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“I was
not
jealous! I was bored!”

“Those drinks hit me hard. I didn’t have too many of them. Maybe I became too much of the big old party boy. But I didn’t make any passes at anybody, and I didn’t even think of making any passes at anybody. I danced. It’s a social custom or something. So I get the word that this is a very ordinary marriage.
I guess if people go around thinking a thing like that, it comes true.”

“Oh, Gil!”

“All right. You’re over there crying. There’s tears on my face too. This is what they call the first quarrel, I guess. But I don’t like this ripping and tearing at each other, this trying to find the soft spots so you can really hurt.”

“Oh, I don’t like it either. I hate it, darling!”

“I don’t think it’s so ordinary.”

“I think it’s … terribly special.”

And when he went over and slid in beside her, she turned into his arms with a little shuddering sob, and he kissed her salty eyes and both sides of the small nose, and the tip of the nose, and her lips, and the sides and hollow of her throat, and they mended all their wounds with a special lingering sweetness.

For Gam Torrigan, the departure from the original plan of dignified restraint was so gradual that he was not aware of when it happened nor, in retrospect, could he remember which specific act was out of keeping with his intended design. Surely, when they had played a fast number, his demonstration of the Cossack dance, staying well down on his heels, kicking his legs out strongly, had been a display of skill, not a drunken exhibition. Nor, when he had improvised the bongo drums from kitchen utensils, had he been offensive. Though the musicians had not seemed appreciative of his efforts, it had been for a time a popular diversion, with others taking his place. Perhaps the edge had been reached when he had sat out in the patio court on the stone bench with Mary Jane. Mary Jane kept saying she had lost her best friend in all the world and then she had wept. The tears of this lovely child had touched him deeply and so he had wept too, gulping and snuffling, the tears trickling down into his beard. He had held her gently and tenderly, without any motive but to comfort her. She had clung to him, and they had rocked and mourned, and he had kissed her as a father might.

But the next incident had been unquestionably questionable. He had looked at the starry sky and had seen a section of the terminal N and a top slice of the O in EL HUTCHINSON, dark against the sky. And his eye had wandered to a possible route to the roof. A low wall, and a higher wall, a low roof and a cornice and the high roof.

Mary Jane, sniveling against his chest said, “Everything I ever do turns out miz’able.”

“Hey!”

“What you want, Gamble?”

“Bet if you got up there you could sit on those big letters and look all over hell.”

She stared up. “Lovely idea! Get the good old ice ax and the crampons. We got to climb it because it’s there.”

“My feeling exactly.”

The climb was easy. After he helped her over the cornice, they stood up and looked around. They could see the car lights on the main highway, all the lights of the city, and the little beads of light coming winding down the mountain.

“Wow!” she said.

“A perfectly adequate comment, my dear. It has the proper semantic ring about it. Say it again.”

“Wow!”

They walked to the front of the roof and looked down. “Cars look like beetle bugs,” she said. “Shiny old beetle bugs. Gives me an icky feeling I want to jump.”

“Inconsiderate. Messy.”

They investigated the huge concrete letters. They were eight feet tall, square cut, festooned with the frayed wire and the broken and burned-out bulbs from the brave days when the sign had been lighted. The big letters made for lovely games. They played like children. He would think of a word beginning with each letter, and she would drape herself on, in or against the letter in a pose to illustrate that word. She was particularly successful with
horror
and
lazy
, and he banged his big hands together in applause. Then they sent code to each other. This was accomplished by trotting back and forth and pausing in front of the desired letter, and slapping your hands once to indicate the end of a word. But they ran out of words. and it was tiring. He sat in the curve of the U and she sat in the curve of the O.

“One thing wrong up here, Gambelino.”

“What’s that?”

“Terrible room service.”

“We could let down a rope. Some lovely co-operative gentleman might tie a bottle on the end.”

“No rope.”

“You have a practical mind. Practicality upsets me.”

“Maybe we can unravel something. Make a rope. You wearing anything unravelly? Can’t use anything I got on, Gambelino. Be left up here bare as a wood nymph.”

“That vision would be artistically sound but socially undesirable. And I am wearing khakis. They don’t unravel.”

“Maybe we could weave something out of that beard. What the hell is under that beard, Torrigan? I’ll just bet you’ve got one of those chipmunk mouths and no chin at all.”

“Young woman, I have a powerful face. I haven’t seen it in years, but I bear a distinct resemblance to Burt Lancaster.”

“So why goop it up with hair?”

“Your questions are impertinent and personal. But as you are too young to know better, I shall answer you. It is a reverse play, my pet. Artistic gamesmanship. Because it is obviously trite for me to wear a beard, a rather evident cliché, it would be reasonable for me to go about clean-shaven. So I take it one step further, back to the beard. In addition, it leaves me in a constant state of readiness for any historical pageant that may pop up. The hundredth anniversary of the American Garden Club or something. In addition, I find a sensuous pleasure in combing and brushing it. I am not a slave to a razor. It cushions any blow at the jaw. It gives me freedom of action because it advertises the fact that I am a practicing eccentric. It gives my most trivial comment an emphasis of portentousness. And it attracts women.”

“Hah! Like Gloria?”

“You are making sport of me, my child. I knew the lady long ago and far away. I will break, for once, my inflexible rule against speaking of old affairs, particularly to a minor. She was married then. And full of an antic, reckless joy. It was in Maine, and we could hear the sea from my windows. But, to my disappointment, child, she has aged very poorly. Not in appearance. But in the texture of her spirit. There is no more tenderness, no flair for the romantic nuance. She brings to the gentle arts of love all the implacable purpose of a riveting machine. She is a truly alarming organism. What, I ask you, is dalliance without the flash of wit, the clever turn of phrase, the lazy heart-to-heart conversations? But I bore you.”

“Gamelino, you are a hairy fraud.”

“Of course.”

“I am not attracted by a beard. I want to run through there barefoot, pushing a mowing machine.”

“The mental picture sickens me.”

“So leave us go get a drink to settle your stomach, Torrigan.”

“I think of you as my lovely daughter.”

They went to the edge of the roof. Mary Jane started down first. She stood on the cornice and turned to put her foot down to the ledge and lost her balance. She teetered for a moment, her back to the drop, arms waving madly. And just as she started to go, Gam grabbed a flailing arm and yanked her back. She huddled against his chest, breathing hard, and he held her tightly.

“Lovely daughter nearly becomes small smear on stone,” she said weakly.

“If you knew how sensitive I am, you wouldn’t do things like that.”

“I am sober. I am humbled. I’m sorry I bad-mouthed your beard.”

He released her. “Perhaps you will have to be lowered on a rope.”

“When they crack up the aircraft, you send them right on up again into the wild blue stuff, man. Don’t think I haven’t got eyes for this fine solid roof, but the bar service is nowhere.”

She moved with great care. He followed her down. After they jumped down from the final wall they bowed and shook hands. “The Big Top will miss you, Madame Scaloppini,” he said.

“I have make zee farewell pair-formance. Giff me my severance pay.”

“But first we shall become dronk.”

She took his arm and they marched inside.

It was about that time that the little blackouts began. When they had first begun, years before, they had terrified him. He was afraid that while the conscious mind was blacked out, he might do some unspeakable act of violence. And he was afraid that they signified the beginning of serious alcoholism. But, through canny questioning of his friends, he had learned that there seemed to be no detectable difference between his actions while still functioning and when blacked out. And, as the affliction did not seem to become worse as time went by, he had gradually come to accept it as a standard phase of his drinking times, a personal idiosyncrasy. But when he looked back over an evening of periodic blackouts, it was as though he looked at a movie where the projection bulb burned out at intervals.
When it burned out, however, the projector kept functioning. So when the light would come on again, the thread of the plot was lost.

The light came on once and he found himself having an involved argument with John Kemp and Barbara Kilmer about communication in art and the responsibilities of the artist to his culture. At another bright interval, he was standing in the lobby and Mary Jane was vividly angry at him. She was shouting into his face, backing him up step by step as he protested feebly. She was explaining forcibly that it would be a waste of rope to hang him and a waste of lead to gut-shoot him. He gathered that he had offended her by making certain disparaging remarks about Texas and Texans.

In one most curious sequence which seemed to bear no relation to the rest of the evening, he was in a room he did not recognize, and he was sitting on a bed with a glass in his hand. The drooping, indifferent Margot sat in a weary wicker armchair, talking endlessly in her flat British monotone. Her pale slender legs were drawn up into the chair and her only garment was a towel with wide blue-and-white stripes knotted around her waist. She had a glass in her hand and as she talked she ran it up and down her forearm and occasionally touched it to her cheek. He sat there nodding agreement to talk he found almost impossible to follow. It seemed to be a long story about some American officer in London a long time ago and what it had done to her marriage. She seemed to have a special talent for being able to recall every dull and insignificant detail, the date and time of day of all telephone calls, and precisely what she was wearing at the time, and when the kippers at breakfast had been too salty, and the exact roads and mileages and villages they had passed through when they had driven together to someplace or other.

He looked at her, and saw how nicely made she was, how slimly delicate, how smooth and flawless her skin texture. He looked at her with no more desire than if he had been staring at a figurine that held up a lamp. His jaw creaked as he kept stifling yawns. And he began to feel an enormous sympathy for that young major so-and-so if he had had to long endure this total recall of statistical, gastronomical and geographical trivia. There was a crushed-petal look about her long slim face, a bruised look that seemed to promise a dissertation on evil
when she opened her mouth. But the flat dreary voice went on and on and on.

“It’s been so good to talk with someone mature, Mr. Torrigan. Someone with wisdom and sympathy. Everyone seems so hurried.” She uncurled her long legs and stood up slowly. She put her empty glass on the bureau and drifted over to the other bed, in slow ivoried slimness. She unknotted the towel and took it off, stretched out on the bed and placed the towel across her middle.

She yawned and said from the shadows, “I’m really teddibly widdy. D’you mind too awfully much, darling?”

“Mind? No, I don’t mind. Not at all.”

“It’s act’ly despicable to encourage you, darling, and then disappoint you, but really I’m emotionally exhausted from pouring my heart out to you. Catch the light like a dear.”

Gam turned out the light and heard her sigh as he quietly closed the door behind him. As he turned, a figure sprang at him in the dimness of the hall, and before he could protect himself a hard fist crashed against his jaw. He recognized Paul Klauss. The smaller man stood in front of him, fists clenched, face distorted.

“What’s the matter?” Gam asked.

“You know damn well what’s the matter. I hope you’re satisfied. I hate every damn one of you. I’ll get even with all of you somehow. You’re a dirty stinker, Torrigan!” And Paul Klauss began to cry. He struck again, and hit Gam solidly in the same place as before.

“You keep doing that and I’m going to …”

But Klauss had turned on his heel and he went scurrying up the corridor, his shoulders hunched, sobbing audibly.

The final flash of memory was the most distasteful. Kemp and Ardos were walking him to his room, his arms across their shoulders. They held onto his wrists. He was trying to make his legs work, and it was a strange sensation. Like riding a rubber bicycle.

And he was saying, braying, “Rumors are flying. And I’m not deny-innng la da da da dut da dada dado …”

“Easy, old horse,” John Kemp said.

And the world faded away again as they got him through the doorway of his room.

* * *

After Torrigan had been bedded down, John went back out to the lobby. Barbara was waiting for him. “Get the key?” She nodded and handed him the key to the station wagon. “And how was
she
doing?”

“Pretty good, considering.”

Rosalinda had disappeared. The bar was empty. The marimba player lay under his marimba. One guitar player was curled up nearby. The other sat on the floor in a corner, plucking slow sad chords, his nose almost against the strings.

After surveying the situation, Harvey, Monica, John and Barbara had a policy discussion. If they could be restored to partial life, it would be best to take them down into town in the wagon. If not, they might as well be left right there. Every bottle on the bar was completely empty.