Take Me Home Read online

  TAKE ME HOME

  Originally published in 1959.

  CHAPTER 1

  Henry Harper was a young man who lived in two rooms above a secondhand bookstore. All he wanted to do in the world was to write, but he was forced by circumstances to do other things besides. He was naturally forced by the same circumstances to do most of his writing at times when sane and sensible men are sleeping or making love or getting drunk or expressing their sense and sanity in some other accepted way.

  That’s what Henry had been doing this particular night, which was the night of a Saturday. He had been writing a book that he had hoped someday to finish, and he had been, in a way, a little drunk himself. He had been drunk for hours on words, but now he was sober, and nothing he had done was good, and nothing would be good that he would ever do. His head ached, and he was filled with sodden despair. It was, he saw, three o’clock in the morning. Since it was impossible to sleep, he went down the street to the Greek’s for a cup of coffee.

  He felt better in the street. A sharp wind was blowing down the narrow way between old buildings. It slashed his face and blew from his brain the stale litter of leftover words. In the Greek’s, behind steamed windows, there was only one customer besides himself. A girl. She sat huddled over a cup at the counter, wrapped closely in a black wool coat as if she were very cold. The cup was empty, drained of what it had held, and so was her face. There was something imperiled in the emptiness, a precarious adjustment to the brief sanctuary of an all-night diner. The Greek himself was behind the counter.

  “Hello, Henry,” the Greek said.

  His name was George. He had a last name too, but it was too difficult to say comfortably and had fallen in disuse.

  “Hello, George,” Henry said. “Black coffee.”

  “You don’t need to say it, Henry. It’s always the same. Always black coffee.”

  “Don’t make a moral issue of it, George. Just draw the coffee.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning. It’s no time to be drinking coffee.”

  “Any time’s a time to be drinking coffee.”

  “Sure. Coffee and cigarettes. Cigarettes and coffee. A man lives on them, but not for long. You look bad, Henry. You’ll die young.”

  There was that about George. He was compassionate. He was filled with concern and pity. He was an olive-tinted mass of fat compassion with an oily, earnest face. He grieved in his large and limpid, black eyes for all young men who died young from smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee.

  “A man can’t sleep after drinking black coffee,” he said.

  “I don’t want to sleep.”

  To secure his position, Henry lit a cigarette that he didn’t want. George picked up a cup and turned to the shining urn behind him.

  “How does the book go?” he said.

  “It goes badly.”

  “You always say it goes badly.”

  “Because it always does.”

  George was very interested in the progress of the book. He didn’t believe it when Henry said that it was going badly. One of his greatest concerns was that Henry would die from cigarettes and black coffee before the book was finished.

  Henry buried his nose in the rich vapor rising from his cup. He was feeling gradually a little better. What he had accomplished didn’t seem so bad now, although not so good as he wished. It was never so good.

  “You should take better care of yourself,” George said. “Why don’t you get a haircut?”

  Half a dozen stools away, the girl moved. She lifted her eyes and stared for a moment blindly at bright labels of canned soup on a shelf behind the counter. Then she lowered them slowly and began staring again into the empty cup. Henry glanced at her briefly and back to George, and George lifted his heavy shoulders in a small confession of ignorance and impotence. There were far too many troubles in the world even for a compassionate Greek.

  “Off the street,” he said. “She has no place to go.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Who sits and looks into an empty cup when there is a place to go?”

  “Maybe she has a place but doesn’t want to go there.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  The girl stood up abruptly and came toward them. She was wearing nothing on her head, but her brown hair fitted like a ragged cap around her thin and empty face. “Pay for my coffee,” she said to Henry.

  “Like hell I will,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I don’t have any money.”

  “Too bad for you.”

  “Is a lousy dime so important?”

  “It’s all right,” George said. “It’s on the house. Compliments of George.”

  The girl turned her head and looked at the Greek for a moment without speaking, as if she were considering whether or not it would be proper to accept his offer. She didn’t appear to be grateful. As a matter of fact, she gave the impression of feeling that he was meddling in a matter that did not concern him.

  “It wouldn’t hurt the son of a bitch to pay for my coffee,” she said.

  “Look out who you’re calling names,” Henry said.

  “He’s a poor writer,” George said. “He has to watch his dimes carefully.”

  “What does he write?” she said.

  “He’s writing a book,” George said. “He’ll be famous.” She stared at Henry as if she had caught him in the worst kind of perversion. It was a relief, however, to see an expression, even an unpleasant one, invade the emptiness of her thin face.

  “It’ll be a lousy book,” she said. “No one will buy it.”

  “Not at all,” George said. “It’s going badly at the moment, but later it will go better.”

  George had become an authority on writers and understood that they had to be handled with care. His air of authority was plainly not acceptable to the girl, however. She inspected him with a faint expression of revulsion.

  “You’re just a fat, greasy Greek,” she said. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  “Say,” George said, “I give you a good cup of coffee and you call me names. What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

  “Maybe you think I ought to kiss your fat tail for a lousy cup of coffee,” she said.

  Turning, she walked up along the line of stools at the counter and went outside into the narrow street beyond the steamed glass. George watched her go with his large, limpid eyes. For a moment, when she opened the front door, he felt compassionately in his own warm flesh the cold cut of the wind.

  “She has troubles,” he said. “That’s apparent.”

  “She’s crazy,” Henry said.

  “Because she has troubles, she hates everyone. That’s the way it happens. When my wife left me for an Italian acrobat, I hated everyone for months. It was impossible to get along with me.”

  “I didn’t know you ever had a wife.”

  “It was a long time ago. She came from Salonika as a girl. I seldom think of her.”

  Henry didn’t answer. He lifted his cup in both hands and drank some of the hot coffee.

  “She was very young,” George said.

  “Naturally,” Henry said. “As a girl, she couldn’t be anything else.”

  “Not my wife. The one who was here.”

  “Was she?”

  “Under her coat, she was very thin. Did you notice?”

  “No, I didn’t. Anyhow, it’s better to be a thin, young girl, even with troubles, than a fat, greasy Greek or a
son of a bitch.”

  Henry finished his coffee and stood up. He put two dimes on the counter beside the empty cup.

  “You have given me one dime too many,” George said.

  “I know how many dimes I gave you,” Henry said.

  He walked to the door and paused to turn the collar of his coat up around his neck.

  “I hope the book goes well,” George said.

  “It will go lousy,” Henry said, “and no one will buy it.” He opened the door and went out, and there at the corner, leaning against a lamp post in dirty yellow light and a kind of arrogant indolence, was the girl. He started past here without speaking, but at the last moment he discovered that it was something he couldn’t do, even though he had a strong feeling that it would probably be a mistake to do anything else. Stopping a step or two beyond her in the yellow light, he turned and stared at her, and he saw that the Greek was right, that her body under the coat was very thin, but it seemed somehow to be a natural thinness appropriate to her character and chemistry, and not the thinness that would come from not having enough to eat for too long a time.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “As you see,” she said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Don’t you have any place to go?”

  “That’s a reasonable conclusion, isn’t it? If I had a place to go, I’d go there.”

  “Don’t you have any money at all?”

  “I have a little, but not with me.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At the place I came from.”

  “Why don’t you go there and get it?”

  “Because I don’t want to. I don’t suppose a chintzy son of a bitch like you would give a girl a cigarette.”

  “I might if she asked me properly.”

  “Really? What would you consider properly?”

  “With a little respect and courtesy.”

  “Will you please give me a cigarette?”

  “That’s better.”

  He gave her a cigarette and struck a match for her, holding it cupped in his hands against the wind. The tiny light flared up from the protective bowl of flesh and spread across her thin face as she leaned down to suck the flame. He was surprised, and somehow touched, as if it were a special concession to him, to see that she was rather pretty in a taut and sullen way.

  “I paid for the coffee after all,” he said.

  “Actually?” She straightened, drawing smoke deeply into her lungs and releasing it to the wind on a deep sigh. “Thanks all to hell.”

  “All right. Now that you’ve got your cigarette, there s no need to behave decently any longer. I can see that. Why don’t you go find a nice warm alley to spend the rest of the night in?”

  Crossing the intersection, he started down the block, and it was not until he had gone almost halfway to the next corner that he became aware that she was following him. She had moved so silently behind him that he never heard her at all, not the least sound above the wind of her heels striking the concrete walk, and it was only the sudden leaping of her shadow in a small island of light that told him she was there. He stopped and wheeled around, and she also stopped in the same instant, and be thought in that instant that he could detect in her a kind of wariness and apprehension. She was abusive and insolent, the Greek had said, because she was filled with hate for everyone on earth. These attitudes could also be, he thought, a front for fear.

  “What do you want?” he said. “Why are you following me?”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “Go with me where?”

  “Take me home with you.”

  “No. That’s impossible. It’s a crazy idea.”

  “I wouldn’t be any trouble to you.”

  “The hell you wouldn’t.”

  “I promise I wouldn’t.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

  “I’d damn well be sorry if I did.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to give me a place to sleep and stay warm.”

  Staring at her in amazement, he had a sudden odd sensation of gaseousness, of being lighter than air and in imminent danger of rising through the dirty light into upper darkness.

  “Well, by God,” he said, “this is a switch! You abuse me and curse me and behave in general like a bitch, and now you want to move in with me.”

  “If I say I’m sorry for the way I acted, will you let me come?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? I tell you I wouldn’t be any bother. I promise.”

  “You’re pretty good at making promises, aren’t you? At breaking them too, I’ll bet.”

  “All right. It’s apparent that you’re determined to make me sleep in an alley. If I die of the cold, it’s no skin off your tail.”

  She started back the way they had come, and there was a display of desperate pride in the rigidity of her thin back, in each carefully measured and conscious step. He felt himself choke with pity, and he softly cursed the pity and himself and his bad luck in meeting her.

  “Wait a minute,” he called.

  She stopped and turned toward him, waiting beyond the perimeter of light, a pale shadow against the dark street stretching out behind her.

  “You’d have to get out tomorrow,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Don’t get the idea that you’re going to hang around and live off me until you’re damn good and ready to leave.”

  “Don’t worry. You said I’ll have to leave tomorrow, and I will.”

  “Later today, I mean. Sunday. Not tomorrow.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Come on, then. Let’s go.”

  He started walking on at a quickened pace, not looking back, but aware of her behind him just the same, matching steps, measuring and maintaining between them the distance that had existed at the start. And then, after crossing another intersection and moving perhaps fifty feet along the block, he suddenly knew that she was no longer there. Turning, he saw her standing quietly under the lamp at the corner. They stood staring at each other for half a minute before she began to advance very slowly, almost reluctantly, stooping again at the distance from him that she seemed to have established in her mind as being appropriate and proper.

  “I don’t think I’ll go home with you after all,” she said.

  “Well, for God’s sake, make up your mind. Don’t imagine for a minute that I’m anxious to have you come.”

  “If I were to come, what would you expect of me?”

  “I’d expect a little civility and gratitude, that’s all, but I doubt that I’d get any.”

  “I thought you might expect me to sleep with you.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Why should it make you laugh? I suppose you’d be justified in expecting it under the circumstances.”

  “Listen to me. I’ve been working all night, and I’m tired. I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last female on earth and it was my last chance. Besides, you’re not my type. You’re too skinny, and you’ve got a nasty disposition, and you’d probably accuse me of taking advantage of you. Go sleep in an alley if you choose.”

  “I’d prefer to go with you and be warm.”

  “In that case, stop standing here in the cold.”

  Once more under way, he felt her following at the established interval. Stopping, he felt her stop.

  “Why are you walking behind me?” he said. “If you’re coming, walk beside me. It makes me uncomfortable to have you walking back there like a servant or something.”

  “I thought you might prefer it.”

  “I don’t. I prefer to have you up here. If it’s not too offensive to you, that is.”

>   “I don’t mind walking beside you.”

  She came even, and they walked on, a distance by this time of slightly more than another block to the second-hand book store with his rooms above. Using his key, he unlocked the street door to the stairway leading up, and using the same key on the landing at the top, unlocked the door to the first of his two rooms, which was the living room. She went past him into the room and stood waiting a couple of steps inside while he closed the door behind them. He had left a lamp burning on the table where he had been working. His typewriter stood in position, loaded with a yellow second sheet on which several lines had been typed and x-ed out, and the top of the table surrounding the machine was littered with two hundred more of the yellow sheets covered with words and words and inexorable x’s where words had failed. Additional sheets were crumpled and scattered about the floor.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  She looked at the scant furnishings, old and worn and ugly, the stained and faded walls. She reeked, it seemed to him, of an irritating air of disdain.

  “It isn’t much,” she said.

  “It suits me.”

  “You must be easily pleased.”

  “It’s a place to go, at least. That’s more than you’ve got.”

  “It’s warm, I admit. That’s something.”

  “It seems to me that you’re mighty goddamn particular for a beggar.”

  “Well, you needn’t get so angry about it. You’re surely aware that it’s nothing to be proud of.”

  “If you don’t care for it, you don’t have to stay. No one asked you in the first place.”

  “Under the terms of our agreement, I’m willing to stay.”

  “Thanks a lot. It’s very generous of you.”

  “You must be very poor.”

  “I’m not rich. If you thought I was, it was your mistake.”

  “I should think a writer would make quite a bit of money.”

  “Some writers don’t make any money at all.”

  “Why don’t they quit writing, then?”

  “Because they’re writers.”