Something was going to happen, Shank decided. There was more than enough for Joe there. The girl was appealing, and scared, and Shank was going to help himself to a little. Just a little. Not right away, but fairly soon. When he was ready he would simply take what he wanted. If she would not want to give it to him that would be just too damn bad. He would take it anyway. He undressed and stretched out on his bed. In his mind he concocted pleasant fantasies involving Anita. In one, her ankles were tied together, and her hands bound behind her back. She was shrieking in agony. He went to sleep and dreamed of pain.
Chapter 8
They sat on a bench in Washington Square. Looking at her through the smoke from his cigarette, Joe was amazed at the change time had worked in the girl beside him. Before, Anita had worn a little lipstick; now she dispensed with it altogether and made up for it by wearing too much eye-shadow. Tight and faded dungarees encased belly and hips and legs. A loose black sweater covered her arms and chest. Her hair fell free, loose.
But the outer trappings were the least of the change. Any girl could replace lipstick with eye-shadow, could switch from skirt and sweater to dungarees and sweater, could unpin her hair and let her mouth go slack and her eyes droopy. Such could be accomplished overnight, and frequently was—generally by freshman girls from Brooklyn College making the perfunctory pilgrimage to Greenwich Village before they went home to marry dentists. Exchange students from Kew Gardens, Lee Revzin called them. Kiddie-beats.
Anita was different. More important than the outer wrapper was the girl inside. And there had been a change in that girl of direction, of attitude and mind. The words of Hip colored her speech now and sounded right coming from her mouth. The exchange students from Kew Gardens, when they used those words, made them sound like English from the lips of a Sudanese. She walked Hip and thought Hip and spoke Hip. Harlem and Long Island had drained away from her and the beat mystique had quickly replaced them. She accompanied Joe when he wanted her company; other times she remained at the apartment or wandered around the Village and the East Side by herself. She smoked marijuana with Joe, and had tried both codeine cough syrup and mescalin, neither of which had made much of an impression upon her. The cough syrup had merely drugged her for a while until she had unceremoniously thrown it up in the toilet bowl. The mescalin had given a weak high which she had found unpleasant and a bit frightening. But marijuana had seemed valuable, somehow, and she continued to smoke it whenever he did.
Joe looked at her now, his eyes all-seeing, and he thought perhaps he had done something radically wrong. The metamorphosis from Square to Hip was, he knew full well, far from complete. He knew she worried, and he knew she was firmly convinced that much of what she was doing was intrinsically wrong. He remembered her as she had been, fresh and eager and searching for something beyond her comprehension. And he was not at all sure that what she had become was an improvement on the original.
He recalled the first time she had smoked—at Judy’s Obershain’s party. He remembered their love-making on the floor, more or less center-stage, and he remembered how she had been when the effects of the marijuana had worn off. Scared, sick, frightened—and very much ashamed of herself. Then at last the shame had slipped away and the fear had claimed her altogether. And she was still not a girl who could make love in the middle of the floor in the middle of a party without there being something wrong about it for her, without some guilt that had to be buried beneath the rugged exterior of the perennial cool.
Bad, Joe thought.
“I hate this park,” she said now.
“Huh?”
“It drags me,” she said. “It really does. I sit here and all these people walk by. It used to be a kick. I mean, I didn’t know any of the people. They were strangers. And now either I know them or I’ve seen them so many times it’s like they’re relatives or like that. I want something to happen. God, I want something to happen.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. A small boy stopped and asked Joe if he wanted his shoes shined. Joe pointed to his tennis sneakers and laughed easily. The boy frowned, laughed and left them to bother somebody else.
“We could go to the coast,” he said. “North Beach or something. Everybody goes to the coast. It’s like the thing to do.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I mean, if you’re hung up on New York—”
“Not New York. Not New York, not the park, I don’t know. Just hung up in general, I suppose. Just bored and tired. I don’t know.”
“A change of scene might help.”
“I’m a leopard, Joe.”
He stared, feeling disoriented. “A leper? I don’t get it, baby. I—”
“Not a leper. A leopard. Like an animal. Leopards can’t change their spots. Remember?”
“Oh,” he said.
“Allee samee under the skin. New York or Chicago or San Francisco or…I don’t know. Portugal. Wherever you run it’s the same person running. Can’t run out of yourself. Doesn’t work.”
He said nothing.
“I think I’m going back to the pad,” she said.
“Want me to come?”
Anita shook her head no. “I just have eyes to walk. I’m going to buy a big cup of Italian ice from the cat on the corner of Thompson, the funny one with the wagon. And I’m going to walk all the way home eating the ice. Then I’ll sit around and wait for you.”
Joe shrugged.
“A nice long walk,” she said. “In the lovable afternoon. I’ll make dinner. Paella, I think. A pot of rice and some seafood. It’s cheap and it tastes good. Spanish. I made it last week.”
He remembered. “Shank may be around,” he said.
“I hope not.”
“You really put him down, don’t you? He’s a good cat. He’s making nice bread and giving us our share.”
“He’s making too much bread.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money from peddling pot. I think he’s doing something else. Muggings, hold-ups, I don’t know.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“He’d do anything,” she told him. “My God, you don’t know him at all. He’s a rotten son of a bitch, Joe. He really is. He’s a snake.”
He remained silent, having no great drive to spring to Shank’s defense. “He never did anything to you,” he managed after a few moments.
“I know.”
“So why the noise? There’s lots of studs I can live without. But I don’t go screaming on ‘em all the time.” She smiled. It was a strange smile. Then she stood up.
“Later,” she said. “Fall up around six or so for dinner. It’s okay to reheat it, you can keep the pot on the stove for a week. But it’s best the first day.”
He watched her walk away until she was out of sight and he wondered what was wrong. She was a leopard and she couldn’t change her spots. Solid. But why all the fuss? He thought about Shank. Somehow he couldn’t see Shank as a stick-up man. The picture did not add up. But there was no way to get around the fact that Shank had changed visibly. He was less talkative than ever. He didn’t seem to have any time for casual conversation. He rarely hung around the pad, rarely went out with them during the evenings. A few nights back a whole mob of them headed out around midnight, caught a late show in Times Square, then bought a few bottles of wine and went to Central Park. They stayed there all night long, singing at the top of their lungs, balling on occasion, making a major scene. But Shank hadn’t wanted to come along. He had said he had things to do. But what kind of things? And how come he never talked about them? A problem. But Joe Milani knew how to deal with problems. He had carefully cultivated a method over the days and weeks and months. He simply ignored the problem. From a pocket he took a paper-bound copy of Henry Miller’s Sexus that somebody had carefully smuggled in on a return trip from Europe. He opened it to an intriguing passage, began to read, and forgot completely the changes in Anita and Shank.