A loneliness that took on substance and form, like a crouching man wearing some sort of faded, outworn uniform.
He was lonely all right. He was lonely for his old buddy with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.
Neither Sophie nor Sergeant McGantic wanted him to practice at the board any more. She sat by the window and McGantic roamed the long, cold hall. It had been some hours since she had spoken. It had been some time since McGantic had called.
But toward the end of the afternoon she began telling him of all the things he had missed when he’d been gone. She had seen a movie about ‘Jack London in the Klondikes’ and another wherein Joan Crawford had changed hats without a change of scene. ‘I’m gonna write to Screenland about that,’ she threatened to snitch on Joan, ‘they pay five bucks fer movie boners they call them.’
She never wrote. But had added several morbid memories to the five-and-dime loose-leaf volume, her Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. Yet there were long hours between them now when the book lay open on her lap and she had no word to say.
As if realizing at last that there was really nothing for her to do in the world. No true place of her own at all. Nothing to do but to wait. For what? For the booby hatch or a miracle, she didn’t much care which.
‘Why don’t Vi come to see me no more, just to say, “How you feelin’?” like she used?’ she suddenly demanded to know.
‘She’s havin’ trouble with the punk is why,’ he answered, not knowing himself just what he meant. ‘Vi is up to somethin’,’ he guessed indifferently and let it go at that.
Thus Sophie knew, more clearly with each hour, what she had so long suspected: that they were all in secret league against her. Violet and Frankie, Owner and Jailer, just the same as they’d been before Frankie had gone away; the overnight guests and creaky old Pin Curls down the fourth floor rear who played, over and over, just to get Sophie’s goat, the same old creaking tune:
‘Painted lips, painted eyes,
Wearing a Bird-of-Paradise…’
‘You only make the same mistake once,’ she advised him abruptly.
‘Whatever that means,’ he answered mechanically.
‘Oh, don’t always pertend you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about,’ she persisted, ‘a woman is the downfall of every man ’n a man is the downfall of every woman. You’re my downfall ’n I’m yours.’
‘Quit fallin’ down ’n say what you’re tryin’ to say,’ he urged her irritably, ‘quit beatin’ around the bushes.’
‘What I mean is there’s nuttin’ deader’n a dead love,’ she told him sternly, ‘nuttin’ deader.’
‘Sure there is,’ he assured her lightly, ‘dead people. They’re deader’n anybody.’
Her reply was simply to weave her hands in front of her face like a Hawaiian dancer and to sing saucily:
‘Hello, Aloha, how are you?
I’m bringin’ you kisses
From over the sea.’
She watched him slyly while they ate a cold-cut supper out of paper plates. There wasn’t enough strength left in her wrists, she claimed, to slice bread or cut sausage. She watched while he cut everything into small cubes for her and then sat weaving her hands instead of eating.
‘Others you’ve met
May call you coquette…’
‘Quit yawpin’ ’n scoff,’ he told her, ‘you sound like a lost orphan in a rain barrel.’
For now she fancied herself a vocalist with an all-girl band. Over the sausage she smiled faintly at the unseen players, encouraging one with a nod here and another with a nod there. There was something really distracted about her smile.
‘What the hell are you – a bird?’ But his eyes were clouded with concern for her.
‘Evelyn ’n her magic violin,’ Sophie explained easily. ‘I can do magic too.’
‘Well,’ he sighed, realizing he was in for a long, long night, ‘here we go again.’
‘… mean to me’
she sang,
‘Why must you be mean to me?’
and broke off abruptly to ask directly, ‘What do you think of the A. F. of L.?’
Frankie looked up, genuinely startled. ‘What the hell – you don’t even know what the A. F. of L. is. I think you’re tryin’ to act crazier just ’cause I’m back. If nobody was here you’d have more sense. Quit disguisin’ your eyes. Quit showin’ off.’
But whether she was just showing off or not he couldn’t be certain. Half an hour later she overdid herself. He was dozing and wakened to see her tracing, with one forefinger upon the dust of the unwashed pane, the single word: Perdition. Just as she finished tracing it the sirens sounded, the hook-and-ladder pulled past and patrol cars, insurance cars and all the frantic traffic of a 4-11 alarm came crashing by with a sense of imminent doom. She wheeled to the door and shrieked up the stairwell to Violet, ‘It’s goin’ up! Loop ’n all! It’s all goin’ up!’
Violet came down the stairs at a gallop; she had to phone the papers to learn what was burning, how far it was spreading, and a kind of elation seized Sophie while Vi was at the phone behind Jailer’s desk.
‘It’s just a short circuit by Fish Furniture’s basement,’ Vi reported dryly from the doorway. ‘All under control.’
But Sophie herself stayed out of control the rest of the evening. Neither magazines nor scrapbook nor the promise of beer could give her consolation. Just to realize that that was all it had come to, that that was all anything could ever come to. Just the way Vi had said that – it made a person want to cry, that was all.
‘The whole fire was in my head,’ she mourned.
He left for Schwiefka’s toward eleven o’clock. There was no other way to make the long night pass.
And wondering, the minute he sat down in the slot, how in the name of sweet Jesus Christ he was going to make it without a charge till morning.
Solly Saltskin wasn’t as happy, sleeping in the late Stash Koskozka’s bed, as he’d once thought he’d be. If he could, occasionally, have slept there alone it might have been endurable. Sneaking in for an hour of fast woo a couple times a week when Old Husband had still been padding about had been one thing: being tied down to these same four bedposts all night long, night after night, was strictly something else. Of late the bedposts had taken to leaning together with a faintly disapproving air. They’d seen them come and they’d seen them go: this one wouldn’t last as long as some of the others, they calculated, the reckless way he was going about things. A cooler head was what was needed; a cooler head, an older hand, a bit more restraint and snatches of sleep between rounds.
But Vi was so hothanded he didn’t get a chance either to sleep or even to cool off between rounds. Once he evaded her senseless stroking with some such thin excuse as, ‘I’m just gonna have a fast cup of coffee in the kitchen – you go to sleep, you need your rest, you’re gettin’ to look like a wornout movie actor.’
But just as he was putting the cup to his lips her fingers encompassed his throat from behind and he squawked like a strangling duck.
‘Don’t do that when you see I’m swallerin’,’ he protested.
‘That’s when it’s most fun, when you’re not expectin’ – you didn’t even hear me creepin’ up, did you, Goosey? Still love me, Goosey-Goo?’
And crushed down upon his lap to feed him coffee from a Pixley & Ehlers spoon, howling with joy at his every wretched gulp.
‘You look so unhappy, Goosey.’ She never ran out of new nicknames for him, each more revolting than the last. ‘Ain’t there enough sugar in it? Now tell me I’m sweet enough for you, you don’t need sugar with me settin’ here.’