He held the bottle to the light. “If nothing turns up,” he said, “I’ll drink this. And to hell with the kitchen window.”
The cab driver brought the pizza and Bertie gave him the twenty dollars.
“I can’t change that,” the driver said.
“Did I ask you to change it?” Bertie said.
“That’s twenty bucks there.”
“Bird lives. Easy come, easy go go go,” Bertie said.
The driver started to thank him.
“Go.” He closed the door.
He spread Norma Preminger’s largest tablecloth over the dining-room table and then, taking china and silver from the big breakfront, laid several place settings. He found champagne glasses.
Unwrapping the pizza, he carefully plucked all the mushrooms from it (“American mushrooms,” he said. “Very square. No visions.”) and laid them in a neat pile on the white linen. (“Many mushloom,” he said. “Mushloom crowd.”) He poured some beer into a champagne glass and rose slowly from his chair.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “to the absent Klaff. May the police in Los Angeles, California, beat his lousy ass off.” He drank off all the beer in one gulp and tossed the glass behind him over his shoulder. He heard it shatter and then a soft sizzling sound. Turning around, he saw that he had hit one of Norma’s paintings right in a picturesque side street. Beer dripped ignobly down a donkey’s leg. “Goddamn,” Bertie said appreciatively, “action painting.”
He ate perhaps a quarter of the pizza before rising from the table, wiping the corner of his lips with a big linen napkin. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I propose that the ladies retire to the bedroom while we men enjoy our cigars and port and some good talk.”
“I propose that we men retire to the bedroom and enjoy the ladies,” he said in Gimpel’s voice.
“Here, here,” he said in Klaff’s voice. “Here, here. Good talk. Good talk.”
“If you will follow me, gentlemen,” Bertie said in his own voice. He began to walk around the apartment. “I have often been asked the story of my life. These requests usually follow a personal favor someone has done me, a supper shared, a bed made available, a ride in one of the several directions. Indeed, I have become a sort of troubadour who does not sing so much as whine for his supper. Most of you—”
“Whine is very good with supper,” Gimpel said.
“Gimpel, my dear, why don’t you run into the kitchen and play?” Bertie said coolly. “Many of you may know the humble beginnings, the sordid details, the dark Freudian patterns, and those of you who are my friends—”
Klaff belched.
“Those of you who are my friends, who do not run off to mix it up with the criminal element in the far West, have often wondered what will ultimately happen to me, to ‘Poor Bertie’ as I am known in the trade.”
He unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the floor. In his undershirt he looked defenseless, his skin pale as something seen in moonlight. “Why, you wonder, doesn’t he do something about himself, pull himself up by his bootstraps? Why, for example, doesn’t he get his eyes fixed? Well, I’ve tried.”
He kicked off his shoes. “You have all admired my bushy mustache. Do you remember that time two years ago I dropped out of sight for four months? Well, let me tell you what happened that time.”
He took off his black pants. “I had been staying with Royal Randle, the distinguished philologist and drunk. You will recall what Royal, Klaff, Myers, Gimpel and myself once were to each other. Regular Whiffenpoofs we were. Damned from here to eternity. Sure, sure.” He sighed. “You remember Randle’s promises: ‘It won’t make any difference, Bertie. It won’t make any difference, Klaff. It won’t make any difference, fellas.’ He married the girl in the muu-muu.”
He was naked now except for his socks. He shivered once and folded his arms across his chest. “Do you know why the girl in the muu-muu married Randle?” He paused dramatically. “To get at me, that’s why! The others she didn’t care about. She knew even before I did what they were like. Even what Klaff was like. She knew they were corrupt, that they had it in them to sell me out, to settle down — that all anyone had to do was wave their deaths in front of them and they’d come running, that reason and fucking money and getting it steady would win again. But in me she recognized the real enemy, the last of the go-to-hell-goddamn-its. Maybe the first.
“They even took me with them on their honeymoon. At the time I thought it was a triumph for dependency, but it was just a trick, that’s all. The minute they were married, this girl in the muu-muu was after Randle to do something about Bertie. And it wasn’t ‘Poor’ Bertie this time. It was she who got me the appointment with the mayor. Do you know what His Honor said to me? ‘Shave your mustache and I’ll give you a job clerking in one of my supermarkets.’ Christ, friends, do you know I did it? Well, I’m not made of stone. They had taken me on their honeymoon, for God’s sake.”
He paused.
“I worked in that supermarket for three hours. Clean-shaved. My mustache sacrificed as an earnest to the mayor. Well, I’m telling you, you don’t know what square is till you’ve worked in a supermarket for three hours. They pipe in Mantovani. Mantovani! I cleared out for four months to raise my mustache again and to forget. What you see now isn’t the original, you understand. It’s all second growth, and believe me it’s not the same.”
He drew aside the shower curtain and stepped into the tub. He paused with his hand on the tap. “But I tell you this, friends. I would rather be a mustached bum than a clean-shaved clerk. I’ll work. Sure I will. When they pay anarchists! When they subsidize the hip! When they give grants to throw bombs! When they shell out for gainsaying!”
Bertie pulled the curtain and turned on the faucet. The rush of water was like applause.
After his shower Bertie went into the second bedroom and carefully removed the spread from the cot. Then he punched the pillow and mussed the bed. “Very clever,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to let them think I never slept here.” He had once realized with sudden clarity that he would never, so long as he lived, make a bed.
Then he went into the other bedroom and ripped the spread from the big double bed. For some time, in fact since he had first seen it, Bertie had been thinking about this bed. It was the biggest bed he would ever sleep in. He thought invariably in such terms. One cigarette in a pack would suddenly become distinguished in his mind as the best, or the worst, he would smoke that day. A homely act, such as tying his shoelaces, if it had occurred with unusual ease, would be remembered forever. This lent to his vision an oblique sadness, conscious as he was that he was forever encountering experiences which would never come his way again.
He slipped his naked body between the sheets, but no sooner had he made himself comfortable than he became conscious of the phonograph, still playing in the little hall. He couldn’t hear it very well. He thought about turning up the volume, but he had read somewhere about neighbors. Getting out of bed, he moved the heavy machine through the living room, pushing it with difficulty over the seamed, bare wooden floor, trailing deep scratches. Remember not to walk barefoot there, he thought. At one point one of the legs caught in a loop of the Premingers’ shag rug and Bertie strained to free it, finally breaking the thick thread and producing an interesting pucker along one end of the rug, not unlike the pucker in raised theatrical curtains. At last he had maneuvered the machine into the hall just outside the bedroom and plugged it in. He went back for the Billie Holiday recording he had heard earlier and put it on the phonograph. By fiddling with the machine, he fixed it so that the record would play all night.