He took the rest of the steps quickly, forgetting the danger. He discovered, surprised, he was going toward the empty pool. So many times now, after he had already made them, he had discovered the pointlessness of his gestures, his un-willed movements. Ah, I am abandoned, he thought, surrendering. He turned around. A light was on in Norma’s room. He could still hear Bieberman calling his name. He stood among the beach umbrellas on the wide dark lawn and listened to the old man’s desperate voice. “Preminger, Preminger.” It was as if he were hiding and the old man had been sent out to look for him. “Preminger, I mean it.”
All right, he thought, all right, damn it, all right. He would wait until the morning and then he would go to Norma’s room and apologize and they would go back to the city together and he might investigate some jobs and they might continue to see each other and, after a while, perhaps, he might ask her to marry him.
THE GUEST
On Sunday, Bertie walked into an apartment building in St. Louis, a city where, in the past, he had changed trains, waited for buses, or thought about Klaff, and where, more recently, truckers dropped him, or traveling salesmen stopped their Pontiacs downtown just long enough for him to reach into the back seat for his trumpet case and get out. In the hallway he stood before the brass mailboxed wall seeking the name of his friend, his friends’ friend really, and his friends’ friend’s wife. The girl had danced with him at parties in the college town, and one night — he imagined he must have been particularly pathetic, engagingly pathetic — she had kissed him. The man, of course, patronized him, asked him questions that would have been more vicious had they been less naïve. He remembered he rather enjoyed making his long, patient answers. Condescension always brought the truth out of him. It was more appealing than indifference at least, and more necessary to him now. He supposed he didn’t care for either of them, but he couldn’t go further. He had to rest or he would die.
He found the name on the mailbox — Mr. and Mrs. Richard Preminger — the girl’s identity, as he might have guessed, swallowed up in the husband’s. It was no way to treat women, he thought gallantly.
He started up the stairs. Turning the corner at the second landing, he saw a man moving cautiously downward, burdened by boxes and suitcases and loose bags. Only as they passed each other did Bertie, through a momentary clearing in the boxes, recognize Richard Preminger.
“Old man, old man,” Bertie said.
“Just a minute,” Preminger said, forcing a package aside with his chin. Bertie stood, half a staircase above him, leaning against the wall. He grinned in the shadows, conscious of his ridiculous fedora, his eye patch rakishly black against the soft whiteness of his face. Black-suited, tiny, white-fleshed, he posed above Preminger, dapper as a scholarly waiter in a restaurant. He waited until he was recognized.
“Bertie? Bertie? Let me get rid of this stuff. Give me a hand, will you?” Preminger said.
“Sure,” Bertie said. “It’s on my family crest. One hand washing the other. Here, wait a minute.” He passed Preminger on the stairs and held the door for him. He followed him outside.
“Take the key from my pocket, Bertie, and open the trunk. It’s the blue convertible.”
Bertie put his hand in Preminger’s pocket. “You’ve got nice thighs,” he said. To irritate Preminger he pretended to try to force the house key into the trunk lock. Preminger stood impatiently behind him, balancing his heavy burdens. “I’ve been to Dallas, lived in a palace,” Bertie said over his shoulder. “There’s this great Eskimo who blows down there. Would you believe he’s cut the best side ever recorded of ‘Mood Indigo’?” Bertie shook the key ring as if it were a castanet.
Preminger dumped his load on the hood of the car and took the keys from Bertie. He opened the trunk and started to throw things into it. “Going somewhere?” Bertie asked.
“Vacation,” Preminger said.
“Oh,” Bertie said.
Preminger looked toward the apartment house. “I’ve got to go up for another suitcase, Bertie.”
“Sure,” Bertie said.
He went up the stairs behind Preminger. About halfway up he stopped to catch his breath. Preminger watched him curiously. He pounded his chest with his tiny fist and grinned weakly. “Mea culpa,” he said. “Mea booze, Mea sluts. Mea pot. Me-o-mea.”
“Come on,” Preminger said.
They went inside and Bertie heard a toilet flushing. Through a hall, through an open door, he saw Norma, Preminger’s wife, staring absently into the bowl. “If she moves them now you won’t have to stop at God knows what kind of place along the road,” Bertie said brightly.
Norma lifted a big suitcase easily in her big hands and came into the living room. She stopped when she saw Bertie. “Bertie! Richard, it’s Bertie.”
“We bumped into each other in the hall,” Preminger said.
Bertie watched the two of them look at each other.
“You sure picked a time to come visiting, Bertie,” Preminger said.
“We’re leaving on our vacation, Bertie,” Norma said.
“We’re going up to New England for a couple of weeks,” Preminger told him.
“We can chat for a little with Bertie, can’t we, Richard, before we go?”
“Of course,” Preminger said. He sat down and pulled the suitcase next to him.
“It’s very lovely in New England.” Bertie sat down and crossed his legs. “I don’t get up there very regularly. Not my territory. I’ve found that when a man makes it in the Ivy League he tends to forget about old Bertie,” he said sadly.
“What are you doing in St. Louis, Bertie?” Preminger’s wife asked him.
“It’s my Midwestern swing,” Bertie said. “I’ve been down South on the southern sponge. Opened up a whole new territory down there.” He heard himself cackle.
“Who did you see, Bertie?” Norma asked him.
“You wouldn’t know her. A cousin of Klaff’s.”
“Were you living with her?” Preminger asked.
Bertie shook his finger at him. The Premingers stared glumly at each other. Richard rubbed the plastic suitcase handle. In a moment, Bertie thought, he would probably say, “Gosh, Bertie, you should have written. You should have let us know.” He should have written! Did the Fuller Brush man write? Who would be home? Who wouldn’t be on vacation? They were commandos, the Fuller Brush man and he. He was tired, sick. He couldn’t move on today. Would they kill him because of their lousy vacation?
Meanwhile the Premingers weren’t saying anything. They stared at each other openly, their large eyes in their large heads on their large necks largely. He thought he could wait them out. It was what he should do. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to wait out the Premingers, to stare them down. Who was he kidding? It wasn’t his forte. He had no forte. That was his forte. He could already hear himself begin to speak.
“Sure,” he said. “I almost married that girl. Klaff’s lady cousin. The first thing she ever said to me was, ‘Bertie, they never build drugstores in the middle of the block. Always on corners.’ It was the truth. Well, I thought, this was the woman for me. One time she came out of the ladies’ john of a Greyhound bus station and she said, ‘Bertie, have you ever noticed how public toilets often smell like bubble gum?’ That’s what it was like all the time. She had all these institutional insights. I was sure we could make it together. It didn’t work out.” He sighed.