The Last Gentleman

engineer, blinking around at the watery darkness which smelted of sweet beer and hosed-down concrete—there were others present but he could not yet make them out. “The truth is that when I saw you yesterday I did not place you. As you may recall, I spoke to you last summer of my nervous condition and its accompanying symptom of amnesia. Then yesterday, or the day before, I received a blow on the head—”
    â€œListen,” cried the pseudo-Negro. “Yes, right! You have no idea how glad I am to see you. Oh, boy. God knows you have to be careful!”
    â€œNo, you don’t understand—”
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” said the pseudo-Negro.
    The engineer shrugged. “What you say, Breeze?” He caught sight of the proprietor, a chunky shark-skinned Negro who still wore a cap made of a nylon stocking rolled and knotted.
    â€œAll right now,” said Breeze, shaking hands but sucking his teeth, not quite looking at him. He could tell that Breeze remembered him but did not know what to make of his being here. Breeze knew him from the days when he, the engineer, used to cut through the alley behind the Dew Drop on his way to the country club to caddy for his father.
    â€œWhere’s Mort?” asked the engineer, who began to accommodate to the gloom.
    â€œMort couldn’t make it,” said the pseudo-Negro in a voice heavy with grievance, and introduced him to his new friends. There were two men, a Negro and a white man, and a white woman. The men, he understood from the pseudo-Negro’s buzzing excitement, were celebrities, and indeed even to the engineer, who did not keep up with current events, they looked familiar. The white man, who sat in a booth with a beautiful sullen untidy girl all black hair and white face and black sweater, was an actor. Though he was dressed like a tramp, he wore a stern haughty expression. A single baleful glance he shot at the engineer and did not look at him again and did not offer his hand at the introduction.
    â€œThis is the Merle you spoke of?” the actor asked the pseudo-Negro, indicating the engineer with a splendid one-millimeter theatrical inclination of his head.
    â€œMerle?” repeated the puzzled engineer. “My name is not Merle.” Though the rudeness and haughtiness of the actor made him angry at first, the engineer was soon absorbed in the other’s mannerisms and his remarkable way of living from one moment to the next. This he accomplished by a certain inclination of his head and a hitching around of his shoulder while he fiddled with a swizzle stick, and a gravity of expression which was aware of itself as gravity. His lips fitted together in a rich conscious union. The sentient engineer, who had been having trouble with his expression today, now felt his own lips come together in a triumphant fit. Perhaps he should be an actor!
    â€œYou’re here for the festival, the, ah, morality play,” said the engineer to demonstrate his returning memory.
    â€œYes,” said the pseudo-Negro. “Do you know the sheriff here?”
    â€œYes,” said the engineer. They were standing at the bar under a ballroom globe which reflected watery specters of sunlight from the glass bricks. The pseudo-Negro introduced him to the other celebrity, a playwright, a slender pop-eyed Negro who was all but swallowed up by a Bulldog Drummond trenchcoat and who, unlike his white companion, greeted the engineer amiably and in fact regarded him with an intense curiosity. For once the engineer felt as powerful and white-hot a radar beam leveled at him as he leveled at others. This fellow was not one to be trifled with. He had done the impossible!—kept his ancient Negro radar intact and added to it a white edginess and restiveness. He fidgeted around and came on at you like a proper Yankee but unlike a Yankee had this great ear which he swung round at you. Already he was onto the engineer: that here too was another odd one, a Southerner who had crossed up his wires and was something betwixt and between. He drank his beer and looked at the engineer sideways. Where the actor was all self playing itself and triumphantly succeeding, coinciding with itself, the playwright was all eyes and ears and not in the least mindful of himself—if he had been, he wouldn’t have had his trenchcoat collar turned up in great flaps around his cheeks. The Negro was preposterous-looking, but he didn’t