Then he managed somehow to stand Harry Troyden’s lifeless shell on its feet, and be gently — shoved.
He was in Troyden’s room when he heard the crash; and then the yells of the other twenty-seven tenants. He managed to slip out and join them, unnoticed.
This time, there was a great deal of blood.
After the twenty-eight of them had returned from the P. J. Kyley & Thomas Roseforth Funeral Home, Mr. Huggerson was approached in the upper hall by Omar Troyden.
For a sharp instant, Mr. Huggerson felt fear, but Omar Troyden soon put him at his ease. A warm handshake and a thirty-cent cigar did that quite admirably. Then Troyden drew him into the room Mr. Huggerson had occupied for eight years, and sat down in the easy chair to speak.
If anything, Omar Troyden was a satire of what his father had been. Obese, pasty, bald and squinting, he hunched forward, squeezing his lap into the round pillars of his legs, and said, “Mr. Huggerson, how long have you lived here?”
Mr. Huggerson’s spine became clammy and cold. The rent was going to be raised. It had all been for nothing; he was getting his just desserts. He had sinned, and now he was to be turned out into the street after all.
“Ei-eight years.”
Troyden smiled and sat back. “Good, good,” he said to the ceiling with its water stains. “Fine. You know, Mr. Huggerson, for some time now I’ve been of the opinion that my father was not running things properly here. This house has been losing money for him for some years.”
Oh dear ,here it comes , thought Mr. Huggerson.
“So I’ve been intending to do something about the status quo here at Troyden’s, ever since father died. It’s unfortunate that my father had to fall down those stairs, but we must take these things philosophically, eh?”
Mr. Huggerson nodded, confused. This did not seem the proper tone to use when raising a man’s rent.
“So.” Omar spoke the word as a proclamation. “So! What I would like you to do, Mr. Huggerson, and I know this is an imposition, but I felt sure I could ask you, seeing as how you’ve been here the longest of anyone, what I wanted to ask you is if you would consider managing this place for me.”
He waited a second. Mr. Huggerson blew air between his thin, strained lips. “I — I —”
“Yes, I imagined it might be a shock, but you know how it is. I have a great many other interests uptown, and can’t be here as my father was. I know you would have only the best interests of the place at heart, seeing as how you live here yourself. So, I wondered if you would consider taking the job. Now, I can’t pay much, but aside from well, say, thirty dollars a week, I can guarantee you a room here free of cost. How does that sound?”
“I — I —”
“The work won’t be hard.” Omar pressed onward, undaunted, seemingly unaware of Mr. Huggerson’s consternation. “We have a janitorial service I’m engaging that will tend to all the cleaning-up chores, and all you’ll have to do, really, is make sure the rents are paid on time, and no one gets into trouble.”
He spoke on at some length, as though he felt he had to sell the job to Mr. Huggerson. Mr. Huggerson, on the other hand, had been sold from the outset. He was, simply, caught with his throat locked in shock, forced to listen to the beauty of it all being poured out by the son of the man he had killed.
Finally, be agreed and it was done.
Omar Troyden even shook Mr. Huggerson’s hand.
Later that day, when news had gone through the rest of the establishment, and the twenty-seven tenants knew Mr. Huggerson was to be manager of the flophouse, Mr. Huggerson felt impelled to speak to Mr. Zeckhauser.
He drew the stout man aside near the desk, and said, “Mr. Zeckhauser, you have been with us for a good many years, and though we are most happy to have you remain with us, I’m afraid the status quo here at Troyden’s is not quite satisfactory.
“Now there is no reason to be alarmed, but I wanted to speak to you about —”
It was only fair; a man of responsibility should not be compelled to live in a single, ten-dollar-a-week room. It was more fitting, therefore more logical, for a man of Mr. Huggerson’s position to occupy a larger room. A fourteen-dollar room, with private bath.
Besides, he had never liked “Under The Tonto Rim.”
Four: Nedra at ƒ:5.6
I’m looking at the pictures, but I don’t believe it. I may just go have my eyes examined, or trade in that goddamned Leica and be done with it, but I don’t — doubly do not — believe it. Listen: it’s so weird, I didn’t simply trust the raw negatives … I actually developed the bloody things, every frame.
Nedra’s asleep in the bedroom, and well she should be after the monumental bout we staged tonight, and I’m almost afraid to go in and wake her. Oh, hell, it’s just a trick of lighting, that’s all, or something wrong with that damned Leica, or some crap got into the developer. But still …
Central Park uptown can be a strange and wonderful thing on an early spring day, but today wasn’t a spring day. This was the middle of October, overcast, with the grass frantically struggling to stay green as it was trampled; with the trees whispering how clever they were to be dumping their leaves; with the sky siphoning down from a watery blue to a washed-out orange near the horizon. It was the Park on a day when all the nannies would have rather been in the apartments, with their white shoes off, drinking Pimms Cups pilfered from their employer’s larders, and watching The Edge of Night instead of perambulating their charges’ perambulators. A week after the World Series, when the wormy tittle bookies who had lost their shirts when the Dodgers folded in five had crawled back into the topsoil till football season was under way. A sort of day that idles along, like a rolling hoop, just lightly jouncing over troublesome things like the canine Twinkies on the paths and the creepy gang kids looking for someone to mug; just going its way with an occasional shove or two.
That sort of day. And the people on the benches were nothing spectacular. Mostly old men and women, taking the sun — what there was of it — and proud young mamas, showing their offspring to the folks.
It didn’t look like the sort of day to be getting any good photos, but I decided to leg it around a few blocks of park and snap what there was. Overcast, just right, can get you some good candid color stuff. Sometimes.
Well, I was skirting the benches along in the Sixties, snapping one here and one there; catching a kid trying to stomp a dirty pigeon; catching a woman watching the sky to see if rain was coming and picking her nose at the same time; catching a bum twisted like a foetus on a bench, with a copy of the Wall Street Journal over him for warmth. Nothing spectacular, but maybe it would look good in the darkroom.
It was just as I was passing the 79th Street underpass — you know, the part that takes you down to the boat basin — with the October wind snapping up off the Hudson, tossing my hair around my head, making me wish I’d worn my Aquascutum, when I spotted her.
Now let me get this straight with you for a second. I’ve been a professional photographer for twelve years now. I’m thirty-five years old, and I’ve snapped some of the wildest-looking women in the game. I’ve had Valerie Perrine and Ann-Margret up on kitchen stools in front of a white cyclorama sheet; I’ve posed Victoria Vetri and Claudia Jennings and Charlotte Rampling and Elsa Martinelli with and without their undies; I’ve done fashion layouts with every courant breathtaker from The Shrimp to Farrah Fawcett; even worked with the mythic lust-dreams like Bettie Page and June Wilkinson and Irish McCalla and Anita Ekberg and Vikki Dougan right at the end of their popularity, before they vanished to wherever the great beauties vanish to; I’ve seen more hundreds of women in the bare, with their vitals exposed, than any other dude with a planar I can think of, excluding maybe Haskins, Avedon, de Dienes, Rotsler, Casilli and a couple of others. So stunning women aren’t anything that special to me, except maybe something to make a buck off, if I can develop a set on them. What I’m saying is that Lauren Hutton isn’t a coronary arrest where I’m concerned if, as they say, you get my drift.