T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

He dodged a puddle, sidestepped two big-armed old ladies staring at a Christmas display as if they’d just got off the bus from Oshkosh, and pinched the last drag out of the butt of his cigarette, which hissed as he flicked it into the gutter. For a minute, staring down the length of Fifth Avenue as it faded into the beating gloom like something out of an Eskimo’s nightmare, he thought of hailing a cab. But there were no cabs, not in weather like this, and the reason he was walking the thirty-odd blocks to the studio in the first place, he reminded himself bitterly, was because he didn’t have money to waste on anything so frivolous as carfare. He lifted his feet gingerly and turned into the blow, cursing.

—

It was cold in the apartment — the landlady was a miser and a witch and she wouldn’t have turned on the heat for two free tickets to Florida — and Darlene felt her body quake and revolt against the chill as she stood before the mirror plucking her eyebrows after a lukewarm shower. She couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the session. It was grim outside, the windows like old gray sheets tacked to the walls, and she just couldn’t feature bundling up and going out into the storm. But then it was grimmer inside — peeling wallpaper, two bulbs out in the vanity, a lingering sweetish odor of that stuff the landlady used on the roaches — and she never missed a date, not to mention the fact that she needed the money. She was in her slip — she couldn’t find her robe, though she suspected it was balled up somewhere in the depths of the laundry basket, and there was another trial she had to get through, the machine in the laundry room inoperative for two weeks now. Her upper arms were prickled with gooseflesh. There was a red blotch just to the left of her nose, tracing the indentation of the bone there. The eye above it, staring back at her like the swollen blown-up eye of a goldfish at the pet store, was bloodshot. Bloodshot. And what was she going to do about that?

On top of it all, she still wasn’t feeling right. The guy she’d been seeing, the guy she’d been saving up to go to Florida with for a week at Christmas — Eddie, second trumpet with Mitch Miller — had given her a dose and her backside was still sore from where the doctor had put the needle in. The way her head ached — and her joints, her right shoulder especially, which burned now as she positioned the tweezers above the arch of her eyebrow — she began to wonder if there’d actually been penicillin in that needle. Maybe it was just water. Maybe the doctor was pinching on his overhead. Or maybe the strain of gonorrhea she’d picked up — that Eddie had picked up in Detroit or Cleveland or Buffalo — wouldn’t respond to it. That’s what the doctor had told her anyway — there was a new strain going around. His hands were warm, the dab of alcohol catching her like a quick cool breeze. Just a little sting, he said, as if she were nine years old. There. Now that’s better, isn’t it?

No, she’d wanted to say, it’s not better, it’s never better and never will be because the world stinks and the clap stinks and so do needles and prissy nurses and sour-faced condescending M.D.s and all the rest of it too, but she just opened up her smile and said Yeah.

She was tired of every dress in the closet. Or no, not just tired — sick to death of them. All of them. The hangers clacked like miniature freight cars as she rattled through them twice, shivering in her slip and nylons, her feet all but frozen to the linoleum. Christ, she said to herself, Jesus Christ, what the hell difference does it make? and she reached angrily for a red crepe de chine with a plunging neckline she hadn’t worn in a year and pulled it over her head and smoothed it across her hips, figuring it would provide about as much protection from the cold as a swimsuit. She’d just have to keep the cloth coat buttoned up to her throat, and though it was ugly as sin, she’d wear the red-and-green checked scarf her mother had knitted her… what she really needed — what she deserved, and what Eddie, or somebody, should give her and give her soon — was a fur.

A gust threw pellets of ice against the windowpane. For a moment she held the picture of herself in a fur — and not some chintzy mink stole, but a full-length silver fox — and then it dissolved. A fur. Yeah, sure. She wasn’t exactly holding her breath.

—

The hallway smelled like shit — literally — and as he stomped the slush off his shoes and bent to wipe the uppers with the paper towels he’d nicked from the men’s room at Benjie’s, where he’d stopped to fortify himself with two rye whiskeys and a short beer, he wondered what exactly went on on the ground floor when they weren’t recording. Or maybe when they were. Neff would press just about anything anybody wanted to put out, whether it was boogie-woogie, race records or that rock and roll crap, and who knew how many junkies and pill heads came in and out of the place so stewed they couldn’t bother to find the bathroom? He took off his hat, set it on the extinct radiator and ran both hands through his hair. There was a slice of broken glass in a picture frame on the wall and that at least gave him back his reflection, though it was shadowy and indistinct, as if he’d already given up the ghost. For a moment there, patting his hair back into place while he stared down the dim tunnels of his eyes, he had a fleeting intimation of his own mortality — he was thirty-eight and not getting any younger, his father ten years dead and his mother fading fast; before long it would be just him and his sister and one old wraith-like spinster aunt, Aunt Marta, left on this earth, and then he’d be an old man in baggy pants staring at the gum spots on the sidewalk — but suddenly the door opened behind him and he turned round on a girl in a cloth coat and he was immortal all over again.

“Oh, hi, Johnny,” she said, and then she gave the door a look and leaned back into it to slam it shut. “God, it’s brutal out there.”

At first he didn’t recognize her. That sort of thing happened to him more and more lately, it seemed, and he told himself he had to cut back on the booze — and reefer, reefer was the worst, sponging your brain clean so you couldn’t recognize your own face in the mirror. He’d come into some joint — a bar, a club, his manager’s office — and there’d be somebody there he hadn’t expected, somebody transposed from some other scene altogether, and he’d have to fumble around the greeting and give himself a minute or two to reel his brain back in. “Darlene,” he said now, “Darlene Delmar. Wow. I haven’t seen you in what, years? Or months anyway, right?”

She was wearing sunglasses though it was as dark as night outside and there was some sort of welt or blemish under the left lens, right at the cheekbone. She gave him a thin smile. “Six months ago, Cincinnati. On what was that station? W-something.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, faking it, “yeah. Good times, huh? But how you been keeping?”

A rueful smile. A shrug. He could smell her perfume, a faint fleeting whiff of flowers blooming in a green field under a sun that brought the sweat out on the back of your neck, spring, summer, Florida, but the odor of the streets drove it down. “As well as can be expected, I guess. If I could get more work — like in a warmer climate, you know what I mean?” She shook out her hair, stamped her feet to knock the slush off her heels, and he couldn’t help looking at her ankles, her legs, the way the coat parted to reveal the flesh there.

“It’s been tough all over,” he said, just to say something.

“My manager — I’ve got a new manager, did I tell you that? Or how could I, since I haven’t seen you in six months…?” She trailed off, gave a little laugh, then dug into her purse for her cigarettes. “Anyway, he says things’ll look up after the New Year, definitely. He was talking about maybe sending me out to L.A. Or Vegas maybe.”