John Passos - Big Money

She followed him out and stood beside him in the shallow spume with her short hair wet over her eyes. She brushed it back with her hand. “Here we are,” she said. Charley looked both ways down the beach. There was nobody to be seen in the earlyafternoon glare. He tried to put his arm around her. She skipped out of his reach. “Charley… aren’t you starved?” “For you, Eveline.” “What I want’s lunch.”

When they’d eaten up the lunch and drunk all the cocktails they felt drowsy and a little drunk. They lay side by side in the sun on the big towel. She made him keep his hands to himself. He closed his eyes but he was too excited to go to sleep. Before he knew it he was talking his head off. “You see Joe’s been workin’ on the patent end of it, and he knows how to handle the lawyers and the big boys with the big wads. I’m afraid if I try to go into it alone some bird’ll go to work and steal my stuff. That’s what usually happens when a guy invents anything.”

“Do women ever tell you how attractive you are, Charley?”

“Overseas I didn’t have any trouble… You know, Aviaterr, lewtenong, Croix de Guerre, couchay, wee wee… That was all right but in this man’s country no girl you want’ll look at a guy unless he’s loaded up with jack… Sure, they’ll lead you on an’ get you half-crazy.” He was a fool to do it but he went to work and told her all about Doris. “But they’re not all like that,” she said, stroking the back of his hand. “Some women are square.”

She wouldn’t let him do anything but cuddle a little with her under the towel. The sun began to get low. They got up chilly and sandy and with the sunburn starting to tease. As they walked back along the beach he felt sour and blue. She was talking about the evening and the waves and the seagulls and squeezing his arm as she leaned on it. They went into a hotel on the boardwalk to have a little supper and that just about cleaned his last fivespot.

He couldn’t think of much to say going home on the train. He left her at the corner of her street, then walked over to the Third Avenue el and took the train uptown. The train was full of fellows and girls coming home from Sunday excursions. He kept his eye peeled for a pickup but there was nothing doing. When he got up into his little stuffy greenpapered room, he couldn’t stay in it. He went out and roamed up and down Second and Third avenues. One woman accosted him but she was too fat and old. There was a pretty plump little girl he walked along beside for a long time, but she threatened to call a cop when he spoke to her, so he went back to his room and took a hot shower and a cold shower and piled into bed. He didn’t sleep a wink all night.

Eveline called him up so often in the next weeks and left so many messages for him that the clerk at the desk took him aside and warned him that the house was only intended for young men of irreproachable Christian life.

He took to leaving the shop early to go out with her places, and towards the end of July the foreman bounced him. The foreman was getting sore anyway because Charley kept on winning so much money at poker. Charley moved away from the Chatterton House and took a furnished room way east on Fifteenth Street, explaining to the landlady that his wife worked out of town and could only occasionally get in to see him. The landlady added two dollars to the rent and let it go at that. It got so he didn’t do anything all day but wait for Eveline and drink lousy gin he bought in an Italian restaurant. He felt bad about Paul, but after all Paul wasn’t a particular friend of his and if it wasn’t him he reckoned it would be somebody else. Eveline talked so much it made his head spin but she was certainly a stylishlooking rib and in bed she was swell. It was only when she talked about divorcing Paul and marrying him that he began to feel a little chilly. She was a good sport about paying for dinners and lunches when the money he’d saved up working in the shop gave out, but he couldn’t very well let her pay for his rent, so he walked out on the landlady early one morning in September and took his bag up to the Grand Central station. That same day he went by the Chatterton House to get his mail and found a letter from Emiscah.

He sat on a bench in the park behind the Public Library along with the other bums and read it:

CHARLEY BOY,

You always had such a heart of gold I know if you knew about what awful luck I’ve been having you would do something to help me. First I lost my job and things have been so slack around here this summer I haven’t been able to get another; then I was sick and had to pay the doctor fifty dollars and I haven’t been really what you might call well since, and so I had to draw out my savingsaccount and now it’s all gone. The family won’t do anything because they’ve been listening to some horrid lying stories too silly to deny. But now I’ve got to have ten dollars this week or the landlady will put me out and I don’t know what will become of me. I know I’ve never done anything to deserve being so unhappy. Oh, I wish you were here so that you could cuddle me in your big strong arms like you used to do. You used to love your poor little Emiscah. For the sake of your poor mother that’s dead send me ten dollars right away by special delivery so it won’t be too late. Sometimes I think it would be better to turn on the gas. The tears are running down my face so that I can’t see the paper any more. God bless you.

EMISCAH

My girlfriend’s broke too. You make such big money ten dollars won’t mean anything and I promise I won’t ask you again.

Charley, if you can’t make it ten send five.

Charley scowled and tore up the letter and put the pieces in his pocket. The letter made him feel bad, but what was the use? He walked over to the Hotel Astor and went down to the men’s room to wash up. He looked at himself in one of the mirrors. Grey suit still looked pretty good, his straw hat was new and his shirt was clean. The tie had a frayed place but it didn’t show if you kept the coat buttoned. All right if it didn’t rain; he’d already hocked his other suit and his trenchcoat and his officers’ boots. He still had a couple of dollars in change so he had his shoes shined. Then he went up to the writingroom and wrote to Joe that he was on his uppers and please to send him twentyfive by mail P.D.Q. and for crissake to come to New York. He mailed the letter and walked downtown, walking slowly down Broadway.

The only place he knew where he could bum a meal was the Johnsons’ so he turned into their street from Fifth Avenue. Paul met him at the door and held out his hand. “Hello, Charley,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for a dog’s age.”

“I been movin’,” stammered Charley, feeling like a louse. “Too many bedbugs in that last dump… Say, I just stopped into say hello.”

“Come on in and I’ll shake up a drink. Eveline’ll be back in a minute.”

Charley was shaking his head. “No, I just stopped to say hello. How’s the kid? Give Eveline my best. I got a date.”

He walked to a newsstand at the corner of Eighth Street and bought all the papers. Then he went to a blindtiger he knew and had a session with the helpwanted columns over some glasses of needle beer. He drank the beer slowly and noted down the addresses on a piece of paper he’d lifted off the Hotel Astor. One of them was a usedcar dealer, where the manager was a friend of Jim’s. Charley had met him out home.

The lights went on and the windows got dark with a stuffy late-summer night. When he’d paid for the beer he only had a quarter left in his pocket. “Damn it, this is the last time I let myself get in a jam like this,” he kept muttering as he wandered round the downtown streets. He sat for a long time in Washington Square, thinking about what kind of a salestalk he could give the manager of that usedcar dump.