He expanded on his theme as he descended to his non-air-conditioned Inferno. Shirts and socks and ties off bargain counters. Ill-fitting “irregular” underwear torturing his crotch, Reduced for Quick Sale lettuce wilting his salads. Elgar bought these things not because he had to, God knew. Because he was compelled to. Because he had been educated early to deserving nothing but bargains: second-run movies, second-hand cars, retread tires, low-octane gasoline. And low-octane girls with pimples, and sorority pins, and brothers who belonged to the American Legion. —Except Sally, who qualified because she was so U she made him feel the requisite amount of discomfort. And Lanie, a first-rater who was determined to live up, or down, to her second-class birth.
Part of the problem of course was that all of Elgar’s girls had to be the kind who would not be after his money. They had to be too kooky and independent (Lanie) or too scornful of wealth (Rita) or too rich themselves (Sally) or just too damned dumb (the rest) to know or care he had it. Elgar had proposed to nearly all of them, and kept proposing, at regular intervals, to test whether he was loved for himself alone. A girl could prove this to Elgar only by rejecting him. So far, all those put to the test had passed.
Continuing his descent he noted that the depressing plastic treads from one of the Seven Branches were missing from half the stairs. The defunct miniature bulb over his door was still unreplaced after two weeks. Jesus! With only half a chance—with only half a houseful of half-sane tenants—Elgar could easily be a better landlord than the owner of the Trejour Apartments. A treasure, indeed. Fit to be buried. Quickly.
Finally fumbling the key into the slot in the pitch-black door and twisting it successfully, Elgar kicked his way into his torture chamber and was greeted by the reeking bag of garbage he’d meant to take out that morning. Reached for the light switch, missed, plunged his hand into an overflowing ash tray. Swore, finally got a light on, and stood there in the midst of unwashed laundry, unread papers, unwashed beer glasses, unmade sofa-bed. At these rents, maid service not included.
There he stood, a monument to the inevitable human condition: surrounded by his own filth. Elgar Enders, heir of the tasteless ages. Worth, at this very instant, a quarter of a million dollars. Worth, at the unpredictable and joyous instant his old man’s heart stopped beating, a half-dozen millions. Currently the possessor of thirty dirty pairs of thirty-nine-cent F. W. Woolworth socks, and not a single clean pair, and unable to do better by himself. Couldn’t do anything better right now than penance.
But couldn’t stand the place right now, either. Not until he was close enough to unconsciousness to sleep anywhere, in the handiest cozy gutter, even in his own apartment if necessary. Achieving the desired comatosity would require several hours and quite a few drinks.
Might as well be consistent about the pattern, Elgar decided. Go across town, other side of the tracks, and visit his second-class-citizen girl friend.
4
Elgar thanked God, for the hundredth time, that Lanie was always up after midnight. What better time to paint those nightmarish canvases, brown and black limbs and organs writhing in white limbo; and practice modern dancing, tragic shudders and leaps and thuds that reverberated from her high ceilings; and play her records about gin and sin and the man that done me in; and entertain her friends, a motley bunch of nightcrawlers including Elgar; and smoke in great hissing gasps until she reached the marijuana nirvana where, eyes slanting in withdrawal, skin sallowed by candlelight, mouth smiling La Giocondawise, she seemed more than ever a Eurasian monster he’d picked up somewhere on the Ginza.
Way-out by night, she was completely “in” by day, anonymous and all business behind the counter of the D-R Luncheonette, across from the Trejour. Working in tandem with Lucy the short-order cook, she was typically American and terrifyingly efficient: crisp white uniform, severely bunned rusty hair, a quick-frozen smile. Together they were like a pair of connected machines—reaper and thresher, washer and dryer—tall Lanie calling “Order toast!” and Lucy, compact and contained as an ebony statuette, responding instantly with buttered brown slices of joy.
Lanie’s schizzy schedule, he’d learned, was a brisk seven A.M. to three at the D-R; a hearty supper from three till four; a loudly snoring sleep from four till midnight; then up, and up, and up. At sometime between dawn and seven each morning she pulled together her various selves, Vampira and Cho-Cho San and Bessie Smith and the rest, packaged them all in crisp Betty Furness cellophane, and trundled them off to work in an old M.G. that looked and sounded like a shopping cart.
Imagining violent Jekyll-Hyde convulsions—hair disappearing, eyes brightening—Elgar always wanted to stick around to watch the transformation. Werewolf Woman Becomes Doris Day, a thrilling Technicolor feature. But he was never permitted to see it.
“Out, lout,” she’d say, with a firm toe or elbow in his sensitive windpipe or worse. “It is my private hour.”
Nor was he ever allowed in her bedroom. His part-time evening excursions with Lanie never proceeded farther than her living room couch, and once, when he’d taken the wrong turn stumbling toward the john in the dark, she had sharply screamed, “Stop!”
But at least she’d wrung the tensions from him in many memorably athletic pre-dawn hours, and by daybreak Elgar was always reconciled to living through another twenty-four hours anyway. It was nights when he needed Lanie or somebody, and her topsy-turvy schedule had saved his life on several occasions, nights when otherwise he would have carried out his ace in the hole, Plan S. —Though lifesaving was the furthest thing from the laconic intentions of Lanie, who often said she couldn’t care enough to lift a finger to save a kitten drowning in a toilet. A description that aptly fitted Elgar, alone in the depths of certain damp nights in his cell in the Trejour. She didn’t have to lift a finger, though; all that was necessary was that she be there.
And there she was, always. Dependable as the sun overhead each day were the lights burning every night in Lanie’s loft over the laundry. The schedule never varied, though the program changed.
Tonight, he could tell from the street, it was her records, an unearthly musicale of Mississippi Delta howls and laments. Stretched out on the floor, the better to absorb the vibrations of Soul through every pore, Lanie ignored the jeroboam of gin he had brought for them. While one long, red, elevated, Danskinned leg beat time in the air to washboard thumpings and wailings about drinking muddy water, Elgar went to rummage in the kitchen for ice and to retrieve two glasses from the swamp of her sink.
When he returned the machine was clanking a new record into place. Through the soup of scratches on an ancient record came an angelic little voice he had heard somewhere before, probably in a high-church choir. But now it was crooning:
I’m a hard-workin’ woman and you know I don’t mind tryin’.
I’m a hard-workin’ woman and you know I don’t mind tryin’.
But if I catch you wrong, Papa,
I know you don’t mind dyin’. . . .
“Shhhh,” Lanie said, deigning to accept a drink but not to converse during the razzmatazz trumpet bridge between the sacred verses. “It’s a collector’s item.”
Elgar coughed, spluttered, sprayed the air with gin as the voice went on, sweet, girlish and suddenly familiar:
I was out all night, my revolver in my hand.
Out all night, my revolver in my hand,
Lookin’ for that woman who ran off with my man. . . .
“An early Marge Perkins,” Lanie said reverently. “Cost me a month’s tips, and worth it. Nobody has Marge Perkins records any more.”
Belatedly she took note of Elgar’s predicament: choking to death before her eyes.
“What’s