Barbary Shore (12 page)

In confirmation, some ash fell from the cigarette, and she rubbed it into her skirt. The suit she wore, a brilliant violet poorly chosen for her mouse-brown hair and sallow color, was frayed at the elbows, ravelled at the collar.

“You’re a poet, aren’t you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Oh, but you are, I can tell.” When she smiled, her childish mouth turned pensive and wise, conveying to me the uneasy suggestion that she knew more about me than I had discovered myself. “A poet with a typewriter,” she mused, “oh, things are sad.” The smoke curled upward over her hand into the air. “You should never use a typewriter,” she said.

“I like to,” I confessed gruffly.

“No, you don’t understand,” she informed me. The cigarette had burned to within a half-inch of her knuckle, but she seemed unaware of the heat.

“Hadn’t you better put it out?” I asked.

She looked at the butt in some surprise. Probably she had forgotten how it came there. Yet, obediently, she opened her hand and let it fall, and if I had not ground it down, I believe she would have watched the ember char my floor.

Realizing at last that she must have had some reason for coming into the room I asked her purpose. She placed a hand over her pocketbook. “I noticed,” she said slowly, “that there’s a place to let in this building. I saw the sign outside.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“Who could rent me the room? I came into the house, and I couldn’t see where I could find the janitor, and I just walked and all the doors were closed.”

I smiled to reassure her. “I’ll take you down to the landlady.”

“I’ve got to have it,” she said, a pressing note in her voice. “You see I don’t have any place to live.”

I shook my head. “If it’s one of the lower rooms it’s probably expensive.”

“But I’m just loaded with money,” she said in a wan attempt at gaiety. “If I pay the money, she can’t refuse me. That’s a law, isn’t it?”

I led her downstairs to Guinevere’s apartment. Before I could knock on the door, the girl clutched my elbow. “I’m named Lannie,” she said, “Lannie Madison. Will you tell her that we’re friends, and that it would be wonderful if she would give me the room.” After a pause, she smiled. “It’s not really untrue. I liked you the moment I saw you.”

I nodded. “All right.” After I rapped, there was a long pause in which I could hear Guinevere approaching, her slippers flapping slovenly upon the floor. She opened the door a crack, and peered out with suspicion. “Oh, it’s you,” she said ungraciously.

I made the introductions, and Guinevere, clasping her bathrobe over her bosom, nodded indifferently. “What the hell do you want, Lovett? I’m busy with Monina.”

Her rudeness angered me, but I said quietly, “Lannie’s an old friend of mine, and she saw there’s a room empty, and she’d like to rent it.” As I finished, I felt I had made a mistake. Guinevere’s face became guarded. “That would be a nice cosy setup for you, wouldn’t it, Lovett? When the police come, you can tell them you two are playing house.” And apparently determined to extract the last chiché from her role, she announced, “Listen, Lovett, and you … Miss Madison, I keep an orderly house here without shenanigans, and I don’t intend to start any.”

Lannie had turned pale. In a small voice, she murmured, “Why are you so cruel? You don’t mean it. I can see that you’re kind, and that you’re ashamed of it.”

“I’m ashamed of nothing.” But Guinevere was staggered. I sensed that the cliché of the blusterer with the heart of gold was not entirely without attraction to her. “What do you want the room for?” she temporized.

“I don’t have anywhere to live. I found a job today, and I have to have a bed.”

“Why don’t you go to a hotel?” she asked, examining Lannie in detail.

“I don’t have enough money.”

Guinevere folded her arms. “Well, then you don’t have enough for this. It’s fifty dollars a month, and the bath is in the hall.”

“But I do. I can get enough money.” As if she had just remembered—“I have enough now.”

Guinevere shook her head. “There’s nothing I can do for you. Room’s rented.”

The reaction surprised me. Lannie stood with her back straight, her head high. “Oh, you’re a wicked, silly woman,” she said with sudden passion. “You don’t understand yourself. You don’t understand the good there could be in you. Why do you lie, and why must you bully?”

Guinevere’s face reddened. “Listen, Lovett, you don’t need to bring your friends around to insult me. I’ve gotten enough lip in my life.”

Lannie put her hand in mine. “Well, let’s go.” There was indifference in her voice. But at the door she paused and, with what I suspected was artistry, said, “You know you should give me that room. You’re going to feel terrible later, because you suffer when you’ve been unkind.”

“Wait a minute,” Guinevere said. “You sure there’s no monkey business, Lovett, between you and her?”

“No business at all,” I drawled, and abruptly the strain in Lannie’s eyes dissolved, and she began to peal with laughter. Guinevere, reluctantly, began to snigger. “You’ll be the death
of me, Mikey,” she said, and for the first time since I had brought Lannie down, there was recognition in her bald blue eyes, and a hint that she might wink at me. “Oh, you give me a pain in the ass, all of you,” she grumbled.

Yet nobody laughed genuinely. When we finished it was on a wary note. Guinevere sighed heavily. “You sure you got sixty dollars?” she asked Lannie.

“I thought it was fifty,” I said.

Guinevere folded her arms. “It is fifty … after the first month. There’s a joker wants to rent this place, and he offered me ten bucks. I’m not letting that go for anybody, no matter what my personal feelings may be.”

“Oh, I’ll give you the ten,” Lannie said. “You deserve it, you should have it.” She fumbled through her purse once more, and extracted a small sheaf of bills. “Let me pay you now.”

“Don’t you want to look at the room first?” Guinevere asked.

Lannie seemed surprised as though this had not occurred to her. “Oh. Oh, no. I know what it’s going to be like, and I know I’ll take it. I could tell it was a wonderful room from the sign outside.”

“Take a look at it anyway,” Guinevere said.

“No, no, I want to pay the rent now,” Lannie said in a breathless voice. With her stained fingers, she counted off sixty dollars, the last ten in singles. I do not believe she had five dollars left. “Can I have the key?” she asked.

I intended to leave with Lannie, but Guinevere delayed me. “You don’t mind, Miss Madison, if I keep your boy friend for a while?”

“Of course not.” Lannie turned to me. “You’ll visit me, won’t you?”

“I’ll drop by when I leave here. Probably I can help you.”

When we were alone, Guinevere shook her head. “That girl friend of yours is an odd dame,” she said.

“Mmm.”

A nudge in my ribs. “I suppose it’s all over between you and me now.”

“There never was anything.”

Guinevere smiled sadly. “There could have been. Fate kept us from getting together and throwing a little party, but I’ve thought about you, Lovett.” She grinned. “I’ll say one thing. You like them older than you. First me, and then Lannie, or should I say, first Lannie and then me?”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said indifferently.

“I like that Miss Madison,” Guinevere mused aloud. “There’s something a little out of the ordinary about her.” She allowed her voice to trail over the words. “You know I could tell you something.”

“But you won’t.”

She deliberated. “Yes, I will. You know there was no vacancy sign up. What do you think of that?”

“Then how did Lannie know there was a room?” I asked automatically.

“Yeah, how did she?” Guinevere shrugged, and pointed a finger up the stairs. “Go ahead, go after your girl friend.”

“Who offered you ten dollars?”

How coy Guinevere could become. “Oh, that don’t matter. He won’t get it now, anyway.”

“Who?” I persisted.

She fingered a lock in her red hair. “It’ll all come out in the wash. That’s my philosophy. And you might just as well go ahead. I can see I’m passé as far as you’re concerned.”

I
MOUNTED
the stairs to Lannie’s new room. She opened the door for me, her face shining, her greeting rippling forth so easily that the questions Guinevere had asked seemed not important.

“This is a wonderful place. Oh, you were marvelous. The way you talked to her.”

“I don’t see how.”

She gave the sad smile which illumined her face. “I knew you would be modest,” she said cryptically in a manner to indicate one had heard about me for years. “But it’s wrong. When we have something, we should be proud of it.” Lannie looked about the room, and sprawled in an armchair, her legs extended before her. “I can’t tell you how happy I am.”

Certainly, it took little to please her. The room was large and had a high ceiling, but that was the best to be said for it. The windows, which rose from the floor to the molding, opened upon the back court with its clotheslines and fire escape. Here, too, a scale of cinders had bedded the woodwork, and the gray light diffused between the buildings could hardly improve the dull nap of the aged sofa and armchairs. For decoration there was only a calendar left by the last occupant, its nude maiden curling at the edges. Across the room was a washstand, and
above, a metal dish, a piece of soap moldering within, its underside turned to jelly.

Lannie sat contentedly, obviously ready to wait until I suggested what we should do. The ragged violet suit was tailored poorly to her bony frame, sagged to her knees, unpressed and wrinkled. Perhaps she had lost weight. The suit seemed to alienate her head from her long legs so that the young ravaged face with its dark eyes appeared to exist yards away from the brown scuffed moccasins where a large perforation in one sole exposed extravagantly the soiled flesh of her foot.

“What about your baggage?” I asked. “Won’t you need help in moving it?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t dream of that. You’ve done enough for me already.” Her long stained fingers curled around a cigarette. “I’ve got friends. They’ll help me.”

“I’d be glad to do it,” I insisted.

“Oh, no.”

“I would.”

Lannie laughed at last, a husky contralto, and her brown eyes stared mischievously at me. “I don’t have any baggage.”

“None at all?”

“It’s with my father.” She laughed again. “With Father Pawnbroker.”

“But what’ll you wear?” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I saved something.” She rummaged through her pocketbook, and pulled out a rumpled pajama top and bottom.

“You’ve got to have something else.”

This only made her sullen. She laid her head against the top of the chair.

“What are you going to do?” I insisted.

Lannie was aloft in a private study. “I don’t care,” she said. “This morning I woke up, and I thought of all the dresses I had, and my typewriter, and all those little chains. I’m a cat. I don’t want strings to my legs. I gave them away to Father
Pawnbroker.” She smiled. “Like Vincent I cut off my ear and gave it to my beloved, and now I hear sounds I never knew before.”

“That was the money you gave for the rent.”

“I don’t know, I suppose it was.” I might have been the fat man and she the sprite, and as I blundered after her, the audience she had assembled for herself must have roared with approval.

“How will you eat?”

“Oh, Mikey, I don’t care. Tomorrow I’ll eat. I’ve got money, money.” She dumped her purse upon the floor, and nudged the few singles with her foot.

“And after tomorrow?” The weeks had gone by, each to the eye-dropper of twenty dollars. At bottom, I was jealous.

“After tomorrow … people will feed me. People are good, that’s what no one understands.”

“Who will feed you?”

She laughed at me. “Mrs. Guinevere.”

“She even begrudges me a cup of coffee.”

“But that’s because she doesn’t love you, Mikey. She’ll love me.

I was exasperated. “Do you want a loan of some money?”

“You see, Mikey,” she pealed, “people always take care of me.” Lannie shook her head. “No, I can’t take your money; I’d never pay it back.” But then mock-seriously, finger to her chin, she reconsidered. “No, I
would
pay it back, I’d work and slave to pay you back because you’re so virtuous, and you’d make me ashamed. I hate bullies.” She puffed at her cigarette, and watched the smoke trail to the tips of her broken nails. “I love the color nicotine gives to your hands,” she said. “It makes them look like rich old wood.” She sniffed. “My father’s shirts always used to smell of tobacco. He was a wonderful man, a wonderful old drunk. He would have loved Mrs. Guinevere just as I do.”

At the look of bewilderment on my face, she laughed. “Poor Mikey.”

“I don’t like being called Poor Mikey.”

She shook her head. “And you shouldn’t be. You’re proud. I love proud people. You can see the pride in Mrs. Guinevere.” Lannie’s voice was eager. “She knows so well she’s a woman she’s so big and her coloring is so beautiful, and she
trumpets
it. ‘I’m full of life, don’t hold me in,’ she cries, and all her life people held her in, and so she’s unhappy. I love her. I want to talk to her.”

Somehow she wove an obligation to accept her verdicts, to feel she had discovered truths one had never discerned before. For a few minutes I could accept all the qualities she had bestowed upon me. I could be handsome, and I could be proud, and I could be even a bully. And in parallel to me, Guinevere would become beautiful, her coloring vivid, the large body assuming its strong curves with confidence.

Under Lannie’s influence what could avoid its transformation? She had stood up and was pacing about the room. At the mantel of the dummy fireplace she halted and drew an imaginary face in the air. “He’s cute, isn’t he?” she demanded, and then before I could answer, she had gone to the window and was playing with the fastener on the middle sash. “It’s like a finger,” she said. “Look!” and crooked her hand. “When they finished the house, there were no locks for the windows, and so the builder, a cruel capitalist who later built a house at Newport, cried at the top of his lungs, ‘Cut off the fingers of the workmen, and nail them into place.’ And this is a poor workingman’s finger.” She stroked it. “It’s all that’s left of him now, his finger and his thumb.”