On Green Dolphin Street (31 page)

“What are you doing?” he said. “With your fingers?”

“I was writing my name on your skin. Like this. My full name.” She traced out the letters, Mary Elizabeth Kirwan, over his shoulder.

“Egoist,” he said.

“Write something on me,” she said.

He rolled her onto her front, and traced something with his finger down her spine.

“What’s that?”

“My army number. I think. Good God, you know, I think I may have forgotten it.”

“Good.” She kissed him.

At first when they had made love, Mary was surprised that a woman of her age should still have a hunger for these actions, ungainly, coarse—and
pointless, too, because she took every precaution that they should not end in pregnancy; she would not have thought that she could still feel so desperate to perform an act which she had mentally relegated to her past.

But when Frank touched her, with the music still drifting through the door, she pictured for a moment the drummer’s circular caress of the skin. As her thoughts became less coherent, she closed her eyes. She did not think she was “good” at this, if there were standards or comparisons; and it was odd that the feelings she had were so little like love as she understood it—what she had felt for Charlie, or her mother or her children. The deeper into sensation she went, beneath his weight and his urging, the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other, or beyond; it was like death, or very near it.

When she returned and found herself still lying there, with his adored face close to hers on the pillow, there was nothing for her to say.

In the morning she awoke to the high metal screech of the garbage trucks collecting on Grove Street. She was alone in bed.

Frank came back with bagels and muffins and a selection of newspapers, which he let fall on the table before he set about making breakfast. When she had returned from the bathroom, Mary sat on the couch and leafed through the papers while she waited for the coffee to be ready.

“Sorry I was out for so long,” said Frank, from the kitchen. “I got talking to the super. Giovanni. He always wants to talk about DiMaggio and Crosetti and when the Yankees won the pennant in ’41. You like your bagel with sesame seeds or plain? He thinks I’m Italian. He can’t believe I don’t speak a word of the language. Then it’s how Rizzuto replaced Crosetti because shortstop was an honorary Italian position. And I made the mistake of mentioning a couple of guys who’d played for the Cubs, Cavarretta and Dallesandro, but Chicago doesn’t count for Giovanni, it’s only the Yankees.”

“Is this American football?” said Mary. “Or basketball?”

Frank put a tray on the coffee table and sat down next to her. “Best not to ask,” he said. “What would you like to do today?”

“I have to go back and change,” said Mary. “That’s the first thing I have
to do. Then, I don’t know. Maybe I could come back, wander round the Village a little. Have lunch.”

“Or I could come up to join you. We could—”

“But, Frank, I like it down here.”

“Okay. I tell you what. If you really like it, there’s a guy I met in San Remo’s the other day who asked me to some party tonight. Poetry, mime, that kind of thing.”

She saw his suppressed grimace. “You sure?”

So they did what Mary had always wanted to do, wander from shop to shop, from Pierre Deux antiques on Abingdon Square, via Li-Lac Chocolates to Zito’s bakery and Chumley’s defunct speakeasy. Frank, initially reluctant, told her that Minetta Street was on top of an old trout stream called manetta, the Canarsee Indian for “devil water.” Mary did not know if he was serious, but she liked his commentary as they walked down streets which to her looked fashionable in a bohemian way, with goods displayed across the sidewalk, as in Europe. They had coffee in a pavement café near the Sullivan Street Playhouse, and Mary felt hungry from the morning’s walk. She scraped the grains of brown sugar from the bottom of her cup.

“And what would you like to do now?” she said.

Frank looked at his watch. “It’s getting close to lunch. Me, I guess I’d like a dry martini and a steak as big as a blacksmith’s apron, then maybe go back to the apartment and …” He spread his hands delicately.

“I recognize that phrase,” she said. “ ‘As big as a blacksmith’s apron.’ ”

“It’s famous. It’s from that story by Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ ”

“Yes, that’s right.” Mary nodded. Something made her feel uneasy. “You read that, did you?”

“Sure. Not quite your American primitive.”

“Of course.” Mary frowned, then gathered herself. “Well I’m hungry too. Let’s go down there, shall we?”

“You don’t want to go there. Below Houston Street it’s kind of a slum. Hell’s Hundred Acres. I only go there to report industrial accidents.”

“I’m sure I went there once when you were away. A lovely bar.”

“Well, maybe there’s some places. Perhaps the beatniks are moving in. After all, when a slum’s hit the bottom there’s only one way it can go.”

“Up?”

“No. An artists’ colony.”

Mary hung on to Frank’s arm as they forded the torrential traffic of Houston. Eventually, they came to an averagely blackened industrial building that stood out from the others by virtue of a primitive awning and a string of white fairy lights. They went inside and found waiters fluttering laundered cloths over scrubbed wooden tables, welcoming them with even-teethed smiles as they set down the glasses.

Frank muttered, “Give it a try?”

The food that came was Italian, but seemed to Mary better than the usual scaloppini at Monte’s or the Grand Ticino with their headachey Chianti in straw-covered bottles.

She felt troubled as they ate. “That story by Irwin Shaw. Did you like it?”

“Yeah. Sure. It said something, I guess.”

“Yes, it did. It said that men were incapable of being faithful to one woman because they would always be distracted by these girls on Broadway in their summer dresses.”

“Fifth Avenue, wasn’t it?”

“It doesn’t matter. But is that true? Are all men like that?”

“ ‘What a pretty girl. What nice legs,’ ” he quoted.

“That’ll do, Frank.”

There were few other people in the restaurant and it was astonishing to Mary to think that such sleek and glorious wine, that food of a subtlety she had tasted only once before, on honeymoon in the Piazza Navona, could be produced and served with a speedy democratic glee from what was, in effect, the back end of a garage. New Yorkers never seemed to wonder at these discrepancies.

Frank ate with his usual efficiency, the cutlery shuttling back and forth between his hands, the left-handed stab of the fork preceding the vigorous but silent chewing.

“You watching me?”

“How come you never get fat? And how come you’re always hungry?”

Frank drank some wine and put his glass down. “First one, I don’t know. Second one, I guess I’m making up for lost time. If you’ve ever been truly hungry, you never pass up a chance to load up. It’s kind of an instinct.”

“Were you that poor?”

“Sure. But the army was the worst thing. Once we ate a dog.”

“In the Philippines?”

“No, it was in Germany. Near Cologne. We drew lots for which part we’d have. It was a German shepherd bitch. Billy Foy got the ribs, lucky bastard. I got the jaw.”

“What was it like?”

“Pretty good.” Frank pushed his plate away. “Pity the teeth were still in. Have a cigarette. You’ve put me off my lunch now.”

In the early evening they went to the address given them by Frank’s acquaintance in San Remo’s; it was off Cooper Square near the jazz club, in a cold-water flat on the fifth floor of a brick building with padlocked toilets on the landings.

As Frank pushed at the open front door of the apartment, he turned to Mary. “It’s your world, sweetheart. You asked for it.”

Mary’s first, rapidly replaced, impression was that they had surprised some construction workers on the job. Two women in overalls were in conference with a dozen men in blue jeans, pea jackets and navy surplus clothes; their paint-smeared fingers needed only a lunch pail to grasp for the illusion to be complete. They glanced toward Frank and Mary, but only one or two nodded in greeting. With a bottle of Dixie Belle gin he had bought on the way over, Frank mixed them both a drink.

“It’s a long way from the Embassy,” Mary whispered in his ear.

The gathering was a party but also a performance; so long as you had contributed something, no one seemed to mind who came and no one seemed to be in charge. The barfly from San Remo’s who had invited Frank was nowhere to be seen.

When about thirty people had gathered, a man with a corduroy jacket
and heavy glasses asked them all to move to the side of the room, as a dance was about to begin.

A woman bound up in muslin, part bride, part mummy, came into the room on pointed toes. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl and her hair was scraped back from her shiny face. A pattering of tabla and maracas began from a corner where a bearded man was sitting cross-legged. The dancer looked about the room, her gaze challenging and bleak; a male performer with wild, curly hair in a soiled dhoti followed her into the center of the room and prostrated himself before her as she pirouetted. Three other women entered in due course and proceeded to make patterns in which the single man seemed imprisoned. Mary found it difficult to take her eyes off his thin legs, which were coated in black hair through which she could see the almost fleshless sinews stretch.

The original female dismissed her handmaidens and pressed herself against invisible objects while the abject male cowered. Her unbound breasts leapt within the muslin as she trailed and arced herself about the room, her bare feet occasionally screeching on the linoleum floor. For all its lack of inhibition and despite the loosening dhoti’s tendency to gape, the dance was unerotic, its severity maintained by the challenging stare of the female principal.

A sequence of chants, in which all five performers joined, brought the first entertainment to an end. The dancers left, unsmiling, to prepare a second piece.

“Eva’s a genius,” said the woman next to Mary, one of those in overalls.

“Sure she’s a genius,” said a bearlike man on her other side. “The other great thing about her is that she owns no underwear. Drives Emilio crazy. Thinks a gust of wind’s gonna catch her some day.”

“Even when she’s dancing—”

“Sure when she’s dancing. Know what they pay for this place? $85.90 a month including utilities. How d’you think they manage that? Hey, you wanna try some of this?”

He held out an oversized homemade cigarette. “I got it from this cat at the Vanguard.”

“I don’t use tea,” said the overalled woman. “You go ahead.”

“I’m all set. You wanna try some?” He was offering the lumpy tube to Mary, who could smell its bonfire-incense smoke.

She had the feeling that if she declined, she would somehow reveal herself to be an impostor, so she held out her hand and placed the damp cardboard end between her lips, where she cautiously inhaled. She puffed twice before handing it back to the bearlike owner, who seemed pleased to be reunited with it. A circle had gathered round them and for the first time Mary found herself included in the party.

“D’you know Jane Freilicher?” the man who had done the introducing asked her, indicating an elegant young woman of European beauty who seemed to have drawn four men to her side. “She’s a genius. They say her pictures lack passion, she can’t make up her mind, but I don’t think so.”

“Another genius,” said Mary. She looked around for Frank and saw him leaning over the phonograph in the corner of the room, a record poised between his palms. “Are you a painter, too?” she said.

“No, I’m a dealer,” he said. “This is Little Helge. You met her? She’s at the Stella Adler School of Acting. She’s very, very talented.”

Little Helge shrugged, but did not demur. “What about you?” she said to Mary, who felt her clothes being rapidly scanned.

“I … I just came with Frank,” she said lightly, nodding toward the corner of the room.

“Sure,” said Little Helge. “But for yourself, what are you doing in New York?”

The group around her was suddenly silent. Their different conversations about Larry Rivers and old Barney Newman, Bill de Kooning and Frank O’Hara had all ended at the same moment; now everyone seemed to want to know what Mary did.

“I … I’m writing a book,” she said.

“Well, that’s swell,” said Eva the principal dancer, who had rejoined the company. “What’s it called?”

“It’s called …” The sound of the record Frank had put on filled the room. Mary looked toward him in panic. “It’s called ‘On Green Dolphin Street,’ ” she said.

Frank had joined the circle standing round her. “I thought it was ‘Stella by Starlight,’ ” he said.

“I changed it,” said Mary. “Anyway, I never could tell the two apart.”

The man with the marijuana laughed, Little Helge turned to speak to someone else and the circle dissolved.

It was nearly ten by the time they left and it was dark as they walked down the Bowery to the corner of Bleecker Street. A doorway bum with boiling red sores on his face was drinking dinner from a brown paper bag. He called out something incoherent, desperate, to Frank, who paused and dropped a quarter into the grasping fingers scorched black with grime.

Up in the apartment Mary put on a record and went over to the couch, where Frank had picked up the newspaper. He opened books and papers no more than halfway, and held them at arm’s length, as though scared of being dazzled by the banality of what he read.

This habit of his was a loved and integral part of her life, Mary thought, but how many books would she actually see him hold? There was a finite number and it was not a large one. She had once felt that what she loved and valued was made eternal or innumerable by her passion for it, but in the last few months—belatedly, perhaps—she had come to recognize that the instances of bliss were numbered as unforgivingly as the streets of the city, and that the edge of the island, once only a dream of explorers, was now in plain view.