The Early Stories (121 page)

Transaction
 

In December of the year 197–, in the city of N——, a man of forty was walking toward his hotel close to the hour of midnight. The conference that had kept him in town had dispersed; he was more than a touch drunk; in his arms he carried Christmas presents for his loved ones—wife, children. At the edge of the pavement, beneath his eyes, bloomed painted young women, standing against the darkened shop fronts in attitudes that mingled expectancy and insouciance, vulnerability and guardedness, solitude and solidarity. A scattered army, was his impression, mustering half-heartedly in retreat. Neon syllables glowed behind them; an unlit sign,
MASSAGE PARLOR
, hung at second-story level, and his face, uptilted, received an impression of steam, though the night was as cold as the spaces between the stars.

A large Negress in a white fur coat drew abreast of him at a red light, humming. His eyes slid toward her; her humming increased in volume, was swelled from underneath, by a taunting suggestion of
la-di-da
, into almost a song. Fear fingered his heart. He shifted his paper Christmas bags to make a shield between him and this sudden, fur-coated, white-booted, melodious big body. The light broke; under the permission of green he crossed the avenue known as T—— and walked up the hard, faintly tugging slant of sidewalk that would lead him to the voluminous anonymity of his hotel, the rank of silver elevator doors, the expectant emptiness of his room.

A glass office building floated above his shoulder, silent as an ice floe. Amid this deathly gray of winter and stone, a glistening confusion of contrary possibility was born in him, an incipient nest of color. In the unlit grated window of a corner drugstore, cardboard Magi were bringing their gifts. He turned left and circled the block, though his arms ached with his packages and his feet with the cold.

The routed but raffish army of females still occupied their corner and dim doorways beyond. Our passerby hesitated on the corner diagonally opposite, where in daytime a bank reigned amid a busy traffic of supplicants and emissaries, only to become at nightfall its own sealed mausoleum. He saw the prettiest of the girls, her white face a luminous child's beneath its clownish dabs of rouge and green, approached by an evidently self-esteeming young man, a rising insurance agent or racketeer, whose flared trouser-legs protruded beneath a camel-colored topcoat, correctly short. He talked to the girl earnestly; she listened; she looked diagonally upward as if to estimate something in the aspiring architecture above her; she shook her head. He repeated his proposition, bending forward engagingly; she backed away; he smartly turned and walked off.

Had it been a pack of schoolchildren, the others would have crowded around her, eager for details. But the other women ignored her, maintaining each her own vigil.

Seeing an approach having been made emboldened our onlooker to cross to their side of the avenue and to walk through the cloud of them again. His packages perhaps betrayed him; he was a comet returning. They recognized him. He felt caught up, for all the seasonal good will in his heart, in a warfare of caution and invisibility. His breath held taut against some fantastic hazard, he passed through the prime concentration, centered upon the luminous face of the child beauty. Only when the cloud thinned did he dare glance sideways, at an apparition in a doorway, who, the glance told him, was far from pretty—bony, her narrow face schoolteacherishly beaked—but who, even as he reproached himself, did accept his signal.

“Hi,” she said. A toothy white smile suddenly slashed the doorway shadows. With triggered quickness she came forward from her niche and at the same mechanical speed inserted her hand in the crevice between his body and his arm, among the rustling bags decorated with bells, conifers, snowmen.

He answered, “Hi.” He felt his voice dip deep into a treasure of composure, warmth, even power. Her touch was an immense relief.

“Thirty O.K.?” she asked in a rapid whisper.

“Sure.” The back of his throat itched with silliness, which rose to counter the humorless, slithering urgency of her question.

She posed another: “You got a place?”

He named the hotel, the R——, fearing it told too much about him—solid, square, past its prime.

Indeed, the name did seem to amuse her, for she repeated it, skipping
with the same breath to put herself in step with him and tightening her grip on his arm. His clothes, layer upon layer, felt transparent. He plaintively accused, “You don't like my hotel.”

“Why wouldn't I?” she asked, with that intimidating, soft-voiced rapidity. He saw that the stratagems, the coaxing ironies useful and instinctive in his usual life, would have small application in this encounter. I produce, you produce. Provocation had zero value.

He wanted to do the right thing. Would she expect to be taken to a bar? He had already drunk, he estimated, more than enough. And wouldn't it be to her profit to go to his room promptly and be done? She was a treasure so clumsily wrapped as to be of indeterminate size. Experimentally, he turned left, as on his prior circuit; she did not resist; together they crossed the avenue and climbed the hard little slant of pavement he had climbed before. Her grip tightened on his arm; he felt a smile break the mask of cold on his face. He was her prize; she, his. She asked, “What's your name?”

Amid his sensations of cold and alcohol and pleasure at this body warm and strange and tugging against his, he imagined his real name would break the spell. He lied, “Ed.”

She repeated it, as she had the name of the hotel, testing it in her mouth. Many names had passed through her mouth. Her voice, it seemed to him, had an East Coast edge without being indigenous to N——. She volunteered, “Mine's Ann.”

He was touched to sense that she was not lying. He said, “Hello, Ann.”

“Hello.” She squeezed his arm, so his mind's eye saw his bones. “What do you do, travel for some company?” Her question and answer were one.

“Sure,” he said, and changed the subject. “Am I walking too fast for you?” Something chalklike was coating his words. He mustn't, he told himself, be frightened of this woman; his fright would not serve either of them. Yet her presence nearly submerged his spirit in wonder. She loomed without perspective, like an abutment frozen in the headlights the moment after a car goes out of control. He glanced at her obliquely. City light had soaked into her face. Her long nose looked waxen. She was taller than the average woman, though still shorter than he. In his elementary school there had been a once-a-week penmanship teacher who had seemed ageless to him then but whose bony ranginess when she was young would have resembled Ann's.

She answered carefully. “No. You're walking fine. Who are the presents for?”

His own question, he felt, had been subtly mocked. He answered hers mockingly: “People.”

They did not talk again for some minutes.

The little paved rise crested. His hotel filled the block before them. In its grid of windows some burned; most were dark. Midnight had passed. The great building blazed erratically, like a ship going down. He said, “There's a side entrance up this way.” She may have known this, but didn't indicate so. Had she been here before? Often? He could have asked, but did not; he did not ask, in retrospect, so many questions she might have willingly answered. For women, it turns out, always in retrospect, were waiting to be asked.

The side entrance was locked. The revolving door was chained.

Against them? Not only was Ed a stranger to the etiquette of prostitution, but hotels puzzled him. Was a hotel merely a store that sells rooms, or is it our watchdog and judge, with private detectives eyeing every corridor through dummy fire extinguishers, and lawyers ready to spring from the linen closets barking definitions of legal occupancy? They had to walk, Ann and Ed, another half-block in the interstellar cold and to brave the front entrance. The maroon-capped doorman, blowing on his hands, let them pass as if by a deliberate oversight. Mounting the stairs to the lobby, Ed was aware of the brass rods, slimmer than jet trails, more polished than presentation pens, that held the red carpet to the marble. He was aware of the warmth flowing down from the lobby and of, visible beneath her black maxicoat as she preceded him by a step, tall laced boots of purple suede. The lobby was calm. The cigar stand was shrouded for the night. Behind the main desk, men murmured into telephones and transposed coded numerals with the muffled authority of Houston manipulating a spacecraft. A few men in square gray suits, travelling men, rumpled but reluctant to be launched toward bed, stood about beneath the chandeliers. With his crackling packages and his bought woman packaged in black maxi and laced boots, Ed felt disadvantageously encumbered. His eyes rigidly ahead, he crossed to the elevator doors of quilted colorless metal. He pushed the Up button. The wait built tall in his throat before an arriving car flung back a door. It was theirs. No one at the control desk looked up. At the last second, as the doors sighed to close, two men in gray pushed in with them, and stared at Ann, and smiled. One man began to hum, like the Negress on the street.

Didn't Ann look like a wife? Didn't all young women dress like whores these days? She was plain, plainly dressed, severe, and pale. He could not quite look at her, or venture a remark, even as he inched closer to protect
her from the strangers' gazing. The elevator grew suffocating with the exhalations of masculinity, masculinity inflated by booze. The humming grew louder, and plainly humorous. Perhaps an apparent age-difference had betrayed them, though Ed had always been told, by those who loved him, that he looked young for his years. One man shifted his weight. The other cleared his throat. Ed lifted his eyes to the indicator glow, as it progressed through the numbers 4, 5, and 6 and, after a yawning interval in which assault and murder might have been committed, halted at 7, his floor. As the two of them stepped out, she halted, not knowing whether to turn right or left. One of the men behind them called musically, “Good night.”

Bastard. Buy your own whore.

“To the left,” he told her, when the elevator door had sucked shut. In a mirror set diagonally where the corridor turned, he imagined a spectator, a paid moral agent of some sort, watching them approach the turning. Then, after they turned, the agent—with his fat cigar and tinfoil badge—was transposed in a magical knight's move to where they had been, now watching them recede, Ed's back eclipsing his packages. Ann's maxi swung stiffly, a cloth bell tolling the corridor's guilty silence.

The key balked at fitting. He could not open the door to his room, which he had paid for. Struggling, blushing, he dropped a package, which his companion stooped to retrieve. That was good of her. This service free of charge. The key turned. The door opened into a dark still space as tidy and kind as a servant waiting up.

He held open the door for Ann to precede him, and in this gesture discovered his mood: mock courtesy. The hotel corridor, with its walls of no certain color and its carpet cut from an endless artificial tundra of maroon, somehow came with her, past his nose, into the room. The pallor of her face, momentarily huge, bounced his gaze to the window, its rectangle of diffuse city light flayed by venetian blinds. As his eyes adjusted, the walls glowed. The package she had retrieved she set down on the gleam of a glass bureau top. He set the other packages down beside it; his arm ached in relief. He found the wall switch, but the overhead light was too bright. He could not look at her in such bright light. He brushed the switch off and groped at the base of the large ceramic lamp standing on the bureau top. This light, softer, showed her a distance away, standing by the bed, her hand on the second button of her long dark coat, undoing it; by this gesture of undoing she transposed his sense of her as packaged from the coat to the room itself, to the opaque plaster
walls that contained her, to the fussy ceiling fixture like the bow at the top of a box. She was his, something he had bought. Yet she was alive, a person, unpredictable, scarcely approachable indeed. For his impulse to kiss her was balked by unstated barriers, a professional prohibition she radiated even as she smiled again that unexpected slash of a toothy smile and, after hesitating, as she had when stepping from the elevator door, handed him her coat—heavy, chill, black—to hang in the closet, which he did happily, his courtesy not altogether mock.