Hot Night in the City Read online

  "Oh, by then I'll be a qualified secretary. I'm taking shorthand two nights a week. The Gregg Method? And I'm going to take a typing course as soon as I save up enough money. You know what they say: If you can type and take shorthand, you'll never be out of a job."

  "Yeah, they just keep on saying that and saying that. Sometimes I get tired of hearing it. So, I suppose that what with your job and your shorthand classes and all, you don't get out much."

  "No, not much. I don't know all that many people. ...No one, really."

  "You must miss your folks."

  "No."

  "Not at all?"

  "They're religious and awful strict. With them, everything is sin, sin, sin."

  He smiled. "They do a lot of sinning, do they?"

  "No, they never sin. Never. But they... I don't know how to describe it. They're always thinking about sin. Always cleansing themselves of it, or strengthening themselves to resist it. I guess you could say they spend all their time not sinning. Sort of like... well, do you remember when we were walking here and I bumped into you and we touched shoulders, then we walked on making sure not to touch again but thinking about it every step of the way? Well, with them it's sort of like that with sinning, if you know what I mean."

  "I know exactly what you mean." Actually, he hadn't once thought about their shoulders touching, but to admit that would be unkind. And he admired her simple frankness where other girls would have been coy.

  They fell silent for a time, then she emerged from her reverie with a quick breath and said, "What about you?"

  "How do I feel about sin?"

  "No, I mean, tell me about yourself and your job and all."

  "Well... let's see. First off, I have to confess that I don't work in a JC Penney's, and I've never taken a shorthand course in my life. I haven't the time. I'm too busy lurking around movie houses and following girls on buses."

  "No, come on! How come you talk with an English accent if you're not English?"

  "It's not an English accent. It's what they call 'mid-Atlantic'. And it's totally phony. When I was a drama major in college, I—"

  "You've been to college?"

  "Only a couple of years. Then the Korean Police Action came along and I—" He shrugged all that away. "No, I'm not English. I just decided to change my voice because I hated it. It was so... New York. Flat, metallic, adenoidal, too little resonance, too much urgency. I wanted to sound like the actors I admired. Welles, Olivier, Maurice Evans. So I took courses in theater speech and I practiced hours and hours in my room, listening to records and imitating them. But it turned out to be a waste of time."

  "No it wasn't! I like the way you talk. It's so... cultured. Sort of like Claude Rains or James Mason."

  "Oh yes, my dear," he said as Rains, "the phony speech eventually became habitual." He shifted to Mason, which was only a matter of bringing Rains a little further forward into the mask, dropping the note, and adding a touch of aspirate huskiness. "But even with a new voice, I was still the person I was trying not to be. Damned nuisance!" Then he returned to the voice he used for everyday. "For all my correctly placed vowels and sounded terminal consonants, I was still a bad boy running away from... whatever it is we're all supposed to be running away from."

  "So you left college to join the army?"

  "That's right. But the army... well, they decided to let me out early."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged. "I guess I'm just not the soldier type. Not aggressive enough. Are you cold?" She had been sitting with her arms crossed over her breasts, holding her upper arms in her hands. He reached across the table and touched her arm above the elbow. "You are cold."

  "It's this air-conditioning. I don't know why they turn it up so high."

  The refugees had been steadily thinning out, and now the family in the booth behind them left, the mother with the wet-mouthed baby in her arms, the father carrying one child and pulling a sleep-dazed little girl along by the hand, her untied shoes clopping on the floor. Soon the place would be empty, except for the night people.

  She looked up at the clock above the counter. "Gee, it's after two. I've got work tomorrow." But she didn't rise to leave. He drew a deep sigh and stretched, and his foot touched hers beneath the table. He said, "Excuse me," and she said, "That's all right," and they both looked out the window at the empty street. He watched her eyes refocus to his reflection on the surface of the glass, and he smiled at her.

  "What about you?" she asked. "Don't you have to be at work early?"

  "No. I don't have what you'd call a steady job. I just drift from city to city. When I need money, I go to the public market before dawn and stand around with the rest of the drifters and winos. Job brokers come in trucks and pick out the youngest and strongest for a day's stoop labor. I almost always get picked, even though I'm not all that hefty. I give the foremen one of my boyish smiles, and they always pick me."

  "It's true, you do have a boyish smile."

  "And when the boyish smile doesn't work, I fall back on my 'look of intense sincerity'. That's a sure winner. Stoop labor only pays a buck or a buck ten an hour. But still, one thirteen- or fourteen-hour day gives me enough for a couple of days of freedom."

  "But there's no future in that."

  "What? No future? I've been tricked! They assured me that stoop labor was a sure path to riches, fame, success with the women, and a closer relationship with my personal savior. Gosh, maybe I'd better give it up and take a course in shorthand. The Gregg Method."

  He meant to be amusing, but the smile he evoked was so faint and fugitive that he said, "I'm sorry. Look, I wasn't poking fun at you. If I was poking fun at anybody, it was myself. You are absolutely right! There's no future in stoop labor. I've got to start taking life seriously!" He made his eyes crinkle into a smile. "Maybe I'll start next Thursday. How would that be?"

  She didn't answer for a time, then said she really had to be getting home.

  He nodded. "You want me to walk you? Or do you feel pretty safe in your Italian neighborhood?"

  "What about you? Don't you have to get some sleep?"

  "They won't let me in. It's too late. So I'll just roam the streets. Cities are interesting just before dawn when everything is quiet, except for the occasional distant siren announcing a fire, or a crime, or a birth—which is a sort of crime, considering the state of the world. There's something haunting about a distant siren. Like when you hear the whistle of a freight train at night, far off down in the valley, and you'd give anything in the world not to be the kind of..." He stopped speaking and his attention turned inward. He seemed to be listening to a distant freight train in his memory.

  She cleared her throat softly. "Gee, it must be interesting to travel around on freight trains and see things. Lonely, I suppose. But interesting."

  "Yup!" he said in Gary Cooper's lockjaw way. "Real interesting, ma'am. But real lonely, too."

  She pushed her coffee mug aside. "I've really got to get some sleep." But she still didn't rise to go. "You said something about not being able to go to bed because they wouldn't let you in. Who won't let you in? Why not?"

  "Obviously, you're not au fait with the protocol of your friendly neighborhood flophouse. They're all pretty much the same. You sleep in wire cages that you can lock from the inside to protect your bindle from thieves and your body from men who— They're not exactly homosexuals. Most of them would rather have a woman. Most of them fantasize about women. But..." He shrugged and glanced at her to see if this was embarrassing her. But no. She was listening with a frown of concern, trying to understand with a total absence of coyness that he admired. "The flophouse routine is simple and rigid. You aren't allowed in until ten at night, and by eleven the lights are turned off. Early in the morning, usually five-thirty or six, the alarms go off and you've got half an hour to get out before they clean the place with a fire hose, shooting it through the wire cages. The mattresses are covered with waterproof plastic so they don't get soaked, but they always feel
clammy, and the place always smells of urine and Lysol. But the price is right! Four bits a night. A dime extra if you want a shower. Tonight I took a long cold shower, then I lay on my cot, reading a paperback until the lights went out. But it was so hot! The rubberized mattress stuck to my back and made a sort of ripping sound every time I rolled over. And the sweat was stinging my eyes. So finally I decided to get out and wander the streets. But then..." he shifted to a Peter Lorre voice, nasal and lateral with dentalized consonants "...what should I see but June Allyson coming out of a June Allyson movie, so naturally I followed her. You think that was evil of me, don't you, Rick. You don't like me much, do you, Rick." He smiled and returned to his street voice. "And now here I am, talking to a very, very sleepy girl in an almost empty White Tower. Ain't life a gas?"

  She shook her head sadly. "Gosh, what a terrible way to live. And for a person who went to college, too."

  He let W. C. Fields respond. "That's the way it is out there, my little chickadee. It's not a fit life for man nor beast!"

  "You must be lonely."

  "Yup," he said. "Sometimes a fella gets lonelier than one of those lonely things you see out there being lonely." Then he suddenly stopped clowning around. "I guess I'm nearly as lonely as a girl who gets all dressed up on the hottest night of the year and goes out to see a movie... all alone."

  "Well I... I don't know many people here. And what with my night classes and all..." She shrugged. "Gee, I've really got to get home."

  "Right. Let's go."

  She glanced again at the clock. "And you're going to walk around until dawn?"

  "Yup."

  She frowned down into her lap, and her throat mottled with a blush. "You could..." She cleared her throat. "You could stay with me if you want. Just until it gets light, I mean."

  He nodded, more to himself than to her.

  They stepped out of the cool White Tower into the humid heat of the street. At first, the warmth felt good on their cold skin, but it soon became heavy and sapping. They walked without speaking. By inviting him to her room, she had made a daring and desperate leap into the unknown, and now she was tense and breathless with the danger of it... and the thrill of it.

  He looked at her with feeling. 'This is it,' he said to himself. 'She's the one,' and he felt a thrill akin to hers. When he smiled at her, she returned an uncertain, fluttering smile that was both vulnerable and hopeful. There was something coltish in her awkward gait on those high heels, something little-girlish in the sibilant whisper of her stiff crinoline. He drew a long slow breath.

  He followed her up three flights of dark, narrow stairs, both of them trying to make their bodies as light as possible because the stairs creaked and they didn't want to wake her landlady. She turned her key in the slack lock, opened the door, and made a gesture for him to go in first. After the dark of the stairwell, the room dazzled and deluded him. The streetlight under which they had first met was just beneath her window, and it cast trapezoidal distortions of the window panes up onto the ceiling, filling the room with slabs of bright light separated by patches of impenetrable shadow. His eyes had difficulty adapting to this disorienting play of dazzle and darkness because the brightness kept his irises too dilated to see into the shadows. The oilcloth cover of a small table was slathered with light, while the iron bed in the corner was bisected diagonally by the shadow of an oversized old wardrobe that consumed too much of the meager space. The only door was the one they had entered through, so he assumed the toilet must be down the hall. The room was an attic that had been converted at minimal cost, and the metal roof above the low ceiling pumped the sun's heat into the small space all day long.

  "It's awful hot, I know," she whispered apologetically. Standing there with her back to the window, she was faceless within a dazzling halo of hair, while the light was so strong on his face that it burned out any expression; she wore a mask of shadow; he wore a mask of light.

  "I'll open the window so we can get a little breeze," he whispered.

  "You can't. It's stuck."

  "Jesus."

  "Sorry. Would you like a glass of water? If I run it a long time, it gets cold. Well... cool, anyway."

  "Do we have to whisper?"

  "No, but I..."

  "But you don't want your neighbors to know you have someone up here?"

  She nodded. "You see, I've never..." She swallowed noisily.

  "I understand," He didn't whisper, but he spoke very softly. "Yes, I would like a glass of water, thank you." He sat on the edge of the bed, sunk up to his chest in shadow.

  She turned the single tap above a chipped sink and let the water overflow the glass onto her wrist until it got cool. He could tell she was glad to have something to do—or, more exactly, to have something to delay what they were going to do.

  The harsh streetlight picked out a two-ring hot plate on the table. Its cord ran up to a dangling overhead light. The bulb had been taken out and replaced by a screw-in socket. He deduced that cooking in the room was forbidden, but she did it anyway to save money. She probably unplugged the hot plate and hid it when she left for work. There was an open workbook and a pad of paper beside the hot plate: the Gregg Method. These everyday objects were abstracted, caricatured, by the brittle streetlight that set their edges aglow but coated them with thick shadow. The room had a shrill, unreal quality that put him in mind of a bright but deserted carnival lot, and something about it made him think of a kid jolting awake from a terrible nightmare to see the shadow of a tree branch dancing insanely on a window shade.

  She brought him the glass of water; he thanked her and drank it down; she asked if he would like another; he said he wouldn't, thank you; she told him it wouldn't be any trouble; he said no thanks, and she stood there awkwardly.

  "Hey, what's this?" he asked, holding up a glass sphere that his fingers had discovered beneath her pillow where they had been unconsciously searching for that coolness that children seek by turning pillows over and putting their cheek on them.

  "That's my snowstorm."

  He shook the heavy glass paperweight and held it up into the band of light across the bed to watch the snow swirl around a carrot-nosed snowman. "Your own private snowstorm. A handy thing on a hot night like this!"

  "I won it at the county fair when I was a kid. I used my ride money to buy a raffle ticket, and I won third prize. I told my folks I found it at the fairground because they're dead against raffles and bingo games and all kinds of gambling. My snowstorm's the only thing I took with me when I left home. Except my clothes, of course."

  "So your snowstorm's your friend, eh? A trusted companion through the trials and tribulations of life."

  "I keep it under my pillow, and sometimes at night when I'm feeling real blue I shake it and watch the snow whirl, and it makes me feel safer and more... oh, I don't know." She shrugged.

  "Back to your sentry post, loyal snowstorm." He returned the paperweight to beneath her pillow and patted it into place; then he reached up, took her hands, and drew her down to sit beside him.

  "Please..." she said in a thin voice. "I'm scared. I really shouldn't of... I mean, I've never..."

  He pressed her hands, clammy with fear. "Listen. If you want me to go, I'll just tiptoe down the stairs and slip out. Is that what you want?"

  "...No, but... Couldn't we just..."

  "You know what I think? I think I'd better go. You're scared, and I wouldn't want to talk you into anything you don't want to do." He rose from the bed.

  "No, don't go!" Her voice was tight with the effort to speak softly.

  He sat down again, but left a distance between their hips.

  For a moment she didn't say anything, just sat there kneading the fingers of her left hand with her right. Then she squeezed them hard. She had come to a decision. She began speaking in a flat tone. "I was sitting at the table, like I do every night. Practicing my shorthand by the light of the street lamp because it's too hot to put on the light. And suddenly I was crying. I just felt so
empty and lonely and blue! I wasn't sobbing or anything. The tears just poured out and poured out. I didn't think I had so many tears in me. I was so lonely." Her voice squeaked on the word. "I don't know a soul here in the city. Don't have any friends. Even back home, I never went on a date. My folks wouldn't let me. They said that one thing leads to another. They said boys only want one thing. And I suppose they're right."

  "Yes, they are," he said sincerely.

  "After a while I stopped crying." She smiled feebly. "I guess I just ran out of tears. I splashed cool water on my face and tried to work at my shorthand some more, but then I just closed the book and said, no! No, I won't just sit here and mope! I'll dress up in my best and go out and find someone. Someone to talk to. Someone to care about me and hold me when I'm feeling blue."

  "You decided to go out and just... let yourself be picked up?"

  "I didn't think about it that way, but... Yes, I guess so."

  "You wanted to make love with a total stranger?"

  "No, no. Well... not exactly. You see, I've never..."

  She shook her head.

  "Shall I tell you something? I knew you were a virgin when I first saw you. Yes, I did. You had that Good Girl look. Like June Allyson. But somehow—don't ask me how—I could tell that the good girl was looking for a bad boy to make love to her. Funny, how I could tell that, eh?"

  "But you're wrong. I was just looking for someone to talk to. Someone who might care about me."

  "Oh. So you didn't want to make love, is that it?"

  "I don't know. Maybe I did. Sort of, anyway. I didn't think it out or anything, I just took my towel and went down to the bathroom and had a long cool bath, then I put on my good dress, and out I went. Just like that."

  "...Just like that."

  "I took the bus downtown, and I walked around. Boys on street corners looked at me. You know, the way they look at any woman. But none of them... I guess I'm not... I know I'm not pretty or anything..." She paused, half hoping for a contradiction. Then she went on. "They looked at me, but nobody said hello or anything, so..." She shrugged.

  "So you decided to go to the movies. Woman's World."