James Cain - The Cocktail Waitress

Easier said than done.

I spent the whole day trying to go through with my big idea, of being nice to him. There were three buttons on the table, each with a picture beside it, one of a waiter, one of a maid, and one of a bellboy. “A lot of their guests,” he explained, “don’t speak any English, so for them it’s made plain.” I punched the one for a waiter, and suddenly there he was, a napkin on one arm, a menu card in his hand. “I never take anything but rolls, buttermilk, and black coffee for breakfast,” said Earl. Of course I wanted bacon, eggs, and toast, but I smiled and went along with his tonic water of a breakfast for myself as well. We ate it together in the sitting room, he still in pajamas, I in my walking clothes. When the food was gone, he dressed, not inviting me to watch, to my relief. Then started what would have been an interesting day, if it hadn’t been for the finish I was dreading it would have.

We went to lunch at Simpson’s, a place I’d heard about, which was just a few steps from the hotel. I ordered steak, being hungry still from breakfast, “a Delmonico steak, just a small one,” but the waiter told me they didn’t have one-“We’re strictly a join-’ouse, ma’am.” “Join-’ouse” seemed to mean a place that served roast meat only, so I ordered roast beef instead. When it came he carved and served me- one slice only, and I fear my face blanched, or perhaps my stomach rumbled. Earl passed over a coin, and the waiter, looking pleased and surprised, said “Oh, thank you, sir,” and cut me another slice. “You’d think,” said Earl when the waiter had gone, “that no one had had that idea before, of pitching in with an extra shilling-in point of fact it’s a ritual. If I hadn’t done it he’d have found some way to remind me. They’re a funny bunch, the English. They always have to pretend.”

I, meanwhile, was wolfing down the meat, which was tender and terrific. I wanted to know more about it, so when we had finished our lunch Earl disappeared for a minute, only to return with the manager, who showed me around the kitchen while my new husband took some more coffee at our table. I must say I was fascinated. The meat hangs on hooks at the end of chains, which turn slowly in front of a bank of live coals, roasting out in the open. To keep it from burning they wrap it in brown paper.

When I went back upstairs I felt I had learned something.

It was after three when we got back to the hotel, and he led the way up to the suite. “Time I took my nap,” he said, “Doctor’s orders-but everyone ought to do it, they’d feel better, and probably live longer. Why don’t you take one, Joan?”

“Then O.K., why not?”

I didn’t much care, one way or the other, but if it pleased him, was willing to give it a try. So we went up, he going to his room, I to mine. I slipped off my clothes, and was just reaching for my nightgown when there he was at the door. He stood there for a long moment staring at me. “… I hope you don’t mind,” he stammered. Then: “You’re so beautiful I have to look.”

“I don’t like to be looked at,” I answered. “At least in the daytime — it doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“Day or night doesn’t make much difference in how you look. You’re the same girl, either way.”

By now he was close to me, and I instinctively turned my back, but that turned out a mistake. When he put his arms around me, it put his hands over my breasts, and he did what he’d done the night before: cupped them and kneaded them with his fingers. I hated it, and began pushing him off, hooking my fingers in his, to pull them away from me and make him turn me loose. We began to wrestle, he making a game of it, laughing and gasping for breath. But I’m fairly strong, and pretty soon had his hands in mine, holding them clear, while I shoved him with my hip. Then suddenly he gasped, and when I looked was lying across the bed, his hands pressed to his chest. “Joan,” he whispered, “will you get my pills for me-my nitro pills, from my bed in the other room? They’re in a bottle, at the head of the bed. In a little vial-would you hurry, please?”

I hurried, not waiting even to throw something on, and there sure enough, on the shelf at the head of his bed, was the tiny bottle he spoke of, and I raced with it back to him, unscrewing the top as I

went. “That’s it,” he gasped. “Give me one-so, in the palm of your hand.”

He took the pill I gave him, popped it into his mouth and then poked it under his tongue with his finger. Then, in a moment: “Give me another one, Joan.” I did, and he jammed that one under his tongue, too. Then he lay there, eyes closed, as though waiting. Slowly the strain on his features began to subside. Then: “I’m sorry, Joan-I can’t help it. The pain is indescribable, and the pills help but it still goes on.” Then: “If I die-”

“Earl!”

“If I die,” he insisted, speaking still with some difficulty, “I want you to know what to do. Please have me cremated-it’s important to me, Joan, please listen. Have me cremated and take my ashes to Maryland, for burial in our family plot, in the College Park Cemetery. My will is drawn, signed, and in my deposit box. You’re the sole beneficiary, Joan, except for some remembrances to my staff. I had my lawyer see to it.”

“Please don’t talk like that.”

“I try to face reality.”

I didn’t think he was going to die. I certainly didn’t want him to, despite what he’d just told me about his will. All I could think of was that now at last I’d have a real excuse for holding him off, and not letting things get started in the way he seemed to want, when it came time for me to undress.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. He remembered the pain only as long as he felt it, clamping his chest in a vise. Once past, it was quickly forgotten, or if not forgotten then he chose to overlook it, and was back each evening despite all my reminders of the danger he faced. “I’ll only watch,” he would say, cajoling me. Except that he wouldn’t only watch, as seeing me in the nude seemed to exert a magnetic pull on him, such that his hands invariably found their way to my body, at which point he’d say, “I only want to feel you in my arms”-but if I’d let him do that, I know it wouldn’t have stopped there, either.

And to think he’d once waved Casanova in my face, as proof of women’s weakness and inability to resist the physical act of love-or of their not knowing any other way, to be more precise. Well, he didn’t seem to know any other way, and I had my hands full just keeping him off of me. Twice more he’d needed an application of his nitroglycerin, to the point that I began to worry his supply might run out. But he reassured me, when I raised this concern, that there was a British chemist on call to supply more if he needed it.

For a week or more, I bore up under the strain. During the days, I could relax and enjoy London, which I proceeded to do, in the morning mostly, slipping out as I had that first day, before he got up. I picked up a pal, a girl I ran into by accident in front of the National Gallery. I knew she was American by her clothes and we hit it off at once. Her name was Hilda Holiday. She was from Texas, just a little bit older than me, and was staying, with her new husband-her first and only-at the Charing Cross, on the Strand, which was where I stopped by for her each day. She wouldn’t come to the Savoy because, as she put it, “I wouldn’t have the courage.” I told her it didn’t take courage to walk through those doors, only money, but she laughingly said, “I wouldn’t have enough of that either.”

Her husband was a stay-in-bed type, mornings at least, leaving her free to wander the city a bit, and we took to wandering together. We hit it off with one another, and did a lot of laughing, like at the sentries at Buckingham Palace, trying to make them laugh. We never succeeded, but once, by the way he cut his eyes in our direction, we knew one boy heard us. Then we laughed at the parking lots, which seemed to be everywhere in the most improbable places. We said, “They have more lots than cars,” for by that time we’d both noted how little traffic there was, even in the rush hour-not a tenth of what New York has, or any American city. And then one day, piled alongside a lot, we noted a wall made of loose bricks, and of course started laughing about it, how “a little mortar might help.” But the attendant chimed in, “Temporary, you know-” or “temp’ry,” as he called it. “From the Blitz, that was all that was left from the bombing. Nothing to do with the space but rent it-it brings in a bit, and it helps.”