on a blackboard. “An you git along outa here. I dont allow no drunken bums in my house. Git along outa here. I dont care who brought you.”
Harland looked at Joey with a little sour smile, shrugged his shoulders and went out. “Charwoman,” he muttered as he stumbled with stiff aching legs along the dusty street of darkfaced brick houses.
The sultry afternoon sun was like a blow on his back. Voices in his ears of maids, charwomen, cooks, stenographers, secretaries: Yes sir, Mr. Harland, Thank you sir Mr. Harland. Oh sir thank you sir so much sir Mr. Harland sir....
Red buzzing in her eyelids the sunlight wakes her, she sinks back into purpling cottonwool corridors of sleep, wakes again, turns over yawning, pulls her knees up to her chin to pull the drowsysweet cocoon tighter about her. A truck jangles shatteringly along the street, the sun lays hot stripes on her back. She yawns desperately and twists herself over and lies wide awake with her hands under her head staring at the ceiling. From far away through streets and housewalls the long moan of a steamboat whistle penetrates to her like a blunt sprout of crabgrass nudging through gravel. Ellen sits up shaking her head to get rid of a fly blundering about her face. The fly flashes and vanishes in the sunlight, but somewhere in her there lingers a droning pang, unaccountable, something left over from last night’s bitter thoughts. But she is happy and wide awake and it’s early. She gets up and wanders round the room in her nightgown.
Where the sun hits it the hardwood floor is warm to the soles of her feet. Sparrows chirp on the windowledge. From upstairs comes the sound of a sewingmachine. When she gets out of the bath her body feels smoothwhittled and tense; she rubs herself with a towel, telling off the hours of the long day ahead; take a walk through junky littered downtown streets to that pier on the East River where they pile
the great beams of mahogany, breakfast all alone at the Lafayette, coffee and crescent rolls and sweet butter, go shopping at Lord & Taylor’s early before everything is stuffy and the salesgirls wilted, have lunch with ... Then the pain that has been teasing all night wells up and bursts. “Stan, Stan for God’s sake,” she says aloud. She sits before her mirror staring in the black of her own dilating pupils.
She dresses in a hurry and goes out, walks down Fifth Avenue and east along Eighth Street without looking to the right or left. The sun already hot simmers slatily on the pavements, on plateglass, on dustmarbled enameled signs. Men’s and women’s faces as they pass her are rumpled and gray like pillows that have been too much slept on. After crossing Lafayette Street roaring with trucks and delivery wagons there is a taste of dust in her mouth, particles of grit crunch between her teeth. Further east she passes pushcarts; men are wiping off the marble counters of softdrink stands, a grindorgan fills the street with shiny jostling coils of the Blue Danube, acrid pungence spreads from a picklestand. In Tompkins Square yelling children mill about the soggy asphalt. At her feet a squirming heap of small boys, dirty torn shirts, slobbering mouths, punching, biting, scratching; a squalid smell like moldy bread comes from them. Ellen all of a sudden feels her knees weak under her. She turns and walks back the way she came.
The sun is heavy like his arm across her back, strokes her bare forearm the way his fingers stroke her, it’s his breath against her cheek.