She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Dont I? Oh Elmer I wish this strike was over… It gets me crazy doin nothin all day.’
‘But Anna the strike is the worker’s great opportunity, the worker’s university. It gives you a chance to study and read and go to the Public Library.’
‘But you always think it’ll be over in a day or two, an what’s the use anyway?’
‘The more educated a feller is the more use he is to his class.’
They sat down on a bench with their backs to the playground. The sky overhead was glittering with motherofpearl flakes of sunset. Dirty children yelled and racketed about the asphalt paths.
‘Oh,’ said Anna looking up at the sky, ‘I’d like to have a Paris evening dress an you have a dress suit and go out to dinner at a swell restaurant an go to the theater an everything.’
‘If we lived in a decent society we might be able to… There’d be gayety for the workers then, after the revolution.’
‘But Elmer what’s the use if we’re old and scoldin like the old woman?’
‘Our children will have those things.’
Anna sat bolt upright on the seat. ‘I aint never goin to have any children,’ she said between her teeth, ‘never, never, never.’
Alice touched his arm as they turned to look in the window of an Italian pastryshop. On each cake ornamented with bright analin flowers and flutings stood a sugar lamb for Easter and the resurrection banner. ‘Jimmy,’ she said turning up to him her little oval face with her lips too red like the roses on the cakes, ‘you’ve got to do something about Roy… He’s got to get to work. I’ll go crazy if I have him sitting round the house any more reading the papers wearing that dreadful adenoid expression… You know what I mean… He respects you.’
‘But he’s trying to get a job.’
‘He doesnt really try, you know it.’
‘He thinks he does. I guess he’s got a funny idea about himself… But I’m a fine person to talk about jobs…’
‘Oh I know, I think it’s wonderful. Everybody says you’ve given up newspaper work and are going to write.’
Jimmy found himself looking down into her widening brown eyes, that had a glimmer at the bottom like the glimmer of water in a well. He turned his head away; there was a catch in his throat; he coughed. They walked on along the lilting brightcolored street.
At the door of the restaurant they found Roy and Martin Schiff waiting for them. They went through an outer room into a long hall crowded with tables packed between two greenish bluish paintings of the Bay of Naples. The air was heavy with a smell of parmesan cheese and cigarettesmoke and tomato sauce. Alice made a little face as she settled herself in a chair.
‘Ou I want a cocktail right away quick.’
‘I must be kinder simpleminded,’ said Herf, ‘but these boats coquetting in front of Vesuvius always make me feel like getting a move on somewhere… I think I’ll be getting along out of here in a couple of weeks.’
‘But Jimmy where are you going?’ asked Roy. ‘Isnt this something new?’
‘Hasnt Helena got something to say about that?’ put in Alice.
Herf turned red. ‘Why should she?’ he said sharply.
‘I just found there was nothing in it for me,’ he found himself saying a little later.
‘Oh we none of us know what we want,’ burst out Martin. ‘That’s why we’re such a peewee generation.’
‘I’m beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want,’ said Herf quietly. ‘At least I’m beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.’
‘But it’s wonderful,’ cried Alice, ‘throwing away a career for an ideal.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Herf pushing back his chair. In the toilet he looked himself in the eye in the wavy lookingglass.
‘Dont talk,’ he whispered. ‘What you talk about you never do…’ His face had a drunken look. He filled the hollow of his two hands with water and washed it. At the table they cheered when he sat down.
‘Yea for the wanderer,’ said Roy.
Alice was eating cheese on long slices of pear. ‘I think it’s thrilling,’ she said.
‘Roy is bored,’ shouted Martin Schiff after a silence. His face with its big eyes and bone glasses swam through the smoke of the restaurant like a fish in a murky aquarium.
‘I was just thinking of all the places I had to go to look for a job tomorrow.’
‘You want a job?’ Martin went on melodramatically. ‘You want to sell your soul to the highest bidder?’
‘Jez if that’s all you had to sell…’ moaned Roy.
‘It’s my morning sleep that worries me… Still it is lousy putting over your personality and all that stuff. It’s not your ability to do the work it’s your personality.’
‘Prostitutes are the only honest…’
‘But good Lord a prostitute sells her personality.’
‘She only rents it.’
‘But Roy is bored… You are all bored… I’m boring you all.’
‘We’re having the time of our lives,’ insisted Alice. ‘Now Martin we wouldn’t be sitting here if we were bored, would we?… I wish Jimmy would tell us where he expected to go on his mysterious travels.’
‘No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He’s a useless fardel on society… The artist is a fardel.’
‘That’s not so Martin… You’re talking through your hat.’
Martin waved an arm across the table. Two wineglasses upset. A scaredlooking waiter laid a napkin over the red streams. Without noticing, Martin went on, ‘It’s all pretense… When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls… But now you must listen to me for the last time… For the last time I say… Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside… I am very drunk. Waiter another bottle.’
‘Say hold your horses Martin… I dont know if we can pay the bill as it is… We dont need any more.’
‘Waiter another bottle of wine and four grappas.’
‘Well it looks as if we were in for a rough night,’ groaned Roy.
‘If there is need my body can pay… Alice take off your mask… You are a beautiful little child behind your mask… Come with me to the edge of the pit… O I am too drunk to tell you what I feel.’ He brushed off his tortoiseshell glasses and crumpled them in his hand, the lenses shot glittering across the floor. The gaping waiter ducked among the tables after them.
For a moment Martin sat blinking. The rest of them looked at each other. Then he shot to his feet. ‘I see your little smirking supercil-superciliosity. No wonder we can no longer have decent dinners, decent conversations… I must prove my atavistic sincerity, prove…’ He started pulling at his necktie.
‘Say Martin old man, pipe down,’ Roy was reiterating.
‘Nobody shall stop me… I must run into the sincerity of black… I must run to the end of the black wharf on the East River and throw myself off.’
Herf ran after him through the restaurant to the street. At the door he threw off his coat, at the corner his vest.
‘Gosh he runs like a deer,’ panted Roy staggering against Herf’s shoulder. Herf picked up the coat and vest, folded them under his arm and went back to the restaurant. They were pale when they sat down on either side of Alice.
‘Will he really do it? Will he really do it?’ she kept asking.
‘No of course not,’ said Roy. ‘He’ll go home; he was making fools of us because we played up to him.’