She looked terribly weary; her skin seemed to have loosened. She put one hand lightly on his arm. “No,” she said, “that’s not the way it is.” Then a kind of fury shook her and tears came to her eyes. “You haven’t any right to say such things to me; you’re blaming me for something I haven’t anything to do with at all!” He reached out to touch her shoulder; she moved away. “You’d better go, Eric, this can’t be much fun for you. Make our excuses, please, to Vivaldo and Ida.”
“You can say that the Silenskis, that model couple, were having their Sunday fight,” said Richard; his face very white, breathing hard, staring at Cass.
Eric set his drink down, carefully; he wanted to run. “I’ll just say you had to stay in on account of the kids.”
“Tell Vivaldo to take it as a warning. This is what happens if you have kids, this is what happens if you get what you want.” And, for a moment, he looked utterly baffled and juvenile. Then, “Hell, I’m sorry, Eric. We never meant to submit you to such a melodramatic afternoon. Please come and see us again; we don’t do this all the time, we really don’t. I’ll walk you to the door.”
“It’s all right,” Eric said. “I’m a big boy, I understand.” He walked over to Cass and they shook hands. “It was nice seeing you.”
“It was good seeing you. Don’t let all that light fade.”
He laughed, but these words chilled him, too. “I’ll try to keep burning,” he said. He and Richard walked to the hall door. Cass stood still in the center of the living room.
Richard opened the door. “So long, kid. Can we call you — has Cass got your number?”
“Yes. And I have yours.”
“Okay. See you soon.”
“Sure thing. So long.”
“So long.”
The door closed behind him. He was again in the anonymous, breathing corridor, surrounded by locked doors. He found his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, thinking of the millions of disputes being waged behind locked doors. He rang for the elevator. It arrived, driven by another, older man who was eating a sandwich; he was dumped into the streets again. The long block on which Cass and Richard lived was quiet and empty now, waiting for the night. He hailed a cab on the Avenue and was whirled downtown.
His destination was a bar on the eastern end of the Village, which had, until recently, been merely another neighborhood bar. But now it specialized in jazz, and functioned sometimes as a showcase for younger but not entirely untried or unknown talents or personalities. The current attraction was advertised in the small window by a hand-printed, cardboard poster; he recognized the name of a drummer he and Rufus had known years ago, who would not remember him; in the window, too, were excerpts from newspaper columns and magazines, extolling the unorthodox virtues of the place.
The unorthodox, therefore, filled the room, which was very small, low-ceilinged, with a bar on one side and tables and chairs on the other. At the far end of the bar, the room widened, making space for more tables and chairs, and a very narrow corridor led to the rest rooms and the kitchen; and in this widened space, catty-corner to the room, stood a small, cruelly steep bandstand.
Eric had arrived during a break. The musicians were leaping down from the stand, and mopping their brows with large handkerchiefs, and heading for the street door which would remain open for about ten minutes. The heat in the room was terrifying, and the electric fan in the center of the ceiling could have done nothing to alleviate it. And the room stank: of years of dust, of stale, of regurgitated alcohol, of cooking, of urine, of sweat, of lust. People stood three and four deep at the bar, sticky and shining, far happier than the musicians, who had fled to the sidewalk. Most of the people at the tables had not moved, and they seemed quite young; the boys in sport shirts and seersucker trousers, the girls in limp blouses and wide skirts.
On the sidewalk, the musicians stood idly together, still fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs, their faces blandly watchful, ignoring the occasional panhandlers, and the policeman who walked up and down with his lips pursed and his eyes blind with unnameable suspicions and fears.
He wished he had not come. He was afraid of seeing Vivaldo, he was afraid of meeting Ida; and he began to feel, standing helplessly in the center of this sweltering mob, unbearably odd and visible, unbearably a stranger. It was not a new sensation, but he had not felt it for a long time: he felt marked, as though, presently, someone would notice him and then the entire mob would turn on him, laughing and calling him names. He thought of leaving, but, instead, inched into the bar and ordered a drink. He had no idea how he would go about finding Ida or Vivaldo. He imagined that he would have to wait until she began to sing. But, presumably, they would also be watching for him, for his red hair.
And he sipped his drink, standing uncomfortably close to a burly college boy, unpleasantly jostled by the waiter, who was loading his tray next to him. And he was, indeed, beginning to attract a certain, covert attention; he did not look American, exactly: they were wondering how to place him.
He saw them before they saw him. Something made him turn around and look out through the door, to the sidewalk; and Ida and Vivaldo, loosely swinging hands, walked up and began talking to the musicians. Ida was wearing a tight, white, low-cut dress, and her shoulders were covered with a bright shawl. On the little finger of one hand, she wore a ruby-eyed snake ring; on the opposite wrist, a heavy, barbaric-looking bracelet, of silver. Her hair was swept back from her forehead, piled high, and gleaming, like a crown. She was far more beautiful than Rufus and, except for a beautifully sorrowful, quicksilver tension around the mouth, she might not have reminded him of Rufus. But this detail, which he knew so well, caught him at once, and so did another detail, harder, for a moment, to place. She laughed at something said by one of the musicians, throwing her head back: her heavy silver earrings caught the light. Eric felt a pounding in his chest and between his shoulder blades, as he stared at the gleaming metal and the laughing girl. He felt, suddenly, trapped in a dream from which he could not awaken. The earrings were heavy and archaic, suggesting the shape of a feathered arrow: Rufus never really liked them. In that time, eons ago, when they had been cufflinks, given him by Eric as a confession of his love, Rufus had hardly ever worn them. But he had kept them. And here they were, transformed, on the body of his sister. The burly college boy, looking straight ahead, seemed to nudge Eric with his knee. Eric moved a little out from the bar and moved nearer the door, so that they would see him when they looked his way.
He stood sipping his drink in the bar; they stood on the twilit sidewalk. Eric watched Vivaldo and used these moments to remember him. Vivaldo seemed more radiant than he had ever been, and less boyish. He was still very slim, very lean, but he seemed, somehow, to have more weight. In Eric’s memory, Vivaldo always put one foot down lightly, like a distrustful colt, ready, at any moment, to break and run; but now he stood where he stood, the ground bore him, and his startled, sniffing, maverick quality was gone. Or perhaps not entirely gone: his black eyes darted from face to face as he spoke, as he listened, investigating, weighing, watching, his eyes hiding more than they revealed. The conversation took a more somber turn. One of the musicians had brought up the subject of money — of unions, and, with a gesture toward the spot where Eric stood, of working conditions. Vivaldo’s eyes darkened, his face became still, and he looked briefly down at Ida. She watched the musician who was speaking with a proud, bitter look on her face. “So maybe you better give it another thought, gal,” the musician concluded. “I’ve thought about it,” she said, looking down, touching one of the earrings. Vivaldo took this hand in his, and she looked up at him; he kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose. “Well,” said another musician, wearily, “we better be making it on in.” He turned and entered the bar, saying, “Excuse me, man” to Eric as he passed. Ida whispered something in Vivaldo’s ear; he listened, frowning. His hair fell over his forehead, and he threw his head back, sharply, with a look of annoyance, and saw Eric.