“Paella again,” he said. “I can live without it.”
“I can live without your company.”
He laughed again. “I think I’ll pass up your paella,” he told her. “Catch a bite out somewhere. Give my regards to your man, Anita.” He laughed again, louder, and he was gone.
She shut the door after him, sank on the bed, and cried. When she stopped crying she thought she would tell Joe, and they would leave Shank. Why shouldn’t she tell Joe? Shank’s reasons were nonsense. They made no sense at all, and they were just an argument because he was afraid of what would happen if she did tell Joe.
She told herself that again and again.
But, when Joe came home, she acted as if nothing were wrong. All through dinner—the paella was delicious, although she hardly managed to taste it—she told herself she would tell Joe later, in a little while, later in the evening, after dinner.
But she did not tell him.
They stayed home that night and Shank did not show. They stayed home, and when Joe suggested smoking some pot she made no objection at all. She got very high.
But still she did not mention anything to Joe about what Shank had done.
Joe wanted to make love to her. But after what she’d been through, that was out of the question. Anita lay awake for hours after they had gone to bed. Her brain reeled in circles and the sun was coming up before her mind finally blanked out and she drifted off to a hectic sleep.
Chapter 9
“Let’s move,” she said to Joe.
“Solid. Where to? Want to fall up to 42nd Street and catch a movie?”
On this Thursday afternoon a hot sun shone high in the sky. Anita and Joe were home by themselves. Some two weeks had passed since Shank had cruelly assaulted the girl, and she had said nothing to Joe about it.
“That’s not what I mean,” Anita said.
“No?”
“I mean move out,” Anita said. “Out of here.”
“The apartment?”
“Let’s get an apartment of our own,” she said. “Just the two of us. Away from Shank.”
He thought that one over. “Got any idea what we would use for bread?”
“I could get a job.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You mean I could get a job. That’s the bit, isn’t it? Go out and work, Joey. Go support me, Joey.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you meant it. You didn’t have to say it, baby. You meant it.”
She started to deny it but stopped. She had not meant it, not just then, but saying so would only be begging the question. The idea that he could certainly put in a few hours a day working had been in the back of her mind for quite a while. After all, it wasn’t as though he did anything else. Some people could use writing or painting as an excuse. But not Joe. He did nothing, nothing at all.
“You want me to work,” he said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“It wouldn’t kill you.”
He sighed. “You remember what you said once? About being a leopard and you couldn’t change your spots?”
She remembered.
“You hit it, girl. Oh, you hit it on the top. Those spots of yours are permanent features, all right. You’re the same little girl I found in The Palermo. You know that? The same little girl who lived in Harlem with Grandma and went out with that engineering wop Ray Somebody. You want the same damned thing you always wanted. You want security and heavy furniture and charge accounts. You want—”
“Did I say that? All I said was I wanted an apartment where we could be by ourselves! I said I’d get a job. Not you! I—”
A bitter laugh. “Uh-huh. Now it’s an apartment. Then it’ll be, Joe, honey, we’re living together so why don’t we get married, it’ll make things easier, why not. The whole routine with a lot of yapping until you wind up with a ring on your finger. Then you’ll want a kid, and then a house, a little split-level paradise out in the suburbs, and—”
“Stop that!”
He stopped.
Her eyes blazed. “Now you listen to me,” Anita said. “Now you just turn it off for a minute and listen to me. All I want is for us to be alone. A-l-o-n-e. Alone, just us, no wedding ring, no house in hell, no nothing, no kid, no nothing, damn you to hell!” Her voice got louder and louder until, when she hit the last word, she was screaming. He stared at her, not believing what he was seeing or hearing.
“You listen,” she went on. “You just shut that mouth of yours and you listen. Nobody’s trying to run you. Nobody wants to own you. Own you! I wouldn’t take you in marriage if you crawled. I’ll live with you, I’m no good, you’re no good, I’m a slut and you’re a pig and I live with you. But marriage? You should live so long. You should positively live so long.”
Joe had never seen her like this before. He was lost. It made no sense.
“Just to be alone,” she said. “So we can live like people instead of animals. Not luxury. I wouldn’t care if the place were worse than this. How that could happen I don’t know, this place is for pigs, but it wouldn’t matter. Just so we could live alone without the rest of the world in our living room, without that rat friend of yours here, without—”
She stopped. She took a breath. She found a cigarette and lit it and inhaled deeply.
“You think it over, Joe. You think about it. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get the same job either way, Joe. Either if we get our own apartment or if I get my own apartment, and don’t think I won’t. You think I’m trying to own you? I’ll walk right out on you, Joe. I can do it. It’s up to you. I leave with you or without you but I will be damned if I’ll go on living here.”
She walked to the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said. “You make up your mind.”
And she stormed out and slammed the door. He sat there, his eyes on the door, and he thought about everything she had said and the way she had said it. He was still sitting there when Shank came in.
“Shank,” Joe said. “Got to talk to you.”
“Yeah?”
“I got a problem, Shank.”
“Bread?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“So talk.”
“Anita and I are going to split.”
“Leaving town?”
He shook his head. “Not that. To a pad of our own. She wants to. You know how chicks get. They need privacy.”
“I get it.”
“Which means I’ll need money. I don’t know how I’m going to swing it. Like, you’ve been paying the tab for a long time. Now I’ve got to pick up my own end of it. Anita says she’ll get a job but that’s no good. We couldn’t make it that way. Which means, I’ll have to find a gig.”
“You think so?” Shank said flatly.
Joe shrugged. “Why not? Maybe something around the area, you know, because I have no eyes to put on a suit every morning. Clerking in a Village shop, waiting tables in a coffee house, something like that. I ought to be able to find a gig without sweating.”
“Finding is easy. Holding is harder.”
“I don’t read you, man.”
Shank lit a cigarette and talked through the smoke.
“You really think you could hold a job? You think you could get up every morning and go to work no matter how dragged you felt?” Joe was silent.
“Work,” Shank said. “A nice draggy routine, one day after the other. You could ball it up on the weekend, man. No work for two whole days. And a hot dollar an hour would give you forty bucks to play around with. Man, you could really move on that sort of bread.”
“What else is there?” Joe turned away. “That’s just it, man. Either way I lose. I ought to be able to hold a job. I mean, there’s a lot of pretty stupid cats working their eight hours a day with no trouble. So—”