“I’ll find one.”
She handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Please hurry,” she said. “I’ll be worrying.”
“Go put on your dress,” he said. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, and went out of the apartment.
The streets outside had been washed clean by the rain, and everything glistened with the sparkle of fresh wetness. He breathed deeply of the air and walked two blocks up the avenue to the liquor store. He spent $6.94 for a fifth of Old Grand-Dad and $6.80 for a fifth of Black and White. In one of the side streets, he found an open grocery store where he bought two quart bottles of club soda for fifty-nine cents, six splits of ginger ale for the same amount, a bag of potato chips for thirty-nine cents, a bag of cheese tidbits for twenty-nine cents, and a can of salted peanuts for thirty-nine cents. He had spent a total of fifteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. In addition to the thirty cents he still had from Gloria’s five-dollar dole, he now had four one-dollar bills and one penny, for a grand total of four dollars and thirty-one cents. He was rich again.
He stopped on the street corner, the brown paper bag with the whiskey bottles in one arm, the brown paper bag with the groceries in the other. The buildings of New York rose around him like a wall of slitted eyes. Beyond that wall, there lay the world for his taking. With Grace beside him, he would destroy every tiger in these narrow canyons. He would drain a bottle of booze, and then shout a war cry in the streets. He would flush out all the yellow and black cats, seize them by the tails, twirl them over his head in exultant triumph, and then call Gloria Osborne at MO 6-2367 to tell her he was a giant, and perhaps go to eat a victory feast with her at Izzy’s Cafeteria.
MO 6-2367.
Gloria.
No, not Gloria, but
“It’s not your fault,” Dan says.
These are the first kind words Dan has ever said to him in his life.
“I know it isn’t,” he answers.
“In case you thought it was.”
“It just started wrong,” he says.
“You’ll have to call tomorrow morning,” Dan says. “They need all that information. About how many people there’ll be, all that.”
“I’ll be going there, anyway.”
“I know, but... maybe you ought to sleep late, get some rest. You’ll be there all day, you know.”
“I thought I’d go early.”
“There’s no need for that. Molly and I will be there.”
“All right, I’ll call them.”
“Unless you want me to handle it.”
“No, I can do it.”
“You’d know better than I, anyway. And it’s your decision to make.”
“Yes, I know.”
They are silent for a long time. He walks beside Dan and tries to hate him, tries to hate somebody, but all emotion seems to have drained out of him.
“How will you be going?”
“What?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll drive,” he says.
“Do you think you should?” Dan asks.
“Why not?”
“I’d feel a lot happier if you took the train.”
“I can drive.”
“Still, you might be there late tomorrow night, and you’ll be tired. Take the train. I’ll drive you home tomorrow.”
“All right,” he says.
“Maybe we ought to get a schedule.”
“All right.”
They walk toward Grand Central. At the information booth, they ask for a Harlem Division timetable. He puts it into the inside pocket of his jacket without looking at it.
“You have the number now, don’t you?” Dan asks.
“Yes,” he says.
“You wrote it in the book, right?”
“Yes.”
“You still have the book?”
He feels his pocket. “Yes, I have it.”
“You won’t forget to call, will you?”
“No, I won’t forget.”
“You won’t forget, now, will you?”
“No, I won’t forget.”
MO 6-2367.
Again, as it had earlier this morning, the need to call that number seemed terribly urgent. As he walked, he began looking for a bar or a cigar store, the need rising, his pace quickening. He had promised to call, had he not? He had specifically written down the number so he would not forget to call. Besides, now that he was brimming with plans for the future, he felt he owed her a call, just a ring — Hello there, how are you, this is me again — to let her know she was forgiven. What the hell, he should not have expected her to know all the answers. He would tell her that he was strong and swift and ready to do battle. I am going to make you proud of me, he would say. He could almost visualize her listening to him as he spoke. She would be standing in her bedroom with the phone tucked under her ear, and she would smile and nod encouragingly and benevolently, Yes, son, go kill all the tigers.
He went into a United Cigar Store and walked directly to the phone booth. He deposited his dime and dialed her number, MO 6-2367. His hand on the receiver was trembling. He listened to the phone ringing on the other end, and then Gloria’s voice came onto the line, and his heart lurched.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello there, how are you?”
“Who is this?”
“This is me again,” he said.
“Who the hell is me again?”
“You remember. I was there this morning.”
“What do you want? Another handout?”
“No, Gloria, I thought—”
“My husband is here with me,” she said curtly, and hung up.
For a moment, he could not believe he was holding a dead phone in his hand. He stared at the instrument as though it had betrayed him, and then put it back on the hook and sat motionless in the booth, watching the grinning white face of the dial. He clenched his fist suddenly and banged it against the coin box, and then he picked up his bundles and walked out into the street again.
I only wanted to tell you what I was planning, that’s all, he thought. I mean, I thought maybe, just maybe, you might be interested in knowing what the hell your son was planning. So what was all that business about a handout? Who needs anything from you? I’m a big boy now, sweetie; I can make it alone. I knew I’d have to make it alone from that day in Yokohama. I left you a long long time ago, sweetie, so what gives you the right to, talk to me this way now, to tell me your husband is there with you? Your husband has always been there with you — is that supposed to be news? Who the hell needs you or him? I’ve got Grace with me, she’s going to learn to growl and spit, we’re going to run so far and so fast that neither of you will know where the hell we are, or even if we ever existed!
He nodded his head defiantly, and began walking back toward the apartment.
The blond woman in the black cocktail dress was waiting in a taxi at the next corner.
16
At first, he was not sure the woman was addressing him. As he approached the taxi parked alongside the curb, she lowered the window, leaned partially out of it, and called, “Hey, you! Do you want to be a trophy?”
Clutching his parcels, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that he was the only person on the corner. As though answering the question he was phrasing in his mind, the woman in the taxi said, “Yes, you. I’m talking to you.”
He moved closer to the cab and bent down to look into it. The woman was in her middle thirties, wearing a very low-cut black cocktail dress and sitting forward rather carelessly on the seat, the dress riding high up over her knees. For a moment, her face seemed familiar, but then he realized the resemblance was only an illusion, the neon reflection from the bar on the corner softening her features in the dimness of the cab interior. Her blond hair was clipped close to her head, a coiffed tendril curling onto one cheek, a disorderly tangle falling haphazardly onto the other. There was a hard line to the woman’s jaw and nose. Her mouth, smiling at him now, combined with her heavily made-up eyes to deliver an immediate impression of knowledgeability that even the neon glow could not conceal. Whatever she had once looked like — at eighteen, at twenty, at twenty-two, at twenty-eight — had been obscured by a shellacked veneer of smartness and chic, and something more than that: a cynical wisdom that seemed to shine through her eyes from within.