Women and Men

by Thomas Berger

  “Foosing,” then, was gone, leaving no more souvenirs of its tenancy that had Custer and Anonymous above, and the same fact was soon established for Corngold & Co., late in costume-jewelry findings, fleeing from whose 4A former space at the dash I finally remembered who, before the ossified rat, had occupied the office directly overhead: Natural Relations, either marriage counselors or computerized panders.

  Well, the third floor was mine own and immune to alteration. Ganymede’s closed door faced me as with imaginary poles I made a skiless Gelandesprung off the last step. Teddy might well have taken refuge in the pots and pans within, and I hesitated briefly for loin-girding before breaching the portal and battering him from the batterie de la cuisine.

  Three deep breaths, mouth-taken, nose-expelled, an aspiratory technique recalled from some adolescent manual on bully-trouncing, and I was ready. I twisted the knob and hurled myself in, knowing as I did that were the woman there, and not Teddy, I should have added another gaffe to that of helping myself to the second brownie.

  Perhaps you are now too blase, as I was not yet, to be startled by my assurance that no person was in the Ganymede outer office, no furniture, no wall-to-wall carpeting, and in the rear showroom, to which I next repaired through an empty rectangle in the partition, the blond door having vanished as well, neither pot, pan, table, nor fluorescent fixture!

  I discarded all thought of Teddy at that moment and sped through the hall to my own office.

  If the disappearances had become routine, I hope to shock you now with an existence in statu quo: my rooms were precisely as last seen. Peggy’s crumpled Blimpie bag lay yet on her desk, guarded by the sentry wearing the regimental colors of Tab. In my inner sanctum, in memoriam to the working over at the hands, and feet, of Pete & Tony, since smithereened on Union Square, the desk drawers and their former contents were still floor-bound at random. The blue towel lay where it had fallen when, after washing the paw that had struck my frontal bone, Bakewell had flung it into my face. How long ago that seemed; yet, contradictorily, in time’s perverse fashion, how recent as well.

  I flung myself from the third floor to the second, conscious of touching no stair en route, and burst into what had ever been the Wyandotte Club, which, had it been occupied, might have earned me at least a merciless hiding, at worst a concrete burial. But I was back again in the old series of voids: gone were staff and members and whatever furnishings they had sported amidst, bar, machines of chance, gaming tables, perhaps curtained alcoves in which to sluice their molls: of what had gone on there I was, and to remain forever, innocent.

  I had no hopes for the final enclosure, 2A, once the home of Alpenstock Industries: whatever they had been, they were gone, lugs and luggage.

  I went to the ground floor and squirted through the lobby like Rioja from a skin squeezed by a Spaniard, debouching onto the sidewalk, from which I wheeled and re-entered, not without noticing on my old adversary, the directory board, that no names remained but my own. Sam Polidor would have much to elucidate, but first I was faced with the bearding of Teddy, who, unless he had fled the building, abandoning the expensive aircraft on the roof, must be cornered, fangs bared, in the cellar.

  No doubt he had maintained his stronghold there throughout, with God knew what armory, to the total ignorance of heedless, myopic Polidor, so sensitive to petty irregularities, so oblivious to enterprises of great pith and moment.

  I ripped open the door and confronted the garbage cans and, beyond, the strait, precipitous stairway. So framed, I should be an irresistible target to him who stood below with firearm, crossbow, sling, or assagai. Fortunately, no such figure could be seen on the oblong of cracked concrete. I scampered down the splintery treads.

  A shadowy, inclined element against the bulky boiler seemed a crouching man. I addressed it—“Swine!”—and regardless of such weapons as it might bristle with, advanced with balled fists, receding navel, and jellied knees, until I was sufficiently near to fetch it so savage a loafered toe as almost to disable my poor foot.

  It was Sam’s baseball bat, and it went hurtling into the dark recess behind the furnace, where, if Teddy hid there, he must now be felled. Stepping into this place, however, I heard only a smaller rat, skittering away from which evil sound I barked my pate on a booming duct of galvanized metal.

  The remainder of the basement, stalactited with valves, festooned with loosened insulation and the corroded metallic tapes that once had snugged it, showed nothing of sufficient bulk to hide a man, and in the interests of continuity I shall not here catalogue Sam’s cellar, an inventory of which would interest only the antiquarian of that which never had recommendation: disemboweled Morris chairs, ocherous newspaper pages advertising Nehru jackets, etc.

  I toiled back to the lobby and stared into the elevator. It had not been used during my search, else I should have heard it. The car was grounded and open, and I stepped within. The slow ascent was appropriate to my ratiocinative mood, and when I emerged on the third floor I knew the signal failure of my previous tour: I had neglected to examine the water closet in each hallway.

  As if on cue, at my approach, the one at the end of my own hall now swung back its door and…Sam Polidor emerged.

  He was in the act of grossly zippering his trousers. His carnelian necktie was a loose noose around the white collar of his ultramarine shirt. After closing his fly, he tightened his tie.

  He stared at me through his horn-rims. “So Ran I see ya still here no matter what you sonofagun you.”

  “I advise you to take cover, Sam,” said I. “A desperate man is at large in the building.”

  He was unmoved. “So that’s New York for you. I wouldn’t never had a tenant if I wouldn’t rent to schmucks.”

  “You don’t seem to have any at the moment but me,”

  I said. “But time for that no doubt fascinating explanation anon. A master criminal, a fiendish fellow, lurks in some cranny of this edifice. I should ask you to call the police, but they have proved inept, if not impotent, in their previous efforts against him. Like all contemporary art-forms, theirs is in its decadence, occupied solely with structure and not substance, more ritualistic role-playing. A vice-squadder, for example, speaks like a character from Euphues—”

  Sam pawed the old boards with his shoe of dark patent leather, from which the highlights winked in ruby; across the instep stretched a golden horse bit, a chain between two rings.

  “Know,” said he, “these woods are good yet dating from the first Rusevelt probably. Real lead in the plumbing, solid doors. Scratch the paint off the switch plates, you find pure brass. Used to do things right, Rone, before the world turned to shit.”

  Did I see a tear behind his refracting lenses? I was touched, suddenly, by his feeling for quality. The man had a dimension I had never discerned. “Yes, Sam, bookbinding, engraving, and the lost-wax process of molding bronze are also dying crafts.”

  Sam winced hatefully. “Don’t talk like a prick, Run. This breaks my hot.”

  I was not offended. I saw his authentic distress, though I knew not its pretext.

  “Well,” said I, “all this is but the masochist’s flight forward. The old place has a good many years in it yet.” However, this might be a bit too far to go with a New York landlord, and I quickly added: “Not that certain improvements would be unwelcome. The full flood of my faucets seldom exceeds the trickle; the rubbish of a fortnight past can usually be found in the garbage cans; the super has been an utter stranger on my floor since his Xmas collection from me of sufficient funds to buy a pint of Twister…”

  Sam was surveying the length of my person. Tarrying at my forehead, he told me: “Rin, you got me beat, I’m man enough to admit. So gimme your proposition.”

  “Proposition?”

  “Your run-around awready cost me a fortune.” He showed his teeth in an evil smile, very like the expression of a dog suffering an unwanted snout at its hind parts but restrained by its master’s ukase against combat. “I been through a
lot, Rum. My brother-in-lore a cocksucker sold me a Valiant once that was a lemon.” He glared while I tried to puzzle out whether his relative and the fellator were one and the same, then went on before I succeeded. “I gotta kid, you know. He went bad for a while, lived with a lotta hoors and hopheads on some reservation or whadduh yuh call it where all they do is take dope and play the banjo. He finally straightened out, thank God, though didn’t go inna business but went for sociology professor in California. I guess he’s a bigger Commie than ever but don’t knock it he earns a good living the little mumser.”

  “Sam,” I said gently, “you are somewhat overwrought. It touches me to be so taken into your confidence, and these incidents from a life as valuable as any are eloquent. But I doubt your motive is purely to supply fragments of a great confession. I suspect you are somehow putting an onus on me.”

  Sam was not deterred by my speech, throughout which he continued to list the ailments incurred in his passage through the years, the betrayals, the miscarriages, and eventually fetched up at: “But you take the cake, Rain.”

  I sighed. “What is your point?”

  “The Wyoming guys never cost me a penny!” Sam cried. “They said they was moving anyhow, on account of they didn’t like the neighbors.” He guffawed in a style that partook of desperation, gloating, and malevolence. “Meaning you, haha! Shooting people upstairs what a schmuck!”

  I said schmugly: “They’re involved in a gang war with black rivals. Good for you they’ve gone.”

  “Don’t talk to me about niggers,” Sam said, sea-gulling his arms. “Don’t think I wanted to sell out to them. They’re the only ones with money in this derecession.”

  In confusion my incisors momentarily detained my tongue on the terminal word: “You’ve lost me further, Stan.”

  “Sam’s the name,” he said, not, however highly exercised, missing a trivial lapse. “What’s this about selling out?”

  “Maybe you been shrewd befaw,” said he, “but now you’re dumb. If I was to tell them you alone was holding up the deal, you find yourself with the throat cut inna garbage can in Hollem, and how police would trace it to me they couldn’t, and I’d save myself a lot of trouble and more money. Know what I spent on you so far? A bundle. For what? For shit. I was wrong, and I admit it. I thought you was some fegeleh. So you turn out a tough cookie. O.K. You can’t be bought off, you can’t be scared off. So you wanna be killed by some big bastard black as tar?”

  “No,” I confessed, “certainly not. Though neither do I share your bias against the African-derived. Timbuktu in its golden age may not have been Periclean Athens, but then what was? And did they poison their dusky Socrates? And, in the most extravagant fantasy, engendered by racist paranoia, would New York suffer morally, culturally, or aesthetically if replaced by a cluster of huts woven of wattles and cemented with cowdung?”

  Sam made a glottal sound that suggested the flush of the water closet from which he had lately emerged (incidentally, without such sound of flush).

  “My final offer take it and leave,” said he. “Four-five, you got it.”

  “Offer? Four-five? I got?”

  “Not a penny more, Rind.” Sam slapped his forehead. “Awright, five, you hustleh. But that’s tops, and next is some big coon with a switch knife. I don’t want no blood on my hands.” He turned, walked rapidly away, returned to breathe stertorously at the banister, peering at me from time to time and moving his lips as if a fragment of nut were trapped in a nook of gum.

  “Sam,” I said, “I know that it will violate the most cherished principle of yours and your milieu, namely: the total disregard of other human beings except as objects to be manipulated or eluded, but I ask you now to consider an unprecedented experience: not merely listening, but hearing. I have no clue as to the subject of your remarks.”

  And then, detecting no evidence that he comprehended my incomprehension, and being furthermore at the limits of my patience, so sorely tried these twenty-four hours by a raft of rogues, I unleashed the animal from the cage of culture and cried: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Sam whipped his glasses from his face. For an instant I believed this the preface to belligerence, but soon saw it was rather the reverse, displaying a nudity much more shocking than the exposure of Washburn’s bare pelt or even the show of Peggy confined by two ribbons.

  “You’re crucifying me is what you’re doon!” he wailed from this parody visage of defenselessness.

  Saying, “I cannot minister to a mind diseased,” I sidestepped the man and went along the hall to my office, entered the inner chamber, and hurled myself into the swivel chair behind the desk, forgetting its spring was feeble and would not sustain a backward thrust. Fortunately, the wall behind was near enough to catch me at an angle, feet in air, sight line below the surface of the desk, in fact going into the aperture left by Pete & Tony’s removal of the central drawer. An object was secured therein, Scotch-taped to the underside of the desk top.

  I rocked and toed myself down, reached in and plucked the thing away, examined the cold metal rectangle so procured.

  It was a cartridge clip for an automatic pistol. It was in fact very like the cartridge clip for my automatic.

  Sam entered during my examination of this object. “Sure,” he said, “I hid it so nobody would get killed with these shenanigans. That big schmuck Bakewell has to make it look good, so before laying down like a corpse he shoots the gun inna wall so one bullet would be gone and the barrel would stink. He could of killed somebody next store but he don’t think of that. I tell you, this is the last time I work with actors.”

  I lowered the clip to the desk and said slowly: “It went into a brownie.”

  “What a buncha bums!” Sam sighed. He had seemingly spent his passion. He fell onto the couch. “They couldn’t make a living in any other line, I tell you that. I’m paying the son of a bitch, but he gets a chance to play a corpse in some show called The Reformers and he takes off.”

  “A Ziggy Zimmerman film,” I said. “They shot the scene in my apartment, which no doubt was rented to them, in my absence, by that swine of super or dog of doorman.”

  “Him and the other one, their asses are out most of the time,” said Sam, as usual ignoring what I said and pursuing his own sequence. “That Washburn had a bit part once on ‘Kojak,’ he played a fag bartender, but he’s on unemployment all a time, on account he wants to stay in this Shitville and not to go to California. Can you beat that? You know this town is fulla assholes.”

  “One of whom is me,” I said. “You’re Teddy Villanova, aren’t you?r

  “You!” he exclaimed. “You’re some kinda real smart apple. You saw through it right away, you sonofagun.” He wore his glasses again and used them to produce a leer of admiration. “Know what it costs to hire a chopper?”

  “Neither do I have any idea of how an urban slumlord could fly one.”

  “Rusty! I tell you that, and they changed some since Korea. I had a real bitch with the thermals over ya house, maybe you noticed how I hadda swing over the river to turn?”

  “Korea?”

  “I was young once,” said Sam.

  “I thought it would have been much longer ago than that.”

  “This city takes a lot outa ya. I still got lead in the pencil, though.” He patted his belly, with an index finger thrown crotchwards. “I don’t wanna speak out of turn, but when your girl says come around, I’ll give you a good jazzing, the old soldier stood right up at attention.”

  “She released an alternative version,” said I. “Her stated purpose being, taking you as archcriminal, to lure you to capture—perhaps hitting you with a paperweight at your instant of maximum vulnerability, for she was unarmed.”

  “Got some pair, that cooze,” said Sam. “I envy you, Ram. You’re a winnah.”

  “So Bakewell and Washburn are professional Thespians—”

  “You’re talking about them girls, Nat and Al, and it’s funny, ain’t it, so good-looki
ng, could get alia guys they wanted. Whatinhell they really do, Rome? Muff one another? I can’t see it.”

  “—and Zwingli, Knox, and Calvin are genuine policemen. What of Hus and Boris?…Just a moment, who really is Natalie Novotny?”

  Polidor moued lavishly. “Uh nairline stew with a great sensa yooma. I met huh rin a singles place, name of Big Dick’s Pub, Second Avenue inna eighties.”

  “She did this in malicious japery?” I asked, and then, to rout his frown: “A practical joke?”

  Sam’s thumb and forefinger felt whether he had grown a mustache. “Hates men. You know the type.”

  I could manage my sweep of reason only by assembling a broom straw by straw. “Hus and Boris are what they say they are?…Your irresponsible scheme, for which I trust you will soon explain the purpose, unwittingly brought many forces into play, Polidor. Unruly man! There may well be international reverberations. Do you know of the Hindu?”

  “He’s the pal of them actors, runs a yoghurt gym where they go to keep in shape. A Jewish kid from the Grand Concourse,” Sam added with the usual contempt he displayed towards his ethnic fellows. “Little pisspot! I used to rent to him here. Had to throw him out. All fonfing, he didn’t pay a nickel.”

  The yoga wallah’s authenticity as native Indian having been the only identification I accepted as unquestionable, I fled to another theme, though not forgetting I owed him a return for that savage zetz to the head that he obviously had himself given me on his threshold. The only remaining character to deal with was the main, the grand, the motive for all this play of passion and volition, to which the other performers were but supernumerary: Teddy Villanova, also known as Sam Polidor.

  “Why, Sam?” I asked quietly. “Why Teddy?”

  Polidor was dumfounded. “I tole ya! I thought I’d save a buck by scaring you out. You wouldn’t listen to them other offers.”

  “Just a moment. Defer telling me Why and explain What Other Offers. You said nothing, before a few moments ago, about any offer for whatever.”