by Tadzio Koelb
“Well, it looks like you hit your noggin pretty hard—or someone hit it for you. We were sort of hoping you could tell us. Look at my finger, and don’t move your head. That’s fine, yes. Good.”
“Okay if I sit up?”
“I think so, but take it slowly.”
George inched backwards until his shoulders rested on the wall behind him. “Say, is that water? Can I drink that?” he asked about the glass Wade still held in his left hand. For a minute they watched him drink.
“How do you feel?” asked the tall one.
“Oh, copacetic,” said George.
Wade said, “Do you remember what happened?”
“There was a guy, I hadn’t seen him before. He didn’t talk to anyone except to order his drink, I don’t think. Just sort of hung back, like. I figured it was his first time, that he hadn’t ever been, you know, with anyone before, or at least not around here, since I didn’t recognize him. So I started to talk to him, but it was loud out there and he didn’t seem to have much to say. Which is fine most of the time, you know. I felt as if he wasn’t just being quiet, though, but like he was avoiding talking, if that makes sense. Then when he talked he was really hoarse, and I guess I figured that was why. Sounded like he had laryngitis, practically. Like it hurt.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, really, just that he was fine, thanks, and no, he wasn’t from out of town, and so on. Things like that.”
“Okay.”
“I felt sort of sorry for him, maybe. I said, Are you nervous, and he didn’t say anything, just looked at me. His face never changed the whole time, now that I think of it: he looked at me just like that the whole time. I thought maybe he was just nervous.”
“Sure,” said Wade.
“Anyhow, I said something like, ‘Let’s go talk in the back’ or something, and he said that would be fine, and we came back here. His face really didn’t change at all. He didn’t look scared or not scared, or excited or not excited. He just had this look, like he was thinking about something else the whole time. Even when he slugged Al.”
“When was that?”
“A little later.”
“When did he clock you?” asked the tall one.
“Just let him talk,” said Wade.
“I know,” said the tall one. “You need to read his brain waves with your pinkie, find out if he has meningitis. Meanwhile.”
“All right, one thing at a time, smart guy. So you came back here. And then?” asked Wade.
“So, I figured the crowd made him jumpy, and then that voice of his, you could barely hear him out there by the bar. When we got back here, he didn’t want to touch. I suppose I still thought that he was nervous, so I started asking him about himself, but he didn’t really want to talk, either, or at least not about anything I could think of. After I tried a few things, where are you from and so on, he started acting like there was a problem. Then he kept sort of hinting at something. I got the impression he didn’t want to be here.”
“So why didn’t he leave?”
George looked up at the tall one with a face confused for a moment and then shook his head gently, tenderly. “No, I mean he wanted us not to be here, me and him. I think he wanted me to go back to his place with him, although he wouldn’t come right out and ask. Just said stuff about it being more comfortable at his apartment, having a bottle there of something fancy. Port? Something awful like that. I said we could start here, get to know each other a bit, then maybe some other time.”
“Well?”
“That’s when he started to get really weird. He started talking something about his wife.”
“That’s rich,” called Al.
“Just keep your head back, Al, please. And pinch.”
“I told him that wasn’t my thing, couples, you know. Why get a woman involved—no offense, Al.”
“None taken, I’m sure,” said Al from the hallway.
“Well, he got really bent out of shape over it. Put his hat back on, talked about his fancy booze again, and at some point he said something like, ‘I thought you people would do anything,’ something like that. I guess that’s about when Al came in, right before he said that or right after, I don’t know exactly. I had left the door open a crack so the guy didn’t feel pressured or trapped or anything, like to say all we’re going to do is talk if that’s what he wants. So Al comes right in and sits down next to him and the guy looks him over and says something weird to him. He says something like, ‘I only need one.’ ”
“One what?” asked Wade.
“Right. That’s just what I asked him. ‘One what?’ and he said, ‘One of you people.’ Or I think he said, ‘One of you perverts.’ Something like that, I don’t know.”
“Pansies,” called Al. “ ‘I only need one of you pansies.’ ”
“Whatever it was, pansies or perverts, I saw it was trouble. I was done by then. I figured, ‘To hell with this son of a bitch,’ and I was about to get up to leave, but Al sort of went for the guy. I guess he was trying to be, I don’t know…provocative or something?”
“I was drunk,” said Al from the hallway. “I’m not any more, though, damn it all.” With his wet handkerchief, Wade waved at him to be quiet. “Let him go on,” Wade said.
“So anyway, Al grabbed for the guy’s cock, and bang: without hardly waiting a second, he punched Al right in the face. I almost laughed it was so sudden. It was funny, too, in a way, because Al’s the only one here I know of who’s interested in women, so he brained the one guy who might ever have been up for it, you know, with his wife. Well, of course, I didn’t know what in the hell to do, but I guess I stood up, maybe, and anyway that’s all I remember.”
“That’s enough for me,” said the tall one. “George is okay. If we leave now and each take a car, maybe we can find the guy.”
“There’s no guy,” said Al.
“Oh, hell. Al’s delirious. Did you check his eyes, too, while you were at it?”
“I’m not delirious. Will you listen?”
“Al,” said the tall one, turning to the door, “would you give me a break. If there’s no guy, who socked you? Sit down, please, and pinch your head back like Wade told you. Jesus.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” said Al, standing in the doorway. “Who socked me. I didn’t know at first, but then I was really grabbing for it. I put my hand right down in there, really felt around, and that’s when I knew. There is no little guy. There’s a broad who’s dressed like a man. A very strong goddamn broad in a drip-dry suit and an ugly goddamn tie.” He sneezed suddenly, and the others all jumped as a chunk of half-dried blood burst from his left nostril, held to his face by a long finger of red mucus.
“Oh, Jesus, Al,” said Wade, smoothing his tie, “put your head back. And pinch, I told you to pinch.”
“Ah, hell,” said Al, looking at his shirt. “It’s too late anyway. This is ruined. Janice’ll never get that out. It was new, too. I’m not ever going to hear the end of it.”
Kunstler was out of breath and sweating hard, and an angry stitch dug into his ribs. He stopped running and turned around. The dark made it impossible to be sure, but through the muffle that was the noise of his breathing and his heart and the blood in his head it didn’t sound like anyone was following. He rested his elbows on his half-bent knees and heaved for air. Running had left him wet through. The knuckles of his right hand hurt and were starting to swell. The bar had been hard to find, like a castle in a myth, but there was no going back: he was known now, an event fixed in their recalling, a thing that had happened and would be recounted and therefore remembered. Not that it had been working, anyhow. He would have to find another way.
The place was not exactly hidden, but it was not out in the open, either, and it was hard to find, but he figured now that he had expected as much. The first time he had gone too early, the noiseless hours of the afternoon, and it had been too empty, he had been too visible, had stayed to survey the place too long.
Then he had been mistaken when he thought he could ask questions. In fact he should have kept his mouth shut, not said anything but simply nodded and paid, receded into forgetting, which is where he was safest. You should never question luck, he knew that, should have remembered it—and he had found the place, even the idea of it, absolutely by luck, carried there by talk in the locker room one day of somewhere not at all far from State Street being raided for “indecency.”
“Right in the middle of town,” Blackie said. “Can you believe that? It’s in the papers, but I bet you won’t hear it on the radio. They don’t want to offend any delicate ears.”
“What,” said Bobby, “like a whorehouse?”
“Even the newspapers just call that prostitution,” said Butler.
“So what, then?”
“You really don’t know?” asked Blackie. “Youth today, am I right? They don’t teach them nothing useful at school. When the newspapers say a place was raided for ‘indecency,’ see, it’s always a cinch that what they mean is queers.”
It was almost a year since Kunstler had first stood in the Parkside Avenue tunnel at Cadwalader Park, hours in the night’s cold, a shoulder pressed to one of the stone pillars, worked the dodge of moving around it to avoid being picked out by passing headlights as they sliced into the walkway. The factory men sometimes told jokes about what was rumored to happen there, stories of acts glimpsed in passing, of men in pairs or groups, of bare buttocks pale between parted bushes. It was all too wild, of course, too exaggerated and elaborate to be believed, but there was always the hope that smoke meant fire. In his mind they were the furthest thing from himself that he could imagine: he thought of them as practically animals, insatiable, teetering at the very edge of self-control, as sure as an animal to eat any meat you put before them, and he imagined their dark joy in his willingness to bring them something fresh. When it was over they would share with him at least this: the terrible fear of disclosure. It would clad them all in safety.
* * *
·
At first the plan had just been the girl. For months every Saturday, and some Fridays, too, when he had money, Kunstler had climbed the poorly lit stairs to buy his tickets from the glass-caged seller on the landing. Then he would go stand in the long, narrow room among the wilted paper flowers and painted archways, the fading red-white-and-blue streamers. There along the walls loitered the Hungie cinder snaps from the foundries or the servicemen still waiting for their discharges, who would all willingly spend ten cents for hardly more than one hundred and twenty seconds rolled against one of the girls in the blanket of smoke and noise.
Sometimes he came alone, but often enough some of the factory others would be there, Jacks pulling hard on a cigarette rolled crooked and lip-wet, Bobby awkward in his church suit.
“Hey, Abe,” Augie liked to joke. “How’s your Napoleon complex?”—or something similar.
“Depends,” rasped Kunstler. “You got a girl called Josephine?”
They always met outside. Here they would stand, four or five or more sister- and mother-darned blazers and loosely knotted ties and the tart carbolic odor of blue-collar clean on a half-lit street where drumming echoed recklessly from the buildings around. They waited as still as animals hunting or hunted, and when they moved it was with the suddenness of birds turning. If Kunstler found the others there, he waited while they waited, and when at last they went in he followed. He walked through the flaking beaverboard foyer as if going no place in particular, as if just off a train and trailing the crowd to the exit, eyes on the heels of the man preceding him, the movements automatic, carried by the machinery of their own progression. Once in the dance hall’s rhythmic jostle the men jellied together in a slow, uncertain mass from which Kunstler dangled only slightly apart, his pockets full of his fists and a week’s pay.
“Did you ever dance with that one?” Jacks asked, pointing to a bottle blonde. “She dances good. Real close.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You really like that other one, don’t you? Inez. You don’t really dance with no one else.”
“I suppose I like her well enough.”
Jacks lowered his voice to what he clearly mistook for a whisper. “I thought you said she’s a dipso.”
Kunstler lit a cigarette. “You said she’s a dipso, Jacks. I just corrected your grammar.”
Inez was out on the floor with a boy of her own age, a boy weedy and pale and dressed in clothes too big for him, too long and too loose, as if they had been borrowed from his father. Kunstler recognized him as a regular. He and Jacks watched Inez guide him tripping around the room. Kunstler knew she liked to dance with this kid, with others like him, because he was scared of the girls, of how one of them might react if he started moving his hands down her back. Most of her customers were scared only of not getting their dime’s worth of contact.
“I got to find a new job,” she sometimes said when she had danced with someone particularly pushy. “This is for the birds.” The other girls had admirers, “but I’ve just got you,” she told Kunstler, and silently he congratulated himself that this at least had gone right, every gear in place. He was proud of how, on the night that Jacks had introduced them and Kunstler and the girl had shared their awkward first dance, he had escorted her right away to the long bar that filled one side of the dance hall. While they waited for their drinks she said, “Well would you look at that? The hem of my dress is coming undone. I repaired it myself twice already, but I always make such a mess of it. I hate to ask the other girls, and I really don’t want to pay. God, I don’t even like this dress any more, I’ve worn it so much. It’s like a noise you’re sick of hearing.” She gave an uncomfortable giggle and shrugged.
Kunstler handed her the drink she had ordered, and before he had really thought about it, and even though he knew as if she had just come out and said so that what she wanted was someone to pay the seamstress, or better yet, to buy her a new dress, or even better still just give her the money in her hot little paw, and to hell with this dress and every other, he said, “I can fix it for you.” The girl laughed then, loudly, rocked her chest forward and asked, “Of course I’ll just have to take it off for you first?”—but when he didn’t laugh back, just looked at her with that unchanging expression he wore, just sipped at his whiskey and soda and looked, she cocked her head at him and said, “Why, you aren’t just trying to be funny, are you?”
“No,” he said. “I can really fix it. Better than you did.”
The girl put one hand on her hip and said, “You know, I bet you probably can. I bet you’re one of those men who can do just about anything, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know about that,” Kunstler replied. “I mostly just draw wire for the wire rope. But I guess I can fix your hem.” The girl drank and laughed again. It sounded different.
He knew instinctively that the girl had to believe in fate, and understood why: the glancing blows of circumstance by which she had made her way seemed to call for it, a better and more comforting name than any other for how she should have to live. It tempered the struggle for existence. Kunstler counted on her trust in it, needed her to because to protect her was to make her unknowingly protect him, shield him from questions and uncertainties. This was the realm of her gift.
For Kunstler the matter of life was something else, and the great and real difference was this: that fate you would never need to work for, it came to you as if placed by a mysterious hand in the letter box—but this urge he felt was a challenge, a calling not just heard, but answered. It summoned the creative force in a man, who then constructed the world in which he succeeded or failed, constructed himself to suit that world, remade whatever yielded as he would have it. It was clear to him that of course many men missed their destinies, failed them through lack of action or of foresight, or through the very weakness they afterwards called fate when shortcoming left them passive and apologetic, but even to fail at destiny was better than the other way. To accept fate was
to allow your least self to be maintained and not surpassed: destiny, the name he gave to life and living and the daily decision not to obliterate himself—that required something more.
Kunstler didn’t dance with Inez much after the first month or two. His money was spent instead buying her drinks whenever the band knocked off for twenty minutes or if she didn’t have a partner. The girl poured herself headlong into a recurrent boozy oblivion that to Kunstler was a guarantee of privacy, a vulnerability that bound and blinded her. When the time would come for the dance hall to close they always left together, the little man and his girl, and then she might ask him if he didn’t want to go with her for a cocktail someplace. After that there would be the slow walk to his rooming house, the quiet search for signs of his landlord during which the girl would lean against the porch column and fight an urge to giggle, followed by the gentle shuffle that would piece by piece remove her clothes. She would lay beneath his hand on the bed and accept his clothed body beside her naked one, accept the probing fingers when to spoon was all she wanted and preferred, saying quietly in the morning as if in a gesture of faith and solidarity, as a vow that sealed their union, “I enjoyed last night.” They wouldn’t look at each other when she said it.
That first time she had gotten out of bed afterwards to find her dress basted and hanging from a hook on the back of the door. From the chair where he had half slept Kunstler watched her try unsuccessfully to wrap herself in the tangle of sheet so she could squat and examine the hem. He admired her bare back, the way it blossomed into the forked swell of her buttocks.
“Well, hey,” she said, looking at the repair. “Now would you just look at that? I guess you really can do anything.”
“Don’t go spreading it around,” Kunstler said.
At that moment, he had thought the girl would be enough. He wouldn’t have been able to say when the change came, either—just that it had come, and one day the girl was not the plan, but only a part of the plan, a means to an end that he had maybe only just conceived, even if it felt as if he had been thinking of it all the time. He could pursue his desires, he learned, but not choose them. That was why it disturbed him that sometimes as he stood waiting for the wire to spool he thought of the girl Inez, of her lopsided smile. It sometimes seemed to him that nothing could be more dangerous.
