She learned about him. She learned how he’d left home before finishing high school and how he had travelled all up and down the Eastern seaboard, winding up in New York three years ago. He’d been there ever since.
Once in a while he worked. He had pushed a garment truck on Seventh Avenue for a few weeks, clerked in book stores and drugstores, bussed tables in cafeterias and slung hash in a beanery once. He had seaman’s papers and twice he had shipped out for short cruises along the coast as a deckhand.
He’d learned the guitar six years before in Virginia. It accompanied him wherever he went. He learned new songs constantly and he sang them all — at parties, in Washington Square on Sunday afternoons, at folksings and, when he was lucky, at folk music concerts.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Keep singing.” He smiled.
“Will you keep on like this? I mean—”
“You mean will I always be a bum with a guitar? I hope not. I’m sick of starving for my art, Jan. You hear people talk about starving in a garret as though it was a treat, but those people never missed a meal or lived in a cold water flat with roaches for company.
“It’s only romantic for the first week. Then you’re too tired all the time to think how noble it all is, and you feel as though you have lead in your shoes, and you stay out all night and sleep all day because at night your room’s too cold to sleep in.
“Did you ever live like that?”
She shook her head.
“Of course not. But I have. For awhile I was the only person in the Western world who was starving to death and eating caviar every day. Know why?”
“Why?”
“Because it was very nourishing and the cans were small enough to fit in my pocket without bulging. Besides, there was something poetic about it.”
“Were you ever caught?”
“No, but I was hoping they’d catch me, just like in all the jokes. Then they’d put me in a nice warm cell and give me food. It was a hell of a way to live.”
He paused. “I’m through with that,” he said. “I want to make enough money to live on. Not a fortune, but enough.”
“How?”
“Singing.”
“Is there money in folksinging?”
He laughed. “Not much, but it’s there. It’s tough — you keep on singing and you keep on trying and you let people listen to you, and you get a few plugs in mags like Caravan and get heard by the right people. If you’re lucky you cut a record.”
“For a special record company?”
He nodded. “Elektra, Folkways, Tradition, Comet — some label like that. The record date pays a little with more coming in if the record sells. And when people buy the record you can get lucky and play a few concerts and club dates, and if you make it big you cut a pop record or do a bit in Hollywood. People like Bikel and Seeger made it that way.”
“Would you want to record popular songs? I thought—”
“You thought that would be the so-called act of prostituting my art? Hell, I’d be happy to prostitute my art. That’s another expression the people who never starved come up with. They think Art is playing the guitar in your room with the door closed. That’s not the way I want to sing.”
“I like the way you sing,” she said. “I only heard one song last night, but I’d like to hear more sometime.”
“Would you? Well, that could be arranged.” He grinned.
She didn’t say anything.
“Jan,” he said after a moment, “I’m not on the make. Really, I’m not — but would you come to a party over at my pad tonight? It’s not a big thing, just a few people dropping in. There probably will be a mob by the time it gets rolling, but nothing much doing but singing. Would you like to come?”
“I don’t know, Mike.”
“Why not? Look, you don’t have to come as my date or anything. Just drop over whenever you feel like it. I’ll have the guitar there and a few other singers’ll be around. We’ll have an easy-going evening and you can get to know some people. Why not come?”
“I’m busy tonight.” The minute the words were out of her mouth she realized how phony they sounded. “I—”
“See? It’s impossible to get to know anybody in this damned town. They always think—”
“It’s not that.”
“Then why don’t you come?”
Why not? And she said, “All right. I’d like to come, then.”
He smiled.
“You see,” she went on, “it’s not easy for a girl either. A guy could think she’s... on the make.”
“I don’t think that.”
“I know.”
For a moment neither of them said anything. Then he said, “I’ve got to cut out now.” He stood up and started to the door, and she noticed that his eyes did not look as tired as they had before.
“Eight-thirty or nine will be about right,” he said. “Want me to pick you up?”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ll be going out for dinner anyway.”
“Okay. My pad’s on Cornelia Street north of Bleecker. Know where that is?”
She nodded. She had passed that street last night on the way to Macdougal Street.
“Twenty-four Cornelia Street. It’s on the third floor.”
“I’ll remember it.”
He stood with his hand on the door knob looking down at her and she realized how tall he was, how he towered over her. He seemed to be searching for something more to say.
“Well,” he said at length, “I’ll see you then.”
He opened the door and walked down the hall and she stepped to the doorway to watch him leave, following him with her eyes until he was out of the building and gone. Then she closed the door, slowly and almost absently, and went to the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke rise to the network of cracks in the ceiling.
She liked him; he was handsome and honest and interesting and perceptive. Not entirely honest, of course — he was on the make, but on the make in a nice way.
He could be a friend.
He could introduce her to New York and to some of the people in it, and he could teach her things and take her places.
And, if she let him, he could make love to her. And, afterwards, she could lie back on the bed, alone and empty and sick. Then she would be a virgin twice removed, a little girl from Indiana who tried it once and didn’t like it and didn’t have the brains to quit.
She was afraid of him.
6
His name was Michael Hawkins. He was the oldest of five children of an English father and an Irish mother in Marionsburg, a town of 2,500 people in the foothills of the Adirondacks.
In Marionsburg his father ran a drugstore and his mother worked behind the counter. Jed Hawkins was a good businessman — not too clever, hardly imaginative, but willing to put in the long hours necessary to earn enough money to support a wife and five children. His mother was a good woman, but he never knew her at all. It took all her time to work in the store and to bring up the children. He was the oldest; he learned to get along by himself. Afternoons he ran errands for his father at the drugstore and swept the floor and dusted the bottles on the shelves. The rest of the time he was alone.
He was a good student and a natural athlete, but he spent little time with school books and less with the boys in his classes. They always seemed so young to him, and they walked around with their eyes closed, hardly realizing that there was a world outside of Marionsburg.
Instead he preferred the company of the lonely old men who sat on the wooden benches in the square and talked with him by the hour. He got along well with them — they had things to tell him that he was hungry to hear, and they in turn were glad to find such a willing listener. Nobody else seemed to listen to them any more.