Cinderella Sims, page 2
There was a Help Wanted card in a window on Columbus and I took a long look at the place that wanted help. It looked as though they could use it. A big weather-beaten sign said the place was Grace’s Lunch and advised the world to drink Coca-Cola. The window needed a scrubbing and so, by the looks of things, did the people who ate there.
I went inside. There were half a dozen tables with chairs around them and maybe twice as many stools at the counter. A battered dame in her thirties with frizzy black hair was dividing her time between the counter and the cash register. There seemed to be somebody in the back cooking up the slop for her to serve. About eight or ten customers were shoveling it down.
I pulled up a stool and the dame with the hair came over and shoved a menu at me. It was dog-eared around the edges and contained a lot of food. Somebody’s fried eggs were stuck to it in one spot; the rest I couldn’t identify.
I gave the menu back to her. “I ate a little while ago,” I told her. “I’m looking for a job.”
“Ever sling hash before?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“Nothing much to it, actually. No cooking—Carl takes care of that end. Just take the orders, pour the coffee and like that. We don’t get much of a rush here. Just neighborhood people who know the place, regulars that come in all the time. You look at this place from the front and it doesn’t make much of a show. The grub’s good and the regulars know it. They don’t care how fancy it is.”
I filled in with a nod.
“My name’s Grace,” she told me. “I own the place. I need somebody nights from midnight to eight. Horrible hours for most people. It gets tough to keep help those hours. A guy’ll take the job, then quit me cold in a week or two as soon as his belly’s full. If you’re going to pull that bit I don’t need you. If you want to be steady the work’s here for you. The job pays forty a week and meals. You get to stuff yourself as much as you want while you work only don’t eat up all the profits or I’ll fire you. Try to cheat me and I’ll catch you. Sound fair enough to you?”
“Fair enough. I’m just looking for steady work.”
“That’s what it is. You don’t mind the hours?”
I was used to them. I told her I didn’t mind at all. And the job turned out to be simple enough. Grace couldn’t have gotten rich on the midnight-to-eight shift; the bulk of the trade was coffee-an’ with an occasional ham and eggs thrown in. Most of the time the place was half empty; sometimes Carl and I would talk to each other without seeing a single customer for twenty minutes at a clip.
But the food was good and the pay was enough to live on. I spent April and May settling down into a strange sort of routine, the general type of life that Dr. Strom had said would do me the most good. Up at four or five in the afternoon, coffee on a hot plate in my room, a magazine in my room or a movie around the corner on Broadway. A walk, a nap or something until it was time to go to work.
Then eight hours of work, broken up with a meal or two and a few rounds of the harmless and generally useless conversation a counterman has with a customer. I got to know the regulars—a couple of cabbies who made a stop at Grace’s once or twice a night for coffee, a bartender from Maloney’s who’d stop in for a bite as soon as his place was closed for the night, a waitress who ended her shift at four and a batch of guys and dolls whom I knew only by their faces.
It was supposed to be therapy. I was completely alone, as alone as a person could be who still talked to people, still breathed city air and still walked in city streets. No one knew more about me than my name. No one asked where I was from, what I was doing, where I was headed. Come to think of it, Grace was the only person in New York outside of my landlady who knew my last name. To everybody else I was Ted, or Hey, You.
I think I understand what Strom had in mind. Bit by bit every shred of the identity of Ted Lindsay, Reporter, was evaporating. At first I would glance through the New York papers with the eye of a pro, but now all I read were the stories themselves. Fine points flew by me; I was too immersed in other things to bother with them. They didn’t matter at all anymore.
And, as Ted Lindsay disappeared, Mona Lindsay gradually faded into the background. As I lost consciousness of myself the woman who was lost forever gradually ebbed into oblivion, or Limbo, or whatever is the abode of lost and forgotten souls. This isn’t to say that I forgot her, because forgetting Mona would have been like forgetting a white cow. You know the bit? Try not to think of a white cow. See what I mean?
But I would test myself now and then, trying to think of her without caring, trying to remember her without getting a hard painful spot in my chest about where your heart is supposed to be. It got progressively easier. Away from Louisville, away from the Times Building, away from our home and our friends and all the places where we had been together, the memories of her were far less compelling, far less vivid and real.
It should have been ideal. By all rules it should have been ideal, just an inch or two short of Nirvana. It wasn’t, and this was a constant source of irritation to me. It didn’t send me screaming, didn’t drive me to drink in the cool green Irish bars on Columbus Avenue, for the elementary reason that there was nothing to scream about, nothing to drink over.
There was no pain.
But pleasure is more than the absence of pain. And, all in all, the life I was leading was totally devoid of pleasure. One day followed the next with mechanical precision. Eight hours of nothing was followed by eight hours of work which in turn was followed by eight hours of sleep. Life was three shifts of eight hours each, seven of these groups of three making a week. The worst day in each week was Sunday—then I had to find something to do to fill in the eight hours when I would otherwise have been working.
The monotony of it was occasionally overpowering. Little things became very important—taking my shirts to the laundry was a big thing, even if Toy Lee didn’t have much to say to me when I handed him my shirts or picked them up. A haircut was a big deal. I never bought much of anything, but I window-shopped constantly, furnishing an apartment mentally and buying a whole new wardrobe in my mind.
It wasn’t enough.
There were needs, basic and human needs. The need for a woman, of course. I hadn’t had a woman since Mona left. I suppose there were opportunities for that—lonely women nursing cups of lukewarm coffee at the lunch counter, whores walking up and down Broadway, that sort of thing. But I hardly knew where to begin.
I was out of practice. Two years of marriage plus a year of courtship added up to three years without another woman than Mona. The role of wolf was a foreign one; I would have felt ridiculous approaching a girl.
The need for someone to talk to was even more important, actually. Living alone, eating alone, never talking about anything more far-reaching than the weather or the murders in the tabloids—this didn’t make for the world’s most stimulating existence. I didn’t know anybody, didn’t get any letters or write any.
But no single need seemed to be important enough for me to do anything about it. If I had needed a woman badly enough, I suppose I would have found one who would have been obliging. If I had needed a friend badly enough, it’s logical to guess that I would have found one over the counter at Grace’s or over a beer at Green’s. I read somewhere that a man gets anything in the world if he wants it badly enough. But I couldn’t even want anything, not deeply enough for it to matter inside, where it counted.
So it was mid-June, and I dried myself with warm air from the window and boiled water in the teakettle on the hot plate. The water boiled and the kettle whistled. I spooned instant coffee into a white china cup and poured water on it. I stirred it with a spoon, set it on the sill to cool and looked out across the courtyard at somebody’s washing. When the coffee was cool I drank it, then washed out the cup in the bathroom and put it away.
I walked down three flights of stairs as usual, stole a look at the heap of mail as usual—which was silly, since no one on Earth knew my address—and, as usual, walked out of the building and down the steps.
Outside, a damned fine day was finishing up. There’s a line in a song that goes I like New York in June. How about you? and it makes good sense. New York is eminently likable in June with the air warm and the skies generally clear. Later in the summer it gets too hot, far too hot, but in June it’s better than any other time. The sky was clear as good gin and the air even smelled clean. I took deep breaths of it and felt good.
I walked around the corner to the candy store and exchanged a dime for a copy of the Post. Then I wandered over to the park and found an empty bench to sit on while I made my way through the paper to find out what if anything was new in the world. Nothing much was. Some politicians were trying to decide to cut out nuclear tests without managing to accomplish much of anything, some local crime commissions were investigating some local crime, God was in his heaven and all was wrong with the world.
There were only two stories that I read all the way through. One told about a young mother in Queens who had meticulously removed her husband’s genitals with a grapefruit knife; the other reported on a teenager in Flatbush who’d gotten jealous over his girlfriend and then cut off her breasts with a switchblade. I thought that the two of them ought to get together, and then I thought that the New York Post ought to be ashamed of itself; and then I thought that maybe I ought to be ashamed of myself. I threw the paper in a trashcan and left the park before dark. Only mad dogs and Englishmen walk in Central Park after the sun goes down.
I bought a bag of peanuts from a sad-looking peanut vendor at the 72nd Street gate. It was an ordinary day, this time an ordinary day with peanuts. I ate the peanuts and threw the shells in the gutter. I kept walking.
I thought about things. Maybe Dr. Strom had either shot his wad or accomplished his mission in life. Maybe it was due time for me to get the hell out of New York and back to Louisville where I belonged. The Police Beat at the Times was infinitely more exciting than slinging hash at Grace’s Lunch. The house on Crescent Drive was far more livable than the brownstone on 73rd Street. Ted Lindsay, Reporter was a considerably more exciting individual than Ted Lindsay, Nobody.
Perhaps I was cured. Now I could go back to my home and settle down again, take an apartment a few blocks from the Times Building and get my old job back: Hanovan would find work for me, even push some deserving bum out in order to get me back where I belonged. All I had to do was ask him.
I thought about this, and I thought about other things, and I thought about how nice it would be to feel alive again. And then I saw the girl.
2
The impact of the girl defies description. It wasn’t just the femaleness of her—she had the effect that anything impossibly striking and beautiful can have upon a person. I suppose a sailor who hasn’t seen dry land in years might react the way I did when he catches a glimpse of shoreline. She was all the seven wonders of the world rolled into one, a symphony of beauty, and for several eternal seconds I couldn’t breathe or move. I could only look at her and be happy that she was there.
How do you describe something lovely? Summarizing the various components doesn’t do the trick; in this case the whole is a great deal more than the sum of its separate parts. I can tell you that her hair was black as sin, that she wore it short and pixyish. I can tell you that her skin was as white as virginity personified, white and clear and pure. She was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts that showed enough of her legs to assure me that her legs were good from top to bottom. She was wearing a charcoal grey sweater that let me know that legs were not her only strong points.
But that doesn’t do her justice. It shows that she was pretty; that the various parts of her were in good order. It doesn’t show the girl herself, the beauty of her, the radiant quality that reached with both hands across the width of 73rd Street like a human magnet, reached me and grabbed me and would not let go.
You have to get the picture. I was on the downtown side of 73rd Street on my way back from the 72nd Street entrance to the park. She was on the uptown side of the street, walking west the same as I was, going from God-knew-where to God-knew-where. She was walking fairly quickly. I couldn’t walk because I was too busy looking at her.
Then I was able to walk again. I followed her—not consciously, not purposely, but without even being able to think about it. She walked and I walked and my eyes must have burned two small holes in the back of that sweater that so intimately hugged the top half of her body.
She waited for the light at the corner of Columbus. So did I. But I didn’t look at the light. I looked at her, and when she started across the street I crossed in step with her. My eyes stayed with her.
Her walk was poetry, her body music, the toss of her head pure ballet. I found myself hoping she’d go on walking clear over to the Hudson so that I could go on with her. I think if she had walked to the edge of the river and had proceeded to hotfoot it across to Jersey I would have followed until I drowned. For the first time I understood how those rats and mice felt when they followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They simply couldn’t help themselves.
Halfway down the block she stopped, turned and went down a flight of stairs, disappeared. I would have followed her if I could but it was fairly obvious that her apartment was off bounds to me. It didn’t seem fair.
For several minutes I stood on my side of the street watching the building she had entered. Evidently she lived in the basement apartment in that particular brownstone, a building quite indistinguishable from the identical brownstones on either side of it. I stood there, watching, committing the address to careful memory. Then it hit me all at once and I realized where I was.
I was standing right in front of my own building.
I couldn’t believe it at first. I looked around, very cautiously, and sure enough, that was where I was. I was smack dab in front of Mrs. Murdock’s home for wayward newspapermen. The girl of my dreams lived across the street from me, with her bed twenty or forty yards from mine. It seemed impossible.
I told myself that she must have just moved in, that if she had ever been there before I would have known it. Nothing like that could be within a mile of me without my noticing her, sensing her presence.
But who was she? Where had she come from? What was she doing, whoever she was?
I had to know. All the questions—the who what where when why and how that are burned so deeply into a reporter’s brain—they haunted me now. I had to find out about her.
The first step was simple. It required my getting the hell off the streets before the dog catcher saw me standing with my tongue hanging out and carted me off to the pound. It took a little work but I managed it. I dragged myself back to Columbus and aimed myself at Green’s. The notion of a cold glass of beer seemed tremendously appealing all of a sudden. Maybe because I was sweating.
I took a stool and the bartender brought me a glass of beer. He did this without asking. I was a regular at Green’s, although hardly the kind of regular that kept them in meat and potatoes. I was in there once a day, rain or shine, and each and every time I nursed one small glass of draft beer for half an hour or so, paid my fifteen cents and left.
There were plenty of the other sort of regulars. They started early at Green’s and I knew they would be there until the place closed, drinking their lives away slowly, never getting too drunk and never drawing what could be honestly described as a sober breath. Many times I’d thought about them, about the way they spent their lives, and many times I’d figured out that I would have wound up that way if I hadn’t left Louisville.
The bar wouldn’t be Green’s but it would amount to the same thing. One of the rundown joints on East Cedar Street where old reporters go when they don’t get lucky and die of cirrhosis instead.
I sipped my beer. I left the lushes to their alcoholic poison and thought of more intriguing things.
Like the girl.
The hell of it was, she was just what I needed to make my life complete. No sarcasm here—this is the straight dope. Before Little Miss Vision waltzed into my life there was nothing for me—no pleasure, no joy, no imagination, nothing but the monotony of a day-to-day routine that had become increasingly stifling. Now, however, Little Miss Vision had transformed the monotony to fascinating frustration. Now, instead of being bored, I was enhanced, entranced, and ready to be romanced.
Which seemed to be a new version of screwed, glued and tattooed.
Well.
I now had problems—which was, if nothing else, a change from monotony. Problem the first was to find out who in the world the lithe little brunette was. Problem the second was to get to know her. Problem the third, of course, was to get into her pants.
In Louisville the first two problems wouldn’t exist. I would simply say hello to her and she would say hello to me and I would take it from there. But New York was hysterically different. In New York you were considered horrifyingly square if you were on a first-name basis with anyone who lived within a one-mile radius of your residence. In New York you could live across the hall from someone for a lifetime without ever saying hello. And, in New York, if you said hello to a pretty girl on a street you were a masher and subject to arrest, conviction, and permanent residence in the Tombs; an unpleasant prospect at best.
I sipped some more beer and, amazingly, the glass was empty.
This gave me pause. It was a warm day and I had built up a fairly substantial thirst. I certainly could have made good use of a second glass of beer. Hell, I would have loved a second glass of beer. But my life was ordered in such a manner that certain habits had become damnably difficult to break.
I paid fifteen cents for the glass I’d just downed and left Green’s, still thirsty. It was warmer out, which struck me as somewhat silly in view of the fact that it was after six and time for New York to start cooling off for the night. But there was no doubt about it—it was warmer, and the freshness of the day was getting sponged up by a palling mugginess that had sneaked in from Jersey. The breezes had given up for the evening. It was, suddenly and very annoyingly, damned uncomfortable.
