Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [368]
“Who are you that I should worry how I treat you? What do I owe you?”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s . . . aw, come on, sister, let’s get to knowing each other,” he said, reaching to grasp her hand.
“Don’t!” she said, stepping back. “Whenever I’m as hard up as you seem to be, I can certainly find myself a better specimen than you.”
“Listen,” he said, sore.
“I wish that you would please get the hell out of my house.”
“Say, what the hell’s the idea? One day you hustle like a bitch, and the next you try to pull a high-hat gag like this.”
“If you don’t leave I’ll call the police.”
“And then we’ll ride to jail together in the paddy wagon, and George’ll come down to bail you out. There’s a law against whores in this town.”
“Who’d take your word for mine? My husband’ll kill you, he’ll break you in two. Get out before I scream. Get out! Get out, you dirty little rat!”
“All right, girlie. Keep your pants up. I ain’t afraid of anybody getting tough, and you can send your husband around any old time.”
“Are you going?”
“You can bet your boots I’m going. Sorry I made the mistake.”
“If you ever come around again, I’ll have you arrested. . . . Say, I remember how you acted yesterday, and I pity any woman who’d get the idea that you’re a good time. Say, you don’t even know how to jazz.”
“All I can say is I feel sorry for George, having a cheating bitch like you for a wife.”
“Get out before I scream!”
The door slammed behind him, and he hurried downstairs and out of the building.
The bitch . . . he repeated to himself, walking in the rain. That dirty, low-down, filthy. . . . He quickly turned the comer. She might set the cops on him. Well, she better not. That goddamn . . . and wasn’t he glad he hadn’t tossed his dough away for a pig like that! She was lower than a nigger whore or a pansy. Still, she was a neat trick. That dirty. . . . There wasn’t any word filthy enough to describe her.
And what a chump he’d been coming all the way over in a rain like this for her. The rotten, goddamn. . . . She probably had some poor feeble-minded chump of a husband, too, who sweated his ears working to get dough she lost on the ponies. And hustling on him on the side. He hoped that dumb George would wake up and kick her all over the house. And the bitch, telling him he didn’t know how to. . . . It made him appreciate how decent a girl Catherine was, and it all went to show how when a guy got a girl who was pure gold like Catherine, he should hold on to her. And he was going to. He’d just like to tell that goddamn bitch one thing. He had a girl who was clean and decent, a girl that she wasn’t fit to walk on the same street with. The rotten, contaminated little . . .
He darted into a drug store.
“Slug.”
“Bad weather today. Looks like it’s going to keep up all day, too,” the bald-headed druggist said.
Studs picked up his slug, and turned toward a booth. The druggist frowned after him.
Waiting to get her, he became afraid she’d turn him down flat, and he breathed in choking anxiety. Jesus, she couldn’t. It was her voice.
“This is Studs,” he mumbled with a prayerful hope.
“Yes,” she replied, but in a friendly voice.
He coughed in the embarrassment of an extended thirty seconds of silence.
“It’s a bum day and I guess I caught a cold.”
“It is terrible out, and you should stay in today and drink tea and hot lemonade.”
“I think I’ll go home and do that,” he gravely said.
He grunted during a second silence.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“All right, that is, in one way.”
“Well, in what way?” he asked gently.
“Well,” she said, and he liked her soft and caressingly friendly voice, and Jesus, he had to see her again.
“I thought I’d call you up because I didn’t see any point in not calling and . . .”
“Yes,” she said encouragingly while he struggled to find words.
“Anyway, when am I going to see you?”
“When do you want to?”
“When can I?”
“Come over to supper tonight. Mother and dad are going out to a supper and bridge party, and I’ll cook supper for you.”