OCR Text |
Show 207 with him in the mornings: if I would run down to 55th Street for fresh rolls, he would make coffee and we could eat in his cheerful room. One morning I came back with cheese rolls, my favorite, and Ben had coffee perking on the hotplate, himself rosy-faced from a shave and putting on his pants, Frances Hicks in his bed. "Oh. I didn't expect you here." "Who did you expect? Ben's no monk, you know." "I thought you were a virgin though." "You would. Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy." Frances had been living in what was now my room with an abstracted philosophy major named Hirsch, who in August had stuffed the pockets of his corduroy jacket with cooked spaghetti, no sauce, and took off hitchhiking for New York. Left loverless, Frances had moved in with a guy on the third floor. Norman Lander told me that she had been living in one room or another in The Castle for two years, though never, he said, with him. Thank god. He said that whenever her roommate moved out, she took another roommate, another room. When I asked her about the guy on the third floor she told me cheerfully that he hadn't worked out and that Ben had taken her in. She wasn't a bad looking girl, only a few pimples and only a little bit overweight, but she didn't much like me. She claimed Ben had smuggled me into The Castle just to have a slave to exploit, though she didn't mind when I bought rolls and fruit for her too. From the start she told me to get a poppyseed cake, lamenting that we never had poppyseed. "I don't like poppyseed," I said. "You could learn to like it. Hey, get fresh fruit too-figs, papaya, breadfruit. Quince or kumquats. Whatever they have." "Yes, ma'am." She loved to tell me what to do. Usually when I got back she would still be in the sack and 3en would be |