Midnight Cowboy (6 page)

“My name, Perry, P-e-r-r-y.”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah.” He took the young man’s hand and shook it. “Joe Buck,” he said. “Want a cigarette?” They lit up and then Joe found Perry looking at him. His eyes were peculiar, humorous and touched with death: If a young person were to bring about his own untimely demise by some absurd and foolish blunder, these might be the eyes with which he would observe his own funeral.

Not knowing how to cope with these eyes upon him, Joe laughed and shrugged his shoulders, faking the situation. Perry smiled faintly and then stopped looking at him altogether. He simply leaned back in his chair, spread-legged, seeming to be totally relaxed and self-contained. He kept his eyes on the portion of street visible through the large front window of the Sunshine. There wasn’t much doing out there; occasionally a pedestrian passed and now and then a taxicab cruised by.

Joe was impressed by his own good fortune. Here he was sitting at a table with another person for the first time since he’d left the army. He was eager to prolong the situation but uncertain what was expected of him. He thought of various ways in which he might initiate conversation, but if Perry had joined him in order to participate in his silence, Joe didn’t want to spoil it all by talking.

He developed very quickly a deep and mysterious admiration for this stranger named Perry. If some wizard capable of magical transformations were to have approached him with the proposition that he and this sandy-headed personage in levis might exchange identities, he would have seized the opportunity with no questions asked. And he would have been unable to give any reason at all.

But it was this: Such people as Perry enjoy a special privilege. They walk into a place and their favor is sought and that’s all there is to it. Often they are beautiful, but this is not always the case. The thing is that they are doomed and have accepted their doom with a kind of deadly grace unusual in persons so young.

And so, elated and uncomfortable, Joe sat in this young man’s presence. After a few minutes Perry’s former company, the colorful four, got up and started toward the door. A tall redheaded boy who seemed to be their leader led them past the table where Perry and Joe were seated. He said, “Good night, dear,” and kept on moving. The second and third giggled, and the fourth, a short young man with a double chin, said, “Lotsa luck.” Joe watched as they filed out of the place. But Perry did not. He turned to Joe and looked at him briefly in a way that revealed nothing, and then continued to look out the window.

This night was the beginning of a mysterious and silent friendship that lasted for some weeks. Each night when Joe finished his work and had eaten his midnight meal, Perry would wander into the place from no one knew where and establish himself quietly at Joe’s table.

At first there would be some minimum of talk between them, having to do with the fetching of coffee or the passing of sugar, but on many nights no words would pass between them at all. They would look out the window together, or sometimes they would observe an interesting table for a while, and occasionally their glances would cross and hold for a second or two, but mostly between them there was just this sitting together in the Sunshine through the nights with no other apparent connection at all. They shared the time and they shared the place, and who could have said just why?

There was no way of guessing when Perry might leave or where he would go. He would simply rise from the table after ten minutes or after a number of hours, sometimes nodding and sometimes not, and off he would go through the revolving door and past the windows out of sight.

Joe gradually conceived the notion that Perry was the keeper of some remarkable secret that with luck would one day be imparted to him. The secret would have to do with other aspects of Perry’s life, where he came from at midnight and where he went at dawn. Somehow Joe would then be allowed to partake of these unknown activities; he would walk with Perry into the mysteries that lay beyond the revolving door of this cafeteria, and from then on Joe’s own way of occupying the dark would change. The emptiness of his own existence, the long lonesome sleeps at the H tel, and the senseless hours of dish-clattering in the scullery would be altered in some way. Perry would choose to look upon him with his peculiar grace, he would make some simple gesture that would signal the beginning of this new time Joe foresaw, and the waiting, the initiation of coffee-drinking nights at this silent table in the otherwise noisy Sunshine, would enter upon a new phase or would cease altogether.

Joe’s thoughts on these matters were not well formed; he did not even know them as thoughts. And he knew Perry only as a man knows his fate when he is visited by it: in his blood. Perry was the visitor and Joe, with no real thought to cover the matter, knew himself to be the host waiting for the visitor to state in his own good time the nature of his visit.

One night Perry turned unexpectedly to Joe and said, “What’s the story?” But he did not seem really to be asking a question. He did, however, keep his eyes on Joe.

Joe shook his head. “Hell, man, I don’t know,” he said. But what he seemed to be saying was, “I am just waiting, that’s all I know.”

On another night, in a similar way, out of the blue, Perry said, “Do you make the scene?” This was somewhat more of a question, but Joe was at a loss to answer it.

“Make the scene,” he said, faking it, “yeah, that’s right, hell yes.” He had no notion of what he was talking about.

On these few occasions when Perry did speak, his voice was deep and low, just a cut above a whisper and intimate as the grave.

One morning at dawn he said, “Are you for real, Joe?” and then he left the table and went out of the place, clearly not expecting to be answered at all.

And then one night he looked at Joe in that very first way, the long look of that first night.

Joe was nervous. It was time. For something. He was desperately anxious to know what was expected of him. He puffed on his cigarette, stalling, hoping for inspiration. He laughed and wheezed and shook his head knowingly and tapped the table with his finger tips. And then, suddenly, almost involuntarily, he stopped all this false activity and sat still, simply looking at the man across from him. His eyes clearly said, Help me, but he had no idea any message at all was being transmitted.

Perry nodded slightly. His eyes were sympathetic. Then the amusement in them became more pronounced than usual. And suddenly all that could be seen in them was the mystery that was nothing more or less than his own doom. He turned his gaze on the street once again.

It happened that at this moment, as if by some outlandish plan, the revolving door was spinning. A small man in a green necktie and brown tweed sport jacket was coming toward their table.

The man was young, about thirty, but nearly bald, and he had a high naked-looking forehead and burning beady eyes that were enlarged many times over by the thick lenses of his spectacles. He looked like a mad young scientist in a silent movie.

He stopped at the table where the two young men were seated. “Perry,” he said.

Perry gave no sign of having heard his name spoken.

“Please, Perry, do you know how many times it’s been this late?” His voice lapped the ear with something caramel-soft and caramel-sweet.

A long ash fell from Perry’s cigarette onto his trousers. He brushed at it with his hand and went on smoking.

“Please
, I said, Perry.” No answer. “I just want to ask you if you know what time it is, that’s all.”

He changed his tack: took a chair from the next table, placed it in such a way that it faced Perry, then sat down with a deliberateness calculated to suggest that he could outwait any human being alive, folded his hands on his lap, and commenced to stare.

Perry after another long moment said to Joe, “Want some coffee?”

Before Joe could answer, Perry turned to the third man without actually looking at him directly and said, “Marvin.”

The man would not break his game of staring. “Yes, Perry.”

“Marvin, two cups of coffee.”

The movie scientist leaned forward, tilting his head in a way that indicated pleading. All his gestures had this quality of standing for something not quite felt. “Oh,
Perry,”
he said.

“One black, Marvin, and one with cream.”

Marvin, by pressing his lips together and raising his thin black eyebrows, acquired an imposed-upon look. He sighed and went to the counter.

Joe smiled and said, “Hey, Perry, I bet you that fella’s a brother o’ yours, right?”

“Wrong.”

Returning with the coffee, Marvin placed both cups in front of Perry. Some aspect of the situation seemed to prohibit him from acknowledging Joe’s presence at the table.

Perry said, “Serve my friend, Marvin.”

Marvin slid one of the cups across the table toward Joe.

“Thanks,” Joe said. “Thank you a lot.” He smiled at the big forehead and tipped an invisible hat to it, considering an absurd impulse to draw a picture on it.

The man resumed his seat and his impassive stare and said nothing.

“My friend thanked you, Marvin.”

“He’s welcome, Perry. You’re welcome, sir.”

Perry’s voice did not alter; it was a warm narcotic bath of sound: “His name is Joe, Marvin.”

“You’re welcome,
Joe.”

A moment passed.

Perry said, “Marvin.”

“Yes, Perry.”

Perry put his hand forward, still not looking at the man. He seemed to place a high, benedictory value on his eyes and would not squander them on unworthy subjects. “Let me see your billfold, Marvin.”

“Oh, Perry, please.”

Perry’s hand was still extended. “I meant immediately, of course, Marvin. I always mean immediately, unless I specify otherwise.”

Marvin placed his billfold in Perry’s hand. “Oh,
honestly,”
he said.

Perry counted the money. There were four one-dollar bills. “How much is in your pocket, Marvin?”

“What
pocket?” Marvin said, quickly removing a hand from the side pocket of his tweed jacket.

“That pocket,” said Perry without pointing or even glancing in Marvin’s direction.

Marvin then handed over a small wad of bills, which Perry held without counting. “How much is here?” he said.

“Tch.” Marvin sighed. “Seventy,” he said.

“You may have my portion then, Marvin.” Perry handed back the billfold. “And I will have yours.” He pocketed the seventy-dollar wad.

“Now I’d like the car keys, Marvin.”

“No! I absolutely refuse! Please, Perry.”

“Excuse me, Marvin. I didn’t hear you. What did you say? You said something just now. Repeat it.”

“Oh, how am I going to get home?”

“What’s the matter, are your feet just killing you, Marvin?”

“Oh, Perry, why are you doing this? Is it to impress your friend? I’m sure your friend is very impressed.”

“I had planned,” said Perry, “to come to your home tomorrow afternoon. However, you’re behaving so poorly, Marvin, it may be necessary to adjust my plans.”

“What time?” Marvin said. “Late afternoon or early afternoon or what tomorrow?”

“The car keys, Marvin.”

“I’ll give them to you, I’ll give them to you. But say what time.”

“Are you suggesting a bargain, Marvin?”

“Oooh!”

“Don’t whimper. You’re whimpering, Marvin.”

Marvin smiled and tried to laugh, but all he could manage was a twitch of the eyebrows and a few minor explosions of breath.

Joe by now had completed plans for the drawing he would never be able to place on Marvin’s big blank forehead: a girl-child with long mascara’d eyelashes.

Marvin took the car keys from his pocket and placed them on the table before Perry.

“Here,
take
the things. Five o’clock?”

“Thank you, Marvin, for the use of your car, and for all your other kindnesses. I may sometimes fail to show my appreciation, but you do have it, from the heart.” Perry rose from the table. “Come on, Joe.”

Joe rose slowly from the table, confounded by what he had witnessed. He had the feeling that if Marvin would show his eyes everything would then be all right. But the spectacles clearly grew out of his face like flesh and horn and muscle and there was no removing them.

Marvin got up and grabbed Perry’s arm. Perry stood stock-still, holding the offended arm aloof from his body, his back to Marvin. “Remove your hand, Marvin. And sit back down.”

These commands were executed at once.

“What time then?” urged Marvin. “About five? Or after? Or what?”

Perry now turned for the first time to the little man with the many-times-magnified eyes and bestowed upon him a long ambiguous gaze: It looked like contempt, but then again it looked like tenderness. “Sometime tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Now I want you to sit still and stay that way till I’ve gone. Do you understand what I want?”