Sneaky People: A Novel (21 page)

Buddy had, already prepared, a dollar bill rolled tight as a cigarette. He took this from his side pocket and poked it at the tuxedoed headwaiter, a pockmarked Dago who stared insolently at Laverne and not at him, thinking he had her number, and but for the need not to embarrass naïve, oblivious Buddy, she might well have sent the greaseball on a flying fuck at the moon.

As it was, the cheap little prick unrolled the bill to see its denomination, and when Buddy said, with the imperiousness of which Laverne could now discern the limits, “Gimme a ringside, fella,” he sneered and led them, with the place half empty, to a table just off the passage marked with arrows to the toilets.

If Buddy noticed this, he passed it off, gazing grandly around. Laverne was rapidly coming to an understanding that Buddy was nothing like Ken Canning—unless it was that she had known too little of Ken: this thought startled her. In a decade she had not had a new one pertaining to men. When the orchestra came out and began to tune up, she scanned the musicians, expecting in a mystical fashion to see Ken among them, now no longer the leader but under the domination of another’s baton. But he was not there, an absence that did not please her.

The fact was that she was falling for Buddy, who once seated became strangely silent, sipping his B & L and ginger ale and playing with the green swizzle stick fashioned like a palm tree.

“A penny for them,” she said, adjusting the little lamp with the orange bulb shaped like a candle flame on the tiny table-top that also held salt-‘n’-peppers, sugar bowl, and ketchup bottle, the presence of which interested her as professional waitress: in a swell place every table was equipped with its own, the customers didn’t have to ask.

“Oh,” said Buddy, “I was just feeling blue.” He brightened manfully. “How’s your drink?”

She had, at his suggestion, a planter’s punch. She swirled it with her own miniature palm tree. “I never saw so much fruit. They must have used a whole can.”

“This is the place to go all right. I gotta hand it to you. It’s got it all over the Starlight Roof, with that fake ceiling.”

“Well, it was just an idea.”

Buddy looked shyly at her. “You get around much?”

Laverne was touched by the question, which had no hint of possible disapproval. She had a crazy sense that she could have told him everything and he would have applauded: at this moment, at least.

“I’m not a kid any more. I don’t have much time. I work six nights a week.”

“Yeah,” Buddy said reflectively. “A swell-looking doll like you, dressed like a cheerleader and running sandwiches to a lot of punks. It really ain’t right, Laverne.” He put his head down. “Listen, I wanna apologize for treating you like a chippie the other night.”

Laverne’s jaw fell. “My gosh,” said she, “I don’t know what’s got into you. You behaved like a perfect gentleman.”

Buddy frowned and shook his head. “You’re nice. You’re a real fine person, Laverne.”

Embarrassed by his sincerity, she said: “Maybe that’s because you don’t know me better.”

“I got instincts,” said Buddy. “The way you got dressed up and came to the lot. That took a lot of gumption.”

“I wanted to see you again,” Laverne said tenderly. “And I wanted to look right this time.”

Buddy stared wonderingly at her. “How’d you know I wouldn’t just rape you again?”

“Well, my gosh.” She put her hand on his wristwatch. “You are just about the funniest fella I know. Rape. Well”—she moved her fingers onto his—“I don’t know where you got that idea. You didn’t force me, you know.”

“I didn’t?”

They stared at each other through the dim orange light and then simultaneously broke into grins, Laverne’s an instant earlier.

“Gee,” she said, “if I thought that, you didn’t look worried when I showed up on the lot.”

“I was putting up a front,” said Buddy. “You gotta do that in my business.”

“Are you kidding? You gotta do it everywhere in life! They’ll get you otherwise and put the screws to you. You can’t trust most people further than you can throw them.”

At last he actively accepted her fingers in his. “I like the way you handle yourself.”

“Oh sure,” said Laverne. “With what I got and a nickel you can get a cuppa coffee.”

“Naw, I mean it. You’re twenty-four carat.”

They had a couple more rounds of drinks, Laverne switching from planter’s punch to Buddy’s B & L because all that fruit juice gave you acid, and then, deciding they weren’t all that hungry, had club sandwiches, which were however enormous and garnished with bread-and-butter pickles, potato chips, a half of deviled egg, and a rosebud radish. The waiter, in his red monkey jacket and black bow tie, gave Laverne a wink at one point: colleagues could always smell you out no matter how you were dressed.

Then, coming from the toilet, after her third drink, she encountered the slimy maître-d’, who went over her again with his dirty eyes, then speaking sotto voce from the corner of his mouth, said: “You wanna gimme a number? I get a lot of calls.”

“Excuse me?” asked Laverne, arching one of the painted brows she had just refreshed at the dressing table in the can, presided over by a motherly old Negress, to whom she had given a dime. Knowing gratuities from the other side of the fence, she always tipped well.

“Come off your high horse, Toots,” this bastard whispered. “I seen all kinds.” Meanwhile he was surveying the room with his sneer.

Laverne smiled sweetly and said: “Go piss up a rope, you cheap wop.”

He nodded politely. “Cocklicker.”

She graciously inclined her head. “You wasn’t born: your mother shit you on a rock and the sun hatched you.” She returned to the table, using the most respectable walk. Nevertheless, some baldheaded fart distracted his horsefaced wife with a finger at the band, and quickly fucked Laverne with eyes swimming in booze.

“Christ, I missed you, honey,” Buddy said with tremendous feeling, and now he took her hand. He hadn’t leered at her tits or ass all evening. When they finally danced, she could feel his bone-on, but it nestled nicely against her belly and he didn’t grind it nastily into her crotch. His face against her cheek was smooth as a baby’s bottom and smelling not of crappy barber’s bay rum but some classy aftershave.

“Say, what’s that dandy lotion you use?” she asked once between numbers.

“You like it? It’s Ed Py-naud.” He sniffed at her. “What you use? Either Evening in Paris or Chanel Number Five, right?”

The contrast of Buddy’s all-knowing air and her practice of knowing nothing made her heart ache. She adored this strong but helpless man, and could supply all his needs.

“You sure came close,” she said. “It’s Apple Blossom cologne. Anything else gives me sinus.”

Then the band played “Always,” and Buddy breathed the lyrics into her ear, and added the sentiments Laverne quoted to him in a somewhat altered version six months later as they lay in the bed from which he would arise and go home to his family: “I want to be with you always, baby, and have a whole lifetime.”

Her immediate reaction was to nuzzle his neck. The expression of love was however soon checked by the appearance of another tuxedoed functionary, this one a gorilla with a blue jaw, who tapped Buddy’s shoulder and warned him against dance-floor intimacies. Laverne knew this to be the work of the maître-d’, and she would have given the bouncer at least some lip and maybe, if pressed, a platform shoe in the jewels; but nodding at the ape, Buddy obediently separated himself from her.

“That makes sense,” he solemnly assured her. “This ain’t no taxi-dance joint. I’m going down and get us a room.”

“Why? That’s awful expensive, Bud, when my place is sitting there empty.”

“No,” said Buddy. “I want it different this time than the other night. I want to make it up to you.”

So he paid the check, which she could see was almost ten bucks, and added a tip of a dollar, and they left, her head high as they passed the maître-d’s station, and went downstairs, where she stood near the newsstand while he signed in and collected a bellhop and vanished into the elevator.

Soon he was back, saying: “I signed Mr. and Mrs. Sandifer, not Smith,” his face shining like a kid’s. “I wanted you to know that.”

Laverne would have cried did not her practical side come into play. “Buddy,” she chided him, “you sure throw the money away. You should of got a single and sneaked me in.”

“Laverne,” said Buddy, gripping her hand, “I never will be cheap when it comes to you.”

In the room he took her again and again, with only her pants off and her best green dress being crumpled and maybe stained also, and the least she could do was pretend to come even oftener than he, because if you found a good man you should make him feel able and give him a home, because you were stronger than he and could take more punishment and would last longer, whereas his assertions were short-lived and his fragility basic, not only physically but morally as well: that Buddy believed he was celebrating her by paying too much for the room was an example in point. A sense of pathos informed her love for him. She never let on that often she squeezed him as if he were the biggest dollbaby in the world, the subject of a persistent dream of her girlhood.

Buddy himself had writhed out of his own clothes by degrees until he wore only an undershirt and black-clocked tan lisle socks supported by dark-blue garters. Now he suddenly arose and climbed into his Jockey shorts, hand-ladling his damp manhood into the pouch. He had an adorable little soft potbelly and white banty legs that would break your heart.

“You going for cigarettes or something, Bud?”

“I got to get home, Laverne,” he said piously, climbing into the first leg of his chalk-stripe pants and then hopping about on one foot to retain his balance.

“Huh?”

He got his other leg through and began to button his fly. “Listen, kid,” he said, “I been thinking. What rent you pay for that place of yours?”

“What’d you say, Bud?”

“Rent,” said he. “Listen, I’m doing all right at the lot this year, and I can swing it. I wanna pay that rent of yours, so I got some stake in your place, see. I want to make it a home for me and you so I can come there and you make meals, see, and we get a family going.”

Laverne bitterly hid her eyes in both hands. “What you want with another one?”

He remained oblivious and found his shirt on the floor. She peeped and saw him at the dresser, knotting his tie.

“You mean it? You going home now, Buddy Sandifer?”

He fastened his tie pin. “I got to,” he answered, still insensitive.

“Well,” said she, “lotsa luck, huh? I don’t wanna see you any more.”

He whirled and came to the bedside. “What kinda talk is that for Jesus sake?”

“We ain’t staying here all night?”

“Christ almighty, Laverne.” He knelt on the bed. “How can I do that? I said I had to keep up a front, didn’t I?” He leaned over and massaged her left breast, which had not been bared and in which she had no special sensation.

“Lay off,” she said and rolled away.

“Be fair,” Buddy beseeched. “I never said we would stay all night. I got to think of my boy.” He patted her bare rump.

She rolled back and opened her eyes. “You got kids?”

“One only. He’s a boy. He’s a fine boy, real clean-cut. I like him. We are real pals. If it was just her, I’d stay, I swear. I despise her, but I got to think of Ralph. How’d it look to him? There ain’t no lodge meeting where you’d stay out till next morning, is there? Come on, baby, try to see it my way.”

Laverne asked: “How old’s the boy?”

“Fourteen going on fifteen,” said Buddy with a rising inflection.

She winced. “You been married since the Year One.”

“Yeah.” Buddy looked miserably at the pillow.

Laverne struggled up, found her step-ins where he had hurled them, and smoothed out her dress, remembering the deposit of semen at her bellybutton only when it soaked through the slip and proceeded to darken the green satin before her eyes. Sponging it with a wet towel would leave a water ring. If she couldn’t brush it away when dry she would call it milk to the cleaner, who would know better.

She looked in the dresser mirror and poked her hair. Buddy rose and came behind her. He laid his head over her shoulder.

“I’m gonna work it out, kid. I ain’t ever going to let you go. I’m crazy about you.”

Laverne really couldn’t oppose such an argument, being likewise nuts about Buddy and having anyway noplace to go except the drive-in or the streets, and next day he did begin to pay her rent and not long afterward decided she must be there whenever he needed her and not hopping sandwiches for punks, so he put her on a salary of twenty-five per, which he said he could enter in his business books as part of overhead, accounting fees or something, and considering the rent was an extra and he brought her lots of gifts besides, she was way ahead of what she would have earned at the drive-in and almost even with what she would have made hustling, given the wear and tear of clothes and shoes and kickbacks to bartenders, taxi drivers, and other free-lance pimps and bribes to cops.

And she didn’t mind staying home most of the time in negligee and mules, reading
True Story
and
Modern Romances
and listening to
When a Girl Marries
and
Vic and Sade
in the afternoon and in the evening
Lum and Abner
, who reminded her of her own hick origins.