When he reached the platform, he burst out laughing.
He knew the neighborhood Gloria lived in, because it was close to Broadway, and he used to work in a grocery store on Broadway when he was a boy going to high school. What was the name of the man who’d owned the store? It didn’t matter. An Italian name. He had hated the man; the man had worn eyeglasses. He could remember that he had taken the job because he had needed the money for something. It had been a summer job, and he had been about sixteen. What had he needed the money for? Something.
The day he reported to work, the boss (Palumbo or Palumbi or something with a P, something Italian) had explained to him that his job would be primarily the delivery of groceries, but that occasionally he would help out behind the counter. He also told Buddwing that he could eat his lunch in the basement under the store, where all the soda pop was kept, but that he would have to pay him for any soda he drank.
Buddwing thought this was fair until the first day he went down to the basement to have his lunch, and found there a veritable treasure trove of soda pop. Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Seven-Up, Canada Dry Ginger Ale and Orange Soda, Hoffman Cream Soda and Sarsaparilla were stacked in cases that almost reached from floor to ceiling, bottle upon bottle. He correctly figured that if he paid the boss five cents a day, six days a week, for the bottle of pop he had with his lunch each day, the grand and munificent total would come to thirty cents a week. He mused that if he were the owner of a fancy grocery store, he would certainly allow his lowly delivery boy to drink a meager bottle of soda pop once a day every day of the week without charging him for it. The boss, it seemed to him, was being a cheap bastard. Besides, he was earning only twenty-two dollars a week, and the boss could certainly afford to let him have a free bottle of pop each day, or at least a bottle of pop at wholesale, which Buddwing was sure was not five cents a bottle. Nevertheless, even though the boss’s cheapness rankled, he went down to the basement for lunch every day for the first two weeks, and every day he opened a bottle of Coke and drank it with the sandwiches he brought from home, and then went upstairs and gave the boss a nickel.
Then, one morning while he was putting a carton of eggs into the refrigerator, he dropped the carton and broke eight of the eggs, and the boss told him he would deduct the price of those eggs from Buddwing’s salary. That very afternoon, Buddwing went down to the basement to have his lunch as usual. But instead of opening a bottle of Coke, he opened a quart of Hoffman’s Cream Soda and drank the whole quart, and then he opened a quart of Canada Dry Ginger Ale and drank half of that and spilled the rest down the open drain. When he went back after lunch, he paid his boss a nickel for the Coke he had not had. For the rest of the time he worked there, he stole the boss blind. He did not smoke at the time, but he stole cartons of cigarettes and took them home with him, and he opened canned fruits in the basement and had those with his lunch, and he sometimes would open six or seven quarts of soda, each a different flavor, and have a few sips from each bottle, and every day he would go back upstairs and pay the boss a nickel for a bottle of Coke.
He could remember all this, but he could not remember what the cheap bastard’s name was, or what he had done with the stolen cigarettes, though he had a feeling he had given them to a very close friend of his who smoked, and whose name he also could not remember. There was something else he could not or would not remember about that lousy job on Broadway and 91st Street — yes, that was where it had been — something else that troubled him about that job besides the cheap bastard who could not speak English, something else in one of the apartments he delivered to, something. Or maybe a combination of somethings, maybe that. He only knew that he remembered the job with a curious feeling of dread, and that the dread could not have come from the memory of his petty thefts.
He wondered now why he had needed money that summer, and he wondered too why even such a scanty memory of the job seemed to fill him with such dread, and then he stopped wondering. There was simply too much to wonder about, too little he knew. He hesitated in the lobby of Gloria’s building. For a moment, he did not wish to go into the building, did not wish to find Gloria, did not wish to find himself. Coming up Central Park South, listening to the birds, sensing the city around him and inside him, he had felt an anonymity that he instantly equated with freedom. The freedom had caused him to pull his outrageous trick on the change-booth attendant, and to sit in secret glee all the way uptown to 96th Street. But now... now memory of that grocery store job so long ago had triggered a reluctance in him to know anything more about himself. He suddenly felt that knowing himself would simply mean losing this freedom he had newly found. Knowing himself would bring a responsibility that would not allow him to hold up a blank piece of cardboard as a Transit Authority pass. Knowing himself would be frightening, and he did not want to be frightened.
He found himself walking through the lobby and to the mailboxes. He was not at all sure that he would go upstairs once he found out what apartment Gloria was in — he had not asked her on the phone, was that significant? — but there was a burning curiosity inside him that threatened to override both the earlier freedom he had experienced and the shudder of dread that had accompanied his recollection of the grocery store job. As he ran his index finger over the names in the mailboxes, he remembered Gloria’s voice on the telephone, edged with sleep, somewhat breathless, a sensuous voice, and the things she had hinted at, the things she thought he wanted from her. He did not know whether he really wanted these things from her or not, or even whether he had ever had these things from her, and if he had had them whether they were good or bad. But he was curious, and he was also oddly excited by the idea of going into the apartment of a woman with whom he had perhaps been intimate, and not recognizing her but nonetheless knowing that he had perhaps been intimate with her; the idea was very exciting. He could feel a stirring in his groin that had nothing whatever to do with intellectual curiosity. His finger traveled along the name-plates a little quicker, almost passed one of the names by, and then retraced itself and stopped.
He searched the remainder of the row. There were no other Glorias, and no other names with the initial G before them. This, then, was Gloria. Gloria Osborne. Not the G.V. who was inside his ring, not the G.V. from whom the ring had come, whoever he or she was, but Gloria Osborne, whose hair was in curlers and who spoke with a sleep-fuzzed breathless voice, who promised by denial the things that would happen when he entered that apartment, Gloria Osborne.
As he walked out of the small alcove containing the mailboxes and toward the elevator, he found himself becoming more and more excited by what he was now certain awaited him upstairs. He pressed the elevator button and waited while the name Gloria Osborne echoed sensuously in his mind. Apartment 7A, the mailbox had said, Apartment 7A, and Gloria Osborne waiting to tell him who he was, to do with him the things they had doubtless done a thousand times before, Gloria Osborne. He got into the elevator and pressed the button for the seventh floor.
When the elevator stopped, he walked into the corridor and again hesitated. The excitement that had come with his thoughts of Gloria’s voice, of Gloria’s denying promises, suddenly died when he realized she probably would not know him at all. He would knock on her door, and she would open it and look at his face and not know him, and perhaps slam the door, and perhaps call the police; it was after all only six-thirty in the morning! His passion died limply. He stood in the corridor, lonely and drained and discouraged. She would not know him, she would not tell him who he was, she would not offer him her bed and her body and her warmth. He stood with his head bent, undecided, and then he thought, Why shouldn’t she know me? I’m Sam. He pulled back his shoulders and began looking for Apartment 7A. He found it at the end of the hall. He hesitated a moment more before knocking, and then he raised his fist and rapped his knuckles sharply against the door.