She should have been wearing a hat but she only stood with the rain falling on her face and running down the front of her black raincoat, her hands folded across her breast.
When she saw us, one hand came up in a gesture as if she might call. Instead, she pulled back, as if alarmed that we might run.
“Dear God,” Sonny whispered.
He sighed but did not nod to acknowledge her. “Wait!” He ducked back inside and came out a minute later, wiping his mouth. “One more for courage.”
Still he made no sign of recognition, nor did he move to cross the street. The handsome middle-aged woman stood, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“She knows you,” I said.
“None of your business.”
“But you’re crying, too!”
“Am I?” He touched one eye and looked at the wetness on his fingertip. “Damn.”
“She’s crying, you’re crying. Is someone dead?”
“A long time ago.”
“She a relative?”
“No. Dumb woman. Crazy lady.”
“What does she want?”
Sonny laughed, a crazy kind of broken laugh.
“Me.”
“Beg pardon.”
“Me. Me. Me! Don’t you get it? She wanted me. Past tense. She wants me. Present tense. She will want me tomorrow and the day after. Some joke!”
“You’re not so bad,” I said lamely.
“Not so bad as what?”
“Not as bad as you think you are,” I said, looking away.
“You don’t know a damn thing about me!”
“I know that on Saturday nights if you left town the gang would break up.”
“Some gang, a bunch of lonely half-starved idiot intellectuals with no guts and no future so they follow me like dogs peeing on fireplugs.”
“It gives us something to do. You help do it.”
“What does that make me?”
“A leader.”
“A Christ-awful what?”
“Leader.”
“Give me that head.” He grabbed my skull and twisted my head. “Go have it examined.”
“Sure we’re nuts,” I went on, with his fingers still clutching my skull. “But if you weren’t around we’d all go home and stay. If you can lead us you can lead others, in some job, someplace. You’re funny. You’re an actor. You make us all feel good and you cover up how bright you really are.”
“How bright am I?”
“You probably went to college and dropped out. Maybe you got in trouble at the men’s gym. Right?” A silence. “Right?”
“You’re pretty damn smart.”
“Why did you never go back?”
“They wouldn’t let me.”
“What about some other schools?”
“You got to be kidding. This is 1939. There’s a war coming. The army would claim I wear perfume and shave under my arms. Bang! I’m on the street! ‘And stay out!’ they’ll say. Colleges pass the word. No fairies, please, at the bottom of our gardens.”
“Don’t talk that way about yourself.”
“They do. Why not me?”
I glanced across the street, and the woman, seeing this, gave a small gesture and a half-smile, as if she guessed our discussion. Yes! I could almost read her lips. Tell him!
“How did that lady want you?”
“God, she proposed marriage!”
“Why didn’t you say yes?”
“What is this, a police lineup? You got your lie detector on?”
“It’s running. You can’t lie to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you like me and I like you.” I took a deep breath and went on.
“Do you mean to tell me that if you crossed the street now she would take you home and marry you?”
“More fool she.”
“No, damn fool you.”
Sonny wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am.”
“If I walked over you’d never see me again. The gang would break up. Where in hell would they go without me?”
“To hell with the gang. Get over there.”
“It’s too late.” Sonny stepped back, watching her to see if she moved. “I’m drowning. No. I’ve gone down for the third time.”
“No you haven’t!”
“Besides, if I married her, she’d catch my cold. I haven’t been warm in years.”
I hesitated and said, “Do you want me to talk to her?”
“Nut, why would you do that?”
“Because I can’t kick you downstairs. I don’t like the way you’re living.”
“Then why the hell are you with me?”
I almost had an answer. “It’s to fill time. I won’t be here forever. I’ll be gone in a year.”
“You going to be a famous literary person?”
“Something like that.”
He studied me for a long moment. “Son of a bitch. I really think you will.”
“Then come on. I’ll go over with you.”
“The blind leading the blind? How come you’re always right?”
“Because I just let things fall off my tongue and I’m surprised to hear me say them.”
“You believe that crud?”
“I better. Or I won’t have a life.”
“Then get on with it. Take her home. I’m too old for her, for you, for everyone.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“That’s not old.”
“Yes it is, if you’re me and a thousand men behind me. I’ve got four more years, then I’m gone.”
“You’ll only be thirty.”
“Wake up! No one wants a thirty-year-old fairy godmother!”
I blurted it out:
“What’s going to happen to you?”
Sonny froze in place and without looking at me, in a cold voice said, “I hate people asking what’s going to happen to me!”
“I just mean, what? I’m asking as a friend.”
“Let me look at you. Yes, poor sap, you really think you are my friend. Why,” said Sonny, staring into the rain, “when I hit thirty, three-oh, I’ll buy some rat poison.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Or a gun. Or maybe I’ll defenestrate. Fine word, eh? It means jumping through a window. Defenestrate.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Silly boy, someone like me, thirty’s the end. No more. Finis. That old song: Nobody wants you when you’re old and gray.”
“Thirty’s not old.”
“Are you telling granny? Thirty’s when you have to pay for it, right? All the things you once had free, now you dig out the wallet and peel off the green. I’m damned if I’ll shell out for what now is my divine right.”
“I bet you talked like that when you were five.”
“I was born talking. Only one way to stop me. Out the window!”
“But you have a whole life ahead.”
“You maybe, dear chum, not this lady on the piano bar singing the blues. I’ve got fingerprints all over my skin. Not an inch isn’t an FBI file of bounders, cads, and the criminally insane.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Poor naive sap.” But he said it gently and chucked me under the chin. “You ever been kissed by a man?”
“Nope.”
“I’m almost tempted.” He loomed, then pulled back. “But I won’t.”
I fixed my gaze at that woman, it seemed, a mile away.
“How long have you known her?”
“Since high school. She was one of my teachers.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t say ‘Oh.’ I was Teacher’s Pet. She was never mine. She told me I was headed for great things. Pretty great, huh, downtown Saturday nights leading a dog pack of gutless wonders.”
“Did you ever try to be great?”
“Jesus!”
“Well, did you?”
“Try what? Being artist, writer, painter, dancer?”
“You should have picked one.”
“That’s what she said. But I was busy at wild parties in Malibu or Laguna. She still hung on, and there she is, a whipped cur.”
“She doesn’t look whipped to me.”
“No? Wait there.”
I watched him through the bar-room window as he ordered another Dubonnet and made a phone call. When he came back out he said, “Just talked to Lorenzo di Medici. Know anything about the Medicis?”
“Venice, right? Formed the first banking systems? Friend of Botticelli. Enemy of Savonarola?”
“Sorry I asked. That was one of his great-great-grandsons, just asked me to live in his Manhattan penthouse in September. Secretarial work. A little light housekeeping. Thursdays off. Weekends on Fire Island.”
“You going to accept?”
“She can’t follow me there. Come on!”
Sonny walked off.
I looked at the woman across the street. Half an hour of rain had made her older.
I stepped off the curb. That did it. She turned away in a fresh downpour.
Summer was over.
Of course you can’t tell in Los Angeles. No sooner do you think it’s finished than it comes back full-blast for Thanksgiving, or spoils Halloween with 98 degrees instead of rain, or a strange hot Christmas morn with snow melted that never fell, and New Year’s Eve a Fourth of July.
Anyway, summer was over, not because of season’s change but just people going away, packing their grips, stashing photographs, ready to vanish in a war that was clearing its throat just beyond the ocean.
You could tell summer was over in the voices of your lost and never quite found friends, whose names, if they had some, stuck in your throat. Nobody said goodbye or farewell, it was just so long, see you, with a deep sad sound to it. We all knew that whatever bus or trolley we took, we might never come back.
With the park empty on a final Saturday night, I walked Sonny to his streetcar. Just before it arrived, Sonny, not looking at me, said, “You coming along?”
“Where?” I said.
“To my place, silly.”
“It’s the first time you ever asked.”
“Well, I’m asking now. Hurry up. I’m going away.”
I looked at his profile, the pale flesh drawn over the hidden cheeks and nose and moonlit brow. He felt me examining him and turned his head to really look at me, like a discovery, for the first time.
“Thanks a lot.” I hesitated and had to shift my gaze. “Thanks, but I don’t think so, Sonny.”
Sonny gasped.
“I’ll be damned, rejected by a Martian!”
“Is that what I am?”
“Yes, yes,” Sonny laughed. “But someday you’ll marry another Martian and raise a dozen kids for John Carter, Warlord of Mars.”
I nodded weakly. “I think you’re right.”
“I am. Well, here goes, home to a lonely bed and off to the Medicis mañana. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Thanks.”
The trolley had stopped. He climbed up and looked down at me and the park and
