Флетчер Флора - Take Me Home

Henry Harper was a young man who lived in two rooms above a secondhand bookstore. All he wanted to do in the world was to write, but he was forced by circumstances to do other things besides. He was naturally forced by the same circumstances to do most of his writing at times when sane and sensible men are sleeping or making love or getting drunk or expressing their sense and sanity in some other accepted way.

That’s what Henry had been doing this particular night, which was the night of a Saturday. He had been writing a book that he had hoped someday to finish, and he had been, in a way, a little drunk himself. He had been drunk for hours on words, but now he was sober, and nothing he had done was good, and nothing would be good that he would ever do. His head ached, and he was filled with sodden despair. It was, he saw, three o’clock in the morning. Since it was impossible to sleep, he went down the street to the Greek’s for a cup of coffee.

He felt better in the street. A sharp wind was blowing down the narrow way between old buildings. It slashed his face and blew from his brain the stale litter of leftover words. In the Greek’s, behind steamed windows, there was only one customer besides himself. A girl. She sat huddled over a cup at the counter, wrapped closely in a black wool coat as if she were very cold. The cup was empty, drained of what it had held, and so was her face. There was something imperiled in the emptiness, a precarious adjustment to the brief sanctuary of an all-night diner. The Greek himself was behind the counter.

“Hello, Henry,” the Greek said.

His name was George. He had a last name too, but it was too difficult to say comfortably and had fallen in disuse.

“Hello, George,” Henry said. “Black coffee.”

“You don’t need to say it, Henry. It’s always the same. Always black coffee.”

“Don’t make a moral issue of it, George. Just draw the coffee.”

“It’s three o’clock in the morning. It’s no time to be drinking coffee.”

“Any time’s a time to be drinking coffee.”

“Sure. Coffee and cigarettes. Cigarettes and coffee. A man lives on them, but not for long. You look bad, Henry. You’ll die young.”

There was that about George. He was compassionate. He was filled with concern and pity. He was an olive-tinted mass of fat compassion with an oily, earnest face. He grieved in his large and limpid, black eyes for all young men who died young from smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee.

“A man can’t sleep after drinking black coffee,” he said.

“I don’t want to sleep.”

To secure his position, Henry lit a cigarette that he didn’t want. George picked up a cup and turned to the shining urn behind him.

“How does the book go?” he said.

“It goes badly.”

“You always say it goes badly.”

“Because it always does.”

George was very interested in the progress of the book. He didn’t believe it when Henry said that it was going badly. One of his greatest concerns was that Henry would die from cigarettes and black coffee before the book was finished.

Henry buried his nose in the rich vapor rising from his cup. He was feeling gradually a little better. What he had accomplished didn’t seem so bad now, although not so good as he wished. It was never so good.

“You should take better care of yourself,” George said. “Why don’t you get a haircut?”

Half a dozen stools away, the girl moved. She lifted her eyes and stared for a moment blindly at bright labels of canned soup on a shelf behind the counter. Then she lowered them slowly and began staring again into the empty cup. Henry glanced at her briefly and back to George, and George lifted his heavy shoulders in a small confession of ignorance and impotence. There were far too many troubles in the world even for a compassionate Greek.

“Off the street,” he said. “She has no place to go.”

“How do you know?”

“Who sits and looks into an empty cup when there is a place to go?”

“Maybe she has a place but doesn’t want to go there.”

“It’s the same thing.”

The girl stood up abruptly and came toward them. She was wearing nothing on her head, but her brown hair fitted like a ragged cap around her thin and empty face. “Pay for my coffee,” she said to Henry.

“Like hell I will,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

“Because I don’t have any money.”

“Too bad for you.”

“Is a lousy dime so important?”

“It’s all right,” George said. “It’s on the house. Compliments of George.”

The girl turned her head and looked at the Greek for a moment without speaking, as if she were considering whether or not it would be proper to accept his offer. She didn’t appear to be grateful. As a matter of fact, she gave the impression of feeling that he was meddling in a matter that did not concern him.

“It wouldn’t hurt the son of a bitch to pay for my coffee,” she said.

“Look out who you’re calling names,” Henry said.

“He’s a poor writer,” George said. “He has to watch his dimes carefully.”

“What does he write?” she said.

“He’s writing a book,” George said. “He’ll be famous.” She stared at Henry as if she had caught him in the worst kind of perversion. It was a relief, however, to see an expression, even an unpleasant one, invade the emptiness of her thin face.

“It’ll be a lousy book,” she said. “No one will buy it.”

“Not at all,” George said. “It’s going badly at the moment, but later it will go better.”

George had become an authority on writers and understood that they had to be handled with care. His air of authority was plainly not acceptable to the girl, however. She inspected him with a faint expression of revulsion.

“You’re just a fat, greasy Greek,” she said. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“Say,” George said, “I give you a good cup of coffee and you call me names. What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

“Maybe you think I ought to kiss your fat tail for a lousy cup of coffee,” she said.

Turning, she walked up along the line of stools at the counter and went outside into the narrow street beyond the steamed glass. George watched her go with his large, limpid eyes. For a moment, when she opened the front door, he felt compassionately in his own warm flesh the cold cut of the wind.

“She has troubles,” he said. “That’s apparent.”

“She’s crazy,” Henry said.

“Because she has troubles, she hates everyone. That’s the way it happens. When my wife left me for an Italian acrobat, I hated everyone for months. It was impossible to get along with me.”

“I didn’t know you ever had a wife.”

“It was a long time ago. She came from Salonika as a girl. I seldom think of her.”

Henry didn’t answer. He lifted his cup in both hands and drank some of the hot coffee.

“She was very young,” George said.

“Naturally,” Henry said. “As a girl, she couldn’t be anything else.”

“Not my wife. The one who was here.”

“Was she?”

“Under her coat, she was very thin. Did you notice?”

“No, I didn’t. Anyhow, it’s better to be a thin, young girl, even with troubles, than a fat, greasy Greek or a son of a bitch.”

Henry finished his coffee and stood up. He put two dimes on the counter beside the empty cup.

“You have given me one dime too many,” George said.

“I know how many dimes I gave you,” Henry said.

He walked to the door and paused to turn the collar of his coat up around his neck.