David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

You know how hot the nights can get in New York in August, when everybody suffers — like the vagrants in the doorways along Third Avenue without any ice for their muscatel? Or all the needy, underprivileged call girls with no fresh-air fund to get them away from the city streets for the summer?

I’d taken a cold shower at one o’clock. Since then I’d recited the line-ups of six out of the eight National League baseball teams from the early thirties, I’d tried twice to make a mental list of every woman I’d ever known carnally, and now I was running through parts and nomenclature of common American hand weapons. I’d even had the light on and read for half an hour, but it was no good. It was still steaming. I was still awake. I was still thinking about her.

Cathy. I did that once in a while. Lying there alone like a chump and remembering. Things like the little cries she’d made, my name the way she’d always said it over and over, and then the way it would come in a gasp and her fingers would tear at my shoulders and—

Me Tarzan, you Jane. It was a recollection you’d cherish, like your first swift hobnail boot in the shins. I wondered how much lower she’d sunk in the year since I’d seen her.

No, I didn’t wonder that. All I wanted was to get some sleep. I started doing the linemen of the 194 °Chicago Bears. Stydahar. Artoe. Fortman. Musso. Plasman. Turner. Bray. Wilson. Fortman. Or had I said Fortman? I was almost glad when the phone rang.

I knocked my book to the floor, reaching for it. One considerably bushed private investigator with a healthy dose of insomnia, at your service. “Hello,” I said.

There was nobody there. Or rather somebody was, but he wasn’t saying anything. Probably just shy. “Take your time,” I told him.

I heard one long exhale. Then the steady dull buzz of a disconnected line.

“At the tone,” I said to no one in particular, “the time will be sort of damned near three-thirty in the morning.”

I put back the receiver, then fumbled for the book and put that back too. Nothing else to do, so I supposed I might as well be neat. Maybe I’d even get up and iron. I took a smoke, rolled over on the damp sheets with my hands behind my head and stared at shadows.

The book was a gay little thing by Thomas Mann called The Magic Mountain, another one of the forty-nine thousand and thirteen items I hadn’t had time for when I was day-laboring my way through the University of Michigan at left halfback. Or before that, in North Africa. Or for that matter later, when I had been night city editor in too many saloons. I had been slogging through it for weeks and was having a rough time. Hardly any shooting at all.

I heard a car screech around a corner and then pull up abruptly near my building, burning rubber extravagantly along a curb. It had to have come in from Lexington Avenue, since I live on 68th just off Third and the traffic runs one-way east. The car door slammed with a squeaky sound, as if a terrier had had its tail in the way. High heels clicked a few irresolute steps on the pavement, paused, clicked indecisively some more, stopped altogether. The car was very likely something small, probably a foreign sports job. The indecisive lady was very likely potted.

I heard another car door closing, a heavier one this time. And this time when the telephone started I did not lift it immediately. I let it tease me until after the sixth ring, just to give my playful chum an idea of how valuable my time could be.

“Hi,” I said then, “this is Judge Crater. Where is everybody?”

“Mr. Fannin? Mr. Harry Fannin?”

“Fannin’s dead. Wasted away from lack of sleep. People kept calling him in the middle of the night.”

“Oh, please, this is urgent. May I have Mr. Fannin?”

She wasn’t one of the names in the little black book. She sounded young and pretty. But then they always sound that way. Also they always think it’s urgent.

“This is Fannin.”

“Mr. Fannin, you don’t know me, but my name is Sally Kline. m—

“You call a few minutes ago?”

“What? No. Please, Mr. Fannin, I started to say, I—”

I lost the rest of it, or at least the next sentence. The doorbell blasted in my ear like time to change to the next classroom. When I caught Sally Kline again she was saying,”—and I think she might be in trouble, Mr. Fannin, in serious trouble.”

“Who?” I said. “Listen, Miss Kline, hang on, will you? All of a sudden we’ve got a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler running up here.”

“A what? But—”

“One minute. I’ve got to get the door.”

I left her angled on top of ponderous friend Mann and went to the buzzer. I’ve got one of those speaker things at the bell, rigged by an electrician who should have been a tuba player, and it sometimes works. “Who is it?” I said brightly.

Another female, but that was all I got out of it. My name and a lot of static. This one seemed to know me, however. She called me something that sounded intimate, like hlmphlmph or phrugg, instead of formal old Fannin.

I pressed the button and unlatched the door, but I didn’t bother to look out. I’m on the second floor in front, and with the stairs moving toward the rear you couldn’t see a pole vaulter carrying his gear home from practice until he was almost to the top. I started over to Miss Kline again, and then I remembered that it might be appropriate to greet my guest in something more dignified than common perspiration.

I pulled on G.I. suntans, then leaned down to the phone and said, “Can you hang on there for one more minute?” I went to the door again without listening for an answer. “Who is it?” I called down.

There was no reply but I knew it would be the gal from the sports job, the one I’d decided was drunk. I could hear her using both dainty left feet on each of the steps, taking them slowly enough so that for all I could tell she might have been lugging that little car on her shoulder. I wasn’t going to help her with it. “If you’ve got any friends or pets maybe, bring them along too,” I told her. I went back to the phone.

Miss Kline had found some other form of amusement. I put the receiver on the cradle, crossed the living room once more and went into the kitchen, took ice out of the bucket and poured two Jack Daniels on the rocks. There were a couple of steaks in the Frigidaire, but they were frozen solid and I wasn’t quite sure they’d be fully thawed before my guest got there.

I decided I wasn’t feeling too hospitable anyhow. Snow White was in the outside corridor now, but she was so tight that even on a level keel she was bumping into dwarfs all over the forest. A professional call, no doubt about it.

I could see it all. One of my legion of admirers, alone and bewildered in the night, come to seek succor at Harry’s hearth. Eight to five I’d have to listen to some incoherent sob story until she passed out, all the while doing valiant combat with my conscience to keep from taking advantage of her condition — which would be precisely what she would have come up to have taken advantage of. I dropped myself into my one good chair and took a short snort of the sour mash as the door opened.

No one came in. The door had swung inward toward me, so that I could see her shadow where the light behind her threw it on the rug, but nothing else.

The shadow swayed. Whoever it was, she giggled.

I’d expected a belch. So now we were playing guessing games. “Garbo,” I said. “Anna Magnani.” I couldn’t think of any woman with a foreign car, but I decided I ought to be sporting about it. I supposed I’d given out the license when I’d pressed the buzzer to let her in. “Dietrich. Wendy Hiller. Maria Meneghini Calks.”