“Did you now? For a lot of money?”
“Quite a lot of money. That’s probably why I was in such a stinking mood the last time you saw me — it wasn’t going well.”
“You were in a stinking mood, all right.”
Wouldn’t mind being in jail….
“What’re you having, Rufus?”
“I’ll stick to Scotch, I guess.”
But I’ve got to stay there….
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what makes me such a bitch.”
“You drink too much. Let’s just have one drink here. Then I’ll walk you home.”
They both looked quickly at Rufus.
So long….
“I’m going to the head,” Rufus said. “Order me a Scotch with water.”
He walked out of the back room into the roaring bar. He stood at the door for a moment, watching the boys and girls, men and women, their wet mouths opening and closing, their faces damp and pale, their hands grim on the glass or the bottle or clutching a sleeve, an elbow, clutching the air. Small flames flared incessantly here and there and they moved through shifting layers of smoke. The cash register rang and rang. One enormous bouncer stood at the door, watching everything, and another moved about, clearing tables and rearranging chairs. Two boys, one Spanish-looking in a red shirt, one Danish-looking in brown, stood at the juke box, talking about Frank Sinatra.
Rufus stared at a small blonde girl who was wearing a striped open blouse and a wide skirt with a big leather belt and a bright brass buckle. She wore low shoes and black knee socks. Her blouse was low enough for him to see the beginnings of her breasts; his eye followed the line down to the full nipples, which pushed aggressively forward; his hand encircled her waist, caressed the belly button and slowly forced the thighs apart. She was talking to another girl. She felt his eyes on her and looked his way. Their eyes met. He turned and walked into the head.
It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit. He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. But I’ve got to stay there so long…. He looked at the horrible history splashed furiously on the walls — telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walls with hatred. Suck my cock. I like to get whipped. I want a hot stiff prick up my ass. Down with Jews. Kill the niggers. I suck cocks.
He washed his hands very carefully and dried them on the filthy roller towel and walked out into the bar. The two boys were still at the juke box, the girl with the striped blouse was still talking to her friend. He walked through the bar to the door and into the street. Only then did he reach in his pocket to see what Cass had pushed into his palm.
Five dollars. Well, that would take care of him until morning. He would get a room at the Y.
He crossed Sheridan Square and walked slowly along West Fourth Street. The bars were beginning to close. People stood before bar doors, trying vainly to get in, or simply delaying going home; and in spite of the cold there were loiterers under street lamps. He felt as removed from them, as he walked slowly along, as he might have felt from a fence, a farmhouse, a tree, seen from a train window: coming closer and closer, the details changing every instant as the eye picked them out; then pressing against the window with the urgency of a messenger or a child; then dropping away, diminishing, vanished, gone forever. That fence is falling down, he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint, or The tree is dead. In an instant, gone in an instant — it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought. That’s Ruth. Or There’s old Lennie. Son of a bitch is stoned again. It was very silent.
He passed Cornelia Street. Eric had once lived there. He saw again the apartment, the lamplight in the corners, Eric under the light, books falling over everything, and the bed unmade. Eric — and he was on Sixth Avenue, traffic lights and the lights of taxis blazing around him. Two girls and two boys, white, stood on the opposite corner, waiting for the lights to change. Half a dozen men, in a heavy gleaming car, rolled by and shouted at them. Then there was someone at his shoulder, a young white boy in a vaguely military cap and a black leather jacket. He looked at Rufus with the greatest hostility, then started slowly down the Avenue away from him, waving his rump like a flag. He looked back, stopped beneath the marquee of a movie theater. The lights changed. Rufus and the two couples started toward each other, came abreast in the middle of the avenue, passed — only, one of the girls looked at him with a kind of pitying wonder in her eyes. All right, bitch. He started toward Eighth Street, for no reason; he was simply putting off his subway ride.
Then he stood at the subway steps, looking down. For a wonder, especially at this hour, there was no one on the steps, the steps were empty. He wondered if the man in the booth would change his five-dollar bill. He started down.
Then, as the man gave him change and he moved toward the turnstile, other people came, rushing and loud, pushing past him as though they were swimmers and he nothing but an upright pole in the water. Then something began to awaken in him, something new; it increased his distance; it increased his pain. They were rushing — to the platform, to the tracks. Something he had not thought of for many years, something he had never ceased to think of, came back to him as he walked behind the crowd. The subway platform was a dangerous place — so he had always thought; it sloped downward toward the waiting tracks; and when he had been a little boy and stood on the platform beside his mother he had not dared let go her hand. He stood on the platform now, alone with all these people, who were each of them alone, and waited in acquired calmness, for the train.
But suppose something, somewhere, failed, and the yellow lights went out and no one could see, any longer, the platform’s edge? Suppose these beams fell down? He saw the train in the tunnel, rushing under water, the motor-man gone mad, gone blind, unable to decipher the lights, and the tracks gleaming and snarling senselessly upward forever, the train never stopping and the people screaming at windows and doors and turning on each other with all the accumulated fury of their blasphemed lives, everything gone out of them but murder, breaking limb from limb and splashing in blood, with joy — for the first time, joy, joy, after such a long sentence in chains, leaping out to astound the world, to astound the world again. Or, the train in the tunnel, the water outside, the power failing, the walls coming in, and the water not rising like a flood but breaking like a wave over the heads of these people, filling their crying mouths, filling their eyes, their hair, tearing away their clothes and discovering the secrecy which only the water, by now, could use. It could happen. It could happen; and he would have loved to see it happen, even if he perished, too. The train came in, filling the great scar of the tracks. They all got on, sitting in the lighted car which was far from empty, which would be choked with people before they got very far uptown, and stood or sat in the isolation cell into which they transformed every inch of space they held.
The train stopped at Fourteenth Street. He was sitting at the window and he watched a few people get on. There was a colored girl among them who looked a little like his sister, but she looked at him and looked away and sat down as far from him as she could. The train rolled on through the tunnel. The next stop was Thirty-fourth Street, his stop. People got on; he watched the stop roll by. Forty-second Street. This time a crowd got on, some of them carrying papers, and there were no seats left. A white man leaned on a strap near him. Rufus felt his gorge rise.