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“Well, so do I.”
“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said, “us ru
She laughed for the first time, and instead of that finally putting me at my ease, suddenly I knew—some big spade was going to leap out of the bedroom closet and spring for my heart with his knife—or she herself was going to go berserk, the laughter would erupt into wild hysterics—and God only knew what catastrophe would follow. Eddie
Wait! us!
Was she a call girl? A maniac? Was she in cahoots with some Puerto Rican pusher who was about to make his entrance into my life? Enter it-and end it, for the forty dollars in my wallet and a watch from Korvette’s?
“Look,” I said, in my clever way, “do you do this, more or less, all the time . . . ?”
“What kind of question is that! What kind of shit-eating remark is that supposed to be! Are you another heartless bastard too? Don’t you think I have feelings too!”
“I’m sorry. Excuse me.”
But suddenly, where there had been fury and outrage, there were only tears. Did I need any more evidence that this girl was, to say the least, a little erratic psychologically? Any man in his right mind would surely then have gotten up, gotten dressed, and gotten the hell out in one piece. And counting his blessings. But don’t you see—my right mind is just another name for my fears! My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with he should be strung up, that son of a bitch, hung by his fucking storm-trooper’s boots till he’s dead! In the street, who had been trembling, me or the girl? Me! Who had the boldness, the daring, the guts, me or the girl? The girl! The fucking girl!
“Look,” she said, wiping away the tears with the pillowcase, “look, I lied to you before, in case you’re interested, in case you’re writing this down or something.”
“Yeah? About what?” And here he comes, I thought, my shvartze, out of the closet,—eyes, teeth, and razor blade flashing! Here comes the headline: ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL’S APT!
“I mean like what the fuck did I lie for, to you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I can’t tell you.”
“I mean they didn’t want me to eat the banana. My friends didn’t want me to eat any banana. I wanted to.”
Thus: The Monkey.
As for why she did lie, tome? I think it was her way of informing herself right off—semiconsciously, I suppose—that she had somehow fallen upon a higher-type person: that pickup on the street notwithstanding, and the whole-hearted suck in her bed notwithstanding—followed by that heart-stirring swallow—and the discussion of perversions that followed that . . . still, she really hadn’t wanted me to think of her as given over wholly to sexual excess and adventurism . . . Because a glimpse of me was apparently all it took for her to leap imaginatively ahead into playboys in their Cardin suits; no more married, desperate advertising executives in overnight from Co
What happened finally at Irvington Park: late on a Saturday afternoon I found myself virtually alone on the frozen lake with a darling fourteen-year-old shikseleh whom I had been watching practicing her figure eights since after lunch, a girl who seemed to me to possess the middle-class charms of Margaret O’Brien-that quickness and cuteness around the sparkling eyes and the freckled nose—and the simplicity and plai
My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer’s Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury—while my father cries, “Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!”