The Harder They Fall (13 page)

‘Charles,’ I said, ‘you are the truth-stretchingest man I ever met. You stretch it out so far I forget where it started from.’

‘Dramatic licence,’ Charles shrugged.

I told Charles to put the bottle away because it was beginning to catch up with me and I didn’t want to louse
up my last night with Beth. I walked back to the Edison thinking about this Molina deal. My mind was already working ahead to the angles. As soon as we hit LA I’d get all the sports writers together and toss a party and fill them full of flit. Deaden their powers of integrity and self-criticism. Then slip them a little something to make their readers feel they were getting their nickel’s worth. It didn’t have to be true.

Beth said she would probably be a little late getting away from the office. So I stretched out on the bed with my copy of
War and Peace
. I have been reading
War and Peace
since I was a high-school senior and have now succeeded in getting almost halfway through it. It’s not that I haven’t found it interesting. But it was written in a large
dacha
in Russia before the age of electricity, motor cars or radios, and sometimes I think I will have to approximate those conditions in order to finish it. I read a couple of chapters and then can’t find time to go on. When I’m ready to dip into it again I have forgotten who Marya Dmitrievna is and have to thumb back two or three hundred pages to pick up the thread. If
War and Peace
has given me trouble, it’s nothing I blame on the Count or myself. It’s more the fault of the Hotel Edison and my room which overlooks Strand’s bar and the horse players who usually assemble on the kerb
under my window. This is far more conducive to reading
Racing Form
and
Ring Magazine
than Russian literature.

I was lying on my bed with my shoes and socks and shirt off and a glass on the floor where I could reach it when Beth came in.

‘Hello, honey,’ I said.

The sweet name only brought a sour expression to her face. She never liked it.

She looked around for a cigarette and I tossed her one from the bed. She came over and reached down to me to light her cigarette from mine. I put my arm around the back of her legs the way I often did.

I could tell from the way she held herself against my arm that something was wrong. That’s the way Beth was. Her passion had its irregular tides. One evening she would come into my arms with a wanton hunger the moment the door was shut and the next evening she had to be as carefully seduced as if it had never happened between us before.

‘Darling,’ I said, ‘don’t be like that. I’m leaving for California tomorrow.’

‘Oh!’ Beth hesitated. ‘Maybe it’s a good idea.’

My hand came away from her as if it had a mind of its own. ‘Well, that’s a nice loving send-off.’

She sat down on the edge of my bed and deliberately snuffed out her cigarette. Beth could hold a pause longer than was comfortable. I knew I was in for it when she began slowly, ‘Now, Eddie, don’t get sore.’

She looked at me seriously and seemed to be debating with herself whether she should say any more. I tried to feint her into a new lead.

‘Lots of writers go to California.’

‘To write?’ she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let’s get things straight, Eddie. I think it’s just about time one of us went out to California.’

‘You mean for good?’

‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t thought that far. All I know is that we’re getting nowhere in New York, because, I guess, you won’t let yourself think about where you want to go. The trouble seems to be, I’m the only one who has any idea where you’re going. You’re always stopping somewhere, to have a drink, to make some soft money, to put off what you ought to do. Just starting, never finishing. This fight business … You know, when you first told me about it, I was fascinated. It seemed to have something, a force, a vitality that’s missing in so many other things. But you were in your early thirties then. Now it’s the middle thirties, thirty-five, thirty-six, come November. That’s a dangerous age, especially in your job, Eddie. A fighter’s press agent at thirty-one is kind of an interesting fella. You can see it on book jackets – newsboy, copyboy, reporter, merchant seaman, fighters’ press agent, advertising writer. You know how they always sound. But a fighters’ press agent at forty, that’s a little sad. At fifty, it’s very sad. And at sixty you’re a bum hanging around those Eighth Avenue saloons boring everybody with the names of great fighters you used to know.’

‘You’ve really got my life laid out for me,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t sound so bad.’

‘You can’t laugh it off, darling. The midtown bars are full of guys like you. They come to town because they have
something on the ball. Look at yourself, you’ve got some talent for writing, but you’re too lazy or too frightened or too tied up to develop it.’

‘Boy,’ I said, ‘it’s a good thing I’m pulling out of here tomorrow.’

‘What’ll you be doing in California?’

I told her a little about the set-up we expected to have on the Coast, about the plans for making Molina, the Giant of the Andes, a household word.

Beth shook her head. ‘That’s exactly what I mean. What kind of a job is that for a guy who …’

‘Who what? Who doesn’t have to go begging for assignments from the slicks? Who doesn’t want to hang around the fringe and starve a little? Who wants an easy buck – and lots of them – on the chance of salting away enough to sit down and see what he can write some day?’

‘Some day! Some day! Eddie, do you want those two words for your epitaph?’

‘Well, what the hell’s the difference?’ I said. ‘So I sell Molina. Another guy works for J. Walter Thompson and sells soap. Or he writes perfume ads, telling the girls how his particular poppy juice will make every guy they meet want to lay them. Only he uses ten-dollar words like “enticing mystery” and “bewitchment of the night”. He probably went to Princeton too. Or Yale or maybe even Harvard. But if you peek under those beautifully starched white cuffs with the delicate monogram, just above the wrist you will definitely see the shackles. Or take that friend of mine Dave Stempel who published that little book of poems when he was still in school,
The Locomotive Dream
– remember,
we read it together? – well, he’s out in Hollywood writing stinking Class B melodramas. Where’s the difference between that and my job with Nick?’

‘But I’m not talking about the ad writer with the starched cuffs. Or Dave Stempel. I’m thinking about you. I mean I guess I’m really thinking about me. I’m a big girl now. I’m twenty-seven. It’s time I knew the man I was sleeping with. I never know whether I’m going to bed with one of Nick’s boys or someone who can think for himself.’

I looked down into the loud and garish night of 46th Street. I could see across the street where old Tommy the bartender was leaning on his elbows talking to Mickey Fabian, a gimpy little gnome who gambled his entire disability pension from World War I every month on his judgement of the relative speed of our four-legged friends. Later on, I’d probably wander over and lift a glass with Mickey and hear how they ran for him at Saratoga. They were my guys. Crumbs, some of them, touch artists and no-goods, but still my guys. Maybe that’s what Beth meant. It’s part of my racket to sit around the various joints enjoying a friendly powder with the boys. The talk is whether Joltin’ Joe has got it any more, and was the Commish justified in tying up both those bums’ purses after the waltz last Friday night. A fellow gets to like that kind of life. It’s no way to live, but he gets to thinking it is and he can’t do without it. I wanted Beth and still I wanted to be free to sit around with the boys, if that’s the way I felt. That must have been why I never got around to that proposal unless I had had a few, and after I had them and they worked their quick
depressive magic, that was when she knew me better than I knew myself.

‘I guess I’m one of Nick’s boys,’ I said. ‘Oh, sure I like to read a book once in a while and I’m not so dumb I can’t see how the profit system takes the manly art out behind the bushes and gives it the business. But I’m strictly a saloon man. Every once in a while I like to pick up the cheques all around the table and I like to have enough in my kick to pay my tabs. Nick’s dough may look a little soiled but they still exchange it for nice crisp new bills at any window.’

‘What happens after California?’ Beth said.

‘Don’t know yet. We’ll have to see how things break. Probably work our way east knocking over the usual clowns.’

‘So what you’ll really be is a barker for a … circus freak.’

‘For Christ’s sakes, what do you want me to do, sell my poems on the corner of Washington Square and starve with the rest of the screwballs? For a hundred a week and a slice of the pie – I bark.’

Beth rose from the edge of the bed and said with an air of finality, ‘Okay, Eddie. But I think you sell yourself awful short. I guess you know what you want. I just wish you wanted a little more.’

Then she relaxed into her own self a little and put her arms around me and kissed me quickly. ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘You too, kid.’

‘You’re sore,’ she said. ‘I hoped you weren’t going to be sore.’

‘I’m not sore,’ I said. ‘I’m just …’

‘Write me once in a while.’

‘Sure, we’ll keep in touch.’

‘Hope everything goes the way you want it.’

‘I’ll be okay.’

We looked at each other, probably just a second or two, but it seemed longer. There is always that moment when you seem to be able to see in each other’s eyes a flash of the things that might have happened if your cards had been a little better or you had played them differently.

‘Maybe this breather is just what we needed,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can get married when I get back.’

‘Maybe,’ Beth said. ‘Let’s see what happens.’

‘Swell. Be good, coach.’

‘Goodbye, Eddie.’

‘See you, Beth.’

I stood at the window and watched her go out onto the street. I saw how the boys instinctively turned for a hinge of the gams as she went past. That trim figure of hers never quite looked as if it should belong with her bright and agreeable but untheatrical face. I stayed at the window until her rapid stride was lost in the cross-currents of human traffic sweeping over the corner.

I bought myself another drink, but it backed up on me. I lay down on the bed again and tried to get back into
War and Peace
, but the scene and the characters had lost contact with me and the words ran into each other meaninglessly. I went over to the dresser and looked at the other books. A Fleischer’s
All-Time Ring Record Book
, a two-bit copy of
Pal Joey
, Cain’s
Three-in-One,
the
Runyon
Omnibus
and an old marked-up edition of
The Great
Gatsby
. I picked up the
Gatsby
and turned to one of the passages I had marked. It was that terrible scene where Daisy, Tom and Gatsby finally bring it out into the open. One of the best damn scenes in American fiction, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it.

God Almighty, maybe Beth was right. Who was I? Who
had
she been sleeping with? The reader who marked and studied those lines of Fitzgerald? Or the guy who dished out the hyperbolic swill about Joe Roundheels and Man Mountain Molina? What were they to each other, the reader and the raver? Just two fellows who lived under the same skin, strangers sharing a common roof.

I threw the book down impatiently and started dressing for the street. Toro and Acosta were at the Columbia Hotel around the corner. For need of something to do I thought I’d check on whether everything was set with them for the trip tomorrow night.

The Columbia was one of those innumerable hotels in the Times Square area with the same nondescript
street-front
, the same lonely people drinking the same cut stuff from the same chromium bars, the same harassed-looking clientele of unlucky horse players, theatrical agents without clients, stage actors without parts and managers of derelict prizefighters like Harry Miniff. The lobby of the Columbia seemed to be full of small, shabby groups addressing themselves in sly undertones to the petty conspiracies devoted to the cause of running down a buck without physical effort.

Toro and Acosta had what the Columbia calls a suite, which
was a sitting room not much larger than a phone-booth leading into a small double bedroom.

‘Ah, my dear Mr Lewis,’ Acosta said when he came to the door and did his little bow. He looked very dapper in his bow tie and black smoking jacket, with his long-handled cigarette holder and a book under his arm.

‘Disturbing you?’

‘Please? Oh, no – no, I am just passing the time studying English.’ He held the grammar out to show me.

‘This is one language I’m glad I learnt early,’ I said.

‘Yes, the verbs – the verbs are very difficult,’ Acosta agreed. ‘But you have a fine language. Not so musical as Spanish perhaps, but very virile, very strong.’

‘That’s us all right,’ I said.

He led me to the most comfortable chair and bowed me into it with the automatic deference of a head waiter. ‘Please,’ he said. From the bottom drawer of the desk he brought forth a half-empty bottle which he placed on the coffee table with a nice little flourish.

‘Please, you will have a little brandy?’ He touched the bottle fondly. ‘I bring this all the way from Mendoza.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better pass. I’ve been on whisky all day, and this is the only stomach I’ve got.’

Acosta laughed the way men do when they don’t understand.

‘Well, how do you feel about California?’ I said.

‘Oh, I am very excite – excited,’ Acosta said. ‘All my life I have hear – heard of Los Angeles. Some say it is even more beautiful than our own Mar del Plata. And I think for El Toro it will be very good too. He will have a climate
more like he is use to. Here it is so
humedo
. Perhaps that is why he has look so sluggish in the ring.’

I had said everything there was to say on the subject of Toro’s ability that afternoon, so I didn’t grab at this one as it went by.

‘Where is Toro, by the way?’

Acosta pointed to the bedroom. ‘Already in the bed asleep. Poor El Toro. Tonight he feel very bad. He feel he has make this afternoon a very poor showing and he has the wish to go home to Santa Maria. I try to explain to him that now with the interest of Mr Latka and Mr McKeogh he will make more money than Luis Firpo. But you know how boys are. Now and then they get the homesickness.’

‘He doesn’t really like to fight? He hasn’t really got his heart in it, has he, Luis?’

Acosta had a disarming smile. ‘The killing instinct, he does not have, perhaps no. But with a man of his strength, when Mr McKeogh has teach him how to punch …’