awaiting the suggestive
à trois
attentions of a dancing girl.
“Too hot for Emile to run,” said Jerry.
Cuddles and Becky nodded in unfeigned admiration, before shebroke the silence to ask: “Jerry, you said something about this being your masterpiece ‘until now’?”
“You bet, Becks!” He dashed back to his desk for a just-dried print that he triumphantly placed between her gloved hands.
What she saw in the picture was, she knew, monstrously false, and yet it had the appearance of absolute, Hogarthian truth. In short, it was better than she had dared to hope. The 1926 Christmas-party photograph of Jimmy Gordon that she had located at
Bandbox
on Saturday morning had been wondrously transformed in the forty-eight hours since she’d given it to Jerry with her confidential instructions. In the original photo, taken of Jimmy while he conversed with Richard Lord, the subject’s facial expression had appeared argumentative. But now, Jimmy’s head, seamlessly attached to someone else’s body—and put beside a burlesque queen, whose hand rested in that body’s lap—appeared to be expressing a sort of lubricious ecstasy.
“Oh, Jerry!” cried Becky, her face flushed not just from the air out on Broadway but a new hopefulness as well. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothin’, kid,” said Jerry. “Old times.” He ran back for two extra prints of the picture.
Cuddles was too impressed by Jerry’s latest work to notice, let alone begrudge, the kiss Becky now planted smack on her old boyfriend’s lips.
“Okay,” she said, wheeling around. “Let’s go.” Rolling up the photographs, Becky pushed Cuddles back into the
Graphic
’s newsroom. They dodged the staff’s mandatory late-afternoon calisthenics on their rush to the elevator.
“Going down!” she cried.
“Could happen yet,” said Cuddles.
8
“It’s the scissors,” said Harris, on the phone to Betty for the eleventh time that day. “Dmitri’s in the office cutting my hair. I can’t tell him to stop.”
It amazed him that Betty could hear the shears but misapprehend at least one crucial word in each paragraph he spoke to her. Actually, it amazed him that she could hear
anything
at all with Mukluk yapping at her feet all the time, here in the Graybar and at home in the Warwick.
“Order up an early supper,” he suggested. “I’m too jumpy for the Crillon.” He’d been explaining the morning’s fracas before Dmitri’s scissors went into overdrive.
Dmitri, whose real name, never remembered by Harris, was Nicos, beavered away until his most important client got off the phone. Now the barber could give him the kind of stock tip he came in here with every two weeks. Today it was on a new company with a line of hair relaxants for Negro women.
“I tell you, Mr. Harris,” said the barber, replacing the receiver for his customer. “It make these girls’ heads look not even Italian. You’d think they was Roumanian or Polish.
Long
, straight hair I’m talking about. Down to their shoulders if they want.”
After a long pause, Harris asked: “Did I ever tell you my old man used to cut hair?”
“No kidding,” said Nicos, with a disappointed sigh. He’d heard about old man Haldeweiss’s vocation at least a dozen times.
Other facts of Harris’s life were conveyed with less regularity and truth during Nicos’s office visits, but the barber had a good memory, and he’d learned to sort the more reliable pieces of autobiographyinto something like a chronological whole, the way he kept track of his margin purchases and all the mortgages he’d assumed over in Queens.
He could tell you how Harris had come to New York in the mid-nineties, after ten years on the Newburgh
Messenger;
how once on Park Row he’d done everything from the police beat at the
Recorder
to chasing down society items for Ward McAllister on the
World
. Theatre, books, City Hall: it had been a tiptop education for a writer and an even better one for an editor,
à trois
attentions of a dancing girl.
“Too hot for Emile to run,” said Jerry.
Cuddles and Becky nodded in unfeigned admiration, before shebroke the silence to ask: “Jerry, you said something about this being your masterpiece ‘until now’?”
“You bet, Becks!” He dashed back to his desk for a just-dried print that he triumphantly placed between her gloved hands.
What she saw in the picture was, she knew, monstrously false, and yet it had the appearance of absolute, Hogarthian truth. In short, it was better than she had dared to hope. The 1926 Christmas-party photograph of Jimmy Gordon that she had located at
Bandbox
on Saturday morning had been wondrously transformed in the forty-eight hours since she’d given it to Jerry with her confidential instructions. In the original photo, taken of Jimmy while he conversed with Richard Lord, the subject’s facial expression had appeared argumentative. But now, Jimmy’s head, seamlessly attached to someone else’s body—and put beside a burlesque queen, whose hand rested in that body’s lap—appeared to be expressing a sort of lubricious ecstasy.
“Oh, Jerry!” cried Becky, her face flushed not just from the air out on Broadway but a new hopefulness as well. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothin’, kid,” said Jerry. “Old times.” He ran back for two extra prints of the picture.
Cuddles was too impressed by Jerry’s latest work to notice, let alone begrudge, the kiss Becky now planted smack on her old boyfriend’s lips.
“Okay,” she said, wheeling around. “Let’s go.” Rolling up the photographs, Becky pushed Cuddles back into the
Graphic
’s newsroom. They dodged the staff’s mandatory late-afternoon calisthenics on their rush to the elevator.
“Going down!” she cried.
“Could happen yet,” said Cuddles.
8
“It’s the scissors,” said Harris, on the phone to Betty for the eleventh time that day. “Dmitri’s in the office cutting my hair. I can’t tell him to stop.”
It amazed him that Betty could hear the shears but misapprehend at least one crucial word in each paragraph he spoke to her. Actually, it amazed him that she could hear
anything
at all with Mukluk yapping at her feet all the time, here in the Graybar and at home in the Warwick.
“Order up an early supper,” he suggested. “I’m too jumpy for the Crillon.” He’d been explaining the morning’s fracas before Dmitri’s scissors went into overdrive.
Dmitri, whose real name, never remembered by Harris, was Nicos, beavered away until his most important client got off the phone. Now the barber could give him the kind of stock tip he came in here with every two weeks. Today it was on a new company with a line of hair relaxants for Negro women.
“I tell you, Mr. Harris,” said the barber, replacing the receiver for his customer. “It make these girls’ heads look not even Italian. You’d think they was Roumanian or Polish.
Long
, straight hair I’m talking about. Down to their shoulders if they want.”
After a long pause, Harris asked: “Did I ever tell you my old man used to cut hair?”
“No kidding,” said Nicos, with a disappointed sigh. He’d heard about old man Haldeweiss’s vocation at least a dozen times.
Other facts of Harris’s life were conveyed with less regularity and truth during Nicos’s office visits, but the barber had a good memory, and he’d learned to sort the more reliable pieces of autobiographyinto something like a chronological whole, the way he kept track of his margin purchases and all the mortgages he’d assumed over in Queens.
He could tell you how Harris had come to New York in the mid-nineties, after ten years on the Newburgh
Messenger;
how once on Park Row he’d done everything from the police beat at the
Recorder
to chasing down society items for Ward McAllister on the
World
. Theatre, books, City Hall: it had been a tiptop education for a writer and an even better one for an editor,
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