Captive,” said Stasia. “It’s a French play. Everybody’s talking about it.”
During the conversation Stasia had been trying to cut her toenails. She was so awkward that I begged her to let me do it for her. When I had finished the job I suggested that she let me comb her hair. She was delighted.
As I combed her hair she read aloud from The Drunken Boat. Since I had listened with evident pleasure she jumped up and went to her room to fetch a biography of Rimbaud. It was Carré’s Season in Hell. Had events not conspired to thwart it, I would have become a devotee of Rimbaud then and there.
It wasn’t often, I must say, that we passed an evening together in this manner, or ended it on such a good note.
With Kronski’s arrival next day the results of the examination negative, things commenced to go awry in earnest. Sometimes I had to vacate the premises while they entertained a very special friend, usually a benefactor who brought a supply of groceries or who left a check on the table. Conversing before me they often indulged in double talk, or exchanged notes which they wrote before my eyes. Or they would lock themselves in Stasia’s room and there keep up a whispered conversation for an ungodly while. Even the poems Stasia wrote were becoming more and more unintelligible. At least, those she deigned to show me. Rimbaud’s influence, she said. Or the toilet box, which never ceased gurgling.
By way of relief there were occasional visits from Osiecki who had discovered a nice speakeasy, over a funeral parlor, a few blocks away. I’d have a few beers with him—until he got glassy-eyed and started scratching himself. Sometimes I’d take it into my head to go to Hoboken and, while wandering about forlornly, I’d try to convince myself that it was an interesting burg. Weehawken was another God-forsaken place I’d go to occasionally, usually to see a burlesque show. Anything to escape the loony atmosphere of the basement, the continual chanting of love songs—they had taken to singing in Russian, German, even Yiddish!—the mysterious confabs in Stasia’s rooms, the barefaced lies, the dreary talk of drugs, the wrestling matches. . . .
Yes, now and then they would stage a wrestling match for my benefit. Were they wrestling matches? Hard to tell. Sometimes, just to vary the monotony, I would borrow brush and paints and do a caricature of Stasia.
Always on the walls. She would answer in kind. One day I painted a skull and crossbones on her door. The next day I found a carving knife hanging over the skull and bones.
One day she produced a pearl-handled revolver. “Just in case,” she said.
They were accusing me now of sneaking into her room and going through her things.
One evening, wandering by my lonesome through the Polish section of Manhattan, I stumbled into a poolroom where, to my great surprise, I found Curley and a friend of his shooting pool. He was a strange youngster, this friend, and only recently released from prison. Highly excitable and full of imagination. They insisted on returning to the house with me and having a gabfest.
In the subway I gave Curley an earful about Stasia. He reacted as if the situation were thoroughly familiar to him.
“Something’s got to be done,” he remarked laconically.
His friend seemed to be of the same mind.
They jumped when I turned on the lights.
“She must be crazy!” said Curley.
His friend pretended to be frightened by the paintings. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.
“I’ve seen them before,” he said, meaning in the booby hatch.
“Where does she sleep?” said Curley.
I showed them her room. It was in a state of complete disorder—books, towels, panties, pieces of bread scattered over the bed and on the floor.
“Nuts! Plain nuts!” said Curley’s friend.
Curley meanwhile had begun to poke around. He busied himself opening one drawer after another, pulling the contents out, then shoving them back in.
“What is it you’re looking for?” I asked.
He looked at me and grinned. “You never know,” he said.
Presently he fixed his eyes on the big trunk in the corner under the toilet box.
“What’s in there?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Let’s find out,” he said. He unfastened the hasps, but the lid was locked. Turning to his friend, he said: “Where’s that jimmy of yours? Get busy! I’ve got a hunch we’re going to find something interesting.”
In a moment his friend had pried open the lock. With a jerk they threw back the lid of the trunk. The first object that greeted our eyes was a little iron casket, a jewelry box, no doubt. It wouldn’t open. The friend again produced his jimmy. It was the work of a moment to unlock the casket.
Amidst a heap of billets-doux—from friends unknown—we discovered the note which had supposedly been flushed down the toilet. It was in Mona’s handwriting, sure enough. It began thus: “Desperate, my lover. . . .”
“Hold on to it,” said Curley, “you may need it later on.” He began stuffing the other letters back into the casket. Then he turned to his friend and advised him to make the lock look as it should. “See that the trunk lock works right too,” he added. “They mustn’t suspect anything.”
Then, like a pair of stagehands, they proceeded to restore the room to its original state of disorder, even down to the distribution of the bread crumbs. They argued a few minutes as to whether a certain book had been lying on the floor open or unopened.
As we were leaving the room the young man insisted that the door had been ajar, not closed.
“Fuck it!” said Curley. “They wouldn’t remember that.”
Intrigued by this observation, I said: “What makes you so sure?”
“It’s just a hunch,” he replied. “You wouldn’t remember, would you, unless you had a reason for leaving the door partly open. What reason could she have had? None. It’s simple.”
“It’s too simple,” I said. “One remembers trivial things without reason sometimes.”
His answer was that anyone who lived in a state of filth and disorder couldn’t possibly have a good memory. “Take a thief,” he said, “he knows what he’s doing, even when he makes a mistake. He keeps track of things. He has to or he’d be shit out of luck. Ask this guy!”
“He’s right,” said his friend. “The mistake I made was in being too careful.” He wanted to tell me his story, but I urged them to go. “Save it for next time,” I said.
Sailing into the street, Curley turned to inform me that I could count on his aid any time. “We’ll fix her,” he said.
5
It was getting to be like sequences in a coke dream, what with the reading of entrails, the unraveling of lies, the bouts with Osiecki,
