Streets of Night

by John Dos Passos

Silly, this blather of the Renaissance, ham actors mouthing To be or not to be... Like Whitey, that was better. But first I'll have to be so girls don't bother me. Shall I go home with her? I wish she was better looking. He wouldn't care how she looked.... I get it now and then, but I don't miss it. And Nan; is Nan just girls bothering me?

"You're blue this evenin', kiddo, ain't they treatin' you right? Tell it to mommer."

Wenny jerked his chair round and put an arm round her waist. Her head sank on his shoulder. Smell of her hair, what was the perfume she used? Rouge too, sweetish fatty smell of rouge from her lips. She beads her eyes. His hand touched her breast limp under her bodice. Firm Nan's breasts would have been. This morning how he had wanted to put his hands on Nan's firm breasts and kiss her. Don't think of it. When I am sated I will forget Nan, everything. He kissed her lips. Her eyes were bored unfired between their beaded lashes.

"Look out, kiddo, don't get too close. This is a respectable joint. I doan wanter get in wrong here."

Wenny seemed to stand apart from this body of his touching the girl's body, to look at it critically through the tobacco smoke as if from the bleary eyes of the chromo of Washington. And when he is sated, his voice seemed to say, when his flesh has grown very cold he'll be like Whitey, going round to new towns, walking down roads, hopping freights: Tallahassee and South Bend and Havana and Paris and Helsingfors and Khiva and Budapest and Khorasan ... riding over more parched hills than the leanfaced people of the Renaissance rode over, in search of words, of old gods' names more powerful than any they ever dreamed of. Under the table his hand was on her thigh. His heart was pounding.

"What do you think about when you're blue, Ellen?"

"Me? I don't think when I'm blue. I drink."

At the next table a man with three chins whose bald head swayed from side to side was trying to stroke with a puffy ringed hand the arm of the redhaired girl opposite him. A waiter hovered over them threateningly. The room was swinging round in smooth spirals to the sound of The Blue Danube from the orchestra.

Wenny's heart was pounding. His hands were cold. Afraid, are you? a voice sneered in his head. To live you can be afraid of nothing. The Greeks were not afraid. The lean-faced men were not afraid. By god they were. Men flagellated themselves round the altar of Apollo on Delos. They recanted on their deathbeds and stuck their tongues out eagerly for the wafer. And can David Wendell, silly little Wenny, son of a minister with his collar on backwards, can I conquer fear. I must. Her flesh was hot under his hand.

"Let's go, Ellen. Where do you live?"