I love this, she said.
What, shopping?
For men’s things. It’s sexy.
They selected shirts and ties and cufflinks. They studied shoes in a glass case. A sleek attendant hovered.
Wednesday noon he appeared at Comer’s in a pair of alligator shoes and wearing a camelhair overcoat. A pair of beltless gabardine slacks with little zippers at the sides and a winecolored shirt with a crafty placket requiring no buttons.
Fuckin Suttree’s robbed Squiz Green’s, said Jake.
Stud grinned and wiped the countertop before him. What’ll you have, Sut?
I think I’ll go for the steak and gravy.
Ulysses leaned on the counter and studied him. He took Suttree’s lapel between his thumb and forefinger and eased the coat open to read the label, nodding sagely, a toothpick in his mouth. Fishing business has picked up a bit, has it? he said.
Fishy business, more likely, said Sexton, posed beneath his picture on the wall in flight gear, tapping his thigh with the wooden triangle and watching down the hall.
Let me have a chocolate milk, said Suttree.
She was gone to Asheville for ten days. He had a radio in the room now and a rug for the floor by the side of the bed for stepping out onto. In the afternoons he’d run down ads in the paper for apartments to let, stalking around in cold and barren corridors with half a heart and listening to the chatter of a graying landlord in houseshoes with his massive ring of keys like some latterday gaoler saying blah blah blah blah blah. When she came back he was still at the hotel.
He showed her the bankbook. It was in her name and there was eleven hundred dollars in the account. She gave it back to him and smiled and pushed his nose.
He watched her while she sat at the mirror and dried and set her hair, himself consumed in womby lassitude there in the sagging bed, watching her scoop great daubs of cream from a pot and slab it onto her arms and her breasts, her eyes turned to his in the mirror where he lay sipping his drink. She had smeared her face with a sizelike caulking that set up in a clown’s alabaster mask, crumbling gently in the lines of her smile, a white powder sifting from the cracks. In this theatrical cosmetic she came to the bed and sat lotuslike clad only in her panties and dressed her heels with a stone, her full thigh arched, she bent intently.
He bathed and dressed in his new suit and shoes and the neatly folded silk tie and Suttree and his soiled dove descended the shabby stairwell and stepped into a cab at the curbside to take them to dinner. Later they went out to the American Legion and she won over a hundred dollars at the craptable and put it in the top of her stocking, giving him a big whore’s wink while the patrons goggled at that outrageous expanse of flesh. She got a little drunk and they danced and she told him she wanted to make love right there on the floor, whispering in his ear and rubbing her cunt on his thigh until he had to take her home.
In the morning she came up with the papers, still in her nightwear under the raincoat, a jug of cold orange juice and a bottle of aspirin. They sat up in bed together and read the paper and went through the rentals with a pencil. They moved that afternoon.
Lugging stuff out of the taxi and up the cold high stairwell to the apartment on the second floor, Suttree poking around in the kitchen, looking in the empty refrigerator, the cupboards. Sitting in the airy front room above Laurel Avenue and staring into space, detached, a displaced soul musing on the hiatus between himself and the Suttree moving through these strange quarters.
The cabman stood fingering the brass snap on the leather change-pouch at his belt. Suttree looked up.
That’s it aint it?
I hope so.
Well.
What do I owe you?
Two forty.
Suttree gave him three dollars and sent him down the stairs. She was hanging stuff in the closet. He stood in the doorway and watched her.
Imagine a closet, she said.
Imagine.
He got ice from the refrigerator and fixed them drinks and came into the bedroom with them.
Is it five oclock yet? she said.
Of course, said Suttree, clicking the glasses.
She went in to the bathroom and he stood at the window looking out, the drink in his hand. He could see an old man washing at a sink, pale arms and a small paunch hung in his undershirt. Suttree toasted him a mute toast, a shrug of the glass, a gesture indifferent and almost cynical that as he made it caused him something close to shame.
Toward the middle of February it grew bitter cold. She went to Chicago and he didnt hear from her for ten days, he thought she’d gone back to her girlfriend. The plumbing froze. He spent long hours in bed, his head hanging over the edge of the covers watching how the purfling of scorpions on the raw and napworn carpet went head and tail. Blue and dusky rose, dirtdulled, a center pattern esoteric and obscure. After a chemical dream, or the dried hand of some eastern adept.