Though old Cholet had been in his rented office rooms for years, no one called out to him, no one seemed to know him. He passed Ram’s Curry Shop and Sam Mi’s Trading Company, the walls hung with a hundred wigs and hairpieces. “Anyway,” he said, holding up his hand like a cop as we crossed the street, “before the war I was a doctor in a part of Paris where there were clothing and sewing shops, poor and mostly Jewish, but I wasn’t Jewish. I had a second-floor office up off a lovely wrought-iron stairwell painted white, like iron lace, and marble stairs, an office all frosted glass panels with pansies etched into the glass, a horsehair couch, and the first entirely naked woman I saw ever in that little room was in that frost light. Absolutely still she stood. I walked around and around her, stunned by the white curve of her belly. For some reason I thought, ‘This is the curve of condolence,’ above that blackness between her legs. Then soldiers came a few years later and herded all the Jews and me, too. They came right into my home and took me off in the trains.”
He held me by the elbow again. “You know, you’re a good listener,” he said. “But the trouble with a good listener is you don’t know for sure whether he’s listening.” He laughed and I said, “What can I say?” as we stepped into the grey light of the Parthenon Room. Cholet continued his story: “Anyway, I was no Jew. I went into a rage in circles, how could they do such a mistake, and terrified, I told them to take down my pants, they’d see, and when they didn’t, I did. I held my cock, my own self out to them like an offering, my proof.” He sat down with his back to the wall, facing the stage in the big empty restaurant. There were plastic olive-coloured leaves and grapes hanging from the crossbeams over the bar. The jukebox was playing and two north-country Indians were sitting alone in a corner, aimlessly rolling red dice along their tablecloth, calling out, “Six, your point is six. Make a six, six…”
“You see, I look back,” he said. “It’s like one day I find myself watching – because nothing could be hidden in the camps – a young boy and girl making love, and they had the skin and bones of old, old people, looking like they would have looked if they’d lived a long life. They made love furiously, whispering over and over love words and making love like lunatics, nearly killing themselves because they had no more life coming. Some of us watched, and we knew what they were doing, killing themselves off quicker, which in a way we envied because we kept our hearts hidden. Otherwise I don’t remember much except for the sound of the boxcar wheels clicking on the rails – that doesn’t go away – and baby shoes, piles and piles of little shoes. I’d seen men slide off what we called the flute, the board with the bum holes over the cess pit, fall off into the shit and drown. A terrible thing, a man swallowing shit. After I was out and on my feet, I’d lost an eye but I felt good because again I could smell tobacco on myself. I bought a suit, a good suit, heavy tweed, brown but with a green thread all through so it looked almost dark green. I had this one eye with an eyepatch and sometimes I found myself standing staring at myself in shop windows like the windows were mirrors, and before I got myself out of Paris I thought I’d get a glass eye. I was blue-eyed but I got a green eye to match my good Sunday suit, which seemed right in a wrong kind of way, like a joke on a joke. Like for a while I ate only kosher food, awful-tasting stuff, a non-Jew more Jewish than the Jews, but now I eat anything, junk food, it doesn’t seem to matter,
as she walked over to the window wall and stepped into purple suede pumps, laughing and parading, then planting herself and angling her left foot like she was on stage, chin up, mockery-full of herself and full of nakedness and silence in the room, the feel of eyes, my smile, all the approval needed. She said her father’d had his own dream about her, too, “’cause he was in construction, and he loved being the boss ’cause he said life is for steadfast guys, that’s the way he talked. He wanted nothing to do with windsucker guys, guys who had small dreams and held on to them. He made model airplanes, you know, paper and balsa wood, and he went into all these big summertime competitions on the island, trying to win and betting he would win. He was a big bettor on himself. ‘Money talks and bullshit walks,’ is what he said. So one day another flier says to me, can he have a date, and before I can say yes or no my old man says his daughter don’t go out with no windsucker guys and laughs himself blue, saying, ‘Walk, walk,’ which was the nicest thing my father ever said about me,” and down she sat with her legs stretched out, still wearing the baseball cap, staring. “It’s all a gamble. Look at me, where I ended up. A hairdresser, and I make a bet on a horse every day. You’d be surprised how many women are throwing their bread away every day just to get a little action in their lives. You’d be surprised at what’s humming under the hair dryers. I lose like everyone else except one day I parlayed a real payoff into some big bucks and I decide the hell with it, time to come up in the world, move out of this here basement and across the street, to a small apartment. So I take a place after talking to the super and I got no furniture, which you can see, so he says he’ll help carry what’s around, and I know he’s hoping for a little action with me himself. He’s got the mattress, a single size, you know, and I got the box spring, which weighs nothing, and he gets it across the street and I’m coming and then, right in the middle of the road carrying a goddamn box spring, a car hits me, “But what happens,” Cholet said, “even when there’s nothing, what we called nothing, and this is remarkable enough in itself, when there was nothing to live for, even in the camp we played cards. We played with little dirt-marked cards, all the one-eyed kings and jacks passed hand to hand, hoping for a little luck, good or bad. It is so strange the way we become what we have shared, a little hope,” and he smiled, crossing his skinny legs.
“What I mean is, now there are four of us. We’re not friends necessarily, but we found each other here in this city that we’d never heard of before – men lucky to be alive anywhere, nobodies from nowhere, three Jews and me, and what am I? Nothing, and it’s our home but not our home, so there we are playing cards every Friday night with a man, a young Chinese who’s our pharmacist, in one of the guy’s high-rise, very nice with all white rooms with white rugs, a round table. He plays poker almost every night, this Chinese. It seems gambling’s in their blood. And stacked on the floor against the wall a foot deep on one side of the table are Playboy and Penthouse magazines from ten years back, and the same thing on the other wall, except it’s Popular Mechanics, and if your cards are no good, you sit and take your choice thumbing through these books. She laughed hard, circling the table, high heels clacking on the loose parquet floor, pulling her cap over her eyes, naked arms open, “I ask you, someone who gets hit by a car while carrying a box spring is in big trouble, right? That’s boxcars when you get hit while hustling a bed in the middle of the road. I mean, that’s a signal, man. So I moved right back down here into the basement. I mean, this is where I live, the most roots I got, I guess, and I never gambled since because when you get a sign you got to go with it. No apartment for me. So I’m easy, very okay, I don’t break my nails, I don’t break my heart, I’m a good dancer and I got some nice shoes, right? A young girl strode out of the kitchen, a jacket of beads and tassels draped over her bare shoulders. Cholet ordered saganaki and a salad of black olives and onions in oil. “Black olives with good spices, you know how hard they are to find?” he asked. “No,” I said, and he said, “Say aah,” and laughed. I laughed, too, and opened my mouth. He shook his head and smiled. “I like you. A little tense but you’re all right. You would have been okay where I was. And here you are okay, too. What’s to worry? You got a heart like a horse.”
The small stage was spot-lit for the girl. Her cigarette burned to the filter tip in an ashtray while she danced. She clomped around in a circle, sometimes cupping her breasts, chewing gum. The Indians paid no attention, laughing, rolling the dice, calling numbers, “Crap, acedeuce.” “This doesn’t go on long,” Cholet said, eating olives and sipping brandy, and soon the girl was gone and he said, “The funny thing is, there are apartments
above these stores and this bar and all the time, if you listen, there’s a child above here. She runs up and down what must be a long hall. I don’t know why I’m so sure it’s a girl but I suppose it’s because what she makes me think of is my son.” Cholet lit a Gitanes and folded five dollars under the saucer on the table, nodded to the unshaven bartender, and knotted his scarf. In the open doorway, her crossed arms under her breasts afloat in the lamplight, she said, “You know what’s nice? Most guys you meet the first time all they got is yack yack about themselves, right? But with you there’s no yack yack.” “Maybe I got nothing to say.” And she said, “Maybe so, but that’s why I wanted to take off my clothes for you earlier, like a little present, you know, because if sometimes you got nothing to say it doesn’t mean you’ve got to lie and say something.” Her hand out, touching, wistful, “You got my number, right, if you want to call, okay? And you know what? I’m gonna put on my pyjamas and go to bed, and have a real good sleep. Thanks to you, I feel real good,” the door closing on the early morning, and out in the street a low-hanging mist, dong of the bell in the city hall tower and a damp coolness soothing in the air, coming home, looking for some thread of light
and a neon sign flashed down the street. “So there we were, you see,” Cholet said, walking toward the stone gate, “surrounded by magazines, motors, private parts. We are four old men dealing each other a hand in the middle of nowhere except for what we share, numbers, which make us closer than most men, numbers which are everything, and nothing tattooed on the arms. Last Friday we played till five in the morning and someone says it’s the last pot, like a last chance at life, so all bets are doubled. And he says, ‘You know what, let’s play our numbers,’ like you sometimes see people in beer halls playing with dollar bills, playing Bullshit Poker, where what they do is they pair up the numbers on their bills. And we laugh a little but it seems like a good joke at so late an hour so we bet, the four of us, no cards necessary. But now our Chinese friend is left out and sour because he’s got no chance to get even on his losses. With each call there’s more money and finally a big pot. So there we are facing each other, stiff in our white shirts still buttoned at the wrists, palms flat on the table, and the Chinese says, ‘Okay, show what you’ve got,’ but Jacob, he says to the Chinese like he’s delivering a death sentence, ‘There’s some secrets you don’t lie about,’ and he calls two pairs, sixes and eights. But the way it works out, two pairs and Avrom’s three threes are not good enough because I am three nines with a four and a five and so Avrom says, pushing all the money at me, smiling, ‘Cholet,’ he says, ‘you’re a big winner,’ and I said yes, my heart beating, yes, and we all put on our coats like we always do at the door, laughing, and went home in the dark,”
walking away from her through the park, a misty night, street lamps in the elm leaves, with no lights on in the houses along the street except from my front window, the floor lamp left on when there was nobody else home. In the dark, I saw myself standing at the window, calm but hunched, my heart pounding, staring into my reflection, with her saying thanks to me for saying nothing and with me left wondering what was there to say to Cholet, except nothing.
POODLES JOHN
Poodles John owned a small clothing store. He was called Poodles because he always carried Benny, a small poodle, in the crook of his arm. He drove a big white car with old-fashioned fin-tail fenders. He had an easy smile and a little bulge of baby fat under his chin. In the late afternoon, with his car parked by the curb, he liked to stand outside the store wearing a one-button-roll suit – preferably a pearl-grey lightweight flannel – straight-last shoes, a white-on-white shirt, and in the winter a dark blue Bennie topcoat, narrow at the waist and flared at the hem. He thought that calling the dog Benny after his topcoat was still very funny. “Funny is as funny does,” he always said to his clerks in the store. “Today we sucker the soft touches.”
“You got the touch, Poodles?” his clerks said, laughing.
Poodles John lived with a woman a year older than himself, a handsome woman with auburn hair and full breasts who was in her late thirties. She had a loping walk. “You got racehorse legs,” he’d told her, “and good lips, not those thin razor jobs like some women who’d just as soon cut your heart out as look at you.” She no longer laughed when he tried to compliment her. “Old Luella’s got the legs built for speed,” she said one morning, smoothing her nylons, “but I’m slowing down. It’s not the drop in the tits,” she said, “it’s under the arms that worries me.”
Poodles liked the fullness of her body, remembering his mother before she died, the flushed warmth of Luella’s flesh as she sat in front of the mirror listening to an alarm clock radio, keeping what she called, “A little calm before the storm.” One soft spring night Poodles yelled, “What goddamned storm?” and Luella looked at him mournfully. “You only prove you don’t know what’s out there, waiting for us,” she said, and Poodles told her he could not stand waiting for a bus let alone waiting for what he didn’t know was there. Now he had to watch the wary look in Luella’s eyes as she sat slumped forward on the side of the bed. He had admired the straight way she walked, her aloofness, and he always tried to walk with his own shoulders thrown back, sure that his ability to keep calm allowed him to handle other men wisely, the way he handled hookers and the clerks in his store. But now she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“About what?”
“About getting old. I’m getting old.”
“To me,” he said, “you look terrific. We got nothing to worry about, me and you.”
“You’re such a con artist, Poodles,” she said and shook her head. “Like you say. I got the racehorse legs.”
“You better believe it, baby.”
“I’m going to the glue factory, Poodles.”
“This is no goddamn glue factory,” he said, slamming his hand against the wall. “I ain’t no scuzzbag and neither are you. I’m telling you to think good about yourself. I think good about myself and I think good about you. But if you wanta think bad about yourself, there’s nothing no one can do.”
He smoothed the lapels of his suitcoat. She put her head in her hands. He was worried she was going to cry. He picked up Benny and went out, driving slowly downtown. He took in two deep, calming breaths as he strode into the store carrying the dog. His clerks called out, “You got the touch today, Poodles?” He put the dog in its hamper behind the counter. “I always got the touch,” he said, and the two clerks laughed. “Magic man, that’s me,” and he was pleased, going upstairs to the room he rented over the store. But as he stepped into the grey light of the bare room and saw the unpainted walls, the daybed and the card table, the phone and the slat blinds, all his good feeling drained away. It’s all her fucking fault, the bitch.
Poodles closed the blinds. He ran a poker game in the afternoon in the upper room. He was a good dealer, stern-faced, and his fingers always fast. He broke open a new Bicycle deck and a carton of cigarettes. A long time ago an old dealer named Herschel, who never drank liquor but still died of cirrhosis of the liver, told him to give players a little something free. “It’s a touch,” he told him, “and they think they’re among friends, and there’s no one you can fade faster than a guy who thinks he’s among friends.” Poodles set out tinfoil pouches of potato chips along with the cigarettes. Emptying the ashtrays, he sat down, worried about Luella, who’d become so erratic, often breaking into tears that left him speechless. He’d had enough of keeping his mouth shut all his life, what with all the shit and trouble it took to get a fistful of anything. And he remembered bitterly when only a few low-life gamblers had come in the door and he’d had to scuffle and scramble, since he was running the game for a big Greek who had fronted all the money. He’d always had to try to skim something for himself while running the game and trying to take a little betting action on the phone at the same time. The players had complained about the phone ringing and he had sweated a lot. He’d stuck his betting slips, little roll
-your-own cigarette papers, to his sweating arm while laying cards around and nobody liked that. That was the ass end of it all, Poodles thought, remembering how the Greek had come by and taken a lady’s lipstick mirror from his vest pocket and hunched forward on the daybed clipping his razor moustache with small scissors, saying, “You’re in the phone book, Poodles. You’re Poodles Enterprises, but you’re not turning shit. You take in loose change that don’t pay the rent. You think, eh? You think what to do, Poodles, but until then, no more front money. You’re on your own with your dinky dog. Do me a favour, eh? Get rid of the dog. It’s humiliating, a big man with such a little dog. It’s unnatural.”
Poodles had opened up on his own, working three hookers in the Strathcona Hotel. He liked his girls, and one of them, Carrie, a girl with corn-yellow hair and small breasts, had real talent. Men asked for her and he appreciated her talent. He wanted his girls to do well, and one day when he was sitting with Carrie in her hotel room, her Kleenex box and washcloth on the floor beside the bed, he told her she was terrific, that she had a real gift, and it was too bad that she wasn’t better-looking so that she could have made a big buck. Carrie only smiled and said, “Well, what’re you going to do? You do the best you can.” Poodles had been moved, and at the end of the week he gave her an extra fifty dollars because he now had six girls working for him, and he laughed, saying, “Never give a sucker an even break.” Suddenly I’m right where I want without really trying, he thought, which is I got a string of girls and my own ass ain’t on the line in my own premises. So maybe I should say to myself that me and Lou should take a holiday. At home Luella shuffled around looking glum and sometimes when he came up the walk he saw her staring out the window like one of those women in ghost movies, always staring out the upstairs window. One night he came upstairs and stood quietly beside her, looking down into the street through the thick leaves of a crimson maple. There was a light breeze. “Beautiful,” he said. Someone had cut the grass and he could smell the sweetness. “Just take a whiff of that,” he said, touching the small of her back. Then the man who owned the house came down the street holding hands with a willowy black girl and Poodles said disdainfully, “Jesus, even I draw the line at coons. No self-respect, man.” Luella shrugged, indifferent to the little distinctions he drew between himself and other men. “Sometimes,” he complained, “you treat me like I’m any low-class hustler.” Because his business was now bigger, he knew he wasn’t ordinary and so worried more about her when she refused to laugh at his deprecating jokes and made him feel that he had no right to believe he was a shrewd, respectable businessman. “I worry about you all the time, baby,” he said, but she only muttered that she was going out for a walk.
All the Lonely People Page 23
