Finally with the heavy notes buttoned into his jacket pocket he came out into the glare again and stopped at the newsstand to buy the English and American papers that had come in on the morning Sud Express. He bought some bullfight weeklies to wrap the English language papers in and then walked down the Carrera San Geronimo to the cool friendly morning gloom of the Buffet Italianos. There was no one in the place yet and he remembered that he had made no rendezvous with Catherine.
“What will you drink?” the waiter asked him.
“Beer,” he said.
“This isn’t a beer place.”
“Don’t you have beer?”
“Yes. But it’s not a beer place.”
“Up yours,” he said and re-rolled the papers and went out and walked across the street and back on the other side to turn to the left into the Calle Vittoria and on to the Cervezeria Alvarez. He sat at a table under the awning in the passageway and drank a big cold glass of the draft beer.
The waiter was probably only making conversation, he thought, and what the man said was quite true. It isn’t a beer place. He was just being literal. He wasn’t being insolent. That was a very bad thing to say and he had no defense against it. It was a shitty thing to do. He drank a second beer and called the waiter to pay.
“Y la Senora?” the waiter said.
“At the Museo del Prado. I’m going to get her.”
“Well, until you get back,” the waiter said.
He walked back to the hotel by a downhill shortcut. The key was at the desk so he rode up to their floor and left the papers and the mail on a table in the room and locked most of the money in his suitcase. The room was made up and the shutters were lowered against the heat so that the room was darkened. He washed and then sorted through his mail and took four letters out and put them in his hip pocket. He took the Paris editions of The New York Herald, the Chicago Tribune and the London Daily Mail down with him to the bar of the hotel stopping at the desk to leave the key and to ask the clerk to tell Madame, when she came in, that he was in the bar.
He sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a marismeiio and opened and read his letters while he ate the garlic-flavored olives from the saucer the bartender had placed before him with his glass. One of the letters had two cuttings of reviews of his novel from monthly magazines and he read them with no feeling that they dealt with him or with anything that he had written.
He put the cuttings back in the envelope. They had been understanding and perceptive reviews but to him they had meant nothing. He read the letter from the publisher with the same detachment. The book had sold well and they thought that it might continue selling on into the fall although nobody could ever tell about such things. Certainly, so far, it had received an extraordinarily fine critical reception and the way would be open for his next book. It was a great advantage that this was his second and not his first novel. It was tragic how often first novels were the only good novels American writers had in them. But this, his publisher went on, his second, validated all the promise his first had shown. It was an unusual summer in New York, cold and wet. Oh Christ, David thought, the hell with how it was in New York and the hell with that thin-lipped bastard Coolidge fishing for trout in a high stiff collar in a fish hatchery in the Black Hills we stole from the Sioux and the Cheyenne and
bathtub-ginned-up writers wondering if their baby does the Charleston. And the hell with the promise he had validated. What promise to whom? To The Dial, to The Bookman, to The New Republic? No, he had shown it. Let me show you my promise that I’m going to validate it. What shit.