In the hall, a man screamed, without words or inflection: footsteps, some dull thuds—the scream changed pitch at each of them.
Kidd started reading. He paused at the third line, wanting very much to laugh, but didn’t look up.
Footsteps: running voices arguing—a lot of them.
Kidd kept reading till he reached Mrs. Richards’ omitted comma.
Lynn, beside him, let out a little cry. From the corner of his eye, he saw her husband take her arm. Somebody banged on the wall outside with what sounded like a crowbar. And the screaming cracked to a hysterical, Mexican accent: “Oh, come on, please, come on lemme ’lone. Don’t fool ’round like that—No! C’mon, c’mon—No. Don’ please—”
Kidd read the last lines of his poem and looked up.
The crashes had moved from the wall to the door, and fell with timed, deliberate thuds. Within the crash, as though it were an envelope of sound, he could hear the chain rattle, the hinges jiggle, the lock click.
As he looked around the table, the thought passed with oblique idleness: They look like I probably do when somebody’s eyes go red.
Outside, above the shouting, somebody laughed.
Kidd’s own fear, dogged and luminous and familiar enough to be almost unconscious, was fixed somewhere in the hall. Yet he didn’t want to laugh. He still wanted to giggle.
Out there, someone began to run. Others ran after.
A muscle on the back of Kidd’s thigh tensed to the crashing. He smiled, vaguely, confused. The back of his neck was tickly.
Someone’s chair squeaked.
“Oh, for God’s sake, why don’t they—” and, where rhythm predicted the next crash, only her word felclass="underline" “—stop!”
Footsteps lightened, tumbled off down steps, retreated behind banged doors.
Kidd sat down, looked at the guests, some of whom looked at him, some of whom looked at each other; the woman in corduroy was looking at her lap; Mrs. Richards was breathing hard. He wondered if anyone liked his poem.
“They do that around here too, huh?” Sam forced, jocularly.
Then a woman Kidd could not really see at the table’s end spilled coffee.
“Oh, I’ll get a rag!” Mrs. Richards screamed, and fled the room.
Three people tried to say nothing in particular at once.
But when Mrs. Richards returned with a black and white, op-art dish-towel, one voice detached itself, a hesitant baritone: “For God’s sakes, can’t we do something about that? I mean, we’ve got to do something!”
Of several feelings, the only sharp one Kidd felt was annoyance. “Mr. Richards?” he said, still standing, “Mr. Richards? Can I talk to you now?”
Mr. Richards raised his eyebrows, then pushed back his chair. June, beside him, surprisingly concerned, touched her father’s arm,…restrainingly? protectively? Mr. Richards brushed her hand away and came down the table.
Kidd picked up his orchid and went out into the hall.
The woman in corduroy was saying, “When you can think of something to do, will you please let me know what it is. You’ll have my cooperation one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent, believe me.”
At the door Kidd turned. “We should get this five dollars an hour business settled now, don’t you think, Mr. Richards, because it’ll just—”
Mr. Richards’ slight, taught smile broke. “What are you trying to do, huh?” he demanded in a whisper. “What are you trying to do? I mean five dollars an hour, you must be crazy!”
Mrs. Richards, still holding the dishtowel, drifted up behind her husband’s shoulder, blinking, in perfect imitation of Smokey with Thirteen.
“I mean just what are you trying to do?” Mr. Richards went on. “We don’t have any money to give you, and you better understand that.”
“Huh?” because it seemed absurd.
“Five dollars an hour?” Mr. Richards repeated. “You must be crazy!” His voice was insistent, tense and low. “What does somebody like you need that kind of money for, anyway? It doesn’t cost anything to live in this city—no food bills, no rent. Money doesn’t mean anything here anymore. What are you trying to do…? I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a family. MSE hasn’t had a payroll for months. There hasn’t even been anyone in the damn office! I’ve got to hold on to what I have. I can’t spend that kind of money now, with everything like this. I can’t—”
“Well, isn’t that what you told—?” He was angry. “Oh shit. Look, then why don’t you…” Then he reached around to his pocket.
Mr. Richards’ eyes widened as the orchid Kidd held flicked by him.
But Kidd only dug at his pocket. “Then why don’t you keep this too?” Mr. Richards swayed when the moist, green knot bounced off his shirt and fell to the floor, unfolding like paper on fire.
Kidd turned the lock and pulled the door open. The chain stopped it—ratch!—at two inches.
Mrs. Richards, immediately beside him, fumbled with the catch. A step into the hall, he looked back to show them his disgust.
The astonishment Mr. Richards returned him, as Mrs. Richards with varied bitternesses at her eyes, closed the door on it, was unexpected, was satisfying, was severed with the doors’ clash.
He counted the fifteen, paint-chipped dents before he decided (someone was laughing inside again) to go.
In the elevator, he dropped, ruminating. Once he looked up to wrinkle his nose at a faint putrescence. But dropped on. Echoing in the shaft, with the wind, were footsteps from some stairwell, were voices.
There was no one in the lobby.
Satisfied?
His annoyance, at any rate.
But all the vague and loose remains roiled and contended for definition. “Ba-da ba-da ba-da?” he asked. “Ba-da ba-da,” he answered, sitting. It listed like oil on turbulence. At last Ba-da ba-da ba-da? formed around the fragments of a question, but Ba-da ba-da fit no worded answer. He flexed his fingers around the pen point till they ached, then went back to struggling with the recalcitrant quantities of sound overlapping their sense. He reread some dozen alternate lines for the beginning of one section: with the delight of resignation, he decided, with the change of a “This” to a “That,” on his initial version.
A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless projector’s swinging shadow across the notebook opened on his naked thigh.
Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letters, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). “Are you in there?” Lanya asked.
“Huh?” He looked up at the door’s layered scrawl. “Yeah. I’m coming out now.” He stood and pulled his pants up from around his shins, pulled the flush chain.
“He said you were in there.” She nodded toward the bartender when Kidd opened the door. “Come on.”
“Huh? Where?”
She smiled. “Come on.” She took his hand.
“Hey,” he called, passing the bar. “You wanna keep this for me again?”
The bartender leaned over for the notebook. “In the usual place, kid.” He reached up and stuck it through the cage bars.
She paused at the door to ask, “How did it go with the Richards?”
“I gave him back his fucking five bucks.”
Her confusion suddenly went in laughter. “That’s too much! Tell me what happened.” And she tugged him on into the hallway and out to the street.
“What happened?” she asked again, shrugging her shoulder into his armpit. They walked quickly down the block. When she turned to glance at him, her hair tickled his arm.
“He didn’t want to pay me. They were having a dinner party or something there. So I gave him back what he gave me already, you know?” He rubbed his chest underneath his vestflap. At his hip, the orchid’s harness jingled. “You know their kid, the boy, they just left him…” He shook his head against hers. “Hell, I don’t want to talk about that. Where we going?”