THE BELLBOY WAS NOT entirely sure of his ground. Sleepy-eyed and merely sullen in the beginning, an expression of concern and vast bewilderment soon clouded his face as if he half suspected the great joke being played on him.
“Mistah Diz-ray Lee?”
“What?” Stanley stood in his oversized shorts, staring at the boy through the doorway.
“Ben Diz …”
“Ben Diz-ray-lee, sir. Are you Mistah Diz-ray-lee?”
“No, for Chrissake. What’s all —”
It was some horrible mistake, some monstrous joke played on the young man … by the town drunk, maybe, at two in the morning. The bellboy backed off, making apologies.
“Wait a minute,” Stanley said. “Hold it a second.” He stepped round the corner of the room and reached for a pack of cigarettes. He had not been really asleep — just partly mesmerized by the Mexican music on the radio, lying on the bed and wondering if he ought to switch off the lights. The bellboy had been knocking for only a minute or so. Stanley returned to the doorway.
“Now … What’s all this again?”
“I’m sorry. Hope I didn’t wake you. The radio — I could hear the radio, and I thought —”
“That’s okay … What were you saying? Just now.”
“I had a message for Disray Lee. Or a Ben Raylee … It was supposed to be this room. He insisted it was this room and he wouldn’t let me call. Gave me two bucks to deliver the message personal.”
“Okay. What’s the message.”
“Are you Mistah —”
“No. But what’s the message? Who’s it from?”
“He wants you to meet him outside. He wouldn’t come in. He’s parked out front. He said he couldn’t come up. He didn’t have any shoes on. And he was wearing Bermuda shorts.”
“Wait a minute now. Who wants me to come downstairs?”
“His name was Stevenson.”
“Stevenson?”
“He said he wanted to show you his hair.”
“Oh! Ah! I’ll have to dress …”
“Yessir.” The boy continued to stand in the doorway.
“You said he gave you two dollars?”
“Yessir. I’ll give him the message.” The boy began backing off again …
“Wait a minute,” Stanley said. “Come on in here.”
The boy followed him into the room. Stanley gathered up the newspapers.
“Give him these while he’s waiting.”
“All right.”
“And this. Can you carry this?”
Stanley poured half a glass of whiskey and handed it to the boy. Then he cleared the top of the desk of change. The bellboy had both hands full, and Stanley dropped the coins into the boy’s jacket pocket. Then he began dressing.
The hotel lobby was deserted. Stanley moved between potted palms and Grecian spittoons, the bottle under his arm and the speech folded inside his coat pocket. The desk clerk did not look up and the bellboy was nowhere in sight. The little red car was parked directly in front; Neil was slumped in the seat with the newspapers spread out against the steering wheel. Stanley moved through the revolving doors and stepped out into the warm air.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Out of the habit.” Neil folded the papers without looking up and started the little car. At the first stoplight Stanley refilled the glass and they passed it back and forth.
“You read the stories?”
“Yes,” Neil said. “There any later editions? This stuff is okay — what there is of it — but it looks like it got chopped off right in the middle. And there aren’t any pictures. They took a lot of pictures.”
“There ought to be a morning edition about now,” Stanley said. “I guess that’s where all the newsboys are. You want to go to pick ’em up wet off the presses?”
“Yes,” Neil said. “I’m an egomaniac.” They drove off in the direction of the rail yards. Trucks and motor scooters and bicycles were parked at the rear of the old building. There did not seem to be any urgency about getting the news out onto the streets at that hour. The presses made an awful din, but the men and boys moved without enthusiasm, loading the bundles onto trucks, talking quietly. Stanley vanished inside the building and was back in a moment with two newspapers. They drove on a short distance and stopped under a streetlight.
“This is better,” Stanley said.
Neil was silent, bent down, squinting in the bad light.
“It’s a good picture,” Stanley said. “Except that you look like a high school debate champion. Let’s start powdering your hair. And painting lines in your face. You look like Andy Hardy breaking into the bank at Bayonne, New Jersey.”
Neil grunted. “You see what the Governor did?”
There was a separate story on the Governor. He had apparently called the wire services sometime after his conversation with Neil, announcing that a “Draft Neil Christiansen” committee was being formed and friends of “David McNeil Christiansen” had already paid the $1500 filing fee. “I talked with Senator Christiansen tonight,” the Governor was reported to have said. “He wouldn’t give us any encouragement. But he didn’t say no. We’re hopeful we can get a commitment from him before his return to Washington …”
“Who is David McNeil Christiansen?” Stanley said.
“An invention of the Governor’s,” Neil said. “About as authentic as that committee … I wonder where he got $1500? I could have used it — I’ve got an overdraft at the bank.”
“Well don’t advertise it, for God’s sake. You need some money? I’ve got a few hundred.”
“That’s your few hundred for going around the world.”
“I’ll never go,” Stanley said. “I never seem to get enough ahead.”
“I wonder how far it would get me?” Neil said.
“Owen Edwards finds out you’re overdrawn, he’ll be going around saying you can’t even balance your own budget …”
Owen Edwards, the State Senator, was also mentioned in the paper. He had made a speech in another city about the need for a return to constitutional government. Tax and tax, spend and spend; the people bled white by foreign giveaways; the courts rewriting the laws; rabble invading our shores. “And our unelected representative in Washington never raising his voice in protest …” He mentioned the confirmation of an Under-secretary of State, a housing bill, a supplemental appropriation for one of the Mutual Security programs — all of which Neil had supported.
“Thrashing machines,” Stanley said. “He’s back on thrashing machines for India and India not having anything to thrash.”
Neil folded the papers and drove on, heading up into the hills above the city and the winding river, higher even than those better neighborhoods with their Tudor-Gothic circus fronts. Then they circled round and re-entered the city near the campus. Neil tried unsuccessfully to find the old trailer park where years ago they had planted the quonset hut, but half of it was now overgrown in jungle and the other had become an intramural football field. He wondered if the quonset hut was hidden in the jungle or dismantled for bonfire kindling. Neil parked the roadster in a little clearing between the football field and the tangle of trees and vines and weeds now grown man-high. They sat there for a time, passing the glass of whiskey back and forth. Stanley produced two cigars from his jacket pocket and they sat quietly, smoking and occasionally swatting at the insects that came at them in great droves from the jungle.
“This is making me very melancholy,” Stanley said. “Except that something’s missing. There ought to be a creek running through. I don’t recall one, actually, but I feel there ought to have been a creek — a place where the wives of all those ex-servicemen beat their Monday wash against the rocks. Like native women …”
“You’re getting your images confused,” Neil said. “It was John Tom. He used to do his washing around here somewhere. With a tin tub and a washboard.”
Again they were silent. Stanley said: “I’ve got your speech.”
“Will I have to rewrite it?”
“No. This time I got the mixed tones licked. I wrote two speeches. One with all the right things in it, and one with all the wrong things. You won’t have to go through separating one from the other.”
“I’ll take both of them,” Neil said. “I may want to give the wrong one.”
At that remote hour the clear sound of young men’s voices came to them suddenly from across the campus, soft and melodic, a serenade to a sorority house.
“Oh God,” Stanley said. “I may cry … My lost youth …”
“I remember bringing Andrea out here once,” Neil said. “I showed her around and asked if she could live in one of the hutments until I finished law school.”
“What did she say?”
“She said yes — if we could run off to her family’s summer place up in the hills on weekends. So she could use the automatic washer there and have someone do the cooking.”
The singsong voices faded and then rose again, like an old radio receiver picking up a distant signal. Stanley remembered that Neil and Andrea had not really lived in one of the hutments. Stanley and John Tom had stayed on in the little room with busy wallpaper during the last two years, but Neil had won a seat in the Legislature on his second attempt, and he and Andrea were married a few months afterwards. They had honeymooned at the country place, while Andrea’s mother had come to search the better sections of the city for a suitable apartment. A carriage house next to one of those phony Norman mansions was made available when the newlyweds came down out of the hills …
Neil remembered the endless long distance telephone conversations and the weekend motorcycle trips to the summer house.
“I knew it was you,” she would say to him. “I had vibrations. I ruined a pair of stockings getting to the phone.”
“Where were you?”
“Outside — fumbling with my date and my door keys.”
“Let’s get married. It’s time we got married.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s time, and I love you.”
“You don’t really.”
“Hell yes I do.”
“Say it again.”
“Hell yes I do.”
“The other …”
“I love you.”
“That’s nice.”
“Sure it is. So let’s get married.”
“No.”
“Then live in sin with me. I can afford maybe a week of really high type sin. I’m solvent. I’ve got $500. Collected the night before election by Stanley and John Tom. I never got around to spending it.”
“Sounds like dirty money.”
“That’s the only kind there is, honey. You know that. I’ll take you to Mexico for a week.”
“No. That’s passed. That offer, as they say, was limited. You never delivered me there on time.”
“I was up for office, honey. I was campaigning.”
“Did you win?”
“Hell yes I won … Don’t you read the papers?”
“There’s no delivery out here, love. But I knew you’d call. Can you come out this weekend?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I need rescuing. There’s been a party every night. Pre-debutante parties. I’ve got to withdraw — absolutely the last group of young ladies I’m presenting to the ravages of society. Got to withdraw from this glittering world and all these faceless figures in white ties … You like that?”
“Yes.”
“It’s hard on one’s perspective spending night after night eating caviar and drinking twenty-five-year-old Ambassador.”
“I know it is, honey. It’s awful. That’s why I don’t go to debutante launchings any more. I promised myself.”
“Will you come this weekend, then? There’s a party this weekend.”
“I’ll try like hell, honey. I’ll sure try. You’ve got the right idea. It’s best to ease off these things gradually … What’s the party?”
“Artist types. Or entertaining the artist types. It’s a society we’ve organized. We encourage the muse.”
“I’m only coming to get married …”
“It’ll be a nice party. Martinis served up lukewarm in milk bottles. They’re all a pack of primitives. Neanderthals. Flanked by hairy-faced women.”
“Why don’t you come here.”
“You’ve got to come. I’ve got a date I can’t get out of.”
“That’s wonderful. You think the three of us will get along?”
“You don’t understand. I’ve got a date, but he won’t last the evening. He’s a heavy drinker and he always passes out early. Then you’ll be my date.”
“That sounds awfully tenuous.”
“You can count on it. I’ve never seen it fail. He collapses before ten. He’s very unhappy. He works in the family store, but he wanted to study medicine or play the violin or something …”
The party was as she described it. The sad young man was unconscious before ten o’clock; the martinis were warm and the guests were a combination of extremes — fine-limbed young people and seedy throwbacks to bohemia. The paintings were hung about like great prime slabs of beef. He moved alongside Andrea from room to room, shaking hands. She introduced him to everyone as her “Representative-Elect.” “This is my Representative-Elect,” she would say, like the queen and the prime minister. The guests smiled and nodded as if he were in the bond business or was perhaps her desperate young man who wanted to play the violin. The talk was mostly about Truman and Toynbee and Kenton, ranchstyle houses and draft laws and Howard Hughes. Those who could afford it were planning vacations in quaint, clapboard artist colonies, and those who couldn’t were already resigned to the endless weeks of working over window displays in local department stores.
Later, she had turned to him and asked if he disapproved.
He remembered saying yes, absolutely yes; that he would be willing to start a subscription campaign just to finance a special, chartered one-way flight to Provincetown. For all the others. With the understanding they wouldn’t be coming back. He made an outlandish gesture: “You don’t give a damn for all the oppressed peoples of the world.”
“Who are all these oppressed peoples?” she said.
“Millions all over. Me … right here. I’m oppressed. I want to take you off to some quiet glade and make love and talk about the success of the Berlin airlift, and this party oppresses all that.”
She smiled at him. “Get my bag and we’ll find this place.”
Outside he had said: “I don’t know any glades.”
They sat in the car, holding on to each other with the trifling medleys of some hotel dance orchestra coming from the radio. There was a period of interminable kissing during which she had got her hand inside his shirt and he was able to push the top of her dress down and touch her small breasts. He remembered the spectacular contrast of dark and light skin. Then she had sat up, touching her hair, and said: “It’s too bad.”
“About what?”
“About that glade. Now there’s no place to go but home, and my folks aren’t here this weekend and it’ll be such a disappointment you won’t get to see them …”
She had taken his hand and led him across the concrete walk between banana trees and eucalyptus plants and the Mexican tile floor in the living room and directly up the carpeted stair into a small, girl-smelling bedroom with a view of the garden and a gone-dry creek. She kissed him once, briefly, almost tragically, and began to undress. Next to him in the bed she was trembling violently, but in a moment she was giggling in his ear. “I’ve read the books,” she said, “yet I can’t remember any of it. Will you tell me what to do …” Later, still smiling with her face next to his, she laughed about not being able to say the right things. “The trouble is I really do feel different … I ache all over …” And still later, when they had slept in each other’s arms for a time, she sat up in the bed, looking like a little girl roused from an afternoon nap. “Don’t stop saying it now,” she said. “This is absolutely the Wrong Time to stop saying it.”
“Saying what?”
“That you want to get married.”
“I want to get married,” he said, but she had not heard any of it; not even her own question: she was asleep in his arms again almost immediately.
Sitting on the soft leather cushions in the cramped space of the roadster, listening to the young men’s voices from across the campus, he was able, finally, to realize his loss, to feel the great gap in himself. Not so much long gone youth as adulthood never quite attained. For all his good intentions, there had been only a kind of chic faithlessness in between, randy and frivolous. If there had once been beauty … a fever for life and a search for a code of conduct, those private joys had long since been supplanted by trivial and lighthearted depravities.
He started the engine of the little car. Stanley, sleeping next to him, held on to his glass of whiskey but did not come awake. They bounced across the football field and steered the car toward the commercial district, past darkened dormitories and gray buildings and faintly lit chapels. Moving into the center of the city he smoked the last of his cigarettes and thought about their deeply violated selves.