“Was he colored?”
“God, no!” Martha laughed. “Wasn’t no black doormen at Le Palais until 1965. Black porters and bellboys
and car-park valets, but no black doormen. Wasn’t considered right. Quality people like Mr Jefferies wouldn’t
have liked it.
“Anyway, I asked Billy how the man’s books could be so wonderful when he was such a booger in person.
Billy asked me if I knew the one about the fat disc jockey with the thin voice, and I said I didn’t know what he
was talking about. Then he said he didn’t know the answer to my question, but he told me something a prof of
his had said about Thomas Wolfe. This prof said that some writers – and Wolfe was one of them – were no
shakes at all until they sat down to a desk and took up pens in their hands. He said that a pen to fellows like
that was like a telephone booth is to Clark Kent. He said that Thomas Wolfe was like a . . .” She hesitated,
then smiled. “That he was like a divine wind-chime. He said a wind-chime isn’t nothing on its own, but when
the wind blows through it, it makes a lovely noise.
“I think Peter Jefferies was a wind chime like that. He was quality, he had been raised quality and he was, but
the quality in him wasn’t nothing he could take credit for. It was like God banked it for him and he just spent
it.”
Martha smiled again.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “After I’d read a couple of his books, I started to feel sorry for him.”
“Sorry?”
“Because his books were pretty and he was ugly. The way he was and the way my Johnny was, they weren’t
so much different. But Johnny was luckier, in a way, because he couldn’t ever have been any more than what
he was. Mr Jefferies – his books were like dreams he had. Like he picked up his pen and dreamed of all the
parts of the world he didn’t, or couldn’t let himself, believe in.”
She got up, went to the fridge, and came back to the table with two more beers.
Delores laughed and said she’d pass. “Harvey will smell it on my breath,” she said. “He doesn’t say anything right out, but he gets uneasy.”
“You better take it,” Martha said, “this is where the water gets murky.” And after looking carefully in her friend’s eyes, Delores took it.
13
“One other thing about the man,” Martha said. “He wasn’t a sexy man. At least not the way you usually think about a man being sexy.”
“You mean he was a-”
“No, he wasn’t a fag, or a homo, or a gay, or whatever it is right to call them these days. He wasn’t sexy for
men, but he wasn’t much sexy for women, either. There were two, maybe three times in all the years I did for
him when I seen cigarette butts with lipstick on them in the bedroom ashtrays when I cleaned up. Those times
there was the smell of perfume in the suite, and on one of them I found a Coty eyeliner pencil in the
bathroomit had rolled up under the mirror where you could hardly see it.
“I reckon he’d had call-girls come in and do him, but two or three times in all those years isn’t much, is it?”
“It sure isn’t,” Delores said, thinking of all the panties she had pulled out from under beds, all the condoms she had seen floating in unflushed toilets, all the false eyelashes she had found on and under pillows.
“I think he was sexy for himself,” Martha said. “That’s what I think. Just for himself. I changed a lot of sheets with stiff patches on them, if you know what I mean.”
Delores nodded.
“And there’d always be a little jar of cold cream in the bathroom, or sometimes on the table by his bed. I think
he used it when he pulled off. To keep from getting chapped skin.”
The two women looked at each other and suddenly began giggling hysterically.
“You sure he wasn’t no ass-bandit, honey?” Delores asked finally.