I Have Gloria Kirby

She touched a bruised spot on my side. The tips of her fingers were cool and her lips on my body were even cooler. My eyes closed and there was nothing but the touching of our lips. One by one, she touched the bruised places.

I tried to speak, but no words would come out, only a rough sound made tight and harsh by wanting.

Do they hurt much now? she asked.

She leaned over to kiss my forehead. I caught her to me.

It was a kind of love I had never known. I had it now and found myself reaching toward the very heart of it.

I Have Gloria Kirby ©1951 by Richard Himmel

All rights reserved. Including the right to reproduced this book or portions thereof.

All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-9993209-3-8

Automat Catalog #A015

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Chapter One

It came back the minute I saw her again. Everything. All at once. The way it used to be. There was the crazy way my blood ran when she walked into a room; the hot pot under my collar when she was near me; the terrible tearing of my insides telling me how much I wanted her, wanted to have her; the skip beat of my heart and the dizzy, almost drunk feeling in my head. All these things were back again. Even the marvelous quiet that comes with the afterglow of love, the hours of being alone together in wordless talking. That feeling was back, too.

And it might have stayed, we might have picked up and gone on as though the years that had passed were nonexistent, if… if this had been night. If I had been seeing her again in the night light, this excitement might have stayed inside me, caught in my throat, rushing in my blood.

But it wasn’t night. The light of the morning was bright and intense. It came through the windows of my office with the harsh clarity of a floodlight, and I could see clearly the years between the last time I had seen Gloria Kirby and now, that moment as she stood in the door.

Her hair had been brown then, drab in the winter but wonderfully highlighted by the summer sun. It was all a glare of highlights now, bleached to a brash blondeness. The careful layers of paint on her skin couldn’t camouflage the lines around her eyes or the soft sags that had come to be around her mouth and under her chin.

Don’t get the idea that this new Gloria Kirby wasn’t something to look at. Her face had changed, become hardened and sadder. But probably to most guys she was more attractive than she had been. It’s just that I carried a picture of her in my mind and it was different from what I was seeing.

She seemed empty, somehow. All that wonderful vitality and spirit seemed drained out of her, leaving a cold void of nothingness. Maybe no one but I could see how it was with her. Maybe nobody but I had known her so well.

Even in the beginning heat of the day she was huddled in a big mink coat, holding it tightly around her, her fingers clutching the soft fur.

I stood up slowly, not saying anything for a few minutes.

She didn’t move from the doorway. Then she said my name, almost whispering it, testing the saying of it. Johnny.

Hello, Kitten.

Johnny… This time it was more than saying my name. It was saying a lot of things. Johnny. Johnny. She ran to me and I could feel her body collapse as my arms went around her. She kept repeating my name over and over again until it wasn’t my name any more but a kind of chant, a wailing.

Easy, Kitten. Take it easy.

Hold, me tight, Johnny. Hold me tight.

I held her as tight as I could. She was shivering under all that fur and crying hard. Crying not with tears alone, but with her whole body, the dry kind of tears that are so hard to cry. There was a minute that I thought all of this was for me, that seeing me again was affecting her this way. But only for a minute. Gloria Kirby was scared. She was shaking with her fright.

Holding her away from me, I looked at her face. The tears had streaked her make-up. Get hold of yourself, Kitten. I pressed her arms hard. Come on, snap out of it.

She bit her lip and tightened her body. I’m all right, Johnny. Really I am. She smiled then and backed away. It’s just that I haven’t seen you for such a long time.

Something is wrong, baby. What is it?

No, really, Johnny. It’s nothing, nothing at all. I… I had an early appointment this morning and happened to remember that your office was close by and I…

You’d better sit down. I led her over to the couch.

You wouldn’t have a drink for a lady, would you, Johnny?

I think some breakfast might set better, I said. Have you eaten yet?

Breakfast? She laughed a little and threw her head back. It was there again for a moment in that gesture, the, girl I had known, the girl I had loved. Do you remember our flat on Fourteenth Street, Johnny? Do you? Twelve bucks a month we paid, out of what you made and I made. Every morning I fixed breakfast for you. Do you remember that? Except Sunday, and then you made breakfast for me and we ate in that crazy bed that pulled out of the wall. Do you remember, Johnny? She gasped for breath. Was it real or is it something I made up? Did it happen?

It was real, baby.

She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, lit it with a lurking hand. You want to know something, Johnny? I haven’t made breakfast for anyone else since then, when we broke up—when I went away—God, it seems like a million years ago—I had my first taste of dough then, Johnny. I knew what it was to pick up a hotel phone and have them send breakfast upstairs. I thought what a sap I had been, sweating it out with you. Working for you, cooking and, washing clothes. I told myself I’d never be a sap like that again for any man. Never. Her voice softened. There have been a lot of men since then, Johnny, and I never made breakfast for any of them. No one since you. She took another deep breath and it became a rasping gasp for air. I’ve missed it, Johnny. I’ve missed it terribly. I started toward her. The years had vanished again and things were the way they had been on Fourteenth Street. But she stopped me. Stay away, Johnny. Please. Get me a drink like a good boy, will you?

I kept a bottle in my bottom drawer. I handed it to her and she took a stiff swallow and set it on the floor.

Something is wrong. What is it?

Be smart, Johnny. Tell me to get the hell out of here. I’m trouble, you know that. I’m plenty of trouble. I’ve been trouble to any guy who has touched me. Except you. I don’t want to be trouble for you. Tell me to get the hell out of here and get out of your life.

If you’re in hot water, Gloria…

Me in hot water? She laughed, took another swallow out of the bottle. That’s a hot one. Look at me, Johnny. Look at this coat. You know how much it cost? You know how much this thing cost? Do you? You know how many more I got? Me in trouble? It couldn’t happen to me, Johnny. Not to Gloria Kirby.

She wasn’t fooling me any. There was something wrong and I couldn’t figure it. It was a cinch she hadn’t come to put a touch on me. Where Gloria Kirby walked, money walked right with her.

With effort and unsteadily, she got up from the couch. Nice to see you, Johnny. Drop in and see me when you’re in my neighborhood. She took one step and collapsed to the floor, a mound of beautiful woman and beautiful mink. Her purse had fallen, too, and the contents spilled on the floor.

I stood there, wide-eyed, not believing what I saw.

Wads of dough, brand-new money in neat packages, were scattered all over the bare wooden floor. Not small stuff, either. These were packages of thousand-dollar bills.

She had come a long way, Gloria Kirby had, and she had come no way at all.

She had started in the same place, the same rough neighborhood, walking the same dirty streets looking for excitement, looking for answers. You had to be tough to survive in that neighborhood, there was so little to be had and so many people trying to get it.

I don’t remember any more how Gloria and I met. It’s unimportant. We were alike in many ways. Both of us were part of the neighborhood, born in it and rooted to it. But there was something in each of us—call it having star in your eye or a secret dimension. I don’t know what it was, but it drew us together.

In the years before the war, I was on the fence between becoming a hoodlum and being a right guy. I was tough enough for the gang, tough enough to be a leader. But I was afraid to get mixed up with them. Not afraid of getting hurt or landing in jail, but I was afraid that once started I’d never stop, I’d want to be the top man, blind to everything but being the top man. I knew all the ropes. I knew dope peddling, blackmail, policy rackets, and all the other rottenness that breeds in big cities.

I wanted what was at the top of all that, the money and security and the being free from wanting.

There was another way to get it, too—the right way, the storybook way. I was going to have to make up my mind which direction to take. The two directions gnawed at me constantly and I did nothing, not moving either way. It was at this time that Gloria Kirby and I moved into the apartment on Fourteenth Street.

Let’s get this straight, Gloria was not a virgin flower when we first got together. I say this because what happened to her isn’t really one man’s fault. It’s not my fault and it wasn’t entirely Danny Nelson’s fault. Danny was the guy she finally wound up with, as high as you could climb the strata of racketeers. Gloria was the way she was because she had been that way ever since she found out about the birds and the bees and what went on in the shed behind the church. I had always wondered why the caretaker never locked that shed, but I was glad he didn’t, and Gloria was glad too.

We lived together for more than a year. It was good living, better in retrospect than it seemed at the time. Our lives were so simple then. As I looked at her lying on the floor of my office, it didn’t seem possible that it was the same girl, the sandy-haired kid I had loved and had pillow fights with and danced with to tinny juke-box music and held hands with as we lay side by side on the wet grass in the park looking up at the stars.

It wasn’t that we stopped loving each other. We never even talked about love. One morning at breakfast Gloria said, Johnny, I’m leaving.

At the time, I didn’t feel anything. This was a girl and I had had her and there would be other girls. O.K., I said.

I’ve got a chance to go to California.

O.K.

Don’t you want to know who with, Johnny?

Sure. Who with?

Mickey Dwyer, she said. It was none of my business. I guess I didn’t really care very much, I was so caught up in my own problems. It was taking a lot of energy and concentration to sit on the fence the way I was. The rackets were so easy, just reach out and touch them. But the other thing, being a lawyer, being what I thought a lawyer was, that held the real temptation and fascination for me. It was a birthday cake a kid dreams about and never gets.

I got off the fence finally. Maybe Gloria’s leaving gave me the shove that was needed. I made it the hard way being a lawyer. It was rough and tough, but I got what I wanted, the diploma on the wall. Dollarwise, the boys in the rackets did better than I. Like Mickey Dwyer, the guy Gloria went to California with. Dwyer is right in there between being a high-class hoodlum and a first-class operator. But he does all right. He drives a Buick.

I’m going to miss you, Johnny, she had said. Mickey is all right, but it won’t be like being, with you. You know that.

You’re sure you want to go with Mickey? He likes things pretty exotic, you know.

She didn’t say anything, so I figured I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. She could take care of herself.

After she left, I moved out of the old neighborhood and lost track of her. When she began hitting the big time, her picture was in the paper once in a while or in a magazine. She was the queen of the gangster’s molls, she moved from continent to continent as easy as I cross a street. She wore the best clothes and lived in the best places and stayed in the best hotels. She could have been in the movies but she didn’t need that. She had everything money could buy.

She also had Danny Nelson, and Danny Nelson was the biggest and best in the underworld. Funny thing about Nelson, in a lot of ways he was a cute guy. He was part of the old neighborhood, a couple of years older than me, had brains and cunning, an invaluable sense of timing. I always said that Nelson was a terrible waste of talent. With all the stuff he had on the ball, if