Legs

LELAND: (Where the talkies are better), Billie Dove in The Age A for Love.

PALACE: (Showplace of The Capital), Leo Carillo in The Guilty Generation.

MADISON: Mae Clarke in Waterloo Bridge.

COLONIAL: Ann Harding in Devotion.

PARAM0UNT: Wheeler and Woolsey in Hook, Line and Sinker.

PARAMOUNT: Marian Nixon and Neil Hamilton in Ex Flame (a modernized version of East Lynne).

ALBANY: Wheeler and Woolsey in Caught Plastered.

Jack, sitting on his bed in the rooming house, took off the blue pants, pulled them over the scuffy black shoes, the dark-blue socks with the white clocks. He hung the pants on the open drawer of the tawdry dresser, and they stayed there a few seconds before they fell to the floor. Jack had drunk too much with too many. And yet he was lucid when he left the party, pushed by the whiskey into clarity and anticipation of the sweets of love; that face of perfect worship, the excitement of the body of perfect satisfaction, so wholly Jack's, so fully responsive to his touches, his needs. Climbing the stairs to her apartment, he already relished the look of her, the way she would smile when he greeted her with a kiss, the sweetness of presence alone when they sat and faced each other. This did not change. The power of sweetness had not faded in the almost two years he'd known her.

'They tell me you're going to Boston.'

'I really am.'

'Without even saying good-bye?'

'What's another good-bye? We're always saying that.'

'You're not going anyplace. Tomorrow we'll go down to the mountains, have a drink with old Brady up at Haines Falls. Weather's still pretty good.'

'You say that, but we won't go. '

'Sure. I'll have Frankie pick you up at noon and meet me at Marcus' office, and we'll go from there.'

'What about your darling Alice?'

'I'll send her out shopping.'

'Something'll happen and we won't go.'

'Yes, we'll go. You can count on it. You got my word.'

Jack, euphoric now, opened Marion's robe, gazed on her garden of ecstasy. Always a vision. Now better than ever. Jack had been down. He had hit bottom. But like an astral rubber ball, he was bouncing back toward the stars. When he held Marion in his arms, he felt the giddiness. 'Top of the goddamn world,' he said into her ear. 'I'm on top of the goddamn world.'

'That's nice, Jackie.'

'I'm a winner again.'

'That's really nice.'

Jack knew that winners celebrated with biological food. You found the most beautiful woman on the Eastern Seaboard. You took your body to where she waited. You turned off her radio, then gave her body to your body. Your body would thank you for such a gift. Your body would be a happy body.

Jack laughed out loud, once, in his bed, a resonant 'Haw!'

Moonshine was down to thirty-five cents a pint, and kids were sipping it with two straws. Iced beer was down to five dollars a gallon, and you could get it delivered home. College girls were pledging not to call for drinks costing more than a nickel when their boyfriends took them out for a good time. Dorothy Dix found this a step in the right direction, for matrimony was waning in popularity, a direct result of the high cost of living.

Jack remembered the night he penetrated to the center of Kiki's treasure at Haines Falls and struck something solid.

'What the hell is that?'

'A cork,' she said.

''A cork? How'd it get up there?'

'I took it off a gallon of dago red and put it up there. It's my Italian chastity cork.'

'What the hell's the matter with you?'

'I'm not taking it out till you promise to marry me.'

But she got over that, and when he entered her on this euphoric night in Albany there was no cork, no ultimatum; no climax either. Jack erected, Marion lubricious, they could've danced all night. But Jack wearied of the effort, and Marion ran out of her capacity to groan with pleasure. They rolled away from each other and let the sweat slowly cool, the breathing return to normal, the artifacts dry. He pulled off one shoe without opening the laces, let it drop. He took off the second shoe, noted its scuffiness and remembered the night he surrendered on the Hotsy charges. He walked into the Forty-seventh Street station house in his navy-blue chesterfield with the velvet lapels, white on white silk scarf, the midnight-blue serge double-breasted, the gray and black dragon tie, and the shoes so highly polished they could pass for patent leather, the derby heightening the tone of his special condition. Jack was on top that night, too, remembering Vinnie Raymond from East Albert Street, who walked by the Diamond house every night in his derby and his high-polish shoes and spats, on his way to life. The image of that man's perfection was still in the mind that controlled the scuffed shoe, down at the heel. Then he let it too, drop.

Jack heard the horn blowing in the street outside Marion's Ten Broeck Street apartment. He raised the window.

'It's gettin' late, Jack,' Frankie Teller called up to him. 'You said half an hour. It's going on two hours. You know what Alice told me. You get him back here to this party, back here to me.'

But no partying remained in Jack. He would not return to any festive scene, festive drunks, festive Alice. He closed the window and looked at Marion, who had wrapped herself in a beige floor-length silk robe, gift from Jack six months ago when he had money for anything. The gown had one large brown flower below the knee, same color as the stripe around the small lapel. So gorgeous. Will ever a woman look more gorgeous to Jack than this one?

'You treat women like animals,' Marion said.

'Ah, don't fight me tonight, baby. I'm feelin' good.'

'Like cats. You treat us like damn old cats. Pet us and pussy us up and scratch our neck.'

Jack laughed, fell back on the pillow of his own rooming house bed and laughed and laughed and laughed. She was right. You look a cat in the eye and demand a love song. It sits there, and if it likes you at all, it doesn't run away. It wants its goddamn neck scratched. Wants you to play with its whiskers. Give it what it wants, it turns on its motor. He laughed and raised his feet off the floor and saw his socks, still on.

He sat up and took off one sock, dropped it onto one shoe, missed.

.. I toast his defiance, his plan not to seduce the world but to terrify it, to spit in the eye of the public which says no Moloch shall pass…'

Jack would not begin life again in the same way. Adirondacks? Vermont? Maybe. But Coll was in jail, his mob busted up after a shoot-out in Averill Park and a roundup in Manhattan. Jack would have to recruit from scratch, and the prospect was wearying. So many dead and gone. Mike Sullivan, Fatty Walsh, Eddie. He reached for the second sock, remembering all the old boys, friends and enemies. Brocco. Babe. Frenchy. Shorty. Pretty. Mattie. Hymie. Fogarty. Dead, gone off, or in jail. And he seemed to himself, for the first time, a curiously perishable item among many such items, a thing of just so many seasons. When does the season end? He has survived again and again to another day, to try yet again to change what he had never been able to change. Would Jack Diamond ever really change? Or would he wake tomorrow out of this euphoria and begin to do what he had done every other day of his senior life? Was there any reason to doubt that recurring pattern? In the morning he would pay Marcus what he owed and take Kiki for a ride and hustle Alice and keep her happy somehow and try to figure out what next. Where was the money coming from? Something would come up.

He would solve it-he, Jack Diamond, who is what was designed, what was made this morning, yesterday, and the day before out of his own private clay.

Ah. What was designed.

This perception arrived as Jack dropped his second sock to the floor and leaned toward the dresser and saw the rosary in the top drawer. He thought then of saying it again. But no. No rosary. No prayer. No remorse. Jack is so happy with his perception of being what was designed, so released from the struggle to change, that he begins with a low rumble that rises from the sewers of madness; and yet he is not mad, only enlightened, or could they be the same condition? The rumble grows and rises to his throat where it becomes a cackle, and then into his nose