Page 74 of Shadow Ticket
“Gosh, honey, you’d really do that? For me?”
“No.”
A patch of silence, short and also long enough.
“There’s a train for Le Havre I can be on before you get back from work.” She almost said “before you get home.”
No more than a dotted whole rest this time.
“Well, Daphne. See you around the circuit.”
“You bet, Hop.” Yes, it’s the Norma Shearer turn she’s always being accused of, “Oh how I’ll miss you,” plus “Whew, out the door at last!” Everybody’s got her number, all right, and so what?
26
For a while Daphne, flown into a dither, was chasing all over the map, trying to be there waiting wherever the puck might be on its way to but not always guessing right, along with wires going astray, trains running late, street-fighting and barricades to detour around and so forth, sleeping and eating when she can, usually within earshot of railway stations, steered along by tattered notices stuck onto public surfaces, helpful Swing Kids, Eukodal addicts with their own notions about the sequence and speed of passing events, Daphne continuing to run a train and a half, a day or a night or a street address behind, till eventually the charm wore off and she wound down to this pause in Budapest, where she figures to take a rest and wait to see if the band or any of its unknown fragments might find their way to her.
“…but perhaps I’m telling you more than I should…”
“I’m interested, really.”
Hicks could point out that keeping still and listening to a story isn’t always the same thing as falling for it, but sees no reason to start an argument, being no stranger to the time-honored routine men have had to sit through since the world has been the world, listening to desirable women banging on about their love-life history in hopes however remote of some payoff in the cheerfully jangling currency of present-tense whoopee.
Talk about meeting cute. You’d think she’d have known better by then. It was in Chicago a few years back, still deep in her teen playgirl phase, Hop remembers some block-long Chicago speak while Daphne remembers someplace more intimate…getting set to move along, when shots ring out. Acocktail she has been looking forward to making the acquaintance of goes flying one direction, and the person bringing it another, ending up under the nearest table.
Hop touching his hat brim, “That may’ve been meant for me, Miss, awful sorry.”
“Well, you should be. You owe me a double Aviation…and for dry-cleaning this dress,” realizing, in one of those thunderclaps that can roll in sometimes and last for more than the average length of a jukebox number, that this is the goods, the one she’s been looking for forever.
What am I thinking? she then proceeds to spend a good deal of time asking herself. Forever? Who am I kidding? Long before taking her first gowned step into the Grand Ballroom at the Pfister Hotel, she’s been aware of men hanging around who thought of themselves as prime domestic material, showing up with diamond charm bracelets, wristwatches, cigarette cases, often overpriced, always annoying. None until Hop had ever considered a serenade.
Daphne could just sit and listen to Hop on that licorice stick all day and night, especially classical stuff like the solo from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, swinging it with a respectful jazz-band approach. Gets her every time. “I mean he’s not that bad on ‘Embraceable You,’ and ‘Siboney’ can always get my ticker to doing the rumba, but when he starts in on that Rachmaninoff, a girl’s no longer legally responsible.”
“For…?”
“Anything.”
After listening politely to this sort of thing for as long as he figures he has to, “Truth is,” Hicks confesses, “as I move into mid-career and begin to specialize, I’ve been trying not to work any more of these romantic scenarios than I have to.”
“Maybe you just don’t like women much. Afraid of us or something.”
“Who isn’t? Even women are afraid of women. Scientific fact, so I hear.”
“Nothing to get defensive about, is it.” Along with a look implying “You big gorilla.”
“You’ll want to keep watching my left, sometimes I let it drop.”
Taking a long backbeat, “You don’t think much of us.”
“Which ‘us’ would that be again?”
“Whoever sent you over here after me.”
“All being handled out of a law office up on North Wabash—your mother who misses you, family, relatives, all chipping in on the fee and let’s not forget that Rodney, your, which he keeps reminding everybody about, fiancé?”
At the mention of whom she maybe doesn’t wince but does blink expressively once or twice. “Well. It’s not likehe’shopping the next liner over here, is it. No, instead Li’l Million-and-a-Half hires a goon to come and do it for him. Can’t trust men? Jury’s still out, a girl lives in hope—but damn sure there’s not one woman I’d ever trust for as long as it takes to blink a set of fake eyelashes, and especially not Mrs. Vivacia Airmont, my own mother.” A pause, as if for thought. “Of course she’s been busy with pals at the State Department, making a nuisance of herself, desperate to have me back, maternal as it gets, gosh yes, can’t wait, deported back to the mother country, how humiliating is that?”
“About as much as being played for a sucker once again, after all these promises of advance money and per diem hard to pass up, now it’s lookin like the only way I’ll ever see a payday out of this ticket is if I can get you back Stateside.”
