The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (24 page)

My guest rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. He must have been drinking before he arrived. He must have been drinking when he used to invite me to lunch, when he lectured me on the responsibility of intellect, the value of the written line. “Don’t worry about those papers,” he said. He hugged me to him again like a beloved nephew. “
Ciao
,” he said.

The next morning I would have to make a plan. And I didn’t want anyone around to bother me. Whatever I did I would have to do it on my own.

Ira was cleaning the windshield of the Caddy in the basement when I came down. “This car is going for a ride,” I said.

“Justo says no,” the big man said.

“Justo says no,” I said. “That’s great. You’re very loyal.”

“I try to be, boss.”

“You’re loyal to Justo?”

Ira appeared confused. It suited him. If you looked at his face in profile it had all the determination of a question mark, his forehead bulging over a small nose and then an abrupt chin. Only his resolute thin mustache spoiled it. Otherwise he was doubt personified. “I’m loyal to, you know, to...”

“To Shushan.”

“Yeah, to Shushan. He’s the boss.”

“But he may not be alive.”

“I got to have faith, boss.”

“But you call me boss.”

“I call you boss in case, you know, in case...”

“In case Shushan is dead.”

“Yeah,” Ira said. He had put down his chamois rag. “In case.”

“So if Shushan were alive you wouldn’t listen to Justo, right?”

“Sure,” he said. “Right.”

“You’d listen to the boss. What the boss told you, you’d do.”

“Sure.”

“No questions?”

“No, no questions. I mean, he’s the boss.”

“And if Shushan isn’t around. Say even he’s not dead. Maybe he’s in Las Vegas.”

“The boss never went to Vegas—he liked Havana.” Ira thought this over. “Once or twice to Vegas, on business. We went together. But not to gamble. The boss didn’t gamble.”

“Didn’t.”

“You know, didn’t, doesn’t.”

“So maybe he’s alive and is going to come back tomorrow. You don’t know that one way or the other, do you, Ira?”

“I don’t know it.”

“But if he’s God forbid no longer with us, if Shushan is gone, then you have a new boss, right?”

Confusion is too positive a description of the feuding impulses that seemed to be caroming inside Ira’s enormous head. I’d seen his hat on the chair by the door. Eight and a half. My hat size was seven and a quarter, same as Shushan’s, although his head looked smaller, his hair close-cropped. You couldn’t say that about me. In 1963 anyone under twenty-five carried a lot of hair. I waited while the caroming slowed. “Who’s your new boss, Ira?”

“You are, I guess.”

“And if Shushan comes back tomorrow and slaps you on the back, who’s your boss?”

“Shushan?”

“Exactly. So what will Shushan say if I’m the boss and you’re listening to Justo, not me?”

“He’ll be pissed.”

“What’s he like when he’s pissed?”

Ira frowned, his mustache following the reforming line of his thin lips like a mansard roof.

“Right,” I said. “So if he comes back tomorrow morning and he finds out you’re listening to Justo and not to me, what would he say?”

Confusion.

“Would he say you did right or you did wrong?”

“Wrong,” Ira said after a moment’s contemplation. “He’d say I done wrong.”

“And if he doesn’t come back, God forbid, then would you be right in following Justo’s orders or mine?”

A longer pause, then the glimmer of a smile. “Yours.”

“So either way, who should you listen to?”

No pause. No doubt. Not so much as a reflective glimmer. “You,” he said. “I got to follow what you say.”

“Justo might be mad.”

“Fuck Justo,” he said. “You’re the boss, boss.”

“Good,” I said. “Now tell me, when’s the last time you saw Myra?”

“Myra?”

This was like painting woodwork. “Your wife.”

“Sure.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

He appeared to be counting in his head. “Four days.”

“She’s a beautiful woman, isn’t she?”

A flicker of suspicion. “Gorgeous.”

“Should you leave a gorgeous woman alone four days, a gorgeous woman all alone in Brooklyn?”

“I got to be here,” he said.

“To watch me?”

“So nothing happens.”

“But you went down to clean the car, didn’t you? That’s what I’m looking at. You weren’t watching me.”

“Wednesday.”

“It is Wednesday, Ira. So?”

“So I always give it a good going over on Wednesday.”

“Admirable,” I said. “So you figured I was safe enough upstairs for you to leave me for an hour to clean the car?”

“I check the oil, brake fluid. It’s not just cleaning. Usually I gas it up. Shushan likes it ready.”

“So you felt you could leave me alone for a few minutes, for an hour, to take care of business, right?”

“Right, sure.”

“Now I want you to listen to me, Ira. I’m telling you this for your own benefit. You love your wife?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“You don’t want anyone to bother her, in Brooklyn?”

A thought, such as it was, danced slowly behind his small gray eyes, arched brown brows crinkling with the effort. “You think I should...”

“I think you should go home and sleep in your own bed with your gorgeous wife. I’m going to be fine.”

“You mean, now?”

“You can gas up the car in the morning. Just be back at eleven.”

“In the morning?”

No, dope, at night. “Yes, eleven in the morning. See Myra, make sure she’s okay.”

“I talked to her on the phone.”

“A beautiful woman like that, Ira, you can’t know everything from the phone.”

“You want I should fill her with regular or high-test?”

Myra? “What does Shushan prefer?”

“High test,” Ira says. “That way the engine don’t knock.”

“Fill her with high test,” I said. “Go on, get out of here. I’ll be fine. Nobody can get past the lobby.” But I was wrong.

When I let myself in I found the lights turned down and music playing on the stereo: Frank Sinatra, Shushan’s favorite, his voice like calming oil poured over a sea of what seemed to be a hundred storm-tossed violins.

You’d be so nice to come home to,

You’d be so nice by the fire...

And there was a fire. The fireplace was lit. I had never even considered it might be real. There was a fireplace upstairs as well, of course, with logs stacked similarly in a creche beside it. But I never considered either might actually function. I was a city boy. I had read about fires in fireplaces, but never seen one. Or smelled one. The deeply masculine aroma carried with it a lighter one, sensual, musky. It was perfume, lavender, citrus, adult. The college girls I went with were on ideological grounds dead set against perfume and makeup and anything else their mothers wore, even bras. This aroma was more than heady. It was exciting with promise.

While the breeze on high sings a lullaby

You’d be all that I could desire.

The strings came up just as a woman’s voice cut through them. “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Newhouse. I let myself in.”

Whoever this was, she was seated demurely on the facing sofa—I could barely make her out as my eyes slowly became accustomed to the dimness.

“You let yourself in?”

“I have a key.”

I looked around. “Are you alone?”

She laughed, her voice husky, a smoker’s voice that went with the look. In 1963 platinum hair was the big thing for movie stars: Marilyn Monroe, Mamie van Doren, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, Angie Dickinson, dozens more. But this was platinum with a vengeance. Piled up on her head in what was called a beehive—Jackie Kennedy used the same technique and called it
bouffant
, which apparently made it seem less cheap—the woman on the couch looked like some peculiar amalgam of all the Hollywood beauties of the day: big (very blond) hair, big (very red) lips, big (very soft) curves. The girls I knew were... girls. This was a woman.

“You have the advantage on me,” I said.

“How’s that?” She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray that had been empty a half hour before and now held a half dozen lipstick-marked butts, and immediately stuck another into her mouth, drawing it directly out of her purse, a small beaded affair that made the woman who owned it seem even larger, monumental, iconic: Anita Ekberg in a Roman fountain courtesy of Federico Fellini. It was as though she had stepped off the screen at the Eighth Street Cinema in the Village and found her way to this hotel, this suite, this couch. But it was no miracle. After all, she did have a key.

“You know my name, I don’t know yours.”

“Darcie,” she said. “Unless you have another you’d prefer.”

“Darcie is good.”

“Got a light?”

I sat at the other corner of the same couch, found a matchbook in my pocket, leaned across the empty cushion and lit her Parliament. In those days it was a woman’s smoke. Something about the recessed filter not smearing lipstick. “How is it, Darcie, you have a key?”

“Shushan.”

“That’s a noun,” I said. “Put a verb to it.”

She seemed unsure, then smiled to cover it. Clearly this was not someone who made her living teaching high school English.

I tried to direct her. “I mean, Shushan what?”

“Cats.”

It was impossible not to appreciate this. Every female I knew was aggressively literate. “Shushan Cats gave you a key?”

“Sure.”

“And why did he do that?”

“Wednesdays.”

“Wednesdays?”

“Every Wednesday Shushan liked me to be here when he got in.” She pointed demurely to the bedroom opposite.

“And today is... Wednesday.”

“Til midnight,” she said.

“But you knew Shushan isn’t—”

“Yeah,” she said. “I heard.”

“But you came anyway.”

“I didn’t expect Shu to be here.”

“Shu.”

“Shushan,” she explained helpfully. “I mean, it’s in the papers.”

“That and Jack Kennedy is flying to Dallas, and the sheriff in Birmingham, Alabama, one Bull Connor, is arresting hundreds of Negroes.” I watched her face, but under the smooth makeup could make out nothing. “So why come here if Shushan is, maybe, dead?”

“He’s as dead as you and me,” she said. “I don’t believe any of it. That man is tough. His muscles have muscles.”

“So you came expecting to find him. Here. Alive.”

“Nah,” she said. “I expected to find you. I figured you’re the replacement, so I ought to show.”

“The replacement.”

“If you want,” she said. “Unless you don’t find me attractive.”

What a question. After a week with no sex a guy like me, not yet twenty-one and producing so much testosterone my balls ached, would have found a bagel attractive, so long as it shifted position from time to time. And Darcie was no bagel. “Oh yeah, I do,” I said. “But I’m afraid I can’t afford you.”

“Not to worry, Russy. That’s how Shu calls you. Can I call you Russy?”

“Sure.”

“I’m on a long-term contract. Justo takes care of it.”

“How long a term?” I asked, moving closer.

“As long as you like,” she said.

For a moment there was silence. Frank was done with the first song and now had moved on to another, more up-tempo, trumpets countering the violins.

Is it for all-time, or merely a crock?

Is it the good turtle soup, or just Millie the Mock?

Is it for all time, this feeling of joy?

Is this feeling the real McCoy?

Whatever it had been with Celeste and with the dozens of Celestes who had passed through my life since the day I had lost my cherry at fourteen in the basement of a tenement on Powell Street in Brownsville with the indelible Marie-Antonetta Provenzano, it was as if I had been playing sandlot ball and was now in the majors. The difference was startling, not only because Darcie was almost twice my age and her body had been lushly modified not only by emollients and powders and perfumes but gravity, and not only because Darcie knew things that my other girlfriends had expected me to teach
them
. It was that I was no longer on trial: I was not being asked to prove myself; I was asked only to show up. Darcie was doing for me what I had demanded of myself that I do for girls my own age. There was something so giving in her, so unselfish, so open and sure I could not help feeling that I was the inspiration for her soft lushness, her sweet pockets of scent, the way her hands knew where to go and her mouth what to do. Kissing her I felt I was sinking deeply into a fertile mossy earth, the taste of tobacco combining somehow with a flowery, almost funereal muskiness.

Of course she came precisely when I did, her body heaving and convulsing, her mouth making soft whimpering music as she continued to pump me, high thighs grinding slowly to a rhythm that was at once earnest and totally artificial—the best fake orgasm I had ever met, a masterful arrangement of movement, sound, scent: the best orgasm money could buy. And it worked. Because even though I had come hard and long, emptying myself like the turned out pockets of a pair of jeans, I began—almost against my will—to fuck her again.

And again.

And again.

At twenty years of age, twice was not unusual. Three times was not unknown. Four had occurred once, with Celeste in fact. And here I was going for six. Wait a minute, I thought:
she’s
going for six. Darcie was the one doing it. I stopped.

“Something wrong, honey?” she asked.

“Do you get paid by the come?”

A pause. “That’s nasty,” she said.

“Because?”

“Because I get paid by the night. And if I don’t like the guy I don’t even show up. I’m not a whore. I’m a compensated companion.”

The distinction escaped me, but even so it was wrong to fuck a woman for an hour and a half and then insult her. This was not so much a matter of ethics—in eros there is none—as much as simple manners. Besides, I had not meant an insult, merely a clarification. I found her hand, brought it to my lips, and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “This kind of thing is new for me.”