“I meant now,” said Simple, “right now since I have met up with you, old buddy, and I know you will buy a beer.”

“I saw Zarita in that bar,” I said, “and if we go in there, you will have to buy her more than a beer.”

“No, I won’t! I’m off that dame. She talks too loud—come near getting me put out of my room. Besides, she will drink you up coming and going and not try to pay you back in no way. She is one of them hustlers you was talking about always out in the street at blip-A.M.”

“Most of these people where you hang out are hustlers.”

“All but you and me. I came out here hoping to run across you to borrow a fin until payday.”

“I regret to say that I don’t have anything to lend.”

“Too bad—because I was going to buy you a drink.”

“Then lose the rest in a game?”

“I was not,” said Simple. “You see that cat inside the bar with that long fingernail, don’t you? Well, he uses that nail to mark cards with. Every time I get in a game, there is somebody dealing with a long fingernail. It ain’t safe! I am tired of trickeration. Also I have had too many hypes laid down on me. Now I am hep.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “It’s about time you settled down anyhow and married Joyce.”

“Right. I would marry her,” said Simple, “except that that girl insists that I get a divorce first. But my wife won’t pay for it. And looks like I can’t get that much dough ahead myself—in my line of work, I can’t grow no long fingernails because they would break off before night.”

“Oh, so you would like to be a hustler, too.”

“Only until I pay for my divorce from Isabel,” said Simple.

“If you hadn’t quit your wife, you wouldn’t need a divorce,” I said. “If I had a wife, I would stay with her.”

“You have never been married, pal, so you do not know how hard it is sometimes to stay with a wife.”

“Elucidate,” I said, “while we go in the bar and have a beer.”

“A wife you have to take with a grain of salt,” Simple explained. “But sometimes the salt runs out.”

“What do you mean by that parable?”

“Don’t take serious everything a wife says. I did. For instant, I believed her when my wife said, ‘Baby, I don’t mind you going out. I know a man has to get out sometimes and he don’t want his wife running with him everywhere he goes.’