They talked for a while. Break ended. The quartet drifted back to the stand, fiddled around, started off with a Sphere composition called Fugue Your Buddy. Rachel returned to Pig and Profane. They were discussing Pappy Hod and Paola. Damn, damn, to herself, what have I brought him to? What have I brought him back to?
She woke up the next morning, Sunday, mildly hung over. Winsome was outside, pounding at the door.
'It is a day of rest,' she growled. 'What the hell.'
'Dear father-confessor,' he said, looking as if he'd not slept all night, 'don't be angry.'
'Tell it to Eigenvalue.' She stomped to the kitchen, put coffee on. 'Now,' she said. 'What is your problem?'
What else: Mafia. Now, this was all deliberate. He had put on the day before yesterday's shirt and neglected to comb his hair that morning, to put Rachel in the mood. If you wanted a girl to go pimping for her roommate, you didn't come right out and say so. There were subtleties to be gone through. Wanting to talk about Mafia was only an excuse.
Rachel wanted to know, naturally enough, if he'd spoken to the dentist at all and Winsome said no. Eigenvalue had been busy lately, holding bull sessions with Stencil. Roony wanted a woman's point of view. She poured coffee and told him the two roommates were gone. He closed his eyes and jumped in:
'I think she's been sleeping around, Rachel.'
'So. Find out and divorce her.'
They drained the coffeepot twice. Roony drained himself. At three Paola came in, smiled at them briefly, disappeared into her room. Did he blush a little? His heartbeat had speeded up. Dingy damn, he was acting like a young blood. He rose. 'Can we keep talking about this?' he said. 'Even small-talk.'
'If it helps,' she smiled, not believing it for a minute. 'And what's this about a contract with McClintic? Don't tell me Outlandish is putting out normal records now. What are you getting, religion?'
'If I am,' Roony told her, 'it's all I'm getting.'
He walked back to his apartment through Riverside Park, wondering if he'd done right. Maybe, it occurred to him, Rachel might think it was herself he wanted, not her roommate.
Back at the apartment he found Profane talking with Mafia. Dear God, he thought, all I want to do is sleep. He went in to the bed, assumed the foetal position and soon, oddly enough, did drift off.
'You tell me you are half-Jewish and half-Italian,' Mafia was saying in the other room. 'What a terribly amusing role. Like Shylock, non a vero, ha, ha. There is a young actor down at the Rusty Spoon who claims to be an Irish Armenian Jew. You two must meet.'
Profane decided not to argue. So all he said was: 'It is probably a nice place, that Rusty Spoon. But out of my class.'
'Rot,' she said, 'class. Aristocracy is in the soul. You may be a descendant of kings. Who knows.'
I know, Profane thought. I am a descendant of schlemiels, Job founded my line. Mafia wore a knit dress of some fabric that could be seen through. She sat with her chin on her knees so that the lower part of the skirt fell away. Profane rolled over on his stomach. Now this would he interesting, he thought. Yesterday Rachel had led him in by the hand to find Charisma, Fu and Mafia playing Australian tag-teams minus one on the living room floor.
Mafia bad squirmed to a prone position parallel to Profane. Apparently she had some idea of touching noses. Boy I'll bet she thinks that's cute, he thought. But Fang the cat came tearing in and jumped between them. Mafia lay on her back and started scratching and dandling the cat. Profane padded to the icebox for more beer. In came Pig Bodine and Charisma, singing a drinking song:
'There are sick bars in every town in America,
Where sick people can pass the time o' day.
You can screw on the floor in Baltimore,
Make Freudian scenes in New Orleans,
Talk Zen and Beckett in Keokuk, Ioway.
There's espresso machines in Terre Haute, Indiana
Which is a cultural void if ever a void there be,
But though I've dragged my ass from Boston, Mass.
To the wide Pacific sea,
The Rusty Spoon is still the bar for me,
The Rusty Spoon is the only place for me.'
It was like bringing a little bit of that gathering-place in among the proper facades of Riverside Drive. Soon, without anyone realizing it, there was a party. Fu wandered in, got on the phone and started calling people. Girls appeared miraculously at the front door, which had been left open. Someone turned on the FM, someone else went out for beer. Cigarette smoke began to hang from the low ceiling in murky strata. Two or three members got Profane off in a corner and began to indoctrinate him in the ways of the Crew. He let them lecture, and drank beer. Soon he was drunk and it was night. He remembered to set the alarm clock, found an unoccupied corner of a room and went to sleep.
IV
That night, April 15, David Ben-Gurion warned his country in an Independence Day speech that Egypt planned to slaughter Israel. A Mideast crisis had been growing since winter. April 19, a cease-fire between the two countries went into effect. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco the same day. The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to, and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws. In the city of New York alone, there were at a rough estimate five million different rathouses. God knew what was going on in the minds of cabinet ministers, heads of state and civil servants in the capitals of the world. Doubtless, their private versions of history showed up in action. If a normal distribution of types prevailed, they did.
