"Ralph," she said.
He glanced up. "Why you look at me that way?"
"Ralph," she said, "why don't you sell him one of your extra ones?"
"Look, Aimee, do I tell you how to run your hoop circus?"
"How much do those mirrors cost?"
"I can get 'em secondhand for thirty-five bucks."
"Why don't you tell him where he can buy one, then?"
"Aimee, you're not smart." He laid his hand on her knee. She moved her knee away. "Even if I told him where to go, you think he'd buy one? Not on your life. And why? He's self-conscious. Why, if he even knew I knew he was flirtin' around in front of that mirror in Screwy Louie's Room, he'd never come back. He plays like he's goin' through the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like he don't care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad, late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on nights when business is good. God knows. No, sir, he wouldn't dare go buy a mirror anywhere. He ain't got no friends, and even if he did he couldn't ask them to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even mentioned it to me is I'm practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at him-he ain't got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin' up, but where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the market, outside of circuses."
"I feel awful. I feel sad." Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk. "Where does he live?"
"Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?"
"I'm madly in love with him, if you must know."
He grinned around his cigar. "Aimee," he said. "You and your very funny jokes."
A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of burning tinsel and glass.
Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea, keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun-bleached magazines under her arm. She opened a flaking door and called into hot darkness. "Ralph?" She picked her way through the black hall behind the mirrors, her heels tacking the wooden floor. "Ralph?"
Someone stirred sluggishly on the canvas cot. "Aimee?"
He sat up and screwed a dim light bulb into the dressing table socket. He squinted at her, half blinded. "Hey, you look like the cat swallowed a canary."
"Ralph, I came about the midget!"
"Dwarf, Aimee honey, dwarf. A midget is in the cells, born that way. A dwarf is in the glands. . . ."
