David Goodis - The Blonde on the Street Corner

“Last night was last night,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, bringing her head back slowly, “so that’s the way it is.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it ain’t that way at all, see?” Very slowly she got up off the sofa. Then she stepped fast up to him and her face came up close to his and she was saying, “It’s altogether different from the way you think it is. You think I’ll hand you your overcoat and you’ll walk out and that’s all there is to it. But it’s not gonna be that easy. When I feel like telling you to walk out, then you’ll walk out. But I don’t feel like telling you to walk out. From now on you’ll be around when I want you to be around.”

“What are you talking about?” He stepped away from her.

She stepped toward him. “Maybe you’re stupid,” she said. “Maybe I gotta draw pictures for you.”

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Now go ahead and tell me you didn’t know what you were doing last night.”

“I knew what I was doing.”

“You’re damn right you knew what you were doing.”

“Look, what do you want?”

She stepped away from him, to look him up and down. She put her hands on her hips. She said, “I want what you got. I’ve been looking for something like that for a long time. Now I got it. I got something that puts me on fire and then knocks me out. That’s what I always wanted. You think I’m gonna let go of it? You think I’m gonna let it walk out the door? Try another think.”

Ralph frowned. He shook his head a little, as though he didn’t quite get the drift of all this. And he said, “Are you making plans?”

“They’re all made already.”

“Is that so?” he said. “Well, you can throw them out the window.”

She smiled at the belligerency in his eyes. “You’re cute,” she said. “That’s what gets me. I feel like pinching you. I feel like running out and buying you neckties. It’s the first time I ever felt this way toward a man.”

“Give me my overcoat and let me get out of here.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know where I’ll go.”

Lenore nodded, as though this was the answer she had expected. “You bet your sweet life you don’t know where you’ll go. You don’t know what you’ll be doing tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. What are you? What do you do? You stand on the corner. You’re one of the bums. You’re thirty years old and what do you have?”

“Nothing.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It gives me very little to worry about. I don’t have to think about losing it. There’s nothing to lose.”

She nodded with emphasis, and it threw him off balance, because it was as though she agreed entirely. Abruptly her manner became soft, there was sympathy in it, there was an element of understanding. She walked toward the sofa and plumped herself into it and looked at the wall on the other side of the room.

“You and me have an awful lot in common,” she said.

He didn’t know what to do, or how to take it. He tried to detect strategy in this new mood she had suddenly assumed, but it impressed him as something genuine, as though she had no idea it was giving him that impression. He was forgetting about the overcoat, about the plan she had referred to. He was concentrating on watching her and waiting for what she would say next.

“We’re a couple of people who live in hard times,” she said, continuing to look at the wall. “I’m older than you are and I can see these things a lot clearer. We give ourselves the idea we can do better than we’re doing, and some days we get bright ideas and try to put them into play. But it’s no go. You can’t get off a ferris wheel when it keeps going around and around. I’ve been aching for a smart apartment and a yellow piano.” Her fat arm indicated the dreary room. “Look what I got.”

He pushed fingers into a trousers pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He put a cigarette in his mouth and gave one to Lenore and struck a match.

Lenore pulled a lot of smoke into her throat and let it out in jagged little clouds as she said, “What is it with us? It’s trying to get things. We keep trying to get things. When we get them we develop all kinds of crazy schemes to hold on. Like the scheme I thought I’d work on you.”

She laughed. She was laughing at herself. It was a little laugh, without much sound to it.

“You’ll get a kick out of it,” she said. “It strikes me funny, just thinking about it.” She was still looking at the wall. “I was gonna tear my dress and raise a rumpus and claim rape.”

“That was brilliant.”

“Who said I was clever?”

Ralph walked across the room and sat down in a tattered chair. He blew smoke toward the floor. “I’m wondering where I’ll be ten years from now.”

“There’s only one thing you can be sure of. You’ll be ten years older.”

“Maybe not even that,” he said. “Maybe I won’t even be alive.”

“You expect to be hit by a truck?”

“It could happen.”

“The world could blow up. That could happen, too.”

He watched the smoke from his cigarette as it left his lips and sprayed toward the floor. “You think a lot about these things?”

She shook her head. “Hardly ever. I couldn’t tell you the last time I thought about it. The people I’m with ain’t the kind of people who get me to thinking. Not that it bothers me. I’m glad I don’t have the habit of thinking a lot. The people who think a lot these days are the ones you see jumping out of windows. In 1928 it was different. Jesus Christ, in 1928 I was married to a man worth three hundred thousand bucks. We had two Packards. A year later he took gas.”

“What did you do?”

Lenore shrugged. “I went out looking for another man.”

He hooked a leg over the side of the chair. “You don’t believe in wasting time, do you?”

“Why waste it? There’s only so much of it and no more. You, you’ve got ten years until you reach forty. Me, I’ve only got four. But I’m not kidding myself. I’m stuck in this house. Every time I tell Clarence I’m gonna pack up, he says he’ll kill himself. He’d do it, too. The way he says it. Different from the way he says anything else. His voice goes way down and he just says it and walks away.”

“Does that stop you from packing up?”

She nodded.

He leaned forward a little. “Where do I come in?”

“I just want you to be around,” she said. “I want to see you once or twice a week.”

“What else?”

“That’s all. No strings.”

He bit at the edge of his lip. Something jabbed deep into his mind. It was like a hook catching hold of the buried thoughts and bringing them to the surface. He heard himself saying, “I guess it’s all a matter of what we can afford. I’m just a corner bum and all I can afford is a deal with no strings.”

His head was lowered. His eyes were closed. In the darkness under his eyelids he could see the shabby house where Edna Daly lived. Edna was standing on the doorstep. For an instant he saw her clearly, then gradually she faded, like something floating out of a dream. He opened his eyes and saw the fat blonde on the sofa.

Lenore lifted a finger and beckoned to him. He moved toward her.