“Relax, Georgie, let me handle this...”
“Damn it, Joe, don't go near her! Don't...”
Joe pushed me, gently, and I fell back on the bed. He held me down with a fat hand, said with great enjoyment in his patronizing voice, “Take it easy, Georgie, ain't no doll too big or hot for me. Get some sleep, take in the baths, then cut into a steak. Take Flo out to supper, or something. And Merry Christmas. See you at the office.”
I called to him at the door, “Look, Joe, I'm telling you to stay away not because I ever intend to go back to her again, but I'm thinking of you.”
Joe chuckled.
“Look, if you really want to help me, just mind your business. And leave your cigarettes, that's the only real help you can give me.”
He tossed the pack at me, winked, and was gone.
I lit a cigarette, propped a pillow under my head, and felt very tired and happy. I'd finally pulled out from under.
Joe was like a child, like me, I suppose. Giving him the sex bait, telling him not to see Lee, was like showing a dog a piece of unguarded meat. Once Joe saw her, went to bed with her—as he certainly would—then Lee would be Joe's problem... probably Joe's and Walt's.
Okay, I couldn't take any more, and in a sense I had warned him.
* * *
And that's the way it turned out. It's been over three months since that Christmas day and I've stopped giving Lee money, in fact I never go near the house. Joe seems cheerful around the office, winks at me a lot—whatever that means—and is a little tight with money. I lend him a few bucks now and then.
I'm back at the Hotel Taft, my pre-supper cocktails, and I rent a dance studio whenever I'm in the mood. Soon I'll tell Joe to move Lee to his apartment, and then things will be as before. Flo and I are sparring, have been through two “grand reunions” already. As a salve to my conscience, I've started a series of ads in German papers, to find Lee's folks, if she has any, which will be the only solution for her and not much of a one at that.
Of course things, for me, will never quite be in the same rut they were before. I carry on quite a correspondence with Eddie, who seems to be comfortable and healthy in Rome. And I realize now how right he was—I was the naive one. In this day and age you can't live without rooking your neighbor.
Here's Lee, terribly wronged by an entire nation and part of our army, and Eddie, wounded here and abroad by fascism, and even that poor Porto Rican he killed—what made him attack Eddie for a few lousy bucks? This is the era of fear and the fast buck, and look what it did to me; money made me rook poor Lee, slip her to a good-natured dope like Joe, made me try to blackmail a sweet old man like Henderson. And the fast buck turned Walt from a shy schoolboy to a tin-horn racketeer. It seems to me that as long as the fast buck makes this a dog-eat-dog world—if you'll pardon the trite expression (and you will, won't you?)—we have to follow petty lives. Like Flo and myself... our silly life of little spats and petty victories. Flo and her inane sublimation to style: when she dies they'll put a clothes hanger on her grave instead of a tombstone. And myself—what's my out, my escape valve? I'm trying to con my way through life, duck responsibilities—and in a way I can't be blamed; the dizzy pursuit of the fast buck makes for some cockeyed responsibilities these days.
But you see what it all adds up to: we're not really living. We straitjacket our lives with misery and stupidity, then spend our free time looking for an escape. We think we're living, yet in reality we're merely killing time. As I said, I wanted to go through life with a sure pair backed up... and all the time I've been dealing myself out of the game.
The End