James Cain - The Cocktail Waitress

I caught Liz’s eye and motioned her over. “This is Miss Baumgarten,” I told him, “Liz to her many friends. She’ll bring you whatever you want.”

I went back to the locker room and stretched myself out on the bench. In a couple of minutes Liz was there. “He wants to see you,” she said.

“I’m kind of busy just at the moment.”

“Joanie, the guy’s nuts about you-the whole place knows it, been knowing it all summer, even if you don’t. And as much as I’d like to say I prefer Tom for you-you don’t brush something like that.”

“Who says I’m brushing him? Please just tell him what I said.”

“… Just right now you’re busy?”

“That’s it. Tell him so.”

I don’t quite know why I played it that way. For a moment there, serving his order, I had had a horrible hunch I had lost Mr. White, had broken beyond repair what we’d had, based as it was, at least in part, on his sense that I was a ‘lady,’ or at least more ladylike than Liz. But then, there seemed to be something squashy in the way he was acting toward me, and I could feel it somehow that if I played it right I still might call him mine. But the last thing in the world, I knew, would be for me to lead to him. It had to be him to me, or he’d look down on me. So I let Liz go with her message, and didn’t move off the bench. In a minute or two she was back. “He’s gone,” she whispered. “And he didn’t like it much, you not coming out. At least to tell him goodbye.”

“He’s not supposed to like it.”

“Joanie, with a fish like that on the hook-”

“You play him, you keep the line tight.”

“I wouldn’t play him that way, but-”

“He’s not your fish.”

What I would say to Tom, I hadn’t the faintest idea. What I had thought I would say, as I rehearsed it during the night, was that I expected to be getting married, and couldn’t risk an involvement with him. But now that I’d been caught by surprise, now that Mr. White knew what I’d done, or almost done at any rate, and had acted as any man would, I didn’t know where I was at, and for that reason hated to face it, the scene I would play with Tom. But anticlimax, he didn’t come. As his time approached I grew nervous, knowing “There was a reason” was no reason at all, and expecting a miserable mess, but when closing time came, he still hadn’t showed and there I was, not only with nothing to say but no one to say it to. And it went on for some little time-I not only didn’t see him, but didn’t hear where he was, or anything about him. He simply stopped coming, and no one had any news.

With Mr. White, however, things were different, and little by little, and then much by much, the situation changed. He was in the next afternoon, after the one I’ve just told about, still grim, but with no repetition of his hysterical outbreak. He ordered, then sat looking straight ahead, saying nothing at all. However, I wasn’t too bashful to speak. “In the first place,” I told him, beginning right in the middle without any small talk at all, “you can get rid of that snoop, that spy.”

“I don’t have any snoop.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. White, you have one.”

“You doubt my word?”

“You want a straight answer to that?”

“I demand a straight answer to it.”

“I not only doubt your word, I call you a goddam liar. You do have a snoop, and if you want to know how I know I go by that look in your eye. So spit it out, Mr. White. You do have a snoop, don’t you?”

“I have a man, O.K. But not to spy on you, for heaven’s sake.”

“A snoop is a snoop is a snoop.”

“This was a man that works for me, a man from down in the office, that I asked to keep an eye on you-not to spy, that’s the truth, simply to see that nothing happened to you after leaving here at night. That was all, I swear it was.”

I let him stew a bit before I relented: “Then O.K. I believe you.”

Because I knew he was telling the truth, or at least thought he was. I went on: “But in return for taking your word, taking your word on him, I must have your word it’s the end, that he won’t stake me out anymore, that you take him off my neck. What do you say to that?”

“… Joan, if you insist, I say O.K., of course. But-”

“I don’t need protection. Thanks to your great generosity, I have my own car now. I don’t ride with Liz anymore, I go straight home, let myself in with my key, and if I need the police can call them. Do I have your word you’re taking that tail off my back?”

“Joan, I’ve already said it.”

“Then O.K., let’s get on to the next matter.”

He looked up in surprise, and I went right on, boring in: “About you and I, getting married. On that, you said you asked nothing better, and would go through with it gladly, except that your doctor forbade it, as a sure sentence of death. O.K., Mr. White, but whose life is it? Your doctor’s?”

“… What do you mean, Joan? That it’s up to me to die to prove how I feel about you?”

“No, Mr. White, it’s not. But, there is a way out.”

“What do you mean, a way out?”

“Way in, perhaps I should say. Mr. White, sex isn’t everything. There’s no reason at all that you couldn’t marry me, stay in your bedroom, and let me stay in mine. That way, you’d have me with you always, if I mean what you say I do to you, and I’d have you with me always, and I do confess that would mean quite a lot. In addition to which, I could quit this job serving drinks, which has been a godsend to me, but which I confess I could do without. And most important of all to me, I could have my son back, and give him the growing up a boy dreams of, in that beautiful house, playing on that beautiful grass, and rolling his tricycle on that beautiful drive. What use is all that house and those grounds with just you living there by yourself? You’ve told me how lonely you are, how much more you like it here where we can talk and be together. For god’s sake, Earl, why should a man like you have to come to a bar for companionship? Or in other words, once again to make plain what I mean: Who’s running your life?”

“I’d love to have you helping me run it.”

“O.K., then. What do you say to what I just now said?”

“I say I’ll think it over.”

“It’s what I want you to do.”

It was two or three weeks after that, I would say in mid-September, so it was coming on for fall, before he came up with his answer-if you could call it that. He came in, ordered, and then, in the most casual way, said: “I think I’m going to say yes-but I must go to New York first.”

“New York? You mean, now?”

“I thought to leave tomorrow.”

“For how long?”

“Oh-better part of a month. Maybe more.”

There was something peculiar about it, and I asked: “What’s in New York? Why must you go up there?”

“Lawyer. He’s spending some time up there, working on a business deal for me, an important one.”

“And what does he have to do with you and me?”

“About such a marriage as ours, such a marriage as ours would be, there are quite a few legal angles. I’m not sure I know what they are, except in a general way. I think I should talk to him. And I need to be there to see to the deal as well.”

“I see. I see.”

“You could talk to a lawyer too.”

“That might be a good idea.”

I left him, did one or two things at the bar, and thought over what he had said. Then I went back and told him: “It’s really the best way, I agree. You go now, have your month in New York, and if you forget me, O.K. I have other chances, don’t worry.”

“… Stop talking like that! ”

“I told you go-then we’ll know where we stand.”