“You’re kidding,” Spinelli said. “You just got to be kidding.”
Mom blushed. Sis beamed. Baby bawled. And Spinelli edged his way almost imperceptibly into the apartment with Zupan right behind him.
The woman led them to the sofa in a small, cluttered room. Then she sat down between them. Zupan was drawn to her. He could see her skin between the buttons of her dress. Her legs were unshaven. She did not seem to be wearing underclothes. Her breasts lay flat against her chest but the nipples were erect. She had bad teeth. Spinelli showed her the card and moved closer to her. Zupan moved closer to her too. Her breath was stale. She started making marks on the card, giggling as she wrote, as though the experience of reading and writing was entirely new to her. Then Spinelli made the pitch, but she said she had no money. She had no husband either, she said. He was in prison, or had abandoned her, or had died. She told him she’d had to do some pretty awful things to make ends meet. Sometimes men were kind to her and sometimes she was kind to them.
Spinelli made another offer. Her leg moved against Zupan’s. Spinelli winked at the daughter, who kept coming in and out of the room. The woman looked at Zupan as if seeking his advice, but Zupan had none to give. Spinelli pressed against her from the other side. “I’m gonna do something here I never done before because you’re such a sweet lady and I got a mom who lost her husband too.” They talked for a while about losing husbands. Then Spinelli made another offer, holding out the gift. She looked at Zupan again and then she signed the form.
Spinelli wrapped things up. Zupan looked around the room. He had grown up in such a house, where the floorboards creaked and there were always rattling sounds in the radiator pipes but it was warm inside when he sat by the window looking down into the street. Zupan got up and went to the window. Spinelli’s car was parked across the street. A policeman was looking it over and seemed to be writing out a ticket. Ashcans were out at the curb. No one else was there.
“You see?” Spinelli said when they were back in the hall. “Nothing to it.” Then he winked. “I’m gonna come back
tomorrow and fuck the daughter. You wanna fuck the mother?”
He had Zupan try a few doors on his own but no one opened any. Zupan gave him back the cards, the pencils, the order forms and the receipt book. “It’s always tough in the beginning,” Spinelli said. “This is how I started off too, and look at me now.” He put everything back in his briefcase. “Why don’t you try that cunt upstairs, Lizzy Beth or whatever the fuck she calls herself. I think she’s got the hots for you.”
Spinelli tore up the ticket on his windshield and then they drove back to the office and Spinelli made some phone calls. Zupan picked up an old newspaper and tried to find something about the Horns and their play. Then he looked at the classified ads. Spinelli had one in the help wanted section and was in fact now taking calls from people like himself who thought they had what it took to make a fast buck. Spinelli invited them to come up to the office the day after tomorrow, between nine and ten in the morning. Zupan had brought a sandwich. He took it out of the pocket of his suede jacket and unwrapped the wax paper. Afterwards he made coffee for Spinelli and himself. It was clear from the barrenness of the place that Spinelli had just occupied it, having only recently been promoted. It was a big step up for him in the world, Spinelli said, but this was just the beginning. The Company was vast, with offices all around the world, in places
like New Delhi and Montevideo. Spinelli had tried other things. He had even been on the wrong side of the law. But he was a family man now. He had to think of the future. He had the new car and the new house and before long the kids would start to come. They wanted three kids, two boys and a girl, or two girls and a boy. His wife didn’t want to breast feed because it would spoil her tits. “If I had tits like hers I wouldn’t wanna spoil ‘em either,” Spinelli said. He finished taking his calls and phoned his bookmaker. Then they drove back to Manhattan. Spinelli parked in the no-parking zone next to the house. His blonde wife was at the window chewing her bubblegum and waved at them. They both waved back. Zupan had only seen Spinelli’s wife once from the waist down, when she had stepped out of Spinelli’s car one day, and was not surprised to find that she had perfect legs, though she moved somewhat unsteadily, as though walking was not one of her specialties.
It was time for lunch. Zupan ate his in the Automat. He bought little dishes in the little windows and put them on a tray. The Automat was crowded but he had a table to himself. The lunchtime crowd included mostly people from the offices and shops but shoppers too, women with packages and sometimes young children as well. He examined them. Some of the women were pretty, others plain. Some had fine figures, others were too fat or thin. Zupan bit his nails and watched them, as though searching for a certain face. He ate peas and beets and mashed potatoes. Perhaps it had all begun back then, in another time, when he had been the child. He could not remember what he had seen. He only remembered the noise and the movement and the tinkling of the cups. And later she had been there, with her red hair and turquoise suit and the shoes green too.
After he ate he loitered for a while in Union Square. The pool room where he sometimes joined Spinelli was on Fourteenth Street. The bookstore where he sometimes bought used books was on the corner of Eighth. Once he had worked in an office nearby. He could walk to work and eat his lunch in the Automat. Once he had taken Marion to the Automat. But that had of course been the Automat near the Library. They all had revolving doors. She had gone in first. He had followed her, finding her on the other side, and then they had bought their little dishes from the little windows and found a table and had their meal and went to a play.
On Union Square he watched an old socialist in baggy pants haranguing the crowd. He’d seen him in the Automat, drinking coffee. They had not spoken. He sat on a bench and watched some couples holding hands. The Square was like an island in the sea or an oasis in the desert. All around them the traffic flowed, everyone was hastening home, now that another day was ending. Two tall women came by, in identical raincoats; perhaps they were sisters, perhaps they were lovers. They looked like models. Zupan was nondescript. His mind was racing. The sky was gray. The day was cold. It was the Christmas season, so something cheerful was in the air. He remembered other times and other places. He remembered certain films he’d seen. In these films there was always snow on the ground and Christmas carols were being sung and perhaps a man and a woman who had parted found each other again. He had grown up watching such films and dreaming about the women who were found. They wore woolen caps and checkered scarves, high boots and woolen gloves, or mittens as they are sometimes called. They wore heavy coats. They wore woolen skirts coming down just below the knees. These women were interchangeable but from time to time one face in particular stayed with him for many days and formed an image in his mind. Such images often interrupted his thoughts and then his thoughts took a different turn, went down different roads, or lingered in a certain place. There were many pictures in his mind, and voices too, and he could hear that music now.
One face floated up above the others and that was Marion’s, so delicately made. He remembered what she had been wearing that day, and her dreamy walk, and certain thoughts had occurred to him, coming from a buried place. He invited all these thoughts into his head without prejudice, indiscriminately, come what may. He did not orchestrate these thoughts but let them wash across his mind like a raging river. He sat at the river’s edge and picked them out like flotsam, holding them up to the light.
Women were walking toward the subway with their packages. They had been out shopping. It had been a busy day. Some had children with them. Some had eaten in the
Automat. Sometimes as they walked toward the subway a woman’s coat fell open and he saw her knee. No one looked at him. He was nondescript. He wore a suede jacket and a scarf. The wind blew his hair. His skin was raw. The cold cut into his flesh. He was alone now. Once she had been there but now she was g
one. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the knife or if he’d closed the bedroom door.
Everything was mixed up in his head. He did not try to arrange his thoughts. He liked this movement in his mind, the swirling of the raging sea and the pounding of the surf. Sometimes it made him breathe a little faster. He got up and walked around the Square, then he crossed the street, touching each corner of the intersection, crossing back and forth until he had completed the circuit. There was more to do before he could leave the Square. He stopped at the steps to the subway and lit a cigarette. He inhaled the smoke deeply and then threw the cigarette down on the ground, grinding it out with the heel of his shoe. He put his hands in his pockets and crossed the street again.
It was late in the afternoon when he got back home. The little Puerto Rican janitor was sweeping up the steps. His black wife was picking up scraps of garbage from the ground. Spinelli’s blonde wife waved to him from her window. He unlocked his door and stood there straining his ears and peering intently into the room. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Nothing had changed. The windows were shut, the curtains were drawn, the silence was almost unnatural. It was three steps to the center of the room. It was beginning to get dark. The sink was clean. He had provisions for a week, and that was enough. He could sit out a blizzard, if it came to that.
He closed his eyes and made his way around the kitchen. He knew where everything was. He ate his supper standing up. Then he waited near the window. One by one the lights came on in the windows of the building across the yard. Soon they were almost all lit up. So many lives in so many windows. Some had their shades down and he could barely see a thing. He could only imagine what was happening inside. And sometimes a woman in a robe came out of the shower after a bath and he could see the bare flesh flash by beneath the window shade. It must have been midnight when she came out on the balcony in the long black gown that fell open to her thigh when she raised her foot to the parapet and bent her body back. But this time she turned her face to him and their eyes met with a little shock of recognition.
VI
Mornings began with the sound of the heavy trucks rolling by his window in the street below. Suddenly his eyes opened and all at once he was there again in the familiar room with nothing, really, to signify his presence but an absolute and uncanny sense of the room itself and a vague apprehension of his own dry body stretched across the bed, and everything unremittingly fixed in the hard morning light, held there in some profound tension whose source he could not fathom. Nothing had changed. He was there again. The silence of the room engulfed him. The bed was warm. He liked to lie in the bed and listen to the sound of children’s voices in the street and the sound of the sparrows high up in the trees. The shots that rang out made the leaves rustle in the air, and in the distance he could hear the herds of the wilderness thundering across the plain, and then the keening cry of the heron at the river’s edge. Brown women came to bathe there. Their breasts were sleek and taut and beads of water glistened on their bellies, and he lay among them indolently in the tall, wet grass. He would lie there forever now. They would rap at his skull and shout in his ears but he would not open the door. That was what he had understood: the room contained itself, so that when you opened the door you found yourself entering the same room through the same door. Sometimes, of course, a voice cried out in him, urging him to reclaim himself, but though the voice was not unlike his own, he could not be certain that it was his own, for still other voices joined it, and they too were not unlike his own. That was curious, these voices addressing themselves to him, to one another, each voice not unlike the other. And though he could silence them at will, they could just as easily usurp that will, so that now, when the voice cried out for silence, it was as though the voice was mocking him, and it caused him to smile. He was inclined now to join the chorus of voices chattering incessantly in his skull. A song was rising in him and he was singing it.
The sound of the heavy trucks receded in the distance. Spring was in the air. The room was full of sunlight. He lay in the bed for a long while, disinclined to rise, though he had a busy day ahead of him. His mind wandered. He did not try to arrange his thoughts in any orderly way. They crashed up against each other, as in a raging river. The sounds in the street inspired still other thoughts. All these thoughts ran together and exhilarated him. They carried him along. He was like a raging river too.
He made his breakfast and ate it standing up. He had fried eggs, then a cup of coffee, holding the saucer up to his chin. He heard footsteps in the hall and braced himself, expecting a knock at the door, but there was none. It must be Mrs. Miller, he thought. Sometimes she brought him soup. When he finished eating he opened all the windows. It had been a long time since he aired the rooms out and spring was in the air. He could hear the music now. Mr. McGuire lived on the second floor, Spinelli was opposite him, the Horns were up above. He wondered if Spinelli was home. He wondered if he should knock at his door. After he opened the windows he straightened out the house. There were stacks of books on the bedroom dresser and some more on shelves along the living room wall. He had a desk with writing paper but did not use it. It was three steps from the center of the living room to the bedroom door. He listened for a while at the door but heard nothing from within. Often he heard noises in the rooms. Once he had heard a scraping sound at the front door. Often he imagined that the Horns were standing there.
Mr. McGuire was down in the street on his wooden folding chair. The sun slanted across the sidewalk and fell across the curb. He walked west, then north. The streets were uncrowded at this hour, until he got farther uptown. Then the crowds began to thicken and he was swept along towards Times Square as he always was on his daily walks. He wore a brown suede jacket and brown suede shoes. When he had been a student of philosophy he had worn the same jacket but different shoes. Walking had worn them out. When he had been a student of philosophy he had liked to sit on the lawn and watch the girls go by. Then he had seen Marion, and then they had been together. In that time and that place he had shown promise. People said he would go pretty far in this world. He had a quick wit and a charming smile. He was not tall but he was not short. He was not fat or thin.
Before Marion there had been others, but none had understood him so well, or seemed to. She did not say much. She was self-absorbed, her head was in the clouds, as the saying goes, though she was not a student of philosophy or anything remotely connected with that venerable discipline which has exercised men’s minds throughout the ages as they sought answers to unanswerable questions and never saw what was right beneath their noses. Marion, he understood, was in the sciences, perhaps in botany, perhaps biology. Her mind, however, was open. He could see that.
Before Marion there had been others. Not all were thin, far from it. Some were solid, buxom, with wide hips and broad bellies, dark hair, strong necks, sensuous lips. He had watched them too. He had watched them at the Library, between the stacks of books. He had cleared his throat but did not speak.
However, one face was always before him. It was her face, dissolving or slipping away, sometimes hidden, veiled or averted. Then his blood raced and pounded as in an ancient rite as he raised his hand and brought it down. Then his heart pounded as a child’s heart pounds when he hears the distant laughter and sees the pennants flapping in the breeze. But that was in a different place.
These days were interminable, as busy as he was. At noon he ate lunch, using his last few coins. Now his pockets were empty. Soon his bank account would be empty too. Then he might wind down his days in a systematic and orderly way, put his affairs in order, settle old accounts. He calculated the time he had according to the money he had, as he might have calculated the volume of air in a sealed room, dividing by the hours, minutes, seconds. The results were not encouraging. He had nothing, moreover, to sell, unless it was his books. He decided to make a list and bring it around to the shops. That would keep him busy.
He crossed the street
. The Library was up ahead. Women waited on the steps. They were waiting for young men like himself. Some would be disappointed. Everyone was involved in his own affairs. Everyone lived in his own world. Everyone moved in his own circles. You had to have a heart of stone to destroy a human life. So many other lives were connected to it, so much love, so much grief. These were things you sometimes forgot. He knew he should think things out but his mind was not built for systematic thought. That was why he had grown tired of philosophy, though he still asked the eternal questions. None of the answers, however, had satisfied him He was still searching for an answer. The old philosophy books were on his shelves and on the dresser. He had no intention of looking at them again. They contained only strings of words arranged according to the conventions of language, and words, as everyone knew, were just a lot of talk.
The answer was in him. He felt it but he did not have the words to describe it. It was in the music too. The music was inside him but it was outside too. He could hear that music now.
It was late in the afternoon when he got back home. He stood at the window for a long while looking through the curtains. Slowly it began to grow dark in the street. Slowly the lights began to come on in the building across the yard. It must have been well past eight o’clock when her lights came on too. Then he saw the flesh beneath the robe where her window shade was slightly raised. Then she turned off the lights and threw open the French doors and came out on the balcony in her black gown. He stepped back when she raised her eyes to his window and stood behind the curtain listening to the sound of traffic and people’s voices in the street. So intense was the silence surrounding every sound that his head began to pound.
He had never been to the other side of the block and could not have said for certain where the building was; that is, had he been walking on her street he would not have been able to identify her building without establishing a palpable relation to his own. This was problematic, since he could not see his building from her street, nor hers from his. It was clear to him that he would only be able to identify her building from the rear of his own, making whatever adjustments were necessitated by the alteration of perspective while mapping out in his mind the configuration of the interior of the block. However, when he came out of the alley that led to the rear of his building—the very alley from which their janitor emerged each morning with the trash cans that contained the refuse of the entire building, his own, the Horns’, the Spinellis’ with its many bubblegum wrappers, Mr. McGuire’s, Mrs. Miller’s, to name a few of the tenants—he came out under a tier of unfamiliar balconies overlooking an unfamiliar fence. The trees was there, and the stones, but not where he had expected them to be. It seemed very odd to him that though he had followed a straight line, a certain shift in his own perspective had occurred, so that what should have been straight ahead was to his left, or perhaps his right, and what should have been to his left or right was straight ahead. In fact, the whole vast yard, sectioned off with fences of varying heights and walls jutting out haphazardly at the rear of every building and sheltering numerous little gardens and patches of neglected ground strewn with rubbish, was so asymmetrical that it resembled a labyrinth more than the ordered space it was intended to represent. For a moment, climbing one fence and then another, he thought he was lost, having somehow gotten on to another series of lots, and realized that he was sweating profusely though he had not really exerted himself too strenuously. He seemed, in fact, to be moving deeper and deeper into a jungle of trees and vines and farther and farther from the surrounding lights of the city, though it was clear to him now that the building must be just ahead. A cat ran by. The ground was damp. He fixed his sights on a single window in the distance and worked his way toward it in a direct line, over three more fences and a wall, and then he found another alley which led to the street.
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