“My jacket, Slotsky.”
“Take a jacket.”
“I didn’t give it to you forever.”
“There’s the closet.”
“You’re being difficult. You don’t have the right attitude. Not about anything.”
“Toward anything. You think I stole your jacket.”
“Never mind what I think. I want it back.”
“Take, take, Fein.”
“Finn.”
Slotsky smacked his forehead, then adjusted his glasses. “That’s right. How could I forget? You’re Finn.”
“This is very disappointing. I expected more from you.”
“I’ve got a lot of work to do, roomie.”
Finn walked to the closet. “This one.”
“That one?”
“Mine!”
“I wouldn’t use it for toilet paper.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I used to wear it because I pitied you.”
“Ha, ha.”
Finn was out the door.
Millicent Coyle had brown hair, blue eyes, a slender body, and she made an impression of cleanliness and optimism. Finn talked most of the evening about Slotsky. He told her about his filthy habits, his obnoxious political beliefs, and, striking at the essential man, told her Slotsky was neurotically sensitive about being a Jew and yet never went to all-campus Yom Kippur services or any others held at the Concert and Dance Theater or the Hillel Center, which had been designed by Miyoshi and cost several million dollars. Not once. He explained that Yom Kippur was an important holy day for Jewish people; at least that was Finn’s understanding. They were parked in the lot outside the Kappa house. When Millicent didn’t seem about to say anything in regard to Slotsky, he began to suspect she was waiting for a chance to scramble out of the car and just say good night. Suddenly she said, “I’ll bet you think we’re all alike at the Kappas’.”
“Of course I don’t think that. Everyone is different.”
“I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet, for instance, you think we’re all prudes.”
Finn sighed. He would have found some answer to her accusation, but she didn’t quite seem to be talking to him; to have sensed, that is, a particular subject in the air between them for the past several hours.
“Do you like to ski?” she asked.
“I’ve never skied, but I’ve thought about it. Up the mountain, down the mountain. Groovy.”
She grinned. She knew he was making a joke. “Well it also gives you a chance to wear your après-ski outfits, you know. You could learn in a minute. I know a guy who has a car like this.”
“Pontiac? I rented it for the evening.”
“I love Pontiacs. His is a Mercedes.”
Almost impetuously, Finn said, “You know when I called you last week I was afraid …”
“My roommate took the message.”
“Really?” It seemed relevant. Finn considered. Nothing relevant occurred to him. He plunged on. “I’d been thinking about calling you for a long time.”
The confession made silence. He felt sweat blossom in his palms and armpits.
“For months I’ve wanted you to call,” she whispered, leaving the silence intact. “Months.”
Finn’s heart pumped into the silence. His hand, like an independent caterpillar, pushed softly down the top of the seat and touched her cashmere. He looked at her eyes. Her eyes looked. He held his breath, bent toward her, and her eyes shut. Their lips touched. On her breast he felt murmur. They kissed, slowly drawing closer, pressing more and more of themselves against one another. Beneath her skirt, along smooth tubes, he felt white, touched silky. “I wanted you to call months and months an’ muns-ago.” She crumbled in his ear. “Millicent,” he whispered, shoving against her hand, her hard, fused tubes.
“Fein,” she whispered.
“Finn,” he said.
She pulled free. “I think I need a cigarette. I mean I really need a cigarette, but I’d like to talk a little.”
Minutes later Finn was tapping the steering wheel with his fingernails. “I’m the only one who knows you’re Jewish?”
“Well, actually, my mother converted years and years ago.”
Finn drove to Slotsky’s place and knocked until the door opened on Slotsky in underwear, his face deranged behind fingers shoving glasses against his eyes. “For Christ’s sake. What the hell do you want?”
Finn shrugged, mumbled. Slotsky stared. The hall light made him look papery. Without a word Finn took off his jacket, then handed it to Slotsky. Slotsky frowned and shook his head.
“Take,” said Finn.
“I don’t want it.”
“Take.”
“No.”
Shaking his head, Slotsky backed into the room. Finn shuffled after him, jacket stiff-armed at Slotsky’s chest.
“Take it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Yes.”
“Screw you. Get out of here, creep.”
“Take it or I’ll jam it down your throat.”
“Screw you, Fein.”
Finn lunged, stabbed the jacket against Slotsky’s chest. Slotsky fell, smacking the floor with both palms, and Finn threw the jacket at his head. It caught over his head and chest like a lamp shade. Beneath it Slotsky screamed for help. Finn slammed the door. Slotsky shut up.
Alone and tired, Finn drove around town, the night droning, crowding into the car, pressing at the borders of his brain. He checked the dashboard again and again … twenty-five miles an hour … three-thirty … twenty-eight miles an hour … a quarter past four … less than half a tank of gas … ten past five …
And then Finn had a little waking dream in which he saw himself in Slotsky’s glasses and Slotsky in his jacket, and Slotsky took his hand and he put his arm around Slotsky and they danced in the headlights, big Finn, black Slotsky, like ballroom champions, gracefully mutual, dancing for the delectation of millions until Finn hit the gas and crushed them into rushing blacktop.
Going Places
BECKMAN, A DAY OUT OF THE HOSPITAL, barely strong enough to walk the streets for a job, carrying a ruined face that wouldn’t heal for weeks and probably never look the same, was shocked to find himself hired at the first place he tried, as assistant to a paint contractor, and thought to tell his parents and write his girl to come back from Chicago and marry him, but, recalling disappointments with jobs in the past, decided to wait, not say anything, and see how things went; to see if they continued to be real as the hard, substantial hand which had enveloped and strongly shaken his hand, less rough and hairy, but masculine, calloused by the wheel and stick of his trade, and a substantial hand, too; if not in muscle and bone, certainly in spirit, for in that shake Beckman was welcomed to the end of a successful interview and a life made wretched by rattling kidneys, the stench of gasoline, of cigarettes, of perfume and alcohol and vomit, the end of surly toughs, drunken women, whoring soldiers, vagrant blacks and whites, all the streaming, fearsome, pathetic riffraff refuse of the city’s dark going places, though places in hell, while he, Beckman, driver of the cab, went merely everyplace, anyplace, until the sun returned the day and he stopped, parked, dropped his head against the seat, and lay mindless, cramped, chilled in a damp sweater and mucky underwear, lay seized by the leather seat, debauched by the night’s long, winding, resonant passage and the abuse of a thousand streets.