The Late Child (35 page)

They got off near a great museum, with hundreds of people on its long steps.

“That's the Metropolitan—are you much of a museumgoer?” Laurie asked.

“No, but Eddie's been to museums,” Harmony said. “He went on a school trip already.” She was glad Laurie didn't suggest going into the big museum. The steps looked like a long climb, but the main reason Harmony was glad Laurie didn't suggest it was because she was afraid she would reveal her total ignorance about art. From the age of sixteen until she was too old to be a showgirl she had mostly been working two shows a day at one of
the casinos. She didn't take trips, really, unless it was just a drive to the lake with some guy. None of the guys she had gone to the lake with had exactly been museumgoing types.

“Let's just walk across the park and see a little of the West Side,” Laurie suggested. As they walked Harmony began to relax a little about New York City. It was plain that most of the guys they met weren't rapists or murderers. In Central Park there were lots of old ladies and an equal number of little old men. There were lots of mothers with children, some fathers with children, and a fair number of children who were just goofing off in the park, on their own. There were some very well dressed people who gave off an aura of wanting to be alone; obviously they were thinking over some problem, or maybe just brooding about life in general. There were quite a few policemen on horses. Across the park, on both sides, were huge, towering buildings that looked mysterious to Harmony. She couldn't imagine living in huge towers in New York. The towers were nice to look at, though. While looking at some of the great towers on the West Side Harmony was nearly hit by a speeding bicyclist she had stepped in front of. There were plenty of joggers in the park, men and women, but the joggers didn't present any problem because they weren't nearly as speedy as the people on bicycles.

The bicyclist who nearly hit Harmony yelled the word “Cunt!” as he swerved to miss her.

“Ring your bell, asshole!” Laurie yelled after him.

It was a nice park, but after her near miss, anxiety about being hit by a bicycle kept Harmony from enjoying it to the full. Laurie, though, didn't seem to give the cyclists a thought.

“Do you have a man in your life, Harmony?” Laurie asked, as they were waiting at West Seventy-fifth Street for the light to change.

“No,” Harmony said. “My boyfriend left ten minutes after he heard that Pepper was dead.”

“I've never had any restraint,” Laurie said. “I just come right out and ask people the facts about their lives.”

Harmony was about to say that she didn't mind, Laurie was
welcome to ask her anything she wanted to ask, when she looked across Seventy-fifth Street and saw that the man on the opposite curb, the man that would be coming right toward them as soon as the light changed and the taxicabs stopped swishing by, was one of the very people her instincts had always told her to give a pretty wide berth to.

“Oh my God, that's Sonny Le Song,” Harmony said. “Oh my God, he'll recognize me for sure.”

“Who?” Laurie asked. She looked across the street and saw a short man in cowboy boots and old jeans and a trench coat, waiting for the light. He was looking down, watching the shallow stream of brown water swish along below the curb.

“That's a man I know,” Harmony said. “Turn around quick, before he sees us.”

Laurie obeyed without question. They whipped around and started back down the sidewalk, walking at a much faster pace than they had been walking previously.

“I can't believe it,” Harmony whispered to Laurie, as they hurried along. “All these millions of people, and my first walk in New York and I have to run right into Sonny Le Song.”

“You have to be joking about that name, Harmony,” Laurie said. “Nobody could be named Sonny Le Song.”

Harmony was afraid to argue, for fear that Sonny would somehow catch the sound of her voice, even over the traffic, even if she whispered. Sonny had always claimed he would follow her forever—he was that in love—and now it looked as if he
had
followed her forever.

Harmony was wondering what the chances would be of ducking into an apartment building. Maybe they could pretend to be in the wrong apartment building just long enough for Sonny to pass. All the apartments had doormen standing in front of them, and the doormen looked pretty formidable—still, anything was preferable to Sonny catching up with them.

“Do you hate him?” Laurie asked.

“Is he still behind us?” Harmony asked. She was having an unkind fantasy, which was that the water swishing along the curbs
was not a shallow little runoff but a deep pool that Sonny would step into and drown. It wasn't that she hated him so much, either, it was just that she hoped to avoid him for the rest of her life.

“Let's just edge over to the right,” Laurie whispered. “If we turn real quick he might see you, but if we give it another block or two and then turn, maybe we can get over to Columbus Avenue and hit the subway.”

“He might recognize me from my walk,” Harmony pointed out.

They gave it one more block, edging west as they walked. When they came to Seventy-third Street they just slid around the corner. After they had walked half a block, toward Columbus Avenue, Harmony couldn't stand the suspense, she had to know if Sonny was still behind them.

She turned her head and there he was, not a yard behind her, looking at her out of the same big dumb brown eyes he had always had.

“I guess you thought I wouldn't recognize you by your walk,” Sonny said. “Always playing hard to get.”

“Sonny, my daughter died, just let me alone, please,” Harmony said. “I have to take the subway.”

“I heard about Pepper, I was at a club in the Poconos—this guy she danced with told me about it,” Sonny said, holding his ground. “It's tragic, kiddo.”

“Bye, Sonny, I have to take the subway,” Harmony said.

“All the more reason why you need the Cowboy,” Sonny informed her. “Muggers will be on you in the subway like ticks on a coon.”

“She doesn't want to talk to you, buddy,” Laurie said. “She just said so in plain English. Will you excuse us now?”

Sonny's big brown eyes didn't change expression. He held out a hand.

“Sonny Le Song, ma'am,” he said. “I have no intention of intruding on a mother's grief.”

“But you
are
intruding on it,” Laurie pointed out, not unkindly.
She had been prepared to be abrasive, in the manner of the New York streets, but something about the small man's look stopped her. He just looked dumb and scared.

“I've been in love with Harmony since the day we met,” Sonny said.

“Oh, Sonny,” Harmony said. He was just one of those men who were easily hurt—even now, on West Seventy-third Street, he looked as if he might cry, just from the fact that she hadn't been exactly welcoming.

“Do you want him to come home with us, Harmony?” Laurie asked. Then she walked away several steps. She had been ready to slam the guy on the sidewalk, but now she felt uncertain. She felt strange. Just when she was able to get Harmony to come to life a little—to eat, to take a walk—they start across Seventy-fifth Street and run into a little yokel who happened to be an old beau of Harmony's—or at least an old would-be beau. Harmony had freaked at the sight of him, but now she seemed to be a little ambivalent.

“Sonny, could you just give me a day or two?” Harmony asked. “This is my first day to be with Laurie—I wasn't planning on male company right now.”

“I knew you were in town, babe,” Sonny said, more or less sidestepping Harmony's request. “I saw your little boy on TV—talk about star quality. I wouldn't be surprised if Caesars signed him up—maybe the pup could do a diving act or something.”

Harmony wished he would just stop looking at her with those eyes. Sonny couldn't stand rejection—it was the only reason she had ever slept with him. He got so upset if he was rejected that it was easier just to sleep with him; it took less time. She knew that Laurie probably wouldn't think that was very good grounds for a relationship; probably it wasn't, but it was what had kept Sonny Le Song in her life for the better part of a year. Basically she did it with him as a means of avoiding listening to him cry. Sonny explained that he couldn't help it, his feelings lay close to the surface; he didn't feel he should be blamed for bursting into tears because of his close-to-the-surface feelings. Harmony had been
hopeful for a while that there might be a part of Sonny that
wasn't
so close to the surface; after all, she developed a few tender feelings for the guy; even if she was just sleeping with him because she didn't want to hurt his feelings, still, she
was
sleeping with him.

But if there was a part of Sonny Le Song that didn't lie close to the surface, Harmony never located it. All he liked to do was sing and screw, and he wasn't exactly casino class in either department. So far as Harmony could remember, he never got higher in Las Vegas than a lounge act at the Best Western, and, in the romance department, Harmony got the sense that Sonny never got higher than her. But those were just reflections; they didn't help her know what she was going to do with the guy now that she had had the misfortune to bump into him or her first and only walk in New York.

There he stood, with his “I'm gonna cry if you send me away” look on his face.

“How old are you now, Sonny?” Harmony asked. She was really just stalling, hoping he could be distracted into a normal conversation. Maybe they could walk along together to the nearest subway, after which maybe Sonny would just go one way and she and Laurie would go another.

“Not too old to cut the mustard, babe,” Sonny said. He had a short upper lip—probably it was one reason he never got higher than a lounge act at the Best Western. When he smiled there was something a little chipmunky about Sonny—people just didn't go to shows in Las Vegas to be sung to by a man who reminded them of a chipmunk.

Later, she knew, Sonny had sunk considerably lower than the lounge at the Best Western; he had even been forced to try country-and-western for a while. Once, when she had borrowed Gary's car and stopped to fill it up at a brand-new Chevron station on the Strip, there was Sonny, dressed in rhinestones, with a little mike and an audience of four or five old couples who had pulled in to fill up their RVs, singing “Behind Closed Doors.” It turned out that the Chevron station was even more brand-new
than she had thought; it had only been open about two hours—Sonny had been hired to entertain at the opening. There was a little sandwich board propped over by the airhose that said:

SONNY LE SONG

STAR OF STAGE AND SCREEN

(appearing exclusively for Chevron)

For a second or two Harmony thought that maybe she could just gas up and head on down the Strip, but while she was gassing up, Sonny spotted her. There was no way she could leave without hurting his feelings, so she sat on the fender of the car and listened to a few songs. Being polite didn't work out too well, either. Quite a few people turned out to be more interested in getting her autograph than in listening to Sonny sing—he had never had perfect pitch, exactly. Of course it was the middle of the day and it was pretty hot over by the airhose—that might have thrown Sonny's pitch a little further off than usual.

Finally he finished his set and came over to say hi. Several old couples who had seen Harmony on stage wanted to snap her picture. Harmony didn't care, it was part of her job to welcome vacationers to Las Vegas. Sonny promptly squeezed himself into the pictures. One or two of the old couples weren't too happy with that development, and neither was she, to be truthful. What if one of the old couples sent her a copy of the photograph and Jay, her boyfriend, who was definitely the jealous type, happened to open the mail that day and saw Sonny Le Song practically sitting in her lap? On the whole, she was glad when Sonny's break ended.

Little did she know that trouble was coming with Jay anyway, and it didn't involve Sonny or the photographs the old people took at the opening of the Chevron station. Jay had accidentally happened to walk through the casino one day and noticed Harmony chatting with Hank, the captain of the cleaning crew. Hank was sitting on the seat of a big, silent vacuum cleaner that he swished around on, sucking crumbs and other trash off the
floor. Harmony had known Hank for years, since long before he became head of the cleaning crew at the Stardust. They were just chums—they had never even gone on a date, none of which mattered to Jay, of course. Jay didn't accept the chums part, he took the position that there was more going on; or, if there wasn't more going on already, there would be more going on sooner or later; in his view men and women could never be chums. He came over and got huffy with Hank, who just turned on the big vacuum cleaner and swished away. Harmony felt a little hurt that Hank hadn't stayed around to explain, but of course he had his position to think of, he had an important job; people liked the casinos to be clean. Hank couldn't afford to be in a controversy on the casino floor—he just smiled, and left her to her fate.

Later, at home, Harmony tried over and over again to explain to Jay that she wasn't romantically interested in Hank; she had just stopped to chat—after all, she and Hank had worked at the same casinos several times. But all her talk fell on deaf ears—Jay didn't even listen. He yelled at her, and called her a slut in front of Pepper—after which he slapped her hard enough that she fell over the back of a couch. Then he stalked out the door and Harmony never saw him again.

It was during that time that Harmony gave up and slept with Sonny Le Song. His real name was Butch Gussow, but of course you couldn't go on stage in Las Vegas with a name like Butch Gussow. Sonny's gig at the Chevron station was for three days—she would drive by and see him, with his white suit on and the mike in his hand, singing some country-and-western song to three or four old couples—well, somehow it touched her.