Epitaph For A Tramp (4 page)

I supposed she’d known the place from when she’d lived in the Village before we were married. I went past the doorway once and saw her standing in the crush at the bar. If she was meeting any one guy in particular he wasn’t doing any downhill schuss to get there.

I went back and got the Ford and parked it a few doors down from the entrance. I walked down the opposite side of the street to the liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. When I came back past the doorway this time three or four of the guys near her were working on it. It was all palsy enough so that she was laughing about something. I went back to the car and opened the pint.

People drifted in and out or along the street. So did their conversation, and it was too muggy to roll up the window:

“—Look, if you can call
my
mother Jocasta, and
me
narcissistic—”

“
—Talk about paranoia—”

“—The really accomplished Mexican painters, like Orozco and Tamayo—”

The bohemians. The intellectuals. Tamayo and Tamayo and Tamayo, seeps in this petty paste from plate to plate. If they stopped that talk for three consecutive minutes the world would blow up.

“—Do I know Willie? Why, he quotes me three separate times in one chapter—”

“—If I saw Heathcliff on the street I’d just die—”

It got to be ten. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock. You can drink a goodly amount of whisky in that time, say a pint. I was saving a buck or two by drinking it
out of the bottle instead of across a bar. Be sensible that way for another decade and I could probably even manage that two-week cruise to the Bahamas I’d been dreaming about all those years.

It was 1:49 when I tagged them. He was a tall slender kid with fairly good shoulders under his denim jacket. He was wearing tan slacks and a black knit tie and white sneakers and if someone had told him that the frat was holding a stag beer party he would have trotted off on the spot. Nobody told him. She had him by the arm and when they came up the stairs onto the sidewalk she said something and he laughed.

They came past the car. She never saw me. They were both laughing now but she was not that tight. She walked easily and when they were turning the corner I saw his arm go around her hip.

They walked two more blocks and then they went into a rundown building with a grocery store on the street floor. I was sixty yards behind them on the other side of the street. Next to me a sign in a plumber s window said, IS THERE WATER IN YOUR BASEMENT?

After a minute a light went on two flights up. Third floor front. I lit a cigarette. The grocer was pushing haddock that year. I smoked the cigarette hard. I was still trying to finish it when the light went out again.

I went across.

There were a lot of bells and a lot of names. Lonergan. Goldman. Zachery. Hoy. Cranley. Philkins. When I was nine years old an avant-garde juvenile delinquent named Philkins knocked half the spokes out of the front wheel of my Western Flyer with a baseball bat. Or maybe that was Filkins. There was no lock on the outside door.

There was one naked light bulb for each flight. There was a faint odor of turpentine. The walls were a drab schoolroom
brown. The door I wanted was like any other dingy door in any other dingy walk-up anywhere. I wondered what I was doing there.

I rang the bell hard, hearing it blast inside the apartment.

A minute passed. If they had the turpentine I wondered why they didn’t get some paint. I heard him padding toward me. “Who is it?” he said through the door.

“Delivery.”

“Huh? Here?” The door opened. “You want Cranley, mister?”

He was peering out at me, tying the sash around a blue robe. He was a good-looking boy, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. The line of his nose was sharp and straight where the light from the hall cut it half into shadow. I would not have had to move my right hand more than ten inches from where it lay near the bell to change all that.

“You sure you want Cranley, mister?”

“Go back inside,” I said. “Tell her it’ll be cleaner if she’s got something on when I come in.”

“What? Hey now, what is this? Who do you think you’re—”

I took him by the front of the robe, moving close to him. “Maybe you better say you never saw her before tonight,” I told him. “Maybe you better get that over with first.”

He got with it quickly enough then. I let him go and he edged away a step or two, his eyes going toward a closed door that would be a bedroom and then back to me. He was pushing six-one which made him almost as tall as I am but I had him in all the other ways and he knew that. He was about as thick through the chest as a breakfast lox. He swallowed once, scared.

“Look,” he said then, “if you’re her husband, honest, I didn’t know. I never did see her before, really. She said she was divorced and she—”

“You got a can?”

“What? Yes, sure, right over there—”

“Get in it,” I said. “Get in it and lock the door and scrub the bowl or something until you hear us leave.”

He didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to write home about the experience but he went. I waited until he closed the door and then I walked across and opened the other one.

The candy-striped skirt and the white blouse and her underclothes were thrown over a straight-backed chair. She was lying across a rumpled spread with her back toward me, looking at a magazine. One small shaded bulb threw a tarnished circle of light over the bed, and if I’d been Leonardo da Vinci I probably would have started fumbling around in a panic for paper and crayons.

She thought I was the kid. “Aren’t you lucky,” she said. “People bringing you surprises in the middle of the night.”

“What was it, a race?” I said. “Do you get a trophy for it?”

She hadn’t moved, not consciously. I saw the muscles tighten beneath the flesh of her shoulders as her arms went rigid to the elbows beneath her. Then her head came around slowly. Her face was the color of ice cubes.

“You had to go marry a cop,” I said.

She came apart then. Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled. I had never seen her cry before. It broke me up real bad. “Wrap it up,” I told her. I shut the door on her and went back into the other room.

I stood there, feeling the whisky in my stomach and seeing the place for the first time. She’d found herself an adult one. He collected things. There were lanterns from construction barriers, signs that said
No Parking 8 AM. to 6 P.M.
Near the door there was a cross-wired Department of Sanitation street-corner trash basket big enough to turn over and cage a walrus in. He didn’t have the walrus but it wouldn’t have taken
more than a word. The kid’s jacket was hanging over a chair and the label said
Whitehouse and Hardy, Fifth Avenue,
so good old Dad had paid for that the same way he was paying for the graduate school. There were enough books to repave the Jersey Turnpike.

There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it.
G P. Cranley,
it said at the top,
Comp. Lit. 207, Page 4,
and under that it said:

And thus it is my conclusion that
The Recognitions
by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since
Moby Dick,
a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—

She was dressed. She went straight to the door and out without saying anything and I followed her down. When we got to the street she turned the wrong way and I said, “This way.” I said, “Here,” when we got to the car. I ran a red light on Hudson Street and said, “Nuts,” when some guy yelled at me. So I won. That made four more words than she had said.

Coming out of Central Park I had to wait for a light at 66th. “He didn’t even know my name,” she said then.

“That’s all right,” I told her. “I didn’t once either. Maybe something lovely will grow out of it for you both.”

She sucked in her breath. I found a parking slot directly in front of the apartment and she went in ahead of me with her own keys while I was locking the car. I wondered why I was bothering to do that with a rented job. She was in the good chair with one small light on when I came up, sitting with her head on her chest and her arms dangling, looking like a thrown coat.

I made myself a drink, spilling an inch and a half of Jack

Daniels into a kitchen tumbler and taking it without ice. It had the same effect as a short carrot juice. I went out and sat across from her.

You could hear the busses out on Third Avenue.

“Why?” I said.

She said nothing.

“I thought it was good. Plodding, dull-witted old Harry, I thought nothing could be better. And all the while I—”

“It
is
good. But I’m just—”

“Good, yeah. It must be remarkable. You’re just what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” Her voice was ragged and she looked up at me. I stared at the rug.

“You go away,” she said then.

“Good God—three, four times in a year?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whenever you do, the minute you’re gone, the minute I’m alone I start pacing. I start walking around this room as if I don’t belong here, as if I’m a stranger.” She was talking from very far away. “It’s as if something is pushing me. I’ve got to get out of here. Just out. And I can’t stop myself, I want to be with—with I don’t know who. It doesn’t make any sense and I can’t explain, I—”

“How many times?”

“Almost every time.” I heard her swallow. “You were in Phoenix four days. When you were in New Orleans it was five. And just now three when you were in Chicago. Almost every one of those nights.”

I didn’t feel sore. I didn’t feel cheated or betrayed or outraged or anything else. I felt nothing. I was sitting there hearing her say all that and somehow it did not have anything to do with me. I knew it would have something to do with me later but it didn’t now. I got up and poured myself another drink and then I came back and sat there again.

“The same guys? How many guys?”

“They’re different each time. A different one each night, Harry. I see one and then they want to make dates but I won’t. It’s all confused, like if it’s only one night it’s not so bad, as if I’m not really doing anything wrong if I don’t let any of them get to mean anything. I go into bars and I meet them the way I did tonight and I… Oh, God in heaven, I—”

She had her face in her hands. She was sobbing and saying, “Help me, help me.” She said it over and over. And four plus five made nine and three made the dozen. And tonight was thirteen. I stood up.

“Harry, I’m sick. Something’s the matter with me. It’s all right when you’re here, when I’m with you, but the minute you’re gone I’m—”

I went into the bedroom. I dug out a suitcase and opened it on the bed. She came into the doorway.

“I’ll go,” she said. She had stopped crying. “It was your place before I came. I can stay with my mother and Estelle until I find someplace else.”

I didn’t answer. I did not have a particularly distinct concept of the ethics involved in that kind of thing.

“It will be easier that way,” she said. “I’ll take one bag. I can come back when you’re at the office and get the rest.”

I went past her and into the living room. She did not take long. She came out with the suitcase and stood it near the door. She hung there like something wet on a hook.

“It’s going to sound pretty silly, isn’t it? But I—I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Forget it,” I said. “You told me all about it that first night on the beach, all about the other ones. I didn’t buy anything without a label on it.”

I wasn’t looking at her. Outside they were running every bus on the line.

“I deserve that and more,” she said. “But that was different,

Harry. Before we were married I wasn’t hurting anyone but myself. I didn’t want to hurt you. Oh, dear God, I didn’t! I—
”
Her voice broke. She was sobbing again with her head turned, softly now. “Harry, I love you, I—”

“That’s swell,” I told her. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll remember it every time I think about you in that crummy room down there tonight with your drawers flung over that chair and your bare butt sprawled all over the bed. ‘Aren’t you lucky, people bringing you surprises in the middle of the night. And, oh, by the way, my name’s Cathy. Mrs. Cathy Fannin but don’t worry about that, the sucker’s gone chasing off someplace and—
^m

She missed the best part of it. I hadn’t even worked up a light sweat. The door had not swung shut all the way and I could hear her on the steps. Then the downstairs latch clicked and after that there was the sound of a car door closing that would be a cab and then there was nothing.

The glass smashed low against the wall across the room when I heaved it. The whisky left a stain which I finally scrubbed off but there was a small permanent mark where the paint had been chipped. The mark was still there a year later when Cathy came back up the stairs for the first time since that night and giggled once in the hallway and then fell into my arms and died.