Half of Paradise

“It ain’t that. I know it’s good coming from you, but Emma don’t like me taking checks from nobody.”

“You ain’t running the only cathouse in town. You want me to go somewhere else?”

Jerry took the empty jigger off the bar and looked up the stairs at the back of the room.

“All right. I’ll cash it for you. But don’t let Emma know about it,” he said.

J.P. wrote out a check for a hundred dollars. Jerry took out for the two drinks and placed the rest of the bills and a couple of coins on the bar. J.P. folded the money and put it in his pocket. The room smelled of sawdust and flat beer.

Emma, the bartender’s wife, met him at the top of the stairs. She was big for a woman, and she had masculine features and thick muscular arms. She looked at him with her opaque colorless eyes.

“You pay here before you go any further,” she said.

J.P. took some money out of his pocket, counted it, and gave it to her.

“Where is Honey?” he said.

“She’s got a customer. You want to wait?”

“No.”

“Go into that room on the right. I’ll send a girl in.”

He went into one of the bedrooms. The single window was boarded on the outside. The only furniture was a wood chair, a large double bed that was covered with a spread tucked in tightly on all sides, and a night table ringed with glass stains with a tin washbasin on top. There were cigarette burns on the floor, and a half-empty glass of beer on the windowsill. There was a lipstick print on the rim of the glass. He turned on the overhead light and looked at the cracked wallpaper and the stains on the bedspread and he turned it off again. He sat in the wood chair and took his package of cigarettes out of his pocket. It was empty. He crushed it and threw it on the floor.

The door opened and the girl came in. She was thin and tall with long straight black hair, and she looked as though she had been up all night. She had on light blue shorts and a knitted sweater without sleeves. Her mouth was thin like a spinster’s, and she used her lipstick to make her lips look larger. She undressed by the bed and put her clothes on the chair. She looked at the crushed cigarette package on the floor.

“Say, this room ain’t a garbage can,” she said.

“Get in bed.”

“Listen. We have to keep our rooms clean. Miss Emma don’t like them dirty.”

“You ought to set fire to the whole goddamn place, then.”

“Wait a minute, mister. I’ve had a hard night. I don’t have to put up with any stuff from you.”

“I ain’t come in here to talk about your dirty floor. Get on the bed,” he said.

“I have to look at you first.”

A half hour later he sent down for a bottle. The girl asked for beer. She said whiskey made her sick. She got drunk very easily, and she talked obscenely while they made love. She hadn’t taken off her lipstick and she smeared it on the side of his face. He felt the whiskey go through his body, and he had that same thick feeling in his head of the night before, and the strain of the alcohol and sexual labor made him short of breath. He wished he had taken another girl. She had had only three bottles of beer, but she was very drunk. He drank down the whiskey and felt it hit hot in his stomach. The girl opened another beer and smoked a cigarette. She got up once to use the bathroom. They could hear the music from the jukebox down in the bar and she popped her fingers in time to the tempo. After a while she became half asleep, her mouth open, and lay relaxed on the bed and didn’t move her body with his.

“Go tell that woman to send in another girl,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Just tell her to bring someone else in, and you can take the day off.”

“What’s wrong with me? You want a special kind of jazzing or something?”

“I didn’t pay you to fall asleep.”

“You must think you’re some kind of wonderful lay. I’ve had better lays from a sixteen-year-old boy than you. You don’t even know how to get it in.”

“Get the hell out.”

“I hope somebody else gives you a good case of clap, you bastard,” she said.