Free Listening to Billie by Alice Adams

knife. Or a pimp. Or just a man, like her brothers.
    He looked mostly like a pimp, but would that be, like, his disguise?
    One time, she had heard about the funeral of a pimp, andshe had to laugh, it was so funny. Jimmy, the pimp, used to have this green Caddy with pale brown leather inside, and at the funeral there were all his whores, three black and two blond white girls, all wearing these green outfits, with pale brown leather trim. Still, Jimmy was dead, shot dead by the brother of a girl he’d pulled, one of his whores.
    What did those guys have to say to pull a girl, to get her to be their whore?
    Kathleen said, “Miriam! wake up. Suppose somebody comes in?”
    Miriam could get home to the Project by walking along Webster Street and then down Steiner, instead of going along Fillmore, where he might be. But at five o’clock she still didn’t know; she didn’t know where to go.
    “There was this bad purple outfit in the window this morning,” she said to Kathleen, and she suddenly wished that Kathleen were Eliza, who would at least say something nice. But she went on anyway. “Tunic and pants—it was
bad.
Where I saw that guy.”
    “Lord, Miriam, all you think about is outfits. And guys.” Together they turned off the lights, and locked up, and walked down the stairs to the street, where for a moment they stood in parting conversation.
    Miriam laughed; suddenly she felt very good. “Sometimes you sound like my mother,” she said. “Telling me what I don’t need.”
    “You go to hell. Well, see you tomorrow. And you be on time!”
    “Yeah, tomorrow.”
    And Miriam walked off toward Fillmore Street, to where she now knew he would be waiting for her, with something—a Valentine?—he would have something for her. An outfit? A ride in his car and some kind of offer of a job?
    Some stuff for a great new high?

8 / A Sudden Marriage
    “How about it?” asked the man—Larry? Harry?—in the pink-and-black jacket who was introduced to Eliza about ten minutes ago. “How about it? I’ve got the tickets in my pocket. We could take the red-eye flight to Acapulco, have breakfast and grab a car and on to …” The name of the Mexican town he mentioned was unintelligible, lost in the din of the Kennerlies’ party. “We could be back by Wednesday or so,” he added.
    Laughing politely (she was like that, generally), Eliza excused herself with the truth. “I have to go to unemployment on Tuesday.”
    From Hollywood, although born in Berlin, Harry (not Larry) was used to people who did that; everyone sooner or later got unemployment checks. “Okay, sure,” he answered easily. “Tuesday it is.”
    He did not, could not, know about her Tuesday traumas: the bus trips to a frightening part of town, Third and Bryant, standing in line with discouraged, tired people. Being given cash—being terrified.
    In fact his reasonable tone, delivered in a still slightly Berlin-flavored accent, had begun to make Eliza wonder how could a reasonable man make such an insane suggestion. A very old-fashioned phrase even came to her mind: What kind of a girl do you think I am? And at the same time her imagination, whichwas quick and vivid, saw a stretching hot white Mexican beach, a tropical background of palms and manzanitas. Where they were, in Belvedere, across the Bay from San Francisco, it was a terribly cold dark day.
    He even looked a little crazy, Harry did. His hair was a little too long for that time, its waves a little theatrical. His slightly protuberant blue eyes were too intense. (Too intense as she thought this, Eliza inwardly smiled; it was an odd phrase for one who had pursued intensity with lemming-like directness, who had generally thought the non-intense people were the crazy ones: Smith, her brother-in-law, and The Lawyer, her recent lover.) But the point was that, introduced to her fifteen minutes ago by their mutual host, Ted Kennerlie, this man was now asking her to go fly to Mexico for the weekend with him,