Страница 44 из 194
There was little traffic at this hour and the cab swept uptown. Airman in the quick sky.
One last kiss for Eli Lefkowitz and she buttoned her dress, proper for the bridal suite.
The facade of the Hotel Stanley was imposing. The architect had been to Italy, or had seen a photograph. The Doges’ Palace, plus Walgreen’s. The Adriatic coast of Seventh Avenue.
She stood to one side of the lobby while Willie went to the desk for the key. Potted palms, Italianate dark wood chairs, glaring light. Traffic of women with the faces of police matrons and hair the frizzed blonde of cheap dolls. Horse-players in corners, G.I.’s on travel orders, two show girls, high-assed, long-lashed, an old lady in men’s work shoes, reading Seventeen, somebody’s mother, traveling salesmen after a bad day, detectives, alert for Vice.
She drifted toward the elevator shaft, as though she were alone, and did not look at Willie when he came up to her with the key. Deception easily learned. They didn’t speak in the elevator.
“Seventh floor,” Willie said to the operator.
There was no hint of Italy on the seventh floor. The architect’s inspiration had run out on the way up. Narrow corridors, peeling dark-brown metal doors, uncarpeted tile floors that must have once been white. Sorry, folks, we can’t kid you anymore, you might as well know the facts, you’re in America.
They walked down a narrow corridor, her heels making a noise like a pony trotting. Their shadows wavered on the dim walls, uncertain poltergeists left over from the 1925 boom. They stopped at a door like all the other doors. 777. On Seventh Avenue, on the seventh floor. The magic orderliness of numbers.
Willie worked the key and they went into Room 777 of the Stanley Hotel on Seventh Avenue. “You’ll be happier if I don’t put on a light,” Willie said. “It’s a hole. But it’s the only thing I could get. And even so, they’ll only let me stay five days. The town’s full up.”
But enough light filtered in from electric New York outside the chipped tin blinds, so that she could see what the room was like. A small cell, a slab of a single bed, one upright wooden chair, a basin, no bathroom, a shadowy pile of officer’s shirts on the bureau.
Deliberately, he began to undress her. The red cloth belt first, then the top button of her dress and then, going all the way, one button after another. She counted with his movements as he kneeled before her. “… seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …” What conferences, what soul searching in the workrooms farther down on Seventh Avenue to come to that supreme decision—not ten buttons, not twelve buttons, ELEVEN!
“It’s a full day’s work,” Willie said. He took the dress from her shoulders and put it neatly over the back of the chair. Officer and gentleman. She turned around so that he could undo her brassiere. Boylan’s training. The light coming in through the blinds cut her into a tiger’s stripes. Willie fumbled at the hooks on her back. “They must finally invent something better,” he said.
She laughed and helped him. The brassiere fell away. She turned to him again and he gently pulled her i
She stretched out on the bed, her legs straight, her ankles touching, her hands at her sides. He stood over her. He put his hand between her thighs. Clever fingers. “The Vale of Delight,” he said.
“Get undressed,” she said.
She watched him rip off his tie and unbutton his shirt. When he took his shirt off, she saw that he was wearing a medical corset with hooks and laces. The corset went almost up to his shoulders and down past the web belt of his trousers. That’s why he stands so erectly, the young Captain. We made an aggressive landing and bounced. The punished flesh of soldiers.
“Did you ever make love to a man with a corset before?” Willie asked, as he started pulling at the laces.
“Not that I remember,” she said.
“It’s only temporary,” he said. He was embarrassed by it. “A couple of months more. Or so they tell me at the hospital.” He was struggling with the laces.
“Should I turn the light on?” she asked.
“I couldn’t bear it.”
The telephone rang.
They looked at each other. Neither of them moved. If they didn’t move, perhaps it wouldn’t ring again.
The telephone rang again.
“I guess I’d better answer it,” he said.
He picked up the phone from the bedtable next to her head. “Yes?”
“Captain Abbott?” Willie held the phone loosely and she could hear clearly. It was a man’s voice, aggrieved.
“Yes,” Willie said.
“We believe there is a young lady in your room.” The royal We, from the Mediterranean throne room.
“I believe there is,” Willie said. “What of it?”
“You have a single room,” the voice said, “for the occupancy of one individual.”
“All right,” Willie said. “Give me a double room. What’s the number?”
“I’m sorry, every room is occupied,” the voice said. “We’re all booked until November.”
“Let’s you and I pretend this is a double room, Jack,” said Willie. “Put it on my bill.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the voice said. “Room number 777 is definitely a single room for a single occupancy. I’m afraid the young lady will have to leave.”
“The young lady isn’t living here, Jack,” Willie said. “She isn’t occupying anything. She’s visiting me. Anyway, she’s my wife.”
“Do you have your marriage certificate, Captain?”
“Dear,” Willie said loudly, holding the phone out over Gretchen’s head, “have you got our marriage certificate?”
“It’s home,” Gretchen said, close to the receiver.
“Didn’t I tell you never to travel without it?” Marital a
“I’m sorry, dear,” Gretchen said meekly.
“She left it home,” Willie said into the phone. “We’ll show it to you tomorrow. I’ll have it sent down by special delivery.”
“Captain, young ladies are against the rules of the establishment,” the voice said.
“Since when?” Willie was getting angry now. “This dive is famous from here to Bangkok as a haunt of pimps and bookies and hustlers and dope peddlers and receivers of stolen goods. One honest policeman could fill the Tombs from your guest list.”
“We are under new management,” the voice said. “A well-known chain of respectable hotels. We are creating a different image. If the young lady is not out of there in five minutes, Captain, I’m coming up.”
Gretchen was out of bed now and pulling on her panties.
“No,” Willie said beseechingly.
She smiled gently at him.
“Fuck you, Jack,” Willie said into the phone and slammed it down. He started to do up his corset, pulling fiercely at the laces. “Go fight a war for the bastards,” he said. “And you can’t find another room at this hour in the goddamn town for love or money.”
Gretchen laughed. Willie glared at her for a moment, then he burst into laughter too. “Next time,” he said, “remember for Christ’s sake to bring your marriage license.”
They walked grandly through the lobby, blatantly arm in arm, pretending they were not defeated. Half the people in the lobby looked like house detectives, so there was no way of knowing which one was the voice on the telephone.
They didn’t want to leave each other, so they went over to Broadway and had orangeades at a Nedick stand, faint taste of tropics in a Northern latitude, then continued on to 42nd Street and went into an all-night movie and sat among derelicts and insomniacs and perverts and soldiers waiting for a bus and watched Humphrey Bogart playing Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest.
When the picture ended, they still didn’t want to leave each other, so they saw The Petrified Forest over again.