Epitaph For A Tramp Page 3

  It was just somebody who had dropped in. An old friend. Yes, old. So old he’d been too weak to sit on a chair and had had to lie down on the bed.

  No. Cathy had brought the tray out into the living room, put it back without emptying it.

  Cathy.

  It was no good. I went up to the client’s office on Park Avenue and delivered the money and collected what was due on my fee. I walked up three blocks to the bank on the 47th Street corner and deposited the check. It was a bright summer day and there were a lot of women on the streets. All of them were very smart-looking and very chic and not one of them had that quality of being alive that Cathy managed even when she was shaving her legs.

  Mrs. Harry Fannin.

  I dialed her at four o’clock from the office. She got on and I told her I had rotten news. There was a rush deal and I’d have to be away again for two or three days. Cleveland, I said. I was making a flight in forty minutes.

  “Oh, Harry—”

  “I’m sorry. Just came up. I’m in a hurry, Cath.”

  “Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Harry, you’ve been so strange on the phone today. So kind of—of distant.”

  “Cath, look, I’ve got to scram.”

  “All right, Harry.”

  “See you, huh?”

  “Bye—”

  I hung up. She’d sounded forlorn as hell. The first guy who came along with a tin cup, I was going to buy every pair of shoelaces he had.

  I went out and took a cab down Fifth Avenue to the nearest You-Drive-It and I rented a two-year-old Ford sedan. I drove over to Third Avenue and stopped at one of the cheap saloons the fags hadn’t decided was quaint yet and I had three bourbons while watching the clock. At 5:151 left and swung around to Lexington and went back up town. It had started to drizzle. I pulled in at 68th at exactly 5:28 and parked near the end of the block, away from the direction in which she would come home. Four minutes later I saw her make the corner on the double, running with a newspaper over her head. She went inside. I sat there.

  I chewed cigarettes, thinking how the one kind of job a legitimate P.I. won’t take are those cheap divorce things where you climb through transoms with a fresh load of Sylvania 25’s in your flashholder. I could make a couple thousand more a year if I was hard up enough to do that. I could have probably even afforded an electric lathe or a power saw, so that my wife would have had a hobby when I was out nights.

  The rain stopped in an hour. No one had gone in or out of the building who I didn’t know. There are only four apartments in it. Collins, the architect on the top floor, went in about ten minutes after Cathy. Jojo Pringle came out a little after six. He’s a jazz clarinetist and a hophead and I knew he’d be on his way for a light brunch. Three or four patients went into Dr. Salter’s private entrance on the ground floor.

  I began to dislike myself around seven. By eight o’clock the feeling had become one of contempt. I had planned to park there for three days if I had to, but now I told myself I’d give it one more hour and then if I had any sense I’d go upstairs and apologize.

  She came out at 8:33.

  She had changed out of her office clothes. She was wearing a tight, candy-striped summer skirt and a white blouse. She was great on white blouses. Her hair glinted under the street lamp.

  She began walking away from me, going with the one-way traffic and glancing over her shoulder. I started the engine in the Ford when I spotted the empty cruiser cab in the mirror. It picked her up and went a block and then cut downtown on Second.

  Go to a movie, I said. Do that, Cathy. Tell the driver to head over to midtown.

  Get rich wishing. The cab went all the way down to 14th before it turned. It went across to Seventh Avenue and then south again into the Village. It stopped at Sheridan Square. The light was green and I had to pass it. I double parked in front of a liquor store, using the mirror while she paid and got out. A panel truck pulled away a little up the block. I waited until she turned a corner and then I eased the Ford into the gap.

  There was a small off-Broadway theater over a few blocks. Maybe she was going there. Maybe she was going to Hobo-ken or Las Vegas or Guam, since they were all in that general direction.

  The joint was called Angelino’s.

  It was one of those seedy basement places some landlord had had to turn into a bar twenty years before because no one would pay United States currency to live in it. I knew the kind of crowd it would get. Guys with a notion they wanted to be artists who didn’t shave because they thought you were halfway there if you looked the part. Girls in grimy sweat shirts with the complete poems of Dylan Thomas under their arms when what they needed were cartons of Rinso. Sophisticated young uptown ladies slumming with their toothbrushes in their pocketbooks.

  I supposed she’d known the place from when she’d lived in the Village before we were married. I went past the doorway once and saw her standing in the crush at the bar. If she was meeting any one guy in particular he wasn’t doing any downhill schuss to get there.

  I went back and got the Ford and parked it a few doors down from the entrance. I walked down the opposite side of the street to the liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. When I came back past the doorway this time three or four of the guys near her were working on it. It was all palsy enough so that she was laughing about something. I went back to the car and opened the pint.

  People drifted in and out or along the street. So did their conversation, and it was too muggy to roll up the window:

  “—Look, if you can call my mother Jocasta, and me narcissistic—”

  “—Talk about paranoia—”

  “—The really accomplished Mexican painters, like Orozco and Tamayo—”

  The bohemians. The intellectuals. Tamayo and Tamayo and Tamayo, seeps in this petty paste from plate to plate. If they stopped that talk for three consecutive minutes the world would blow up.

  “—Do I know Willie? Why, he quotes me three separate times in one chapter—”

  “—If I saw Heathcliff on the street I’d just die—”

  It got to be ten. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock. You can drink a goodly amount of whisky in that time, say a pint. I was saving a buck or two by drinking it out of the bottle instead of across a bar. Be sensible that way for another decade and I could probably even manage that two-week cruise to the Bahamas I’d been dreaming about all those years.

  It was 1:49 when I tagged them. He was a tall slender kid with fairly good shoulders under his denim jacket. He was wearing tan slacks and a black knit tie and white sneakers and if someone had told him that the frat was holding a stag beer party he would have trotted off on the spot. Nobody told him. She had him by the arm and when they came up the stairs onto the sidewalk she said something and he laughed.

  They came past the car. She never saw me. They were both laughing now but she was not that tight. She walked easily and when they were turning the corner I saw his arm go around her hip.

  They walked two more blocks and then they went into a rundown building with a grocery store on the street floor. I was sixty yards behind them on the other side of the street. Next to me a sign in a plumber s window said, IS THERE WATER IN YOUR BASEMENT?

  After a minute a light went on two flights up. Third floor front. I lit a cigarette. The grocer was pushing haddock that year. I smoked the cigarette hard. I was still trying to finish it when the light went out again.

  I went across.

  There were a lot of bells and a lot of names. Lonergan. Goldman. Zachery. Hoy. Cranley. Philkins. When I was nine years old an avant-garde juvenile delinquent named Philkins knocked half the spokes out of the front wheel of my Western Flyer with a baseball bat. Or maybe that was Filkins. There was no lock on the outside door.

  There was one naked light bulb for each flight. There was a faint odor of turpentine. The walls were a drab schoolroom brown. The door I wanted was like any other dingy door in any other dingy walk-up anywhere. I wondered wh
at I was doing there.

  I rang the bell hard, hearing it blast inside the apartment.

  A minute passed. If they had the turpentine I wondered why they didn’t get some paint. I heard him padding toward me. “Who is it?” he said through the door.

  “Delivery.”

  “Huh? Here?” The door opened. “You want Cranley, mister?”

  He was peering out at me, tying the sash around a blue robe. He was a good-looking boy, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. The line of his nose was sharp and straight where the light from the hall cut it half into shadow. I would not have had to move my right hand more than ten inches from where it lay near the bell to change all that.

  “You sure you want Cranley, mister?”

  “Go back inside,” I said. “Tell her it’ll be cleaner if she’s got something on when I come in.”

  “What? Hey now, what is this? Who do you think you’re—”

  I took him by the front of the robe, moving close to him. “Maybe you better say you never saw her before tonight,” I told him. “Maybe you better get that over with first.”

  He got with it quickly enough then. I let him go and he edged away a step or two, his eyes going toward a closed door that would be a bedroom and then back to me. He was pushing six-one which made him almost as tall as I am but I had him in all the other ways and he knew that. He was about as thick through the chest as a breakfast lox. He swallowed once, scared.

  “Look,” he said then, “if you’re her husband, honest, I didn’t know. I never did see her before, really. She said she was divorced and she—”

  “You got a can?”

  “What? Yes, sure, right over there—”

  “Get in it,” I said. “Get in it and lock the door and scrub the bowl or something until you hear us leave.”

  He didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to write home about the experience but he went. I waited until he closed the door and then I walked across and opened the other one.

  The candy-striped skirt and the white blouse and her underclothes were thrown over a straight-backed chair. She was lying across a rumpled spread with her back toward me, looking at a magazine. One small shaded bulb threw a tarnished circle of light over the bed, and if I’d been Leonardo da Vinci I probably would have started fumbling around in a panic for paper and crayons.

  She thought I was the kid. “Aren’t you lucky,” she said. “People bringing you surprises in the middle of the night.”

  “What was it, a race?” I said. “Do you get a trophy for it?”

  She hadn’t moved, not consciously. I saw the muscles tighten beneath the flesh of her shoulders as her arms went rigid to the elbows beneath her. Then her head came around slowly. Her face was the color of ice cubes.

  “You had to go marry a cop,” I said.

  She came apart then. Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled. I had never seen her cry before. It broke me up real bad. “Wrap it up,” I told her. I shut the door on her and went back into the other room.

  I stood there, feeling the whisky in my stomach and seeing the place for the first time. She’d found herself an adult one. He collected things. There were lanterns from construction barriers, signs that said No Parking 8 AM. to 6 P.M. Near the door there was a cross-wired Department of Sanitation street-corner trash basket big enough to turn over and cage a walrus in. He didn’t have the walrus but it wouldn’t have taken more than a word. The kid’s jacket was hanging over a chair and the label said Whitehouse and Hardy, Fifth Avenue, so good old Dad had paid for that the same way he was paying for the graduate school. There were enough books to repave the Jersey Turnpike.

  There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. G P. Cranley, it said at the top, Comp. Lit. 207, Page 4, and under that it said:

  And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—

  She was dressed. She went straight to the door and out without saying anything and I followed her down. When we got to the street she turned the wrong way and I said, “This way.” I said, “Here,” when we got to the car. I ran a red light on Hudson Street and said, “Nuts,” when some guy yelled at me. So I won. That made four more words than she had said.

  Coming out of Central Park I had to wait for a light at 66th. “He didn’t even know my name,” she said then.

  “That’s all right,” I told her. “I didn’t once either. Maybe something lovely will grow out of it for you both.”

  She sucked in her breath. I found a parking slot directly in front of the apartment and she went in ahead of me with her own keys while I was locking the car. I wondered why I was bothering to do that with a rented job. She was in the good chair with one small light on when I came up, sitting with her head on her chest and her arms dangling, looking like a thrown coat.

  I made myself a drink, spilling an inch and a half of Jack

  Daniels into a kitchen tumbler and taking it without ice. It had the same effect as a short carrot juice. I went out and sat across from her.

  You could hear the busses out on Third Avenue.

  “Why?” I said.

  She said nothing.

  “I thought it was good. Plodding, dull-witted old Harry, I thought nothing could be better. And all the while I—”

  “It is good. But I’m just—”

  “Good, yeah. It must be remarkable. You’re just what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” Her voice was ragged and she looked up at me. I stared at the rug.

  “You go away,” she said then.

  “Good God—three, four times in a year?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whenever you do, the minute you’re gone, the minute I’m alone I start pacing. I start walking around this room as if I don’t belong here, as if I’m a stranger.” She was talking from very far away. “It’s as if something is pushing me. I’ve got to get out of here. Just out. And I can’t stop myself, I want to be with—with I don’t know who. It doesn’t make any sense and I can’t explain, I—”

  “How many times?”

  “Almost every time.” I heard her swallow. “You were in Phoenix four days. When you were in New Orleans it was five. And just now three when you were in Chicago. Almost every one of those nights.”

  I didn’t feel sore. I didn’t feel cheated or betrayed or outraged or anything else. I felt nothing. I was sitting there hearing her say all that and somehow it did not have anything to do with me. I knew it would have something to do with me later but it didn’t now. I got up and poured myself another drink and then I came back and sat there again.

  “The same guys? How many guys?”

  “They’re different each time. A different one each night, Harry. I see one and then they want to make dates but I won’t. It’s all confused, like if it’s only one night it’s not so bad, as if I’m not really doing anything wrong if I don’t let any of them get to mean anything. I go into bars and I meet them the way I did tonight and I... Oh, God in heaven, I—”

  She had her face in her hands. She was sobbing and saying, “Help me, help me.” She said it over and over. And four plus five made nine and three made the dozen. And tonight was thirteen. I stood up.

  “Harry, I’m sick. Something’s the matter with me. It’s all right when you’re here, when I’m with you, but the minute you’re gone I’m—”

  I went into the bedroom. I dug out a suitcase and opened it on the bed. She came into the doorway.

  “I’ll go,” she said. She had stopped crying. “It was your place before I came. I can stay with my mother and Estelle until I find someplace else.”

  I didn’t answer. I did not have a particularly distinct concept of the ethics involved in that kind of thing.

  “It will be easier that way,” she said. “I’ll take one bag. I can
come back when you’re at the office and get the rest.”

  I went past her and into the living room. She did not take long. She came out with the suitcase and stood it near the door. She hung there like something wet on a hook.

  “It’s going to sound pretty silly, isn’t it? But I—I’m sorry, Harry.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “You told me all about it that first night on the beach, all about the other ones. I didn’t buy anything without a label on it.”

  I wasn’t looking at her. Outside they were running every bus on the line.

  “I deserve that and more,” she said. “But that was different,

  Harry. Before we were married I wasn’t hurting anyone but myself. I didn’t want to hurt you. Oh, dear God, I didn’t! I—” Her voice broke. She was sobbing again with her head turned, softly now. “Harry, I love you, I—”

  “That’s swell,” I told her. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll remember it every time I think about you in that crummy room down there tonight with your drawers flung over that chair and your bare butt sprawled all over the bed. ‘Aren’t you lucky, people bringing you surprises in the middle of the night. And, oh, by the way, my name’s Cathy. Mrs. Cathy Fannin but don’t worry about that, the sucker’s gone chasing off someplace and—m