The city throbbed in gray effulgence, radiating motion, while silent pigeons swept the lower air, or walked grunting on the sills and cornices of the buildings, and on the sidewalks of open places. In Union Square, one of them attacked a bird of rare beauty, tropically plumed, which looked lost and unused to spreading its wings beyond the breadth of a cage.
Otto stumped about the small room, picking up his cigarette whenever it had rested for long enough to burn a brown scar on the woodwork, to liven its coal and find a fresh place to leave it. He was dressed in shorts. The linen suit was rumpled, and the morning light showed it less becomingly so than he had believed the night before. He examined a smudge on the elbow (where it had been dropped on Esme's floor), started to brush it out, and then did not. It remained, witness to what, try as he would, he could not clearly remember. Two suits and a jacket hung beside the linen, only the gray flannel carefully unpressed.
— O God! What have I du-un. huuuuh. came through the wall. — Haha. Haha. That's the way to do jt… He sank back in the chair, still staring at the wall; but only the radio voice reached him: Ladies, if you are troubled by excess hair, write for a free brochure of our method, guaranteed to remove fifteen hundred hairs in a single hour.
Then he got up and dressed slowly. Buttoning his shirt, he looked vacantly at a book and some papers on the table, which had come under the attention of the fly. He took a towel from the bed and snapped it at the fly. The fly moved to the ceiling, and several of the papers to the floor. Picking up the local Spanish newspaper (which he carried in public and appeared to read), he muttered something; then, pulling on his trousers, he looked as absently at a scrap of notepaper on which was written, Gd crs as mch fr mmnt as fr hr — wht mean? The expression on his face started to change as he read that over, scratching his head as he filled in the vowels. But whatever that expression would have been, it failed: he stood looking at his fingernails, turned in upon the palm. Then barely glancing, crumpled the notepaper as he picked it up and threw it in the basket, to turn away buttoning his trousers, and sit down to count his money.
— And now friends, you've probably been hearing so much about this wonderful new protein diet. He looked up, having reached one hundred thirty. The dial in the next room was being turned.
— To take the odor out of perspiration. Fifty-two per cent more effective.
He gave up counting the money, thumbing over the rest before he put it away, and went to the mirror with a necktie. There he studied his eyes anxiously for a moment, then noticed that his skin appeared pale beneath the surface of color, and the mustache hairs were brought into separate and ragged prominence.
— And so friends, to get your free. Christ sent me not to baptize but to… That wonderful he-man aroma that girls really go for.
Then a pneumatic pavement-breaker-started in the street below, some ten yards from where it had been torn up, and repaired, the week before. He considered leaving the sling where it was, empty, on the table, for it was proving more of an impediment than he had anticipated. But fearful of meeting someone who had seen him in it, he hung it round his neck, and went back to the mirror to arrange it.
The pavement-breaker below stopped just long enough for him to hear through the wall,
— You have just heard the oria from Gluck's Orfeoadoiradeechay. and he stood in his open door looking at the closed door just to his right. He raised a hand to knock; but glancing back as his own door came closed saw the large manila envelope on the table, returned to pick it up, and took the smaller less familiar one with it.
The morning was exceptionally fine, the streets still comparatively unlittered by those tons of ingeniously made, colorfully printed, scientifically designed wrappings of things themselves expendable which the natives drop behind them wherever they go, wary as those canny spirits down under cluttering the path to paradise.
As he walked toward the bus stop, he noticed that his watch was fourteen minutes slow. Turning the corner, he started to run; and the bus which had been waiting roared away as he arrived, bearing faces which looked with benign satisfaction on him catching breath in the exhaust fumes. He waited. A cab stopped right before him; and the next bus, unable to approach the curb, roared past. The taxi driver had looked at him questioningly, now disdainfully, and drove after the bus. The downtown bus he boarded a quarter-hour later was driven by a mustached man in a leather jacket, whose swashbuckling motions recalled the devil-may-care bomber pilots of the motion-picture screen. His cap, its wire frame removed, clung rakishly to the back of his oily head, as he guided his huge machine down the runway for another takeoff. Otto rocked back and forth, holding a strap, attempting to appear as vacant as the faces before him while he stared straight forward at
Take someone to church with you next Sunday You'll both be richer for it
The phantasies of the passengers were suspended, as they tore through clouds, shuddered at air-pockets, dove low over landmarks.
Otto had finally turned round, and was staring at 1,500,000 Americans have SYPHILIS or GONORRHEA and don't know it
From their empty faces, none of the passengers resented the driver's incursion into their own phantastical domains: watching his weaving back, they appeared to respect his right to perform in allegory, to redeem, as best his numb imagination would permit him, the absurdity of reality.
Anselm said nothing; but smiled without recognition as they passed in Washington Square. Otto caught his breath and lowered his eyes quickly from the thin newly shaven face to the crimson-covered book under Anselm's arm, and went on to the doorway he had left only hours before. The stairs had the familiarity of a staircase descended in a dream. He had seen them last unlit, with other eyes than these of morning: now they interested him, for he could see himself climbing them, often and regularly, up and down. The door he approached was blank, anonymous. He knocked sharply: still it stood, no hint of what was resident behind it.
Knock knock knock. And more silence than before.
— Esme? he called.
— Who is it?
— Otto.
— Who?
— Otto.
— Oh. But it's so early.
The instant her voice stopped the door, flat, blank, regained its anonymity, and she was gone, nowhere.
— Otto?
— Hello?
— Will you come back in an hour?
— An hour?
— I have to take a bath.
— All right, he called at that resolute door, and went down the stairs.
A small hairy face turned to him from the lap of the blonde whom he sat beside at the drugstore counter. He ordered coffee, and started to tamper wich the green ribbon on the dog's crown. The blonde straightened herself, looking the other way, the lhasa turned to stare at the Coca-Cola machine, and she bent forward to blow softly in its hair. On his left, the hairy-armed counterman rested his hands on the counter. — Yeh, I could write a book, he said to the girl sitting there — I bet it'd be banned in Boston, she said. She laughed. — Not oney in Boston, he said. They laughed. The blonde with the dog coughed, and moved down a seat. Otto blew more cigarette smoke straight before him, and put the packet of Emus on the counter.
Over his third cup of coffee, staring at the two manila envelopes, he suddenly remembered the smaller one which contained a short story written by a navy veteran, handed him at the party the night before after he said he had a friend with a magazine. That friend was the girl who had caused him untold misery three years before, by not marrying him. Having got all of the poetically incumbent recriminations out of his system, Otto remembered her now with condescending fondness. He wrote on a slip of paper, "My dear Edna: I enclose a copy of a story written by a friend of mine, because having read it over I thought it might go well in your magazine. If you can't use it, will you please return it to me, since he has no permanent address.," which note he signed and clipped to the papers in the envelope without even having to bother to take them out.