“You owe me money,” the stranger said.
Pierrot buttoned up his fly and turned around. There was a man with a peaked cap down over one eye and a missing front tooth.
“Have I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance?”
“That redhead you used to go around with ripped me off. And now you’re going to pay for what she took.”
“Poppy? How is she? I think about her often.”
“She took all my money. I woke up and it was gone.”
“Well, I hesitate to say this, but Poppy was a generous person—so if she stole from you, there might have been a reason.”
“You’re going to pay for what she owes. So hand over a hundred dollars.”
“I don’t have a cent.”
“She said that I should come see you. She said that you would do right by her.”
“If I had money, I would give it to her. Or to you for her. But I have a new girlfriend. Doesn’t she still have that new fellow? He seemed to have his wits about him, an aggressive gent, a real go-getter.”
“He threw her out. She robbed me. Now you’re going to pay me.”
“I am no longer a thief. I can’t be, they have my fingerprints.”
“Buy a pair of gloves and act like a man.”
“I’ve never had any idea what that means.”
The man took out a knife. Pierrot closed his eyes, accepting his doom or fate or whatever. He didn’t know how to fight back. All he knew was how to sacrifice himself. But nothing happened. There was a crashing sound and Pierrot opened his eyes.
The man looked stunned. His jaw dropped as though he were about to say something. He fell to his knees. At first Pierrot wasn’t sure what had happened. The man seemed to have been struck down by God. He was in the presence of a miracle. But standing behind the man was Rose, holding a broken chair in her hands. They both looked at the body as it slumped to the ground. Rose quickly squatted—her coat tucked underneath her buttocks—and she checked the pulse of the man lying there.
“Oh, he’s okay. Let’s move along, though. He won’t be in a good mood when he wakes up.”
They headed off toward the street. The alley was filled with furniture that had been thrown out after evictions. There was a mattress covered in blue violets—the color of the blue lips of corpses. An overturned crib looked like the carcass of a dead buffalo.
“I’m not ever going to let anybody hurt us again. I’m going to fight back.”
“You are so brave!”
“I’m not brave. I just can’t take it anymore. You have to smash people over the head with chairs and bottles in order to be taken seriously.”
Her hat flew off and her hair blew up in the air. Pierrot had never seen her look so dazzling, but he also found her quite mad. He wondered why she was even dating him. He was not ferocious. He wasn’t good enough for her. Rose would realize this any second and leave him. Pierrot was concerned about Poppy. Had he abandoned her? Did he have to help her if she was in trouble? He didn’t want to think of himself as the type of man who treated women badly. But was there any way to have sex with a woman without being unkind to her? Wasn’t sex always a vicious act of cruelty? He couldn’t go back to Poppy. He wanted to be with Rose. It was the only thing he had ever wanted. Would he end up hurting Rose next? Was his relationship to her unholy and unkind as well? He wanted to be true to Rose. He couldn’t be true to any woman but Rose.
She was walking down the street, ranting about how she wanted to bop everyone in the face. Pierrot had stopped in his tracks, and she was walking alone. She started walking toward him with both her palms up and out to the side, like an Egyptian who didn’t know which way to go. Asking, “What the hell?”
“Will you marry me, Rose?”
? ? ?
ON THE DAY of their wedding, they took a bath together in little pots of warm water they had to waste hard-earned coal to heat. They asked Mimi to be their witness when they got married at City Hall. They were twenty-two years old.
Rose had a tiny white veil pinned to her black hat. She wore a navy blue dress with discreet polka dots and a white collar. She held a bouquet of cloth flowers that Mimi had picked up from the costume room at the film studio. Pierrot was wearing his famous suit.
The lace of her wedding veil made it look like they were peering at each other through a window covered in frost.
“I don’t deserve you. If anyone wants to come up here and stop this, they most definitely should. I will do anything for you. I have never put anyone ahead of myself. And I have always wanted to. I want to devote my life to making you happy. After spending this past year with you, were you to leave me, I wouldn’t be able to survive.”
“You are my Napoleon. You have stuck a stake in my heart. You are my Alexander the Great.”
Pierrot shrugged, because he wasn’t anything like those guys.