Half of Paradise

“I’ll discuss it with you when you’re not crosseyed.”

“You don’t know anything about art, whether I’m sober or not.”

“Let’s have a drink. This is rather pointless, isn’t it?”

“Hell it’s pointless. I want to know right now if you think painting these pigs is art.”

Suzanne turned to Avery and spoke quietly. “Take him outside for a while. I’ll serve dinner.”

“I’m going out for cigarettes. Do you want to come?” Avery said to Wally.

“How am I in any way involved with your smoking habits?”

“I thought you might like to take a walk.”

“All right. I know I’m obnoxious. I’ll leave,” he said. “I apologize, painter. You’re an artist. Your pigs will be hung in the Louvre someday.”

They went out of the courtyard into the street. They walked along the sidewalk in the dark under the balconies and colonnades in front of the apartments with the trees hanging over the walk, the tattoo parlors, antique shops, the small lighted restaurants with the steamed windows, the ten dollar a week rooming houses that catered to the Tony Bacino clientele, the pool halls and bars and Salvation Army missions, past the girls who stood in the darkened doorways and smiled woodenly, and across the street to the grocery store on the corner with the big screen doors and the green shutters and coarse-grained floors and the rusted Hadacol sign and the glass cases of chewing tobacco and cigars.

Avery bought a package of Virginia Extra and poured the tobacco into the wheat-straw paper. He and Wally walked back towards the apartment. Avery struck a match and lighted the cigarette and watched the paper curl away from the flame.

“How do you feel?” he said.

“Nonrepentant,” Wally said.

“You made it a little hard on Suzanne.”

“I didn’t mean to, old pal. My bile is directed only towards pretentious painters. I can’t tolerate that fellow. He’s such a goddamn boor.”

“Do you think you can go back in now?”

“I’m in excellent shape. By the bye, can we forget that Lardner business?”

“Sure.”

“I know I’m bloody insulting when I get on the grog.”

“Forget about it.”

“It’s merely that I don’t like Kipling or Lardner. Neither of them could write. I can’t understand how these people are given attention.”

“Do you want a smoke?” Avery said.

“Lardner wrote Saturday Evening Post fiction.”

Avery walked on listening and not answering.

They passed a package store just before they got to the apartment.

“I say, could you let me have a couple of dollars?” Wally said. “I’m out of booze and I don’t like drinking off the others all evening.”

Avery gave him the money. Wally bought a pint bottle and put it in his co

at pocket, and they went back into the courtyard. The guests were eating the barbecued chickens from paper plates with their fingers, and Suzanne was serving several other people who had just arrived. Avery looked at her damp temples and the way her body moved against her dress. He took a beer out of the tub of crushed ice and opened it. The foam came out over the top of the bottle and slid down the side onto his hand.

“How is he?” she said.

“Still plastered.”