But Clarence’s picture portfolio was gone, out in that night, with the wrong people.
Who will protect Clarence now, I wondered. Who will save him from the dark and keep him, living, until dawn?
Myself? The poor simp whose girl cousin beat him at hand wrestling?
Crumley? Dare I ask him to wait all night in front of Clarence’s bungalow court? Go shout at Clarence’s door? You’re lost. Run!
I did not call Crumley. I did not go yell at Clarence Sopwith’s bungalow porch. I nodded to Ricardo Lopez and went out into the night. Constance, outside, was crying. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.
She swabbed her eyes with an inadequate silk handkerchief. “That damn Ricardo. Made me feel old. And that damn photograph of that poor hopeless man.”
“Yes, that face,” I said, and added, “. . . Sopwith.”
For Constance was standing right where Clarence Sopwith had stood a few nights ago.
“Sopwith?” she said.
39
Driving, Constance cut the wind with her voice:
“Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day. Tonight is over, I choose to forget it.”
She shook tears from her eyes and glanced aside to see them rain away.
“I forget, just like that. There goes my memory. See how easy?”
“No.”
“You saw the mamacitas in the top floor of that tenement you lived in a couple years back? How after the big Saturday night blowout they’d toss their new dresses down off the roof to prove how rich they were, and didn’t care, and could buy another tomorrow? What a great lie; off and down with the dresses and them standing fat- or skinny-assed on the three-o’clock-in-the-morning roof watching the garden of dresses, like silk petals going downwind to the empty lots and alleys. Yes?”
“Yes!”
“That’s me. Tonight, the Brown Derby, that poor son of a bitch, along with my tears, I throw it all away.”
“Tonight isn’t over. You can’t forget that face. Did you or did you not recognize the Beast?”
“Jesus. We’re on the verge of our first really big heavyweight fight. Back off.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“He was unrecognizable.”
“He had eyes. Eyes don’t change.”
“Back off!” she yelled.
“Okay,” I groused. “I’m off.”
“There.” More tears fled away in small comets. “I love you again.” She smiled a windblown smile, her hair raveling and unraveling in the flood of air that sluiced us in a cold flow over the windshield.
All the bones in my body collapsed at that smile. God, I thought, has she always won, every day, all her life, with that mouth and those teeth and those great pretend-innocent eyes?
“Yep!” laughed Constance, reading my mind.
“And look,” she said.
She stopped dead in front of the studio gates. She stared up for a long moment.