"Why is it you keep your hands under the table all the time?" I said. "You bring them up only to give Pike one of those tender clouts. Then down they go again. What's under the table that's so interesting?"
"Dorothy Lamour and the squid people."
Pike snorted and softly collapsed. I went to the bar and ordered another drink for myself. Zack put down his newspaper and removed the thick spectacles he wore. He poured the drink, then lifted the wet five, sponged down the bar, gave me change and went to sit in a folding chair beneath an overexposed photo of a bridegroom and best man outside the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn.
"What's that?" she said.
"Scotch."
"It's real neat to watch. The ice shines and there's like things going off. Little explosions all over."
"Why do you want to live in a greenhouse?"
"I want to live in a big wet greenhouse with hair growing in it. There'd be like doll's hair and doggy hair growing in all the pots. That would be neat. And anybody who wanted to be there could be there. John and Paul and Mick and the Doors and the Airplane and Bobby and Buffy. We'd all smoke and there'd be lots of audio-visual hardware. Then we would all eat hot fudge sundaes. That would be the neatest thing in the whole world."
"How did you meet Pike?"
"I was at Elephantiasis with a boy from NYU. The vibrations were bad. I was stoned on hash and I weighed about a zillion pounds. It was like being in the back of the blue bus. Then dada came over and bought this boy about a dozen drinks and he went to the toilet and never came out. Then dada took me to his room and we ate a whole Sara Lee chocolate cake and drank a big thing of milk. It was wild."
"My name isn't Jack, by the way. Not that I mind being called Jack. In a way I like it. It's like some wonderful Far Eastern theology where all the minor deities have the same name as the big guy. You make me feel guilty because I drink. Where do you live, by the way?"
"I stay with Lee, Jemmy and Kit."
I reached over and unzipped the jacket. My hand touched her cool breast. I was aware of a small movement behind the bar and I knew that one of Zack's shotglass eyes had lifted from the newspaper. I edged in closer, wedging her knee between my legs. My hand went up from her breast to her neck and face and when I kissed her there was a message returned from that humid mechanical mouth which let me know that whatever we did, here or later, was a matter of the vastest indifference. I did not bother drawing the jacket together and she did not bother noticing.
"Let's get out of here," I said. "We'll go to my place."
"We have to take him home."
"He'll be all right. He gets like this all the time. I have almost a thousand dollars' worth of stereo equipment."
"When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds."
"Let's go," I said. "We'll get some dinner if you like and then go to my place."
"Can he come?"
"He can take care of himself."
"We painted a circle in the middle of our room. We all sit in there when we smoke. It's real great."
"What else do you do?"
"Whatever we want," she said.
"But what?"
"You can do whatever you want."
"But can't you be more exact? I want to know exactly what you're talking about."
"It's simple. It's so simple. You can come back with me if you want. We have some stuff. But first we have to take him home."
I moved back away from her and finished my drink. Heaving slab of cougar-meat. Would I have to help undress him? Pluck off his weary socks with fastidious fingers and tuck him snoring into his army cot? Few things are more depressing than the sight of a drunken friend who happens to be twice your age; so many illusions are tested. He made a noise, then another, small dogs barking in his throat. His head rested on his left forearm. The hair at the back of his neck was light brown and gray. I put my arm over his shoulder.
"What color is the circle?" I said.
"It's red. It's a big red circle and we all sit inside it. You can come if you want. Anybody can come who wants to. You and me and him. We can all go."
I leaned across and zipped up the jacket. I liked her. I had no desire to trample her. She was delicate and trusting, beautiful in her blank way, and my words could not reach the spaces she felt between sounds. But these facts did not give me the right to trample her. Communications theorist and emperor of stereo. I gave her fifteen dollars-for food, I said.
"No, I can't go," I told her. "We'll take him home and that'll be it for the night."
Then I smiled at her foolishly and she answered with the unembellished look of a feeble nun who has begged successfully for money and found no hand quite willing to touch her own.
You can tell something about a woman by listening to her footsteps on a flight of stairs. As she climbs toward your landing and takes the level walk past your door and then begins to climb again, you can say with some assurance whether she is shapely, impulsive, churlish, simpering, tired, witty or unloved. It is interesting to speculate on the curve of her ankles, how her apartment is furnished, whether or not she believes in a supreme being.
The footsteps I heard that night, that early morning, were those of my ex-wife, Meredith, who lived one floor above me and across the hall. As she went by my door I thought I detected a slight hesitation in her stride. I did not move from the chair nor lower the book I was reading. She climbed the next flight slowly, and in the absolute stillness of the building at that late hour the sound of her key in the lock was enough to break one mood and bring on another, and the soft closing of her door was not unlike that breath of sensuality heard between the silences of sleepless nights in rain falling, in voices on the street, in darkness vibrating to the resonance of every small sound. I waited fifteen minutes, then went upstairs. Meredith squinted out at me through the peephole, then opened the door. She was wearing the parrot-colored housedress her parents had sent from Turkey, where her father was now stationed, tending an undisclosed number of tumescent missiles. She had a wonderful tan.
"How was Puerto Rico?"
"I had a marvelous time, David. You really should go down there for a week or two. Sit down. I'll get you something."
"I heard you go by my door. I was having trouble sleeping so I thought I'd come up for a minute or two."
"I went out with the most awful man in the world tonight. All he could talk about was his eight-speaker stereo system and E-type Jaguar."
She brought the drinks over to the sofa and sat next to me. Even though I saw her often during those years I was continually surprised by some of the changes in her outlook and personality since our divorce. She was much more the New York woman now, informed, purposeful, hard to impress. Gone were the cute enthusiasms of the teen-age bride, those sudden flings into space which seemed, so I thought, to be the outer extensions of a childhood marked by wandering. But with the new sophistication there was a concomitant nameless threat. Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women. She worked as a secretary to the art editor of a newsmagazine. It was a simple enough job, requiring typing and dictation skills, no more than rudimentary intelligence, and yet it prompted her to explore all the museums and art galleries of the city and to spend most of her vacations, and almost all her money, rummaging through the abbeys and chateaus of Europe, all those tourist bins patrolled by guards who look as though they have just deflowered their own daughters. One summer Merry and I had met by prearrangement in Florence, in some bell-swinging piazza, and sipped our orange drinks, so curiously reminiscent of an Eighth Avenue Nedick's, as the tiny invertebrate cars raced by our table, each driver pursuing his private Grand Prix. Meredith's eyes blazed; her arm swept across that vista of stone warriors, philosophers, noblemen and extras. "What meaning!" she cried. "What stupendous meaning!"