“Forty-six years,” he said. “Forty-six years and I’ve done fine not talking to anybody. Forty-six years and I haven’t missed it. So this afternoon I felt like talking for maybe the first time in forty-six years, and there wasn’t a soul I could talk to. It’s a hell of a thing.”
He lapsed into silence. She waited a minute and then said: “What do you want to talk about?”
“You talk. I’ve talked too damned much already.”
“What should I talk about?”
“I don’t really give a damn,” he said. “Talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about. Tell me what you eat for breakfast, or where you get your hair done, or who you like in the fifth at Tropical. I’ll just listen.”
She wondered what he was driving at. She thought that he was probably making some sort of a pitch, a private speech, a summation to a private jury. But he was a nice man and she liked him and so she started to talk.
She started with her childhood — perhaps because that’s an easy place to start, perhaps because coming of age in Coldwater is hardly a controversial topic of conversation. She started there, and before she knew what was happening she was giving him a short history of her life. She talked about Lester Balcom and Madge and Terri and Dee, about Richie and Marie, about the way she felt when she was home alone and the way she felt riding in a cab to an assignation. She needed to talk at least as much as he did and the words poured out of her, and as they did they had a somewhat therapeutic effect upon both of them. Any priest will tell you that confession is good for the soul even if there has been no sin, that the urge to share experience with another human being is a powerful urge that demands satisfaction.
Neither of them kept any track of the time. Finally she had run out of words and the two of them sat quietly and stared thoughtfully at each other. Honour Mercy sipped at her drink and discovered that her glass was empty. Perhaps she had finished it or perhaps it had evaporated; she had no memory of anything but a continual monologue.
Crawford stood up, walked over to her and looked down at her. He reached into his pocket and took out two bills, a fifty and a ten. He handed them to her.
“Go on home,” he told her.
She handed the money back to him. “You can’t pay me until I earn it.”
“You’ve earned it. More than earned it.”
“Joshua—”
He smiled when she said his name. “I mean it,” he said. “I don’t want to... sleep with you. Not now.”
“Because you’re paying for it?”
He didn’t say anything.
“You listen to me now,” she said. “You’re going to take this money and put it back in your pocket. Then you and me are going back in that bedroom and we’re going to bed together. And when we’re done you’re not giving me any money because I’m not going to let you. You understand?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly.”
“Look—”
She stood up and looked straight into his eyes. He had very dark brown eyes that were almost black in the artificial light of the room. “You wanted me to talk to you,” she said. “I liked you and so I talked to you. I told you a lot of things I never told to anybody else.”
“I know.”
“I told you because I like you. And now I want you to go to bed with me. Don’t you like me enough to do that?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Take my arm, Joshua.”
He took her arm.
“Now... now lead me to the bedroom. And afterwards don’t you dare to try to give me money or I’ll hate you. Maybe I won’t hate you but I’ll be mad. I mean it.”
He took her into the bedroom and put on the small lamp and closed the door. He stood motionless by the side of the bed until she had removed her dress; then he too started to disrobe.
When they were both nude they turned to look at each other. He looked at full thighs and a narrow waist and firm breasts; she looked at a body that was still youthful, at a chest matted with dark curly hair.
He didn’t move. She stepped close to him and her arms went around his body.
She said: “Please kiss me, Joshua.”
Six
The bartender, standing down at the end of the bar, looked at Richie and obviously didn’t much care for what he saw. Richie was impaled by the look; he squirmed on it, his face got red, his eyes dropped. He knew what was coming.
With an exaggerated air of Job-like long-suffering, the bartender pushed himself off his elbow and came dirty-aproned strolling down the length of the bar. Stopping in front of Richie, he said, in a weary voice, “How old are you, kid?”
Richie met the barman’s eyes for just a second. In Richie’s eyes were pleading, in the barman’s implacability. Without a word, Richie slid off the stool and skulked, round-shouldered, back to the cold and sunlit street. He turned left, aimlessly, and walked along with his hands in his pockets, imagining himself, after an extensive course in judo, coming back and drop-kicking that bartender through his back-mirror.
The hell of it was, Richie was eighteen. And eighteen was legal drinking age in New York State.
But he just didn’t look eighteen. He was short and skinny to begin with, and that didn’t help. His face was weak and watery, and that didn’t help. And he’d been living soft. He’d put on over twenty pounds, and he’d spouted acne instead of whiskers, and that didn’t help. The twenty pounds didn’t make him look less skinny. It just made him look like a skinny sixteen-year-old with baby fat on his cheeks.
Nine chances out of ten, he could have shown his Air Force ID card (being on active duty, he had no draft card) and been served without question. But he was terrified to show that card anywhere, just as he was honestly terrified to try to get a job or to open a bank account (assuming he had money to put in it) or get to know anybody besides Honour Mercy. Richie Parsons’ concept of Authority was basically the same as George Orwell’s in 1984. Authority was a Big Brother, mysteriously everywhere, all-knowing and all-seeing, waiting to pounce upon Richie Parsons the second he made a mistake, and bear him whimpering back to Scott Air Force Base, where the whole squadron would line up to kick the shit out of him, and then he’d probably go to Leavenworth or something.
The days, for Richie Parsons, were long and empty. And the nights were even longer. Staying in the apartment all the time, waiting for a Knock On The Door, was too much for his nerves to stand. And Honour Mercy was practically never at home. Her work now took her away, usually, in the early evening, and she was never back before two or three in the morning, and sometimes she wasn’t back until long after sun-up. She’d even been away over a whole weekend once, off on somebody’s yacht, she and a number of her coworkers, with a group of rich college boys and a photographer from a men’s magazine. That was only two weeks ago, and Honour Mercy was already haunting the newsstands, wondering if they’d used a picture of her. “They probably won’t, though,” she kept saying. “The only picture he took of me was one I don’t think they could use.”
The point was that Richie was most of the time alone. Honour Mercy was the only one he knew that he could freely associate with, and she was usually either working or sleeping.
Besides that, Honour Mercy seemed to be changing. Her attitude toward Richie was undergoing a very uncomfortable transformation. She was talking more and more frequently, lately, about the fact that Richie wasn’t working. She was even beginning to nag a little about it, as though he could safely go off and get a job somewhere, when he knew without question that it was too dangerous to even think about.
Honour Mercy was changing in other ways, too. Sometimes, her customers would take her out to dinner or a show or something first, and Honour Mercy had by now seen most of the Broadway shows and been to a lot of the midtown nightclubs. She was learning to dress like the ads in the fashion magazines (though nothing in the world could shrink her bust to fashionable boyishness), and a faint southern-ness in her speech was rapidly disappearing. She was, in a word, becoming sophisticated, and she and Richie no longer had quite so much in common.