“You have a very special type of beauty,” he said to her; “a bad nose, but beautiful eyes and hair. It would please me in the midst of all this horror to go to bed with you. But in order to do this we’ll have to leave this bar and go to my apartment.”
“Well, I can’t promise you anything, but I will be glad to go to your apartment,” said Miss Goering.
Andy told Frank to call the hackstand and tell a certain man who was on duty all night to come over and get them.
The taxi drove down the main street very slowly. It was very old and consequently it rattled a good deal. Andy stuck his head out of the window.
“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen?” he shouted at the empty street, trying to approximate an English accent. “I hope, I certainly hope that each and every one of you is having a fine time in this great town of ours.” He leaned back against his seat again and smiled in such a horrid manner that Miss Goering felt frightened again.
“You could roll a hoop down this street, naked, at midnight and no one would ever know it,” he said to her.
“Well, if you think it is such a dismal place,” said Miss Goering, “why don’t you move somewhere else, bag and baggage?”
“Oh, no,” he said gloomily, “I’ll never do that. There’s no use in my doing that.”
“Is it that your business ties you down here?” Miss Goering asked him, although she knew perfectly well he was speaking of something spiritual and far more important.
“Don’t call me a business man,” he said to her.
“Then you are an artist?”
He shook his head vaguely as though not quite sure what an artist was.
“Well, all right,” said Miss Goering, “I’ve had two guesses; now won’t you tell me what you are?”
“A bum!” he said stentoriously, sliding lower in his seat. “You knew that all the time, didn’t you, being an intelligent woman?”
The taxicab drew up in front of the apartment house, which stood between an empty lot and a string of stores only one story high.
“You see, I get the afternoon sun all day long,” he said, “because I have no obstructions. I look out over this empty lot.”
“There is a tree growing in the empty lot,” said Miss Goering. “I suppose that you are able to see it from your window?”
“Yes,” said Andy. “Weird, isn’t it?”
The apartment house was very new and very small. They stood together in the lobby while Andy searched his pockets for the keys. The floor was of imitation marble, yellow in color except in the center where the architect had set in a blue peacock in mosaic, surrounded by various long-stemmed flowers. It was hard to distinguish the peacock in the dim light, but Miss Goering crouched down on her heels to examine it better.
“I think those are water lilies around that peacock,” said Andy, “But a peacock is supposed to have thousands of colors in him, isn’t he? Multicolored, isn’t that the point of a peacock? This one’s all blue.”
“Well,” said Miss Goering, “perhaps it is nicer this way.”
They left the lobby and went up some ugly iron steps. Andy lived on the first floor. There was a terrible odor in the hall, which he told her never went away.
“They’re cooking in there for ten people,” he said, “all day long. They all work at different hours of the day; half of them don’t see the other half at all, except on Sundays and holidays.”
Andy’s apartment was very hot and stuffy. The furniture was brown and none of the cushions appeared to fit the chairs properly.
“Here’s journey’s end,” said Andy. “Make yourself at home. I’m going to take off some of my clothes.” He returned in a minute wearing a bathrobe made of some very cheap material. Both ends of his bathrobe cords had been partially chewed away.
“What happened to your bathrobe cords?” Miss Goering asked him.
“My dog chewed them away.”
“Oh, have you a dog?” she asked him.
“Once upon a time I had a dog and a future, and a girl,” he said, “but that is no longer so.”
“Well, what happened?” Miss Goering asked, throwing her shawl off her shoulders and mopping her forehead with her handkerchief. The steam heat had already begun to make her sweat, particularly as she had not been used to central heating for some time.
“Let’s not talk about my life,” said Andy, putting his hand up like a traffic officer. “Let’s have some drinks instead.”
“All right, but I certainly think we should talk about your life sooner or later,” said Miss Goering. All the while she was thinking that she would allow herself to go home within an hour. “I consider,” she said to herself, “that I have done quite well for my first night.” Andy was standing up and pulling his bathrobe cord tighter around the waist.
“I was,” he said, “engaged to be married to a very nice girl who worked. I loved her as much as a man can love a woman. She had a smooth forehead, beautiful blue eyes, and not so good teeth. Her legs were something to take pictures of. Her name was Mary and she got along with my mother. She was a plain girl with an ordinary mind and she used to get a tremendous kick out of life. Sometimes we used to have dinner at midnight just for the hell of it and she used to say to me: ‘Imagine us, walking down the street at midnight to have our dinner. Just two ordinary people. Maybe there isn’t any sanity.’ Naturally, I didn’t tell her that there were plenty of people like the people who live down the hall in 5D who eat dinner at midnight, not because they are crazy, but because they’ve got jobs that cause them to do so, because then maybe she wouldn’t have got so much fun out of it. I wasn’t going to spoil it and tell her that the world wasn’t crazy, that the world was medium fair; and I didn’t know either that a couple of months later her sweetheart was going to become one of the craziest people in it.”
The veins in Andy’s forehead were beginning to bulge, his face was redder, and the wings of his nostrils were sweaty.
“All this must really mean something to him,” thought Miss Goering.
“Often I used to go into an Italian restaurant for dinner; it was right around the corner from my house; I knew mostly all the people that ate there, and the atmosphere was very convivial. There were a few of us who always ate together. I always bought the wine because I was better fixed than most of them. Then there were a couple of old men who ate there, but we never bothered with them. There was one man too who wasn’t so old, but he was solitary and didn’t mix in with the others. We knew he used to be in the circus, but we never found out what kind of a job he had there or anything. Then one night, the night before he brought her in, I happened to be gazing at him for no reason on earth and I saw him stand up and fold his newspaper into his pocket, which was peculiar-looking because he hadn’t finished his dinner yet. Then he turned towards us and coughed like he was clearing his throat.
“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have an announcement to make.’ I had to quiet the boys because he had such a thin little voice you could hardly hear what he was saying.
“‘I am not going to take much of your time,’ he continued, like someone talking at a big banquet, ‘but I just want to tell you and you’ll understand why in a minute. I just want to tell you that I’m bringing a young lady here tomorrow night and without any reservations I want you all to love her: This lady, gentleman, is like a broken doll. She has neither arms nor legs.’ Then he sat down very quietly and started right in eating again.”