Little Casino (5 page)

Donald liked to eat chocolate-covered graham crackers covered with grape jelly, and adorned with chopped-up marshmallows, all washed down with Dixie Shake. His acne sang the song of empty gratification.

To think that God might be out of his mind is blasphemous. On the other hand, is it blasphemous to think that God might occasionally wear a dusty-rose suit? A string of pearls?

“You’re on dangerous ground, boys, with a thought like that, just what the foul fiend likes to see.”

“La volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal.”

Absolutely beautiful

D
OLORES, DARK, BLACK-EYED, SWEET ITALIAN
girl, with a straight-A average at Fontbonne Hall, who looks absolutely beautiful in her school uniform, asks him if he’d like to come over to the Ryans’ apartment to keep her company while she’s baby-sitting. Her breasts are too small—just as well—for her to wear a brassiere, but lovely beneath her snowy, spotless blouse.

He sees that the Ryans have a piano in the living room, a small upright that, he will soon discover, is utterly out of tune. They drink Cokes, they eat peanut-butter sandwiches, and then Dolores, he’s certain, looks directly into his face and tells him that she’s wearing black lace underwear. He thinks that he probably hasn’t heard this, so he grins and says—what savoir faire!— “What?” She says, he is certain that she says, “I know you won’t believe me, you’re such a dope, but I’m wearing,
really,
black lace underwear.” Just as he’s about to do something crazed and reckless, he has no idea what, perhaps pull up her skirt or kiss her white anklets, she smiles, drapes, for some arcane reason, a towel over his head, and sits down at the piano. She plays, mechanically, the tinny piano making the music sinister, “All or Nothing at All.” One of the straps of her jumper slips off her shoulder and he buries his face in the towel. He cannot look at her and he cannot think of her and he cannot say her name. Even the towel is making him crazy.

“Just as well,” in the context of this faux-vignette, or, perhaps more accurately, Catholic joke, means “just as well,” and only “just as well.”

Dolores became a registered nurse.

“Haunted heart,” a malady with which this “dope” was afflicted, has an
almost
comic or melodramatic ring to it, especially when paired with “registered nurse.” Can’t be helped.

Many of the boys and young men in the neighborhood thought that Dolores’s nose was too big, and made crude and vulgar comments about her. These comments issued from those who had driven themselves senseless with pink-and-white fantasies concerning blondes like Doris Day, June Allyson, and Virginia Mayo, women who, it might fairly be argued, were virtually noseless. Dolores’s nose was the nose of Clodia and Lesbia, of Sulpicia and Cynthia. Of Helen.

“If hair is mussed on her forehead, if she goes in a gleam of Cos, in a slither of dyed stuff, there is a volume in the matter.”

And if her skin smells of Castile soap, he “shall spin long yarns out of nothing,” and sing them to the dreadful noise of an out-of-tune piano.

The light of bowling alleys

H
E HAD BEEN VAGUELY AWARE, FOR SOME
time, that odd and unexpected things often happened in odd and unexpected places, but he had no sense that such things could happen to him. Perry or Sam, let’s say Perry, had picked him up about seven o’clock, after supper, in his old dusty black Plymouth coupe, and they’d gone up the hill to the Blue Front for a Coke, then down to Chez Freddy, if witnesses can be believed, but nobody seemed to be around. Well, it was a May weekend, well before the season. They wound up in, of all places, the bowling alley. He didn’t know how to bowl and Perry wasn’t much good, but they rented their shoes and made fools of themselves: expected behavior for bowling alleys. A few people were there, and a couple of girls, the bowling-alley light, harsh and shadow-less, setting them in clattering and crashing space precisely. The light of bowling alleys can be proven romantic, though the steps of the proof and its final flourish may be too simple to be given credence.

He had no idea where her Evander Childs High School was, nor her Boston Post Road, nor her Mosholu Parkway, Van Cortlandt Park, Gun Hill Road, but these were mysterious places to which she
belonged,
and were strangely inextricable, too, in his wayward mind, from the crisp white uniforms worn by nurses, from the perfume-edged odor of sweat, or so he was compelled to believe, even from the smell of ice-cold furs and the oil-slicked glassy waters of the Narrows. He knew that something was happening, despite the banality of everything, perhaps because of the banality of everything, the musty smell of the garage, just opened after the winter, the dirty screens leaning against the sides of the house, awaiting springtime cleaning, the blowing phlox bordering the hedge. There she stood. He looked around for Perry, Perry Plymouth, where was he? and he was talking to the other girl, small and dark, with startlingly white, even teeth and a short haircut that held her face in an ebony frame. Later, that summer, his friend, Teddy, would fall in love with this dark girl, making his Italian family as unhappy as her Jewish family. “Such goeth the breaks, brother mine,” Teddy’s older brother, Joe, would say, but sadly. In any event, what was happening to
him,
now, could well be considered instrumental in understanding the romantic nature of bowling-alley light. Which, by curious but logical divagation, which there is no time to explain, led him to wonder, that summer, about the whereabouts of Perry.

Helen, her older sister, picked him up at the DeCamp bus stop in Caldwell that fall, in their father’s car, a powder-blue Buick. What in God’s name was he doing at the Caldwell bus stop? In the fall? Helen was engaged to a second-year medical student, Sam, whom she’d met at Jones Beach. Of him and her younger sister, Sam had said, that past August, “You sly dog.” Which reminds me that Marvin, her cousin, had said, “If she weren’t my cousin, oh yeah, oh Jesus.”

The subject of the foregoing is not at all clear, as will be obvious to the attentive reader. The subject, for all I know, may not even be in evidence.

Werner Heisenberg was not convinced by this proof, and thought it, as a matter of fact, “frivolous.” But then Heisenberg had no idea of what a bowling alley is, or, in this case, was. He is on record as saying, in reply to a question concerning bowling alleys, posed him by Lotte Knapke, “Of that which I cannot talk about, I have to keep my mouth quiet.” He of course meant “silent.”

It’s perfectly OK for New Yorkers to make fun of New Jersey and/or its residents, but it is not OK for others to do so. And I mean New Yorkers, not transplanted rubes like, say, E.B. White.

“What about a transplanted rube like Virgil Thomson?”

Fuck him, too, with his wand and his peanut-butter pie!

“I’m not quite …?”

Wand, wand,
wand,
for Christ sake! You never heard of a wand, and pie?

“You mean maybe a cane?”

Imbecile and slave

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE, HE HAD WALKED HER
to her house down by the lake. Thick sweet darkness of the July night. He kissed her, leaning against the cool metal of her father’s powder-blue Buick. She said that she’d see him down at the lake the next day. I’ve seen you there, a lot, she said, last year.

And there she was the next day, lying on a blanket some twenty-five yards from the pavilion, with a girlfriend. She looked up at him and smiled. Do I know you? she said. He felt like a shambling moron in the face of that candid, girlish smile, and the girlfriend was giving him the once-over. Do you, like a, want a, like a want to have Coke? he said. She laughed and got up on her knees and patted the blanket with a hand so golden that her fingernails glowed as pearls. Here, she said. Sit here. He looked at her cool lips and felt them again in the moonless night.

The jukebox in the pavilion was playing a cheap song that would become ludicrously and unimpeachably beautiful in years to come, and the girlfriend left. Lie down, she said. I had a bad feeling that you weren’t going to say hello. What? What? Wasn’t it obvious from his stricken and stupid face that his very self had become her imbecile and slave? He saw that her eyes were hazel.