Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

“Is anyone allowed to make a request?”

“Sure. Anyone. It’s free.”

“In that case, I must make one.”

“I’ll deliver it, if you like. Just name the tune.”

“No. I don’t think so.” She lifted her glass and tipped it, and the olive rolled out onto the bar with two amber drops. “Thank you very much, but I think it would be better if I delivered it myself.”

Slipping off the stool to the floor, she stood for a few seconds in precarious balance. Then she walked back carefully among the tables to the small platform and took the enormous twelve-inch step upward with elaborate caution and leaned against the piano with a vast feeling of relief and pride in having arrived safely. She looked down at Joe Doyle and smiled, and he looked up and grinned a professional grin in which there was the slightest touch of bitterness.

“Hello, Joe Doyle,” she said.

“Hello, baby,” he said.

“Do you know something? You’re wonderful.”

“Do you know something else? You’re drunk.”

“No. I’ve drunk a number of Martinis in a number of places, and for a little while I was drunk, or at least blacked out, but now I’ve recovered and become perfectly sober.”

“You’re drunk, baby. If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t think I was wonderful.”

They were always drunk, he thought, always drunk. That was the way he got them, when the night was running out. Out of a glass in the tail of the night to lean against his piano and ask for the slight and shabby little tunes that had achieved permanence and an exorbitant importance in their minds because they were associated with something that had happened or had not happened or might yet happen, with good luck or bad, some place and time. Mostly they were just women with faces you never saw and names you never heard, and they came and went and in effect had never been, no strain whatever on even a bum heart, but once in a great, great while, a time or two in a couple of thousand nights, there was one with a face and a name who left a memory, and you looked up and saw her leaning over the piano in her expensive gown with her pale hair over her eye on the heavy side, and you felt it suddenly in the bum heart, and you wished it were possible for you to live a little longer than the prognosis, at least long enough to learn in your own way that it would have been better if you hadn’t lived so long.

“If it embarrasses you to be called wonderful,” she said, “I apologize. You’re good. Do you object to that? You’re very good.”

“No, baby. Not even good. Jelly Roll Morton was good. Fats Waller was good. The Duke’s good. Not me. I’m just a thumper.”

“I can see that you’re determined to belittle yourself, and I don’t want to hear it. You’d be surprised to know how sad it makes me to hear it. What I want to hear instead is a particular tune. Will you play me a particular tune, Joe Doyle?”

Sure, he thought, sure. Play me something, Joe. Play me something for me alone. They all came out of a glass in the tail of the night to hear the particular little tunes that stood for a time or a place or a man, and afterward they went away with someone or anyone to someplace or anyplace, and you let them go and remembered them at most for a minute. Even this one who had a face and was felt in the heart and had come, from the looks of her, down into the mean streets from a steel and stone tower, for kicks. Even this one? Especially this one. She was a tramp at best and a nut at worst and probably a lush in either case, and nothing could come of her but trouble in the unlikely event that anything could come of her at all, and whatever she made you feel in the heart in a minute or two of the tail of the night, you had better play her a tune and let her go if you had any concern for what was left of your life.

“You name it, baby,” he said, “I’ll play it.”

“ ‘Rippling Waters,’ ” she said. “I want particularly to hear ‘Rippling Waters.’ ”

He looked down at his fingers that had gone on playing softly the tune they had been playing and were now lightly running scales between the last tune and the next one.

“That’s Willie Smith,” he said. “What do you know about Willie Smith?”

“I know lots of surprising things,” she said.

“I’ll bet you do.”

“It’s the truth. You may ask any of my friends, if you care to. I’m always surprising them with things I know.”

“I don’t know any of your friends, baby. It isn’t like that I ever will.”

“That’s all right. I don’t think you’d like them much, anyhow. Most of the time I don’t like them very much myself.”

“That’s rough. Real rough. What do you do when you don’t like even your friends?”

“I don’t know. It’s a problem that I’ve often thought about myself. When you stop to think seriously about it, it doesn’t seem quite natural, does it? Do you suppose there’s something wrong with me?”

“I suppose there’s something wrong with all of us in one way or another.”

“That’s exactly the conclusion I’ve come to all the times I’ve thought about it. There just doesn’t seem to be any other conclusion to come to. Anyhow, there’s probably no use in thinking about it at all, especially now that I’m waiting for you to play ‘Rippling Waters’ if you happen to know it.”

“I happen to,” he said.

His fingers broke out of the scale and into the tune, and she leaned over the piano and listened, and closed her eyes with the intensity of her listening. Looking up at her, at the small breasts exposed almost entirely by her position and the small face suddenly at peace under the shadow of her lashes, he thought that she looked like a perverse child who played in perversity at being a whore and had gone to sleep in the middle of the game, but he knew that she was no child, and he suspected that she had never in her life been a child truly. Anyhow, what she was or wasn’t or had never been was something that was no concern of his, and all he really knew or wanted to know was that the night had gone on long enough. He stopped playing and dropped his hands from the keys, and she opened her eyes and nodded her head with a kind of grave suggestion of approval and gratitude.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “And now I must buy you a drink for being so kind.”

“That isn’t necessary, baby. It’s part of the routine.”

“Do you refuse to have a drink with me?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said it isn’t necessary to buy me one.”

“I see that I have made a wrong impression, and it’s all my fault because I’m so used to tipping people for everything. What I mean is, will you please give me the pleasure of having a drink with me?”

“Sorry. I don’t drink much.”

“Really? I was always under the impression that musicians drank a great deal. Is it because of having had rheumatic fever as a small boy that you don’t drink much?”

“When you said you knew lots of surprising things, you weren’t fooling, were you? Do you mind telling me how the hell you know what I had as a small boy?”

“It’s simple. The bartender told me. You mustn’t blame him, in case you didn’t want me to know, because it just came out incidentally when I said you were beautiful and he said you weren’t.”

“All right.” He stood up and touched her suddenly and lightly on one arm, as if he somehow doubted she was really there. “I’m wonderful and beautiful, baby, and the last thing you need tonight is another drink, but I’m needing one more and more all the time. Shall we sit at the bar?”

“Yes. I always prefer sitting at the bar, if possible. It’s much more convenient and gives you a chance to talk with the bartender. I’m making a study of bartenders, you know.”