Hot Night in the City

'I'm sorry,' he said. '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!' His eyes crinkled into a smile. 'Maybe I'll start next Thursday. How would that be?'

She didn't answer for a time, then she 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 mattresses are covered with waterproof plastic so they don't get soaked, but they always feel clammy, and the place always smells of urine and Lysol. But the price is right! Four bits a night. A dime more if you want a shower. Tonight I took a long cold shower, then I lay on my cot, reading a paperback until the lights went out. But it was so hot! The plastic mattress stuck to my back and made a sort of ripping sound every time I rolled over. And the sweat was stinging my eyes. So finally I decided to get out and wander the streets. But then...' He shifted to a Peter Lorre voice, nasal and lateral with dentalized consonants. '...what should I see but June Allyson coming out of a June Allyson movie, so naturally I followed her. You think that was evil of me, don't you, Rick. You don't like me much, do you, Rick.' He smiled and returned to his street voice. 'And now here I am, talking to a very, very sleepy girl in an almost empty White Tower. Ain't life a gas?'

She shook her head sadly. 'Gosh, what a terrible way to live. And for a person who went to college, too.'

He let W. C. Fields respond, 'That's the way it is out there, my little chickadee. It's not a fit life for man nor beast!'

'You must be lonely.'

'Yup,' he said. 'Sometimes a fella gets lonelier than one of those lonely things you see out there being lonely.' Then he suddenly stopped clowning around. 'I guess I'm nearly as lonely as a girl who gets all dressed up on the hottest night of the year and goes out to see a movie... all alone.'

'Well I... I don't know many people here. And what with my night classes and all...' She shrugged. 'Gee, I've really got to get home.'

'Right. Let's go.'

She glanced again at the clock. 'And you're going to walk around until dawn?'

'Yup.'

She frowned down into her lap, and her throat mottled with a blush. 'You could...' She cleared her throat. 'You could stay with me if you want. Just until it gets light, I mean.'

He nodded, more to himself than to her.

They stepped out of the cool White Tower into the humid heat of the street. At first, the warmth felt good on their cold skin, but it soon became heavy and sapping. They walked without speaking. By inviting him to her room, she had made a daring and desperate leap into the unknown, and now she was tense and breathless with the danger of it... and the thrill of it. 'Is this it?' she said to herself. 'Is he the one?'

He felt a thrill akin to hers, and when he smiled at her she returned an uncertain, fluttering smile that was both vulnerable and hopeful. There was something coltish in her awkward gait on those high heels, something little-girlish in the sibilant whisper of her stiff crinoline. He drew a long slow breath.

She led the way up three flights of dark, narrow stairs, both of them trying to make their bodies as light as possible because the stairs creaked and they didn't want to wake her landlady. She turned her key in the slack lock, opened the door, and made a gesture for him to go in first. After the dark of the stairwell, the room dazzled and deluded him. The streetlight under which they had first met was just beneath her window, and it cast trapezoidal distortions of the window panes up onto the ceiling, filling the room with slabs of bright light separated by patches of impenetrable shadow. His eyes had difficulty adapting to this disorienting play of dazzle and darkness because the brightness kept his irises too dilated to see into the shadows. The oilcloth cover of a small table was slathered with light, while the iron bed in the corner was bisected diagonally by the shadow of an oversized old wardrobe that consumed too much of the meager space. The only door was the one they had entered through, so he assumed the toilet must be down the hall. Actually, it was on the floor below. The room was an attic that had been converted at minimal cost, and the metal roof above the low ceiling pumped the sun's heat into the small space all day long.

'It's awful hot, I know,' she whispered apologetically. Standing there with her back to the window, she was faceless within a dazzling halo of hair, while the light was so strong on his face that it burned out any expression; she wore a mask of shadow, he wore a mask of light.

'I'll open the window so we can get a little breeze,' he whispered.

'You can't. It's stuck.'

'Jesus.'

'Sorry. Would you like a glass of water? If I run it a long time, it gets cold. Well... cool, anyway.'

'Do we have to whisper?'

'No, but I...'

'But you don't want your neighbors to know you have someone up here?'

She nodded. 'You see, I've never...' She swallowed noisily, and the noise of it embarrassed her.

'Yes, I would like a glass of water, thank you,' he said, not whispering, but speaking very softly. He sat on the edge of the bed, sunk up to his chest in shadow.

She turned the single tap above a chipped sink and let the water overflow the glass onto her wrist until it got cool, glad to have something to do—or, more exactly, to have something to delay what they were going to do.

The harsh streetlight picked out a two-ring hot plate on the table. Its cord ran up to a dangling overhead light. The bulb had been taken out and replaced by a screw-in socket. Cooking in the room was forbidden, but she did it anyway to save money. She unplugged the hot plate and hid it when she left for work. There was an open workbook and a pad of paper beside the hot plate: the Gregg Method. These everyday objects were abstracted, caricatured, by the brittle streetlight that set their edges aglow but coated them with thick shadow. The room had a shrill, unreal quality of a bright but deserted carnival lot.

She brought him the glass of water; he thanked her and drank it down; she asked if he would like another; he said he wouldn't, thank you; she told him it wouldn't be any trouble; he said no thanks, and she stood there awkwardly.

'Hey, what's this?' he asked, holding up a glass sphere that his fingers had discovered beneath her pillow where they had been unconsciously searching for that coolness that children seek by turning pillows over and putting their cheek on them.

'That's my snowstorm.'

He shook the heavy glass paperweight and held it out into the band of light across the bed to watch the snow