Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  Gradually, as he began to feel the effects of the champagne, it occurred to Hunter that Damian was monopolizing the conversation. Or worse: that Damian had got so carried away he seemed to have forgotten the purpose of this little outing. He kept jumping from one subject to another and when he did try to draw Julie out he was so wound up he couldn’t help talking right through her. “So what’s it like to be a deckhand?” he asked at one point. “Pretty cool job, no? Out on the water all day, fresh air, all that? It’s like a dream job, am I right?” Before she could say ten words he’d already cut her off—he loved the outdoors too, couldn’t she tell? He was the one who’d wanted to come out on the boat—“I practically had to drag Hunt, here”—and it wasn’t just luck that had hooked him up with that lingcod, but experience and desire and a kind of worship of nature too deep to put into words.

  Hunter tried to keep up his end of the conversation, injecting sardonic asides, mimicking the tourists at the bar, even singing the first verse of a sea chantey he made up on the spot, but Julie didn’t seem especially receptive. Two guys, one girl. What kind of odds were those?

  Damian had shifted closer to her. The second bottle of champagne went down like soda water. Hunter nudged Damian under the table with the toe of his shoe—twice, hard—but Damian was too far gone to notice. Halfway through the main course—was he really feeding her shrimp off the tines of his fork?—Hunter pushed back his chair. “Men’s room,” he muttered. “I’ll be right back.” Julie gave him a vague smile.

  To get to the men’s, he had to go out on the deck and down a flight of stairs. All the tables on the deck were occupied, though the fog was rolling in and there was a chill on the air. People were leaning over their elbows, talking too loud, laughing, lifting drinks to their lips. Jewelry glinted at women’s throats, fingers, ears. A girl in her teens sat at the far table, the one that gave onto the stairs, looking into the face of the boy she was with, oblivious to the fact that she was sitting at the worst table in the house. Hunter thumped down the stairs and felt a sudden flare of anger. Son of a bitch, he was thinking. He wasn’t going to sleep on the couch. No way. Not tonight. Not ever.

  He slammed into the men’s room and locked the door behind him. The stalls were empty, the sinks dirty, the overhead light dim in its cage. He smelled bleach and air freshener and the inescapable odor they were meant to mask. It had come in on the soles of deck shoes, sandals and boots, ammoniac and potent, the lingering reek of all those failing bits of protoplasm flung up out of the waves to be beached here, on the smudged ceramic tile of the men’s room beneath Spinnakers. The smell caught him unawares and he felt unsteady suddenly, the floor beneath him beginning to rise and recede. But that wasn’t all—the room seemed to be fogging up all of a sudden, a seep of mist coming in under the door and tumbling through the vent as if a cloud had touched down just outside. The far wall faded. The mirror clouded over. He rubbed a palm across the smeared glass, then a paper towel, until finally he put both hands firmly down on the edge of the sink and stared into the mirror, hoping to find something solid there.

  THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY TO HELL

  Snow he could take, but this wasn’t snow, it was sleet. There was an inch of it at least in the gutters and clamped atop the cars, and the sidewalks had been worked into a kind of pocked gray paste that was hell on his shoes—and not just the shine, but the leather itself. He was thinking of last winter—or was it the winter before that?—and a pair of black-and-whites he’d worn onstage, really sharp, and how they’d got ruined in slop just like this. He’d been with a girl who’d waited through three sets for him that night, and her face was lost to him, and her name too, but she had a contour on her—that much he remembered—and by the time they left she was pretty well lit and she pranced into the street outside the club and lifted her face to the sky. Why don’t we walk? she sang out in a pure high voice as if she wanted everybody in New York to hear her. It’s so glorious, isn’t it? Can’t you feel it?And he was lit himself and instead of taking her by the wrist and flagging down a cab he found himself lurching up the street with her, one arm thrown over her shoulder to pull her to him and feel the delicious discontinuous bump of her hip against his. Within half a block his cigarette had gone out and his face was as wet as if he’d been sprayed with a squirt gun; by the time they turned the corner his shoes were gone, and there was nothing either he or the solemn paisano at the shoe repair could do to work the white semicircular scars out of the uppers.

  He dodged a puddle, sidestepped two big-armed old ladies staring at a Christmas display as if they’d just got off the bus from Oshkosh, and pinched the last drag out of the butt of his cigarette, which hissed as he flicked it into the gutter. For a minute, staring down the length of Fifth Avenue as it faded into the beating gloom like something out of an Eskimo’s nightmare, he thought of hailing a cab. But there were no cabs, not in weather like this, and the reason he was walking the thirty-odd blocks to the studio in the first place, he reminded himself bitterly, was because he didn’t have money to waste on anything so frivolous as carfare. He lifted his feet gingerly and turned into the blow, cursing.

  It was cold in the apartment—the landlady was a miser and a witch and she wouldn’t have turned on the heat for two free tickets to Florida—and Darlene felt her body quake and revolt against the chill as she stood before the mirror plucking her eyebrows after a lukewarm shower. She couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the session. It was grim outside, the windows like old gray sheets tacked to the walls, and she just couldn’t feature bundling up and going out into the storm. But then it was grimmer inside—peeling wallpaper, two bulbs out in the vanity, a lingering sweetish odor of that stuff the landlady used on the roaches—and she never missed a date, not to mention the fact that she needed the money. She was in her slip—she couldn’t find her robe, though she suspected it was balled up somewhere in the depths of the laundry basket, and there was another trial she had to get through, the machine in the laundry room inoperative for two weeks now. Her upper arms were prickled with gooseflesh. There was a red blotch just to the left of her nose, tracing the indentation of the bone there. The eye above it, staring back at her like the swollen blown-up eye of a goldfish at the pet store, was bloodshot. Bloodshot. And what was she going to do about that?

  On top of it all, she still wasn’t feeling right. The guy she’d been seeing, the guy she’d been saving up to go to Florida with for a week at Christmas—Eddie, second trumpet with Mitch Miller—had given her a dose and her backside was still sore from where the doctor had put the needle in. The way her head ached—and her joints, her right shoulder especially, which burned now as she positioned the tweezers above the arch of her eyebrow—she began to wonder if there’d actually been penicillin in that needle. Maybe it was just water. Maybe the doctor was pinching on his overhead. Or maybe the strain of gonorrhea she’d picked up—that Eddie had picked up in Detroit or Cleveland or Buffalo—wouldn’t respond to it. That’s what the doctor had told her, anyway—there was a new strain going around. His hands were warm, the dab of alcohol catching her like a quick cool breeze. Just a little sting, he said, as if she were nine years old. There. Now that’s better, isn’t it?

  No, she’d wanted to say, it’s not better, it’s never better and never will be because the world stinks and the clap stinks and so do needles and prissy nurses and sour-faced condescending M.D.s and all the rest of it too, but she just opened up her smile and said Yeah.

  She was tired of every dress in the closet. Or no, not just tired—sick to death of them. All of them. The hangers clacked like miniature freight cars as she rattled through them twice, shivering in her slip and nylons, her feet all but frozen to the linoleum. Christ,she said to herself, Jesus Christ, what the hell difference does it make?and she reached angrily for a red crepe de chine with a plunging neckline she hadn’t worn in a year and pulled it over her head and smoothed it across her hips, figuring it would provide about as much protection from the cold as a swimsuit
. She’d just have to keep the cloth coat buttoned up to her throat, and though it was ugly as sin, she’d wear the red-and-green checked scarf her mother had knitted her . . . what she really needed—what she deserved, and what Eddie, or somebody, should give her and give her soon—was a fur.

  A gust threw pellets of ice against the windowpane. For a moment she held the picture of herself in a fur—and not some chintzy mink stole, but a full-length silver fox—and then it dissolved. A fur. Yeah, sure. She wasn’t exactly holding her breath.

  The hallway smelled like shit—literally—and as he stomped the slush off his shoes and bent to wipe the uppers with the paper towels he’d nicked from the men’s room at Benjie’s, where he’d stopped to fortify himself with two rye whiskeys and a short beer, he wondered what exactly went on on the ground floor when they weren’t recording. Or maybe when they were. Neff would press just about anything anybody wanted to put out, whether it was boogie-woogie, race records or that rock and roll crap, and who knew how many junkies and pill heads came in and out of the place so stewed they couldn’t bother to find the bathroom? He took off his hat, set it on the extinct radiator and ran both hands through his hair. There was a slice of broken glass in a picture frame on the wall and that at least gave him back his reflection, though it was shadowy and indistinct, as if he’d already given up the ghost. For a moment there, patting his hair back into place while he stared down the dim tunnels of his eyes, he had a fleeting intimation of his own mortality—he was thirty-eight and not getting any younger, his father ten years’ dead and his mother fading fast; before long it would be just him and his sister and one old wraith-like spinster aunt, Aunt Marta, left on this earth, and then he’d be an old man in baggy pants staring at the gum spots on the sidewalk—but suddenly the door opened behind him and he turned round on a girl in a cloth coat and he was immortal all over again.

  “Oh, hi, Johnny,” she said, and then she gave the door a look and leaned back into it to slam it shut. “God, it’s brutal out there.”

  At first he didn’t recognize her. That sort of thing happened to him more and more lately, it seemed, and he told himself he had to cut back on the booze—and reefer, reefer was the worst, sponging your brain clean so you couldn’t recognize your own face in the mirror. He’d come into some joint—a bar, a club, his manager’s office—and there’d be somebody there he hadn’t expected, somebody transposed from some other scene altogether, and he’d have to fumble around the greeting and give himself a minute or two to reel his brain back in. “Darlene,” he said now, “Darlene Delmar. Wow. I haven’t seen you in what, years? Or months, anyway, right?”

  She was wearing sunglasses though it was as dark as night outside and there was some sort of welt or blemish under the left lens, right at the cheekbone. She gave him a thin smile. “Six months ago, Cincinnati. On what was that station? W-something.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, faking it, “yeah. Good times, huh? But how you been keeping?”

  A rueful smile. A shrug. He could smell her perfume, a faint fleeting whiff of flowers blooming in a green field under a sun that brought the sweat out on the back of your neck, spring, summer, Florida, but the odor of the streets drove it down. “As well as can be expected, I guess. If I could get more work—like in a warmer climate, you know what I mean?” She shook out her hair, stamped her feet to knock the slush off her heels, and he couldn’t help looking at her ankles, her legs, the way the coat parted to reveal the flesh there.

  “It’s been tough all over,” he said, just to say something.

  “My manager—I’ve got a new manager, did I tell you that? Or how could I, since I haven’t seen you in six months . . . ?” She trailed off, gave a little laugh, then dug into her purse for her cigarettes. “Anyway, he says things’ll look up after the New Year, definitely. He was talking about maybe sending me out to L.A. Or Vegas maybe.”

  He was trying to remember what he’d heard about her—somebody had knocked her up and she’d had a back-room abortion and there’d been complications. Or no, that wasn’t her, that was the girl who’d made a big splash two years back with that novelty record, the blonde, what was her name? Then it came to him, a picture he’d been holding a while, a night at a party somewhere and him walking in to get his coat and she was doing two guys at once, Darlene, Darlene Delmar. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, that’d be swell, L.A.’s the place, I mean palm trees, the ocean . . .”

  She didn’t answer. She’d cupped her hands to light the cigarette—which he should have lit for her, but it was nothing to him. He stood rooted to the spot, his overcoat dripping, and his eyes drifted to the murky window set in the door—there was movement there, out on the street, a tube of yellow extending suddenly to the curb. Two guys with violin cases were sliding out of a cab, sleet fastening on their shoulders and hats like confetti. He looked back to her and saw that she was staring at him over the cigarette. “Well, here come the strings,” he said, unfolding an arm to usher her up the hall. “I guess we may as well get to it.”

  He hadn’t bothered to light her cigarette for her—hadn’t even moved a muscle for that matter, as if he were from someplace like Outer Mongolia where they’d never heard of women or cigarettes or just plain common courtesy. Or manners either. His mother must have been something, a fat fishwife with a mustache, and probably shoeless and illiterate on top of it. Johnny Bandon, born in Flatbush as Giancarlo Abandonado. One more wop singer: Sinatra, Como, Bennett, Bandon. She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought he had talent when she was growing up, all those hours listening alone to the sweet tenor corroboration of his voice and studying his picture in the magazines until her mother came home from the diner and told her to go practice her scales. She’d known she was working with him today, that much her manager had told her, but when she’d come through the door, chilled right to the marrow, she’d barely recognized him. Rumor had it he’d been popping pills, and she knew the kind of toll that took on you—knew firsthand—but she hadn’t been prepared for the way the flesh had fallen away from his face or the faraway glare of his eyes. She’d always remembered him as handsome—in a greasy sort of way—but now here he was with his cueball eyes and the hair ruffled like a duck’s tail feathers on the back of his head, gesturing at her as if he thought he was the A&R man or something. Or some potentate, some potentate from Siam.

  Up the hall and into the studio, a pile of coats, hats and scarves in the secretary’s office, no place to sit or even turn around and the two fiddle players right on their heels, and she was thinking one more job and let’s get it over with. She’d wanted to be pleasant, wanted to make the most of the opportunity—enjoy herself, and what was wrong with that?—but the little encounter in the hallway had soured her instantly, as if the pain in her backside and the weather and her bloodshot eye wasn’t enough. She unwound the scarf and shrugged out of her coat, looking for a place to lay it where it wouldn’t get sat on.

  Harvey Neff—this was his studio and he was producing—emerged from the control booth to greet them. He was a gentleman, a real gentleman, because he came up to her first and took her hand and kissed her cheek and told her how terrific it was to be working with her again before he even looked at Johnny. Then he and Johnny embraced and exchanged a few backslaps and the usual words of greeting—Hey, man, long time no see and How’s it been keeping? and Cool, man, cool—while she patted down her hair and smoothed her skirt and debated removing the dark glasses.

  “Listen, kids,” Harvey was saying, turning to her now, “I hope you’re up for this, because as I say we are going to do this and do it right, one session, and I don’t care how long it takes, nobody leaves till we’re all satisfied, right? Because this is a Christmas record and we’ve got to get it out there, I mean, immediately or there’s no sense in making it at all, you know what I mean?”

  She said she did, but Johnny just stared—was he going to be all right for this?—until Fred Silver, the A&R man for Bluebird, came hurtling into the room with his hands
held out before him in greeting and seconded everything Harvey had said, though he hadn’t heard a word of it. “Johnny,” he said, ignoring her, “just think if we can get this thing out there and get some airplay, because then it slips into the repertoire and from Thanksgiving to New Year’s every year down the road it’s there making gravy for everybody, right? I mean look at ‘White Christmas.’ ‘Santa, Baby.’ Or what was that other thing, that Burl Ives thing?”

  The room was stifling. She studied the side of Fred Silver’s head—bald to the ears, the skin splotched and sweating—and was glad for the dress she was wearing. But Johnny—maybe he was just a little lit, maybe that was it—came to life then, at least long enough to shrug his shoulders and give them all a deadpan look, as if to say I’m so far above this you’d better get down on your knees right now and start chanting hosannas. What he did say, after a beat, was: “Yeah, that I can dig, but really, Fred, I mean really—‘Little Suzy Snowflake’?”

  They walked through it twice and he thought he was going to die from boredom, the session men capable enough—he knew most of them—and the girl singer hitting the notes in a sweet, commodious way, but he was for a single take and then out for a couple drinks and a steak and some life, for christ’s sake. He tried to remind himself that everybody did novelty records, Christmas stuff especially, and that he should be happy for the work—hell, Nat King Cole did it, Sinatra, Martin, all of them—but about midway through the arrangement he had to set down the sheet music and go find the can just to keep from exploding. Little Suzy Snowflake. It was stupid. Idiotic. Demeaning. And if he’d ever had a reputation as a singer—and he had, he did—then this was the kiss of death.