Hunger and Thirst (30 page)

She looked very pretty with her cheeks so red from the cold, ringlets of her darkish blonde hair hanging around her face, framing it. When she smiled, it revealed her small, even teeth, very white.

In the lobby of her hotel, they stood face to face. He was almost sober by then. The cold in his body was beginning to make him shiver fitfully. He wasn’t going to kiss there with the desk man observing them in sleepy detachment, the door porter leaning against the wall.

She took his hand. “Good night Erick,” she said, “It was swell running into you again. Thanks a lot for taking me home.” She seemed suddenly remote, as though everything that went before had been forgotten.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

They stood in awkward silence a moment. Then he blurted out without the slightest desire to blurt out — “May I call you?”

She smiled pleasantly, antiseptically, he imagined, “Sure,” she said, “I’d like you to.”

“Okay,” he said.

There was a brief verbal scuffle while they straightened out the fact that if he forgot the number she gave him he could easily find it in the directory.

Then she squeezed his hand and her eyes were warm a moment. Then she walked into the elevator which yawned conveniently.

He walked back to his room, shivering, coat buttoned up to the neck, his feet getting numb.

What did I ask her if I could call her for? he wondered. Who
wants
to call her? I don’t want to have anything to do with her, the bitch. Just because she reminds me of Sally, should I …

Sally married.

Suddenly he realized that he’d been thinking of it all night without admitting it.

Back in his room, lying on the hard bed, he felt his chest tightening and he coughed hollowly and thought about Sally. He thought of Leo once. Of the fact that he’d never call her up. That was certain.

* * * *

And he wouldn’t have. It was just one of those rare circumstances which seemed to fall under the sole category of fate.

Lynn had known a girl at college named Virginia Greene. Erick had known her slightly. This girl had got a job with a woman travelogue producer after she graduated from college, and, since graduation, had been buzzing around the world making pictures with the woman, Adelaide Cross.

Now they were ready for the new year’s season of touring the country. And their first engagement happened to be in New York City. So, Ginny, remembering Lynn with some affection, got in touch with him and sent him four complimentary tickets to the performance—
Mexican Magic
.

Lynn first suggested just the two of them going and meeting Virginia after the performance. Then Marie found out and insisted on going. So, reluctantly, Lynn told Erick to get himself a date. Since Leo was the only woman in the city Erick knew, he called her. She said she was glad he called and would be glad to attend the travelogue with him and Lynn and Marie. So it was arranged.

* * * *

“Hi,” she said over the house phone, “Why don’t you go in the bar and order us a couple of sidecars.”

“What?” He frowned. “Oh. All right.”

“I’ll be right down.”

He moved into the dim bar that smelled of leather and liquor and smoke. He slid into a booth. He took out his wallet and looked at the three dollars in it. He hissed in displeasure. She must have known he had just about no money.

“Two sidecars,” he ordered irritably, almost asking, “How much are they?”

As the drinks were brought to the table he thought he might have told her his stomach was upset and only ordered one drink for her. He sat there fingering the stem of the thin glass in front of him, staring moodily at the table.

Money
, he thought, goddamn its endless power. He took a sip of the sharp tasting drink. Then he looked up to see if the girl who came into the bar was Leo. It wasn’t.

Leo came down twenty minutes later. By that time Erick was planning to get up and walk out on her. His body was tight with anger.

She slid in across from him. “Mmmm,” She said, picking up the glass, “Sidecar.”

“We have to meet them soon,” he said coldly.

“Sorry I’m late.” She tossed it off.

* * * *

It was a big place. Erick hadn’t thought it would be crowded but it was. Mostly with old people. They were filing in fast, like a sluggish stream wallowing up a dry bed.

They moved in with the aging assemblage. Men in tuxedoes and painful expressions on their faces telling everyone to go upstairs. They went down a side aisle regardless and found four seats together. They squeezed in past bony kneecaps giving their beg your pardons and slumped down.

“I think we got in the old folks home by mistake,” whispered Leo. He smiled thinly. If you don’t like it, get the hell out, his mind said to her. He saw Lynn looking around with a look of half-disguised amusement.

“Pretty sharp haah, Lynn,” he said.

Lynn smiled weakly.

“Haah, Lynn?”

“Quiet,” said Lynn.

Erick looked around. In front of him were two women who could have been nothing but school teachers. The place was a veritable hotbed of school teachers. He could almost smell them, a faint odor of starchy clothes and chalk and drying away.

The two in front of Erick were old maids. That they were shone from the unwrinkled and sexless features. In the botanical hats they wore over their greying hair. One of them, a skinny one, didn’t laugh. She trembled herself as though shaking a bug off her shoulders. The other one was acting out what happened in class that day.

Erick looked around at the theatre, feeling a sense of crowding and of noise. Hearing a hundred voices billowing like ocean spume, rising waves of sound. Seeing the walls rising sheer and parabolic into the high arched ceiling spaced with glittering circles of light. Seeing a chandelier encrusted with geometric china, shining like a crystalline moon. Deep-cut scrollwork on the walls. A stout harp, chipped with brittle age, leaned upon by round-bellied urchins leering down in narcissistic detachment at the squash of the assembly. Curves, elliptic plaster turns, sweeping falls of paint-thick walls with periodic announcements in sober-glassed red: EXIT. Tiers of side boxes dipping from the second balcony and ending at last, a hovering pinnacle of plush and tarnished brass, above the orchestra. And down again to the floor, the long segments of living ellipses that formed the rows of seats.

“Sure is old,” Leo said.

“What?” he asked.

“I said it sure is old.” Louder. The old women in front of them stopped speaking a moment as if she’d insulted their collective chastities. Erick couldn’t help smiling. It relaxed him.

As they spoke of various things; what he’d been doing, what she’d been doing, he heard the crackly voices of old folks all around. And felt out of place. Where were the young people, he thought, the vital people, the people who could change old things? Why did the old ones crowd themselves into one place and never have the young with them? Were they so apart?

He shook his head once.

The young were not here, never would be. They were out, by Christ, he thought, downing a fifth and jazzing up their old flames in a beat up rod on some lonesome country road. Or socking it in hard to the strains of some hirsute and dying combination that plied its ungodly wares in some neon dungeon on the edge of obscurity. Or in movies munching popcorn and holding hands and fumbling for brassieres. Or in darkened living rooms making the springs squeak. Was that the only way?

He looked at Leo. She was looking at him.

“Welcome back, Erick,” she said.

He smiled a little. “I drift,” he said, “I drift away.” She put her hand on his and said, “Welcome back,” again. Her hand was like a claw, he thought, not in appearance so much as in the way she drew the fingers in and sort of scratched his flesh without bruising it. They looked at each other and he noted her breast fall once sharply and her lips tremble momentarily.

“Club people,” Lynn said.

“An unnatural tribe of underdeveloped people who thrive on forced enthusiasms,” Erick defined.

“That’s it,” Lynn nodded. Then he looked around. “Time to start,” he said.

As if responding to his command, the lights flickered and went down. In the darkness Leo’s hand gripped out at Erick’s and she leaned over toward him. Her hand was hot. It caressed his. He felt something stir in his body.

An aging man, white crowned and portly, stalked out of the wings. He strode casually to the podium. There was a murmur of interest from wrinkled lips. Aha, Erick thought, this is nothing new I see. These are the old troupers, smug in their knowledge. This is their club. This is their lodge, their sewing circle, their political ward.

“Oh, God,” he muttered.

“What’s the matter?” Leo whispered.

He leaned over. “I think that the …” he stopped as he realized that she was writhing her head just a trifle as his breath touched her ear. He felt a lump rise into his throat and turned back front quickly as if he had come across something embarrassing not to be looked at.

All the old people murmured now. There was an expectant rustle. What in hell is the man going to do, the thought occurred to Erick, take the wing?

“And how are
you?”
said the man.

Giggles. Old women half swooning and clutching for their lace collars. Old men cackling deep in the hollow recesses of their bony chests. Raw bloody amusement, Erick thought.

The old man went on. The four of them were like strangers there, Erick thought. He began to imagine that they were the New Ones, the usurpers. The others would smell them out. They would rise up in arms and eject them, sever their heads from their bodies and poke them on the ends of their black umbrellas. They would burn them up in a fire of old snuff and asafetida bags.

The man spoke. Proudly. All was pride there that evening. All was grandiose and knowing. We are the ones, all the old people seemed to halloo from their beaming faces.

One hundred and twenty years of continuous seasons, said the man with a husky, patriotic ring in his voice. Mad applause, loud and raucous. People applauding themselves. Who can tell, Erick thought, maybe some of them were there when the first session began those one hundred and twenty years ago.

The man talked incessantly it seemed. Erick kept glancing over at Lynn and saw him sitting there as if anesthetized. A bored Marie kept trying to read a magazine she had with her but with notable lack of success since it was practically dark in the auditorium.

“We must support the Institute,” said the man.

Erick looked up and hoped it would not cave in on the spot. The man said they should go to all the functions of the institute and the museum and the concert series and the operas and so on. Then, after talking twenty minutes he said he wasn’t going to make a speech. He left after everyone had applauded various people in the institute and various customs of the institute and just plain the institute. Erick kept applauding vigorously, once crying “Hurrah!” in a fit of vicious levity. The old school teachers, suspecting cynicism, looked back at him from beneath irate eyebrows.

The applause rang on. Erick could just picture all the old men and women there. He could see each one of them sitting there, glorying in each moment, wishing to make each passing second of such import that even on their death beds it would be memorable and make the passing easier.

I’m young, he thought and will not understand. But life to the aged is a fast one, a cruelly rapid one. It flies past. The days are moments, the months are winks of the eye. It gains velocity the older you get until it goes so fast by your eyes that you cannot even see it clearly and it makes you want to cry aloud. And so they struggle hard to make each moment count for the most.

And this affair was glorious business for the old people. They were all together and they were going to see a show and they had a whole glorious season of shows and lectures and concerts and marionette shows and operas before them. Ahead were bounties, palmy days for the decrepit. A boon to the palsied.

So they applauded. They felt good. They felt as if every moment should be heralded, feted and given the honor so due it. To them, each moment was a precious jewel and it was held tightly and not let go of without a sigh and a backward look that brought tears to the rheumy eye. And if those moments could be made auspicious by singling them out, by applauding them away, by shouting their departure as a crowd shouts departing passengers away on an ocean vessel—then all to the good. Farewell, sweet moments! Never can you come again but I have treated you kindly. Treat me equally so in our next meeting when I am only a shade.

So they applauded. They felt good. And Erick tried to shut his eyes and sleep.

The man left the stage. Except for slight mumbles and chattering, silence fell down like a tent.

“Now do we see the pitcha Lynn?” Erick asked, “Now, haah, Lynn?”

“Shut up or I’ll buy you a season ticket to this place,” Lynn threatened.

“No, not that!” Erick begged.

The old ladies grew more irate. The rest of the audience talked elatedly.

The curtain went up. Erick murmured, “Uh-oh.”

It was a ballroom scene. There were pillars of canvas that trembled as if the ague were upon them. There were doors of canvas painted brown on the backdrop. There was, for reality, a great lumpy grand piano standing boldly and forcefully on the stage.

“Is that the movie projector Lynn?” Erick asked.

Lynn looked discomposed. “I thought this was a
picture
, Lynnie.” Marie said. Lynn looked disgusted. “So did I,” he said.

“Next week is the picture,” said Erick, “This weeks is the Mill’s Brothers.”

Four men filed out on stage, five. The four were middle-age young, held in by trusses. The fifth was old. They strode in manly strides. Over the wings and into the stage. They walked with a good walk, with a true walk. They had tuxedoes on. They smiled. They were a quartet. What else? Erick thought.

The fifth man was desiccated. He was an old grey potato in a black tuxedo. He had no hair. He plopped on the piano seat and struck at the keys savagely as though they were pit vipers all in a line. He bounced his fingers on the whiteness and the blackness. They keys screamed. There was noise. It was music. The men sang.