She shook her head. No, she had to admit it was more that he didn’t want to work. Whenever she brought the subject up, he went into how it wasn’t safe, how they had his fingerprints on file and he couldn’t make a move without them getting on his trail. Each time he explained it to her, but each time the explanation became just that much less convincing. Why, he could get a job without getting his fingerprints taken. And he could surely be as safe on a job as he could walking all over the city and heaven-knows-what.
She paced around the apartment for a while, sat down, got up and paced some more. A good friend would help, she thought. Somebody like Terri, for instance. For a while she had thought that Marie would take Terri’s place, but with Marie being a Lesbian, things just didn’t work out that way. Whenever she was with Marie, the older woman would want to do things that Honour Mercy didn’t want to do, and the situation was strained on both sides. Now she hadn’t seen Marie in days and didn’t much care if she never saw her again.
She paced some more, sat some more, and started pacing again.
She kept walking and sitting until the phone rang and she was in business again.
While the cab carried her to 171 East 38th Street, she wondered what kind of a man Mr. Crawford was that he wanted her again so soon. He was a very nice man — he tipped her ten dollars both of the times she had visited him at his apartment and never asked her to do anything that she didn’t like to do. He was good, too, and when she was with a man all night she had a chance to enjoy it if he was good. Sometimes this made her feel a little disloyal to Richie, but then she would tell herself that this was her work and it was no crime to enjoy your work.
But the thing about Mr. Crawford that she especially liked was that he didn’t make her feel bad. And that, when you came right down to it, was what made New York worse than Newport. In Newport you were just with a man for a few minutes and he didn’t have a chance to make you feel bad, but in New York you were with a man sometimes for the whole night — and with the out-of-town buyer about twenty hours — and when you were with a man that long, you usually felt bad by the time it was over.
Not from anything the men did. Not from anything they did or said, but from the way they felt toward you and the way you felt toward yourself when you were with them. When you were with a man that long, you couldn’t have sex all the time, and when you weren’t having sex you felt uncomfortable. It was hard to explain but it was there.
That was the good thing about Mr. Crawford. She never had felt uncomfortable with him, not either of those times. The second night she had been so at ease that, when they made love, she just closed her eyes and pretended to herself that she and Mr. Crawford were married. It was funny, and very weird, and afterward she felt guilty, but while they were doing it, it was very good for her, and it was even good afterward when they lay side by side in silence and he looked at her with his eyes gentle and his mouth smiling.
He was waiting for her when she got to the apartment. He opened the door for her, closed it behind her and took her coat. He led her to a chair, handed her a drink, and took a seat in a chair across the room from her.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “How have you been, Honey?”
“All right.”
“I haven’t,” he said. “I just lost an important case.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I, but I expected it. Damn fool of a client didn’t have a leg to stand on, but he insisted on going to court. Some of them are so damned stupid they ought to be shot. They get the idea of suing for a few hundred thousand and the numbers get them intoxicated. They smell money they haven’t got a chance in the world of collecting, and the money-smell goes to their heads. I told the damn fool he couldn’t collect, but he was determined to go to court. What the hell — I figured we might as well get the fee as some shysters. But it’s a pain in the neck, Honey.”
“I can imagine.”
His face had been very serious and now it relaxed. “By the way,” he said, “do you call yourself anything besides Honey? It’s a hell of a name.”
She told him her name.
“Honour Mercy,” he echoed. “I like that. Has a good sound to it. You mind if I call you that instead of Honey?”
“Whatever you want, Mr. Crawford.”
He laughed, and after she realized how funny it was to be calling him Mr. Crawford, she laughed too. “My friends call me Josh,” he said. “Josh belongs in the same class with Honey as far as I’m concerned. Why don’t you try Joshua?”
“Joshua,” she said to herself, testing the name.
“The guy who fit the battle of Jericho.”
“And the walls came tumbling down.”
He nodded. “You know, there’s a rational explanation for that whole episode. If you find the right note for a certain object, the right vibration, and sound it long enough, the object’ll fall or crack or whatever the hell it does.”
She didn’t understand, so he went over the explanation in more detail, which wasn’t easy because he wasn’t too clear on just what he was saying. But they talked about the battle of Jericho, and the Bible in general, and Honour Mercy started suddenly when she realized that she hadn’t been thinking of the conversation as part of turning a trick. It was just two people talking, two friendly people in a pleasant apartment, and the real purpose of the visit had gotten lost in the shuffle.
When he had finished talking about vibrations and wave lengths and other sundry physical phenomena, there was a moment of silence and Honour Mercy realized that he couldn’t turn the conversation or the mood to sex now, that he was probably a little embarrassed and that it was up to her. She got halfway out of her chair, intending to go to him and embrace him and kiss him, but before she was on her feet he shook his head and she sank back into the chair.
“Let’s just talk, Honour Mercy.”
She nodded agreeably.
“I mean it,” he said. “I just want you to sit here and talk with me. For the moment, anyway.”
Normally she would have gone along with him. That was automatic — if a customer was paying for your time and just wanted to talk or watch a floor show or listen to music, that was his business. Marie had told her that quite frequently homosexuals engaged girls for the evening to kill rumors about themselves, that other men actually wanted no more than an evening’s companionship exclusive of sex. Already she had met men who liked to build themselves up by talking for hours before getting down to business.
But this time — perhaps the closeness she was beginning to feel for Crawford — made her ask: “Is that what you called me over for? To talk?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at him.
“I really don’t know,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t have anything in mind one way or the other when I called the agency. Neither sex nor conversation. I felt a little disappointed about the case I had been working on and a bit annoyed over things in general and I simply wanted to see you.”
“All right.”
“I wanted somebody,” he said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to want somebody — not anybody specifically, but just somebody to relax with? I wanted to talk to somebody. Who could I talk to? My wife? I haven’t talked to her in years, just the usual where-did-you-go-what-did-you-do crap. My partners? With them I could talk law. That’s all we have in common — law. My kids? They’re good kids, fine kids. I don’t know ’em, but they’re good kids. If something happened to them it would kill me. I love them. But how in hell could I possibly talk to them? We wouldn’t have anything to talk about.” She didn’t say anything.