Preminger stared at him, but Norma was beginning to soften. He wondered randomly what she would be like in bed. He looked coolly at her long legs, her wide shoulders. Like Klaff’s cousin: institutional.
“Bertie, how are your eyes now?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, “still seeing double.” He smiled. “Two for one. It’s all right when there’s something to look at. Other times I use the patch.”
Norma seemed sad.
“I have fun with it,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference which eye I cover. I’m ambidextrous.” He pulled the black elastic band from his forehead. Instantly there were two large Richards, two large Normas. The Four Premingers like a troupe of Jewish acrobats. He felt surrounded. In the two living rooms his four hands fumbled with the two patches. He felt sick to his stomach. He closed one eye and hastily replaced the patch. “I shouldn’t try that on an empty stomach,” he said.
Preminger watched him narrowly. “Gee, Bertie,” he said finally, “maybe we could drop you some place.”
It was out of the question. He couldn’t get into a car again. “Do you go through Minneapolis, Minnesota?” he asked indifferently.
Preminger looked confused, and Bertie liked him for a moment. “We were going to catch the Turnpike up around Chicago, Bertie.”
“Oh, Chicago,” Bertie said. “I can’t go back to Chicago yet.”
Preminger nodded.
“Don’t you know anybody else in St. Louis?” Norma asked.
“Klaff used to live across the river, but he’s gone,” Bertie said.
“Look, Bertie…” Preminger said.
“I’m fagged,” Bertie said helplessly, “locked out.”
“Bertie,” Preminger said, “do you need any money? I could let you have twenty dollars.”
Bertie put his hand out mechanically.
“This is stupid,” Norma said suddenly. “Stay here.”
“Oh, well—”
“No, I mean it. Stay here. We’ll be gone for two weeks. What difference does it make?”
Preminger looked at his wife for a moment and shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “there’s no reason you couldn’t stay here. As a matter of fact you’d be doing us a favor. I forgot to cancel the newspaper, the milk. You’d keep the burglars off. They don’t bother a place if it looks lived in.” He put twenty dollars on the coffee table. “There might be something you need,” he explained.
Bertie looked carefully at them both. They seemed to mean it. Preminger and his wife grinned at him steadily, relieved at how easily they had come off. He enjoyed the idea himself. At last he had a real patron, a real matron. “Okay,” he said.
“Then it’s settled,” Preminger said, rising.
“It’s all right?” Bertie said.
“Certainly it’s all right,” Preminger said. “What harm could you do?”
“I’m harmless,” Bertie said.
Preminger picked up the suitcase and led his wife toward the door. “Have a good time,” Bertie said, following them. “I’ll watch things for you. Rrgghh! Rrrgghhhfff!”
Preminger waved back at him as he went down the stairs. “Hey,” Bertie called, leaning over the banister, “did I tell you about that crazy Klaff? You know what nutty Klaff did out at U.C.L.A.? He became a second-story man.” They were already down the stairs.
Bertie pressed his back against the door and turned his head slowly across his left shoulder. He imagined himself photographed from underneath. “Odd man in,” he said. He bounded into the center of the living room. I’ll bet there’s a lease, he thought. I’ll bet there’s a regular lease that goes with this place. He considered this respectfully, a little awed. He couldn’t remember ever having been in a place where the tenants actually had to sign a lease. In the dining room he turned on the chandelier lights. “Sure there’s a lease,” Bertie said. He hugged himself. “How the fallen are mighty,” he said.
In the living room he lay down on the couch without taking off his shoes. He sat up and pulled them off, but when he lay down again he was uneasy. He had gotten out of the habit, living the way he did, of sleeping without shoes. In his friends’ leaseless basements the nights were cold and he wore them for warmth. He put the shoes on again, but found that he wasn’t tired any more. It was a fact that dependence gave him energy. He was never so alert as when people did him favors. It was having to be on your own that made you tired.
“Certainly,” Bertie said to the committee, “it’s scientific. We’ve suspected it for years, but until our researchers divided up the town of Bloomington, Indiana, we had no proof. What our people found in that community was that the orphans and bastards were sleepy and run down, while the housewives and people on relief were wide awake, alert, raring to go. We can’t positively state the link yet, but we’re fairly certain that it’s something to do with dependency — in league perhaps with a particularly virulent form of gratitude. Ahem. Ahem.”
As he lectured the committee he wandered around the apartment, touring from right to left. He crossed from the living room into the dining room and turned right into the kitchen and then right again into Preminger’s small study. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said, glancing at the contour chair near Preminger’s desk. He went back into the kitchen. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said, looking at Norma’s electric stove. He stepped into the dining room and continued on, passing Norma’s paintings of picturesque side streets in Mexico, of picturesque side streets in Italy, of picturesque side streets in Puerto Rico, until he came to a door that led to the back sun parlor. He went through it and found himself in a room with an easel, with paints in sexy little tubes, with brushes, with palettes and turpentine and rags. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said and walked around the room to another door. He opened it and was in the Premingers’ master bedroom. He looked at the bed. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said. Through a door at the other end of the room was another small hall. On the right was the toilet. He went in and flushed it. It was one of those toilets with instantly renewable tanks. He flushed it again. And again. “The only kind to have,” he said out of the side of his mouth, imagining a rental agent. “I mean, it’s like this. Supposing the missus has diarrhea or something. You don’t want to have to wait until the tank fills up. Or suppose you’re sick. Or suppose you’re giving a party and it’s mixed company. Well, it’s just corny to whistle to cover the noise, know what I mean? ’S jus’ corny. On the other hand, you flush it once suppose you’re not through, then what happens? There’s the damn noise after the water goes down. What have you accomplished? This way”—he reached across and jiggled the little lever and then did it a second time, a third, a fourth—“you never have any embarrassing interim, what we in the trade call ‘flush lag.’ ”
He found the guest bedroom and knew at once that he would never sleep in it, that he would sleep in the Premingers’ big bed.
“Nice place you got here,” he said when he had finished the tour.
“Dooing de woh eet ees all I tink of, what I fahting foe,” the man from the Underground said. “Here ees eet fahrproof, aircondizione and safe from Nazis.”
“Stay out of Volkswagens, kid,” Bertie said.
He went back into the living room. He wanted music, but it was a cardinal principle with him never to blow alone. He would drink alone, take drugs alone, but somehow for him the depths of depravity were represented by having to play jazz alone. He had a vision of himself in a cheap hotel room sitting on the edge of an iron bedstead. Crumpled packages of cigarettes were scattered throughout the room. Bottles of gin were on top of the Gideon Bible, the Western Union blanks. His trumpet was in his lap. “Perfect,” Bertie said. “Norma Preminger could paint it in a picture.” He shuddered.