Marijuana Girl (16 page)
They met in a cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, where the continual tidal flow of people assured a paradoxical privacy. He was waiting for her when she came in, watched her walking across the table-littered floor, saw her looking about for him from behind dark green glasses, and finally caught her eye.
She came over and sat down at the table, letting the coat slip from her shoulders onto the chair back.
Tony knew enough about clothing to see that this was a different Joyce. She looked older in a way that he could not define. She made him seem almost kiddish.
For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Tony reached over and took her hand. "Joy, I've been trying so hard to find you--all this time."
"I didn't really want to be found," Joyce said. "How did you find out about me? Through Jerry?"
"Uh-hunh. He saw you at the Stuyvesant, wherever that is, and then he came out to see Frank, and Frank called me over and--well, here I am. I saw you once on the street. In Washington Square. You went uptown on a bus and I tried to follow you in a cab, but I lost you."
"How is Frank?" Joyce asked.
"All right." He had managed to keep that one under control, though it had plucked a chord of jealousy.
Joyce reassured him. "Don't look like that," she said. "He's a wonderful guy, but--not for me."
"What about us?"
"What do you mean, us?"
"I mean I want to see you. I want to be with you."
"Easy does it, baby," Joyce said. "You don't know about me anymore. I'm not Joyce Taylor from Paugwasset any more, I'm somebody else."
"Oh, stop it, honeybun. You just think you're different."
"Aren't people what they think they are?"
"Not if what they think is wrong."
"Look, Tony," Joyce said, "I'm not a good local talent any more. I've changed. And if you don't know about it, Jerry can tell you. Even Frank can. They know what happened. Especially Jerry. I'm bad, now. I'm different." There was a sort of a pleasure for Joyce in hearing the words coming out of her mouth--in hearing herself say these things. "You don't know what's happened to me. You don't know how I live. What I am. What I do."
"Yes, I do." He said it softly, not trying to keep the injury from showing in his face. "I know about the whole thing. About your--work. About the dope. I know all about you."
Then, because some inner feeling told him that it was the thing to do, he searched out the past in his mind and brought it up and drew it all there, in words, at the little table in the cafeteria. About Paugwasset, and boats, movies, and the Senior play in which they had appeared together. About Chester's and about Harry Reingold going to N.Y.U. with Tony. And then--more cautiously--about how Joyce's parents had come back from Europe, and how they were looking for her, and how he and Frank, with Jerry's information, had decided that whether they should be told, or not, was something for Joyce, herself to decide.
Then he said, "Honeybun, you've got to come back home. We all want you to come back. Honest."
It was as though he had pierced some kind of armor in which she had been girded. He saw she was crying and held out a handkerchief to her. She shook her head. Then she stood up. "I have to go, now," she said. "I can't stay any longer."
He didn't try to hold her. "When can I see you again?"
"I don't know. Where can I call you?"
He tried desperately to think of some place where he could be reached. But the N.Y.U. student is a transient in the Village. There is no center of communication. Frantically he searched his mind. There had to be some place, and it was clear that she didn't want him to call her. He didn't know why it was important for her that it be this way--that she call him and not he call her--but some intuition told him that it was.
Then he thought of a little craft shop on West Fourth Street. He would arrange it there, and then see them once a day. Maybe pay them something to take messages for him. He told her the name of the place, and then, because he wanted to be sure, went to a phone booth and looked up the number.
"All right," Joyce said. "I'll remember." And he watched her as she went out through the wheeling door into the hurrying avenue.
Tony saw Frank again. They sat in the livingroom of Burdette's house and drank rye with beer chasers, and Tony felt adultness coming into him as they talked--and as the soft tentacles of intoxication reached up into his mind.
"I don't know, Frank," he said. "I couldn't seem to reach her. It was like meeting somebody you haven't seen in a long time and you're still anxious to talk to them, but things have changed so much with them that everything you say has lost any kind of meaning. I couldn't even see her face, really, on account of those sunglasses."
"Sunglasses?"
"She even wore them indoors."
"She was high when you talked to her, then."
"How do you know?"
"Well, it wouldn't be surprising, anyway. The first thing that would happen when she knew she was going to meet you would be for her to get on, because she'd be afraid to face you unprotected. I imagine that for that one time, at least, it was a good thing. Because if she hadn't she would probably have run away, and hidden, and we'd never find her again."
"But what do I do?"
"Nothing."
"I've got to do something."
"Don't press her. Don't call her. Try not even to think about her. Just make sure that you get any message she does leave for you. And no matter what happens, meet her exactly when and where she tells you to. Understand?"
"Okay. I hope you know what I'm doing. I don't."
Tony waited.
Joyce went to see a doctor, somewhere in this period. She didn't expect him to be much help, and he wasn't. He recommended the substitution of ordinary sedation. Barbiturates. And gradual reduction of dosage with heroin. Even more strongly he recommended commitment to a private hospital, where all this would be seen to by medical authorities. And, as a last alternative, he suggested voluntary entrance in the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.
Joyce knew that much herself.
She tried the ex-junkies of her acquaintance. They knew more. "You got to make it cold turkey. There's no other way. You stop. You quit. The end. You can't make it otherwise. You can't cut down. You'll flip. You'll flip anyway. But you get it done."
And then there were the "Johns." She still needed the money, as she always had. Day after day, always money. Money to get straight. Money for food. Money for clothes. Always money.
She was making up her mind. You had to make up your mind. Even Roy Mallon told her, "Nothing does it, Joy, without you make up your mind. When you do, it's licked. You got to kick it--cold turkey. No tapering. No messing. Cold turkey."
But she didn't believe them. She cut it out for one day. Two days. And the third day she had to hit it again. And the next day was a postponement of stopping. And so was the next.
She wanted to call Tony. Sometimes in the morning, she lay on the sweat-damp sheets thinking of Tony, thinking how he was no farther from her than the telephone sitting there on the small table against the wall. She thought about that. And then she thought about the "Johns." Good guys, too. A little rigid. A little frightened--even of Joyce. Feeling guilty whenever they saw her, and, at the same time, wanting her, even wanting the fright and guilt of being with her. Not like Eric. With Eric it was love--of a sort--and braggadocio. He wanted to be able to talk about her. He wanted to be able to tell his friends how he had cured a bad girl of drugs, how he had made her over. He felt, somehow, that it would make for prestige. And then he would think to himself that, having done this, he had possession of her.
And that had to be avoided, too. Because of Tony.
Always Tony. And if she saw Tony again, it was the end of the "Johns." It had to be, because, even now, the thought of them and their possession of her--her ceaseless seduction of them--made the mornings harder, made the need for horse greater, made it that much harder ever to call Tony.
And then, one day, she did.
She met him in the cafeteria at N.Y.U., that second time. She was wearing sunglasses, and when she took them off her eyes looked like hard little balls, as though nothing were getting through them to her mind.
He kept telling her, "Joy, I love you. I really do. But you've got to get off this damned habit of yours."
It was all right when he didn't press. She could talk about getting off heroin, then. But if he tried to force her, tried to insist, she hardened up. That day she said, "Why should I? I'm no good to anybody. Not to anybody. I'm what they call a fallen woman. Really, that's what I am. A no good, down and out, rotten harlot." Her voice rose, and he had to take her out of the cafeteria. And then she said, "See, you're ashamed of me, aren't you?"
Tony shook his head.
She said, "Yes, you are. And you're right." Then she ran away from him, and it was another week before he saw her again.
When he did, she looked ill. Her eyes were sunken, and she seemed to have a cold. She kept yawning and sighing as he spoke to her.
He said, "Joy, you look sick. Let me take you to a doctor."
She shook her head. "No. I didn't have enough today. I--I took less. I'm trying to cut down."
He bent over and kissed her. Suddenly she was clinging to him, crying wildly. She said, "Help me, Tony. Just help me."
"I'll help," he said. "I'll always help."
That was when he knew she would make it.
But it was a long time before Joyce knew it, too. He tried to induce her to go back to Paugwasset with him, but she shook her head. "Not till I'm out of it, Tony." And the next time he saw her the sunglasses were back in place.
But the time came when she asked him to go home--to her room--with her.
The little room was stuffy and dingy and stark. Clothes were draped over the chairbacks, and the bed was a rumpled mess of blankets. He said, "Honeybun," softly, "can't you move to another place?"
Joyce said, "That's the thousandth time," smiling.
"The thousandth time I've asked you to move? No it isn't."
"Stupid! The thousandth time you've said honeybun. I'm keeping track."
They went down the ramp side by side, hand in hand, as people should who are deeply in love. It was a hot day, in mid-July, and the people on the platform, waiting for the red Long Island cars to open their doors, held coats on their arms.
Joyce said, "It feels awfully funny to know that home is so near. I always thought of it--all the time--as being somewhere way off, as far away as Europe." Tony squeezed her hand.
"Look," she said. "Well, I'll be darned. There's old Iris, up there. Dean Shay."
Tony looked. "Don't let her bother you."
"She doesn't," Joyce said, a little surprised.
"Look, honeybun," Tony said, "there's something I've got to ask you."
"What?"
"Will you marry me after I finish college?'
Joyce just nodded her head, and he kissed her. Hard. Right there on the platform.
The doors of the red train opened, and they scrambled for seats.
As the train slid through the tunnel under the East River, Tony said, "You won't be bothered about your parents any more, will you, honey?"
"I don't think so."
Then a voice from the aisle said, "Miss Taylor ... ?" A sort of imperative question.
Joyce looked up. Dean Shay was leaning over the edge of the seat, swaying with the movement of the train. Joyce said, "Hello, Miss Shay."
The dean smiled, a little embarrassed. "I've been trying to get in touch with you for some time. It's lucky I found you like this. I just wanted to tell you that on sober second thought Mr. Mercer and I decided last fall that--well, that you needn't repeat your senior year if you wanted to go on to college. We decided that you could be allowed to take a special examination. It wouldn't be exactly fair to let things go all to pot over that one little incident."
Joyce smiled up at her. "They didn't, Miss Shay. I just thought they did."
THE END
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