by Tadzio Koelb
“I’m sure big,” Jacks said in his unmodulated yell, standing up and puffing out his chest. Kunstler laughed—a light tipsy fluting—but stopped right away.
It wasn’t the first time Kunstler had drunk too much, but it had been a long while—too long, he decided, since like everything it was a skill—and then it had been different before, when it wasn’t him yet, and someone else had been there to steer the blinded ship, then later share the pain. When he woke up the blurred clock read nearly five-fifteen. The way he felt, he wasn’t sure he’d wound it. The only way he even knew for sure he had gone to bed was because that’s where he woke up. He experienced a moment of terrible panic: he tried to remember what he had done. Had he said something he shouldn’t? He still had his shirt on. That reassured him, somehow. His thumb ached with burning.
In the bathroom on the landing the key was turned as carefully as ever in the lock, but otherwise it was all a rush: he dumped his razor and mug and brush in the yellowed bowl, and while he dressed he ran the tap so they all got good and wet. He lathered just enough cream out of the mug to tuck some with his fingertip behind his left ear. As he was about to turn the key again to leave he realized he had made a mistake. With his hands he wet the towel, too—in the middle, and taking care not to over-do it. Consistency and details: these were the things that kept him safe. A clean-shaven man must have his elements—a foamy brush, a wet razor; on the peg he leaves a humid towel just as surely as a passing car leaves tracks in snow. Kunstler let the door slam behind him as he went down the stairs two at a time.
In his street he just walked—quickly but not too quickly, because to rush, he knew, was to invite attention, recollection, investigation—until he turned a corner and the boardinghouse was out of sight; then he ran through the hunched, aluminum-sided streets. He ran all the way to the grassy strip that edged the train tracks, and after looking to see that no one was there to observe him in the growing light, ran on and over the short hill. Stumbling up the embankment muddied his knees, and for a moment it felt as if the edge of the fence where he ducked under might have ripped his jacket. He didn’t wait, though, as this was the only chance he had before work started, and in a moment it would arrive, and a moment later be gone, even if it felt like forever while the noise of it was in his chest, and he knew that consistency was everything, had learned once from a door heart-stoppingly ajar to a diner men’s room that nothing could be forgotten, not for a day or an hour, not even for just a minute, because the world was an eye that never blinked. He must be the same in all things: unvaried in his voice, just as in his walk or his clothes. Nothing can change. The sound was coming already as he slid down to the tracks where the grass seemingly trembled in anticipation of the approaching wind. He bent with his hands on his knees to catch the breath he had spent on running. Then with all of a machine’s thundering furious uniformity of sound and motion the Pennsy rushed past, drowning everything, and while it was there, the shattering storm of it all around him, he screamed as loud as he could, arms seized to his sides by effort, lost in the godly mechanical noise until the muscles of his face and throat and chest burned and recoiled and refused to scream any more. Then the train was gone and the wind and passion with it; there was emptiness and silence in its place. He found his hat ten yards away. Later he threw up his first cup of coffee and it smelled like booze.
He had worked other jobs at first—menial, small, unskilled, and uninteresting. He had been testing, trying, but especially learning from the men, the Greek waiters and the colored busboys, the customers who ate every day sitting on vinyl stools at plastic counters without speaking or removing their hats, who told dirty jokes and drank their coffee while they chewed, who threw their ties over their shoulders when they had soup and carried the paper in their suit pockets. Their badges were crusts of dried shaving soap and hair oil and bluntness and the endless scratching between their legs. He watched them, cautiously but closely, especially the occasional ones who showed up still in uniform, making their way back from France or the Philippines or wherever the war had taken them, eating and drinking and dancing up their last few weeks of service pay ten cents at a time with the irrepressible cheer of men taken off guard at coming home alive.
Despite the fears that shook him, no one back then had ever asked him for anything except his name. Saying it the first time out loud drove an edgeless hole of panic through his chest. He had been repeating it to himself every waking hour for days, said nothing else to anyone, a prayer to a lost god that he had begun reciting the minute he saw the hand-written advertisement in the diner window, help Wanted, and repeated endlessly, chant-like, in a frenzy of postponement. It was hunger that had driven him back to the diner as if at the point of a knife. He was almost disappointed to find the card still in the window: it meant he had been cursed with luck and would have to go ahead with his plan, see it through. He would not that easily escape the accident that defined him.
Eventually he added to the name, expanded on the abbreviated chronicle that was contained in the words Abe Kunstler. He gave only the barest bones, but they were enough over time to sketch the man’s story. He told one boss that he had been in the service, and seen action. He told another that he had been a POW. One day with the anticipation of an inventor at last switching on a long-planned machine, he gave it the final embellishment, the portion that was his, that made him who he was, the truth setting him apart from what was otherwise just a name and the rest: the injury, the physical evidence of his person, testimony to his past and patent on his future—that he had been wounded in the war. He would say it just that way: wounded. I was wounded in the war.
In between there had been the man in the dirty white side cap and apron who said, “Kraut name, right? My grandmother’s family was Kraut. I don’t speak it or nothing,” and let him work in the back in a cloud of steam and all-enveloping grease. There Kunstler washed the thick dishes in great galvanized tubs, handing them in stacks for drying to a colored boy a decade or more older than he was. The aproned man with the Kraut grandmother let him eat there, too, the special and a coffee, one meal a day. It wasn’t the factory, but it was a good enough place to start, so he worked hard, never asking for a day off or an advance on the week. He stayed until the afternoon someone told a dirty joke, and with the other men he had laughed. The light, tittering sound was a frightening call from the past. Hearing it, he did the only thing he could think of, which was just what he would have done if he had seen or imagined seeing struck in someone’s face even the smallest spark of recognition, anything that risked burning down the still rough-timbered façade he was constructing: he walked straight for the door, letting fall his apron as he went, saying not a word to anyone, looking at nobody, and never going back.
Other, similar jobs followed, given to him by similar men in similarly soiled counter clothes, with similar voices and faces and lives, who offered him the same stiff, flat kindness, impersonal and uninflected. They employed similar short-order cooks who asked Kunstler in the same teasing tones why he didn’t have a girl. One even paid for the driver’s test so he could make deliveries. Each time he remained, with no plan to leave, until some panic took him, whether a fear of his own creeping sense of ease or comfort, or something more immediate like the laughing he should never have done. Then he would walk out, saying nothing, leaving his last pay uncollected, just as he had the first time, forgetting the places almost as soon as he left them, thinking only of the next.
There had been, too, the local teens who mocked his high voice and called him a flower, who once threw stones as he walked away from them down the road until he turned at last and for no reason he could ever name or understand but still knew somehow to be right took a fistful of dirt from the soft shoulder and threw it in his own face, and then another, screaming all the while, a long wordless choking scream, until the boys, scared and shocked, called him crazy and ran away, leaving him frightened and hoarse, but knowing now the sound of his new voice.
He was
always aware that he could never fight them, of course, not these boys or any others like them, whatever the provocation: for him there could be no police, no frisk, no night in the tank, no common toilet or shower, just as there could be no swimming pools, no hospitals, no examinations or confidences or unguarded laughter—a list too long of things kept in a room whose door hung ready at any moment to swing open in a disaster of exposure.
* * *
·
Ten and a half miles away they were laying rope and drawing wire. It was too far for any of the factory men to eat where he worked, but sometimes when he got an afternoon off Kunstler took the bus out, then walked the unpeopled warehouse road and stood by the gate to watch them. It wasn’t like the factory he knew. The floor wasn’t as big, and it looked to him as if maybe they weren’t making anything bigger than elevator cable, nothing that could hold a bridge certainly, but anyway that was fine: drawing wire was drawing wire. He told himself that soon enough he would be on the floor again. He would go to them when he was ready, and in his body he sensed now that he was very nearly ready, that the next time he walked out on a job, this is where he would go. He would be ready or he wouldn’t: he couldn’t wait forever.
But first there had been the day when one of the waitresses had asked him if he wouldn’t like to take her out, maybe next weekend, maybe to see a picture, and for that reason there was the heavily spectacled salesclerk in dandruffed vest and shirtsleeves who said as Kunstler, his savings in his pocket, stood hesitantly in the doorway of a flyblown shop: “Specials today. Part-worsted gabardine pinstripe suit thirteen ninety-five.” He told him how many pieces were in the sharkskin suit, because it came with extra trousers and was available in medium blue or medium brown, special at eleven ninety-five in English Terylene that wouldn’t fade or wrinkle, and about the casual corduroy sport coat and part-worsted gabardine hound’s-tooth slacks eleven fifty for the set. He kept going until Kunstler was lost in the words, unable to set them to images, as if they were just musical notes. “Now’s the time to shop,” the clerk said, “have the place to yourself,” and when Kunstler wavered, he added, “We don’t get a lot of business during the week, frankly. Buy a suit today and, well…what? I’ll throw in a tie.” The clerk’s thick glasses were split across the middle and his eyes, partitioned, looked like dark yolks loosed from black eggs, or fish slipping through a bowl. The lenses tossed the sun in Kunstler’s face so that he was briefly blind as he entered the woody dimness of the store. When the space at last ripened out of the feathered dark he was standing in the middle of a small carpet facing a mirror.
“Arms at your sides, please,” the clerk said. “Relaxed.” He pulled a tape measure from over his neck and passed it down Kunstler’s arm, and then pressed it across his back. Kunstler got tense. “First time fitted?” the clerk asked.
“I guess so.”
“It won’t hurt at all, I promise,” the man said. “I must have measured half the men in this town, I guess. Or at least half the ones now over thirty, to be specific. Times are changing; everything is changing. Department stores, you know. There’s Bamberger’s everywhere now, Epstein’s, too. Hard to compete. Their service isn’t like what you get here, of course, but it seems no one has time these days. Arms up, please.” Kunstler lifted his arms and then started as the tape measure passed around his chest, but the clerk did no more than incline his head in a brief bow, and then proceed about his work, Kunstler aware but somehow not nervous, watching the man run his thick glasses close over the black and yellow measurements and then against the slip of paper where he wrote them down with a stub of pencil.
After measuring Kunstler’s neck the man stopped and pursed his lips. “Well, fourteen,” the clerk said, lifting his tortoiseshells and double-checking his thumbnail against the tape measure with a closely pressed bare eye. “Fourteen, fourteen. We don’t stock fourteens much, frankly,” he remarked. “No one around here does, I don’t think. That is unless, unless. Unless…” He took the word away with him into the rear of the shop, leaving behind a pleasant, church-like quiet. Kunstler slowly put his arms down. He enjoyed this, he realized, enjoyed looking at the racks and the shelves, feeling a part of this place, this thing. Then the clerk reappeared with a small stack of folded shirts, mostly pale blue and yellow.
“We used to carry some boys’…well. Younger men’s clothes. Sometimes people wanted something more formal for confirmations, weddings, that kind of thing, you know. Here’s what we have left. The styles are a little dated, frankly, as we don’t have much call any more, but I think we’ll find something to fit you, and I can give you a good price on it. It’s really just taking up shelf room, you see? The owner’ll be just as glad to have the space as the merchandise.” He piled them on the counter. “I brought some ties from back there, too. I worry these others would trail you like a noose.” He put a set of ties in Kunstler’s hand and asked, “Left or right?”
Kunstler looked briefly into the bottle-bottom specs with behind them the wheeling, impassive eye-fish and then at the lines and loops of the ties before saying, with something less than conviction, “Right.” The clerk with some effort got down on one knee. Kunstler jumped when the clerk pressed the tape to the inside of his left leg, but again the clerk ignored him, keeping up a hum of small talk about recent styles and changing clientele as he measured and then climbed his way upright, and while he talked Kunstler looked down at the oiled grey hair with its salting of white flakes as if seeing a mountain range from the cloud tops. The clerk said, “For the suit I think we can get away with a thirty-four. I don’t have a lot of them, to tell you the truth, but more choice than you’ll have for the shirts. Or you can go to a department store, maybe Atlantic Mills, but you’ll be limited to what’s in the boys’, I should think, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. Anyway, it’s up to you. You want I should pull out the thirty-fours?”
Then after, in the pure, smooth mirror, with the cream shirt and the grey suit, the printed tie, the long tabs of collars, Kunstler found a presence unmistakable, stronger even than the evidence of a disloyal body—not mere mask, it seemed to him then, but substance. Gone would be the confining sense of materials inappropriate, cladding that would not embrace the structure, the cursed lack of rightness in the matter by which he was bound. Instead he saw a real man, with all of a man’s despicable, admirable arrogance and strength of body—an image that would not remain merely an image.
The clerk was still talking, saying, “That fits pretty well, I’d say, wouldn’t you? Cuff the leg, of course, shorten the sleeves a little bit, and it’s just right, really. Want me to make the alterations?”
“I guess I’ll do it…I mean, I’ll ask my land-lady to take care of it for me.”
“There’s no charge for alterations, you know.”
“No, but I guess she’ll be happy to do it and then I won’t have to find the time to come back.”
“As you like. Have far to go? I’ll box it. Oh, don’t worry about folds, you’ll see—that suit will barely wrinkle at all. Just hang it for a day. Everything will drape right out.”
Kunstler decided at the last minute to trade his soft cap for a felt Dunlap that wasn’t really the right color but happened to fit. “Trust me,” said the clerk. “Whatever the ads say, even a good hat will change plenty once the weather gets right in it a couple of times, and this one, well: maybe a little faster than that, even.” He handed over a deep cardboard box filled with tissue paper and cloth, tied with white and red twine.
Kunstler wore the hat, one fearful hand on the brim in case there should be any wind, and carried his cap in his jacket pocket. There was enough money left over to practice buying tickets to the picture show. None of the titles meant anything to him, so he took a seat for whatever was playing next. The first was a western, the second a musical, with between them the newsreels and cartoons; each seemed as remote and brittle as the other, a series of indistinguishable poses struck behind a silvered window, colored vapors noised by dist
ant, undersea voices, echoes upon echoes. For nearly four hours he sat and stared at the nothingness, then went home to the lodging house, where he basted the suit’s cuffs and looked with wonder at its beauty, and thought how it would roll over him as close and as enduring as a shadow.
There was no hot water at the lodging house so before his date he knocked off work a little early and washed up in the restroom at the diner. Stripped to his shorts, barefoot and air cool in the tiled room, he observed in the mirror the prominent ribs, the waxy yellowed knobs of shoulder and elbow, studied almost with the distant curiosity of a passing stranger the press and gear of muscle and bone and tendon as he scrubbed at his neck and underarms with fingernails foamed on the cracked cake of pink soap.
His bandages were only half on again when he noticed in the reflected room behind his own inverted face the open door—open just a little, hardly anything: but he knew that even a little was too much. There was no one there that he could see, but the door was open when it hadn’t been, shouldn’t have been; by that crack it swung open on his every fear, and in the grip of that fear he slammed it violently shut. Over the sounds of the kitchen being cleaned for the night it was impossible to hear if someone was there waiting, or walking away, but the door had not been closed. Had he never closed it? Could it have opened by itself? He felt sure it had been shut. Had it not been shut? I have not been careful, he thought. I have not taken care. It was not hard for him to imagine an eye, a shocked face. Someone has seen me, he thought next, and everything is already done and lost. He began to sweat. There was an image in his mind of police, of the lights flashing from their cars, and for a moment he wished his were a different name. While he finished his bandages, pulling tighter than ever as if there were protection to be found in them, he held the closed door in place by sitting on the toilet and pushing with one foot. Then he put on his new clothes, the suit that not so long ago had seemed a monument to his triumph and was now perhaps the cause of his absolute destruction. He pressed his back against the door while he kneeled to pack his old clothes in the suit’s box. He was aware of his heart’s rhythm.
