Catch As Catch Can Page 23

  Cooper hesitated and said, “I won’t decide until I know you better.” She threw back her head and laughed and he felt better. Schwoll winked and walked away.

  “Has Cupid gone?” the girl asked.

  “Yes,” Cooper said. “He’s gone.”

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked, turning to him. “Is it your libido?”

  “I have no libido.” He spoke carefully because he wanted to impress her. “I think I am being haunted by childhood dreams.”

  “That’s not unusual,” she said. “That’s life. It stinks. Call him, please. I want a drink.”

  He beckoned to Costello.

  “Calvados,” she said, when he approached.

  Costello blinked. “What was that?”

  “I want a glass of calvados. Or a bottle. I don’t know how they drink it.”

  “What is it?” Costello asked.

  “I don’t know what it is. I read about it in a book.”

  “Try something else,” Costello said. “We don’t read books here.”

  “All right,” the girl said. “Bring me some gentian violet.”

  Cooper was about to laugh when Costello turned to him for an explanation. “I’ll have another scotch,” he said, evenly.

  Costello turned back to her. “Lady,” he appealed. “Why can’t you order something simple, like beer?”

  “All right,” she said. “Bring beer.”

  Costello left, satisfied, and she looked at Cooper and smiled, and at that moment, he fell in love with her. They were silent until the drinks came, and then, he was unable to speak. He felt the silence grow between them, and when she turned back, her face had lapsed back into lines of indifference.

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I publish books,” he said. “What do you do?”

  “I dance,” she said. “I dance like hell.”

  “A dancer?” he asked with surprise.

  “No,” she said, and a forlorn note crept into her voice. “Not a dancer. I’m a dancer who doesn’t dance. I plug switchboards. But I can dance. I’m good too.”

  “Then why don’t you dance?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to dance on the stage of the Metropolitan,” she said softly, her face growing wistful as she stared at a point over his shoulder. “I want to glide before the eyes of the populace. I want to posture before the king and queen of England. And I could too if I wasn’t so damn lazy.”

  “Are you really good?”

  “I studied it all my life. I know what’s good and I know what isn’t, and I know I’m good.”

  “Then why don’t you?” he asked, noticing how intense she had become. “Why don’t you dance?”

  She shrugged and turned to her drink. “What’s the good? I’m dying.”

  He sat up with shock. “What’s the matter?”

  She looked at him and laughed. “Nothing’s the matter. I’m just dying. We’re all dying. From the day we’re born, we begin to die. They get cradles and coffins from the same tree.” She reached out and touched his hand. “Don’t look so sad, Sidney Cooper. It’s all the way you look at it. Either life is beautiful, but it stinks, or life stinks, but it’s beautiful. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m really very happy, I’m the happiest person I know.”

  “Can you really dance?”

  “I swear to God I can. I’m so good that sometimes it frightens me. Have you ever seen the swan?”

  “What swan?”

  “In the Swan Lake ballet. She turns thirty-two times. Thirty-two fouettés. It isn’t easy. You have to turn thirty-two times on one foot and the idea is not to move your foot. The less it moves the better you are. I can do it on a dime.”

  “Can you really?”

  “I can,” she said. “I swear to God I can.”

  “Do it.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. Here.”

  She paused a moment, considering, and he noticed the cor ners of her mouth trembling. “All right,” she said. “All right, Sidney Cooper. I’ll dance for you. I’ll do it right here.”

  She rose from the chair and bent to the floor. “Here’s the circle,” she said, drawing an imaginary circle with her finger. “Now you watch and see if my foot leaves it.” She straightened up and flexed her leg muscles, rising up and down on her toes and bending her knees. The people around them pressed forward curiously. “Move back,” she pleaded. “Please. Please move back.” She put her hands on a man’s arm and pushed him back gently, moving about with a frantic determination. She stopped suddenly and turned to him. “Oh, God, I forgot. I don’t have shoes.”

  “What’s the matter with those you’re wearing?”

  “I can’t get on my toes. I’ll do it on the ball of my foot. All right?”

  “All right. On the ball of your foot.”

  “You watch now,” she said, extending her arms and turning to assure herself of enough room. “You count for me.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll count for you.”

  Costello ran up excitedly. “What’s going on?”

  “Remember,” she said. “Thirty-two. And watch my foot.”

  “For God sakes, lady,” Costello shouted. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to dance,” she said. “I’m going to dance like a son of a bitch.”

  “Dance? You can’t dance here.”

  “Let her alone,” Cooper said.

  “It’s not allowed. There’s a dance floor inside.”

  “For Christ sakes, shut up!” Cooper snapped. He turned to the girl and smiled. “Go ahead, honey,” he said. “Go ahead and dance.”

  “All right,” she said. She smiled at him weakly. Her face was pale and her fingers plucked nervously at the sides of her skirt. “I’ll dance for you.”

  She raised her leg and began turning. The room grew silent and even Costello stared with sober curiosity. Cooper watched her foot, counting. She turned seven… eight… nine times without wavering. She was dancing on a dime! At fifteen, he raised his eyes, and when she came around, he smiled. Her face was grim. When he looked down, her foot was shaking. The muscles in her calf and thigh were quivering in sharp spasms and her foot was beginning to wobble within the circle. At twenty-five, he looked up. Her face was contorted in a grimace of terrible pain. Her lips were pulled back into her face and her gums gleamed like wet blood around her teeth. The only sound was the asthmatic gasp of her breath. She reached thirty… thirty-one… and then thirty-two and spun dizzily into his arms, crying:

  “I did it! My God! I did it!” over and over again.

  She was laughing and her face was shining and she looked like a happy little girl. She broke from his arms and rushed around excitedly.

  “I did it! My God, I did it!”

  Cooper felt her joy well up within him, and he was filled with a warm flood of affection, a sad and tragic affection. When she was calm, she sat down beside him, her eyes still sparkling with joy. They looked at each other for a long while without speaking, and his love for her grew until he felt sweetly that he was going to cry, and then—he remembered Louise and the jar of mustard.

  He looked up quickly to the end of the bar. The woman was talking to the man who reminded him of Ed Chandler. His hand was on her arm, his fingers nipping the flesh beneath her sleeve, and she was smiling at him with interest. In the booth, the young boy was sitting beside the girl with his arm around her. She had stopped crying and she was smiling with satisfaction. It was no use. He was sad now because the men were dying in France. The Spanish countryside was covered with dirt from the mines in Asturias and he was a book publisher who was giving a party for some people who were waiting upstairs for a jar of mustard. He stood up slowly. She looked at him with surprise and he avoided her eyes.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry.” He tried to smile but it wouldn’t come. “I have to go.”

  “Why? Why do you have to go?�
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  “I’ll see you again,” he said quickly. “I can’t explain, but I’ll see you again.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll see you here. I don’t know when, but I’ll see you here. You’ll be here, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll be here. When?”

  “I don’t know when, but you be here.”

  He turned abruptly and walked away without looking back. When he was outside, he walked quickly to the avenue. The store was about to close. He bought the mustard and walked back down the street to the house, walking as fast as he could, because he had been gone a long time and they were waiting upstairs for the jar of mustard. Before he was there he looked at his watch, and he began to run.

  THE SOUND OF ASTHMA*

  It was a warm, humid night, and Peter was sweating as he sat ponderously in a chair that was too narrow for his soft bulk. He was tired and a little depressed as he felt the perspiration ooze warmly from his pores and turn cold as it dried on his under-clothes. He leaned forward over his desk, scratching aimlessly at the worn surface with wide, jaundiced fingernails. The hollow knock of a ping-pong ball came faintly from the recreation room of the Youth Organization across the hall. Alex was talking but Peter’s mind kept wandering and it was difficult to listen to him.

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “Sometimes I don’t know.” His old, bent frame was perched on a high, wooden stool against the wall. “Sometimes I’m not so sure anymore.”

  Peter grunted because he didn’t feel like answering. It was hot and moist and he was sweating and tired. They were playing ping-pong across the hall and Alex was talking, and he was depressed because he felt that it had all dropped dead some time ago and he had been living with a corpse without knowing it. What should have been a vibrant, vigorous organization had somehow turned sluggish and feeble. It was all different now and it was sad and depressing.

  “.….….….……. faith,” Alex said.

  “That’s the way it is,” Peter said slowly, having no idea what Alex had said. “That’s always the way it is.”

  Alex turned silent, and for a while his labored breath joined with the sound of the ping-pong ball to form the only noise. It had all changed somehow. You lived intimately with something for a long time, certain you knew what it was, and then one day you looked and it turned out to be something altogether different. He was older now and Max and a good many of the others were gone now, and in their places there were tired, puzzled old men like Alex, and sneering pedants like Crawford, and young, unhappy people with red pimples and sex frustrations. Traumatic idealism, he thought, and smiled because he liked the phrase.

  “Even the philosophers aren’t sure,” Alex said sadly. “They grope.”

  Peter didn’t reply. Doubles, he thought, listening to the faint staccato of the ping-pong ball, they are playing doubles. He toyed whimsically with the idea of rising and going across the hall to see if they really were playing doubles, whimsically, because he knew he would not exert the energy for so trivial a purpose. He turned and stared out the window at the irregular pattern of lights that hung like tiny patches over the soft, deep cloak of night, listening to Alex breathing behind him. There were the lights on the lampposts along the avenue, and there were the square, yellow lights in the windows, and there were the spatulate beams from the headlights in automobiles that reached out like long, white fingers and squashed themselves against the pavement. There were a lot of lights, and if you included the stars, there were too many lights to count.

  The door opened and Crawford entered, chewing on a toothpick, his stooped shoulders draped in an old tweed suit. He nodded and Peter looked at him without expression. Ira Crawford was a slim, swarthy-faced man who could prove or disprove anything with a set of statistics he always kept in memory and whose jeering, contemptuous manner never seemed to vary. He closed the door behind him and sat down on a corner of the desk. He removed the toothpick from his mouth and applied it to his fingernails. After a few minutes, he looked at Peter.

  “I saw your friend today,” he said, his dark face filling with slow amusement.

  “I have no friends,” Peter said. His fingers plucked at the surface of the desk. “Which friend?”

  “Max.”

  Peter sat up. “Max Hirsch?”

  Ira nodded. “Max Hirsch.”

  “Where?”

  “I saw him in a bar on the west side,” Ira said. He turned to Alex and spoke to him directly with slow, painstaking nonchalance. Peter listened impatiently. “I was there with an amazingly flat-bellied young lady, trying to dispel her moral trepidations with a new technique. I was trying to seduce her with dialectics and alcohol. We were on our fifth beer and she was getting gay when the door opened and Max came in.” He turned back to Peter. “Max Hirsch.”

  “You talk a lot, Ira,” Peter said with annoyance. “Was he in uniform?”

  “He was in civilian clothes,” Ira said.

  “What was he doing there? Did you speak to him?”

  “He was buying a pitcher of beer. I did not speak to him.”

  “Did you follow him?”

  “I knew you would want his address so I followed him.” Ira turned to Alex. “Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I followed him. I bought another drink for the young lady, told her I would return presently, and went after him. Here’s his address.” He drew a folded envelope from his pocket and gave it to Peter. “When I returned,” he continued to Alex, “she was with a big marine who was continuing from where I had stopped. From the position of his hands when I left, I would say he was successful. My beer and dialectics—the marine wins the prize. That’s the way it goes, eh Peter?”

  Peter looked up at him. “You talk too much,” he said.

  “Do I?” Ira asked with amusement.

  “Yes,” Peter said. “You do. And please get the hell off my desk.”

  “The chair has to be fixed,” Ira said. He made no motion to rise.

  “I don’t care about that,” Peter said, his voice rising with anger. “You can sit there or you can stand, but get the hell off this desk.”

  Their eyes met, and then Ira looked away. The smile on his face fidgeted and disappeared. He rose slowly, walked across the room, and sat down on the arm of the chair.

  “You talk too much, Ira,” Peter said slowly, in a soft, menacing voice. “You talk too damn much.”

  Ira avoided his eyes, his assurance gone. “I was only joking, Peter,” he said.

  “You joke too much,” Peter said. He listened for several moments to the asthmatic breathing of Alex, thinking about what he would say to Max when he saw him. Then he stood up and walked down the office without a word. He walked across the hall to the recreation room to see if they were playing doubles.

  The smell of wasting wood, dust, and dry heat grated in his nostrils and throat as he climbed the first flight to Max’s apartment. He held the bannister with his wet hand, cursing Max because he lived on the top floor and there were eight flights to climb. At the first floor, his fat body was hot with sweat and he paused there, sucking loudly at the dry air for breath. He rested a few moments and continued. He arrived at the fourth floor with grateful relief, feeling the heavy drag of exhaustion and the damp warmth beneath his chin.

  The house was quiet. The door to the flat was open and he peered inside. Seeing no one, he stepped through the doorway and moved inside. As he approached the kitchen, he heard voices, and he stopped abruptly and listened. One of the voices was a woman’s. Peter smiled without amusement and retreated to the door.

  “Max?” he called.

  The voices stopped. A chair scraped, and Max came to the kitchen entrance, a worried look on his thin face. He stopped with surprise when he saw Peter, his face turning solemn and hostile. Peter was disappointed.

  “Hello, Max,” he said wryly.

  Max continued to stare at him. A woman came up behind him and peered over his shoulder. Max caught her arm and stopped her. “Go back in the kitchen,�
� he said. He stopped her protest with a gesture. “Go inside, Sarah,” he said gently. She looked curiously at Peter, then disappeared. Max moved into the room slowly. “What is it, Peter?” he asked quietly.

  Peter studied him for a moment. “I’m sorry I’m not welcome, Max,” he said. “I came as a friend.”

  Max hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sit down.”

  Peter sat down wearily. “It’s good to see you again, Max.”

  Max smiled doubtfully.

  “How’ve you been?” Peter asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “I was afraid you were dead when you stopped writing. Were you wounded?”

  “No,” Max said. “I wasn’t wounded.”

  “Were you where the fighting was?”

  “For a little while. Air raids, that’s all.”

  “That’s good,” Peter said. Max was watching him with suspicion and Peter grew resentful. “You haven’t changed much, Max,” he said, teasingly. “Who’s the woman?”

  “My wife,” Max replied.

  “Your wife?” Peter said, concealing his surprise. “How long have you been married?”

  “Seven months.”

  “That’s very nice, Max. Call her in. I want to meet her.”

  “I’d rather not,” Max said. “What do you want, Peter?”

  “Don’t joke, Max. You know why I’m here. Call her in please.”

  “It doesn’t concern her.”

  “I want to meet her. Now call her.”

  Max looked at him, thinking. Then he turned slowly. “Sarah!” he called. The woman entered quickly. “Sarah, this is Peter Winkler.”

  The woman looked at Peter and nodded blankly.

  “How do you do,” Peter said, making no effort to rise. “I heard Max was married and I wanted to meet his wife.”

  The woman didn’t answer and there was a short silence.

  “Go finish your dinner,” Max said to her.

  She walked back to the kitchen and turned in the doorway. “Come finish yours,” she said.

  “I’ll be in later. I have to talk to Peter.”