Algren at Sea (10 page)

The odor of oranges was blown off by the scent of an ashen debris like the very smell of weightlessness.

“Just the disgustin' Germans up to their dirty business,” she assured me from the dark upholstered corner.

“Less is known about weightlessness,” some scrap of newspaper knowledge blew through my mind, “than any other stress man is likely to encounter.” I sat on the floor of the cab until my weight returned. Then I got up and sat beside the girl. Together we peered out at the dark, lit momently by flashbulbs as before—but with a difference now. Now we were like people who had been blown off the earth and back and would never forget that moment when we did not own our own weight.

“What
was
it?” I finally dared to ask.

“Just a V-2, Yank.”

I had come to the South of England. A pitch-black nation where paying for love with Sunkist oranges made the
Luftwaffe
mad as all get-out.

Later in a dim café called the Café Cypriot, the girl told me that just the scent of the things had made her ill.

“I'm very sensitive to smells, ever since I was buried, in the time of the V-1's,” she told me.

She had come to London from Birmingham and had been caught, on her first date with an American, below a falling wall near Paddington Station.

“That was all for my poor chap, whoever he was, but all I got was bruises.
Frightened?
Here I was hearing the diggin' blokes chattin' it up and what would Mum say if I were found dead with an Amerikun? Mum wouldn't minded my bein' found dead with a British lieutenant, but with an Amerikun and him not even an officer. I've never been so frightened since, Yank.

“I couldn't bear those nasty screaming V-1's, where I had to run and hide even though I hadn't hurt anyone. Why should I be ducking underground when I've done nothing wrong? It's much nicer now with the V-2's. If you hear it hit you know you're alright. If you don't there's nothing to worry about.”

Later I kissed Sandy good night and she walked off into the dark. She was hardly out of sight when I started after her, sensing an inner wave of loneliness I wished to fend off. I made a complete circle of Piccadilly, trying to find the Café Cypriot again, thinking the people in there might tell me where to find her. But there was no Café Cypriot.

I tried all the side streets leading out of Piccadilly Circus, and finally began asking M.P.'s. Nobody had heard of the place.

I hired a cabman who assured me he was acquainted with the place and knew Sandy.

“This is it, Yank,” he finally told me.

The place I got out in the dark was the same place I'd gotten in. Nobody, neither M.P.'s nor British police, had ever heard of the Café Cypriot.

I searched, by cab and on foot, for her and for the Café Cypriot until I had just time to get back to the vasty train shed.

The lights on the night train to Wales went out whenever the little train rocked. It was on and off, awake and asleep, the whole rocking night. I felt strangely emptied of love and desire.

Yet asleep or awake on that cold returning my mind returned again and again to the girl.

During the week that followed I became the biggest sport in the PX. I bought a woman's comb-and-brush set, a bracelet, a cigarette lighter, a tiny scissors, and a bottle of
Cuir de Russie,
purported to be a Paris perfume.

The EM had beaten the nurses in the return match, and in the playoff game I played errorless ball, handling one flyball in right field without mishap. We lost.

The bulletins tacked to the morning report continued to report bombings in the South of England. But it was no longer a make-believe land to me.

Storing Sandy's gifts in my duffel bag against the day I would get another pass, the South of England became my own country.

On the last day of the year the Order of Departure was posted. The Channel train left in a misting rain.

It was raining in Soho. It was raining in Piccadilly. It was raining in Wales.

 

In the years that followed my tour of the South of England, in the time of the V-2's, my life turned purposeful; as though cabled to a diesel-powered destiny.

Then strangely in dreams I began to walk between small stars; strung on a moment through some pitch-black undismayed town. Stars that lighted human figures, in doorways of lodgings and old cafés, before they flickered out. I would see myself standing before a café with a name that had been painted over. In dreams I sought a place whose name was altered; yet inside nothing would be changed. And in the end, wherever I walked, I would have to go through this remembered door.

Thus through dreams I came to know that I was still riding a taxi with dimmed foglights, looking for someone I would never find.

Wherever I got out it would be before the Café Cypriot.

In the cold light of London of 1960, the South of England was gone for keeps.

In its place, a city of neon towers climbed. Topped by one in which I was welcomed by one MR. BRANDYWINE. Who greeted me by racing down a line of colored lights to fetch me, then glancing over his shoulder as he raced back to see if I were following. He wished to show me new wonders, I understood.

I had seen the new wonders. I wanted only to see old Soho.

The Underground was still an iron hole down which escalators moved to an English Hell. The guardian lions of Eros looked much shrunken. The British were apparently still trying to shake the Irish off their backs, as I judged, by signs saying IRISH GO HOME TO A BOOM IN JOBS.

billboards demanded all over Piccadilly.

What, I thought, do we have to go through all
that
again?

A press, an international multitude, moved all day around the guardian lions. When the red night-lights of London fell, I saw the guardian lions stir.

The evening neon moved their hearts.

Taxis no longer circled ceaselessly. Instead, they waited, still like so many hearses, in a line down the center of the street. They still looked like they should be horse-drawn.

I climbed into one and off we went on a four-shilling ride to Half-Moon Street, where I gave the driver a twoshilling tip. He said it was alright but thought I was going it rather strong. Only an English cabbie would resent being overtipped.

It looked like he was going to make a scene, but I remembered the George Brent movies just in time, where the big scene is when George turns his back on the woman he loves and says, “When I turn around I want you to be gone,” and when he turns around she's still there.

“When I turn around I want you to be gone,” I told the driver, and when I turned around he had beat it with my two shillings, the bloody Piccadilly bandit.

If he'd had a spark of dramatic instinct he would have left one on the curb.

Or
both!

I was on some little lonesome half-street where low-slung strip-tease caves seemed barely surviving. A Spanish girl came through the pushing gloom and offered me a card—

“Who sent you, honey?” I asked her.

She shrugged and took back her invitation. Whoever had sent her had taught her to shrug in English but never to speak it.

This Spanish con is as corny as the American hard sell or the Irish blarney. The decoy puts on pressure right away—“You like to stay in my house tonight?
Very
cozy.”

When her large boyfriend walks in it gets even cozier.

The Irish blarney is just as sad—”You're such a darlin' man your blood is worth bottlin'.”

The English con works better because it doesn't try to con; it merely disarms. The decoy stands in a doorway like a statue of indifference. A neon sign above her says
Casino de Paris.

Wow.

“What's going on in there, baby?” you have to ask.

“Couple gels chattin' a couple blokes up is all, luv.”

In the
Casino de Paris?
Who does she think she's fooling?

The stairway behind her begins to look sinister. She barely moves aside to let you pass. At the top of the stairs two janitors with a dustbin between them are coming down.

And conversation
is
all that's going on inside. A bright, metallic-looking girl sitting before a glass with a false bottom is only a make-believe whore. Her payoff depends upon how many glasses she can get you to order before you catch on. Her racket is not sex, but conversation. When nobody from the first-person world is left, and third-person persons are running things, sex may come to just that—conversation.

These clubs are flourishing in London for the same reason that the key clubs are doing so well in the States: They remove the responsibility of passion. And a responsibility is what, to these utterly demoralized men of distinction, in whom life has been reduced to protecting oneself at all times, passion has become. The clubs offer them the appearance of being playboys, sports, and regular fellows without the risk of love.

Take this sensible-looking, well-dressed, pleasant chap: he has that infirmity. Should he dream of a woman's arms around him in a naked embrace demanding physical fulfillment, he'd have his afternoon appointment with his analyst moved up to the morning hours, for he would feel life closing in. He pays the analyst to keep life away.

The analyst, of course, has his own troubles. Last night he dreamed he went into a washroom in Madrid and saw the sign on the door had not read
Señores,
but
Señoras.

So much for World War III.

The men who own these clubs, like those in the States, are businessmen, not hoodlums. They are the same investors from the suburbs who, behind the front of a banking, insurance, or investment-counseling firm, use a go-between to buy a piece of a crap game or a whorehouse. These are the same parties who own broken-down but well-paying tenements by proxy.

They are not members of “The Mafia,” “The Brotherhood of Evil,” or “The Syndicate.” They are members of no syndicate save the international one of Make-a-Buck-and-Shut-Your Face. And what is a businessman, anyhow, but a hood who cuts corners when splitting a score? After all, isn't the end product of General Motors not electric appliances, but price fixing? And isn't the end product of the square who gets squarer and squarer, a fascist? Isn't it always the man who goes about neighbors' homes, on Sunday mornings, with a petition banning unescorted women from drinking in the local tavern, always the same bird the girls have so much trouble getting to leave on Saturday night?

I kept on my way along the little lonesome street, plainly an American waiting to be accosted; until accosted I was.

She handed me one of those thin, ladylike pencils usually attached to a note pad beside a phone—this was attached by a cord of some sort around the young woman's neck. She was very young even for a young woman—no more than seventeen—who dipped into her coat pocket and put a note pad under the pencil as I held it suspended.

Her finger jabbed the pad: a mute girl wearing black gloves.

A deaf mute at that. For, when I spoke, she shook her head quickly and showed me a smile that meant
that
did not matter. The finger jabbed my breastbone, then pointed to herself.

You and me.

I wrote on the pad:

“How much?”

She glanced at the pad, took the pencil, crossed out the question, and wrote:

“Name please.”

I wrote:

“John. How
much?”

She took the pad back and wrote:

“You can trust me. John.”

I was pleased that John trusted her. I certainly didn't. I'll trust an unattractive
girl in an expensive coat or a beautiful girl who is badly dressed. But this combination of a deaf-and-dumb beauty wrapped in a mink that would have paid my fare by jet back to Chicago was a little too good to be true. I took her arm, a cab wheeled to the curb as though it had been waiting down the block, and we were off to Ipswitch-on-Bagel-and-Hop-in-the-saddle come what may.

We drove toward the south of England, my sense of direction told me, and disembarked at a bar that had no sign, but seemed well lit. My friend, who had written her name as “Emma” and was no more an Emma than I was a John, permitted me to pay her cab fare. But I let her enter her hangout first. I'd trust a bushman ahead of an Englishman and a bushwoman before both. In fact, I just wasn't too damned sure Emma
was
deaf and dumb.

We were in a cocktail lounge with an American décor, two bartenders and a dozen couples sitting around without making a sound. The couples were jabbing their fingers at each other, tapping themselves and making small circles to dot their “i”s. I caught the bartender's eye, and he asked, “What's yours?”

That was a relief.

It was a relief, but it wasn't right. The other bartender was a deaf mute too.

“Give me a dummy on the rocks,” I told the bartender who had all his senses. If I stuck around here I was going to lose mine. Which was why I had been brought, my instinct told me.

If the bartender with his senses had smiled when I made a funny I might have stayed. But he frowned, so I made him ask again before I told him I'd take Scotch—”And give my friend Guinness.” I saw a way out. She grabbed her pad and scribbled:

“Whiskey, please.”

I grabbed the pencil, and wrote:

“Thank you for an interesting ride,” finished the Scotch while she read my farewell, and got the hell out of there. No, it just didn't
feel
right.

Yet here and there, beside a juke in an all-night restaurant, the honest British whore still survives.