The phonograph was in the hall between the dining room and living room. It was a big thing, with the AM and the FM and the short wave and the place where you plugged in the color television when it was perfected. He found records in Preminger’s little room and went through them rapidly. “Ahmad Jamahl, for Christ’s sake.” Bertie took the record out of its sleeve and broke it across his knee. He stood up slowly and kicked the fragments of the broken recording into a neat pile.
He turned around and scooped up as many of Preminger’s recordings as he could carry and brought them to the machine. He piled them on indiscriminately and listened with visible, professional discomfort. He listened to The New World Symphony, to Beethoven’s Fifth, to My Fair Lady. The more he listened the more he began to dislike, the Premingers. When he could stand it no longer he tore the playing arm viciously away from the record and looked around him. He saw the Premingers’ bookcase.
“I’ll read,” Bertie said.
He took down the Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller and Ronald Firbank and turned the pages desultorily. Nothing happened. He tried reading aloud in front of a mirror. He went back to the bookcase and looked for The Egg and I and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The prose of a certain kind of bright housewife always made Bertie feel erotic. But the Premingers owned neither book. He browsed through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with his fly unzipped, but he felt only a mild lasciviousness.
He went into their bedroom and opened the closet. He found a pair of Norma’s shoes and put them on. Although he was no fetishist, he had often promised himself that if he ever had the opportunity he would see what it was like. He got into drag and walked around the apartment in Norma’s high heels. All he experienced was a pain in his calves.
In the kitchen he looked into the refrigerator. There were some frozen mixed vegetables in the freezer compartment. “I’ll starve first,” Bertie said.
He found a Billie Holiday record and put it on the phonograph. He hoped that out in Los Angeles, Klaff was being beaten with rubber hoses by the police. He looked up at the kitchen clock. “Nine,” he said. “Only seven in L.A. They probably don’t start beating them up till later.”
“Talk, Klaff,” he snarled, “or we’ll drag you into the Blood Room.”
“Flake off, copper,” Klaff said.
“That’s enough of that, Klaff. Take that and that and that.”
“Bird lives!” Bertie screamed suddenly, invoking the dead Charlie Parker. It was his code cry.
“Mama may have,” Billie Holiday wailed, “Papa may have, but God Bless the child who’s got his own, who — oo — zz—”
“Who — oo — zz,” Bertie wailed.
“Got his own,” Billie said.
“I’ll tell him when he comes in, William,” Bertie said.
He waited respectfully until Billie was finished and then turned off the music.
He wondered why so many people felt that Norman Mailer was the greatest living American novelist.
He sat down on the Premingers’ coffee table and marveled at his being alone in so big and well-furnished an apartment. The Premingers were probably the most substantial people he knew. Though plenty of the others wanted to, Bertie thought bitterly, Preminger was the only one from the old crowd who might make it. Of course he was Jewish, and that helped. Some Jews swung pretty good, but he always suspected that in the end they would hold out on you. But then who wouldn’t, Bertie wondered. Kamikaze pilots, maybe. Anyway, this was Bertie’s special form of anti-Semitism and he cherished it. Melvin Gimpel, for example, his old roommate. Every time Melvin tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven he left the kitchen window open. One time he found Gimpel on his knees with his head on the oven door, oddly like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Bertie closed the window and shook Gimpel awake.
“Mel,” he yelled, slapping him. “Mel.
“Bertie, go way. Leave me alone, I want to kill myself.”
“Thank God,” Bertie said. “Thank God I’m in time. When I found that window closed I thought it was all over.”
“What, the window was closed? My God, was the window closed?”
“Melvin Gimpel is so simple
Thinks his nipple is a pimple,”
Bertie recited.
He hugged his knees, and felt again a wave of the nauseous sickness he had experienced that morning. “It’s foreshadowing. One day as I am shoveling my walk I will collapse and die.”
When the nausea left him he thought again about his situation. He had friends everywhere and made his way from place to place like an old-time slave on the Underground Railway. For all the pathos of the figure he knew he deliberately cut, there were always people to do him favors, give him money, beer, drugs, to nurse him back to his normal state of semi-invalidism, girls to kiss him in the comforting way he liked. This was probably the first time he had been alone in months. He felt like a dog whose master has gone away for the weekend. Just then he heard some people coming up the stairs and he growled experimentally. He went down on his hands and knees and scampered to the door, scratching it with his nails. “Rrrgghhf,” he barked. “Rrgghhfff!” He heard whoever it was fumbling to open a door on the floor below him. He smiled. “Good dog,” he said. “Good dog, goodog, gudug, gudugguduggudug.”
He whined. He missed his master. A tear formed in the corner of his left eye. He crawled to a full-length mirror in the bathroom. “Ahh,” he said. “Ahh.” Seeing the patch across his eye, he had an inspiration. “Here, Patch,” he called. “Come on, Patch.” He romped after his own voice.
He moved beside Norma Preminger’s easel in the sun parlor. He lowered his body carefully, pushing himself slightly backward with his arms. He yawned. He touched his chest to the wooden floor. He wagged his tail and then let himself fall heavily on one side. He pulled his legs up under him and fell asleep.
When Bertie awoke he was hungry. He fingered the twenty dollars in his pocket that Preminger had given him. He could order out. The light in the hall where the phone and phone books were was not good, so he tore “Restaurants” from the Yellow Pages and brought the sheets with him into the living room. Only two places delivered after one A.M. It was already one-thirty. He dialed the number of a pizza place across the city.
“Pal, bring over a big one, half shrimp, half mushroom. And two six-packs.” He gave the address. The man explained that the truck had just gone out and that he shouldn’t expect delivery for at least another hour and a half.
“Put it in a cab,” Bertie said. “While Bird lives Bertie spends.”
He took out another dozen or so records and piled them on the machine. He sat down on the couch and drummed his trumpet case with his fingers. He opened the case and fit the mouthpiece to the body of the horn. He put the trumpet to his lips and experienced the unpleasant shock of cold metal he always felt. He still thought it strange that men could mouth metal this way, ludicrous that his professional attitude should be a kiss. He blew a few bars in accompaniment to the record and then put the trumpet back in the case. He felt in the side pockets of the trumpet case and took out two pairs of dirty underwear, some handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks. He unrolled one of the pairs of socks and saw with pleasure that the drug was still there. He took out the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. This was what he cleaned his instrument with, and it was what he would use to kill himself when he had finally made the decision.