Hot Night in the City

'And what if your store modernizes and gives up Mr Weaver's thingamajig—'

'Overhead Cash Carrier.'

'...Overhead Cash Carrier. What happens to your job then?'

'Oh, by then I'll be a qualified secretary. I'm taking shorthand two nights a week. The Gregg Method? And I'm going to take a typing course as soon as I save up enough money. You know what they say: If you can type and take shorthand, you'll never be out of a job.'

'Yeah, they just keep on saying that and saying that. Sometimes I get tired of hearing it. So, I suppose that what with your job and your shorthand classes and all, you don't get out much.'

'No, not much. I don't know all that many people. ...No one, really.'

'You must miss your folks.'

'No.'

'Not at all?'

'They're religious and awful strict. With them, everything is sin, sin, sin.'

He smiled. 'They do a lot of sinning, do they?'

'No, they never sin. Never. But they... I don't know how to describe it. They're always thinking about sin. Always cleansing themselves of it, or strengthening themselves to resist it. I guess you could say they spend all their time not sinning. Sort of like... well, do you remember when we were walking here and I bumped into you and we touched shoulders, then we walked on making sure not to touch again but thinking about it every step of the way? Well, with them it's sort of like that with sinning, if you know what I mean.'

'I know exactly what you mean.' Actually, he hadn't once thought about their shoulders touching, but to admit that would be unkind. And he admired her simple frankness where other girls would have been coy.

They fell silent for a time, then she emerged from her reverie with a quick breath and said, 'What about you?'

'How do I feel about sin?'

'No, I mean, tell me about yourself and your job and all.'

'Well... let's see. First off, I have to confess that I don't work in a JC Penney's, and I've never taken a shorthand course in my life. I haven't the time. I'm too busy lurking around movie houses and following girls on buses.'

'No, come on! How come you talk with an English accent if you're not English?'

'It's not an English accent. It's what they call 'mid-Atlantic'. And it's totally phony. When I was a drama major in college, I—'

'You've been to college?'

'Only a couple of years. Then the Korean Police Action came along and I—' He shrugged all that away. 'No, I'm not English. I just decided to change my voice because I hated it. It was so... New York. Flat, metallic, adenoidal, too little resonance, too much urgency. I wanted to sound like the actors I admired. Welles, Olivier, Maurice Evans. So I took courses in theater speech and I practiced hours and hours in my room, listening to records and imitating them. But it turned out to be a waste of time.'

'No it wasn't! I like the way you talk. It's so... cultured. Sort of like Claude Rains or James Mason.'

'Oh yes, my dear,' he said as Rains, 'the phony speech eventually became habitual.' He shifted to Mason, which was only a matter of bringing Rains a little further forward into the mask, dropping the note, and adding a touch of aspirate huskiness. 'But even with a new voice, I was still the person I was trying not to be. Damned nuisance!' Then he returned to the voice he used for everyday. 'For all my correctly placed vowels and sounded terminal consonants, I was still a bad boy running away from... whatever it is we're all supposed to be running away from.'

'So you left college to join the army?'

'That's right. But the army... well, they decided to let me out early.'

'Why?'

He shrugged. 'I guess I'm just not the soldier type. Not aggressive enough. Are you cold?' She had been sitting with her arms crossed over her breasts, holding her upper arms in her hands. He reached across the table and touched her arm above the elbow. 'You are cold.'

'It's this air-conditioning. I don't know why they turn it up so high.'

The refugees had been steadily thinning out, and now the family in the booth behind them left, the mother with the wet-mouthed baby in her arms, the father carrying one child and pulling a sleep-dazed little girl along by the hand, her untied shoes clopping on the floor. Soon the place would be empty, except for the night people.

She looked up at the clock above the counter. 'Gee, it's after two. I've got work tomorrow.' But she didn't rise to leave. He drew a deep sigh and stretched, and his foot touched hers beneath the table. He said, 'Excuse me,' and she said, 'That's all right,' and they both looked out the window at the empty street. He watched her eyes refocus to his reflection on the surface of the glass, and he smiled at her.

'What about you?' she asked. 'Don't you have to be at work early?'

'No. I don't have what you'd call a steady job. I just drift from city to city. When I need money, I go to the public market before dawn and stand around with the rest of the drifters and winos. Job brokers come in trucks and pick out the youngest and strongest for a day's stoop labor. I almost always get picked, even though I'm not all that hefty. I give the foremen one of my boyish smiles, and they always pick me.'

'It's true, you do have a boyish smile.'

'And when the boyish smile doesn't work, I fall back on my 'look of intense sincerity'. That's a sure winner. Stoop labor only pays a buck or a buck ten an hour. But still, one thirteen- or fourteen-hour day gives me enough for a couple of days of freedom.'

'But there's no future in that.'

'What? No future? I've been tricked! They assured me that stoop labor was a sure path to riches, fame, success with the women, and a closer relationship with my personal savior. Gosh, maybe I'd better give it up and take a course in shorthand. The Gregg Method.'

He meant to be amusing, but the smile he evoked was so faint and fugitive that he said, 'I'm sorry. Look, I wasn't poking fun at you. If I was poking fun at anybody, it was myself. You are absolutely right! There's no future in stoop labor. I've got to start taking life seriously!' He made his eyes crinkle into a smile. 'Maybe I'll start next Thursday. How would that be?'

She didn't answer for a time, then said she really had to be getting home.

He nodded. 'You want me to walk you? Or do you feel pretty safe in your Italian neighborhood?'

'What about you? Don't you have to get some sleep?'

'They won't let me in. It's too late. So I'll just roam the streets. Cities are interesting just before dawn when everything is quiet, except for the occasional distant siren announcing a fire, or a crime, or a birth—which is a sort of crime, considering the state of the world. There's something haunting about a distant siren. Like when you hear the whistle of a freight train at night, far off down in the valley, and you'd give anything in the world not to be the kind of...' He stopped speaking and his attention turned inward. He seemed to be listening to a distant freight train in his memory.

She cleared her throat softly. 'Gee, it must be interesting to travel around on freight trains and see things. Lonely, I suppose. But interesting.'

'Yup!' he said in Gary Cooper's lockjaw way. 'Real interesting, ma'am. But real lonely, too.'

She pushed her coffee mug aside. 'I've really got to get some sleep.' But she still didn't rise to go. 'You said something about not being able to go to bed because they wouldn't let you in. Who won't let you in? Why not?'

'Obviously, you're not au fait with the protocol of your friendly neighborhood flophouse. They're all pretty much the same. You sleep in wire cages that you can lock from the inside to protect your bindle from thieves and your body from men who— They're not exactly homosexuals. Most of them would rather have a woman. Most of them fantasize about women. But...' He shrugged and glanced at her to see if this was embarrassing her. But no. She was listening with a frown of concern, trying to understand with a total absence of coyness that he admired. 'The flophouse routine is simple and rigid. You aren't allowed in until ten at night, and by eleven the lights are turned off. Early in the morning, usually five-thirty or six, the alarms go off and you've got half an hour to get out before they clean the place with a fire hose, shooting it through the wire cages. The