I wasn’t sure where I left the car, which meant I also wasn’t sure where I lived. I got there when the sun was going down, banged the door shut, got undressed, laid down on the bed. I was very thirsty but too lazy to get up. When the phone rang I reached over and put it on my stomach. I must also have put the receiver to my ear because then I heard Davy’s voice.
“Did I get you out of the bathroom or something?” he said. “I was just going to hang up.”
“No. Don’t. Where was I?”
“What?”
“Where were you, I mean.”
“Well, he’s at Mercy, all right.”
“Does he need it?”
“Mister St. Louis?”
“Yes, Davy.”
“Just let me talk. Okay, Mister St. Louis? I’ll tell you everything.”
“All right, Davy.”
“So he’s there in the hospital, and I told them I was his nephew…”
“Why nephew, David?”
“Because I wasn’t allowed to go into his room on account his family was there already. Family. See?”
“Yes, Davy. Please go on.”
“I’m trying. So I said we were plenty worried about this, on account of the family business, and how was he.”
“How was he?”
“Please, Mister St Louis. The family business, said the doctor, would have to be run by the family for a while, or by itself, he said, because Mister Benotti was in no shape for anything. Just for lying still on his back.”
“Ditto.”
“What?”
“Go on, Davy.”
“On account of his concussion in the head and the jaw being wired.”
I had an image of wiring for concussion or detonation or spark plugs, but said nothing about it.
“When is he going to be all tuned up again?”
“Not sure, Mister St, Louis, but not before two weeks.”
“Did you tell Mister Lippit?”
“Yes, sir. He was pleased.”
I relaxed on the bed, my martyrdom vindicated, because two weeks of an inactive opposition might well be all Lippit needed to get his business all squared away again. Somewhere along there Davy hung up. I felt pretty good on the bed, feeling no pain. It even seemed as if I could see out of both eyes again. I thought about this and that and it was a lot like a conversation. About spark plugs, plugged nickels, coin slots, slugged pickles, gauze tickles, red gore, locked door.
“If you locked the door, then how did I get in?”
“Through the keyhole.”
“No. I’m little, but not small.”
This struck me as nonsense, but when I opened my eyes she was there, real enough. I said, “Hello, Doris.”
“Hello, slugged pickle.”
“We talked about that, too?”
“I could not begin to tell you just what we did talk about.”
“You were here. I wasn’t.”
“I was never sure I was getting all of the conversation.”
She sat on the bed, hands in her lap, but then she reached over and took the phone away from my ear.
“Why, it’s dead,” she said. “You always sleep like that?”
Then she cradled it. The instrument was still on my stomach. I sat up and it wasn’t too bad.
“Am I looking at you with both eyes?”
“Sort of.”
I saw that it was dark outside of the window and asked her how long she had been here.
“Half an hour, maybe.”
“Dear Doris,” I said. “My only desire is for something to drink. You have come at the wrong time.”
“I just came to see how you were. And I tried to put your pajamas on but you wouldn’t let me move the phone.”
Yessir, there were the pajamas all right, lying next to me on the bed. I sent her to the kitchen, to bring me a drink, and put my pajamas on. When she brought me a drink it was a tall glass, and cool, filled with water. I sent her back with different instructions and told her where the bourbon was. She came back with two glasses this time, though mine was darker, and we sat on the bed for a while.
“Least you can do,” I said, “is take your shoes off.”
She took her shoes off and we talked some more. I said something nice about her singing and she said I must mean it, because there was nothing else to promote at the moment. This caused me to make a pass at her and she said, if you do that again, I’ll slap your face. That, under the circumstances, put me in a sweat and I told her to get off my bed and fetch over another drink.
It was a nice change from the rest of the day. We talked about singing a little bit more and I said I would like to give her a trial, and we had sandwiches and some more from the bottle. I held her hand and then her arm, and so on.
“You must be feverish,” she said.
“Yes. Somebody better stay for the night.”
She said she didn’t want to sit up all night and I said, of course not, but before she lay down she got up to do something about her clothes getting wrinkled. She got undressed and put on a pair of my pajamas which didn’t fit, of course, and gave her a misleading shape. Then she lay down next to me and turned off the light because the glare was giving me a headache. She held my head and said, “Boy, what a fever,” and put it down on herself, like on a pillow. That was all right, but then I wasn’t sleepy. I said, “Listen. The pajamas make me self-conscious. I don’t like to make love to my own pajamas.”
Her skin felt cool, as if I did have a fever, and she got tense and then stretched.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ve caught your fever.”
She had, and it got higher before it was done.
Chapter 13
She had to go to work in the morning and, as a matter of fact, was gone when I woke. The pajamas had disappeared and the dishes and bottle, but there was a note on the night table which said that the pajamas were no good anyway and had been put in the laundry, the dishes were where they belonged and the bottle she had hidden. “To promote early recovery from all kinds of damages. Too bad,” said the postscript, “and today is my day off. Doris.”
She didn’t have a phone, according to the book, and when I called her office, they said, yes, this was her day off.
Maybe she would come back in the evening, I thought, and went to the bathroom.
The damage looked more confirmed today, one side of my face looking more filled out than the other, but my color was almost normal. There was the patch, with the cut under it-itching-and one eye slitty.
I showered, keeping my head out of the water, and I shaved, one side more than the other. Then I dressed for a slow day at home, and had ham and eggs in the kitchen and coffee, which I took with me to the phone. I called the club.
Lippit wanted to know how I was and then he said he was fine, too. He was off for a talk with Bascot and in
