Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

“Tell me something honestly. What is the very dry Martini look and smell like?”

“Very good. Lots of class.”

“Thank you. You’re sweet and comforting. I’ve never been seen and smelled by a sweeter or more comforting bartender.”

“Besides that, I’m helpful.”

“Yes, you are. You were helpful in telling me what I’ve been drinking, and it would be even more helpful if you’d tell me where I’ve been.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I don’t seem to.”

“Did you walk here from wherever it was?”

“Yes. I don’t remember walking all the way, but suddenly I knew I was walking and remember walking from were I knew.”

“Well, chances are it’s close. It isn’t likely you walked very far.”

“I know. I thought of that myself.”

She said this proudly, as if it were a considerable accomplishment, and he looked at her closely across the bar with a kind of skeptical wariness.

“Do you do this often?” he said.

“Forget where I’ve been and how I got where I am? I wouldn’t say often. Once in a while is more like it. What happens is that I go somewhere with someone and get to drinking quite a bit, and then I apparently just walk off by myself and later have to remember where I was. It’s nothing to be disturbed about. I’ll just sit here and drink my Martini and think about it calmly, and pretty soon it’ll come to me.”

“While you’re thinking, try to think where you live in case it becomes necessary to see that you get home. Will you do that?”

“I don’t have to think about that, because I already know. I live in an apartment house on Park Avenue. I remember that clearly. Would you be interested in the address exactly?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. You’ve been so comforting and helpful that I thought you might come and see me there and mix very dry Martinis for us.”

“I never go see people who live on Park Avenue. Thanks just the same.”

“Why don’t you ever go see people who live on Park Avenue? What’s wrong with us?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re out of my class, that’s all.”

“Oh, nonsense. Do you know what Park Avenue is? It’s a super-slum. I read that about it in a book, but I don’t remember what book it was or who wrote it.”

“There seems to be a lot you don’t remember, and what I don’t understand about it is how you remember leaving where you live and know where you are but don’t remember where you were in the meanwhile.”

“That’s just the way it is. The beginning’s all right, and the end’s usually all right, but now and then there’s something in the middle that gets lost.”

“All right. You sit here and try to remember the middle, and if there’s any way I can help, like fixing another Martini or something, you let me know.”

He moved away and got very busy catching up with what he’d neglected while talking with her, and she took a drink of her Martini and spun herself slowly half around on her stool and looked at the room and what was going on in it. The room was quite narrow and rather long, dimly lit by lamps in brackets on opposite walls, and it was littered with small tables and chairs and people of various sizes. About half the people were men, and the other half were women, and this was an ideal arrangement. The men were dressed every which way in almost anything, and so were the women, and the clearest difference between them was that the women had tried a little harder to make it look like a night out.

Some of the women were older than others, and some were prettier, and this was, she thought, a condition that prevailed practically everywhere you went, even on Park Avenue, and she conceded gladly that the only immediately apparent distinction of any significance between these women and her, as a representative of Park Avenue, was that none of them was wearing, like her, a gown that cost $750 and sandals that cost $50 and panties that cost about $25, as nearly as she could remember. The last item was not an immediately apparent distinction, of course, but it was at least a fair assumption.

Actually, she didn’t think of this difference of expense as proving any difference of quality, one way or the other. As a matter of fact, she hardly ever thought of money, except amusing ways to spend it or how terrible it would be not to have it, and now, after thinking briefly of clothes and the cost of them, she abandoned this line of thought as being a bore and of less significance than it had at first seemed to be. Down the room, she noticed, was a small cleared space that must have been intended for dancing, which signified music, but she could not remember having heard any music of any kind since her arrival from wherever she’d been. Beyond the cleared space, however, was a little platform, an elevation of about a foot, and on the platform was a piano and a snare drum on a stand. Nothing else, unless you counted the piano bench and a single chair. Except the bench and the chair, just the piano and the drum. She thought they looked deserted and sad and strangely static on the small platform, like a still life painted a hundred years ago by an unhappy artist with too little to eat, and she wanted suddenly to put her head on her arms on the bar and cry.

It wouldn’t do, however. It would only make her look like a hag and would accomplish nothing. What she had to do was have another drink of Martini and try calmly to think of where she’d come from. She revolved slowly on the stool and drank from her glass and began to think. To begin with, she started from where she now was and attempted to go back carefully from there, but the moment she reached the place on the narrow street where she’d become aware of herself and part of her surroundings, the street ended, the buildings dissolved, and she herself became a kind of black hiatus between then and there and another place at an earlier time. It was very discouraging and rather exhausting, but she tried patiently several times before she conceded that it was simply no use. She didn’t really care where she’d been, so far as that went, but it was possible that there were obligations or effects associated with it that she ought to know about and so she reversed her procedure and began trying to reach her present time from the other end, the beginning.

She had left her Park Avenue apartment a little after five and had gone to another Park Avenue apartment where there was a cocktail party. This apartment was the apartment of Samantha Cox, who believed that having lots of money did not excuse one from doing something substantial and making a personal contribution to Life with a capital L. Samantha’s contribution was taking lessons in acting and doing small parts in television shows, nothing yet by Paddy Chayefsky, and how substantial this was as a contribution to Life was something that could be argued. She had met a lot of people at Samantha’s party, and had drunk quite a few Martinis, and after a while several of the people, including her, had decided that it would be a good idea to go somewhere and eat, and someone had said he was feeling a violent urge for some of the marvelous Italian food they served at a place on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and that’s where they’d gone.

She hadn’t eaten much of the Italian food, however marvelous, but she had, as she recalled, drunk two or three more Martinis, and afterward they had gone to another place where she had drunk two or three more than that, and still afterward to still another place where there had been a comedian who told dirty jokes that weren’t very funny and several very tall girls in G-strings. She must have switched parties at this place, for she distinctly remembered for the first time riding in the front seat of a white Mark II, and this must mean that she had met and gone away with Milton Crawford, for Milton was the only man she could think of among her fairly close associates who drove a white Mark II.