Ed Lacy - Room To Swing

I went back to the cafeteria, had a glass of water. All the help had their names in plastic holders pinned to the canvas uniforms. She was Mary Burns. I crossed the street and found a phone booth in a cigar store. Of course there were a lot of Burnses, including one at a nearby address that I put down. It could be her father, her home address. It was a few minutes after nine and I phoned Miss Robbens' apartment. I heard music and voices in the background as she answered. I told her what I'd done—but not about the coffeepot trouble—and in a guarded voice she said, “You don't have to work that hard, yet. But I'm pleased you're so conscientious.”

“Make things smoother when the program comes on and I really have to stick to him. Tomorrow I'll take him to work, check him again when he leaves. Call you.”

“That's fine, Touie, what are you doing now?”

“Nothing.”

“I have some people in, interesting folk, why don't you come up?”

“Well, I... uh ...” I fingered my face. Although I only have to worry about that “five-o'clock shadow” every other day, I needed a shave.

She mistook my hesitation for something else. “It's all right, these are liberal-minded people,” she whispered, maybe not realizing what she was saying.

“Wasn't even thinking of that. I need a shave.”

“Oh, forget that. Are you coming?”

“Okay.” If I expected Robbens to make contacts for me on Madison Avenue, I'd have to keep in close touch with her.

Outside, without thinking, I looked around for a barbershop. The only one I saw was closed, not that it would have mattered if it had been open. When I was nineteen I was downtown when I heard that a tobacco company was hiring Negro salesmen for summer jobs. I couldn't get a shave downtown, and by the time I went up to Harlem and back the jobs were filled. I bought a razor and blades in the cigar store, rode a bus up to Penn Station, shaved in the men's room. In the car crosstown to Miss Robbens' place on Thirty-seventh street, I jotted down the cab fare, and as an afterthought threw in the buck I'd spent for the razor.

She lived in a remodeled brownstone, and, judging by the number of them, fixing up brownstones must be the major industry in New York City. When she buzzed the door open I took a tiny elevator I could just about get into to the third floor. Kay was waiting at the door in tight buckskin pants, a dark blue turtle-neck sweater that did a lot for her figure and set off her neat face and copper hair. She had a silver coin belt around her waist and odd leather slippers with tiny bells on them. She led me into a large living room done in Swedish modern, including a working fireplace, and a crazy kind of wallpaper that seemed patches of violent colours.

There was a couple on the floor before the fireplace, a guy sprawled on the couch, and a woman making a shaker of cocktails. They all stared at me with studied interest, as if they'd been boring each other before and behold, a conversation piece enters. I wondered which of the men was her husband. After she hung up my coat and hat, Kay introduced me around. The couple on the floor were man and wife and he was a writer. He was also toasting slivers of potato in the fire, using a long wooden stick, and carefully eating each sliver himself as he took it out of the flames. His name was Hank. I never did get his wife's name. The guy on the couch was named Steve McDonald and Kay said, “Steve is the current white-haired boy at Central. He originated a new show I'm doing publicity for. And last, but by no means least, this is Barbara—we share this coop.”

Steve was one of these long drinks of water, with the slim build of a distance runner, and hair crew-cut so short it seemed to be painted on his narrow head. He had a habit, I saw later, of opening his eyes wide to emphasize whatever he was saying. Anyway he wasn't worrying about wrinkling his thick striped sport coat and flannel pants, lying in them.

Barbara was a trim babe with a young figure but her face looked washed out and tired and her carefully brushed hair was a silky gray all over, so it probably was a dye job. It was all wrong for her face. She said, “Hello, Touie, Kay has told me about you. Want Scotch or a hot buttered rum?”

Before I could answer Kay said, “Touie must try the rum.”

“As you wish,” Barbara said, pouring rum into a thick cup, then a slab of butter, a shake of some kind of spices. Walking to the fireplace, she knelt over Hank and swung a small copper teakettle around, poured some hot water into the cup. She was wearing a plain print dress and when she bent over her hips were lovely and full. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Steve, the couchboy, watching her hips. Then he popped his eyes at me and grinned.

I took the hot drink and Hank patted the rug beside him as he said, “Sit down. It isn't every night one can race back into history and drink with General Toussaint.”

“We were in Haiti last year,” his wife said.

“I'll try this,” I said, sitting on a pigskin hassock.

Everybody stared at me, with friendly curiosity. I sipped my drink, which tasted like soup with a kick. Kay announced, “Touie was a captain in the army. Has medals to prove it.”

“My press agent,” I said, wishing she'd shut up.

Steve raised himself on one elbow, gave me a mock salute, said, “Captain, suh, the troops are in the sun. How would you like them, rare, medium, or well done?”

“You trite bastard,” Barbara said.

Steve made big eyes at her. “I don't know, I thought it was pretty funny. Didn't you, Louie?”

“Not bad,” I said, taking another sip of the junk in my cup.

“The name is Touie, as you very well know,” Barbara said, carrying on some fight of her own with this Steve. “Like the hot rum?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “I've had them before, in Paris,” I added, to get in the conversational trend.

“We were in Paris in '53,” the writer's wife said, turning on the floor to face me.

There was a hi-fi phonograph set in a bookcase with a neat purring jazz record on. The writer's wife licked her lips, as if she were about to take a bite out of me, kicked the ball off with “I simply love Bessie Smith records, but they were so badly pressed; all the scratches come through on our hi-fi.”

As Kay lit her pipe and sat on the floor, the writer nibbled at a blackened bit of potato and said, “I can't bear to listen to her because it galls me to remember how she died, bleeding to death and they wouldn't take her in a white hospital. I can feel the pain in her voice.”

“Her voice gets to know you,” Steve said.

So then I knew they were going to bat “that boy” around, as one Negro writer calls this parlor game. I mean there's a certain type of white who loves to get going on the Negro “question” or “problem,” in fact feels he must break out into a discussion whenever he's around Negroes. I suppose talking about it is better than the attitude of most ofays who try to forget we're alive. But it had been a long long time since I'd been in this type of bull session.

Hank's wife started it by saying the Negro should migrate en masse from the South so we could use our “consolidated voting power,” whatever that is.

Steve and Kay immediately jumped into the water, then Hank and Barbara wet their feet. I finished my drink, managed to make myself a plain shot instead of the warm slop I'd been sipping. I was a very quiet and polite “problem,” and thought how Sybil would love this kind of b.s. As a matter of fact, they were talking so much they forgot about me—except for Barbara, who would glance at me now and then, as if watching me. Finally, as Kay finished a speech and stopped to pack her pipe, Steve popped his eyes at me and asked, “Touie, don't you believe the Negro would do better with a complete population transfer to the North?”