Rob held onto his smile with an effort. “Thanks for the great meals,
Marge.” Marge kissed his cheek. Jim hugged him around the shoulders. They walked him down the long corridor and waved as the elevator doors closed on him. As the elevator went down, Rob tried to decide whether he had just committed a crime or not. The Deacons would never prosecute. No court would ever convict. I am not going to worry about it, he told himself. I left all these petty moral agendas in the park. Still it seemed impolite to just walk away from the Deacons’ hospitality.
He strolled east towards Madison Avenue. At the corner was a stationery shop. A bread-and-butter note, that’s it, he decided. That’s the concession I’ll make to my middle-class upbringing. He went in and selected the toniest notepaper in the store, in keeping with the Deacons’ status. A quick glance into the storekeeper’s head showed Rob that nobody ever became a tycoon selling cards in Manhattan. He paid up fair and square.
To camp outdoors in June in New York is no great hardship, at least as far as the weather goes. Central Park had plenty of grassy nooks for Rob to choose from. Rolled up in his toggle coat and tarnhelmed from cops and petty criminals, he slept well. From a street vendor he bought a brown duffel bag to keep the coat in on warmer days. He also scrounged some black plastic garbage bags to use as a groundcloth.
For the first week, money was a worry. Rob wasn’t often hungry any more, but eating at coffee shops even once a day soon depleted his cash. And using the credit cards would only shift his expenses to Julianne—No! He wasn’t going to think about home, about the family! The effort of holding himself back from that abyss made Rob shake all over. He leaned suddenly against a lamp post, almost unable to stand.
“You’re blocking the crosswalk,” an Asian woman with a briefcase snapped as she shouldered past. Viciously Rob directed her descending foot onto a storm grating as she stepped off the curb. “Oh shit! My heel!” She balanced on the other foot and pulled off her beige leather pump. But it gave Rob no real pleasure to see her hobbling away, the broken shoe in hand. He slumped down to sit on the curbstone. “What have I done to deserve this?” he demanded of the morning rush hour.
To his astonishment, an older black woman bent to address him. “Look, get yourself a square meal,” she said kindly. And she stuffed a ten-dollar bill into his hand.
Did he really appear so seedy? Rob took a look at himself through the eyes of the crowd waiting to cross Lexington Avenue. Since leaving the Deacons he had given up combing and washing and shaving. His light-brown stubble, always thick and vigorous, was fast approaching the status of a beard. His jeans and shirt looked grimy and thoroughly slept in. But it was his eyes and his expression that really marked Rob as strange. He had the desperate look of a man pushed too fast, too far: like a drunk or a mental case.
“Oh great,” Rob muttered sourly. First a criminal and now a vagabond. Only two weeks ago I was a completely normal human being. Too bad my former self, that meddling Rob Lewis who aspired to a cape and tights, won’t come along to reform my life!
But he could use this down-and-out appearance to advantage. Panhandling might be time-consuming and unprofitable for other street people, but not for him. Rob plucked a paper cup from an overflowing trash bin and leaned against his lamp post. If everyone on this corner gave him a quarter he’d be set for the week. But the congestion might look odd. So he settled for muscling a quarter from every third or fourth passerby. He skipped anyone who seemed like they couldn’t afford it. By lunch time, his pockets were so weighted with coin that he had to transfer some quarters to the duffel bag. This is going to be a snap, Rob told himself. It was much easier being a predator than a benefactor!
On rainy days, and whenever he felt like a home-cooked meal or sleeping in
a bed, Rob selected a fat cat and briefly became his best friend. The first time, staying with a hotel magnate in his Fifth Avenue penthouse, Rob didn’t even bother to bathe. But the image of a smelly street bum sitting beside a baronial fireplace soon lost its humor. Besides, when the owner of a bathroom the size of a racketball court begged him to try out the hot tub, how could Rob resist?
There were thousands of really rich people in New York City. Rob figured he wouldn’t have to leech off anyone twice for years, which was just as well.
He didn’t want to see any of his hosts again. No application of power would ever make him feel at home among his victims. And without human feeling to season it, luxury cloyed fast. Always after a day or two, Rob returned to Central Park.
Panhandling only took him a couple of hours a week. The rest of his time Rob mostly spent at the library. Particularly in the bad neighborhoods, the branch libraries were dumps compared to Fairfax County. But the main Central Research library at Forty-Second Street was delightful, with a reference collection like a dream. Rob found a dozen out-of-print H. Rider Haggard novels he had never heard of before. Across the street, the Mid-Manhattan branch was more like the circulating suburban libraries he was used to. There he delved systematically through the mystery section. He was through with self-exploration and analysis. It hurt too much. Better to occupy the surface of his mind with fiction.
Whenever the shoot-‘em-up stuff began to pall Rob stretched himself by trying poetry. He had never had time to read poems before. Now he began with T.S. Eliot, whose work was tough sledding. Working back in time and reading older poems was easier. He liked Swinburne, and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were quite understandable.
Instinctively he skipped Dante—the very first lines of the Inferno were off-putting—but he spent weeks working through translations of the Iliad and the Aeneid of Virgil. That, plus the daily papers and the news magazines, kept him busy just about every day shuttling between the two libraries. Except for the occasional thank-you note, he never set pen to paper. Nor did he ever touch a telephone. Let it be a total amputation.
Dimly Rob realized he was systematically severing himself from all meaningful human contact. Adrift, rootless, there were days when he hardly spoke a word to anybody. Certainly he never talked about anything important. The teeming population around him consisted of either patsies or fish too small to exploit. His rich hosts were exactly that, playing contemptible host to his parasite. Like many men, he had few emotional outlets outside of his family. Severed from that natural intimacy he had nothing.
July brought the heat, atmospheric inversions that muffled the entire city like a filthy plastic garbage bag. The air was brown with exhaust and ozone. It was hellish, sullen weather that fostered madness. Tempers shortened, the crime rate soared, and the wail of police sirens and ambulances sliced over and over through the foul air.
As the summer grew nastier, Rob found himself idly considering rather cruel experiments. What would happen, for instance, if that taxi driver lost control of his cab and swerved into the throng of pedestrians at the Columbus Circle crosswalk? If the ticket taker at Radio City Music Hall suddenly refused to let the customers in the door, how long would it take for the management to notice? Would the Rockettes dance to an empty house? It might be kind of interesting to find out…
The only time the cold shell cracked a little was one Saturday afternoon.
That day Rob didn’t get around to walking to the library until well after noon. It was a sweltering hot August day, the sidewalks like a barbecue grill, and he cut south through the Park. Because it was the weekend the park paths were jammed with strollers and roller-bladers. The simmering humid air was laden with the smell of PABA-free, high-SPF sunscreen and spilled sodas. Every rock and patch of grass had sunbathers sprawled on them, playing boom boxes or talking too loud. Rob surveyed all this humanity with a new distaste. There were too many people in New York, all doing too many different and noisy things. Someday he would do something about it—he wasn’t sure what yet.
Abruptly a dark-haired man with both a stroller and a boom box jumped up and began to yell, his voice rising in a frightened carrying baritone. Rob stared with only mild interest. Surel
y he couldn’t be shouting “Forceps!”
That was pretty unusual even for New York. Then he noticed the kid in the stroller. Her wordless distress surged over him. She was choking.
Rob ran up and, sweeping the shouting man aside, hoisted the baby out of the stroller. She was a small thing, only about a year old. Her face was purple and her eyes bulged. Rob held her upside down over his arm and shook her sharply. A chunk of hot dog shot out of her mouth onto the grass. She drew in a whoop of breath, and began to howl.
In a fury Rob shoved the screaming baby back into the man’s arms. “You idiot!” he roared. “Never give a baby a hot dog! At this age they don’t chew their food!”
“It never occurred to me,” the man said, bewildered. “She’s my niece—I don’t usually feed her.”
“And they taught you the Heimlich maneuver, why didn’t you use it?”
“Oh Jesus! I was so scared, all I could think of was pulling the blockage out with forceps.”
Rob snarled with disgust and turned away. Some people shouldn’t have charge of children for more than ten minutes, max.
The man grabbed Rob’s ragged sleeve. “Wait! Hey, thanks! I’m really grateful—you saved Katie’s life! Look, I can see you’re, like, fallen on hard times …” He set the baby down and fumbled in his shorts pocket. If he offers me money, Rob thought, I’m going to walk him under the wheels of the next crosstown bus.
But the man only pulled out a metal card case. “My name’s Edwin Barbarossa. Here’s my number. Any time you need help, for any reason, you call me, okay?” Rob made no move to take the card, but Barbarossa pushed it into his hand and with surprising strength closed his unwilling fingers around it.
His eyes, green and intelligent, searched Rob’s face through the jungle of dirty hair and beard. “How did you know that I can do Heimlich?”
Shit! Rob thought. Must’ve read his mind! He snatched his hand away. “You don’t see me,” he said quickly. He continued to stand there though, watching with cold amusement as Barbarossa looked wildly around for him. The little girl was still squalling on the picnic blanket. Rob clocked the time on his watch. It took Barbarossa three entire minutes to finish maundering around and get back to the kid. Incompetent! But the feel of that little ribcage in his hands had been obscurely upsetting. He had better get on to the Periodicals Room and read today’s New York Times.
CHAPTER 2
When August slid into September, the summer heat moderated. The air no longer thickened with smog to the color of dishwater, and the sky became blue again between the city towers. Rob looked at his coat, threadbare and
stiff with dirt, and realized it was not going to be enough come winter.
Where could he go when the cold weather came? Hotels were a possibility. Rob commandeered a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria for a weekend, just to see how he liked it. In theory it would be possible to hop from hotel to hotel, week after week, till spring. But something about hotel beds and canned hotel air repelled him.
Another idea would be to become some rich gull’s permanent guest for the season. If he didn’t want to deal with his host on a day-to-day basis, he could find someone who was spending the winter months in Palm Beach or Bermuda. In his pocket notebook he listed what this pirated apartment would have to have: view of Central Park, not above Ninety-second Street, no irritating modern decor, no pets or plants to demand care. When he stayed with his well-heeled victims these days, Rob assessed their homes carefully. If a place attracted him sufficiently he might consider muscling the rightful owners out.
Rob was still mulling over the problem in late September when some entertainment organization threw a fancy awards celebration. On the sidewalk outside the party Rob seized upon Denton MacQuie, the has-been hippie rocker. Whether from age or heavy drug use he was the dimmest bulb Rob had ever fastened upon, a fifty-year old man with shoulder-length gray hair and the wattage of a ten-year-old. But it might be kind of interesting—shouldn’t a rock legend have a magnificent home?
When the private elevator carried the two of them up to Denton’s pad though, it was a disappointment. No Wood-stock memorabilia or sixties souvenirs remained. Some hot interior designer had gone through the place like a steamroller, scattering Navaho rugs and Southwest furniture, hanging cow skulls over the fireplace, and painting fake saguaro cactus on the dining room walls. “Sara had it done,” Denton said proudly. “Hey chick, this is Rob.”
“Hey,” Sara greeted them from the sofa. She looked like Janis Joplin would have if she’d lived to see forty-five. Rob instantly slotted her as a cokehead. The buzzing confusion in her head was entirely characteristic.
She stared vaguely at Rob, not quite focused, and he didn’t even bother to say “I’m a friend” to her. Her brain cells were chutney anyway—she’d never notice.
Denton’s glory days were long past, his life style now maintained only by licensing old hits for Chrysler advertisements. “But I’m still writing songs,” Denton assured Rob. “Lei-nine play you a studio tape.”
Rob riffled through Denton’s memories of the new music and winced. “No thanks. Think I’ll crash, it’s late.”
“It is not either late,” Sara said indignantly. “It’s only like three A.M.
Even Courtenay isn’t back yet!”
“Who is Courtenay?” It was important to at least know of every member in a household, to avoid surprises.
“My daughter,” Denton said. “Went to a party. There’s the elevator, betcha that’s her.” A young and painfully thin girl with vivid orange hair came slouching in. “Courtenay, baby doll, this is Rob, an old friend.”
“Hi,” the girl mumbled ungraciously, and escaped down the hall to the bedrooms.
In spite of himself Rob was shocked. “She’s barely in her teens, and you let her run around town till this hour?”
“She turns fourteen in January,” Sara said, with a spacey smile.
“Courtenay’s got street smarts,” Denton said, dismissing the subject. “Hey,
I know! My bass player deals. Let’s do some hash, like we did in the Haight!”
“Let’s not,” Rob said, standing up. “Good night.” What a contemptible pair! Only the ugly skulls and the blanket-patterned sofas kept him from evicting the MacQuies on the spot.
Luckily he only slept there. In the Reading Room at the main library Rob had worked right back through almost all the major poetry and epics on the shelves. Now he planned to read the very oldest epic of all, the Sumerian
myth about Gilgamesh. He had long ago bamboozled the Reading Room librarian into reserving books for him, although that was against the rules. “I’ve had the Ferry translation of the epic on reserve since July,” he complained to her now. “Where the hell is it?”
“Well, it must be misfiled,” the librarian said. “We do have over thirty-six million research items, you know.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Rob said. “Can’t you look for it?”
“You’ll just have to be patient, Mr. Lewis,” the librarian said soothingly. “Everything that can be done is being done.”
The delay put Rob thoroughly out of temper. He stamped out into Bryant Park behind the library and touched off a tremendous shouting match between a cabbie and an old lady by making the cabbie forget that his fare had been paid. The old lady, a game one in spite of her years, put up a surprisingly noisy battle about paying twice. In the end a traffic cop had to intervene.
Rob watched until both parties were ticketed, but it wasn’t really satisfactory.
He returned early to the MacQuie household. Only Courtenay was home, slumped in front of the TV watching a soap. Today was Monday—why wasn’t she in school? For want of anything more entertaining to do, Rob helped himself to a beer and delved into her mind to find out.
She was skipping class, naturally. Rob wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t even surprised to learn what she was skipping for: to sleep with not one, but two of the boys on the school basketball squad. She was plan
ning to get them all. What an utterly brain-dead ambition! She must’ve inherited idiocy from her parents.
But the knowledge gave Rob a new idea. He prowled through the apartment, beer in hand, and thought, I could sleep with her myself. The girl’s a slut anyway. No one would ever know. And now that he considered it, he hadn’t had sex in months, since—well, since. “I can do it,” he told a hanging cow skull. “So I will.”
He opened doors until he found Courtenay’s room. It was the only one so far done in a reasonable style, with flowered wallpaper and a tall white pencil-post twin bed. Stuffed animals were crammed on picture-rail shelves near the ceiling, and beneath hung posters of rap artists that Rob didn’t recognize. He began rifling the nightstand drawers and the bureau. This type of girl surely had condoms hidden away somewhere. Right here in the sock drawer …
“What the hell?” Courtenay came bursting in and halted in surprise.
“What’re you doing here?”
Rob stepped between her and the door. Delicacy would be wasted on her. “Let’s fuck,” he said.
“Asshole!” she spat, dodging past him. “I’m telling Den-ton and Sara!” How very like the MacQuies, Rob thought, to train a kid to use their first names. He slammed her against the wall, enjoying her sudden terror.
“You want it,” he told her, and let her go. With a sigh she flung herself against him. Her kiss tasted disconcertingly of Juicy Fruit gum. He let her probe his mouth with her tongue while he shoved a hand roughly under her sweatshirt. No bra—she didn’t need one. “Smaller boobs than I’m used to,” he told her, “but these’ll do.”
He adjusted the dials in her head, forcing her excitement yet higher, and then stepped back and unzipped his jeans. Immediately she was stripping too, flinging her clothes aside and then unbuttoning his shirt for him.
“Please!” she begged. “Let’s do it, now!” The feel of her skinny naked body against his was wonderfully arousing, almost as exciting as the raw lust he’d sent roaring through her mind.
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