Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me?”

  He fought the urge to ignore her, and said only, “Yes.”

  She smiled. “Oh, excuse me. I hope you don’t mind. Have we met? I was thinking that I’m sure we’ve met.” Another woman looked over and smiled at them. Kunstler took a deep breath.

  “We’ve been on the same bus pretty often, I guess. That must be what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, no. I mean, I know that, but I’ve thought all along that I must know you from somewhere else.”

  Kunstler looked away at nothing again and with a kind of desperation took the paper from his pocket, but there was nothing to be done with it, so he smacked it against his knee once or twice, then put it back. “I really don’t think so,” he said finally.

  “This is so forward of me, I know, but you’re from here? From Trenton, I mean—aren’t you? I think maybe we lived down the block from each other.” She smiled. More people were looking up from their papers and their shoes, Kunstler noticed, listening to her; he felt as if he were answering them all, along with all their colleagues and families and hairdressers and barbers, when he said, “Well, I’m sure you lived down the block from someone, of course, but I’m afraid it wasn’t me.”

  “You seem very sure,” she said.

  “What I mean to say is, I only got to Trenton after the war.”

  “Oh. It must be my mistake, then. I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s quite all right.”

  For a moment the bus shook on; Kunstler and the woman and the others around who had been listening all assumed the unnatural poses of indifference that result from aborted moments of communion. They would make several more stops before hers, he knew, stops at which more people would get on than off. The bell rang and they slowed; there was a movement of passengers. Kunstler hoped for as many as could fit so one of them might come stand in the aisle and separate them, but no one did, or for an old lady who might accept his seat, but there wasn’t one, and it was only once they were moving again that he finally thought of getting off. He was wondering if he should ring the bell when the girl leaned forward once more, and said, “But you do look so familiar. Might I ask your name?”

  “Oh,” he said, pressing a finger to his eye. “Sure. I’m Kunstler. Abe Kunstler.” He crossed his arms as if he were cold, although in fact he was sweating lightly.

  “Kunstler? Is that how you say it?”

  “That’s right, Kunstler.” He moved a little in his seat, and began to bounce his leg a little on the ball of his foot.

  “Abe?”

  “Right.” He was looking around now, eyeing the spaces between the others.

  She smiled again. “For Abraham?”

  “What? Oh, yes. For Abraham,” he said. He found a handkerchief in his hip pocket and wiped his forehead. Then he took his paper out of his coat again, but a single look at it made him queasy, so he just slapped it against his bouncing thigh.

  “Oh. Well, it’s very nice to know you, Mr. Kunstler.”

  She reached out a grey-gloved hand between the standing men who held the straps. Kunstler put his paper away and took her hand in his and said, “Sure, fine.” He was still holding it and looking at her when the bell rang again. He stood at the sound as if the bell were a part of him, part of the machinery that made him go, and said, “I hope you’ll excuse me, Miss, but I just remembered that I, well.” To the standing men who blocked the way to the door he said, “Pardon me,” but only after he had pushed by.

  He stood quite still for a long while after watching the bus pull away. Once he took his hat off. He turned it around a few times as if he were checking it for holes, although he didn’t look at it. Then he put it on again. A moment later he pulled the paper from his pocket, only to stick it right back.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” he said finally and pressed a hand to his temples. “Yes. That’s just goddamn fine.” He started walking. When the man at the Kaiser dealership asked him what it was he was looking for, exactly, Kunstler told him, “I guess I’m just done with taking the bus, is what it is.”

  “Well, sure,” said the dealer. “That’s junior-varsity stuff.”

  It was well past noon when they finished all the paperwork, so Kunstler gave up on the factory and drove home. It was the first day he’d missed on the floor since they gave him the job, and as the car rolled down the road he screamed in frustration until his voice shook.

  Even as he thought of leaving, he knew he wouldn’t: it was only here that for sure he could pull wire, he told himself, even though he knew without admitting it that pulling wire wasn’t the only reason, if it was even the reason at all, that no matter what his job he would never leave Trenton, and it was because of the man, because it was only here he and the man could be together, it was only here that the man was in the smoke and the dust and the dirt, in the soil and the water. The man had been scattered and now all of Trenton was his body. He was from here and of here, one with the place and indivisible from it. So here is where Kunstler would stay. How else, he wondered, would the child be infused with the man’s being? How else would the man be resuscitated into the world?

  But Cadwalader Park was a long, slow bust. Kunstler knew almost the moment he got there that the tunnel would be a waste of time: practically all he saw were rich people in expensive new cars driving back and forth from places he didn’t even bother trying to picture. He had parked some distance away and walked there along the wide, empty road, the white stone opening of the tunnel like a gateway to an ancient temple. Occasionally someone else walked through: a few times he saw a colored man leaving or going to work in one of the fancy houses on the park’s far side, and once there was a hobo who, finding the place occupied, had asked for a cigarette in a tone of hurt surprise and when it was lit staggered away, leaving behind the heavy odor of soiled clothes. The few others who passed had stared at him with obvious suspicion. After a couple of Friday nights spent waiting around with no sign anything would ever possibly come of it, he started to worry someone would eventually notice and call the cops to report a man loitering half hidden near the kinds of houses men like him didn’t enter except to fix a leak or make off with the silver. There was no option but to withdraw, he decided: the threat of discovery had crept too close. For a time he went walking through the park itself, but that proved no better: moving kept him warm, but away from the road everything was completely deserted and unnaturally dark, unnaturally quiet.

  Next he had tried on the other side of town, out past the working districts near Hamilton, wandered and waited along Spring Lake and the marsh, with Deutzville and the world lit up just behind the trees. There were stories about what went on in the dark here, too, but for three nights in a row no one had walked by, not a single person. There were no rustlings or whispers, Kunstler saw no movement at all in the bulrushes. He would persist for some time, though, trying first one place, then another: this was the stirring Kunstler suffered, the strange tenderness mixed with ownership that the girl Inez evoked in him. It was against his better judgment but equally beyond his control, originating not in his will but his body, a creation that slipped increasingly from the command of its maker, so it wasn’t until winter arrived in full force that he gave up, even if he had known long before the snow came that it was a bust. Then the factory others got to talking about the bar, and he knew that at last he had gotten lucky.

  It was almost spring when Kunstler put a match to a cigarette in an unlit doorway across the street from the raided bar near State and then subsided with the tiny chemical fire into darkness. He had a full pack, and he wasn’t tired; alone and hidden he could be patient, he told himself, and he thought, I expect some people won’t read the news who ought to, or at least I hope they don’t. He was five cigarettes in on his third night when a man wearing a grey overcoat and wide-brimmed fedora tried the entrance. He found it locked, of course, and stopped for just a moment to look quickly around, then just as quickly he walked on, moving in the same direction
as before. Kunstler threw his still-burning stub at the gutter and followed. They crossed East State, which glowed with thirty-foot-tall signs, all the places Kunstler knew the names of and never visited: F. W. Donnelly, Kaplan’s, Reid’s, the Savoy, S.P. Dunham. Although the man in the wide hat hadn’t looked behind him even once since walking away from the locked door of the bar, Kunstler found the light unnerving: for a moment he instinctively hung back, as if fearful their shadows might react explosively if they were to cross.

  A few blocks later the man turned east. On a street filled with businesses shuttered for the night he let himself into a two-tone Hudson. Kunstler continued to walk, came alongside the starting car. Through the window in the dark it seemed the man hadn’t taken off his hat; either way there was no making out his face, Kunstler noticed, even as he reflected that there was no good reason he should want to. After that he walked cautiously as far as the freight yards before circling back through the emptiest streets he could find to his doorway hideout, where he stood smoking for another hour. He returned again the next night, and again the night after that, every evening after work for a few hours, he didn’t know how many nights, until at last another man, a skinny guy in a campus jacket, tried the door. He stood before the vacant building longer than the other had, and looked at the door as if convinced it could tell him something. When he left, Kunstler followed him through a maze of dockside streets. Eventually they came to a different bar. Kunstler watched the guy go in, memorized the address, and then went home to wait for Saturday afternoon.

  What surprised him most at first was that to look at, it was just a bar: if you forgot there were no windows and that even during daytime the place preserved a nocturnal darkness, if you ignored the curtained door at the back through which they sometimes passed in pairs or alone, then it was nothing so strange, a room full of men drinking beer and whiskey, the same smell of stale alcohol amid low lights, the same zinc and mirrors as a normal place full of normal people, the kind of bar he figured you would find just about anywhere there were people who worked and who afterwards wanted to drink. The barman, even the customers: they all looked normal.

  “Not much business,” Kunstler had said while ordering his drink, and then asked, “It ever get full here?” When the barman only shrugged, he added, “Most joints get so full on Saturday, is all.” He spoke clearly, not loud but easy enough to hear in the half-empty room; he realized suddenly that the factory floor had made him cocky. From his stool he could watch them in the mirror, three men talking, the barman twisting his towel, and across the counter from him two others, one customer in tweed and another wearing a charcoal suit and pearl-grey shirt. Kunstler found himself staring at that shirt, at the man in it. He understood already that it was too early, that he should have come at midnight, but somehow he couldn’t yet bring himself to leave.

  The tweed said something quietly to the others, shook his head. The grey shirt said, “What, is he writing a book?” and looked at the barman, who scratched behind his left ear with his right hand.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the barman said.

  “Well, no one is going to drop any hairpins,” said the one in the grey shirt to the tweed. Then to the barman he said, “Still, I suppose we should,” and when the barman didn’t move, he added, “And by ‘we,’ you know. I’m not the one who works here.”

  The barman slapped his towel against the sink edge a few times and said, “No, I guess not,” before coming over to where Kunstler sat in contemplation of his empty glass. The barman worried the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Anything else?”

  “Maybe in a minute,” Kunstler said in his rasp.

  The barman nodded, ran his thumbnail along his jawline. “Well, okay.” He glanced at the others. “I mean, I suppose. But I don’t think there’s anything for you here, see. If you just want to drink, hell. There’s plenty of places.” More confidentially he added, “People like their privacy, is the thing, and this is a spot, you know, for…for regulars.”

  “Members,” called the tweed without looking up.

  “Members, I mean. Right.”

  Kunstler was aware of the few others seated in the booths, although he couldn’t see more than the tops of their heads or their hats hung from hooks between benches, and knew that they must have been aware suddenly in just the same blind way of him. Two men entered through the door at the back. The barman gave them a look and they stopped. Kunstler turned to look at them, too, where they stood awkwardly, and then slowly turned back to his glass.

  “Members,” he echoed back to the standing barman, who nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s a private place, you know. It would probably be better if you…well, you understand. This one is on the house. The next one is five bucks.” He collected Kunstler’s glass, left his money untouched, and walked back to the others.

  Once past the door and the sound of a high laugh Kunstler pushed his hands down hard into his pockets and walked practically without seeing. For a long time his mind floated as if empty, but at the same time he knew that what it floated on was a thought: that if the place was full he could get lost among them, just another head in a dark sea of heads, another glass in another hand. Nobody bothers to pick out the one within the many if the one doesn’t make a spectacle. He knew this already: if no one could see the whole figure of him it was simply because he stood so close. He was never more than details, the anonymous blur of a worker living in sin with his girl, who didn’t talk when talk wasn’t needed, who drank too much, was gruff and blue-collar, was boorish, was dull. That was how it should be done. This time he had done it all wrong, but there was still a chance, he decided, to do it right. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  It was almost midnight when several weeks later he tried the bar again. It seemed he was right—the man behind the bar didn’t appear to know him at all. He ordered a beer and stood quietly, careful to draw no special attention to himself until the handsome one who called himself George had come over to talk, had invited him through the curtain at the back to the half-lit corridor of closed doors behind. For a moment it seemed as if everything was at last on track, that things had been set in motion, but again he had not imagined far enough: the man simply hadn’t wanted to come away. Kunstler tried insisting, even though it was obvious his tenacity was as wasted as the time spent walking through the park in the cold.

  “Oh, hey,” said George. “Women, couples. I don’t really do that.” Kunstler felt as if he were staring at a wall: it hadn’t occurred to him that there would be any question; he couldn’t imagine one of them turning down a body any more than he would have imagined a dog turning down meat. “She’s a beautiful girl,” he found himself saying, vaguely. “We have a nice place.”

  “Sure. Listen, it’s not a shove,” George said. “I just don’t, not with women…see?”

  Kunstler would have left then, departed without trouble even though he was angry. He had put his hat back on, hadn’t he? He would have got up quietly then and walked out, gone home and reconsidered, but the second one had to come in, had to grab him, and Kunstler recognized instantly that although this one was drunk, he nevertheless knew: he identified right away the surprise on the man’s face, felt the searching movement of the hand around the athletic supporter.

  It was the surprise Kunstler wanted to hit when he punched the groping man, watched him fall sideways off the bed where the three of them had been sitting. Then Kunstler was standing, and the one called George was standing, and Kunstler hit George with the side of the same fist, from which George’s head retreated swiftly to the wall. Now George sprawled on the bed, deflated, and Kunstler stood looking down at him, and then the other man was beside him, blood from his nose crawling around his mouth to his chin and neck. The two of them stood together, looking down at George in silence, as if George were in charge and they were incapable of continuing without his direction. Lying there he looked like nothing more than a soaked rag draped thickly over a skeleton, and as they watche
d him Kunstler knew a breathless fear. In that fear he waited, empty of anything and everything else. Then at last George’s chest rose and fell, and, accompanied by a grinding sound from his throat, rose again, and the other man was quietly saying, “Thank Christ, thank Christ.” He was saying it still when he turned his bloody face to Kunstler.

  The man seemed to realize just as Kunstler did that standing there he barred the way to the door, but Kunstler was faster to act: he took the man by the arm and swung him away, overturning the table beside the bed. The lamp fell and the room tilted into shadow. Kunstler ran from the darkness into the hollow light of the bulb’s empty hallway and through that into the near dark of the bar, where he then walked—but quickly, head low—through the crowd of men. He had to ease his way through them, turn and dodge. One yelled at being bumped. “Don’t go away angry!” said another. Then he was running into the night outside, with nothing in his mind but the blows he had struck, no movement through his thinking but of his fist to the yielding flesh, the thrust of his arm, the resonant crack of bone.

  The next Monday morning before he left for work he sat on the end of his bed fixing his tie, and told the girl they didn’t go out enough. “We need to have more fun,” he said. “You want to go dancing? Let’s go to some bars this weekend, dance like kids, drink ourselves stinky.”

  “Sure, baby.” She smiled, and rolled back into sleep. He thought about it all the way to the factory: I should have known that. I should have thought all along it would be the dancing.

  The dancing, but also the booze, and to make the plan work he led them both ever deeper into that hazy forgetful world, a confusing place where he experienced a strange mixture of ease and anxiety. It was the ease itself that caused him fear: to find himself in public with only a loose boozy hand on the lever of his self-control would make him jump, and he could grow furious at how often he caught himself with his guard down. Even among the factory others, who knew him and so accepted his chariness or at least were accustomed to it, he recognized there was always the potential for ruin. Drunken fights happened nearly every night in the factory bars, battles of pride and nerve among the workers, incomprehensible disputes among the Hungies and the Wops; the trigger for the next one was hardly ever more than two words away—and then eventually someone would think it was funny to pick on the little guy, particularly if he had a good-looking girl, a girl you might covet, whose thighs shook in her tight dress when she laughed, whose uneven mouth was an invitation to a warm world, and he knew of course it couldn’t be one of them, never one of the factory men: no one they knew could be allowed to have even the slightest suspicion.