Early Warning

He tried it a month or so later at the Waldorf, taking a room for the night, then watching the girls work the bar. That time, the girl had been slightly younger — maybe twenty-five, and blonde, from Los Angeles, she said, looking for a job on Broadway. But she, too, wore shoes that Andy would have admired, and she carried an expensive handbag. He gave her a twenty, told the man at the desk he was called away. The next hotel he tried was the Plaza — the wrong direction. Farther south, he thought, would suit him better. The Roosevelt seemed perfect — you could walk from there to Grand Central, and the ambience was not quite as stuffy as at the Waldorf. It was winter by then; the first girl he found had a nice Sandra Dee hairdo, headband and all, and her coat was from Macy’s, not Bergdorf’s. She talked with a little whine in her voice, like the wife in a movie he’d seen, The Killing. The second girl was from the South somewhere, and maybe this had been her first time, because when he took her up to the room, she walked around, touching things like the windowsills and the wallpaper.

The third time, he paid for his room at the Roosevelt (twenty-eight bucks), then left because he was too bored to stay. The Mansfield, a little farther south, looked right, but he decided to try the West Side. The Algonquin amused him for a month or two — the rooms were not terribly expensive, and the girls more experienced, as if they had tried out for the Plaza and the Waldorf but hadn’t made the cut. Four girls there — Leslie, Peachy, Zandra (really?), and Honey. He was ready for someplace new.

He got as far south as the Chelsea Hotel, and he liked that — there were girls coming out of every door and leaning out of every window. But he didn’t fit there, with his clean suit, nice shoes, and carefully cut hair. Better to observe the Chelsea Hotel from a distance. Three blocks away, he happened upon a ramshackle, narrow building on West Twentieth Street that faced north. The bar was called the Grand Canyon, and it had two entrances and a large window looking out onto the street. He walked through twice, looked around, greeted the desk clerk in a friendly way and reserved a room, then returned to the Grand Canyon. Three people sitting at the bar. The tables empty. Frank sat by the window. Because it was late May, the light was fairly bright. None of the regulars wanted to sit in the glare.

Frank asked the bartender for a gin and tonic. He took his drink to the sunny table and sat down. A new mixer, Bitter Lemon, masked the flavor of the gin almost entirely. He formed the name with his lips, and made up his mind to look for some. The first girl through the door caught his eye, gave him a big smile. She went to the bar, ordered a Scotch and soda, and made an elaborate show of walking past him, looking for a table, then walking past him again. When she finally settled herself, he looked over at her, lifted his eyebrow, and smiled. His smile, he knew, was irresistible. He was no less good-looking than he had always been, just sharper and harder.

This one was wearing a mouton jacket. The waist of her dress was cinched tight, and she had Jayne Mansfield tits, but Frank estimated that she had ten years on Jayne Mansfield. She got up and came over to him, not forgetting to sway her hips and let her eyelids droop. She said, “You from around here?”

Frank cocked his head, neither shaking it nor nodding. He gestured for her to sit down. She said, “You staying at this hotel?” She waved her hand to indicate the building they were sitting in. Frank kept smiling.

She said, “Yeah, well. Fine.” She smiled and took a sip of her drink. Frank felt himself get a little excited. There was a kind of run-down quality about her that he hadn’t seen much of lately. He took his room key out of his pocket and set it on the table. She nodded, then smiled and said, “So I guess you aren’t from around here. By the looks of you, you must be from Germany, maybe, but that’s okay with me. I was just a kid in the war. Worse now, in a way, at least where I’m from — Allentown, that is, a little ways west of here.” She babbled on, confident that he didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. She smiled at odd places in her discourse, he supposed to keep him interested. “So, anyway, they say New York’s a big city and all, but it’s just another small town. Me, I would like to go somewhere else, but I can never get together the dough.” Frank noticed that her right cheekbone was a little bruised, carefully made up. What got him a little more excited — the bruise itself or the care in hiding it — he didn’t know. He moved to stand up. She said, “Okay, then, Mr. Schulz, yes, let’s get it over with, since you ain’t got much to say.”