«Hold on,» he said, gripping my wrist. «Sure I loved her. But it wasn’t that I
wanted to touch her.» And he added, without smiling: «Not that I don’t think about
that side of things. Even at my age, and I’ll be sixty-seven January ten. It’s a
peculiar fact — but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind
more and more. I don’t remember thinking about it so much even when I was a
youngster and it’s every other minute. Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it
is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and
becomes a burden. Whenever I read in the paper about an old man disgracing
himself, I know it’s because of this burden. But» — he poured himself a jigger of
whiskey and swallowed it neat — «I’ll never disgrace myself. And I swear, it never
crossed my mind about Holly. You can love somebody without it being like that. You
keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.»
Two men came into the bar, and it seemed the moment to leave. Joe Bell followed
me to the door. He caught my wrist again. «Do you believe it?»
«That you didn’t want to touch her?»
«I mean about Africa.»
At that moment I couldn’t seem to remember the story, only the image of her
riding away on a horse. «Anyway, she’s gone.»
«Yeah,» he said, opening the door. «Just gone.»
Outside, the rain had stopped, there was only a mist of it in the air, so I turned
the corner and walked along the street where the brownstone stands. It is a street
with trees that in the summer make cool patterns on the pavement; but now the
leaves were yellowed and mostly down, and the rain had made them slippery, they
skidded underfoot. The brownstone is midway in the block, next to a church where a
blue tower-clock tolls the hours. It has been sleeked up since my day; a smart black
door has replaced the old frosted glass, and gray elegant shutters frame the
windows. No one I remember still lives there except Madame Sapphia Spanella, a
husky coloratura who every afternoon went roller-skating in Central Park. I know
she’s still there because I went up the steps and looked at the mailboxes. It was one
of these mailboxes that had first made me aware of Holly Golightly.
I’d been living in the house about a week when I noticed that the mailbox
belonging to Apt. 2 had a name-slot fitted with a curious card. Printed, rather
Cartier-formal, it read: Miss Holiday Golightly; and, underneath, in the corner,
Traveling. It nagged me like a tune: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling.
One night, it was long past twelve, I woke up at the sound of Mr. Yunioshi calling
down the stairs. Since he lived on the top floor, his voice fell through the whole
house, exasperated and stern. «Miss Golightly! I must protest!»
The voice that came back, welling up from the bottom of the stairs, was sillyyoung and self-amused. «Oh, darling, I am sorry. I lost the goddamn key.»
«You cannot go on ringing my bell. You must please, please have yourself a key
made.»
«But I lose them all.»
«I work, I have to sleep,» Mr. Yunioshi shouted. «But always you are ringing my
bell…»
«Oh, don’t be angry, you dear little man: I won’t do it again. And if you promise
not to be angry» — her voice was coming nearer, she was climbing the stairs — «I
might let you take those pictures we mentioned.»
By now I’d left my bed and opened the door an inch. I could hear Mr. Yunioshi’s
silence: hear, because it was accompanied by an audible change of breath.
»When?» he said.
The girl laughed. «Sometime,» she answered, slurring the word.
«Any time,» he said, and closed his door.
I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without
being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag
colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught
the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black
dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost
breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening
in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses
blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a
woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she
was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.
She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plump
hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically. He
was short and vast, sun-lamped and pomaded, a man in a buttressed pin-stripe suit
with a red carnation withering in the lapel. When they reached her door she
rummaged her purse in search of a key, and took no notice of the fact that his thick
lips were nuzzling the nape of her neck. At last, though, finding the key and opening
her door, she turned to him cordially: «Bless you, darling — you were sweet to see
me home.»
«Hey, baby!» he said, for the door was closing in his face.
«Yes, Harry?»
«Harry was the other guy. I’m Sid. Sid Arbuck. You like me.»
«I worship you, Mr. Arbuck. But good night, Mr. Arbuck.»
Mr. Arbuck stared with disbelief as the door shut firmly. «Hey, baby, let me in
baby. You like me baby.
«I’m a liked guy. Didn’t I pick up the check, five people, your friends, I never seen
them before? Don’t that give me the right you should like me? You like me, baby.»
He tapped on the door gently, then louder; finally he took several steps back, his
body hunched and lowering, as though he meant to charge it, crash it down. Instead,
he plunged down the stairs, slamming a fist against the wall. Just as he reached the
bottom, the door of the girl’s apartment opened and she poked out her head.
«Oh, Mr. Arbuck … «
He turned back, a smile of relief oiling his face: she’d only been teasing.
«The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change,» she called, not teasing
at all, «take my advice, darling: don’t give her twenty-cents!»
She kept her promise to Mr. Yunioshi; or I assume she did not ring his bell again,
for in the next days she started ringing mine, sometimes at two in the morning,
three and four: she had no qualms at what hour she got me out of bed to push the
buzzer that released the downstairs door. As I had few friends, and none who would
come around so late, I always knew that it was her. But on the first occasions of its
happening, I went to my door, half-expecting bad news, a telegram; and Miss
Golightly would call up: «Sorry, darling — I forgot my key.»
Of course we’d never met. Though actually, on the stairs, in the street, we often
came face-to-face; but she seemed not quite to see me. She was never without dark
glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the
plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her,
herself, shine so. One might have thought her a photographer’s model, perhaps a
young actress, except that it was obvious, judging from her hours, she hadn’t time
to be either.
Now and then I ran across her outside our neighborhood. Once a visiting relative
took me to «21,» and there, at a superior table, surrounded by four men, none of
them Mr. Arbuck, yet all of them interchangeable with him, was Miss Golightly, idly,
publicly combing her hair; and her expression, an unrealized yawn, put, by example,
a dampener, on the excitement I felt over dining at so swanky a place. Another
night, deep in the summer, the heat of my room sent me out into the streets. I
walked down Third Avenue to Fifty-first Street, where there was an antique store
with an object in its window I admired: a palace of a bird cage, a mosque of
minarets and bamboo rooms yearning to be filled with talkative parrots. But the price
was three hundred and fifty dollars. On the way home I noticed a cab-driver crowd
gathered in front of P. J. Clark’s saloon, apparently attracted there by a happy group
of whiskey-eyed Australian army officers baritoning, «Waltzing Matilda.» As they sang
they took turns spin-dancing a girl over the cobbles under the El; and the girl, Miss
Golightly, to be sure, floated round in their, arms light as a scarf.
But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell
convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I
discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular
reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she
smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and
melba toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source
made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were always torn into
strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing.
Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the
words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.
Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong,
she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out
on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the
music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes
sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy’s adolescent voice. She knew
all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially she liked
