“I’m just along for the ride. I’ll stay with the drink.”
Martin washed a glass and poured a beer. He stared at the door of the broom closet, then opened the door and saw the notebook for The Flaming Corsage hanging from a nail on a short piece of cord. It was inscribed on the cover: To my beloved son, who played a whore’s trick on his father. Martin closed the closet door and sipped his beer, which tasted like the juice of rotted lemons. He spat into the sink.
Martin dried his mouth and studied Margie, who removed her brassiere for him. Her nipples lay at the bottom of the curves, projecting somewhat obliquely. Martin considered the nipple fetishists of history. Plutarch, Spinoza, Schubert, Cardinal Wolsey The doorbells of ecstasy, Curzio Malaparte called them. Billy reached across the table and lifted one of Margie’s breasts. People preparing for sexual conflict. The pimp slavered and picked his nose with his thumb.
How had Martin’s father prepared for sex? On spindly legs, he stood in his shorts in his bedroom, reading Blake on the dresser top. The shorts seemed unusually long. Perhaps he had short thighs. He looked sexually disinterested, but that was unquestionably deceptive. His teeth carried stains from pipe-smoking. He had a recurring ingrown toenail, clipped with a V, a protruding bone on the right elbow from an old fracture. These things were antisexual.
How would Martin’s son ever know anything of his own sexuality? Gone to the priests at thirteen, blanketed with repressive prayer and sacramental censure. How could the tigers of chastity be wiser than the horses of coition?
Ten years ago, a phone call had come for Martin after he’d completed a sexual romp with his wife. The caller, a Boston lawyer, had heard that the notebook of The Flaming Corsage was in Martin’s possession. Was that true?
Yes.
Was it for sale, or would it be preserved in the trove of Daugherty papers?
The latter, of course.
Well, you may take my name and address, and should you change your mind I want you to know that I will pay a handsome price for that notebook. Like the play made from it, it has a deep significance for my client.
What significance is that?
My client, said the lawyer, was your father’s mistress.
“All right,” Morrie said, emerging from the bedroom. “Little bit of all right.”
“That was quick,” Billy said. “You like it?”
“Short but sweet,” Morrie said. “How much?”
“Buck and a half,” said the pimp.
Morrie snapped a dollar off his roll and fished for the fifty cents. Margie put on her brassiere. Fela picked up the sarsaparilla bottle and looked for a glass.
“Only a buck and a half?” Billy said.
“That’s all,” said the pimp.
“It must be some great stuff for a buck and a half.”
“Go try it.”
Fela tipped up the bottle and gargled with sarsaparilla. She spat it into the sink and eyed Billy. The pimp took Morrie’s dollar and change. Martin opened the broom closet and found a dust pan hanging from a nail.
“How the hell can it be any good for a buck and a half?” Billy asked.
“Hey, I ought to know,” said the pimp with a rattish smile of cuspids. “She’s my sister.”
Billy hit him on the chin. The pimp sped backward and knocked over a chair, shook his head and leaped at Billy’s throat. Billy shook him off, and the pimp reached for the butcher knife in the sink, but Martin reached it first and threw it out the open window into the alley. Billy hit the pimp again, a graze of the head, but the pimp found Billy’s throat again and held on. Martin pulled at the pimp as the whores scrambled away from the table. Morrie pushed past Martin and bashed the pimp with the sarsaparilla bottle. The pimp slid to the floor and lay still. The whores came out of the bedroom carrying their dresses and handbags.
“He looks dead,” Billy said.
“Who gives a goddamn?” Morrie said, and he tipped over the kitchen table, opened the dish closet and threw the dishes on the floor. Billy tipped over the garbage pail and threw a chair at the kitchen window. The whores went out the back door.
“Son of a bitch, pimping for his own sister,” said Billy.
“She wasn’t bad,” said Morrie as he swept the contents of the refrigerator onto the floor. “She’s got nice teeth.”
Martin salvaged a new cold bottle of Stanwix and poured himself a glass. He opened the broom closet so Morrie could empty it. Billy went into the bedroom where Morrie had been with Fela and tore up the bed clothes, then kicked the footboard until the bed fell apart. On the bedside table stood a metal lamp of a nautical F.D.R. at the wheel of the Ship of State, standing above the caption: “Our Leader.” Billy threw the lamp through the bedroom window. Martin straightened up two kitchen chairs, sat on one and used the other as a table for his beer, which no longer tasted like rotten lemons. Billy came back and nudged the inert pimp with his foot.
“I think you killed him,” he said to Morrie.
“No,” said Martin. “He moved his fingers.”
“He’s all right then,” Morrie said. “You ain’t dead if you can move your fingers.”
“I knew a guy couldn’t move his toes,” Billy said, winded but calming. “His feet turned to stone. First his feet then the rest of him. Only guy I ever knew whose feet turned to stone and then the rest of him.”
Transgressors of good fame are punished for their deeds, was what occurred to Martin. He stood up and opened his fly, then urinated on the pimp’s feet. Simoniacs among us.
“What’d you make of Morrie’s answer about Maloy?” Billy asked.
“I thought he was evasive,” Martin said.
“I think he’s lying.”
“Why would he lie?”
“You tell me,” Billy said. “Must be he doesn’t want Maloy connected to Newark.”
“Maybe he’s not connected.”
“No. He was lying. I saw it in his face.”
They listened to the dismal blues Slopie Dodds was making at the piano. Martin squinted in the dim light of Martha’s Place, where they’d come for a nightcap after leaving Morrie. The smoke was dense in the low-ceilinged bar, which was full of Negroes. There were four white men in the place, Martin and Billy, a stranger at the far end of the bar, and Daddy Big, a nightly Negrophile after he reached his drunken beyond. Daddy was oblivious now of everything except hustling Martha, a handsome tan woman in her forties with shoulder-length conked hair, small lips, and a gold-capped canine tooth. Martha was not about to be hustled, but Daddy Big did not accept this, steeped as he was in his professional wisdom that everybody is hustleable once you find the weak spot.
Slopie ended his blues and, as Martha moved to another customer, Daddy Big swung around on his stool and said, “Play me the white man’s song, Slopie.” Slopie grinned and trilled an intro, a ricky-tick throwback, and Daddy Big sang from his barstool the song he said he had learned from a jail-house nigger who’d sung it in World War One: I don’t care what it costs, I’ll suffer all the loss. It’s worth twice the money just to be the boss. ’Cause I got a white man workin’ for me now. The song merged with “The Broadway Rag,” into which Slopie passed without comment. Daddy Big opened his arms to the room and said as the ragtime bounced off the walls, “I love all niggers.” Looking then to the black faces for reciprocation and getting none, he discovered Billy at the corner table, near the neon-lighted window.
“What’re you doing here, Phelan?” he asked. “You ain’t a nigger.” The words were crooked with whiskey.
“I’m an Irish Catholic,” Billy said. “Same thing to some people.”
A few who heard this smiled. Daddy Big hurled himself off the barstool and staggered toward Billy, stopping his own forward motion by grabbing the back of a chair with both hands.