Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

Yes, it had been Milton. She was certain now. Going from the place they had met to the next place, he had kept patting her thigh, and she had let him, not considering it very important, and at the next place, which was noisy and uninhibited and very crowded, he had asked her if she would stay with him in his apartment, and she had said that she didn’t really feel much like it but might feel more like it later. She didn’t like Milton very much, although she didn’t make a cardinal issue of it, and it was more difficult to feel like it with him than with some others. Anyhow, after making it indefinite about staying with him, she had excused herself and gone to the ladies’ room, and it had been very hot in there and a long way from clean, and she remembered thinking that she wouldn’t use the toilet even if she were saturated with penicillin, and this thought had made her feel even less like staying for what would be left of the night with Milton. She had gone out of the room and out of the larger room with all the noise and people and had stood outside leaning against the building and had taken several deep breaths of air.

There. There, there, there. That was when and where she’d become a dark hiatus. The precise place and time. There was no telling how long exactly the hiatus had lasted, but probably not very long, and it would be an absolute waste of time and effort to try to remember what had been done in it, for she knew from experience that it was no use. Besides, at that moment, the drum and the piano began to talk to each other, and she quit remembering and began listening. She listened for a while without turning, and she thought that it was good dialogue, very clever. Whoever was making the drum talk was doing it lightly with a brush, and whoever was making the piano talk was doing it also lightly with a brush of fingers, and the effect was a delicacy, an intimacy, like lovers whispering. Pretty soon, in the first pause in the dialogue, she revolved half around on the stool and looked over tables and chairs and heads to the platform beyond the small area for dancing.

The young man who was brushing the drum had a round, absorbed face and round, bewitched eyes and little brown curls coiled so tightly all over his head that she was immediately inclined to discount them as being very unlikely.

The young man who was playing the piano was about medium height with slightly stooped shoulders, and if he had been naked she could have counted far too many of his bones, and he had black hair and an ugly, thin, dark face with a slightly twisted nose and twisted mouth. She thought with a kind of strange despair that he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen in all her life.

Piano and the drum were lovers. After giving thanks to a dark psychotic god, they laughed and wept and made erotic love. What had been in the beginning a jam-session psalm became, in an instant, jazz pornography. The young man with bewitched eyes leaned above the drum, and the young man with the beautiful ugly face leaned above the piano, and the girl from Park Avenue leaned above the bar and listened and held an empty Martini glass, and the superior bartender leaned against the backbar opposite her and felt in his heart a rare and reluctant bitterness.

For a while she had sat sidewise to the bar with her eyes fixed on the piano player, but then she had turned slowly back to face the bar squarely, and that’s the way she was sitting now, in a posture of intent listening, with her shoulders folded slightly forward and her pale hair falling down over her eye on the heavy side. The bartender from his position could see directly past pale hair and short nose and soft mouth into the cleft between her resilient breasts that were half exposed, even when she sat erect, by the décolleté gown that had probably cost more than he made in two long months of mixing drinks and drawing beer. Watching her, he was aware of an exorbitant emotional reaction, but it was not the view of her breasts that stimulated it. He was used to nudity, resistant if not immune, and he was no longer subject as he had once been in his youth, to the hard thrust of instant desire at the sight of suggestive flesh. It was her face that disturbed him and made him feel the reluctant bitterness, for it was a small, sad, lovely face of fine structure in which sadness and loveliness would survive as a shadow of themselves after the erosions of gin and promiscuous love and nervous breakdowns. It was a face, in fact, which he would surely remember, and remembering was almost always the worst kind of mistake. This was something he had learned from a long time of tending bar. A man was a fool to take anything home in his head.

Well, he had learned a lot tending bar, and it had been, on the whole, a good and satisfying kind of life. Maybe it wasn’t the thing he would have done if he could have done what he wanted most to do, but just the same it was far from being the worst thing he might have done, and he had no complaints, no bellyaches, no futile regrets for not having become something more than he was. The only thing he wished: he wished he were not so vulnerable to the faces. Not specific faces. Not the face of this person or that person as distinguished from all other faces that had stared at themselves in the mirror behind the backbar. Composite faces. Type faces. The face of the old man who sat nursing his bourbon and water in the silence of his own dissolution as be listened to the relentless ticking of the metronome of God. The adjusted face of the pro whore who exploited love, and the sick face of the amateur whore that love exploited. The faces of the lost and the tired and the damned. And now, to disturb his peace for an hour or two, the specific, haunting face of a Park Avenue tramp who had stopped in to find out where she’d been. The rare face of a dissolute child.

She was holding the brittle bulb of her glass in the palms of her cupped hands, and pretty soon she looked up with an odd expression of supplication, as if she wanted desperately to have the bulb filled but somehow did not think it would be proper to ask. The bartender moved across the narrow space between the back and front bars.

“Another Martini, lady?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

She pushed the glass toward him and continued to sit in the posture of intent listening while he measured and mixed gin and vermouth. The drum and the piano were now angry with each other. The piano was speaking with censurable profanity.

“Have you remembered where you were?” the bartender said.

“Yes, thank you,” she said. “Not exactly, that is, but in a general way. It was a very noisy place with a band that was much too big and a dirty ladies’ room. I went there with this particular man I know who wanted me to go home with him, but I decided that I wouldn’t. I went outside and leaned against the front of the building and took several deep breaths of air, and that’s all I remember until I was suddenly walking along the street. Do you have any idea what place it was?”

“It could be one of several. Anyhow, it must be near. I can have someone help you look for it, if you like.”

“No. That won’t be necessary. I don’t care to go back. If I did, I would have to explain to Milton why I don’t want to stay with him, and he would probably be difficult. Besides, to tell the truth, I’m not quite sure myself why I don’t.”

“I see. How do you propose to get home?”

“I’ll take a taxi or something. It’s entirely possible that I may not bother to go home at all.”

“Well, you’ll have to go somewhere.”

“That’s true. It’s always necessary to go somewhere. I wonder why.”

“I don’t know, lady. It’s just expected of us, I guess.”

“Yes. You’re right, as usual. We’re always doing what’s expected of us. The trouble is, however, I’m not. I get into quite a bit of trouble that way.”