‘Slick,’ said Fielding.
——————
Now a paved park in midtown, with dampness and seepage showing between the flags, despite all the heat could do. The heat had done all it could, and failed. The building at the far end of this block-long concrete bower had a look of some austerity to it, with its strictly channelled cornerstones, but the square was anybody’s, street-cultured, with blacks and buskers and birdshit, sax-players, pushers, jungle artists. By my side on the wooden bench, Martina Twain.
She had just been to some museum. Her skin shone with a museum pallor. For all the fruit and nut of her colouring, she has her moments of bloodlessness. Normally, of course, I would attribute this to the fact of my presence and proximity. But there was something else. Consulting my butch radar, I detected Ossie trouble. And I too was thinking of Selina. I had just called London, and the little bag-bantam was home for once. ‘Yes,’ she even said, ‘no, that’s good. Come back quickly’… This meeting with Martina — I had called her in full travel flurry, in full escape posture, to say goodbye, and then I thought: wait, slow down. She sounded poorly, more poorly still when I said goodbye. So this silent meeting, with no progress, only presence, and maybe some comfort too. What are friends for, after all? What are they for? I’ve often wondered.
And I had other spurs to silence. Moviestars, they’re evidently speedy readers. When I loped into the Ashbery after lunch, a tribe of adults converged on me and about a dozen things at once seemed to happen to my face. Someone spat in it, someone slapped it, someone swore at it, someone bunched a fist at it, someone waved a writ at it. There was the tearful Thursday, escorted by a Nub-sized black man in minder livery, who introduced himself as Bruno Biggins, Lorne’s bodyguard. There was old Prince Kasimir, all set to fix a dawn meeting in Central Park. There was Herrick Shnexnayder, wearing his rug sundae, representing Spunk’s interests. There was a hollering ghoul of a human being called Horris Tolchok — Butch Beausoleil’s attorney… In the end I just made a run for it and holed up in a bar with a telephone on my lap. But it was close to dusk now: Fielding had made the rounds of reassurance all afternoon, and things were slowly calming.
Myself, though, I wasn’t calm. Early for my date with Martina, I strolled the bowels of Times Square, the low Forties, the high Thirties. In a murky cross-street I saw a black awning that my legs remembered before I did, because I gave a stagger, and limped forward with my shoulders bent, like a damaged soldier under fire. Zelda’s. I came nearer. Dinner and Hostess Dancing. I peered in through the limousine glass. Tables, a hooded piano. It looked dead in there, it looked extinct, with the grey, dry light imparted by dust and full ashtrays. All the staff and clientele were in their mummies’ tombs and vampire coffins, waiting on the night… I slipped into a bar across the way and turned my stool to face the forgotten awning.
‘Give me a — what are they called?’ I said. ‘White wine and soda.’
‘You sure?’ said the barman. He was big, slabby, Irish, in a clean white apron, like a butcher at the start of the week, yet to begin his week of blood. In his arms, in his butcher’s arms he cradled a beaked pint of scotch.
‘Sure I’m sure.’
Doubtfully he put the B&F aside. ‘Where’s your ladyfriend?’ he asked me, not amiably either — no, far from it. He’s going to chuck me out, I thought, and I only just got here.
‘What lady?’
‘Big gingerhead. The one who had her tongue in your ear.’
‘When?’
‘How the fuck do I know? I don’t know. Saturday night.’
‘That wasn’t me,’ I said, having had cause to use this line before: ‘that was my twin brother. Tell me all about it.’
Bleakly he shook his head. I offered him a twenty but he wouldn’t tell me more.
‘I’m John — he’s Eric,’ I explained.
‘You? A twin brother?’ he said, and moved away from me down the bar. ‘There’s only one of you, pal. One of you will about do it.’