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“Sorry, Mr. Umney. But I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee. What can I do for you, sir?”
“I don’t greatly care for passes this early in the morning.” “What time would suit you, Miss Vermilyea?”
“You will account for the expenses to me, in exact detail,” Miss Vermilyea said. “And buy your own drinks.”
“There’s one thing I like about you. You don’t paw. And you have nice manners—in a way.” “It’s a rotten technique—to paw.” “And there’s one thing I don’t like about you. Guess what it is.” “Sorry. No idea—except that some people hate me for being alive.” “I didn’t mean that.”
He was California from the tips of his port wine loafers to the buttoned and tieless brown and yellow checked shirt inside his rough cream sports jacket.
He poked at me with a straight right, very fast and well sprung. I stepped inside it, fast, cool and clever. But the right wasn’t his meal ticket. He was a lefty too. I ought to have noticed that at the Union Station in L.A. Trained observer, never miss a detail. I missed him with a right hook and he didn’t miss with his left.
What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “You work twenty hours a day trying to put enough together to buy a home. And by the time you have, fifteen other guys have been smooching your girl.” “Not this one,” I said. “She’s just teasing you. She glows every time she looks at you.” I went out and left them smiling at each other.
“I’m just kind of wandering around. I got hit on the head with a whiskey bottle.”
Common sense says go home and forget it, no money coming in. Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He’s high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always somebody else’s money he’s adding up.
There were people in it just sitting, the dedicated hotel lounge sitters, usually elderly, usually rich, usually doing nothing but watching with hungry eyes. They spend their lives that way.
Farther along there was a canasta game going—two women, two men. One of the women had enough ice on her to cool the Mojave Desert and enough make-up to paint a steam yacht. Both women had cigarettes in long holders. The men with them looked gray and tired, probably from signing checks.
Very small things amuse a man of my age. A hummingbird, the extraordinary way a strellitzia bloom opens. Why at a certain point in its growth does the bud turn at right angles? Why does the bud split so gradually and why do the flowers emerge always in a certain exact order, so that the sharp unopened end of the bud looks like a bird’s beak and the blue and orange petals make a bird of paradise? What strange deity made such a complicated world when presumably he could have made a simple one? Is he omnipotent? How could he be? There’s so much suffering and almost always by the innocent. Why
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“But you should, Mr. Marlowe. It is a great comfort. We all come to it in the end because we have to die and become dust. Perhaps for the individual that is all, perhaps not.
Don’t tell me that honor is merely a chemical reaction or that a man who deliberately gives his life for another is merely following a behavior pattern. Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what?
There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium.
On the corner was a dress shop with mannequins in the windows, scarves and gloves and costume jewelry laid out under the lights. No prices showing.
The cottage had a wooden porch with a broken railing. It had been painted once, but that was in the remote past before the shops swallowed it up. Once it may even have had a garden. The shingles of the roof were warped. The front door was a dirty mustard yellow. The window was shut tight and needed hosing off. Behind part of it hung what remained of an old roller blind. There were two steps up to the porch, but only one had a tread. Behind the cottage and halfway to the loading platform of the hardware store there was what had presumably been a privy. But I could see where a water pipe cut
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A bulb burned in a frayed lamp crooked on its base, the paper shade split. There was a couch with a dirty blanket on it. There was an old cane chair, a Boston rocker, a table covered with a smeared oilcloth. On the table spread out beside a coffee cup was a copy of El Diario, a Spanish language newspaper, also a saucer with cigarette stubs, a dirty plate, a tiny radio which emitted music. The music stopped and a man began to rattle off a commercial in Spanish. I turned it off. The silence fell like a bag of feathers. Then the clicking of an alarm clock from beyond a half open door.
“Amigo,” I said. The parrot let out a screech of insane laughter. “Watch your language, brother,” I said.
Somewhere water dripped from a leaky faucet. The clock ticked. The parrot imitated the ticking amplified.
I waited for her to move. When she moved I would know whether I knew her. No two people move in just the same way,
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m a little tired. Once in every two or three days I have to sit down. It’s a weakness I’ve tried to get over, but I’m not as young as I was.
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing for me to say. I sipped the coffee which was too hot, but good otherwise.
