Basic Forms

by Skolnik, Fred;

  The sky was overcast, the room was dark. Zupan turned on a light but it made little difference. The floorboards creaked when he crossed the room. The Horns followed his progress, shifting their eyes without turning their heads. Then they whispered something to each other. Then Elizabeth cleared her throat, but it was Horn who spoke.

  “In our London years,” he said, “we were privileged to appear in many a fine production. You know the English. They’ve got a flair.”

  “And the way they talk,” Elizabeth said.

  “Well, there’s a problem with the bowel movements over there. Maybe it’s the climate, or the food they eat.”

  “I was on laxatives for two whole years,” Elizabeth said.

  “Anyway, in this play we were doing, Liz and I arrive in an unnamed town, that is, a town whose name isn’t mentioned in the play. It could be anywhere in the country, which I suppose was the author’s intention. I’m called Hal, Liz is Mary. She’s the headmistress of an all-boys school over at Harelip-on-the-Crotch in the Midlands. That’s why she wears those long skirts and sensible shoes and her hair in a bun. Otherwise those sixth formers would be all over her. You see, years back she’d slept with one of her students and that had almost ruined her career. The tabloids had had a field day with it. Fortunately old Tom Smarling, who sat on the board of governors, had bailed her out. Of course she’d given him a tumble or two as well in days gone by.

  “Liz and I had met the previous summer at a spa and kind of hit it off. These things happen. Of course, we travel in separate compartments. Liz is married, you see. Her husband is a commercial traveler. That’s what they call a salesman over there. Now here’s the thing. He arrives in the same town and checks into the same hotel where Liz and I are staying.”

  “Fancy that,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s a comedy, you see. It could have been written as a tragedy, of course, but the author chose to play it for laughs. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have a serious purpose in mind. Anyway, in the whole first act we kind of dodge him, in the elevator, the dining room, and so on and so forth, where he’s always coming just as we’re going, or going just as we’re coming. Then he runs into Liz in the lobby at the beginning of the second act. Imagine his surprise. ‘Why, what are you doing here, my dear?’ he says. Liz doesn’t get flustered. She says, ‘What are you doing here?’ as if he’s the one who’s out of line. And the funny thing is, he is. He’s got a bimbo in his room.”

  “Men,” Elizabeth said.

  “She’d known he played around. That’s why she didn’t have any qualms about having an affair. Anyway, in the whole second act it’s he who tries to avoid her, so that in effect both couples, Liz and myself and the husband, Clarence, with his bimbo, keep running around in circles to escape detection. It becomes a kind of farce. You know how the British do this sort of thing, shouting like maniacs and calling each other devastating names like silly twit and bloody fool. On top of everything else it’s one of these hotels where nothing works, so you got the toilet overflowing and shit all over the floor. And of course everyone gets stomach poisoning from some fish that’s gone bad.”

  “You had to see it to believe it,” Elizabeth said.

  “Well, these things have a way of sorting themselves out. It turns out that the plumber is a distant cousin of Liz’s, so she sends him up to her husband’s room to sniff around. It turns out that Clarence has stolen some jewelry from this Lady Fressing’s room next door. He’s a thief too, you see, and the bimbo is in cahoots with him. They work these hotels all along the coast, from Brighton to Swinetown and back down to Sledgehammer-on-the-Thigh. Liz is really pissed. She slips a note under his door saying she’s on to him and is going to get the house dick to roast his ass. But it’s the bimbo who finds it. Apparently she didn’t know Clarence was married. Needless to say, she walks out on him. Lady Fressing identifies him as the man who tried to feel her up in the elevator and apparently stole her key in the process. That’s how they work on the coast. Then the bobbies show up and Clarence is carted off to jail. Liz gets a divorce. And we live happily ever after. London loved it.”

  “After the play closed,” Elizabeth said, “we came back to the States. We’ve been here ever since.”

  “We’ve had our ups and downs,” Horn said, “but it’s been a great ride. Now it’s up to lean and hungry types like yourself to carry on.”

  “That’s what Bill is always saying to the young boys we meet.”

  “We’ll always be here for you, Ed”

  “You’re like the son we never had.”

  Zupan found this a little hard to believe, as his dealings with the Horns had been relatively infrequent, on the whole, though it could not be denied that they were friendly and solicitous types, as has already been mentioned. Then again, he understood that actors were prone to exaggeration, or theatricality, saying things to produce effects. That was how things were on the stage, where you had to capture the audience’s attention, sometimes by raising the voice, sometimes with grand gestures, sometimes by saying outlandish things. This undoubtedly carried over into their private lives. Nonetheless, Zupan did not doubt the sincerity of their feelings and was even touched, to the extent that he could be touched by anything, by their willingness to help, though he had no need for such help as the Horns might be in a position to offer and in truth would have preferred to distance himself from them a bit, dreading the tap on his door at all sorts of odd hours and knowing it was Elizabeth waiting there, with Horn never far behind. Fortunately their visits, and various chance encounters, were never protracted, as the Horns always had things to do. In a way he envied them their busy life. Zupan had a schedule too, but it was far from crowded, as rigorous and demanding as each stage of the day inevitably had to be. In fact there were long hours when he had nothing really to do. Sometimes he read, sometimes he let his mind wander, sometimes he watched the windows in the building across the yard. When he went out, to the Library or the Automat, he followed his fixed route. This was soothing, but though he dreaded chance encounters and avoided human contact, he was not averse to being entertained and would occasionally join a crowd to observe one of those spectacles the city so frequently enjoyed—a violent altercation, a body in the street, a fire truck or ambulance parked at the curb. Sometimes he would even nod at fellow bystanders, acknowledging their common bond. These entertainments, however, did not hold his attention for long, and soon enough he would move on, detaching himself inconspicuously from the crowd like one of those mysterious figures who appear at such scenes and are picked out by the camera, the intent or troubled look on their dark faces captured for just an instant to suggest some sinister purpose. Moving away from the crowd, Zupan had a sense of himself moving alone into the dark night, farther and farther away from the life of the city, into some unknown region just beyond.

  This troubled look of his did not go unnoticed in certain quarters. Those closest to him, however, were oblivious to his state of mind. This was not surprising. The Horns were not perceptive types, nor was Spinelli and his blonde, bubblegum-chewing wife or the little Puerto Rican janitor and the silent, black woman who shared his bed and kept the sidewalk clean. Besides, they had their own concerns. The Horns had their acting careers and Spinelli had now been named a regional director and was being written up in a local paper, and the janitorial staff pretty much kept their noses to the ground. Once he had lost his key and had to wake the janitor up, banging on his door and feeling the heat from the furnace in the middle of the night. The black woman in a thin nightgown had looked at him from their bed but it was impossible to know what she was thinking. The janitor had come up with him and opened the door and given him another key. It was a relief to lock the door and sit on the bed until he was calm again.

  Elizabeth cleared her throat again but this time neither of the Horns had anything to say, so it might have been only a reflexive action brought on by the beginnings of a cold. He could fee
l their eyes on him. They were watching him. They had finished their tea. They were brushing off their clothes. He could see that they were about to leave. Elizabeth stood up first. “We’ll be going now,” she said. “It was so good to see you again.”

  “We’ll be expecting you on the fifteenth instant,” Horn said. “Nine o’clock.”

  There was another of their little ceremonies at the door. Elizabeth again kissed the air beside his cheek and Horn took his hand and looked deeply and meaningfully into his eyes. Then Horn took Elizabeth’s arm and helped her down the stairs as she cooed and fretted. It was cold on the landing. He heard the front door click shut down below and then watched them from his window as they made their way up the street, glancing back from time to time in their furtive or worried way.

  Zupan looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. He had time enough to straighten up and even do the dishes. It was three steps from the center of the room to the bedroom door and three steps from the bedroom to the bathroom. In the bathroom he washed his hands and dried them on the white towel hanging on the curtain rod. He flushed the toilet. He opened the window wide and stuck his head outside. The icy wind cut into his face. Down below there was a little yard that served no purpose, other than creating a shaft for light and air. It was a long drop down and once inside it there was no way out but through a window. There had been complaints from the ground floor tenants about garbage being thrown down from the apartments up above—orange peels, bubblegum wrappers, chicken bones. A notice had appeared in their tiny lobby, next to the cigarette machine. The cigarette machine was broken into from time to time, no doubt by addicts prowling the streets. The building was not secure. Though the front door was locked, access was easy via the roof. Once Zupan had heard a scraping sound at his door and had waited in terror just inside. Once someone had phoned him in the middle of the night but did not speak.

  He had time now. He looked at his watch and watched the second hand progress. It had occurred to him that he might buy a wall clock and stare at it forever. Then time would seem not to pass, or pass more slowly, in an infinitesimal progression, each second an event and tens of thousands of such events each day, millions each month and tens of millions each year. He had worked it out. In this way, without content, a life would seem like an eternity and death would be cheated in a way, though in the end it all came to the same thing. The dead were dead and the living were waiting their turn.

  These were, of course, philosophical thoughts. Zupan was a student of philosophy. He had sat in classrooms for a while listening to teachers of philosophy and wondering about the form and structure of undisclosed time. He had seen Marion walking as in a dream. Certain ideas were inevitably and indissolubly linked in his mind. One evoked the other, causing a chain of associations to unfold, leading him from the lazy, distant drone of a plane high up in the summer sky or the sound of a woman’s heels against the pavement to that other country beyond the dream, beyond the farthest shores of sleep. In that country Marion dwelt. She moved as in a dream with her dreamy look, self-absorbed. Her arms and legs were almost thin and her face was delicately made. He did not remember if she wore glasses. She had red hair and pale skin. The first time they had gone out they had seen a play. She had worn a turquoise suit and a white blouse with a ruffled collar, and he had worn his suede jacket. They had been like old friends and when he took her home on the train he had wanted to kiss her.

  In that time and that place he had been alone. Then he had been with Marion, and then she was gone. All of Zupan’s neighbors came by to see how he was getting along, but none were more solicitous than the Horns. Spinelli lived across the hall. Mr. McGuire sat on his wooden folding chair in front of the building all day to get some sun and there was a Mrs. Miller whose face was always red as though she spent the day standing over steaming pots. And when he had gone to Jones Beach and come back with the smell of the sea in his skin and eaten in the Automat, he had run into a young woman who lived in the building and they had a long talk standing in the street where it was cool and peaceful and shadows fell across the sidewalk and he had hoped he would see her again but apparently she moved out soon afterwards and he had always regretted it. That had been a magical day. He had kept a picture of her in his mind but it grew vague like a faded picture in an album, leaving just a sense of her, disembodied. These images in the mind could not be held for long, they dissolved or slipped away, but their sense was imprinted forever in the little centers of feeling where memory mingled with desire.

  Then a light inside his eye began to grow and then he saw the child and he saw the woman. These things were in another time. He could not measure the time that had elapsed. Some days had flown by and others had stood still, and there was a gulf between them. They were not linked together in his mind. There were only two kinds of time in his mind, the time he was with her and the time he was without her, and there was nothing in between, only an abyss, on one side of which certain days were gathered, and on the other side of which other days were gathered, like with like, as the saying goes. Or perhaps it was the music that joined these days together. He could hear that music now.

  Zupan straightened out the house. He folded his laundry. He washed the dishes. The rooms were almost bare. It was three steps from the bedroom door to the bed. His suede jacket was on a chair. Some books were stacked on the dresser. He bought books in the used book stores or borrowed them from the Library. He had a bank account but it was nearly empty. That was why he had agreed to go uptown with Spinelli.

  When he came downstairs Spinelli was already waiting at the curb with the car keys in his hand. “Come on, I ain’t got all day,” he said. Nevertheless, he took his time, chatting with Mr. McGuire for a while. Mr. McGuire insisted that he was suffering from lumbago but Spinelli said, “That’s a bullshit disease. What you probably got is arthritis. There’s no such thing as lumbago. It’s just a bullshit word. What you need is a piece of ass. I seen that Mrs. Miller giving you the eye. If I was eighty I’d fuck her myself.”

  They drove uptown in Spinelli’s new car. Zupan enjoyed the ride. The car was heated. He liked riding in cars, being transported from place to place, effortlessly. He studied the buildings and the faces in the street. The life of these streets, their histories, their dramas, was hidden from him. Each street contained a world, each face a universe. His life too was full of drama, hidden from the world, hidden from Spinelli, whose face he might strike and strike and cut and cut, with a hammer, with a mallet, with an axe. Spinelli was whistling. He was wearing his felt hat. The car radio was playing. He had a weasel’s face and a weasel’s eyes. “Some legs on that broad, hey?” Spinelli ran a red light and gave a pedestrian the finger. “Fucking assholes!”

  They drove to the Bronx. The office was freshly painted and almost bare. There was a filing cabinet in one room and a steel desk in the other with a telephone that was ringing when they came in. Spinelli answered it and told the head office that the new man looked like a winner.

  “What you gotta understand,” he said to Zupan, “is that you’re dealing with low-income housewives with an itch between the legs. You gotta show poisonality.” Lighting a thick cigar and putting his feet up on the desk, he proceeded to teach Zupan the tricks of the trade, acting, in turn, suspicious, hostile and coy and then switching roles to show him how it was done. When the telephone rang again it was to tell him that his Christmas bonus had just come through.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The office was on Boston Road. They drove back down to Webster Avenue. Zupan parked in a no-parking zone. He had a briefcase full of forms. They went up the stairs of an ancient building with a peculiar smell in the halls. Under a radiator Zupan saw a glass case such as a child might hide on his way to school. He picked it up and removed the glasses, peering through them to judge the thickness of the lenses. Whoever wore them must have been nearly blind. “What the fuck are you doing?” Spinelli said. Then he rang a bell. Zupan came up b
ehind him and stood slightly to the left so that he could observe Spinelli’s technique.

  “Survey,” Spinelli said in a cheerful voice.

  The door was opened by a gaunt, rawboned woman in a housedress.

  “Hi,” Spinelli said in a single breath, “I’m one of the kids from down the block and we’re doing a neighborhood survey that we’d like you to help us out with.”

  “What kind of survey?” the woman said. Spinelli, who must have struck her as more like the criminal type than the friendly neighborhood type with his sharp face and dark eyes and fancy hat, shyly scraped the ground with his foot. Then she looked at Zupan, who also scraped the ground with his foot.

  “It’s to find out what people like and all,” Spinelli said in his boyish voice. “You just check off the list on this little card. And our sponsor will give you a free gift for helping us.”

  “What kind of gift?”

  Spinelli fished the gift out of his briefcase—a can opener or vegetable peeler—but didn’t give it to her. It wasn’t altogether clear to Zupan what they were supposed to be selling.

  Another, younger woman came to the door with a baby in her arms. Spinelli chucked it under the chin. “What a cutie,” he said. “What an absolute cutie. What’s his name?”

  “Jimmy,” the younger woman said.

  “They’re just great, ain’t they. I got a nephew just his age. Look, we live right down the block and I was just telling your sister here...”

  “This ain’t my sister. This is my mom.”