Rich Man, Poor Man (25 page)

‘I’m sorry, every room is occupied,’ the voice said. ‘We’re all booked until November.’

‘Let’s you and I pretend this is a double room, Jack,’ said Willie. ‘Put it on my bill.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ the voice said. Room 777 is definitely a single room for a single occupancy. I’m afraid the young lady will have to leave.’

“The young lady isn’t living here, Jack,’ Willie said. ‘She isn’t occupying anything. She’s visiting me. Anyway, she’s my wife.’

‘Do you have your marriage certificate, Captain?’

‘Dear,’ Willie said loudly, holding the phone out over Gretchen’s head, ‘have you got our marriage certificate?’

‘It’s home,’ Gretchen said, close to the receiver.

‘Didn’t I tell you never to travel without it?’ Marital annoyance.

‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Gretchen said meekly.

‘She left it home,’ Willie said into the phone. “We’ll show it to you tomorrow. I’ll have it sent down by special delivery.’

‘Captain, young ladies are against the rules of the establishment,’ the voice said.

‘Since when?’ Willie was getting angry now. ‘This dive is famous from here to Bangkok as a haunt of pimps and bookies and hustlers and dope pedlars and receivers of stolen goods. One honest policeman could fill the Tombs from your guest list.’

‘We are under new management,’ the voice said. ‘A well-known chain of respectable hotels. We are creating a different image. If the lady is not out of there in five minutes, Captain, I’m coming up.’

Gretchen was out of bed now and pulling on her panties.

‘No,’ said Willie beseechingly.

She smiled gently at him.

‘Fuck you, Jack,’ Willie said into the phone and slammed it down. He started to do up his corset, pulling fiercely at the laces. ‘Go fight a war for the bastards,’ he said. ‘And you can’t find another room at this hour in mis goddamn town for love or money.’

Gretchen laughed. Willie glared at her for a moment, then

he burst into laughter too. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘remember for Christ’s sake to bring your marriage licence.’

They walked grandly through the lobby, blatantly arm in arm, pretending they were not defeated. Half the people in the lobby looked like house detectives, so there was no way of knowing which one was the voice on the telephone.

They didn’t want to leave each other, so they went over to Broadway and had orangeades at a Nedick stand, faint taste of tropics in a Northern latitude, then continued on to 42nd Street and went into an all-night movie and sat among derelicts and insomniacs and perverts and soldiers waiting for a bus and watched Humphrey Bogart playing Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest.

When the picture ended, they still didn’t want to leave each other, so he walked her all the way down to the YWCA, among silent, empty buildings which looked like fortresses that had fallen, no quarter shown.

Dawn was breaking as they kissed in front of the YWCA. Willie looked with loathing at the dark bulk of the building, one lamp on at the entrance, lighting proper young ladies out on the town to their proper beds. ‘Do you think that in the entire, glorious history of this structure,’ he said, ‘that anybody got laid here?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said.

‘It sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it?’ he said gloomily. He shook his head. ‘Don Juan,’ he said. ‘The corseted lover. Call me schmuck.’

‘Don’t take it so hard,’ she said. There’re other nights.’

‘Like when?’

‘Like tonight,’ she said.

‘Like tonight,’ he repeated soberly. ‘I can live through the day, I suppose. I’ll spend the hours in good works. Like looking for a hotel room. It may be in Coney Island or Babylon or Pelham Bay, but I’ll find a room. For Captain and Mrs Abbott. Bring along a valise, for Queen Victoria. Fill it with old copies of Time, in case we get bored and want something

to read.’

A last kiss and he strode off, small and defeated in the fresh dawn light. It was a lucky thing he would still be in uniform tonight. In civilian clothes, she doubted that any desk clerk would believe he was old enough to be married.

When he had disappeared, she climbed the steps and went demurely into the YWCA. The old lady at the desk leered at

her knowingly, but Gretchen took her key and said, ‘Good night,’ as though the dawn coming in through the windows was merely a clever optical illusion.

As Clothilde washed his hair, he sat in Uncle Harold’s and Tante Elsa’s big bathtub, steaming in the hot water, his eyes closed, drowsing, like an animal sunning himself on a rock. Uncle Harold, Tante Elsa, and the two girls were at Saratoga for their annual two-week holiday and Tom and Clothilde had the house to themselves. It was Sunday and the garage was closed. In the distance a church bell was ringing.

The deft fingers massaged his scalp, caressed the back of his neck through foaming, perfumed suds. Clothilde had bought a special soap for him in the drugstore with her own money. Sandalwood. When Uncle Harold came back, he’d have to go back to good old Ivory, five cents a cake. Uncle Harold would suspect something was up if he smelled the sandalwood.

‘Now, rinse, Tommy,’ Clothilde said.

Tom lay back in the water and stayed under as her fingers worked vigorously through his hair, rinsing out the suds. He came up blowing.

‘Now your nails,’ Clothilde said. She kneeled beside the tub and scrubbed with the nail brush at the black grease ground into the skin of his hands and under his nails. Clothilde was naked and her dark hair was down, falling in a cascade over her low, full breasts. Even kneeling humbly, she didn’t look like anybody’s servant.

His hands were pink, his nails rosy, as Clothilde scrubbed away, her wedding ring glistening in foam. Clothilde put the brush on the rim of the tub, after a last meticulous examination. ‘Now the rest,’ she said.

He stood up in the bath. She rose from her knees and began to soap him down. She had wide, firm hips and strong legs.

Her skin was dark and with her flattish nose, wide cheek bones, and long straight hair she looked like pictures he had seen in history books of Indian girls greeting the first white settlers in the forest. There was a scar on her right arm, a jagged crescent of white. Her husband had hit her with a piece of kindling. Long ago, she said. In Canada. She didn’t want to talk about her husband. When he looked at her something funny happened in his throat and he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

Motherly hands touched him lightly, lovingly, doing un-motherly things. Between his buttocks, slipperiness of scented soap, between his thighs, promises. An orchestra in his balls. Woodwinds and flutes. Hearing Tante Elsa’s phonograph blaring all the time, he had come to love Wagner. ‘We are finally civilising the little fox,’ Tante Elsa had said, proud of her unexpected cultural influence. ‘Now the feet,’ Clothilde said.

He obediently put a foot up on the rim of the tub, like a horse being shod. Bending, careless of her hair, she soaped between his toes and used a washcloth devotedly, as though she were burnishing church silver. He learned that even his toes could give him pleasure.

She finished with his other foot and he stood there, glistening in the steam. She looked at him, studying him. ‘A boy’s body,’ she said. ‘You look like Saint Sebastian. Without the arrows.’ She wasn’t joking. She never joked. It was the first intimation of his life that his body might have a value beyond its functions. He knew that he was strong and quick and that his body was good for games and fighting, but it had never occurred to him that it would delight anybody just to look at it. He was a little ashamed that he had no hair yet on his chest and that it was so sparse down below.

With a quick motion of her hands, she did her hair up in a knot on top of her head. Then she stepped into the bathtub. too. She took the bar of soap and the suds began to glisten on her skin. She soaped herself all over methodically, without coquetry. Then they slid down into the tub together and lay quietly with their arms around each other.

If Uncle Harold and Tante Elsa and the two girls fell sick and died in Saratoga, he would stay in this house in Elysium forever.

When the water began to cool they got out of the tub and Clothilde took one of the big special towels of Tante Elsa and dried him off. While she was scrubbing out the tub, he

went into the Jordaches’ bedroom and lay down on the freshly made crisp bed.

Bees buzzed outside the screened windows, green shades against the sun made a grotto of the bedroom, the bureau against the wall was a ship on a green sea. He would burn a thousand crosses for one such afternoon.

She came padding in, her hair down now, for another occasion. On her face the soft, distant, darkly concentrated expression he had come to look for, yearn for.

She lay down beside him. Wave of Sandalwood. Her hand reached out for him, carefully. The touch of love, cherishing him, an act apart from all other acts, profoundly apart from the giggly highschool lust of the twins and the professional excitement of the woman on McKinley Street back in Port Philip. It was incredible to him that anyone could want to touch him like that

Sweetly, gently, he took her while the bees foraged in the window boxes. He waited for her, adept now, taught, well and quickly taught by that wide Indian body, and when it was over, they lay back side by side and he knew that he would do anything for her, anything, anytime she asked.

‘Stay here.’ A last kiss under the throat. ‘I will call you when I am ready.’

She slipped out of the bed and he heard her in the bathroom, dressing, then going softly down the stairs towards the kitchen. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, all gratitude, and all bitterness. He hated being sixteen years old. He could do nothing for her. He could accept her rich offering of herself, he could sneak into her room at night, but he couldn’t even take her for a walk in the park or give her a scarf as a gift, because a tongue might wag, or Tante Elsa’s sharp eye might search out the new colour in the warped bureau drawer in the room behind the kitchen. He couldn’t take her away from this grinding house in which she slaved. If only he were twenty.,. Saint Sebastian.

She came silently into the room. ‘Come eat,’ she said. He spoke from the bed. ‘When I’m twenty,’ he said, ‘I’m coming here and taking you away.’ She smiled. ‘My man,’ she said. She fingered her wedding ringg absently. ‘Don’t take long. The food is hot.’ He went into the bathroom and dressed and went On down the kitchen.

There were flowers on the kitchen table, between the two places laid out there. Phlox. Deep blue. She did the gardening, too. She had a knowing hand with flowers. ‘She’s a pearl, my Clothilde,’ he had heard Tante Elsa say. The roses’re twice as big this year.’

‘You should have your own garden,’ Tom said as he sat before his place. What he could not give her in reality he offered in intention. He was barefooted and the linoleum felt cool and smooth against his soles. His hair, still damp, Was neatly combed, the blond, tight curls glistening darkly. She liked everything neat and shining clean, pots and pans, mahogany, front halls, boys. It was the least he could do for her. She put a bowl of fish chowder in front of him. ‘I said you should have your own garden,’ he repeated. ‘Drink your soup,’ she said, and sat down at her own place across from him.

A leg of lamb, small, tender and rare, came next, served with parsleyed new potatoes, roasted in the same pan with the lamb. There was a heaped bowl of buttered young string beans and a salad of crisp romaine and tomatoes. A plate of fresh, hot biscuits stood to one side, and a big slab of sweet butter, next to a frosted pitcher of milk.

Gravely, she watched him eat, smiled when he offered his plate again. During the family’s holiday, she got on the bus every morning to go to the next town to do her shopping, using her own money. The shopkeepers of Elysium would have been sure to report back to Mrs Jordache about the fine meats and carefully chosen first fruits for the feasts prepared in her kitchen, in her absence.

For dessert there was vanilla ice cream that Clothilde had made that morning, and hot chocolate sauce. She knew her lover’s appetites. She had announced her love with two bacon and tomato sandwiches. Its consummation demanded richer

fare. ‘Clothilde,’ Tom said, ‘why do you work here?’ ‘Where should I work?’ She was surprised. She spoke in a low voice, always without inflection. There was a hint of French Canada in her speech. She almost said v for w. ‘Anyplace. In a store. In a factory. Not as a servant’ ‘I like being in a house Cooking meals,’ she said. ‘It is not so bad. Your aunt is proper with me. She appreciates me. It was kind of her to take me in. I came here, two years ago, I didn’t know a soul, I didn’t have a penny. I like the little girls very much. They are always so clean. What could I do in

a store or a factory? I am very slow at adding and subtracting and I’m frightened of machines. I like being in a house.’

‘Somebody else’s house,’ Tom said. It was intolerable that those two fat slobs could order Clothilde around.

This week,’ she said, touching his hand on the table, ‘it is our house.’

‘We can never go out with each other.’

‘So?’ She shrugged. ‘What are we missing?’

‘We have to sneak around,’ He cried. He was growing angry with her.

‘So?’ She shrugged again. ‘There are many things worth sneaking around for. Not everything good is out in the open. Maybe I like secrets.’ Her face gleamed with one of her rare soft smiles.

This afternoon … ‘ he said stubbornly, trying to plant the seed of revolt, arouse that placid peasant docility. ‘After a… a banquet like this …’ He waved his hand over the table. ‘It’s not right. We should go out, do something, not just sit around.’

‘What is there to do?’ she asked seriously.

There’s a band concert in the park,’ he said. ‘A baseball game.’

‘I get enough music from Tante Elsa’s phonograph,’ she said. ‘You go to the baseball game for me and tell me who won. I will be very happy here, cleaning up and waiting for you to come home. As long as you come home, I do not want anything else, Tommy.’

‘I’m not going anywhere without you today,’ he said, giving up. He stood up. ‘I’ll wipe the dishes.’