Answered Prayers

"I'm not a whore." Though I don't know why I bothered protesting: I am a whore and always have been.

He grunted sarcastically; like all maudlin men, he was coldhearted. "How about it?" he said, blowing the ash off his cigar. "Roll over and spread those cheeks."

"Sorry, but I don't catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no."

"Ohhh," he said, his way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet-potato pie, "I don't want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar."

Boy, did I beat it out of there! — hustled my clothes into the bathroom and bolted the door. While dressing, I could hear Mr. Wallace chuckling to himself. "Old buddy?" he said. "You didn't think I meant it, did you, old buddy? I don't know. Nobody's got a sense of humor anymore." But when I came out, he was snoring slightly, a soft accompaniment to Bill's robust racket. The cigar still burned between his fingers: probably someday when no one is there to save him, this will be the way Mr. Wallace will go.

Here at the Y a sixty-year-old blind man sleeps in the cell next to mine. He is a masseur and has been employed for several months by the gym downstairs. His name is Bob, and he is a big-bellied guy who smells of baby oil and Sloan's Liniment. Once I mentioned to him that I had worked as a masseur, and he said he'd like to see what kind of masseur I was, so we traded techniques, and while he was rubbing me with his thick sensitive blind-man's hands, he told me a bit about himself. He said he'd been a bachelor until he was fifty, when he married a San Diego waitress. "Helen. She described herself as a gorgeous blond piece-ass thirty-one years old, a divorcée, but I don't guess she could have been much, else why would she have married me? She had a good figure, though, and with these hands I could get her plenty hot. Well, we bought a Ford pickup and a little aluminum house trailer and moved to Cathedral City—that's in the California desert near Palm Springs. I figured I could get work at one of the clubs in Palm Springs, and I did. It's a great place November to June, best climate in the world, hot in the daytime and cold at night, but Jesus the summers, it could go to a hundred twenty, thirty, and it wasn't dry heat like you'd expect, not since they built them million swimming pools out there: them pools made the desert humid, and humid at a hundred twenty ain't for white men. Or women.

"Helen suffered terrible, but there was nothing to do—I never could save enough in the winter to get us away from there in the summer. We fried alive in our little aluminum trailer. just sat there, Helen watching TV and coming to hate me. Maybe she'd always hated me; or our life; or her life. But since she was a quiet woman and we never quarreled much, I didn't know how she felt till last April. That's when I had to quit work and go into the hospital for an operation. Varicose veins in my legs. I didn't have the money, but it was a matter of life and death. The doctor said otherwise I could have an embolism any minute. It was three days after the operation before Helen come to see me. She doesn't say how are you or kiss me or nothing. What she said was: 'I don't ant anything, Bob. I left a suitcase downstairs with your clothes. All I'm taking is the truck and the trailer.' I ask her what she's talking about, and she says: 'I'm sorry, Bob. But I've got to move on.' I was scared; I began to cry—I begged her, I said: 'Helen, please, woman, I'm blind and now I'm lame and I'm sixty years old-you can't leave me like this without a home and nowhere to turn.' Know what she said? 'When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.' And those were the last words she ever spoke to me. When I got out of the hospital, I had fourteen dollars and seventy-eight cents, but I wanted to put as much space between me and there as ever I could, so I hit out for New York, hitchhiking. Helen, wherever she is, I hope she's happier. I don't hold anything against her, though I think she treated me extra hard. That was a tough deal, an old blind man and half lame, hitchhiking all the way across America."

A helpless man waiting in the dark by the side of an unknown road: that's how De

De

I placed the call from the bar of the Pont Royal; I remember, as I waited for De

Then De

So I went to Italy, but to Venice, not Rome, and it wasn't until early winter, when I was alone one night in Harry's Bar, that I learned that De

For many years I was very partial to Venice, and I have lived there in all seasons, preferring late autumn and winter when sea mist drifts through the piazzas and the silvery rustle of gondola bells shivers the veiled canals. I spent the whole of my first European winter there, living in an unheated little apartment on the top floor of a Grand Canal Palazzo. I've never known such cold; there were moments when surgeons could have amputated my arms and legs without my feeling the slightest pain. Still, I wasn't unhappy, because I was convinced my work in progress, Sleepless Millions, was a masterpiece. Now I know it for what it was-a dog's di