Strong and healthy as he felt, he was, if the truth be known, somewhat dislocated. The sudden full tide of summer sent him spinning. The park swarmed with old déjà vus of summertime. It put him in mind of something, the close privy darkness and the black tannin smell of the bark and the cool surprising vapors of millions of fleshy new leaves. From time to time there seemed to come to him the smell of Alabama girls (no, Mississippi), who bathe and put on cotton dresses and walk uptown on a summer night. He climbed the alp dreamily and stooped over the bench. The cul-de-sac held the same message it had held for days, a quotation from Montaigne. He read it under a lamp:
Man is certainly stark mad. He can’t make a worm, but he makes gods by the dozens.
No one had picked it up. Nor was it very interesting, for that matter: when he sniffed it, it smelled not of Montaigne but of a person who might quote Montaigne on such a night as this, an entirely different matter.
“Wait—” he stopped in a dapple of light and leaves and snapped his fingers softly. That was what his father used to say. He too quoted Montaigne on a summer night but in a greener, denser, more privy darkness than this. The young man in the park snapped his fingers again. He stood a full minute, eyes closed, swaying slightly. He raised a hand tentatively toward the West.
Yonder was not the alp but the levee, and not the lamp in the trees but the street light at Houston Street and De Ridder. The man walked up and down in the darkness under the water oaks. The boy sat on the porch steps and minded the Philco, which clanked and whirred and plopped down the old 78’s and set the needle hissing and voyaging. Old Brahms went abroad into the summer night. West, atop the levee, couples sat in parked cars. East, up De Ridder, from the heavy humming ham-rich darkness of the cottonseed-oil mill there came now and then the sound of Negro laughter.
Up and down the man walked and spoke to the boy when he passed the steps. More cars came nosing discreetly up the levee, lights out and appearing to go by paws, first left then right. The man grew angry.
“The prayer meeting must be over,” said the man ironically.
Out poured old Brahms, the old spoiled gorgeous low-German music but here at home surely and not in Hamburg.
“What do they expect,” said the man now, westbound. He took his turn under the street light and came back.
“Now they,” he went on, nodding to the east. “They fornicate and the one who fornicates best is the preacher.”
The Great Horn Theme went abroad, the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the worst of times.
“But they,” he said to the levee—“they fornicate too and in public and expect them back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected.”
The boy waited for the scratch in the record. He knew when it was coming. The first part of the scratch came and he had time to get up and hold the tone arm just right so the needle wouldn’t jump the groove.
“Watch them.”
“Yes sir.”
“You just watch them. You know what’s going to happen?”
“No sir.”
“One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch.”
The man stayed, so the boy said, “Yes sir.”
“Go to whores if you have to, but always remember the difference. Don’t treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady.”
“No sir, I won’t.”
The record ended but the eccentric groove did not trip the mechanism. The boy half rose.
“If you do one, then you’re going to be like them, a fornicator and not caring. If you do the other, you’ll be like them, fornicator and hypocrite.”
He opened his eyes. Now standing in the civil public darkness of the park, he snapped his fingers softly as if he were trying to remember something.
Then what happened after that? After he—
Leaning over, he peered down at the faint dapple on the path. After a long moment he held up his watch to the lamplight. After a look around to get his bearings, he walked straight to the corner of the park and down into the BMT subway.
Yet he could scarcely have been in his right mind or known exactly where he was, for what he did next was a thing one did at home but never did here. He dropped in. He walked up to Rita’s apartment in the Mews and knocked on the door at eight thirty in the evening.
Kitty answered the door. Her mouth opened and closed. She could not believe her eyes. He defied the laws of optics.
“Oh,” she said, fearing either to look at him or to take her eyes from him.
“Let’s walk up the street,” he said. “It’s a nice night.”
“Oh, I’d love to,” she cried, “but I can’t. Give me a rain check.” She was managing somehow both to stand aside and to block the doorway.
“Let’s go ride the ferry to Staten Island.”
“Oh, I can’t,” she wailed like an actress.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” he said after a moment.
“What? Oh. Oh.” But instead of standing aside she put her head over coquettishly. Tock, she said, clicking her tongue and eyeing the darkness behind him. They were having a sort of date here in the doorway.
“There is something I wanted to ask you. It will not take long. Your phone didn’t answer.”
“It didn’t?” She called something over her shoulder. It seemed that here was the issue: the telephone. If this issue could be settled, it seemed, he would take his leave like a telephone man. But it allowed her to admit him: she stood aside.
So it was at last that he found himself in the living room standing, in a kind of service capacity. He had come about the telephone. The two women smiled up at him from a low couch covered with Navaho blankets. No, only Kitty smiled. Rita eyed him ironically, her head appearing to turn perpetually away.
It was not a Barbados cottage after all but an Indian hogan. Rita wore a Chamula huipil (Kitty was explaining nervously) of heavy homespun. Kitty herself had wound a white quezquemetl above her Capri pants. Brilliant quetzals and crude votive offerings painted on tin hung from the walls.
They were drinking a strong-smelling tea.
“I’ve been unable to reach you by phone,” he told Kitty.
The two women looked at him.
“I may as well state my business,” said the engineer, still more or less at attention, though listing a bit.
“Good idea,” said Rita, taking a swig of the tea, which smelled like burnt corn. He watched as the muscular movement of her throat sent the liquid strumming along.
“Kitty, I want to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Could I speak to you alone?”
“You’re among friends, ha-ha,” said Kitty laughing loudly.
“Very well. I wanted to ask you to change your mind about going to Europe and instead go south with Jamie and me.” Until the moment he opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wished to ask her. “Here is your check, Mrs. Vaught. I really appreciate it, but—”
“Good grief,” said Kitty, jumping to her feet as if she had received an electric shock. “Listen to the man,” she cried to Rita and smacked her thigh in a Jewish gesture.
Rita shrugged. She ignored the check.
The engineer advanced and actually took Kitty’s hand. For a second her pupils enlarged and she was as black-eyed as an Alabama girl on a summer night. Then she gaped at her own hand in stupefaction: it could not be so! He was holding her hand! But instead of snatching it away, she pulled him down on the couch.