Where is Selina Street? Where is she? She knows where I am. My number is up there on the kitchen wall. What is she doing? What is she doing for money? Punishment, that’s what this is. Punishment is what I’m taking here.
I ask only one thing. I’m understanding. I’m mature. And it isn’t much to ask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my Selina—or not even alone, damn it, merely close to her, close enough to smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding of her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough to put in one good, clean punch. That’s all I ask.
——————
So now I must go uptown to meet with Fielding Goodney at the . Carraway Hotel — Fielding, my moneyman, my contact and my pal. He’s the reason I’m here, I’m the reason he’s here too. We’re going to make lots of money together. Making lots of money — it’s not that hard, you know. It’s overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch.
I came down the steps and into the street. Above, all was ocean brightness: against the flat blue sky the clouds had been sketched by an impressively swift and confident hand. What talent. I like the sky and often wonder where I’d be without it. I know: I’d be in England, where we don’t have one. Through some physiological fluke — poison and body-chemistry doing a deal in their smoke-filled room — I felt fine, I felt good. Manhattan twanged in its spring ozone, girding itself for the fires of July and the riot heat of August. Let’s walk it, I thought, and started off across town.
On masculine Madison (tightly buttoned, like a snooker waistcoat) I took my left and headed north into the infinite trap of air. Cars and cabs swore loudly at each other, looking for trouble, ready to fight, to confront. And here are the streets and their outlandish personnel. Here are the street artists. At the corner of Fifty-Fourth, a big black guy writhed within the glass and steel of a telephone kiosk. He was having a terrible time in there, that much was clear. Often as I approached he slapped the hot outer metal of the booth with his meaty pale palm. He was shouting — what, I didn’t know. I bet money was involved. Money is always involved. Maybe drugs or women too. In the cabled tunnels beneath the street and in the abstract airpaths of the sky, how much violence was crackling through New York? How would it level out? Poorly, probably. Every line that linked two lovers would be flexed and snarled between a hundred more whose only terms were obscenity and threat… I’ve hit women. Yes, I know, 1 know: it isn’t cool. Funnily enough, it’s hard to do, in a sense. Have you ever done it? Girls, ladies, have you ever copped one? It’s hard. It’s quite a step, particularly the first time. After that, though, it just gets easier and easier. After a while, hitting women is like rolling off a log. But I suppose I’d better stop. 1 suppose I’d better kick it, one of these days … As I passed by, the negro cracked the phone back into its frame and lurched out towards me. Then his head dropped and he slapped the metal once more, but feebly now. Time and temperature flashed above.
Fielding Goodney was already in attendance at the Dimmesdale Room when I strolled into the Carraway a little after six. Erect among the misangled high chairs, he stood with his back to me in the depths of this grotto of glass, two limp fingers raised in a gesture of warning or stipulation. I saw his talking face, bleached to steel by the frosted mirror. A low-browed barman listened responsibly to his orders.
‘Just wash the ice with it,’ I heard him say. ‘None in the glass, all right? Just wash it.’
He turned, and I felt the rush of his health and colour — his Californian, peanut-butter body-tone.
‘Hey there, Slick,’ he said, and gave me his hand. ‘When did you get in?’