Ask the Dust by John Fante Page B

him and they walked away, and I was there alone, horrified, and smiling weakly at what I had done. As soon as they were out of sight I got out and walked up the stairs of the Flight and down to my room. I couldn’t understand why I had done that. I sat on the bed and tried to push the episode out of my mind.
    Then I heard a knock on my door. I didn’t get a chance to say come in, because the door opened then and I turned around and there was a woman standing in the doorway, looking at me with a peculiar smile. She was not a large woman and she was not beautiful, but she seemed attractive and mature, and she had nervous black eyes. They were brilliant, the sort of eyes a woman gets from too much bourbon, very bright and glassy and extremely insolent. She stood in the door without moving or speaking. She was dressed intelligently: black coat with a furpiece, black shoes, black skirt, a white blouse and a small purse.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” she said.
    â€œJust sitting here.”
    I was scared. The sight and nearness of that woman rather paralyzed me; maybe it was the shock of seeing her so suddenly, maybe it was my own misery at that moment, but the nearness of her and that crazy, glassy glitter of her eyes made me want to jump up and beat her, and I had to steady myself. The feeling lasted for only a moment, and then it was gone. She started across the room with those dark eyes insolently watching me, and I turned my face toward the window, not worried by her insolence but about that feeling which had gone through me like a bullet. Now there was the scent of perfume in the room, the perfume that floats after women in luxurious hotel lobbies, and the whole thing made me nervous and uncertain.
    When she got close to me I didn’t get up but sat still, took a long breath, and finally looked at her again. Her nose was pudgy at the end but it was not ugly and she had rather heavy lips without rouge, so that they were pinkish; but what got me were her eyes: their brilliance, their animalism and their recklessness.
    She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn’t know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odor of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odor of oldness, the odor of this woman in the process of growing old.
    She merely glanced at the script; it annoyed her and she flipped it over her shoulder and it zigzagged to the floor.
    â€œIt’s no good,” she said. “You can’t write. You can’t write at all.”
    â€œThanks very much,” I said.
    I started to ask her what she wanted, but she did not seem the kind who accepts questions. I jumped off the bed and offered her the only chair in the room. She didn’t want it. She looked at the chair and then at me, thoughtfully, smiling her disinterestedness in merely sitting down. Then she went around the room reading some stuff I had pasted on the walls. They were some excerpts I had typed from Mencken and from Emerson and Whitman. She sneered at them all. Poof, poof, poof! Making gestures with her fingers, curling her lips. She sat on the bed, pulled off her coat jacket to the elbows, and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with insufferable contempt.
    Slowly and dramatically she began to recite:
    What should I be but a prophet and a liar ,
    Whose mother was a leprechuan, whose father was a friar?
    Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water ,
    What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?
    It was Millay, I recognized it at once, and she went on and on; she knew more Millay than Millay herself, and when she finally finished she lifted her face and looked at me and said, “That’s literature! You don’t know anything about literature. You’re a fool!” I had fallen into the spirit of the lines and when she broke off so suddenly to denounce me I was at sea