They spoke of the breakdown of law and order, of crime in the streets, but what a discipline was in these streets, what a knuckling under and catering to the times. It is beyond his capacity to conjure up the future, he cannot even imagine what the safety razors will look like twenty-years from now, or a snow shovel. He passes a drugstore and sees a sign on the window: “Established 1961.” He laughs before he realizes that it is no joke. If it were a question of just this one neighborhood — but it isn’t; it’s spread now even to the shopping centers, even to the ghettos. In his own area—“Alexander Main, Licensed Bailbond Broker”—he has seen wide-windowed tour buses, the sight-seers’ attention close-order-drilled by the tour guide. What can they be looking at? Survivors for a lousy generation and a half? In history already? So soon? He’s not young. He’s seen good times and bad, but never times like these, time itself doing in a season what once it had taken a decade to accomplish. Shall he get paint? Send Crainpool to the window with a brush? Have him paint in…what? “Bail Out?” “I Been Working on the Bailbond?” “A Surety Thing?” It’s as if he lives trapped in the neck of an hourglass. Style, he thinks. As a young man he wanted it, hoped that when he wakened it would be there like French in his mouth. Now he sees it as a symptom of a ruinous disease.
He needs sleep, a nap. He pushes past the strollers and lovers and shoppers — it’s past three, the high school kids are out, the students from the university are — moving in the garishly dressed crowd like someone hurrying down an escalator. He brushes the arm of a young man in an ordinary white shirt with a master sergeant’s chevrons sewn to the sleeve. He dodges a girl in an ammunition belt, kids in flags, yarmulkes, the girls braless, their nipples erect, puckering their T-shirts as if they moved in perpetual excitation, the genitals of the young men askew, crushed packages in their tight jeans, both sexes horny, literally, their sex antlered inside their binding clothes. He sees colors which till now have never been printed on cloth. He sees all the good-looking young who seem some new species in their furred shoes, their boots, bags suspended from the shoulders of the young men, oddly courierizing them. The girls in pants, the ground rounds and roasts of their behinds, the lifting tension of their crotches making it appear as if they are actually suspended in their trousers, like parachutists perhaps, sunk in them up to their hips and the small of their backs. There is something strangely military about this crowd. Perhaps it is the stripy patterns of their clothes, like the tricolors of decorations.
The Phoenician yawns and a young man turns to him. “Hey uncle, I dig your sport coat.”
“What, this?”
“No, it’s nice.”
“You think this is nice? You should see my doorman’s uniform.”
“You got a doorman’s uniform? Wow.”
“Yeah, well my daughter’s getting married Sunday and I’m giving her away.”
“Getting married? No shit?”
He talks to him as if asleep. (So accustomed am I to chatter, to giving as good as I get, coming on strongest, dialogue alive on my teeth like plaque. How long has it been since I’ve had a conversation? A long time. Since my wife died.)
He spots a taxi rank — black, right-hand-drive Austins imported from London: “Guv’s Taxi Company, Ltd.”—and goes over to the first cab, gets in and sinks back into the leather seat.
“Cor blimey, Guv, where to?”
He does not want to return to the office, does not want to go home. “Take me,” he says, inspired, “to a swell hotel.”
A doorman opens the cab for him and he steps out, pays the driver, goes through the revolving doors and checks in. He remembers he has no pajamas and asks the room clerk if there’s a men’s store in the hotel.
He tells the salesman he takes a D.
“Any particular style, sir?”
“Crisp. Linen. Crisp.”
He pays for the pajamas and returns to the desk to pick up his key.
“Luggage, sir?”
He holds up the new pajamas. The clerk hesitates. “What do you want? You want me to pay in advance? What’s the damage?” He looks down at the card he has just signed. “Twenty-eight bucks? Here.” He pushes the bills toward the man who at first does not pick them up. “What is it, you think I’m a troublemaker, a suicide? Furthest thing from my mind. Gimme my key. Gimme my key or I’ll get the manager.” The clerk extends the key and a bellboy steps forward. The Phoenician puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a dollar and gives it to the bellboy. “Save you a trip,” he says and, holding his new pajamas, moves off in the direction of the elevators.
He loves a hotel room. This one is large, new. He is on the twenty-third floor. Through the wide clean Thermopane he can see the ball park, the clipped chemical grass, bright, glowing as emerald, green as eyeshade, has a perfect view into the stadium’s open skull, the variously colored stands folded like nervous system along its sides. Cincinnati beneath him like a crescent of jawbone, the buildings dental, gray as neglect, the Ohio juicing the town like saliva. It is a corner room and commands the south and west; he can see Kentucky. He does not draw the drapes, bunched tight, coiled on a recessed track that runs along the ceiling above the windows, pleats on pleats in a loose reserve, a collapsed bellows of fabric. The blue drapes match the blue bedspread which looks as if it has never been used — looks new, as everything in this room does: the deep modern chairs, webbed as baseball gloves and with seats like the pockets in catchers’ mitts, the two-foot-high cherrywood strips set into two beige walls textured as taut canvas, the aluminum grill of the heating and air-conditioning unit flush with the top of the long window seat by the enormous western wall of glass. He admires the desk (of the same smooth cherrywood) that levitates against a wall, its drawers suspended, hanging in air like holsters. He sits in the red low-backed chair and moves his lap into position beneath the desk, opening a drawer, seeing with satisfaction the stack of thick white stationery, the golden logotype of the letterhead, the two ballpoint pens, the yellow Western Union blanks. He clears the menu, textured and greasy as a playing card, from the surface of the desk, removes the tented cards that announce check-out time and give instructions about the operation of the TV, and places them in a drawer beside the treated shoe-polishing cloth and folded paper laundry bag with its tough kite string and green laundry ticket, a framed gum reinforcement hole at the top. He trails his fingers in the pile of brochures, shuffling them like a magician preparing a card trick. He closes the drawers which move back silently along their grooves. On the right the smooth wooden desk — the wood in this room does not feel like wood, it is level as glass — becomes a chest of drawers, then a treaded slab on which to place suitcases. There are five lamps in the room: on the desk, on the chest, beside his bed, on a low white table; a chrome floorlamp with a tall narrow shade. The television swivels on a chrome stem before the southern window. He turns it on, and from his bed the figures on the screen seem to stand in the sky. He reaches over to the control panel — there is an electric clock, a radio, a speaker like a patch of brown canvas, rows of switches, buttons — and clicks it off. He walks into the bathroom, sees plastic jewel cases of soap, towels of different size and thickness like a complicated terry-cloth cutlery or a pantry of flag. He runs his hand along the rail angled like the trajectory of a banister above the tub, and touches the beautiful basin with its queer fittings. Like a dignitary cutting a ribbon, he tears the paper strip that packages the toilet seat. He pees long and hard into the bowl, drilling his urine solidly into the faintly blue water.