“Go on, go on,” the other said.
“And she said, ‘Why, he’s a little friend of mine,’ and the man said, ‘Well, it’s time little boys like him was in bed.’ He looked at me, hard, but I ignored him and said firmly, ‘Come, Miss Steinbauer, our taxi is waiting.’ Then he said, ‘Herb, you ain’t trying to take my girl, are you?’ I told him that she had come with me, firmly, you know; and then she said, ‘Run along. You are tired of dancing: I ain’t. So I’m going to stay and dance with this nice man. Good night.’
“She was smiling again: I could see that they were ridiculing me; and then he laughed — like a horse. ‘Beat it, brother,’ he said, ‘she’s gave you the air. Come back tomorrow.’ Well, when I saw his fat red face all full of teeth I wanted to hit him. But I remembered myself in time — my position in the city and my friends,” he explained, “so I just looked at them and turned and walked away. Of course everyone had seen and heard it alclass="underline" as I went through the door a waiter said to me, ‘Hard luck, fellow, but they will do it.’”
Mr. Talliaferro mused again in a sort of polite incomprehension, more of bewilderment than anger or even dejection. He sighed again. “And on top of all that, the cab driver had gone off with my ten dollars.”
The other man looked at Mr. Talliaferro with utter admiration. “O Thou above the thunder and above the excursions and alarms, regard Your masterpiece! Balzac, chew thy bitter thumbs! And here I am, wasting my damn life trying to invent people by means of the written word!” His face became suddenly suffused: he rose towering. “Get to hell out of here,” he roared. “You have made me sick!”
Mr. Talliaferro rose obediently. His hopeless dejection invested him again. “But what am I to do?”
“Do? Do? Go to a brothel, if you want a girl. Or if you are afraid someone will come in and take her away from you, get out on the street and pick one up: bring her here, if you like. But in Christ’s dear name, don’t ever talk to me again. You have already damaged my ego beyond repair. Do you want another drink?”
Mr. Talliaferro sighed again and shook his head. “Thanks just the same,” he answered. “Whisky can’t help me any.” The large man took his arm and kicking the blind outward he helped Mr. Talliaferro kindly but firmly into the alleyway. Then the blind swung to again and Mr. Talliaferro stood for a time, listening to the frantic typewriter, watching planes of shadow, letting the darkness soothe him. A cat, slinking, regarded him, then flashed a swift, dingy streak across the alley. He followed it with his eyes in a slow misery, with envy. Love was so simple for cats — mostly noise, success didn’t seem to make much difference. He sighed and walked slowly on, leaving the thundering typewriter behind. Presently he turned a corner and heard it no more. From beyond a cornice there came at last a cold and bloodless rumor of the dying moon.
His decorous pace spaced away streets interesting with darkness and as he walked he marveled that he could be inwardly so despairing, yet outwardly the same as ever. I wonder if it does show on me? he thought. It is because I am getting old that women are not attracted to me. Yet I know any number of men of my age and more, who get women easily. . or say they do. . It is something I do not possess, something I have never had.
And soon he would be married again. Mr. Talliaferro, seeing freedom and youth deserting him again, had known at first a clear, sharp regret, almost a despair, realizing that marriage this time would be a climacteric, that after this he would be definitely no longer young; and a final flare of freedom and youth had surged in him like a dying flame. But now as he walked dark streets beneath the hot heavy sky and the mad wilting gardenias of stars, feeling empty and a little tired and hearing his grumbling skeleton — that smug and dour and unshakable comrade who loves so well to say I told you so — he found himself looking forward to marriage with a thin but definite relief as a solution to his problem. Yes, he told himself, sighing again, chastity is expected of married men. Or, at least they don’t lose caste by it. .
But it was unbearable to believe that he had never had the power to stir women, that he had been always a firearm unloaded and unaware of it. No, it’s something I can do, or say, that I have not yet discovered. As he turned into the quiet street in which he lived he saw two people in a doorway, embracing. He hurried on.
In his rooms at last he slowly removed his coat and hung it neatly in a closet without being aware that he had performed the rite at all, then from his bathroom he got a metal machine with a hand pump attached, and he quartered the room methodically with an acrid spraying of pennyroyal. On each downstroke there was a faint comfortable resistance, though the plunger came back quite easily. Like breathing, back and forth and back and forth: a rhythm.
Something I can do. Something I can say, he repeated to the rhythm of his arm. The liquid hissed pungently, dissolving into the atmosphere, permeating it. Something I can do. Something I can say. There must be. There must be. Surely a man would not be endowed with an impulse and yet be denied the ability to slake it. Something I can say.
His arm moved swifter and swifter, spraying the liquid into the air in short, hissing jets. He ceased, and felt for his handkerchief before he recalled that it was in his coat. His fingers discovered something, though, and clasping his reeking machine he removed from his hip pocket a small round metal box and he held.it in his hand, gazing at it. Agnes Mabel Becky he read, and he laughed a short, mirthless laugh. Then he moved slowly to his chest of drawers and hid the small box carefully away in its usual place and returned to the closet where his coat hung and got his handkerchief, and mopped his brow with it. But must I become an old man before I discover what it is? Old, old, an old man before I have lived at all..
He went slowly to the bathroom and replaced the pump, and returned with a basin of warm water. He set the basin on the floor and went again to the mirror and examined himself. His hair was getting thin, there was no question about that (can’t even keep my hair, he thought bitterly) and his thirty-eight years showed in his face. He was not fleshily inclined, yet the skin under his jaw was becoming loose, flabby. He sighed and completed his disrobing, putting his clothing neatly and automatically away as he removed it. On the table beside his chair was a box of flavored digestive lozenges and presently he sat with his feet in the warm water, chewing one of the tablets.
The water mounted warmly through his thin body, soothing him, the pungent lozenge between his slow jaws gave him a temporary surcease. Let’s see, he mused to his rhythmic mastication, calmly reviewing the evening. Where did I go wrong tonight? My plan was good: Fairchild himself admitted that. Let me think. . His jaws ceased and his gaze brooded on a photograph of his late wife on the opposite wall. Why is it that they never act as you had calculated? You can allow for every co tingency, and yet they will always do something else, something they themselves could not have imagined nor devised beforehand.
.. I have been too gentle with them, I have allowed too much leeway for the intervention of their natural perversity and of sheer chance. That has been my mistake every time: giving them dinners and shows right away, allowing them to relegate me to the position of a suitor, of one waiting upon their pleasure. The trick, the only trick, is to bully them, to dominate them from the start — never employ wiles and never allow them the opportunity to employ wiles. The oldest technique in the world: a club. By God, that’s it.