The eyes of a New York woman
Are never going to cry for me.
Are never going to cry for me.
The girl on the sidewalk twitched. 'It doesn't have any beat.' It was a song of the Great Depression. They were singing it in 1932, the year Profane was born. He didn't know where he'd heard it. If it had a beat, it was the beat of beans thumping into an old bucket someplace down in Jersey. Some WPA pick against the pavement, some bum-laden freight car on a downgrade hitting the gaps between the rails every 39 feet. She'd have been born in 1942. Wars don't have my beat. They're all noise.
Zeppole man across the street began to sing. Angel and Geronimo started to sing. The band across the street acquired an Italian tenor from the neighborhood:
Non dimenticar, the t'i'ho voluto tanto bene,
Ho saputo amar; non dimenticar . . .
And the cold street seemed all at once to've bloomed into singing. He wanted to take the girl by the fingers, lead her to someplace out of the wind, anyplace warm, pivot her back on those poor ballbearing heels and show her his name was Sfacim after all. It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion. 'I'm Lucille,' the girl said to Profane. The other two introduced themselves, Lucille came back up the stoop to sit next to Profane, Geronimo went off for more beer. Angel continued to sing. 'What do you guys do,' Lucille said.
I tell tall stories to girls I want to screw, Profane thought. He scratched his armpit. 'Kill alligators,' he said.
'Wha.'
He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn't born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper of Mulberry Street.
Geronimo came back with beer. They sat and drank beer and watched people and told sewer stories: Every once in a while the girls would want to sing. Soon enough they became kittenish. Lucille jumped up and pranced away. 'Catch me,' she said.
'Oh God,' said Profane.
'You have to chase her,' said one of her friends. Angel and Geronimo were laughing.
'I have to wha,' said Profane. The other two girls, annoyed that Angel and Geronimo were laughing, arose and went running off after Lucille.
'Chase them?' Geronimo said.
Angel belched. 'Sweat out some of this beer.' They got off the stoop unsteadily and fell, side by side, into a little jog-trot. 'Where'd they go,' Profane said.
'Over there.' It seemed after a while they were knocking people over. Somebody swung a punch at Geronimo and missed. They dived under an empty stand, single file, and found themselves out on the sidewalk. The girls were loping along, up ahead. Geronimo was breathing hard. They followed the girls, who cut off on a side street. By the time they got around the corner there wasn't girl one to be seen. There followed a confused quarter-hour of wandering along the streets bordering Mulberry, looking under parked cars, behind telephone poles, in back of stoops.
'Nobody here,' said Angel.
There was music on Mott Street. Coming out of a basement. They investigated. A sign outside said SOCIAL CLUB. BEER. DANCING. They went down, opened a door and there sure enough was a small beer bar set up in one corner, a jukebox in another and fifteen or twenty curious-looking juvenile delinquents. The boys wore Ivy League suits, the girls wore cocktail dresses. There was rock 'n' roll on the jukebox. The greasy heads and cantilever brassieres were still there, but the atmosphere was refined, like a country club dance.
The three of them just stood. Profane saw Lucille after a while bopping in the middle of the floor with somebody who looked like a chairman of the board of some delinquent's corporation. Over his shoulder she stuck out her tongue at Profane, who looked away. 'I don't like it,' he heard somebody say, 'fuzzwise. Why don't we send it through Central Park and see if anybody rapes it.'
He happened to glance off to the left. There was a coat room. Hanging on a row of hooks, neat and uniform, padded shoulders falling symmetrical either side of the hooks, were two dozen black velvet jackets with red lettering on the back. Ding dang, thought Profane: Playboy country.
Angel and Geronimo had been looking the same way. 'Do you think we should maybe,' Angel wondered. Lucille was beckoning to Profane from a doorway across the dance floor.
'Wait a minute,' he said. He weaved between the couples on the floor. Nobody noticed him.
'What took you so long?' She had him by the hand. It was dark in the room. He walked into a pool table. 'Here,' she whispered. She was lying spread on the green felt. Comer pockets, side pockets, and Lucille. 'There are some funny things I could say,' he began.
'They've all been said,' she whispered. In the dim light from the doorway, her fringed eyes seemed part of the felt. It was as if he were looking through her face to the surface of the table. Skirt raised, mouth open, teeth all white, sharp, ready to sink into whatever soft part of him got that close, oh she would surely haunt him. He unzipped his fly and started to climb up on the pool table.
There was a sudden scream from the next room, somebody knocked over the jukebox, the lights went out. 'Wha,' she said sitting up.
