Barbary Shore (2 page)

A small room, not more than eight feet wide, one had to edge sideways between the desk and the bed to reach the window. The paint was years old and had soiled to the ubiquitous yellow-brown of cheap lodgings. Its surface blistered and buckled, large swatches of plaster had fallen, and in a corner the ceiling was exposed to the lath. Cinders drifted up from the dock area
below the bluffs to cover the woodwork. The sash cord was broken, and the window rested in all its weight upon two empty beer cans which served as support. Even at four dollars a week the bargain was not conspicuous, but I was enamored of it.

I would sit on the bed and watch Dinsmore sort his papers, scatter dust from the desk to the floor, and mop his face. He was a short stocky man whose favorite position was astraddle a chair, chin resting on the back, and his body bent forward. He looked like a football lineman in this posture, and his head, which resembled a boxer dog, could hardly contradict the impression. Having told him nothing about myself, and indeed I was hardly in the habit, he made the assumption that I was a war veteran, and I never bothered to explain there might be some doubt. Dinsmore was happier this way in any case. Like so many writers he had very little interest in people, and if they could serve his didactic demands, a pigeonhole was all he required. I had been installed immediately in the one he undoubtedly labelled Postwar Problems.

“I’ll tell you, kid,” he would say, “it’s a shame the way people got to live doubled up in rooms, and lots of you GI’s”—his voice was pitched deferentially when he spoke about veterans—“the ones who’re married and living with their in-laws and their marriages are going to pot all cause they can’t get a lousy apartment. It’s the fault of the real estate interests, and it’s a crime that we fight an anti-fascist war and don’t clean out the fascists in our own house, but I’ll tell you, Mikey, they’re making a mistake, they’re cutting their own throat, cause the veterans aren’t going to stand for it.”

I never knew whether he believed this, or if it came from the desire to vindicate his plays. The poorest strain in his writing had been the kind of superficial optimism prevalent during the war, which still lasted posthumously among the many playwrights and novelists whose lack of political sophistication was satisfied by dividing all phenomena into Dinsmore’s
categories. At bottom it was only a temporary mode of that great crutch to the simple-minded:—the right guy and the wrong-o—and already to the confusion and the eventual danger of men like Willie the names had changed.

Willie kept his head down, however, and his eye to the measure. His hero was still the young anti-fascist who had come back from the war and gave the speech about the world he fought to make. The speech was not new, but an old speech never hurt a playwright, and Dinsmore doubled his success in a thematic sequel whose young veteran told the audience what kind of world he wanted for his infant.

It will be apparent by now, I fear, that I was not precisely infatuated with Willie. He had a home, he had a family, he had a reputation, and any one of the three was more than I could expect. But Willie found other homes as well. He had the kind of mind which could not bear any question taking longer than ten seconds to answer. “There are the haves and the have-nots,” Willie would declare; “there are the progressive countries and the reactionary countries. In half the globe the people own the means of production, and in the other half the fascists have control.”

I would offer a mild objection. “It’s just as easy to say that in every country the majority have very little. Such a division is probably the basis of society.”

Willie reacted with a hurt smile and a compassionate look in his face. Whenever I contradicted him, he would change the subject. “You take the theatre. It’s sick, Mikey, you know why? All commercialized. What we need is a people’s theatre again, you know where you pay a quarter, tie-ups with unions, school kids, where you can show the facts of life. A worker’s theatre.”

“Precisely.”

“The problem is to give it back to the people. The classical theatre was always progressive. Art is a people’s fight.”

To elaborate at such length upon Willie is not completely necessary, but I wanted to give a small portrait of him because he was the first person to mention Beverly Guinevere to me, and his description had its effect long after I knew it was untrue, and colored many nuances. If I had had any judgment, I would have known that Willie was innocent and his perceptions about people had no more chance of being accurate than a man who hurls a stone at a target he cannot see. But to possess judgment was another matter. My face allowed people to think that I was only twenty, and in a reciprocal of that relation I often felt like an adolescent first entering the adult world where everyone is strange and individual. I was always too ready to mistake opinion for fact.

The first time I heard Guinevere’s name Willie was in the process of using it as a springboard for one of his lectures. “Someday,” Willie threatened, “I’ll sic the landlady on you.” He paused, rocking the chair on its legs. “She’s a character, wait’ll you meet her. I’ll tell you, Mikey, when you find out the score you’ll stay away from her.”

“Why?”

“If she gets alone in the same room with you, you won’t be safe.” He paused again. “Guinevere’s a nymphomaniac.”

I remember that I grinned. “What happened to you, Willie?”

“Nothing. She’s not my type. You know she’s kind of old, and she’s fat.” He pursed his lips judiciously. “And then I’ll tell you, Mikey, extramarital relations are different when you’re married, I mean there’s the psychological angle to consider. And when you got kids there’s always the danger of disease, of going blind, having a leg fall off. I may not have been a GI, but I saw that venereal movie, too.” And intrigued, he shook his head. “You remember the guy who couldn’t talk, who just whistled? Holy Cow, I tell you we need Health Clinics all over the country, especially in the South. I made a tour
through there last year to gather some material, and
Jesus
, the ignorance.”

He massaged his chin, fully embarked upon a lecture. “Conditions are brutal in this country—slums, juvenile delinquency. I mean when you add it up there’s an indictment, and that’s just counting the physical part of it. You take Guinevere, someone like that, it’s a psychological problem, a psychological casualty I think of it. I mean I can see her side of it, Mikey. She’s lonesome, that’s all. You know she made sort of an advance, and I repulsed her with a few well-chosen words, just a couple of gags, but I guess it hurt her feelings. People always want you to think well of them, so she started to tell me her side of it, and she hasn’t got any intellectual resources, and there’s a lot of housework cleaning up this barn. You know the typical American housewife with the success story in reverse. I’ll bet she reads
True Confessions.
”

“You don’t make her sound very attractive.”

“Oh, she’s got sex appeal of a sort, but she’s a crazy dame. I might have entertained ideas, but there’s her husband involved, and although I never met the guy I think it’s kind of sneaky seeing a dame when her husband sleeps in the same building.”

This is the woman Dinsmore advertised as having the power to give his cubbyhole away. Witness my surprise—for I had become convinced that he would finally end by awarding his room to some other acquaintance—when Willie came to the dormitory one morning, and told me he was leaving for the country. I dressed quickly and ate breakfast in the cafeteria while Willie sat across from me, scattering his cigarette ash in my saucer. “Look,” he said, “Guinevere could have already promised the first vacancy. We’ll have to figure out a plan.”

“I hope it works,” I told him.

We walked over to the rooming house. For a June morning the sidewalks were still cool, and the brownstone houses
were not without dignity. The spring air contained a suggestion of wood and meadow, and it was possible to imagine the gardens and the trellised arbors as they must have existed fifty years ago. We were on a street which led toward the bluffs, the docks beyond, and the bay. Across the harbor through a morning haze the skyline reared itself in the distance, while down the river an ocean liner was approaching its dock.

Mrs. Guinevere, I discovered, had the basement apartment with its customary entrance tucked beneath the slope of the front stairway, its private gate and miniature plot whose stony soil was without even a weed. As Dinsmore pressed the bell, I could hear it ringing inside.

From the apartment there was the sound of footsteps approaching, then a suspicious pause. A voice shrieked, “Who is it?”

Willie shouted his name and I could hear the bolt slide slowly open. “Come on, come on,” he said raucously, “what do you think, we got all day?”

“Oh, it’s you,” a woman screeched back. “Well, what the hell do you want?” The door opened a crack, a set of plump little fingers curled around it, and a pair of eyes and the tip of a nose appeared in the slit. “You always have to pick a time when I’m busy.” Slowly, provocatively, the face protruded a little further and two curls of extraordinarily red hair peeped around the door.

“Come on out. I want you to meet a writer friend, Mikey Lovett.” Dinsmore made the introductions to the doorpost. I said hello somewhat foolishly, and her eyes stared back at me. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Lovett,” she said in the unexpected and dulcet cadence of a telephone operator. “I hope you’ll excuse the way I’m dressed.” With that, she swung the door open as though to unveil a statue. I was startled. Dinsmore had poorly prepared me. She was quite pretty, at least to my taste, pretty in a flamboyant cootchy way, so that my first impression was of no more
than a fabulous crop of red hair and a woman beneath, waggling her hips. Undeniably short and stout, her limbs were nevertheless delicate, her face was not heavy, and her waist, respectably narrow, tapered inward from her broad shoulders in an exaggeration which was piquing.

“It takes me forever to get dressed,” she grumbled. “Boy, you men are lucky not having to fool around with a house.” Her voice began the first sentence as a telephone operator and finished the second as a fishwife; once again she was shouting. Yet in the silence which followed this, she closed her large blue eyes for several seconds and then opened them again with counterfeit simplicity. Obviously she considered this to be of considerable effect, but since her eyes protruded a trifle, the benefit was somewhat doubtful.

The silence served as a floor upon which she and Dinsmore could exchange a minuet of looks and glances and innuendo, while a smile flickered between them. Standing to one side, I had the opportunity to look at her closely. It was impossible to determine her age, but I was certain she was less than forty.

“Yeah, it’s tough,” Dinsmore grinned at last. His voice rasped more when he spoke to her. “Still, you look good … good.”

“Aw, you.” After the introduction she had paid me no attention, but now, hand on hip, she wheeled in my direction. “If I was to listen to this guy’s line,” she said, “he’d be up my skirts in two minutes.”

“You hope,” Dinsmore said.

She laughed loudly with boisterous good humor, and I had the impression she might have nudged him in the ribs if I were not there. Her thin lips pursed, but this was beneath the other mouth of lipstick which was wide and curved in the sexual stereotype of a model on a magazine cover, and seemed
to work in active opposition to the small mobile lips beneath. “Boy, you writers,” she snorted, “you think you own the world.”

Dinsmore threw up his hands in a pantomime of being rebuffed, and then, the manner satisfied and the preamble concluded, his tone changed. “Listen, Guinevere, you’re a pretty good scout, how about doing us a favor?”

“What?” It was apparent the word “favor” had few pleasant connotations to her.

“I’m giving up my room for a couple of months. How about letting Mikey have it?”

She frowned. “Listen, I can get five dollars extra if I put up a sign and rent it out.”

“Why should the landlord be the profiteer?” He waved his finger at her. “Suppose I kept paying for the room, and Mikey stayed in it. That’d be okay.”

She shrugged. “I can’t stop you.”

“Well, why make me go to the trouble? Why don’t you just let the kid take it.” He whacked her playfully on the hip. “Come on, be a good sport.”

“Aw, you writers, you’re all nuts,” she jeered. “No sooner get rid of one of you, then I get another.”

“I really could use the room,” I said. I smiled tentatively.

Perhaps she was examining me. After a moment or two she nodded her head angrily, and said, “All right. You can have it. But the rent’s got to be paid every Thursday, four dollars paid in advance of the week to come, and no hot air about it.” In the correct style of a landlady her voice had been flat and authoritative, although immediately afterward as though to salvage someone’s good opinion, she whined defensively, “I can’t be bothered chasing around after you guys, I’ve got a lot of work to do here, and Lord knows I get paid little enough for it, and you got to co-operate.”

“I’ll pay the money on time,” I said.

“Well, let’s hope so.” She had yielded grudgingly, but now that business was terminated, she smiled. “I’ll see you around, Mr. Lovett. Linen day is also on Thursday. You get one new sheet a week, and you can help me if you strip the bed before I get up there.” This, however, was said with heavy allure.

We exchanged a few more words and left for Dinsmore’s house. He clapped me on the back. “She likes you, kid.”

“How do you know?”

“She just likes you. I can tell. Good-looking kid like you. You’ll be having your hands full with her.”

Unwillingly, in the customary reaction to just this situation, my hand strayed up to the scar tissue behind my ear, and I was taken again with a desire to study that face Dinsmore had called good-looking. “No,” I answered him, “I won’t be having my hands full with her. I’ve got to work.”

“Stick to your story, Lovett.”

We walked slowly, the day already warm. “She’s absolutely weird,” Dinsmore said. “A complex character.” He sighed, pushed the hair off his forehead. “Basically she was good stuff,” he lectured, “but you get human beings caught in a profit nexus, and it turns them inside out. The structure of society is rotten today.”