— I must call the Sun Style Film man, he thought suddenly. — Peru, and northern Bolivia. . Someone beside him was asking him how to get to Vesey Street. Otto held the impatient man with long and intricate explanation, two sets of alternate routes and was commencing a third when the poor fellow retreated down wind, thanking him, retiring to a policeman to ask directions for Vesey Street.
On the corner a tall black man with an umbrella towered in a hat of unseasonal straw, though on him no more out of season than the permanent attire of a statue. He stood as far as possible from the black poodle dog as their leash would allow, atolls of a formidable reef casting the white-caps to one side and the other. — He's very handsome, Otto said of the strangely familiar animal.
— I takin her to the veterinary, said Fuller, not looking at this young man whom he did not know but at the dog. — Seem like she sufferin with the worms, he added with relish, looking at the dog which ignored him.
— That's a shame, said Otto. — Beautiful dog.
— Yes, mahn, said Fuller, looking up and back at the poodle, — seem like she sufferin from the worms, he repeated, watching her face as though hoping to see discomfort and embarrassment cloud it.
The light changed, and the sea moved reuniting its currents, bore the reef away north and Otto south toward Esme. He had left her late the night before after what might have been an argument, except that he found no way to argue with Esme. He had worked for so long to develop his weak capacity for dialectic into equip- merit for a sophistical game that he was useless now against her blank simplicity. When she had asked him not to spend the night with her there, — because it's so Greenwich Village… he realized that none of his cleverness would change her mind. Still he was jealous enough of her: she had a way of bending one shoulder down almost upon the table and looking up across at him, laughing, which rose into his mind now, and he hurried toward the pit of the subway.
— Wait a minute, Esme called, after he had climbed her stairs wearily. Chaby was still fastening his clothes when he knocked.
Otto and Chaby did not exchange any greeting. They had come to behave together like two animals of different zoological classes in a private zoo, each wondering at their owner for keeping the other. Otto made it evident that he was waiting. Esme treated the three of them together as though they were well-met friends, or as happily, thorough strangers, while Otto smoked industriously. Chaby left, after keeping Esme at the door in a conversation audible enough to drive Otto to turning on the radio, which he did with an air of long habit. After Chaby had gone, Esme sat down beside the truculent smoker on the daybed. He suggested' that they go to dinner, making the invitation in a tone tired but duty-bound, as a gentleman, a concept which labored mightily in his mind as it does in many, who find it the last refuge for in-sipience.
She agreed readily; at which he sulked more oppressively still. When she drew off her dress to change it, he tried to put his arms around her. — You don't do that to ladies who are dressing themselves, she said to him. — Besides your funny bandage gets in the way.
— I may have to go to Bolivia and northern Peru, Otto said soberly, and as though in direct answer. — Soon enough, he added, somewhat menacing. While she sought another dress, he opened his dispatch case and took out the play with business-like aversion. He separated the pages quickly to Act II scene iii, and immediately found the line. Enough times he had found it with a fond smile. Now he took his pen and drew it blackly through priscilla (with tragic brightness): But don't you understand, Gordon? These are the moments which set the soul yearning to be taken suddenly, snatched out of the heart of some fearful joy and set down before its Maker, hatless, disheveled and gay, with its spirit unbroken.
He wrote in:
Don't you understand the sudden liberation that's come over me? and sat pouring smoke down on the wet ink. 3°4
Out on the street, Otto said, — How does it feel to be with a gentleman for a change?
— Ot-to.
— But he is such a ratty little creature, Chaby. How can you stand him.
— Isn't he bad? she said laughing, on Otto's arm. — Do you know what he did when I first knew him? He had something in his hands, and he told me to reach into his pants pocket and get some matches, and I reached in and he'd cut the bottom of the pocket off, my hand just went in and in. Wasn't that bad?
— Yes. What did you do then?
— I didn't do anything.
— Well what did he do?
— I don't remember.
— Where do you want to have dinner?
— At the Viareggio?
— Esme, that place is always so full of… well, I don't know, all the rags and relics below Fourteenth Street. It's like Jehovah's Witnesses when you sit down at a table there, everybody comes over. Why do you go there anyhow?
— I don't go there.
— Esme!
— People take me there, she said. And by now they were at the door of the Viareggio, a small Italian bar of nepotistic honesty before it was discovered by exotics. Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size.
Smoke and the human voice made one texture, knitting together these people for whom Dante had rejuvenated Hell six centuries before. The conversation was of an intellectual intensity forgotten since Laberius recommended to a character in one of his plays to get a foretaste of philosophy in the public latrine. There were poets here who painted; painters who criticized music; composers who reviewed novels; unpublished novelists who wrote poetry: but a poet entering might recall Petrarch finding the papal court at Avignon a "sewer of every vice, where virtue is regarded as proof of stupidity, and prostitution leads to fame." Petrarch, though, had reason to be irritated, his sister seduced by a pope: none here made such a claim, though many would have dared had they thought of it, even, and the more happily, those with younger brothers.
— Is that really Ernest Hemingway over there? someone said as they entered. — Where? — Over there at the bar, that big guy, he needs a shave, see? he's thanking that man for a drink, see him?
— I suppose you'd call me a positive negativist, said someone else.
— Max seems to have a good sense of spatial values, said a youth on their right, weaving aside to allow Esme to pass, — but his solids can't compare, say, with the solids in Uccello. And where is abstract without solids, I ask you?
While Otto looked dartingly for Max, Esme entered with flowing ease, and pleasure lighting her thin face as she smiled to one person after another with gracious familiarity. — There he is, Otto said, as they sat down. The juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento. Otto adjusted his sling, and smoothed his mustache. Esme sat, looking out over this spectral tide with the serenity of a woman in a painting; and often enough, like gallery-goers, the faces turned to look at her stared with vacuity until, unrecognized, self-consciousness returned, and they looked away, one to say, — I know her, but God knows who he is; another to say, — She was locked up for months, a couple of years ago; and another to listen to the joke about Car-ruthers and his horse.