“I don’t know,” he said heavily.
“Well, let’s get a drink. You look like you could stand one.”
“Sure. Call Room Service. I’m going to stretch out a minute.”
“Sissy.”
He removed his coat and lay down on the double bed. The food and liquor had made him hot and his buoyancy was gone. For a few minutes he stared at the overhead light, thinking of the past few days. Then he fell asleep.
When he woke the room was dark except for a floor lamp. There was a tray of glasses and bottles on the table near the bed. He heard water running in the bathroom.
Sitting up, he rubbed his forehead.
“Nora?”
“Yeah, I’ll be right out.”
He glanced at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. She must have skipped work, he thought. He poured himself a drink and drank it down quickly, steeped in self-revulsion. His shirt was damp with perspiration and his head throbbed with pain. This was the perfect picture of his life, he thought. A hangover in a cheap hotel with a cheap woman. The web of his existence was threadbare, dirty, gray.
Nora opened the bathroom door and came out wearing only a brassiere above her skirt and walking awkwardly in her unstrapped high-heeled shoes. She was sturdily built, but the bones of her shoulders and elbows were angular and graceless. Her skin was very white.
She sat beside him and put an arm about his waist.
“Feel better?”
There was a large bruise on her left arm, he saw, just above her elbow. In the dim light it looked like the sooty imprint of a man’s hand.
“Who did that?” he asked.
She looked down at the spot. “Gosh, I don’t know. I didn’t notice it until one afternoon. Some Superman, I guess. It couldn’t have hurt much.”
“You might have been too drunk to feel it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she said, and yawned.
Nolan pushed her away from him and stood up, trembling with confused and bewildered fury. “You should know who did it to you,” he said. “That’s the least you should know.”
“Barny, it don’t matter.”
“You’re a tramp, a bum,” he said in a low and bitter voice. “You’d let a man do anything to you as long as he filled you up with booze first. You think you’re the best I can get, don’t you? Everybody thinks that, I know. But they’re wrong. I’ve got a girl who wouldn’t breathe the same air you do.”
“Barny, you can’t talk to me like that,” Nora said in an uncertain voice. “I ain’t never done anything to you.”
Nolan put both hands to his head. He felt as if his skull might split open.
“Barny, you’re acting crazy.”
“Yeah, I guess I am,” he said, dropping his hands wearily to his sides. He stared at her thin scared face, his thoughts spinning riotously. What was the matter with him anyway? Nora was a good sport. He picked his coat from the back of a chair and fumbled through the pockets until he found the watch he had bought for Linda. “Here, kid, take this,” he said, holding it out to her on the palm of his hand. “Go ahead, take it. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“Barny, lie down and rest a while.”
“No, I got to run along,” he said, tossing the watch on the bed. “Bye, kid.”
“Barny, please don’t go.”
He shook his head, picked up his hat and left the room...
Nolan went to a Turkish bath on Camac Street and, after checking his wallet, undressed and went down a flight of stairs to the noisy, moisture-laden steam rooms. He sat on a stone bench and sipped ice water from a plastic glass, and the perspiration broke out on his thick chest and shoulders and ran down his body in tiny rivulets. There was a comfort in the anonymity of his nakedness, and in the opaque atmosphere of the room. Other men moved back and forth before him, their faces blurred by the swirling steam, and their identities hidden from him by their nakedness. They might be bankers, gamblers, cops, anything, Nolan thought. In his liquor-raddled state the idea seemed very significant.
After baking out for twenty minutes, he left the room, swaying weakly but feeling cleansed and refreshed. He took a hot and cold shower, and that helped too. An attendant toweled him vigorously and led him to the dormitory where Nolan stretched out gratefully on an army cot. He lay with his arms above his head, listening to the insistent hammering of his heart. It was banging away all right, he thought. It was a damn good heart.
There were two rows of cots in the long dark room and about two-thirds of them were occupied. At one end of the dormitory, above the doorway, a large clock with neon hands and numbers cast a faint sickly glow on the sleepers. Some of the sprawled figures twisted and jerked spasmodically, as if they were being prodded with sharpened sticks as they slept. Occasionally they muttered incoherently, or laughed out loud, or gushed out streams of putrescent obscenity. Most of them were sleeping off too much liquor, and their splintered reactions were nightmarishly revealing.
The man on Nolan’s left was particularly noisy. He was a young man, in his early thirties, with a deep, sharply ribbed chest, and the long powerful legs of a runner. He was tossing his head from side to side, as if in pain, and muttering about his father. His father was strong and wonderful, but the young man cursed as he sobbed out paeans to his memory. There was a girl whom he talked about uneasily, and something about a sales quota that hadn’t been met, and a great deal about drinking. The girl, Nolan learned without wanting to, was the young man’s wife. She was in Detroit.
Nolan sighed and stared at the ceiling. The young punk was hiding from his wife behind a bottle. Probably he was a creep. Praising his old man but hating him in his heart. Well, maybe he couldn’t help it, he thought wearily. His old man might have been a bum.
A man across the aisle hoisted himself on one elbow, and said, “Hey, knock it off, for God’s sake.”
This did very little good, so he climbed from his bed and stepped over to the young man’s cot. He looked down at the young man with disgust. “Hey, shut up!” he said. “I’m going to call an attendant to toss you out if you can’t keep quiet. I got to get some sleep.”
“Why not let him alone?” Nolan said.
“You mean you like this noise he’s making?”
“He can’t help it,” Nolan said. He got slowly to his feet and stared at the man, who was heavily built, with a hairy chest and strong confident features. “He’s going to confession, that’s all,” Nolan said.
“This is a hell of a place for that.”
“Well, it may be the only place he’s got. Let him alone. He’ll go to sleep after a while.”
“He’d better,” the big man said, with an uncertain glance at Nolan’s shoulders. Then he returned to his cot.
Nolan sat down on the edge of his bunk and studied the young man’s troubled face. He talked to him in a low voice, saying nothing very interesting or important, but gradually the tone of his voice got through to the young man, and, after a few more imprecations against his father, he fell into an exhausted sleep.
Nolan stood and walked slowly out of the dormitory. He dressed slowly, listlessly. There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing he wanted to do, except see Linda. And, instinctively, he knew that if he did he would only be hurt again.
13
It was ten minutes until Linda’s next show when the door of her dressing room opened and two large men sauntered in casually. One of them closed the door and leaned his great bulk against it; the other put both hands on his hips and regarded her with a cheerful smile.
“Miss Linda Wade, I guess,” he said.