“WHAT WAS THAT RUMBLE?”
“My death rattle, honey …”
“Perhaps it was thunder … What did you say?”
“I like your saxophone player.”
“Isn’t he nice? You think it was thunder? He’s often out there.”
“Every night?”
“Nearly every night I’m here to listen.”
“Always in the alley?”
“Yes. Always. I’ve never seen him in the street. He’s crippled.”
“Is that why he stays in the alley?”
“What?”
“Is it always ‘Roses of Picardy’?”
“If that’s what it is. Always.”
They played John Tom’s old records on the phonograph. She had a marvelous figure, and moved back and forth, to the phonograph and to retrieve the sherry bottle, easy and unembarrassed. It was not so easy for Neil; though he felt better after he had got his underwear back on. He lay on a rollaway bed. He remembered helping John Tom pick it out at the Sears Roebuck store. It was about three-quarter width, and with the cheap bolsters it was an adequate studio couch for the back part of the shop. He lay there watching the girl. In a few years she would be getting thickish through the middle and in the upper part of her legs, but none of it had really begun to show. It was a pleasure to watch her, and even more a pleasure to see a woman with large breasts and a big behind who had not yet begun to fatten and decay. So many of those college girls …
“I think you will like this.”
She sat next to him and they shared the glass of sherry. He tasted it.
“Very good … It’s always ‘Roses of Picardy?”
“The same every night.”
“There was a song …”
“What?”
“I had a record of it once. Sidney Bechet.”
“Bechet?”
“Yes. Perhaps someone will bring it back and record it. With a beat. And a hipster choir in the background. Let’s hope so.”
“Yes.”
They lay nearly sideways together, his head up against her breasts. He turned and kissed the flat of her stomach. She said something — Yiddish or Arabic — he could not tell what.
“Hmmn?”
She laughed. “I don’t think it’s translatable.”
“Do you like John Tom’s records?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you have any of your own?”
“Yes. But you might not like them.”
“Ah! Let’s see. Petrouchka. Prokofiev … Vaughn Williams?”
“No. They’re mostly sixteenth century.”
“And you’ve been reading Thomas Hardy.”
“Only the poetry.”
“You’re unhealthy — that’s what you are. You’re not falling into any of the recognizable patterns for the healthy, American brain-girl fresh from …”
“Healthy? I’m unhealthy?”
“No. Not how you think.”
He turned on his front side and rested his chin along the curve of her middle. Then he pulled himself up toward her face and they kissed for a time. There was still some easy responsiveness between them. It had not been a spectacular thing; she was neither matter-of-fact nor especially fevered about it. But it was something out of the ordinary, and he guessed, like everything else, it could be attributed to her being a foreigner. A function, a need fulfilled. With some poetic imagery to sustain the illusion.
“Is this old couch often put to such uses?”
“What? This couch …?”
“Have you any lovers?”
She thought a moment. “I don’t think so.” And then: “Oh! The couch. No … And not this way. I’ve spent some nights here. And kissed men here.”
He felt unaccountably, queasily jealous. Did those juices ever stop flooding the darkened pools of the ego? He was overwhelmingly assaulted by vague notions of crime. It was a tyranny, and he felt somehow unmanned.
“I’m sick,” he said.
“You’re feeling badly?”
“In the head.”
She stroked his temples. He supposed it was as good a therapy as one could find. It was miraculous how much better he felt already. He got his face down between her breasts.
“Ah!”
“All right?”
“Wait … There.”
The mechanism ground along, resuming, slowly at first, undemanding, nearly aimless, and then the dark passages loomed up ahead of them and they were lost for a few moments in glimpses of each other and the dawn coming through the windows at the far side of the room. His thoughts were incoherent and all out of context: remembering the crippled saxophone player in the alley and the feel of Owen Edwards’ damp backend and an edifice of triteness used to describe somebody’s one-man show — the one posthumously staged by Andrea in John Tom’s behalf — “the palette caked, the brushes dry …”
He slept for a little while. When he awoke she was still next to him, her head propped against one of the bolsters, smoking a cigarette.
“Do you like this?” he said.
“Of course I like this. Don’t you like this?”
“Yes. Perhaps I just need reassuring.”
“Strange … Do you feel better?” She did not smile; she was altogether serious.
“Yes.”
“I may come to Washington.”
“Really? That would be very nice.”
“Stanley asked me.”
“Stanley’s very nice.”
“He said he could find me a job.”
“I imagine he could. You marry Stanley, by the way — or anyone for that matter — and your problems are ended.”
“What an odd thing to say.”
“Why?”
“Americans are always trying to end all their problems. When the trick is to use them to some advantage.”
“I mean the passport, the citizenship business.”
“Oh yes … I suppose they would be.”
He dozed for a moment, his face resting against her dark shoulders. He heard her talking.
“What?”
“I wouldn’t want to do that, though. For a while at least. Stanley is a very good person and I would want to live with him and no one else …”
He was dimly aware that she was articulating some kind of fundamental approach to life, but he fell to sleep again while she was talking and he could never remember the rest of it. He came awake again about an hour later, and Elsie was now sleeping soundly beside him. He got to his feet and dressed and then stood for a few minutes looking at the girl. He found an old yellow bedspread in a closet and covered her before turning to leave.
The sun was well advanced. The tower clock at the college chimed a half hour, and he looked up to see the time. There were lowlying clouds circling the horizon in the east and they lit up the sky with streaks of amber and blue and fading browns. Driving toward home he began to pass cars crowded with people in Sunday dress and occasional good citizens on foot, and as he approached a church he had to stop for a procession of children, fresh-faced and beautiful in vibrantly colored smocks and gowns and vestments. They passed by, strung out in ones and twos, not talking though irresistibly tempted, vastly excited by the hour and the promise of an Easter Sunday. A pair of scrubbed and faintly smiling nuns tagged along. He thought about his two little girls and how he would have to start in immediately upon his arrival at the house to hide all their beautifully colored eggs. For no reason — and only for a few seconds, really — he began to cry.