“Newboy. That poet.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I met him.”
“You did?” She raised her head again, then twisted, tearing blankets from his leg. “When?”
“Up at Calkins’.”
She pulled up beside him, hot shoulder on his. Under the headline NEW BOY IN TOWN! was a picture of a thin white-haired man in a dark suit with a narrow tie, sitting in a chair, legs crossed, looking as though there were too much light in his face. “You saw him?”
“When I got beat up. He came out and helped me. From New Zealand; it sounded like he had some sort of accent.”
“Told you Bellona was a small town.” She looked at the picture. “Hey, how come you didn’t get inside then?”
“Somebody else was with him who raised a stink. A spade. Fenster. He’s the civil rights guy or something?”
She blinked at him. “You really are out meeting everybody.”
“I wish I hadn’t met Fenster.” He snorted.
“I told you about Calkins’ country weekends. Only he has them seven days a week.”
“How does he get time to write for the paper?”
She shrugged. “But he does. Or gets somebody to do it for him.” She sat up to paw the blankets. “Where did my shirt go?”
He liked her quivering breasts.
“It’s under there.” He looked back at the paper, but did not read. “I wonder if he’s ever had George up there?”
“Maybe. He did that interview thing.”
“Mmmm.”
Lanya dropped back to the grass. “Hell. It isn’t past five o’clock in the morning. You know damn well it isn’t.”
“Eight,” he decided. “Feels like eight-thirty,” and followed her glance up to the close smoke over the leaves. He looked down again, and she was smiling, reaching for his head, pulling him, rocking, by the ears, down: He laughed on her skin. “Come on! Let me go!”
She hissed, slow. “Oh, I can for a while,” caught her breath when his head raised, then whispered, “sleep…” and put her forearm over her face. He lost himself in the small bronze curls under her arm, and only loosened his eyes at faint barking.
He sat, puzzled. Barking pricked the distance. He blinked, and in the bright dark of his lids, oily motes exploded. Puzzlement became surprise, and he stood.
Blankets fell down his legs.
He stepped on the grass, naked in the mist.
Far away a dog romped and turned in the gap between hills. A woman followed.
Anticipatory wonder caught in the dizzy fatigue of morning and sudden standing.
The chain around his body had left red marks on the underside of his forearms and the front of his belly where he’d leaned.
He got on his pants.
Shirt open over tears of jewels, he walked down the slope. Once he looked back at Lanya. She had rolled over on her stomach, face in the grass.
He walked toward where the woman (the redhead, from the bar) followed behind Muriel.
He fastened one shirt button before she saw him. She turned on sensible walking shoes and said, “Ah, hello. Good morning.”
Around her neck, the jewels were a cluttered column of light.
“Hi.” He pulled his toes in in the grass, shy. “I saw your dog last night, at that bar.”
“Oh, yes. And I saw you. You look a little better this morning. Got yourself cleaned up. Slept in the park?”
“Yeah.”
Where candlelight had made her seem a big-boned whore, smoke-light and a brown suit took all the meretricious from her rough, red hair and made her an elementary-school assistant principal.
“You walk your dog here?”
An assistant principal with a gaudy necklace.
“Every morning, bright and early…um, I’m going to the exit now.”
“Oh,” and then decided her tentativeness was invitation.
They walked, and Muriel ran up to sniff his hand, nip at it.
“Cut that out,” she demanded. “Be a good dog.”
Muriel barked once, then trotted ahead.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Ah!” she repeated. “I’m Madame Brown. Muriel went over and barked at you last night, didn’t she? Well, she doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“Yeah. I guess not.”
“About all you need now is a comb—” she frowned at him—“and a towel, and you will be back in shape.” She released her shrill and astounding laughter. “There’s a public john over there where I always see the people from the commune going to wash up.” Then she looked at him seriously. “You’re not with the commune there, are you?”
“No.”
“Do you want a job?”
“Huh?”
“At least you’re not a long-hair,” she said. “Not very long, anyway. I asked you if you wanted a job.”
“I wear sandals,” he said, “when I put anything on my feet at all.”
“That’s all right. Oh, heavens, I don’t care! I’m just thinking of the people you’d be working for.”
“What kind of work is it? “
“Mainly cleaning up, or cleaning out I suppose. You are interested, aren’t you? They’ll pay five dollars an hour, and those aren’t the sort of wages you can sneeze at in Bellona right through here.”
“Sure I’m interested!” He swallowed in surprise. “Where is it?”
They approached twin lions. Madame Brown put her hands behind her back. Muriel brushed the hem of her skirt. The glut of chain and glass could catch no glitter in this light. “It’s a family. Do you know where the Labry Apartments are?” To his shaking head: “I guess you haven’t been here very long. This family, now, they’re nice, decent people. And they’ve been very helpful to me. I used to have my office over there. You know there was a bit of confusion at the beginning, a bit of damage.”
“I heard about some of it.”
“A lot of vandalism. Now that it’s settled down some, they asked me if I knew some young man who would help them. You mustn’t take the long-hair thing seriously. Just clean yourself up a little—though it probably isn’t going to be very clean work. The Richards are fine people. They’ve just had a lot of trouble. We all have. Mrs. Richards gets easily upset by…anything strange. Mr. Richards perhaps goes a little too far in trying to protect her. They’ve got three very nice children.”
He pushed his hair from his forehead. “I don’t think it’s going to grow too much in the next couple of days.”
“There! You do understand!”
“It’s a good job?”
“Oh, it is. It certainly is.” She stopped at the lions as though they marked some far more important boundary. “That’s the Labry Apartments, up on 36th. It’s the four hundred building. Apartment 17-E. Come up there any time in the afternoon.”
“Today?”
“Certainly today. If you want the job.”
“Sure.” He felt relief from a pressure invisible till now through its ubiquitousness. He remembered the bread in the alley: its cellophane under the street lamp had flashed more than his or her fogged baubles. “You have an office there. What do you do?”
“I’m a psychologist.”
“Oh,” and didn’t narrow his eyes. “I’ve been to psychologists. I know something about it, I mean.”
“You do?” She touched the lion’s cheek, not leaning. “Well, I think of myself as a psychologist on vacation right now.” Mocking him a little: “I only give advice between the hours of ten and midnight, down at Teddy’s. That’s if you’ll have a drink with me.” But that mocking was friendly.
“Sure. If the job works out.”
“Go on over when you get ready. Tell whoever’s there that Mrs. Brown—Madame Brown is the nickname they’ve given me at Teddy’s, and since I saw you there I thought you might know me by it—that Mrs. Brown told you to come up. Possibly I’ll be there. But they’ll put you to work.”
“Five dollars an hour?”
“I’m afraid it isn’t that easy to find trustworthy workers now that we’ve got ourselves into this thing.” She tried to look straight up under her eyelids. “Oh no, people you can trust are getting rarer and rarer. And you!” Straight at him: “You’re wondering how I can trust you? Well, I’ve seen you before. And you know, we really are at that point. I begin, really, to think it’s too much. Really too much.”