Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

“I can imagine.”

“You’re very understanding. I can see that. Don’t worry about me, though. I’ll go somewhere else when it becomes necessary, but right now I’m happy to be exactly where I am. I like this place very much. We’re compatible. I believe that I was guided here. After all, I didn’t have the least idea where I was coming, and here I came. Isn’t that logical?”

“You blacked out, lady. You might have wound up anywhere, and you ought to be careful. Something might happen to you some time.”

“Something’s always happening to me. I seem to be the sort of person that things just happen to. Can you believe it?”

“Yes, I can. I believe it.”

The piano was now contrite. It was filled with guilt and sorrow for having been profane. It wept softly, and the drum consoled it, and the sad lovely face of the girl to whom things happened was the compassionate mourner for all the troubled drums and pianos in the world.

“Who is that beautiful guy?” she said.

“What beautiful guy?” the bartender said.

“The one on the platform.”

“There’s no beautiful guy on the platform, lady. There’s only Chester Lewis on the drum and Joe Doyle on the piano.”

“That’s the one. The piano.”

“Joe’s not beautiful, lady He’s only a so-so piano thumper with a twisted nose and a bum pump.”

She lifted her glass in both hands and drank from it and stared at him sadly over the edge. In sadness and disappointment she shook her head slowly from side to side, the pale hair moving back and forth with the motion over the eye on the heavy side.

“I thought you were an understanding and perceptive bartender,” she said, “and I still think so. But now you are being disappointing. The piano is easily the most beautiful guy I’ve ever seen in all my life.”

“Excuse me, lady. Everyone to his own taste.”

“Are you being tolerant? I’m not sure I like that. It means I’m being tolerated, which is not particularly pleasant.”

“All right, lady. Joe’s beautiful. He’s the most beautiful guy in the world.”

“Well, you don’t have to be too agreeable. I admit that the piano has a twisted nose, and I admit that he might even be considered ugly by many people, but that’s because many people are not perceptive, which I was inclined to believe you were. What I mean is, he’s beautiful because he’s so ugly. Do you understand that?”

“Sorry. Explain it to me.”

“At first it may seem paradoxical, but a little thought will show you that it isn’t paradoxical at all. What you must realize is that everything goes in circles by degrees. The moon and the sun and the earth and all the planets. This has been demonstrated. I’ve thought a great deal about this, and I’m certain that everything else goes the same way. Every single thing. Ugliness and beauty, for example. If one becomes too beautiful, he has gone too far around the circle and becomes ugly. If one becomes too ugly, he has gone far enough around the circle to become beautiful. Isn’t that reasonable? Don’t you agree?”

“Sure, sure. I get it. Joe’s so damn ugly he’s come around to being beautiful. It’s simple.”

“That’s right. Now you are being the perceptive person I thought you were.”

He looked at her, at her fine grave face and nearly bare breasts, and he thought tiredly that this one was surely gone. If not gone, going, going. All her life, he thought, she had been doing by compulsion in desperation all the significant things that required the sacrifice of herself, some part of herself, and after they were done, after the sacrifice, she had tried to explain and justify, by circles or squares or Omar Khayyam or almost any too-late God-damned rationalization, whatever she had done, whatever sacrifice made, and in the future she would go on drinking too much gin and sleeping in too many beds and blacking out between bed and bottle, and in the end, if she was lucky, she would wind up jumping off a high place, or taking too many soporifics, or having shock treatments and lying on a couch in an expensive sanitarium trying to remember where she’d been and how she’d got where she was, and weaving bright little rugs on a hand-loom for therapy. The worst of it was, she hit him in his vulnerability; she had a face he would remember, and he would see it in the darkness above his bed, tonight and possibly nights afterward, and a long time from now, between a beer and a bourbon, he would wonder suddenly if she were dead or alive and what the diagnosis had been.

“What did you mean by bum pump?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

“You meant something. Of course you meant something.”

“All right. A pump’s a heart.”

“I know a pump’s a heart. I know all sorts of slang. Once, just for fun, I took two tests. You know. These multiple choice things that you get in school and places. One of them was about highbrow words, and the other was about lowbrow words, to find out which ones you knew best, and I came out knowing a lot more about lowbrow. Would you believe it?”

“And you from Park Avenue? Not quite.”

“It’s true. I came out a much better lowbrow. I was quite proud of myself.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind. Tell me, however. Why does this beautiful piano have a bad heart?”

“It started as a kid, I guess. Rheumatic fever. I don’t know, really. It’s just something I heard about.”

“What’s rheumatic fever?”

“It’s something you get as a kid that gives you a bad heart.”

“I don’t know about this. Is it serious?”

“Anything that gives you a bad heart is serious.”

“I mean the heart. Is the heart serious?”

“Not so much. He may live another year or two.”

She drank what was left of her Martini and looked at the empty glass as if it had somehow deserted her when she needed it most. He thought for a moment that she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She hadn’t cried for a long, long time. Not since crying for a reason that he couldn’t know and she wished to forget. It wasn’t likely that she would ever cry again.

“I love him,” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

“It’s true. I thought I loved him because he was so beautiful by being ugly, and now I know I love him, because he has a bum heart from having rheumatic fever as a small boy. Do you honestly think he will die soon?”

“Not before tomorrow. It’ll be long enough if you love him until tomorrow.”

“Maybe I could give him a little happiness in the end.”

“I doubt it.”

“Why? I’ve given several people a little happiness, I believe. It’s not impossible.”

“Leave him alone. You’d probably only make him more aware of what he’s about to be missing.”

“I feel compelled to try. At least, he should be allowed to accept or reject the proposition for himself. We have no right to make the decision.”

At that moment, the drum and the piano became silent, and she sat silently listening to the silence of the drum and piano that was like an empty space in the sound that continued, and then, after a minute or two, the piano began playing again by itself, and she revolved the half-turn on the stool and looked that way. The drum, whose name was Chester Lewis, was gone. Only Joe Doyle, the piano, remained. Joe Doyle, the piano, was not now playing the clever stuff, the jam stuff. He was playing tunes, the little melodies that reminded people of things that had happened. At the moment of her looking, he was playing something that she remembered by sound but not by name. It had no particular associations.

“What’s he doing?” she said.

“He’s winding it up,” the bartender said. “It’s the routine. Every night, last thing before closing, he plays a few of the little tunes. Requests. It sets people up for whatever they have in mind.”