“It’s nice to feel wanted. I wish I did.”
“Sugar, I want you. You know that. It’s just that I don’t have time.”
“Stay here, Sid. Please do.”
“Sugar, I can’t possibly. Rose is waiting for me, and it’s the last time we’ll have to get ready for Zoroaster.”
“To hell with Rose and Zoroaster.”
“You musn’t talk like that, sugar. Zoroaster was a god once, even though no one believes in him any more, and it’s sacrilegious to curse him.”
She stepped into a pair of white panties and slipped the pale yellow dress over her head. I watched with regret as the nut-brown body disappeared, and I wished there was time to bring it back, but there wasn’t, because of Rose and Zoroaster and the discussion group, and I felt bitter about this, somehow deprived, and I was getting lonely again.
“Sugar,” she said, “please zip me up in back.”
“Do you think you can trust me?”
“I’m sure you can restrain yourself if you’ll only try.”
“It will be necessary, you understand, for me to touch you.”
“A slight touching probably won’t lead to anything. I don’t believe the danger will be great.”
She backed up to me, and I zipped her up, and she walked over to her dressing table and began to brush her short brown hair with quick strokes.
“Did you clear the table?” she said.
“Yes. I put the things in the sink.”
“Did you finish the wine and the tails?”
“I finished the wine, but not the tails. One was left.”
“You had better put it in the refrigerator, then.” She put the brush on the dressing table and shoved her feet into white flats and came over and sat down on my lap. “Sugar, I’m sorry to run. Really I am. What will you do while I’m gone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe read. Maybe listen to music.”
“You can think about when I get home. We’ll have an interesting time if you like.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“It’s hard to tell. Quite a while, I imagine. You know how Rose is about things. She insists upon considering every little detail that might or might not be important.”
“Try to be back soon,” I said.
She kissed me then, still perched on my lap, and I began to hope as the kiss went on that I might have my own way after all, but she finally pulled away just short of disintegration, and stood up, and smoothed her pale yellow skirt over her nut-brown hips.
“You keep thinking about later,” she said, “and so will I.”
“All right,” I said. “Have fun with Zoroaster.”
She went out, and I watched her. Slim brown legs below the yellow skirt. Bare brown arms and slender brown neck bearing erectly her proud brown head. I could hear her going down the stairs. I heard the screen door slam.
CHAPTER 4
Well, she was gone.
She had deserted me without appreciable concern just when I was full of vague apprehensions and sorrows, to say nothing of gin and white Burgundy and lobster tails, and was peculiarly susceptible as a consequence to all sorts of idiocies.
What I thought was, if a man can’t compete with Rose Pogue and Zoroaster, what a hell of a man he is. That’s what I thought.
I had wanted her to stay, and she had refused, in spite of leers and suggestions and gin kisses, and even if I had ordered her to stay, no foolishness about it, she would certainly have refused and gone anyhow.
If you are looking for someone with a little authority, I thought, I have as little as anyone.
That wasn’t original. I had read it on one of these little signs that men buy for their desks. These little signs are supposed to be funny and make you laugh, but I wasn’t amused. I was sad and lonely and at odds ends.
I got up from the bed, where I was still sitting after being kissed and deserted. Sid’s short shorts were a bright little pile of cotton on the floor where they had dropped after slipping over her nut-brown hips and down, down, down her nut-brown legs. I picked them up and put them on the bed and went downstairs and washed and dried all the things I had left in the sink. I put the things away in proper places and went out onto the back terrace and looked up at the moon and the mess of stars. They were bright and near now, but not so near as the cherry hearts of charcoal glowing through ash in the grill. I sat down in a canvas sling chair and smoked three cigarettes, which helped to keep the mosquitoes away, and then I went back inside and found a bottle of gin and made a batch of gimlets with Rose’s lime juice, leaving out the cucumber slices, which are only decoration anyhow, and on into the living room, carrying a gimlet in a glass, and turned on a light. I thought I might as well listen to some music, and so I went over to the record cabinet and began looking through the collection of records to see what I could find that would seem appropriate to the kind of night it was and the land of mood I was in. I am ordinarily a Haydn man, and will choose something by Haydn seven times out of ten, but tonight old Papa struck me as being a little too God-damn cheerful, and so I looked through the records until I came to Death and Transfiguration, by Richard Strauss, who was a good composer too, and I knew at once that this was exactly it.
I put the record on the player and sat down to listen and drink the gimlet. I remember reading in the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini about how old Benvenuto went down from Florence to Naples with this certain character he knew, and afterward he said he’d never go anywhere with him again, because he was the kind
