Fling and Other Stories Read online

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  “The next Thursday,” Miss Peg resumed, “I got myself all frilled up, smelling like a church on Easter morning, and Mason the chauffeur was just about to drive the help to the station, and me, sitting there, taking up half the back seat of the car, happy as a lintie thinking about my unknown sailor boy, when out from the quarters comes a message: ‘Tell Small Peggety to stop by at Mr. Saunders’ office, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He has a wee errand for her.’

  “Our Maggie, the cook, who if I was overweight she was a dried-up apricot of the fuzzy variety, said sarcastic, ‘Write down the address. Our Peggety is in love, she’s a bag of daydreams, she’ll never remember.’

  “Between the message and Maggie, it took quite some time for the others to dill me down to where I was calm again. Wasn’t it just like Mr. Saunders to save his ‘wee errands’ for that day? Any other time, this command would have made me tingle with the fun of doing it—‘thistles in me thumbs,’ as our mum used to say when she had a thrill. But that day, it was all I could do to think of my seafaring man with the handwriting like Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee fireworks.

  “Nevertheless, when we reached the city, I went of course as directed to 30 Rockefeller Plaza and I shot up into the sky where Mr. Saunders did his work and up I went to the lady at the desk and I said, trying to be sort of saucy and mature, ‘I am the Peggety. Mr. Saunders has a wee errand for me.’

  “The lady looked at me and said, ‘Sister, aren’t you kind of dressed up for this errand?’

  “So I replied, ‘The nature of the work was not divulged, you might say.’

  “The lady flicked a switch on a box, and I heard Mr. Saunders’ voice come out of the box, only his voice sounded like his nose had been snipped off by a crow or was pinched with a clothespin; he said, ‘What is it?’

  “ ‘Your maid,’ the lady said into the box, ‘has come for the carcass.’

  “This gave me the goose pimples all over, and since I was a thimber sort of girl, a large skin area, you might say, there was a considerable amount of puckering up to be got done with.

  “Mr. Saunders kind of laughed a noseless laugh from the box and said, ‘Send her in.’

  “I walked into the office whither the lady nodded, and there he was, the master, looking very wild, but with his nose, thank the Lord, quite unharmed. It must have been merely the mechanics of the box that had taken away his nose from his voice. In general the master was very wild, however. He was in his shirtsleeves and he was dressed in a big white apron and he had in his hand a butcher’s knife of the largest sort, and I thought: Oh me, I thought asphalt was used to pave the roads, what can it be that the master does for a living?

  “He said to me, ‘Sit down, girl, I’ll be ready in a few minutes.’

  “It was then,” Miss Peg said, “that I noticed another gentleman in the room, he was dressed in ordinary business clothes, though his look was rather ferocious, too, it seemed to me, but at the time, you must remember, I was only Small Peggety, twenty-three winters along, tipping the scales approximately two-o-eight, with no experience of the world beyond the Near Pantry, consequently this fierceness may have been imaginary on my part.

  “I also noticed—and this hit me all of a sudden, like the sun coming out from under a cloud—a smell in the place like Fulton Street at the East River, in other words, fish in all its glory. And by following my senses, I tracked this scent to Mr. Saunders’ desk, where lay, about as big as my upper arm, no, bigger yet, a whole salmon. A very substantial fish, I can assure you, Mrs. Manterbaum.

  “Mr. Saunders grasped the butcher knife in both hands, and he began to stagger and struggle around the room, talking the while like that raddio fellow, Mr. Clem McCarthy, dealing with the Derby, in case you are interested in the horses, Mrs. Manterbaum—breathless he was and yet in command of the telling. I soon puzzled it out that Mr. Saunders was describing to his friend the capture of this particular salmon of his. He was using the butcher knife for his rod and reel, and I was fearful lest he would fish himself into total blindness with that sharp thing. And so we had game-fishing all up and down the office for the next half hour. They say that salmon do go upriver in order to make love, and to hear Mr. Saunders speak of the reluctance of this whopper to leave the headwaters of the Skampawam, or whatever the river would be named, in Nova Scotia, it was—to hear him, I believe this fish must have been engaged in the romance of the century in the salmon world. Really, the aquarium should be told about it. Well! I tell you! We finally landed the thing, but we were panting and giving off a deal of perspiration over it—and there the lecherous rascal was, big as life and ten times smellier, right on Mr. Saunders’ desk, asphalt be damned.

  “ ‘He’s been thawing out all day,’ Mr. Saunders said. ‘We shipped him down in dry ice. His guts were cleaned up there, and now’—advancing on the salmon with the dreadful knife, he said this—‘now I’m going to lop off his head and tail so the girl here can manage him by hand and take him out home for us, and tomorrow night, Spencer, tomorrow night! Well, you’ll just have to wait and taste him.’

  “Our creature was thawed out, all right, and he gave up his head till there was salmon blood all over the newspapers on Mr. Saunders’ desk. Likewise the tail, a smaller operation but also not without splashes and clots of red. By this time the odor of fish was almost a fog around us that you could see. Whew!

  “More newspapers, a bundle, string; there we were. ‘Now, girl,’ said Mr. Saunders, who, never having been on my side of the Near Pantry, of course did not know me by name, ‘now, girl, you may take it home. And have a care!’

  “What a care I had, all that suffering night! And yet…

  “It was now, you see, pushing six o’clock, because of the length of Mr. Saunders’ description of his triumph over the poor hooked thing. Thus, if I was to meet my friend with the birthday-cake handwriting, I would have to rush right over there, with no time to park my bundle meanwhile. Right through the newspaper, through goodness knows how many layers of current events, you could not fail to smell my pink beheaded treat. Trembling, I dashed to the Ritz, corner of Madison and Forty-sixth.

  “I was on time but early. The Merchant Marine, being a man of the world, had decided to have a wee tease of Small Peggety, who knew nothing. So there I stood, before the most swoshy hotel in the land, waiting, with ladies going by in ermine and sapphires and curls right out of the permanent-wave machine, and me, under the marquee with all its sweet little light bulbs, me, embracing a two-and-a-half-foot stink. I was mortified to death, Mrs. Manterbaum.

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  “At last he came and worth waiting for. Short, stocky, and sort of sunny-Italy-complected. His pants as tight as wedding gloves. He was a lovely, tiny creature. He strolled right up to me, with all the swagger of his cute bowlegs, and he said, raising his white cap, ‘Miss Peggety, if I am not mistaken. I could have spotted you, my dear, from a mile away.’

  “Well, he had my heart right then and there, though now in my calmer years I can see that his first remark—about kenning me from such a very impressive distance—left something to be desired as a compliment.

  “Right there on the street corner, as he gazed up into my eyes, looking for my soul, you might say, and my heart like a moth by a sixty-watt lamp, I saw that the flanges of his nostrils were working away quite passionate, exactly like Mr. Rudolph Valentino’s, but then I realized that it wasn’t so much love at first sight as it was he had caught a whiff of something about my person. What he smelt, you already know, Mrs. Manterbaum.

  “I had no doubt, in the next moments, that my Bufano was as packed full of gentility as his bell-bottoms were packed full of Bufano. Because without so much as muttering, ‘Hm, fishy out tonight, ain’t it, Miss Peggety?’—with no such remarks, without a flicker of his lovely waxen eyelids, without even moving to windward of me, he said, ‘Well, my dear, wha
t’ll it be? Shall we dance? Or is food your pleasure? A steak, Miss Peggety?’ You see how well-bred he was? Steak! Any lesser man would have asked me if I was in the mood for a bite of seafood.

  “Timid, I said, ‘First off, Mr. Bufano, I’d like to run down to Grand Central and check this parcel for the evening.’

  “I could see from the way my Bufano looked at the package in my arms that he knew what I was carrying. Jaunty as you please, he swung around and offered me the crook of his arm.

  “At the checking place in Grand Central, I just pushed the package across the brass-plated counter. The man there pulled it toward him and actually snapped the checking tag onto the string. Then (I guess his nose was tuned in by this time) he looked up and said, ‘What’s in here?’

  “ ‘Just some laundry,’ I said. My Bufano stiffened a little at that. The counterman thumped at the package with his fists, shook his head, unsnapped the tag, and shoved the thing back to me.

  “ ‘Sorry, lady,’ the counterman said, ‘we ain’t allowed to accept no carrion here.’

  “I guess my feelings took a tumble that you could see and hear, because Bufano said, ‘Cheer up, my dear, we’ll just hurry over to Pennsylvania Station. We should have done that in the first place. You’ll have to leave from there when our spree is over.’

  “But the man in the parcel room at Penn Station was even quicker than our Grand Central fellow. Indeed, he looked at us at first with a dread look of suspicion, as if we were trying to dispose of the parts of a human body, one by one. I must confess, with the moisture and even some of the tint of corpuscles beginning to show through at the ends, my package might have been a man’s thigh-piece, from groin to kneecap. Except for the odor, which gave us an unmistakable alibi. All the man at the Penn Station counter said was ‘Uhn-uhn,’ negative.

  “My Bufano was a cheerful little rooster, he said we should try the Hotel Wentman, just a couple blocks over; they had a big checkroom, he said. No luck, they wouldn’t take fish. We tried the Hotel Regina. No luck. We tried the Hampdon and the Marjoran. No and no. They wouldn’t even let us all the way across the lobby at the St. Anselm. Mr. Bufano tried to rent a room at a little no-good place away over west, thinking we would put our salmon to bed in it, but they stopped us in the elevator.

  “And so it was that at a few minutes before eight o’clock in the evening, we stood on a windswept corner in western Manhattan, and the tears welled up in my eyes and not even my pigeon, my Bufano, could comfort me. For suddenly I had realized that this parcel was more than a cut-off salmon. This was all my troubles, wrapped up in shabby newsprint. This was all the things that kept me from all my desires. That package—I suddenly realized it, Mrs. Manterbaum—that package was all the unhappinesses I couldn’t get rid of in this life: it was my fleshiness, my unbeatable appetite for chocolate things, and my being without any learning, and no friends to speak of, and teased by such spiteful old maids as our Maggie, and couldn’t even be promoted past the Near Pantry, and what good was I anyhow? And I was embracing all these things in my arms like a dear beloved friend, and smelling to high heaven of the burden.

  “Then it was that my Bufano said, ‘Well, Miss Peggety, three’s a crowd, but let’s face facts, he goes where we go.’

  “And I suddenly realized you have to live with whatever it is you have to live with, so I dried up my eyes and said, ‘Suits me, Mr. Bufano.’

  “ ‘Well!’ he beamed, and a gold tooth he had glistened like the planet Venus at the edge of night. ‘What is it to be, steak or a little twinkletoes?’

  “Now that I knew where I was, with my shortcomings folded up in a wee bundle of old papers, you might say, and my Bufano willing to accept them if I would, I grew bold suddenly and said, ‘Couldn’t we do both, Mr. Bufano? Eat and dance too?’

  “ ‘Miss Peggety, you’re a dear,’ he said, and if I had cried this time, it would have been for other reasons than mere fishiness. My Bufano was so delicate!

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  “We had a grand time, I can tell you. My Bufano took me here and there, now dancing, now eating, now tippling a wee beer, now riding a Fifth Avenue bus just for the ride, as idle as you please. Soon we were used to our scaly friend and his consequences. What if everybody did turn and give us a stare, with tiny wrinkles at the bridge of the nose? In a way, it was gaudy, you might say. Surely Small Peggety had never in her life attracted so much attention, either from eye or nostril. I will go farther. Our salmon became more than a novelty: he was, at last, a handy thing to have about the person. In a crowded situation, we could always get passageway—the mob just opened up for us, real respectful. In the eating places (my Bufano took me to some of the basement ones, away to the fringes of the great city, where, either through kinship with the proprietor or a grand little tip, there was never a question of accepting us with our third party), we used it for a little extra table, beside us, to hold an ashtray or perhaps a wee pony of spirits. There it was, squared off at both ends, like a piece of log, and it stood up steady and true, very convenient by the knee for a reach. And there our hands did brush against one another: that was when I knew that my Bufano was the nicest one of all.

  “Indeed, what except my parcel of shortcomings led to the bliss of the evening? I had to be back to the Near Pantry by seven in the morning, which meant, at the latest, the five-thirteen from Penn Station. It was still only about three in the morning when my Bufano, with the gentlest way in the world, said, ‘My dear, don’t you think that your salmon needs a little ventilation? I should hate, for your Mr. Saunders’ sake, to have it fester and decay. It wants aeration. I propose that we go up to Central Park, and fold back the newspapers, and give it the night air to keep it tasty.’

  “That we did. We found a wee hillock, away from the paved walks—‘Asphalt!’ my Bufano had remarked as we had gone along the walks. ‘Your Mr. Saunders is everywhere’—and we set up our fish on the hill and peeled away the newsprint and let the sweet, damp night get at it. We moved away a little, to wait for the salmon to grow mellow, when, next thing I knew, as natural as the dew all around and the constellations winking up there, Bufano got his arms about me. He could just barely make it with his short little arms and my girth, which he praised. And he stood on tiptoe and kissed me.”

  Miss Peg’s voice had fallen low; her eyelids shaded her jovial eyes in a modest downward look. Mrs. Manterbaum sighed.

  “Did you catch your train?” Johnny the busboy asked.

  “I caught my train, Johnny,” Miss Peg said. “Yes, I caught my train.” She paused. “I never saw my Bufano again, either. He was the hit-and-run sort, you might say. But I don’t know, Johnny, it didn’t matter. That night did something for me. You know, Mrs. Manterbaum, I have never been able to give sufficient worry to my faults since that night. Some would call me slack…. I don’t know…. Yes, I caught the five-thirteen, Johnny.”

  “How was the fish next night?” Mrs. Manterbaum of the sweet tooth wanted to know.

  “When they brought it out to the Near Pantry, after the second serving,” Miss Peg replied, “I dared to cut away a wee snippet. I put it in my mouth. Oh heavens, Mrs. Manterbaum! It faded on the tongue. It put this angel cake of mine to shame. I rested the morsel against my palate and let it warm my throat, the way the men do with their brandy. And I’m not ashamed to tell you, Mrs. Manterbaum, that I said to myself, ‘I’m not so bad as I thought, not half so bad.’…Well!” Miss Peg said abruptly and more briskly. “Time to lock up.”

  Miss Peg lifted the pan of delicacies and slid it onto the shelf where it belonged. She stood up and dusted the crumbs from the front of her dress, seeming to be rather pleased with herself.

  Fling

  “All you have to do is cross a river and you’re in a foreign country?”

  “That’s right, Venus,” Philip said.

  “Let’s really have one last fling. Let’s go across the borde
r. Let’s go abroad.”

  Crossing that dirty little river to Ciudad Juárez would be, yes, a crossing. Ah, not quite a real one, not like the old days, going really abroad on the Ile—remember the food on the Ile?—sea bass farçi and those little paper-thin cucumber slices? That world of the heavenly ships was no more. Where had it gone? This crossing would be on foot, on a rickety bridge, in the dark of the night, and one would be trying to forget the pain. Never mind. “Let’s do it tonight. I can’t wait to tell Drua I’ve been abroad.”

  Every crossing, she’d once said, is an act of imagination. Walking unsteadily across that shabby bridge, tonight, to a dusty town in Mexico, one would have to try to imagine an ocean, a stateroom on the boat deck, portholes with the brass fittings shining like the hopes of all those years. She’d said that thing about crossing the ocean, she distinctly remembered, on the night of the party for Charley Trotter and Pam, their sixteenth wedding anniversary, at Cold Spring—God, how many years ago! That was also the night when that other thing happened, when nobody could persuade our Philip to rise to his feet to make the obligatory anniversary toast, and he began to rumble along seated—he was awfully tight but still he had that knack of his for the mot juste—and the rest of us—we were all so sozzled—scrambled out of our chairs and sat down on the floor, to establish the appropriate spacial relationship between orator and audience—the speaker pouring his words downward to his listeners—and down there we could see that Philip had his legs crossed and was kicking the upper one, showing off because during drinks Pam had suddenly gone over and curled up on his lap, and she’d reached up to her thigh and taken off that atrocious ruffled satin garter, with appliquéd hearts on it—she’d announced she could do without it because she had a garter belt on, too—and she’d given it to him, and now it was on his calf, over his trouser leg, kick kick kick as he droned on even though his audience had all disappeared under the table. On the terrace, after coffee and too many brandies, Sylvia threw Pam’s slippers down the steep bank into the laurel, on account of the garter thing; Sylvia had a crush on our Philip even then, and she was jealous of Pam.