The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [334]
He yawned and watched a baby toddle bow-legged ahead of its mother. What would he do? An old man with an ear phone. He drowsed, fell asleep, awakened stiff and dirty. Two-thirty. He started strolling toward home. He felt like a wreck. The day was more than half over anyway. And maybe his stock had gone up too.
CHAPTER NINE
I
After the movies, Studs and Catherine went to a small restaurant on Seventy-first Street. Studs hung his coat on a hook beside the table and absent-mindedly sat down while she was removing her coat. He missed her frown, lit a cigarette, and settled comfortably in his chair. He thought of how his stock was now down to ten, and he had to make up his mind whether to hold it or sell. A drop from two thousand to eight hundred dollars, and Ike Dugan had said fluctuations. That bastard was going to have fluctuations the next time he met Studs Lonigan.
“You seem awfully interested in me,” Catherine said, sitting down with a great fuss.
“What? What’s the matter?” he asked absently.
“Nothing. Oh, nothing’s the matter, I was just so pleased at the interest you show in me,” she said with increased irony.
He looked at her, puzzled, hoping that she wasn’t set on kicking up a row with him.
“You act like a perfect gentleman who is keeping within the proper bounds before a girl he doesn’t even know, or something like that.”
“Why, what’s wrong, Catherine?” he asked, a vague whine in his voice.
“Nothing... Nothing,” she snapped with mounting exasperation.
A bony waitress hovered over them, and Studs blushed, wondering if she had heard Catherine quarrelling.
“What’ll you have, Catherine?” he asked solicitously, while she made faces at him.
“Coffee and lemon cream pie,” she said haughtily at the waitress.
“One coffee and lemon cream pie, one milk and apple pie,” he said, wondering what the devil was wrong.
He watched the waitress retreat to the counter, and to avoid Catherine’s eye until she cooled off he glanced around the restaurant, at the neat pale green walls and the black-topped counter running almost the length of the opposite side. There were two fellows slouched at it over coffee, and two couples at tables near the window toward the front.
The proprietor emerged from the counter and dialed on the radio.
Singin’ in the rain, just singin,’ in the rain,
What a glorious feelin’, I’m happy again.
One of the fellows in the basket-backed chairs by the counter swung around, and Studs glanced back at Catherine, her expression revealing persisting displeasure.
“What did I do now?” he asked in a restrained voice, jittery because of her mood, thinking that if all girls were like Catherine, they all liked to fight with a fellow more than he liked to fight with them.
“Nothing,” she said sharply, planting her elbows on the table, resting her fattish, dimpled chin in her palms, closing’ her lips poutishly, her eyes cutting intently upon him.
“Well, we’re never going to get anywhere with you acting this way and expecting me to be a mind reader and read your mind when you’re sore and I can’t see the reason why,” he said haltingly, hoping that she would snap out of it.
The waitress set the orders before them and went off.
I’ll walk down the lane with a happy refrain,
Singin’, just singin’ in the rain.
“You men... You can’t see farther than your noses. You’ve got as much delicacy and imagination as a... hound,” she flung at him.
“Oh, come on. What the hell,” he said with attempted persuasiveness, wanting at the same time not to lose his dignity or seem weak in her eyes.
“I cannot say that I distinctly approve of the language you use.”
“Gee, don’t you expect me to be a little natural, what’s biting you?”
“Natural. I don’t understand the same thing by natural that you do. And nothing is biting me. That’s what I suppose you think, though, that just because we’re engaged and I let you kiss me, that I am safely captured