He hung up his khakis and his Garand gun
Came along to Noo York to have some fun,
But couldn't find a job till '51.
Started writing copy for MCA
It wasn't any fun but it was steady pay,
Sneaking out of work one lovely day
He met him a dolly called Mafi-yay.
Mafia thought he had a future ahead,
And looked like she knew how to bounce a bed
Old Roony must've been sick in the head
Cause pretty soon, they up and they wed.
Now he's got a record company,
A third of the profits plus salary,
A beautiful wife who wants to be free
So she can practice her Theory.
[Refrain] Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.'
Pig Bodine had fallen asleep. Mafia was in the next room, watching herself undress in the mirror. And Paola, Roony thought, where are you? She'd taken to disappearing, sometimes for two- or three-day stretches, and nobody ever knew where she went.
Maybe Rachel would put in a word for him with Paola. He had, he knew, certain nineteenth-century ideas of what was proper. The girl herself was an enigma. She hardly spoke, she went to the Rusty Spoon now only rarely, when she knew Pig would be somewhere else. Pig coveted her. Concealing himself behind a code which only did officers dirty (and executives? Winsome wondered), Pig he was sure envisioned Paola playing opposite him in each frame of his stag-movie fantasies. It was natural, he supposed; the girl had the passive look of an object of sadism, something to be attired in various inanimate costumes and fetishes, tortured, subjected to the weird indignities of Pig's catalogue, have her smooth and of course virginal-looking limbs twisted into attitudes to inflame a decadent taste. Rachel was right, Pig - and even perhaps Paola - could only be products of a decky-dance. Winsome, self-proclaimed king of it, felt only sorry it should ever have happened. How it had happened, how anybody, himself included, had contributed to it, he didn't know.
He entered the room as Mafia was bent, stripping off a knee sock. College girl attire, he thought. He slapped her hard on the nearest buttock; she straightened, turned, and he slapped her across the face. 'Wha,' she said.
'Something new,' said Winsome. 'For variety's sake.' One hand at her crotch, one twisted in her hair, he lifted her like the victim she wasn't, half-carried, half-tossed her to the bed where she lay in a sprawl of white skin, black pubic hair and socks, all confused. He unzipped his fly. 'Aren't you forgetting something,' she said, coy and half-scared, flipping her hair toward the dresser drawer.
'No,' said Winsome, 'not that I can think of.'
III
Profane returned to the Space/Time agency convinced that if nothing else Rachel was luck. Bergomask had given him the job.
'Wonderful,' she said. 'He's paying the fee, you don't owe us anything.'
It was near quitting time. She started straightening things on her desk. 'Come home with me,' she said quietly. 'Wait out by the elevator.'
But he remembered, leaning against the wall out in the corridor: with Fina it had been like that, too. She'd taken him home like a rosary found in the street and convinced herself he was magic. Fina had been devoutly R.C., like his father. Rachel was Jewish, he recalled, like his mother. Maybe all she wanted to do was to feed him, be a Jewish mother.
They rode down in the elevator, crowded together and quiet, she wrapped serenely in a gray raincoat. At the turnstile in the subway, she put in two tokens for them.
'Hey,' said Profane.
'You're broke,' she told him.
'I feel like a gigolo.' He did. There'd always be some 15 cents, maybe half a salami in the refrigerator - whatever she'd feed him.
Rachel decided to lodge Profane at Winsome's place and feed him at her own. Winsome's was known to the Crew as the West Side flophouse. There was floor space there for all of them at once, and Winsome didn't mind who slept on it.
The next night Pig Bodine showed up at Rachel's at supper time, drunk and in search of Paola, who was away God knew where.
'Hey,' Pig addressed Profane.
'Buddy,' Profane said. They opened beer.
Soon Pig had dragged them down to the V-Note, to hear McClintic Sphere. Rachel sat and concentrated on the music, while Pig and Profane remembered sea stories at each other. During one of the breaks, she drifted over to Sphere's table and found out he'd picked up a contract with Winsome to do two LP's for Outlandish.
