A Glimpse of Tiger Read online

  16

  Tiger’s next day was a little easier. And that surprised her. She’d lain awake practically all night, dreading the next day so much that, when it finally camped on her windowsill, it shimmered not with dread but with relief. If nothing else, it marked an end to night, and that was a good night to have an end marked to. And yet—why was she all that upset? Luther’s call did not come exactly as a surprise. Also, he’d be calling again. And though she hated him for not letting her rest, she also delighted in his keeping in touch as she slalomed her way through her old, yet alien world. The best strategy would be, she reasoned, to act unconcerned when he called. That would burn him more than anything. The next time he called she’d say, “Oh, hi—I’ve been expecting your call. How are you…Lenny?” She smiled. She liked that. That had style. That was the old spirit. Rah-rah.

  Before checking in at work, she made certain to have a good and well-balanced breakfast, to compensate for her lack of sleep. And what better place than Schrafft’s, where they had all those cute little rolls? It wasn’t something she’d be able to do every day on her salary, but since it was early on in a new game, she figured it was right and necessary to fortify and pamper herself just a trifle. French toast, please. Très magnifique.

  The work was placed on her desk like straw for Rumpelstiltskin. She attacked and performed admirably. She also handled the coffee break with more assurance, barking her order to the counterman in the hole, who threw it at her with a slight curve, but she was ready and one-handed it like Johnny Bench.

  Lunch was with Martha, just the two of them, exchanging life stories. She made no mention of Luther, making up instead a huge dramatic story about a back-street romance with a man of forty-eight who was dying of a war wound. He was divorced, of course, and had three children, two of them older than Tiger. Also, he wanted to marry her before he died, which looked to be coming in the spring. It was a much better story than Martha had to tell because Martha for all her basic intelligence, was from a large family in Brooklyn and nothing ever happened there except periodic unemployment for her father who was a steamfitter or something—but a good one. So Tiger did most of the talking. And she was quite adept at the tale telling, almost as good as Luther might have been under similar circumstances. Tom Dietrich (Tiger made him up) seemed so real that she actually found herself sobbing into the soup of the day, which was watered-down enough. Martha advised her to break up with Tom as soon as possible because it wasn’t fair to either of them. Also, it would leave a big scar on Tiger’s subconscious. Tiger allowed as to how right Martha was but wondered if she could stand not seeing Tom ever again. Also, she wanted to be with him when he died. Martha cried for Tom but still placed Tiger’s well-being first, and suggested that Tiger try to meet new men. What new men? Where? Martha knew a few. She’d work on it.

  It rained exceptionally hard that afternoon, the rain plinking so loud on the exterior glass walls that it could be heard over the typing. But Tiger liked it. It was cleansing. She wondered if the Lever Brothers Building, not too far away, didn’t lather in such a downpour. Or if the Seagram’s Building didn’t get drunk. Or if the Arrow Shirt Building (there just had to be one) didn’t shrink. Or if the Yacht Club Building didn’t float away.

  It was really pouring on the street, splattering like transparent plums. And the ever-revolving door kept depositing people from the lobby into the rain, where they stacked up under the overhanging canopy, knowing that to venture further would be like going full fathom five.

  A few people had umbrellas and decided to walk for their lives. The rest just stood around and said “Wow.” Scrambling for cabs would prove nothing except that people in crises were basically ornery. Tiger stood there as helpless as the others, only not as bothered because she was in no great hurry to get back to the Y. She looked at the people and wanted to tell them to take to the high ground; only she didn’t think it would get much of a laugh. She had no umbrella, no raincoat, and there was no chance of the rain’s stopping for forty days and nights. A bus pulled to the curb a little up the street. Tiger couldn’t see, but she knew that two of everything were getting on. Two chickens, two apes, two goats, too much.

  A cab splashed up right before her, and its doors swung open even before the cab had stopped. A man’s voice gurgled out at the crowd. “Come on! Get in!” A dozen daring girls shrieked and raced for the open door, and Tiger thought that people get killed at soccer games like that. “No! No!” said the voice, and an index finger stuck out and pointed straight at Tiger’s heart. “You!”

  Tiger pointed to herself like a disbelieving Miss America. “Me?”

  “Yes, you! Come on!”

  The other girls groaned, and Tiger felt guilty. Why her? But while she was cogitating a hand reached out and she found herself almost flying into the cab.

  She looked at the man alongside her. A pipe smoker. Around forty. Handsome in a menacing, cocksure way. Probably tall. The man pulled the door shut, and the cab pulled away. The man looked at Tiger and smiled. “Hello.”

  Tiger organized herself as best she could under such short notice. She looked only once at the man and smiled back, instantly determining that she might have made a mistake in getting in, and that if she wasn’t careful, it could just turn out to be a very bumpy ride. She tried to see if the driver was a criminal type, but his head was turned full away. For all she knew she was about to be driven upstate, raped, robbed, and murdered. Served her right.

  The man was enjoying his momentary advantage. He puffed big clouds of pipe smoke into the cab with the obvious intention of overwhelming her with irresistible aromatic masculinity. Tiger resented the tactic and coughed on purpose. A nice, juicy, watery cough, something of the consumptive—just in case he had any ideas of sticking his tongue down her dying throat.

  The man failed to get the message. He removed the pipe from his mouth and spoke with superb modulation. God, she hated him. “Wet?”

  She brushed off some rain and would be struck dead before she’d make the mewing noises of a damsel rescued. “Yes. I perspire heavily.”

  The man didn’t quite know what to make of that, so he laughed loudly. Then he raised his eyebrows in that saccharine knowing smile. “Does the pipe bother you?”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Then she coughed again. Louder. Then she waved her hands about to disperse the heavy billows. “It’s all right. It’s fine.”

  Because she had said that it was all right, the man (an obvious moron) kept puffing away. Tiger could not believe how ridiculous he was in that Aquascutum trench coat surrounded by Dunhill pipe smoke. And damned if he didn’t nudge her with his elbow and wink and say, “Always get into cabs with strangers?”

  Actually it was a good question. Why had she gotten into the cab? Did she think he was Luther? Or poor expiring Tom Dietrich? Or Clark Gable? Did she think it was her father come from Indianapolis on a white horse? Or did she think it was a total stranger and did that idea tickle her? Or did she not think at all, which was more apt to be the case, judging from her behavior over the last few days. It was certainly something to ponder in her old age, provided she ever arrived there. The odds, though, were in favor of her checking out early…and the very cab she was in could easily be the vehicle that would take her to her demise. Not that she any longer believed that the man was a threat, but more because the visibility outside was so absurdly limited that it had to be definitely suicidal to…

  “I asked if you always get into cabs with strangers?”

  “Always,” she said. The trick, she knew, was to agree the man to death. It was a philosophy that Smith girls used when wanting to dampen the ardor of an undesirable suitor. It was invariably successful, though, once, the Amherst man she was working it on had his hand halfway up her goose-pimpling thigh before saying, “Ah, shit,” and walking away.

  “I see,” the man beside her said. The hell he saw. He puffed three times, three clouds north, and the cabby disappeared within them and, for a moment, all there was of the d
river was a series of Morse coughs. The man, undaunted (but then, so are idiots), tried again. “We work for the same firm, you and I. I saw you in the commissary, and because I liked what I saw, I asked who you were.”

  She didn’t comment. He hadn’t asked a question; therefore, no answer was required.

  “Is that okay?” he asked.

  That was definitely a question, so she answered with a masterful disinterest. “Okay.”

  It had to have been about that time that the man began to realize that he was not doing well with his wet waif. So, with utter charm, he puffed up another atomic mushroom and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to know who I am?”

  “No.”

  The man, not an idiot in the true sense, knew when he was being stiffed. Struck silent by her passionate disinterest, he puffed so hard on his pipe that even he coughed. They all coughed. It was like a tuberculosis ward in Geneva. There was so much smoke in the cab that, from the outside, it must have looked as though it were on fire. Tiger, not caring for asphyxia as an end to all woe, rolled down her window just a trifle…and the smoke raced out so quickly, and with such a wind, that had she not held hard to the door handle, she might have been sucked out with it. She wasn’t certain, but she thought that perhaps the man went flying past her, siphoned out through the partially opened window. But no such luck. He was still there in the swirling Kansas twister, still sitting like Lincoln at his memorial; only now he was taking extreme umbrage and his voice was expressing high dudgeon. “Where can I drop you?”

  Tiger leaned forward, fanning a clearing so that she could find the cabby’s ear. “The Marshal House Y, please. It’s on East Forty-seventh Street.” Then she leaned back, having taken note of the driver’s name in the undulating mist. It was a thing Luther always did, collected names. In this case the man’s name was not worth recording. “Robert E. Williams.” Forget it.

  The smoke was on the rise in the cab, for the man was about to try his charm again, once more into the breach. “I could have let you drown, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe next time I will.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re a little bitch. You won’t last a week.”

  “I know.”

  The man shouted to the cabby, a great cliché, but what else was there to be said? “Step on it, will you?”

  The driver said, “I know.” And Tiger laughed to herself. Good old Robert E. Williams, true to his breed, had been eavesdropping all along and had, with royal impertinence, delivered unto the Aquascutum man, the final put-down. Cheers, oh, cabby, and may all your tips be big ones.

  The cab moored in front of the Y, and the curb was at the man’s side. Tiger noticed his hands, wiggling on his knees. What were they about to do—pinch or punch? She decided not to risk it and got out of the cab on her side. For her troubles she was close to flattened by a truck that cursed as it whooshed by. She turned to the man and said, “Thank you,” before closing the door on him, she hoped, for all time. But if the man ever said, “You’re welcome,” she never heard it because of all the loud smoke.

  She scampered behind the idling cab, taking no chances, and galomped through the puddles and up the steps to the entrance of the Y. And there she bumped into Luther.

  He stood in the hard and vertical rain, thoroughly drenched. It was difficult for Tiger to make him out because the rain was cascading off her own eyelashes in such a manner as to make it seem as though she were looking at Luther through a beaded curtain. “Luther?”

  His collar was up, his hair a tangled black doormat, and he was very, very disturbed with her as he stood blocking her entrance. “Where have you been? Your mother and I have been frantic. We even checked the bus terminal. And the morgue. We want you to come home, Beverly. Your old room is ready. And Mr. Hinckley says you can have your old job back at the shirt factory.”

  Tiger had expected that if she ever saw Luther again, her heart would go out of its mind. It hadn’t. Therefore she was relieved and disheartened simultaneously. Perhaps it was as they said (who said?), you can’t look back. All she could feel was the cold rain going right through her, trickling down her legs and gathering in her shoes. “Can we get out of the rain?”

  “What rain?”

  She pushed past him and into the lobby, where a pool of water formed so quickly about her feet that, for a moment, she had the disquieting feeling that, like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, she was melting.

  Luther came in behind her, shaking his jacket free of the veil of rain and looking around at the large and gloomy lobby. “Take my advice, Jessica. Get out of this house tonight. The ghost of Jeremy Dalton is in these very walls.”

  She faced him, unperturbed. Seeing him again had not proved as shattering as she had anticipated. Seeing him, by God, was easier than thinking him. Seeing him alive and as wet as she was seemed to reduce the pressure that had been building inside her since the moment she left him. A big truck tire in her tummy was slowly deflating. She could feel the hiss of it, and she relaxed in the slackening tension. “I’m not doing any more movies, Luther. From now on all my dialogue is spontaneous—though sometimes a little repetitious like…leave me alone.” She liked the way she had said that. Forthright, unhesitating. No vacillating. No crap.

  Luther was a forlorn thing. How long had he been standing in the rain in order for everything on him to have turned so monocolored and sopping gray? He looked like a man on a breadline who had just been told that the last two crusts of bread had been awarded to a man who had the last piece of ham. “I have left you alone,” he said. “For almost forty-eight hours. It’s not working. Too much too soon. I’m getting the bends.”

  She walked away from him, across the lobby to the elevator, which wasn’t there, so she rang for it and waited with her back to Luther. She heard his squishy shoes come to a stop behind her. She turned, and without looking at him, she made an imaginary line on the floor with her shoe tip. “You can’t go past this line. If you do, you get electrocuted.”

  He smiled, seeming to respect her threat. Then he came directly to the point. “Leon the Rodent is gone. He got depressed and threw himself under a cat. Fat goes as soon as his wardrobe comes back from the laundry.” He was standing five feet away from her with his heart opened. “Tiger, the longer I let you stay away, the better the chances you’ll forget you were brought up by us wolf people. You’ll be walking on your hind legs in no time, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  The elevator arrived, its door opening automatically. “I’m sorry,” she said, and stepped into the elevator and pressed twelve. He moved smoothly, stopping the door from closing by letting it continually push against his big shoulder. The door pushed, retreated, pushed, retreated…but he took the gentle hammering while just standing there looking at her. She said it without concern about whether he lived or died or got pressed into a man nine feet tall and six inches wide: “You’re not allowed up. This is a girls’ hotel.”

  “Oh, that poor girl.”

  “Luther, please. I’ll call you.” She was being patronizing. She hated people who patronized, so she hated herself, but she still patronized. “I really will. I’ll call you first chance.”

  “Can’t. They took the phone back. Don Ameche and his gang of ruffians.”

  “I’ll send word.”

  “How?”

  “The queen’s ring.”

  “The queen is dead.”

  “Pigeons.”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “I’ll get some.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I will…Luther! Will you get out of here!” She was furious. Her back was pressed hard against the elevator panel, and if he took but one step toward her she’d scream and kick and God help him. She hated him. She was glad he showed up the way he did because it proved to her that where absence made the heart grow fonder, presence only made it stop cold. Her fists were clenched, and she had chewed so hard into her lower lip that she could taste blood. />
  He took a moment, to monitor her wrath and to consider what it was that he actually wanted. He smiled, but it faded hurriedly. He started to speak, but the words never found their way past his muddled censor. Finally, he stepped aside, allowing the elevator door to close. And it looked to him like a sideways guillotine, slicing into Tiger, then obliterating her. He stared at the closed door and listened to the elevator going up. He stayed where he was until he heard the elevator stop somewhere up there. Satisfied that she had arrived safely, he turned and squished across the lobby, retracing his own soggy footprints as though it were the only way he could find his way out. He stopped at the desk, where the ancient lady in charge had been watching the entire scene. And when he spoke to her, it was with a conspiratorial tone. “Anything happens to that girl, I’ll hold you responsible. She’s had five heart transplants and two knee operations already. How much is she expected to take?” He left, stepping into the downpour as the old lady wondered just what in the world he was.

  Well, that didn’t work. Maybe it was the weather. Whatever it was, my appearance at the Y went over like Hitler playing Grossinger’s. I had actually convinced myself that after a couple of days away from me, she’d come a-running into my swarthy arms at the very sight of me. Shows you how wrong you can be if you really try hard enough. Still, if I was any judge of the female nature, she had reacted just a little too strongly to my showing up in that DAR outhouse. Had she been cool, had she been controlled all the way, I’d have been concerned. But the fact that she ended up screaming at me, well, I took that to be an expression of interest. The opposite of love is disinterest—not hate. Love and hate come out of the same stable. They carry the same colors. One may be Cain and the other Abel, but they’re still Siamese in their twinness. Disinterest, on the other hand, is a cold loner and a distant cousin. Whereas indifference, that icy son of a bitch, he is a great and frosty aunt, twelve times removed and on your mother’s side. Speaking of mother, I still hadn’t heard a word from her. They were obviously spending the best part of their vacation not writing to me. There were so many others they could not write to, why did they have to pick me out? Small wonder I kept wetting my bed. I was sublimating, convincing myself I was riding a surfboard right up to the Hawaiian sands on which they were lying around sucking coconuts and getting leid. Oh, well, and what the hell…what was really bothering me was that Tiger had gotten out of a cab in which some guy had brought her to the Y. And I didn’t care for that one iota in hell. Two days away, and she’s got a guy at the Y. (Rhyme time, folks.) I don’t mind a girl walking out on me in the dead of the stinking night while I’m up to my dingoes with a freaked-out weirdo. I don’t even mind never seeing her again if that’s the way she wants it. But what I do object to is another guy being immediately called in to cut my time. I expect any girl who leaves me to be discriminating enough to remain celibate for at least a week. I expect her to “think convent” until my memory has properly cooled. I expect her to serve penitence and crush grapes and maybe bake a little bread with a gay monk. What I do not expect her to do is to instantly hook up with a priest with the sole intention of humping him on the altar in the Y. You know what goes on in those Y’s. Those priests, they come in to hear prayers and to give solace and they end up with more ass than a cop taking kickbacks in a red-light district. It’s true in YWHA’s, too. Don’t think for a minute that the rabbi on duty doesn’t get himself a nifty bit of ass from the ladies of the Hadassah. Think of the very word: “Hadassah.” Break it down into syllables, and you come up with the ancient rabbinical sex chant: “Had-Ass-Ah!” Anyway, regardless of one’s religious persuasions, you have to admit that there’s an awful lot of hanky-panky going on in the name of the Lord. So I didn’t much care for Tiger taking up with a clergyman in a cab as she was doing, probably going down on him in return for some kind of supreme unction, while he genuflects her little boobs with one hand while investigating her sweet box with the other. I don’t care—whoever the bloke in question was—Father Divine, Father Christmas, or Mother Russia—the situation was too quickly getting out of hand and bore watching because the whole damned history of the Judeo-Christian church has been one of demonic debauchery in the Lord’s name. Just keep in mind the fact that the attitude of a good atheist is “Fuck God.” Whereas the attitude of the church is “Fuck everyone.” For myself, pals, all I wanted to do was “fuck Tiger” as in days of yore. Therefore, plans had to be made, traps set, the pit baited. For it is written in the Koran that the race goes to the quick. And as even a schoolboy knows, time and Tiger wait for no man. Amen, and how’s your ass?