And from the floor, hea
— Slee pin vun peece… lee
— What happened this morning? It's like it was a thousand years ago, Morgie said, and added to Ellery, — It's the first time I ever knew you were so goddam sensitive.
— And that, Ellery mumbled, going on despite the floodlit applause. — His face, I just keep seeing those beads of sweat on his face, understand? like a God-damned wreath of… beads of sweat around his forehead, do you get me?
— Tonight we have with us that famous star of stage and screen
. . Spotlights fought each other over the surface of blank faces.
— It's a little late, but I know everybody still has some of the Xmas spirit. . how about a word of Xmas cheer for everybody. .?
Hanging onto the microphone, the star entertained: —Merry Xmas everybody. Glad to see everybody making merry. Just watch out Mary don't go home with somebody else. He paused for laughter, and breath, swaying. — It was the most beautiful Xmas I ever saw. . when I got up Xmas morning… it looked so nice out I left it out all day…
— That bastard!
— I've got a broad waiting for me down at the Fritz-Carlton. . the star babbled on.
— That bastard! He killed it! said the Alabama Rammer-Jammer man, but neither of his companions appeared to notice. Ellery was trying to sit up straight and drink. Morgie stared dully into his glass.
— Look, what did Schmuck's number-one boy want over there, when you stopped and talked to them.
— They made me an offer. Ellery's shoulders sagged again. — The life of the Virgin Mary. They're shooting it in Italy. They want me on publicity.
— Look Ellery, for Christ sake, you're a swell guy. I'd hate like hell to see you get mixed up with the movies.
— What the hell, Ellery said. — You have to make a change once in a while.
— A change? You think it's going to be any different out there? It's the same goddam thing only it's worse. Here at least you know the people you work with, they know who you are, you got friends. Out there nobody knows you. Morgie was staring at the same blank place on the tablecloth where Ellery was staring. — You got to stop trading in some time. You trade in your goddam car, you trade in your goddam wife, and the minute you get used to the goddam thing some bastard puts out a new model. Just go to the goddam bank. Eye-bank. Blood-bank. Bone-bank.
— That's a nice idea for a show, the old Alabama Rammer-Jammer man interrupted. — Banks as a symbol of progress. Money-banks. Bone-banks. Eye-banks. Blood-banks.
— We just bought a canned show on the march of science, Morgie said, speaking slowly. Neither of them had raised his eyes. The plaintive quality in Morgie's voice was that defiant disappointment in the radio voice which has predicted clear only hours before, and returns to admit the possibility of scattered showers un-humbled by the fact that his listeners are staring through closed windows at driving rain. — Did you know that a handkerchief and a cannonball fall at the same goddam speed in a vacuum? Well that's where we are, in this great big goddam vacuum where a handkerchief and a cannonball fall at the same goddam speed, you know what I mean?
Their companion was watching the floor, the hollow plastic figurine clutched in his hand. H is thumb moved from one salt vent to the other and the lights dimmed again and went out. A ghostly emanation took their place, withholding reality, as an undelineated naked woman came forth, a pair of pink hands described in phosphorescence cupping her buttocks, which she ground at her audience as though the heavy hands of love (fleeting, groping, failing under other tables in the darkness) were kneading them in orgiastic violence.
— He's on, said Mr. Schmuck's assistant to Mr. Schmuck. Then he turned to Mr. Schmuck's musical director. — You're right. Verk-lärte. .
— You're right. Walpurgis. . Mr. Schmuck's musical director commenced.
— Shut up, said Mr. Schmuck, — so 1 could see the lady dancing.
Out there, she turned and bobbed an undulant front, blossoming at its tips in phosphorescent roses.
— What do you want to get mixed up in that for? It's the same goddam handkerchief and the same goddam cannonball in the same goddam vacuum.
— Travel, Ellery muttered. — See why the other half lives.
Six months: Elmira was one postmark, and her lips formed the words silently. The marking on the other letter was indecipherable, though the stamps were Spanish, and she held it up to the light, lips tightening as nothing interrupted the translucency but the jumble of a florid hand. There was no return on it. She put it aside, and took the first letter with her on her trip across the room, there to press it up under her armpit as she adjusted the radio with one hand, and tuned in her new hearing aid with the other. Then she sat down, resting her head back, lips twitching again on "six months," the letter gripped still unopened in her hand as the radio warmed up to Sweet Betsy from Pike sung in Yiddish, and she stared at a crack in the ceiling. By daylight, the crack appeared to have just lengthened another whole inch or even more, and Stanley almost bounded out of bed for his string measure. Then he sank back under the blanket (his sheet was packed), closed his jaws tight on the throbbing tooth to hold off the image it conjured as well as the pain, and then lay waiting, as though for instructions from above on something near at hand which he could not quite grasp, and with little time remaining him to do so. His forehead creased with the effort of trying to think clearly what it might be, and as the effort rose to that part of his face his jaws relaxed and immediately the pain in the tooth penetrated him sharply, and the image, close upon it, intruded.
Within the half hour, he was wandering among hospital corridors.
— But baby, taking that one to Ischia would be like taking an ow-wel to A-thens, he heard, approaching her door, and he stopped. — And don't permit me to leave without the key to my box, all those brrrr-beautiful things, I just couldn't show up over there na-ked.
He heard someone say, — Agnes, I'm glad you're all right. . and then,
— Baby do you call that all rwight? all strung up like an exhibi-bition in a shop window! Cru-wel boy!
Stanley stood there, after a glimpse at the group round her bed, pressing the deep pain in his jaw, listening.
— Arny baby you must try to stand up, or they'll put you in a little box here and you'll never never never see the normal outside world again. Arny-marney-tiddley-parney, what have you got in your pocket?
Then he heard her voice, giving someone an address, her mother's address, on the Via Flaminia in Rome.
— Rubbing alcohol! You should be spanked!
Stanley turned away with sudden resolution: he had heard of there being a chapel in Bellevue, and set off to look for it, rescued from the prospect of actually seeing her, by the more abiding, and surely more prudent reflection, that he might burn a candle for her recovery. And he was well on the way to doing so, moving through the corridors with apprehension, as though afraid of being hustled into a ward, or a straitjacket, himself. But as he came down that hall, where the three western faiths have their depots, he was stopped dead by an apparition in a red and white candy-stripe bathrobe emerging from the synagogue, her face so abruptly familiar, delicately intimate in the sharp-boned hollow-eyed virginity of unnatural shadows, like those priestesses ot Delphos in subterranean silence transfixing what might have been fear on a face in the light but there paralyzed in prophecy (until one of them was raped: then they were replaced by women over fifty). — Hello, Stan-ley, she greeted him as she had always, as a stranger whom she knew.
— But… I didn't kno\v you were. . Jewish? he said, and looked even more surprised, having meant to say, — I didn't know you were here. .