Barbary Shore, Page 2

  He massaged his chin, fully embarked upon a lecture. “Conditions are brutal in this country—slums, juvenile delinquency. I mean when you add it up there’s an indictment, and that’s just counting the physical part of it. You take Guinevere, someone like that, it’s a psychological problem, a psychological casualty I think of it. I mean I can see her side of it, Mikey. She’s lonesome, that’s all. You know she made sort of an advance, and I repulsed her with a few well-chosen words, just a couple of gags, but I guess it hurt her feelings. People always want you to think well of them, so she started to tell me her side of it, and she hasn’t got any intellectual resources, and there’s a lot of housework cleaning up this barn. You know the typical American housewife with the success story in reverse. I’ll bet she reads True Confessions.”

  “You don’t make her sound very attractive.”

  “Oh, she’s got sex appeal of a sort, but she’s a crazy dame. I might have entertained ideas, but there’s her husband involved, and although I never met the guy I think it’s kind of sneaky seeing a dame when her husband sleeps in the same building.”

  This is the woman Dinsmore advertised as having the power to give his cubbyhole away. Witness my surprise—for I had become convinced that he would finally end by awarding his room to some other acquaintance—when Willie came to the dormitory one morning, and told me he was leaving for the country. I dressed quickly and ate breakfast in the cafeteria while Willie sat across from me, scattering his cigarette ash in my saucer. “Look,” he said, “Guinevere could have already promised the first vacancy. We’ll have to figure out a plan.”

  “I hope it works,” I told him.

  We walked over to the rooming house. For a June morning the sidewalks were still cool, and the brownstone houses were not without dignity. The spring air contained a suggestion of wood and meadow, and it was possible to imagine the gardens and the trellised arbors as they must have existed fifty years ago. We were on a street which led toward the bluffs, the docks beyond, and the bay. Across the harbor through a morning haze the skyline reared itself in the distance, while down the river an ocean liner was approaching its dock.

  Mrs. Guinevere, I discovered, had the basement apartment with its customary entrance tucked beneath the slope of the front stairway, its private gate and miniature plot whose stony soil was without even a weed. As Dinsmore pressed the bell, I could hear it ringing inside.

  From the apartment there was the sound of footsteps approaching, then a suspicious pause. A voice shrieked, “Who is it?”

  Willie shouted his name and I could hear the bolt slide slowly open. “Come on, come on,” he said raucously, “what do you think, we got all day?”

  “Oh, it’s you,” a woman screeched back. “Well, what the hell do you want?” The door opened a crack, a set of plump little fingers curled around it, and a pair of eyes and the tip of a nose appeared in the slit. “You always have to pick a time when I’m busy.” Slowly, provocatively, the face protruded a little further and two curls of extraordinarily red hair peeped around the door.

  “Come on out. I want you to meet a writer friend, Mikey Lovett.” Dinsmore made the introductions to the doorpost. I said hello somewhat foolishly, and her eyes stared back at me. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Lovett,” she said in the unexpected and dulcet cadence of a telephone operator. “I hope you’ll excuse the way I’m dressed.” With that, she swung the door open as though to unveil a statue. I was startled. Dinsmore had poorly prepared me. She was quite pretty, at least to my taste, pretty in a flamboyant cootchy way, so that my first impression was of no more than a fabulous crop of red hair and a woman beneath, waggling her hips. Undeniably short and stout, her limbs were nevertheless delicate, her face was not heavy, and her waist, respectably narrow, tapered inward from her broad shoulders in an exaggeration which was piquing.

  “It takes me forever to get dressed,” she grumbled. “Boy, you men are lucky not having to fool around with a house.” Her voice began the first sentence as a telephone operator and finished the second as a fishwife; once again she was shouting. Yet in the silence which followed this, she closed her large blue eyes for several seconds and then opened them again with counterfeit simplicity. Obviously she considered this to be of considerable effect, but since her eyes protruded a trifle, the benefit was somewhat doubtful.

  The silence served as a floor upon which she and Dinsmore could exchange a minuet of looks and glances and innuendo, while a smile flickered between them. Standing to one side, I had the opportunity to look at her closely. It was impossible to determine her age, but I was certain she was less than forty.

  “Yeah, it’s tough,” Dinsmore grinned at last. His voice rasped more when he spoke to her. “Still, you look good … good.”

  “Aw, you.” After the introduction she had paid me no attention, but now, hand on hip, she wheeled in my direction. “If I was to listen to this guy’s line,” she said, “he’d be up my skirts in two minutes.”

  “You hope,” Dinsmore said.

  She laughed loudly with boisterous good humor, and I had the impression she might have nudged him in the ribs if I were not there. Her thin lips pursed, but this was beneath the other mouth of lipstick which was wide and curved in the sexual stereotype of a model on a magazine cover, and seemed to work in active opposition to the small mobile lips beneath. “Boy, you writers,” she snorted, “you think you own the world.”

  Dinsmore threw up his hands in a pantomime of being rebuffed, and then, the manner satisfied and the preamble concluded, his tone changed. “Listen, Guinevere, you’re a pretty good scout, how about doing us a favor?”

  “What?” It was apparent the word “favor” had few pleasant connotations to her.

  “I’m giving up my room for a couple of months. How about letting Mikey have it?”

  She frowned. “Listen, I can get five dollars extra if I put up a sign and rent it out.”

  “Why should the landlord be the profiteer?” He waved his finger at her. “Suppose I kept paying for the room, and Mikey stayed in it. That’d be okay.”

  She shrugged. “I can’t stop you.”

  “Well, why make me go to the trouble? Why don’t you just let the kid take it.” He whacked her playfully on the hip. “Come on, be a good sport.”

  “Aw, you writers, you’re all nuts,” she jeered. “No sooner get rid of one of you, then I get another.”

  “I really could use the room,” I said. I smiled tentatively.

  Perhaps she was examining me. After a moment or two she nodded her head angrily, and said, “All right. You can have it. But the rent’s got to be paid every Thursday, four dollars paid in advance of the week to come, and no hot air about it.” In the correct style of a landlady her voice had been flat and authoritative, although immediately afterward as though to salvage someone’s good opinion, she whined defensively, “I can’t be bothered chasing around after you guys, I’ve got a lot of work to do here, and Lord knows I get paid little enough for it, and you got to co-operate.”

  “I’ll pay the money on time,” I said.

  “Well, let’s hope so.” She had yielded grudgingly, but now that business was terminated, she smiled. “I’ll see you around, Mr. Lovett. Linen day is also on Thursday. You get one new sheet a week, and you can help me if you strip the bed before I get up there.” This, however, was said with heavy allure.

  We exchanged a few more words and left for Dinsmore’s house. He clapped me on the back. “She likes you, kid.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She just likes you. I can tell. Good-looking kid like you. You’ll be having your hands full with her.”

  Unwillingly, in the customary reaction to just this situation, my hand strayed up to the scar tissue behind my ear, and I was taken again with a desire to study that face Dinsmore had called good-looking. “No,” I answered him, “I won’t be having my hands full with her. I’ve got to work.”

  “Stick to your story, Lovett.”

  We wa
lked slowly, the day already warm. “She’s absolutely weird,” Dinsmore said. “A complex character.” He sighed, pushed the hair off his forehead. “Basically she was good stuff,” he lectured, “but you get human beings caught in a profit nexus, and it turns them inside out. The structure of society is rotten today.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  When we reached his house, he paused, shook my hand, and smiled. “It’s been great knowing you, kid, and I’m glad I did you a favor.” Before I could reply, he went on. “There’s something I’d like to say, because right now like everybody else you’re at the crossroads, and the thing you want to ask yourself, Lovett, is which way are you going to go? Will you be against the people or will you be for them?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t thought that way in a long time.”

  “You’ll have to. Wall Street will leave you no choice.” He smiled wisely, and something hard and smug came into his face. “There’s just one thing you got to remember, Mikey. It’s the basic issue, it’s the basic trouble with this country. Do you know what it is?”

  I confessed I was not completely certain.

  He prodded his thumb against my stomach and in a sepulchral voice he stated, “Empty bellies … empty bellies. That’s the issue, kid.”

  Thus, unlike most partings, ours was on a basic issue. I turned once to wave at him from down the street before he went inside his house, and then I continued back to the dormitory and gathered my belongings. It was time for me to move.

  My few possessions transported and unpacked, I lay on my new bed and mused about the novel I was going to write. Through this long summer I could turn back upon myself and discover … but I had seen so much of the world and, seeing, had so disconnected it, that I had everything to discover.

  I daydreamed only a little while about my novel. Instead I was thinking of Guinevere. She was a nymphomaniac, he had said. Such a curious word. I had never applied it to anyone. It was difficult to forget her breasts which had thrust upward from their binding in copious splendor, so palpable that they obtained the intensification of art and became more real than themselves.

  A jewel. But set in brass. This morning she had sported a house dress and covered it with a bathrobe. Her red hair, with which undoubtedly she was always experimenting, had been merely blowzy and flew out in all directions from her head. Yet there had been opera pumps on her feet, her nails had been painted, her lipstick was fresh. She was a house whose lawn was landscaped and whose kitchen was on fire. I would not have been startled if she had turned around and like the half-dressed queen in the girlie show: surprise! her buttocks are exposed.

  The nymphomaniac. As I was about to fall asleep for the first time in my new room, I realized that I wanted to take Guinevere to bed.

  THREE

  THE attic, as I have indicated, was up three gloomy flights of stairs. Once, many years ago, the house had been a modest mansion, but now it was partitioned into cubicles. On the top story, a masterpiece of design, no window gave upon the landing, and at the head of the stairs, burning into perpetuity, one weak light bulb cast its sallow illumination upon my door, upon the doors of the two neighbors I had not met, and upon the oilcloth of the bathroom we shared.

  It was a big house and gave the impression of being an empty house. Downstairs there were ten names arranged in ten brackets next to as many bells which did not ring, but a week could go by and I would pass no one upon the stairs. I hardly cared. In the last months I had come to know fewer and fewer people, and by the time I quit the dormitory, for better or for worse I was very much alone. At first this did not matter. I began my novel, and for a few days, completely isolated, I made progress. Since I could assume that a sizable portion of my life had been spent in one barracks or another, a room for myself was more than a luxury. Temporarily I felt free and rather happy. As though to exploit all the advantages of my new situation, I ate meals around the clock and slept as my whim directed.

  Such a period could not last for long. A day passed and another, while pages of new manuscript collected on the desk. And about me, with patient regular industry, dust accumulated everywhere. Whatever plans I might have entertained for Guinevere were not to come passively to fruition. I never saw her. Conventional landlady, she never bothered to clean, and the dust in my room increased from minute to minute in competition with the hall outside. The entire house was filthy.

  Except for the bathroom. This bore the evidence of regular attention, and even presented a certain immaculacy at times, a mystery to me until I met McLeod.

  One morning I found a man at work washing the bathroom floor. He looked up and nodded, his cold clear eyes staring at me from behind his spectacles. “You’re the one who took over Dinsmore’s room?” he asked finally.

  I answered his question, and he rose from his knees, introduced himself and made a short speech in a dry ironic voice. “I’ll tell you,” he said, pinching his thin lips primly, “this place is always a mess. Guinevere don’t get off her bottom long enough to wash a handkerchief, so I’ve taken over cleaning the bathroom twice a week, and far as I see there’s small profit in it.” He scratched his chin sourly. “I’ve asked Hollingsworth, the gentleman who resides in the other room up here, to pitch in once in a while, but he’s always got a hangover, or else he’s sprained his wrist, or there’s a mole on his belly.” He shrugged. “If you want to, Lovett, you can help me keep this clean, but I can tell you from the outset that if you don’t want to co-operate, I’ll still be doing it because unfortunately I’ve got a mania about neatness.”

  My introduction to McLeod. On completing the discourse, he folded his long slender hands over the top of a broom handle, and pursed his mouth. At the moment he bore an astonishing resemblance to a witch, his gaunt face nodding in communion with himself, his long thin body stooped in thought. When I did not reply immediately, he filled the gap by running a comb through his straight black hair, the action emphasizing the sweep of his sharp narrow nose.

  “You’re a writer, Dinsmore told me.”

  “More or less.”

  “I see.” He gave the impression of listening carefully to what I said, evaluating my words, and then discarding them. “I’ve got a proposition,” McLeod said to me, “which you can take or leave. You clean up the bathroom on Wednesdays, and I’ll keep doing it on Saturday.” With little effort he gave the impression of saturating each word with a considerable weight of satire. I sensed that he was laughing at me.

  Annoyed, I yawned. “What do you say we draw up a contract?”

  His mouth, severe in repose, became mocking as he smiled. He looked at me shrewdly. “I’m getting you down a bit, eh?” Laughter altered his face so that for an instant he could appear young and merry. He drawled out his next offering with a self-satisfied air as though he were sucking a candy-drop. “Well, now, that’s a thought, Lovett. It’s a thought.” And still chuckling, he examined the bathroom floor, found it to his satisfaction, and stowed the broom in a corner. “I’m across the hall. Drop by when you’re dressed,” he offered.

  I did, and we talked for an hour. I had thought he might be taciturn about himself, but he belied this impression by talking freely, or more exactly by conveying a series of specific details much as he might have furnished a dossier. He was forty-four, he told me, and he worked in a department store as a window dresser. He had grown up in Brooklyn, he had always been a solitary man. He had a father who lived in an Old Folks’ Home. Rarely saw him. Possesed a high-school education. Obtained in Brooklyn. “I’ve lived here always,” he said with his mocking smile. “I’ve never been out of New York with the exception of one small trip to New Jersey. That’s m’life.” And he burst into laughter.

  “Just that?” I asked.

  “I see you don’t believe me. People rarely do. It’s because I give the impression of having some culture. I’ve studied, you see, by myself. I’m not a joiner, and I don’t put my education to work, but I am a great reader, it must be said.”

  And with
that, subtly yet unmistakably, he directed me to the door and shook hands, his eyes studying me in amusement.

  I dropped into his room again the next evening and the next. I think I talked with McLeod five or six times that first week. However, I would not say we became friends quickly. He had a brutal honesty which made it difficult to speak casually with him. He would leap upon some passing statement I might make, and figuratively twirl my words about his finger as if to examine them from every aspect. I found myself continually on the defensive, and though with a left-handed fascination I was always providing matter for his mill, nonetheless I resented him for it.

  What glee the process gave him. Once I mentioned a girl with whom I had recently had an affair, and I shrugged and said, “But it didn’t mean much. We got a little bored with each other, and drifted out of it.”

  McLeod gave his sly grin, the side of his mouth sucking on the imaginary candy-drop. “You drifted out of it, eh?”

  Irritably, I snapped, “Yes, I drifted out of it. Didn’t you ever hear of anything like that?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it. I hear it all the time. People are always drifting in and out of things.” He leaned back on the bed, and pressed his finger tips together. “I’ll tell you the truth, Lovett, I don’t know what those words mean. ‘Drifted in and out, drifted in and out,’ ” he repeated as though the phrase were delicious. “When you have to, it’s pretty convenient to think of yourself as driftwood.”

  “I can explain it to you.”

  “Oh,” he said, grinning, “I know you can explain it to me. I just want to try to figure out m’self what it signifies drifting out of an affair. Because in the old days when I used to cut a figure with the women I had my share of it, and it seems to me now that when I broke up with a woman it was often somewhat nasty.”