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“Correction. I was drunk. Now I am sober. Completely cold sober. And I shall stay here. You can throw food to me. I will become a landmark. Through cold of night and rain and frost and burn of sun. Indomitable. People will throng to look at me. Your restaurant will thrive.”

“Impossible, sir. This is a very correct place. Your ambassador has dined here often. And we frequently serve titled people. Even once a king.”

“Kings are just like everybody else. They enjoy something unique. I am going to spend the rest of my natural life right here on your flossy little shelf, buster.”

“Oh, no sir!” the man said piteously.

“Park! Park! I’m over here.”

The crowd had grown. He spotted her on the edge of it. And he did not see the others. She looked very concerned.

“Hello, Bitsy.”

“Park, please come down. I want to talk to you.”

He hesitated for just a moment. “Okay, Bits.” He clambered carefully over the low railing and lowered himself until he hung by his fingers on the marquee edge. When he was sure it was clear below he dropped and struck his chin sharply on his knee and stood up wearily and spat out a fragment of filling.

The head waiter was bowing and beaming. The doorman was dispersing the curious. Bitsy took his arm and walked him down the street. She stopped by a street light and gave him Kleenex and said, “You’re an awful mess, honey.”

“Where did everybody go?”

“It’s a long story. They went. I’ll tell you some time. They decided to go back. They took the car.”

“That’s just jimdandy and nifty,” he said thickly. “What’re we supposed to do, for God’s sake?”

“Hush!” she said. “Come along, now.”

They walked several blocks. His knee was beginning to stiffen up. The whole world was blurred and unconvincing. She backed him against a wall and pushed with gentle emphasis against his chest and said, “Now you stay right here. Don’t you dare move. I won’t be gone a minute. Promise?”

“All right. All right. All right.”

He shut his eyes. And when the world began to tilt ominously he opened them. In a few moments she materialized in front of him. “Now you come with me and don’t say one darn word, and you walk fast, hear? And try to keep your face sort of turned away from people.”

He had a confusing impression of a small, almost deserted, lobby, and then they were in a birdcage elevator that tinkled and ground its way slowly upward. He looked down at her. She stood beside him, her face bland, biting her under lip.

They went down a long corridor, poorly lighted, until she found the number. She unlocked the door and found the lights. It was an old-fashioned-looking hotel room with very high ceilings, two brass beds, a worn flowered rug, ancient dark furniture, a private bath with a tub on claw feet and a prehistoric shower head.

He weaved back and forth and tried to smile at her, and said, “Bitsy, Bitsy, Bitsy.”

“Now you hush. You get in there and you shower good. You just cold soak, hear?” She pushed him toward the bathroom.

As he was undressing she came to the door and asked him to pass out his torn trousers. When he did so, she passed him in a blanket to wrap up in when he’d finished showering.

When he came out of the bathroom the world had a more substantial look about it. She was biting a thread. “You could be human almost,” she said. “I wouldn’t call this any invisible weaving, but it’ll be better than having your bare knee hanging out in the wind.”

She went over to the bureau and poured him a large steaming cup of black coffee. “I found somebody on the other end of that phone speaks English. No, you’ll spill if you try to carry it. You’re on the unsteady side, man. You sit over there and I’ll bring it.”

He sat in a big chair, all dark brocade and carving, and tucked his blanket around him. She brought him the coffee and lighted his cigarette and her own. She had taken off her shoes and stockings. She poured coffee for herself, kicked a small dusty hassock over closer to his chair and sat on it.

“Better now?” she asked.

“Lots.”

“Are you too woozy to understand me if I tell you something?”

“No. I’m operating on the inside better than the outside.”

“Well, you were getting to be real messy and tiresome, Park. And I swear, it sure was funny when you went a-flying up there, arms and legs going like mad. And I laughed. And I felt kind of ashamed and sorry at the same time. Do you understand?”

“Yes. It’s not flattering. But I understand.”

“So we went on, oh, maybe two blocks to a little place where it’s two steps down. And they were bragging on how high you flew. It’s one of those things that’ll get told for years, here and there. They were betting on how much you weigh.”

“A hundred and sixty-five, about,” he said wearily.

“After a little time they started talking about something else, and then I said isn’t it about time we go back and get him. I tell you, they looked at me like I lost my mind. And all of a sudden I realized that wasn’t part of it at all. They weren’t going back. Had no intention of it right from the beginning. And, for a little while, I tried to go along with that idea, but I didn’t feel right at all. Maybe it was funny, but it was cruel too. And nobody stopped to find out what was up there. Too drunk to think about it. And I thought maybe iron spikes sticking up or something. So I said I thought we ought to go back. They saw I meant it, so they tried to laugh me out of it. I tell you, Park, I sat there and I looked at them a long time and then something inside me gave a little clunk and sort of turned over. Those wonderful boys and my very best friend, all of a sudden they looked empty. I don’t know how to say it. I’ve been noticing it a little bit on other dates and in letters and so on, but not enough to really rare back and take a look. They just looked empty, smiling like the face on the zoo lions. You remember I had the car key. I got it away from you. So I clunked it on the table and said I was going back. Mary Jane smiled nasty and told me to have fun and said she wanted to
go on back to Cuernavaca, right away. So go, I told her. And I just walked out. When I saw all those people, I thought you were dead. I really did. And I really came running, man. And there you were setting up there like a toad on the roof, jawing at that poor man with the mustache. The thing I feel so bad about is, honey, that this wasn’t the ordinary kind of fight with Mary Jane. This was a new kind. It will get patched some, but things won’t be the same. All of a sudden like, I don’t like her so much any more.”

“I’m glad you came back, Bitsy. Damn glad.”

“You better get some more of that coffee down you.” She refilled his cup.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I was thinking on staying right here, Park. Anyways, that’s the way I signed us in. Had they got a look at you first, I never would have made it. There’s two beds, and you’re going to have to have somebody around in the morning to keep you from killing yourself.”

“Big scandal at the Workshop.”

“Pooh. I’ve been talked up lots of times. I still sleep fine. But don’t you go around getting the idea there’s more to this offer, Park. I can just as easy as not show you how much judo I know. And you’re not in what anybody would want to call a healthy condition. You work on that coffee some more while I see if I can get some of the blood out of your clothes. Your nose looks pretty bulgy. How’s it feel?”

“Not too bad, but I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye. It makes me nervous.”

She went into the bathroom. He heard the water running in the sink and the small energetic sounds of scrubbing. She came out and said, “They’re drying on the shower rail. I didn’t do all the good I wanted to. But I did some.” She took his empty cup. “You better pile in, man. The more sleep you can get the less you’ll feel like a dog’s dinner tomorrow.”

“Bitsy.”

“Yes?”

“Bitsy, will you listen if I talk to you? I mean … I feel like I have to talk. Now. Or maybe I won’t be able to say it later. Maybe you don’t give a damn, but I want to tell you about me. I don’t mean the crap I’ve told you. All those little inferences and hints designed to make me look so much better than I am. If I’m ever going to learn to live with myself, I’ve got
to do an emotional strip tease. Strip all the way down to the silly little creature under all the pretense.”

“You sure are one talker,” she said.

“Will you listen, please?”

“I’ll listen.”

And he talked. Sometimes he walked up and down the room as he talked, the blanket clutched at his waist. He seldom glanced toward her, as though afraid of what he might see. It wasn’t ornate. It was hard, bitter self-disgust and recrimination. The stale vomit from the soul. Waste and callousness and pretense. And fear. She sat on the bed and listened to him, and knew she had understood him from the first, and marveled that he had the courage to try to understand himself. At times his voice was dull and at times it was almost shrill. And finally, from the timbre of his voice she sensed that he was at last very close to some ultimate point of either fracture or release. So when he passed close she reached out and caught his hand, stopping him in midsentence.

She smiled up at him. “Talk, talk, talk,” she said gently. And the fat tears stood on her under lids. She gave his hand a single tug, and that was all that was needed. There was a grotesque contortion of his face, and then he half fell to the bed beside her, and ground his face into the soft angle between her throat and shoulder, and let go the raking, convulsive, frightening sobbing of a man grown. She cradled his head and rocked him gently, making the murmur-sounds of comfort, feeling the small hot touches of his tears.

When he had quieted, she kissed him. As she kissed at him he groped at her clumsily but with a blind persistence born of needs deeper than those of the flesh. She felt a species of warm and ironic resignation, a special primitive knowledge. She whispered to him to get into bed. She turned off the room lights, and undressed slowly, her thoughts slow and sad and sweet. And she slid in beside him, into the trembling circle of his arms, and she pressed long against him and, with a sudden fierce and protective strength, she locked her hand on her wrist and hugged him around the waist.

Long after he was asleep she lay awake, her eyes wide, turned away from him. He was curled against her back, one arm heavy on her waist, his long exhalations stirring the hair at the nape of her neck.

She had not meant this to happen, she knew. From the
beginning he had wanted it to happen. That was clear. And he had been so suavely confident of her. But it did not and it could not have happened his way. Not as a kind of game. There had been enough of games. It was time for the things that happen for real. And this, in its own way, had been a new kind of real. To be needed so blindly and helplessly and desperately by a man trying to cleanse himself of all illusion. And then, without any greediness of the body, to make of yourself, for him, a deep and warm and tender cradle, and feel exalted and purposeful and so necessary as you held there the bruised body and the torn spirit, and then to rock him in sweetness and gentleness and loving, rocking strongly to mend the hurts, to bring him down at last in warm collapse, with his racing heart and his long, long sigh of fulfillment.

Not like anything that had ever happened to her before. She knew in her native wisdom that this was not very much man. He was clever rather than wise, querulous instead of strong. He could never be cured of his self-doubts, his anxieties. He would always fuss at fate, and meet disaster only with indignation. But he would always need her. And there was a sweetness in him. With something that was almost amusement, she saw the exact dimensions of the trap into which she had willingly walked. Gone now the hope of that one-day, some-day man who would be larger than life.

This man was on smaller scale. A boy-man, who would resent deeply the slight loss of love when she had to spread it among their children, because he would have a greedy need of all of it. And when he wanted to strut, she would have to become a child, respectfully attentive to his instructions.

He sighed in his sleep and for a moment the muscles in his arms tightened. He was back inside himself somewhere, jabbing at his dragons with a paper knife.

She had no illusion that this was something just for a little while. His need was too great. And her response to that need was too strong. And there, in her heart, she became married. She had always wondered what sort of wife she would be. And now she knew she would be a very good one. And she would have to be a very good one. To keep him whole in the face of all his enemies, real and imaginary.

I found him on a roof thing, she thought. Got him down and cleaned him up and so that makes him mine.

No more to and fro, she thought. No more to and fro.

She nestled back to be more firmly against him; she sighed and yawned and then smiled in the dark and gave a little shake of her head in a sort of amused exasperation at herself, and then drifted peacefully into a dreamless sleep.

When Mary Jane awoke on Monday morning the twenty-fourth of July, too many hours since Bitsy had walked out of that cellar hole where the
mariachis
were too drunk to stay in tune, she noticed at once that Bitsy had not returned. She felt angry and worried. It was not at all like Bitsy to get so darn temperamental. And it was certainly a waste of sympathy and concern for her to be upset about Park. He was a desolate type.

After they had taken a cab back to where they had left the car, Mary Jane had decided that they would go look for Bitsy. They found the place where they had left Barnum. A restaurant man, who showed evidence of recent strain, informed them that the man had refused to come down until a girl had spoken to him. Then he had come down. And they had gone off that way. On foot.

They cruised until the boys got bored, and so they had one more drink and headed back across the mountains, singing everything they knew. But Mary Jane’s heart wasn’t in her singing. She was about as mad at Bitsy as she had ever been at anybody. She had been impatient and angry all day Sunday. And now she was still angry, but also apprehensive. Everybody was talking about it. That Klauss person had leered at her several times in a slimy and knowing way.