James Cain - Serenade

I felt my blood freeze for fear of what she was going to do, but she didn’t do anything. When I happened not to see his hand, he began waving it around, and kept chattering about the coincidence, about how he had just signed a lease for an apartment in this very building, and here we were. She smiled. “Yes, very fonny.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to do but introduce him, so I did. She held out her hand. He took it and bowed. He said he was happy to know her. She said gracias , she had been at his concert, and she was honored to know him. Two beautiful sets of manners met in the hall that day, and it seemed queer, the venom that was back of them.

The door of the freight elevator opened, and more furniture started down the hall. “Oh, I’ll have to show them where to put it. Come in, you two, and have a look at my humble abode.”

“Some other time, Winston, we—”

“Yes, gracias , I like.”

We went in there, and he had one of the apartments on the south tier, the biggest in the building, with a living room the size of a recital hall, four or five bedrooms and baths, servants’ rooms, study, everything you could think of. The stuff I remembered from Paris was there, rugs, tapestries, furniture, all of it worth a fortune, and a lot of things I had never seen. Four or five guys in denim suits were standing around, waiting to be told where to put their loads. He paid no attention to them, except to direct them with one hand, like they were a bunch of bull fiddlers. He sat us down on a sofa, pulled up a chair for himself, and went on talking about how he was sick of hotel living, had about given up all hope of finding an apartment he liked, and then had found this place, and then of all the cockeyed things, here we were.

Or were we? I said yes, we were at the other end of the hall. We all laughed: He started in on Juana, asked if she wasn’t Mexican. She said yes, and he started off about his trip there, and what a wonderful country it was, and I had to hand it to him he had found out more about it in a week than I had in six months. You would have thought he might have conveniently left out what he went down there for. He didn’t. He said he went down there to bring me back. She laughed, and said she saw me first. He laughed. That was the first time there was the least little glint in their eyes.

“Oh, I must show you my cricket!”

He jumped up, grabbed a hatchet, and began chopping a small crate apart. Then he lifted out a block of pink stone, a little bigger than a football and about the same shape, but carved and polished into the form of a cricket, with its legs drawn up under it and its head huddled between its front feet. She made a little noise and began to finger it.

“Look at that, Jack. Isn’t it marvelous? Pure Aztec, at least five hundred years old. I brought it back from Mexico with me, and I’d hate to tell you what I had to do to get it out of the country. Look at that simplification of detail. If Manship had done it, they’d have thought it was a radical sample of his work. The line of that belly is pure Brancusi. It’s as modern as a streamlined plane, and yet some Indian did it before he even saw a white man.”

“Yes, yes. Make me feel very nostálgica.”

Then came the real Hawes touch. He picked it up, staggered with it over to the fireplace, and put it down. “For my hearth!”

She got up to go, and I did. “Well, children, you know now where I live, and I want to be seeing a lot of you.”

“Yes, gracias.”

“And oh! As soon as I’m moved in, I’m giving a little housewarming, and you’re surely coming to it—”

“Well, I don’t know, Winston, I’m pretty busy—”

“Too busy for my house warming? Jack, Jack, Jack!”

“Gracias , Señor Hawes. Perhaps we come.”

“Perhaps? Certainly you’ll come!”

I was plenty shaky when we got to our own apartment. “Listen, Juana, we’re getting out of this dump, and we’re getting out quick. I don’t know what the hell his game is, but this is no coincidence. He’s moved in on us, and we’re going to beat it.”

“We beat it, he come too.”

“Then we’ll beat it again. I don’t want to see him.”

“Why you run away?”

“I don’t know. It — makes me nervous. I want to be somewhere where I don’t have to see him, don’t have to think of him, don’t have to feel that he’s around.”

“I think we stay.”

We saw him twice more that day. Once, around six o’clock, he rang the buzzer and asked us to dinner, but I was singing and said we would have to eat later. Then, some time after midnight, when we had got home, he dropped in with a kid named Pudinsky, a Russian pianist that was to play at his next concert. He said they were going to run over some stuff, and for us to come on down. We said we were tired. He didn’t argue. He put his arm around Pudinsky, and they left. While we were undressing we could hear the piano going. The kid could play all right.

“I see his game now.”

“Yes. Very fonny game.”

“That boy. I’m supposed to get jealous.”

“Are you jealous?”

“No. Jealous — what the hell are you talking about? What difference does it make to me what he does, once I’m out of it? But it makes me nervous. I–I wish he was somewhere else. I wish we were all somewhere else.”

She lay there for a long time, up on one elbow, looking down at me. Then she kissed me and went over to her own bed. It was daylight before I got to sleep.

Next day he was in and out half a dozen times, and the day after that, and that day after that. I began missing cues, the first sign you get that you’re not right. The voice was in shape, and I was getting across, but the prompter began throwing the finger at me. It was the first time in my life that that had ever happened.

In about a week came the invitation to the housewarming. I tried to beg out of it, said I had to sing that night, but she smiled and said gracias , we would go, and he put his arm around her and you would have thought they were pals, but I knew them both like a book, and could tell there was something back of it, on both sides. After he left I got peevish and wanted to know why the hell she was shoving me into it all the time. “Hoaney, with this man, it do you no good to run away. He see you no care, then maybe he estop. He know you have afraid, he never estop. We go. We laugh, have fine time, no care ... You care?”

“For God’s sake, no.”

“I think yes, little bit. I think we have — how you say — the goat.”

“He’s got my goat all right, but not for that reason. I just don’t want any more to do with him.”

“Then you care. Maybe not so, how he want. But you have afraid. When you no care at all, he estop. Now — we no run away. We go, you sing, be fine fallow, no give a damn. And you watch, will be all right.”

“If I have to, I have to, but Christ, I hate it.”

So we went. I was singing Faust, and I was so lousy I almost did get stuck in the duel scene. But I was washed up by ten thirty, and we came home and dressed. It wasn’t any white dress with flowers on it this time. She put on a bottle-green evening dress, and over that the bullfighter’s cape, and that embroidered crimson and yellow silk, sliding over the green taffeta, made a rustle you could hear coming, I’m here to tell you, and all those colors, over the light copper of her skin, was a picture you could look at. I put on a white tie, but no overcoat or anything, and about a quarter after eleven we stepped out and walked down the hall.

When we got in there, the worst drag was going on you ever saw in your life. A whole mob of them was in there, girls in men’s evening clothes tailored for them, with shingle haircuts and blue make-up in their eyes, dancing with other girls dressed the same way, young guys with lipstick on, and mascara eyelashes, dancing with each other too, and at least three girls in full evening dress, that you had to look at twice to make sure they weren’t girls at all. Pudinsky was at the piano, but he wasn’t playing Brahms. He was playing jazz. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach as soon as I looked at it, but I swallowed hard and tried to act like I was glad to be there.