In the Slammer With Carol Smith by Hortense Calisher Page A

from New Zealand. Auckland.’ The door closed.
    Alphonse had finished the fizz. ‘You off somewhere?’
    ‘Maybe to Philadelphia? Maybe I can get a job giving out those new packs they have?’ She has just thought of that.
    ‘Neat.’ He touches the Shelter-Pak, almost as if he’s touching her. Always thought you had a pad.’
    Will she lie? Not worth it, ever again. ‘I do. Did. Not now. Giving it up.’ She watches him brush himself off. The chinos are still okay. The tee’s armhole gapes. ‘I always thought—you had one too.’
    ‘Buddy of mine, in Jersey, just across the Tube. I want to sit for their kids, I can stay. Not too often. They don’t have the cash to goof off much.’ He slides the empty fizz bottle into his pants pocket like he needs it there. ‘Sometimes I did stay at the Y.’
    Already, even in the torn, stained turtleneck, he looks as if he could. She wonders what the job is. On that thin-limbed body with its lurking sadness what role will be draped?
    ‘That bar I went, Carol—it’s where that go-go girl—remember her? She gave me a coupon for it once. Free drink, lunchtime only. And topless girls. Way down Ninth Avenue. She wasn’t there. But I stayed.’
    ‘You swing?’
    ‘No. No I never. Lived with a girl once; she was on the vino too. But now—it’s like I’m on the antibuse for that too. Like until I get straight for sure.’
    That figures. Even if it makes her feel the weight of the Shelter-Pak. She can’t put it down, not on all that broken glass.
    ‘And you?’ He says. ‘What about you, Carol?’
    ‘I swung—But not now.’
    ‘I figured.’
    He checks his watch, a round one with a simple face. He told anybody at the club who noticed it that it was a Canal Street rip-off. It’s not junky-fancy. And the strap is leather. More like a graduation present from too long ago.
    Shouldn’t she be making off now? But everyone needs some dispensation. He always liked the way she said his name.
    ‘Alphonse?’
    ‘Yes, Carol?’
    ‘I brought your other shirt.’
    Outside Mungo has set the flowerpots with the stiff-standing blossoms at exact intervals that form a diamond pattern over the entire plot before them. The rubble holds the pots firm. If it were springtime those blossoms could be ranunculus, but it is autumn and she a wanderer, who now cannot be expected to know what plants are. Those hold their heads high in the breeze though, as if everyone is saying their name.

A LPHONSE’S ‘JOB’ is to be a three-time walk-on—as a con man in a street card-game, a bagel-seller and a rube in a Western hat—in an off-off-Broadway production still in rehearsal, that has a big last-act crowd scene, and a low budget. But he may have a chance to replace the understudy of the second male lead.
    ‘The role is a drunk,’ he says, as they sip coffee, looking out on New York Bay from the huge palm garden of the World Trade Center. ‘Good part.’ ‘But the actor doing it just got great reviews in a film. Gossip is he’ll move.’ And the understudy, Alphonse’s friend, will shift up. ‘That’s how I got the tip. He knows me from the AA.’ ‘An actors’ association?’ ‘No—Alcoholics Anonymous.’
    He likes to look at her as if she is the more innocent. ‘It’s a big chance.’ His voice deepens whenever he mentions what she thinks of as being onstage and he calls ‘the theater.’ She sees what a prospect can do—how it hones down the gross details into one gaunt meaning. How it silvers a path.
    Two days and nights had gone by since she had last seen him, parting from him at the curb. Mungo’s barrow had been just rounding the far corner. ‘Odd guy—’ Alphonse had said. At the Cat Club, where all were odd, he wouldn’t have said that. ‘I’m off, then.’ When he’d asked to meet her down here in a couple of days time, surprised that she hadn’t seen this dramatic place, she herself had felt odd—at planning anything that far ahead—but had agreed. As for