.”

Muttering in German, Jirg put the bottle back in the air travel bag. The driver swerved the taxi in front of a truck, missing it by seven inches.

By the time they reached the cutoff to Shea Stadium, Jirg’s hand was all the way under her skirt, sliding under her panties. She was surprised it had taken that long. Luckily, she was in the right hand corner of the back seat and the driver couldn’t see what was happening in his mirror.

Jirg panted convincingly in the region of her neck, while his hand worked expertly between her thighs, his middle finger amorously exploring. She lay back, tense but waiting. Suddenly, the middle finger stopped moving. Then it moved again, two or three sharp scientific probes. Jirg took his hand away abruptly and sat up.

“
Scheisse
,” he said, “
vas ist das?
”

“That’s fate, luv.” Beulah sat up, too.

“Fate? I do not know that word.”

“It means what will be will be.”

“Speak slowly.”

“It means I have the curse, luv.”

“Who cursed?” he said. “So, I said
Scheisse
.”

“It’s a word American girls use when they are temporarily out of commission. Not in working order. Not ready for visitors.”

“Four thousand miles I flew,” Jirg said piteously.

“Mother nature, luv,” Beulah said. “Take heart. It only lasts a few days. For most girls.” She was preparing him for the moment when she would tell him it sometimes went on with her for months, especially in the autumn.

“Vat vill I do for a few days?” Jirg whined.

“Sight-see,” Beulah said. “I think the boat that goes all around Manhattan Island is still running.”

“I did not come to New York to go boat riding,” Jirg said. He looked bleakly out the window at the passing architecture. “New York is a pigsty,” he said.

He sat in silence, disapproving of New York, until they had crossed the Triborough Bridge.

“We are in Fun City, lady,” the taxi driver said. “Where to?”

“That motel on Ninth Avenue,” Beulah said. “I forget the name.” She had never been inside it, but it looked clean, efficient and inexpensive from the outside. It had the added charm of being distant from her flat. She was sure there would be ice water for Jirg, probably running out of the taps, which would entertain him for a day or two.

“We are not to your apartment going?” Jirg asked.

“I was going to explain about that, luv,” Beulah said nervously. “You see, I have a roommate.”

“Does she ski?”

“That isn’t the point, luv. She … she is neurotically puritanical. Religious.”

“So?” Jirg said. “I am also religious. Nobody is more religious than Austria. I will talk religion with your roommate.”

“She believes it is immoral for unmarried girls to sleep with men.” Beulah was briefly thankful that Rebecca was not there to overhear this comment.

“I did not come to New York to be married,” Jirg said warily.

“Of course not, luv. But just to keep peace in the apartment, it would be better if you stayed in a hotel for the first few days. Until she gets used to you.”

“In Austria,” Jirg said, “I haff slept in the same room with two girls. In the same
bed
.”

“I’m sure you have, luv,” Beulah said soothingly. “But we have different customs here. You’ll catch on in no time.”

“I do not like New York,” Jirg said gloomily. “I do not like New York at all.”

At the motel, which was not as inexpensive as it looked, Beulah got Jirg a single room with a shower. He wanted her to go up with him, but she said she was poorly, because of her malady; he could see how pale she was, she wouldn’t even have stirred from her bed that day if he hadn’t been arriving from Zurich; and if she didn’t go home and lie down with a cold compress, she probably would faint right there in the lobby. She gave him $30 in American money, because all he had with him was Austrian shillings and Swiss francs, and told him to eat in the hotel so he wouldn’t get lost. If she was strong enough that evening, she said, she would call him.

She watched him follow the bellboy with his bags to the elevator. When the elevator doors slid shut behind him, she sprinted for the main entrance.

She walked blindly cross-town. By Eighth Avenue, she had decided she was going skiing in Sun Valley this winter. By Seventh Avenue, she had decided to take an offer for a modeling job in Brazil that meant leaving by Tuesday. By Sixth Avenue, she decided she wasn’t going home before midnight, because she wasn’t going to give Rebecca the satisfaction. By Fifth Avenue, she realized that that meant having dinner alone. By Madison Avenue, she remembered Christopher Bagshot. She went into a bar and sat alone over a white lady, trying to decide which was worse.

It was past six o’clock, 6:15, to be exact, and Sue Marsh hadn’t shown up at the bookstore for her tennis bag. Christopher was beginning to worry. He could not keep open, waiting for her. He was disappointed in her. He hadn’t thought of her as a flighty girl who made idle promises. And Miss Anderson hadn’t come into the store at five o’clock, either, as she had said she would. He knew he should be angry at the type of girl who treated a man with so little consideration, but what he really felt was desolation.

Then the door opened from the comparative darkness of Madison Avenue and a tall girl with straight blonde hair came into the store. She was wearing a miniskirt that showed a great length of leg, and a hip-length fun fur, more or less electric-blue in color. He had never seen her before and from the uncertain way she moved around the shop, it looked as though she had never been in a bookstore before. He moved briskly toward her. “Is there anything I can do for you, miss?” he said.

She had big gray eyes that seemed to be imploring him. She was beautiful, in a strange, haunted way, like some of those movie actresses in Swedish pictures who have affairs with their brothers or sisters. An incoherent, unreasonable hope stirred in his breast. “Do you have any cookbooks?” she said.

“We have a selection. This way, please.”

“Thank you very much,” she said, in a near whisper. Her voice trembled. He wondered if she was a young wife who had a fancy dinner to prepare that evening for her husband’s boss or somebody and who had met disaster in the kitchen an hour or so before the guests were to arrive. Saturday evening at 6:15 was a queer time to buy a cookbook. He didn’t catch sight of a wedding ring, though.

He hovered near. “Just what sort of cooking are you interested in? French, Italian, American …?”

“Oh, any kind.”

“There’s an amusing one that has come out fairly recently,” he said. Because it was getting so late, he resolved to be daring. “
The Myra Breckinridge Cook Book
, by a friend of the author, Gore Vidal. It’s quite risqué.” He chuckled, to show that she could take his risqué or leave it alone. “Here, let me get it down for you.” He reached for the shelf. It wasn’t there. He had seen it when he closed the shop the night before and he knew he hadn’t sold it since. Somebody had stolen it during the day. “I’m afraid I’ve sold the last copy,” he said lamely. “If you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll order one and—”

“Oh, there’s no need to bother, thank you,” she said softly. Just from the tone of her voice, you knew she wasn’t the sort of girl who would say she’d come by at five o’clock and never show up, or the kind of girl who deposited a tennis bag and then irresponsibly left it with you while she consorted with New Left agitators who made love in public parks.

The girl took down a huge illustrated book on French cooking and opened it at random to a page on which there was a color photograph of
poularde de Bresse en cocotte
. She stroked the page absently. “Chicken,” she said.

“You like chicken?” It was awfully pedestrian, but he had to keep the conversation going. If she had been at the literary-criticism counter, the dialog would have been more inspiring.

“I love it,” the girl said. “Chicken. My mother used to kill two every Sunday. Whenever I have chicken, it’s like a day I don’t have to work.”

“What do you work at?” The conversation was getting more intimate in long leaps and heady bounds. Although the picture of the girl’s mother wringing the heads of two chickens every Sunday was a little disquieting.

“An actress. A dancer. A little bit of both,” the girl said.

A dancer. That explained the legs. “Where are you working now?”

“No place for the moment.” She kept stroking the picture of
poularde de Bresse en cocotte
. “I’m up for a part off-off-Broadway. One of those naked plays.” She kept looking down at the cookbook and her voice was so low he wasn’t sure that he’d heard correctly.

But whether he had heard correctly or not, it was making an effervescent impression on him. To have a beautiful girl, with pretty nearly the longest legs in the world, who had been walking around in the nude all day before dozens of people, just wander in off the street like that. And just before closing time!

“If you like chicken,” he said, putting everything on the one throw, “I know a place on Sixty-first Street where they do it better than anyplace in New York. A French place.”

“I wouldn’t mind a good chicken dinner,” the girl said.

“By a lucky accident,” he said, “I’m free tonight.”

“By a lucky accident,” she said, “so am I.”

He looked at his watch. “I close up here in about forty minutes. There’s a nice bar around the corner on Lexington. Smiley’s. Why don’t you have a drink there and I’ll be right along and then we can go on to dinner at this great place?”

“You’re sure you won’t forget and leave me there?” she said, sounding dubious.

“You just don’t know me, Miss—”

“My name is Anna. Anna Bukowski. I’m going to change it if I get the part.”

“My name is Christopher Bagshot.”

“It’s a good name,” the girl said, “for a man who works in a bookshop. What time did you say you’d be there?”

She was eager, to top it all. “No later than seven-fifteen. Are you hungry?”

“I can eat,” she said. She gave him the Swedish-actress incest smile and went out of the shop in her miniskirt and electric-blue fun fur.

He raced catatonically around the store, getting things in order before closing up and speeding over to Smiley’s Bar. Now he knew that voice in his dream hadn’t spoken for nothing.

Anna Bukowski walked slowly and deliberately over toward Lexington Avenue. She had to walk slowly to conserve her energy. She hadn’t eaten for two whole days now and she was dizzy from lack of food, and every step she took was like dragging through hot tar. She wasn’t on a diet or anything like that. She was just flat broke. She was just in from Cleveland and she had had no idea New York was so expensive. She had spent her last money on subway fare downtown for the tryouts that morning and she had walked all the way up from St. Mark’s Place after parading around naked all day, which was also fatiguing, even though it didn’t seem like much. But people didn’t count the nervous strain.

The reason she had gone into the bookstore was to see if she could steal a book and sell it to a corrupt little man in a basement. Somewhere, she had heard that was a thriving industry. But then that young man had stood so close to her she wouldn’t have had a chance to steal a rubber band. And she had asked to see cookbooks because she had been thinking of food all day.

Her landlord had thrown her out that morning, too, and kept her bag, and she was standing in all the clothes she possessed in this world, in a miniskirt that was two centuries out of style. If that man in the bookstore was as wild to get laid as he seemed and if she didn’t ruin things at dinner, she might be able to swing getting him to ask her to spend the night with him in his place. If he didn’t live with his dying mother or something. And that would mean at least breakfast, too, the next morning. As an old dancer had once told her in Cleveland, “I was in Buenos Aires and I was living off coffee and rolls. My stomach was shrinking to the size of a pistachio nut and I had to make a decision, and I made it. I sold one part of me to support another.”

When she got to Lexington Avenue, she had forgotten which way the man had told her to turn, uptown or downtown, for Smiley’s Bar. Hunger wasn’t good for the memory. Well, there were only two ways to go. She chose uptown. She stepped down off the curb without looking which way the lights were on and a taxi made a wild swing, with a loud screeching of tires, to avoid hitting her. She jumped back, but fell down. She was safe, but the day had been so awful and she had come so near to being killed that she just sat there on the cold pavement of the city of New York and began to weep.

A man who had been waiting for the lights to change came across the street and said, “Please, let me help you.”

She didn’t say anything but, still sobbing, allowed the man to pull her to her feet.

“You really have to watch the lights,” the man said gently. “All things combine in an attempt to destroy you in this town.”