Blue City (9 page)

She snapped the Yale lock and said uncertainly from the door: “You might as well sit down.”

I took one of the chairs, and she sat facing me on the stool in front of the dressing-table.

“I didn’t expect to be told to go to Allister,” I said. “I thought he was protecting Kerch.”

“Not Allister. He’d like to see him run out of town.”

“What’s he waiting for, then?”

“Allister isn’t a fighter the way you are—at least, the way I think you are. His hands are tied, he says.”

“Is he honest?”

“I think so,” she said after a pause. “Anyway, I know he’s Kerch’s enemy.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I know him. He’s a good friend of a friend of mine.”

“I’ll go and see what kind of a guy he is.”

“He’s clever. And he knows a lot about this town. He investigated it for the Cranbridge D.A., but they killed his report.”

“Who killed it?”

“I heard it was a man called Weather. You wouldn’t know him. He used to own this place.”

“Oh.”

She turned to the mirror, picked up a brush, and began to brush her hair with quick determined strokes. It flowed sleekly around the back of her head and billowed across her shoulders in soft copper gleaming curls. Embarrassment and a deeper feeling that masqueraded as pity made me feel restless and chilly. The brush swished and crackled through her hair like a tiger moving in the undergrowth.

“You don’t live here, do you?” I said.

“God, no! I’d go crazy if I had to. I’ve got an apartment of my own.”

“Where?”

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. The hair drawn smoothly back from her brow made her forehead look very young and pure. “Don’t tell me you want to see me again?”

“I don’t like the atmosphere here.”

“Do I, though!”

“I’d like to come and see you where you live.”

“I’m usually home in the afternoon. I live in the Harvey Apartments, they’re south of Main—”

“I know where they are.”

“I thought you didn’t know this town?” She began to apply lipstick with a red-tipped little finger, stretching her mouth like a mask.

“I went there tonight to see a Mrs. Sontag.”

“How do you happen to know her? Francie’s a friend of mine.”

“I don’t. I was looking for her brother.”

She whirled on her stool. “You bastard. You are a cop.”

“Your family is allergic to cops, isn’t it? Your grandfather had practically the same reaction.”

Her small breasts rose and fell visibly with her quick breathing, and her hands were working at her sides. “You can get the hell out of here. And you can forget what I told you about where I live.”

“So many people are taking me for a cop, I’m beginning to feel insulted.”

“How do you know so much about me, then? Why did you come out here to find me?”

“But you found me. That was a coincidence. And I don’t know a damn thing about you.”

“You said you were talking to Grandfather.”

“Not about you. He just happened to mention you.”

“Who are you? What are you trying to do?”

“My father was this man Weather you said I wouldn’t know. I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

She watched my face in silence. Finally she said: “And you think it was Kerch?”

“My mind is open. What do you think?”

“I don’t know anything about it. That was a long time before I came out here.” After a moment she said shyly: “What did Grandfather say about me?”

I had to look for words. “He sounded kind of disappointed in you.”

“The old fool!” she said bitterly. “I suppose he expects me to spend my life making his meals and cleaning up that dump of his and listening to his crazy lectures. He’s screwy.”

“Now I know what you meant when you said I reminded you of your grandfather.”

A smile moved almost imperceptibly from her eyes to her mouth, but didn’t stay. “No. I just meant you both like shooting off your mouths. He’s all right, I guess. I feel sorry for him sometimes. He wanted me to get an education and be something. He’s pretty well educated himself.”

“Why did you leave him?”

“He ordered me out. He caught me with a boy in the back room.” She was still for a time. Her eyes were looking at me, but they were blind and grim, turned inward on her young past. “I was just as glad, because I didn’t want to stay anyway. He’s a pretty good old man, but he didn’t understand me at all. He had big ideas about helping people, but he never helped me. He thought I should go to normal school and be a teacher, can you imagine? He thought I was a crazy little bitch because I hated school. And then he was always writing radical letters to the newspapers, and the kids would come to school and take it out on me. I couldn’t ever tell him about that, even.”

“What happened to your mother and father?”

“I never saw my father. My mother died when I was eleven. After that Grandfather took care of me. He was nice to me when I was a kid. We used to go on picnics in the country.”

“You never saw your father?”

She moved awkwardly and clasped her hands in her lap. “I was a bastard,” she said violently. Then more softly: “I guess you think I’m taking after my mother.”

“I’m not thinking a thing,” I said. “Except that I’ve got another reason for not liking Sault.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “You said my grandfather didn’t talk about me.”

“All he said was that he thought Sault was going to marry you, and he was wrong.”

“How wrong he was! Isn’t it a scream?” She spoke with strained vivacity. “That I should fall for the pretty eyes of a dirty thug like that. Wouldn’t it’ve been swell to set up light housekeeping with that heel, so he could go the rounds of the poolrooms and drum up trade for me, and pay me off himself with a quick one every day? It makes me laugh every time I think of it.”

“I don’t see you laughing.”

“No? For a long time I couldn’t think of that crawling bastard without laughing. Now he means so little to me I can’t even get a laugh out of him.”

“He means enough to you to make you get all wound up.”

“Hell, I’m wildly crazy about him! Didn’t I make myself clear? I’d like to play marbles with those beautiful black eyes.”

“He works for Kerch, doesn’t he?”

“He did for a while. But even Kerch doesn’t trust him. He milked some of the machines. I hear he’s in business for himself now, peddling marijuana. It’s a business that’s just about low enough to suit him.”

“He used to do some shoplifting,” I said.

“Yeah, he got sent up for it. That’s where he learned most of his little tricks—in reform school.”

“With that record, I don’t suppose your grandfather wanted him around the store?”

“Grandpa’s a sucker for anybody that he thinks has missed the breaks. He kept an eye on Joey, but he didn’t try to keep him out of the store.”

“Did Sault ever steal anything from him?”

“No, not that I knew of. That’s a funny thing, isn’t it? When he started going with me, he said he was going straight. He did seem to be going straight, too. Christ, he even had me fooled!”

“Maybe he had himself fooled for a while.”

She laughed shortly. “Not Joe Sault.”

“But he never lifted anything from the store?”

“No, I guess there wasn’t anything there he wanted. Except me.”

“You make me mad,” I said. “You look like a nice girl, and you talk like an honest one. But once upon a time you let a dimwit with sideburns take advantage of you. You woke up from love’s young dream with a hangover. It could happen to anybody. It happens to more girls than you think. But what did you do? You sat back on your little tail and told yourself your life was finished—you were ruined
for keeps. You knew damn well you were a romantic sap, so you set out to prove the opposite. You’d been too soft, so now you’d be too hard. You’d been tumbled once, so now you’d get yourself tumbled ten or twelve times a night. All to show yourself, and your dimwit with the sideburns, that you’re a hard girl and can take it.”

“You understand me so well,” she said ironically. “You should put all that savvy to work and get yourself a job psychoanalyzing people or whatever they call it.”

“I don’t think you’re so hard. I think I could push my finger right through your crust.”

“You’re the one that talks like a romantic softie. I suppose you read somewhere that a woman never forgets the first man she has. I wouldn’t cross the street to spit on Sault if he was lying in the gutter, and one of these days he probably will be.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I don’t think you know what you meant,” she said fiercely. “I suppose you think I give a damn for the men I bring up here. They don’t mean any more to me than if they were made of wood. They can work and sweat on me, and they can’t do anything to me. I can lie under a man and think about what I’m going to have for dinner tomorrow.”

“It’s a tough way to buy your dinners.”

“Tough? It’s soft and easy. It buys me the things I want. You think I care about myself? I don’t. I admit I cared about myself the first time. After that it didn’t matter. I don’t care about myself at all. Nobody can do anything to me.”

The hysterical rush of her words made a shrill babbling
in the room. Her white hands wrestled each other in her lap.

“You talk like a hard little bitch,” I said. “But you’re a worried girl, and you don’t like yourself very much.”

“I like myself fine,” she cried defiantly. “I like myself better than I like any soft-soaping preacher who goes around sticking his nose in other people’s business.” The stream of words ceased abruptly, as if a valve had been closed somewhere out of sight.

Suddenly she spread her hands over her face, ran blindly across the narrow room, and fell full length on the bed. The dry sobs that struggled up out of her chest shook her whole body. The bed creaked under her in facetious imitation of itself.

I got out of my chair and stood over her. She was lying face down across the bed, her head concealed under her scattered sheaf of hair. She was crying almost without sound now, but her body trembled convulsively. Little shivers of anguish moved rhythmically across her pale back, and her thin shoulder blades were tremulous. I felt I should cover her with something and leave her, but pity held me where I was. I was sorrier for her than I had ever been for anyone before.

Suddenly, as if a pressure had been removed from my groin, the pity turned into an overpowering hunger. I leaned across her and lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck. My hands burrowed under her body and found her sharp small breasts. I forgot the ugly room, the strangeness of the meeting, the dark past, and the dim future. So did she.

Her mouth was sweet. Her body was thin and desperate and sweet.

“Lie heavy on me. Hold me tight. Tighter.”

“I wouldn’t want to hurt you, lover.”

“You couldn’t hurt me.”

The streams of our desire rose, met, mingled, and subsided. I felt empty, dazed, and spent. She was very gentle with me. We lay silent and still for a while, holding each other close.

“This is the queerest thing that ever happened to me,” she said.

“To me, too.”

“And the nicest.”

She stood up smiling and went behind the screen in the corner. Her voice came above the intimate rustle of water running in the basin:

“I hope you don’t think I brought you up here to—to seduce you.”

“I think maybe you did at first. But you got over the idea. I did any seducing that was done.”

“Isn’t it crazy? I was bawling like a baby, and then it happened. But it seemed so natural.”

“It’s natural.”

“But it happened so quick. I didn’t know anything like that could come so quick.”

“Anything like what?”

She came out from behind the screen, her face washed and shining, looking five years younger. She leaned over me and kissed me lightly. “I think you’re nice.”

“I’m not nice. But you are if you’ll let yourself be.”

She laughed in my face. “You look ridiculous. You’ve got lipstick all over you.”

“I wonder where it came from.”

“You know damn well where it came from.” She kissed me again. “Go and wash your face.”

When I had washed myself she was sitting in front of the dressing-table, brushing her hair again. The lucite brush flashed back and down, her curls rustling and blossoming under it.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “I can’t stand seeing you brush your hair. It makes me feel funny.”

“You’ll just have to feel funny, then. I’ve got to go downstairs.”

There were footsteps in the hall, and someone tried the door. Until then we might have been in a mountain cabin miles from anywhere, a stateroom on a ship at sea, a cell in the bowels of the earth. The meaning of the room returned like a bad taste in my mouth.

“Who is it?” she said, her eyes intent on her face in the mirror.

“Mabel. Is that you, Carla?”

“Just wait a minute, hon. I’ll be out right away.”

The voices of a man and a girl, talking and laughing, came through the door.

“I guess we’ve been in here a terribly long time.” She closed her lips on a piece of Kleenex and stood up, straightening the shoulder straps of her gown. Armored in powder and paint, her face had reverted to its original expression of hard impassivity. The easy change made my gorge rise. I
wanted to slap away her mask, tear her down into a crying girl again.

“Wait a minute,” I said sharply. “How much do I owe you?”

“Owe me?” She looked at me blankly. “You mean, for this?” Her single awkward gesture indicated the bed and her body, the incongruity and pain of the situation.

“How much?”

She had enough character to swallow the pain and master the situation. “I wouldn’t take money from you,” she said gently.

“But don’t you have to pay the management?”

“Sure. I can afford it. But you don’t understand. I’d rather starve than take money from you.”

“I don’t get it.” But I got it.

“You don’t have to get it.” Her eyes went soft as flowers. “You called me lover. You said it as if you meant it.”

Mabel’s hoarse whisper came through the door: “Can’t you hurry up, Carla? Baby here is getting awful impatient.”