Here Comes a Candle, page 4
He leaned toward her, putting a hand across to rest on the door on her side and touched her lips lightly—or he had intended it to be lightly. As one might intend to touch a pile of gunpowder lightly with a burning match. Without his even knowing how it happened, her arms were tightly around him and his around her; their bodies pressed together, their mouths together in a kiss that wasn’t like any kiss he’d ever had before. He felt it all the way down to his toes.
And then the bus was coming and he was getting out of the car. He said, “Good-bye,” and it sounded foolish, inadequate and utterly asinine.
She said, “‘Bye, Joey,” quite seriously, and then, “Better wipe off the lipstick before you see Stan again.”
The bus was swinging in at the stop and he had to run for it. He had to catch it, knowing he’d made a fool out of him self already and would make himself into a thousand times worse one—one way or the other—if he missed that bus.
He caught it and sat down in a seat at the back, carefully not looking out either window lest he see a robin’s-egg blue convertible and its occupant. He knew she’d be laughing at him. He sat there sweating, only partially because of the heat and the exertion of his short but hard run to catch the bus.
He thought, damn her, damn her, damn her. He’d never hated a woman as much in his life as he hated Francine. Or wanted a woman as badly as he wanted her.
5
The date with Ellie should have been anticlimax, but, surprisingly, it was fun. It got off to a good start by his getting to the restaurant at five after eight exactly, just as Ellie came out of the back room, having completed the change from waitress costume to street dress. Neither of them had had to wait even a second for the other.
And it was the third time he’d seen Ellie and she was a little prettier each time. Still no raving beauty, but she was much more attractive in a simple beige dress—almost a perfect match for her mousy hair—than she had been in the waitress costume. Just as the waitress get-up had been an improvement over the severely tailored housecoat in which he’d first seen her.
Joe had brought a Journal with him so she could look at the theater ads and pick out what show she wanted to see. He’d looked them over himself and rather wanted to see an exciting jungle picture, Man Eaters of Kumoan, at the Warner. They sat down in a booth to look over the ads together and he had no difficulty at all in selling her on the jungle picture. Just casual mention of a slight preference did it; she said she hadn’t seen a good jungle picture in a long time and she’d like it.
She vetoed the suggestion of a taxi to the theater and Joe vetoed walking—slightly over a dozen blocks—so they compromised on going by streetcar.
After the picture, which they both enjoyed, Joe took her around the corner to the Violina Room at the Kilbourn where they heard some good music and had a sandwich and a bottle of beer apiece; Ellie turned down a second bottle, but Joe had one.
They talked and he learned quite a bit about Ellie. She was eighteen and she’d been born and raised in Indianapolis. Her parents had both been killed in an auto accident when she was fifteen. She’d gone to live with an uncle and aunt in Chicago, but she hadn’t liked them too well and apparently they hadn’t liked her too well, either. She’d managed to stick it out with them a little over a year and she’d been on her own since then, for about two years. She’d worked as a maid in a private family for a while and then had become a waitress. She was working in a restaurant on South State Street and hadn’t liked it very well; it wasn’t a good neighborhood.
And since she had an uncle, Mike Dravich, who ran a restaurant in Milwaukee, she figured she might as well write him to see if he had a job open, and, as it happened, he had.
She didn’t expect to be a waitress all her life; she had a little money, not much, saved up, and as soon as it got to be a little more she was going to take a business course, evenings, so she could do some kind of office work. A stenographer if possible, at least a file clerk or some sort of clerk. She knew she’d have to study grammar and spelling quite a bit to be a stenographer; she’d had only two years of high school as against Joe’s three. But if she once got into office work of any kind she could keep on studying evenings.
He learned that she read quite a bit, mostly novels, but that she hadn’t read any science fiction, which was Joe’s favorite reading. That she smoked occasionally, drank a little beer or wine occasionally, but not too much. That she liked “good” music, although she didn’t really know anything about it, and liked good swing like Stan Kenton or Benny Goodman, but wasn’t too crazy about most popular music and didn’t swoon over Frank Sinatra. That she liked to dance once in a while, but not almost every night like a lot of girls do.
That was Ellie, what she told of herself that evening to Joe. Doesn’t sound like much, but then the exterior, obvious things about most people seem pretty ordinary. Nor can you expect a girl of eighteen to have the background of a Mata Hari.
There was more, too, that Joe read between the lines and in the way they were spoken. Ellie didn’t say so, but she was a nice girl. Definitely not a pushover. Long before the evening was over Joe knew that any faint idea he may have had about the two of them spending the rest of the night in one room at Mrs. Gettleman’s instead of two was so improbable an idea that it wouldn’t be worth while suggesting it.
But he liked Ellie, and he could tell that she liked him.
For his share of the talking he told her as much as he could about Milwaukee—since she had been there only a day and knew little about it—and as little about himself as was reasonably possible. He had a pretty well founded hunch that she wouldn’t like the idea of his having sold tickets in the numbers racket nor the idea of his intention of working—in just what capacity he himself didn’t know as yet—in a gambling joint.
But he split the difference with her as far as telling the truth about those two things was concerned. He admitted that the only full-time job he’d held since leaving high school and up to a short while ago had been selling tickets on baseball and football pools. He explained that the heat was on in Milwaukee as far as numbers was concerned and that it would probably stay on á long time, and that he had no intention of going back to that way of making a living.
But he also told her, which was more or less true, that he wasn’t doing anything at all at the moment. And he told her, which wasn’t true at all, that he hadn’t any serious idea what kind of work he wanted or expected to find.
Because he didn’t want to worry her about the money he was spending on her—not that it was much; the whole evening was costing him only about five dollars—he managed to give the impression that he had money in the bank, saved up, and wasn’t worrying about finding a job in a hurry; rather, that he was deliberately taking his time because he wanted to be sure he was getting into a kind of job that would lead him somewhere worth going.
All that, of course, added up to quite a bit of talking; it was almost one o’clock when they got back to Mrs. Gettleman’s. Not that that mattered, because Ellie’s shift didn’t start until eleven the next day, and his didn’t start at any time, although he usually dropped into the tavern by midafternoon to see if Mitch had anything for him to do.
At the door of Ellie’s room on the second floor, she hesitated only a second before letting him kiss her goodnight. It occurred to him to suggest that they see another show—or dance, if she preferred—Saturday evening.
She made the countersuggestion that they make it Sunday instead, if he had no other plans for then. Sunday was her day off; the Dinner Gong was closed on Sunday. Possibly they could go to the beach or to a park in the afternoon. That sounded good to Joe, so they set the date for two o’clock in the afternoon Sunday and decided not to decide, until then, just what they’d do.
Since there’d been that much conversation since the goodnight kiss and since he really was going now, Joe put his arms around her and kissed her again. And this time got a slight surprise. Oh, nothing like the amperage of that kiss Francine Scott had given him that afternoon, but then this kiss didn’t have the build-up that one had had. And definitely Ellie’s lips moved under his and responded, and it was a very pleasant kiss.
Then she pushed herself away from him but stood looking at him a full second, her eyes wide and not smiling at all, before she said, “Goodnight, Joe,” and went quickly inside and closed the door.
He almost raised his hand to knock lightly, and then thought better of it and went on upstairs to his own room.
For some reason he didn’t feel like reading, as he generally did after getting to his room and before going to sleep. He got into bed and lay there thinking. He liked Ellie, but she was going to be a complication if he kept on seeing her. Rather, the lies and half-truths he’d told her would be a complication. If, within a month or so, he was working for Mitch at a gambling joint, he couldn’t very well keep kidding Ellie indefinitely about what he was doing. Maybe he should have leveled with her in the first place; then, if she didn’t like it and didn’t want to keep on seeing him, that was that and neither of them would be hurt. Maybe he’d tell her Sunday.
He liked Ellie a lot. She was a swell kid, and that second kiss had surprised him. He went to sleep thinking about Ellie.
But he dreamed of Francy Scott.
6
Nothing much happened on Friday. It was still hot and the humidity had gone even higher. Joe Bailey woke a little earlier than usual because of the heat but held off having breakfast until eleven so he could eat at the Dinner Gong after Ellie went on duty. He found himself a bit puzzled about her this morning and wanted to have a look at her again, even across a restaurant counter.
The look didn’t tell him very much and this time there were other customers and they didn’t have much time to talk. Mike was there today, behind the cash register. When Joe came up with the check, Mike said, “Hi, Joe. What you doing these days?”
Joe said, “Nothing much,” and managed to let it go at that. But he felt uneasy, somehow. He had a hunch Ellie must have mentioned him to her uncle and he wondered what Mike would have said about him to Ellie. Mike Dravich knew that he’d been selling pool tickets for Mitch, but then he’d told Ellie that part of it.
Maybe, he thought as he went out, he’d better level with Ellie—a little more than he had, anyway—on their next date. If he was going to keep on seeing her, it would get harder and harder to explain why he wasn’t working at some job or other unless he told her at least part of the truth. And if, after that, she didn’t want to go out with him any more, the hell with her. There were plenty of other girls.
He dropped into the tavern at about the usual time and found out from Krasno that Mitch had gone to Chicago and wouldn’t be back till the next day. And he hadn’t left any word for Joe.
It was too hot to do anything else, so he went down to the beach for a swim. He thought maybe he’d run into someone he knew, but he didn’t. The beach was fairly crowded for a Friday afternoon. Seeing so many girls and women in bathing suits reminded him of Francine, although no one he saw came within forty miles of having as beautiful a body as Francine’s.
After dinner, which he did not eat at the Dinner Gong, he called up Ray Lorgan and got talked into dropping around to Ray’s little two room and kitchenette flat on Cass Street.
It was funny, really, that Joe liked Ray Lorgan and that Ray like Joe. Outside of a liking for science fiction stories they had almost nothing in common. Ray was only two years older than Joe, but he was married and had a year-old kid. He had a job as a timekeeper at A. O. Smith and he was pinko, definitely pinko, although he was not a member of the Communist Party. Joe had met him two years ago when he had attended a meeting or two of a science fiction fan club. Most of the members had turned out to be creeps, in Joe’s opinion, and he hadn’t gone often. By the same criterion he applied to the others, Ray Lorgan was a creep, too. But for some reason he’d never been able to put his finger on, he liked Ray and was liked in return. In fact, if he’d had to pick out any one person as being, currently, his closest friend, it would probably be Ray.
When he got off the Wells Street car at Cass, he stopped in a liquor store and picked up a bottle of wine to take along.
He handed it to Ray as he came in and Ray took it to the kitchenette to open it. Jeannie, Mrs. Lorgan, wasn’t there; she was attending a night class at the University of Wisconsin Extension; the baby, Karl, was asleep in the other room but the door was shut and they wouldn’t have to worry about talking quietly.
Ray peeled the wrapping off the bottle and frowned at it. “A Goddam capitalist,” he said. “You paid a buck and a quarter for this and you could have got just as good for sixty-nine cents. Just as good as far as we’re concerned, anyway; we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
Joe grinned at him. “Maybe I did it just to hear you squawk. Want to put it in the icebox to cool off a while?”
“That proves damn well you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a cheap and an expensive kind. You don’t chill sherry; you drink it room temperature. A man who’d chill sherry would put catchup on apple pie.”
He came out of the kitchenette with two glasses and the opened bottle and sat down at the table before he did the pouring.
“Doing anything yet, Joe?”
“No, but something’s coming up,” Joe said. He wished he could tell Ray about Mitch’s plans, but he’d promised to keep them under his hat. “Meanwhile, I guess I’m just being a Goddam capitalist. Without capital.”
Ray sipped his wine. He said, “In a well organized society, Joe, there wouldn’t be any place for a guy like you. But maybe you’ll get along. This is a hell of a ways from being a well ordered society.”
Joe chuckled a little. “If you don’t like it here—”
“Why don’t I go back where I came from, huh? Here’s a thought for you, Joe, that I’ll bet you never thought of. Where does a man come from? From the body of a woman. And he spends a good share of the rest of his life trying to get back in; but he never succeeds. Not with all of himself, anyway. You know, Joe, I’m not completely kidding; there’s a symbolic significance in that. What’s the moment of greatest ecstasy in a man’s life? The culmination of intercourse, the orgasm. The moment when a part of him is returning to the body of woman. That’s the closest he ever gets to going back where he came from. His one moment of pure ecstasy.”
“And besides, it’s fun,” Joe said. He thought of Francine.
“Don’t you ever take anything seriously, Joe? Except making money, being a big-shot gambler? No, I guess I’m wrong; you do think some, or you wouldn’t read the kind of stuff you read. It takes imagination, abstract imagination, to like science fiction and fantasy. Know what I think, Joe? That you’re afraid to think, afraid to let yourself think.
“Look, I’m no psychiatrist, but I’ve read quite a bit on psychiatry. I can be wrong, but I’d say you’ve got a keener mind than you let show on the surface. But for some reason it’s afraid of itself and keeps itself under wraps. It just could be that something happened to you when you were a kid—all deeply underlying psychoses date back to early childhood—that makes you literally afraid to think for yourself. Ever taken an I. Q. test, Joe?”
Joe shook his head.
“Bet you’d rate a hundred and twenty, at least. And that’s good. Maybe you’d rate more. But I guess that only because a flash of it shows once in a while. Your intelligence is afraid of itself. You act—Look, Joe, we’re pretty good friends. Can you take this?”
Joe wasn’t looking at him. Joe said, “Go ahead,” and realized that his voice had sounded sullen and that he hadn’t meant it to be. “Sure, Ray.”
“Okay. You act like a child afraid of the dark—no, that’s not right. Let’s see, just what do I mean? I mean that because you won’t let yourself think straight, you think like a child. Children pass through a stage of wanting to be gangsters or Billy the Kids; when they play cops and robbers which of the two do they want to be? That’s natural, for kids. But they grow up, most of them, mentally and get over it. Those that don’t, do become criminals—or anyway asocial, people who don’t contribute to society or who make a living pandering to its weaknesses, like selling numbers racket tickets, for instance—
“Hell, Joe, maybe I’m stepping on your toes too hard, but now I’ve got started on this, I’ve got to finish, unless you stop me. Grown-up people who act and think that way do it either because they’re stupid or because they’re warped by something—or a series of some things—that’s happened to them. And you’re not stupid. If you could ever dig out of your mind what happened to you—”
Joe picked up the bottle and poured himself another drink, very carefully and deliberately.
He said, “You’re off the beam, Ray. Am I a psycho to want money without having to work like a dog all my life for it? If you’re smart you can get it—and lots of it. Look at Mitch—you haven’t met him, no, but I’ve talked enough about him—he’s probably worth at least a couple of hundred thousand bucks. More money than you’ll ever have. Everything he wants.”
He thought again of Francine and for the first time he felt more envy of Mitch than admiration for him.
Ray said, “But how did he get it? By taking quarters and dollars away from people who could have used them for something better than gambling.”
“That’s their fault; he never made anyone buy numbers. And maybe it’s illegal, but there’s nothing dishonest about it. He pays off if they hit. And if he didn’t sell tickets, somebody else would.”
Ray grinned. “The sheep are there. Why not fleece them before somebody else does. I guess at that, Joe, your Mitch isn’t much worse than other capitalists.”
“Better than some, I’d say. At least he doesn’t advertise to create an artificial demand—convince people they need something they don’t even want—and then make them pay for the advertising that convinced them. By letting them gamble, he’s just filling a demand that’s already there.”
