Up, Down and Sideways

by Patton, Robert;

  “What you mean?” Nick said.

  “Tell them my plan for your store. Our plan.”

  “For rent?”

  “For flowers, man! Don’t go foreign on me.” This angered him into clamming up.

  Susan said, “Real sweet, Philip.”

  Lyle helped me out. “He cut Nick a deal. He’s—hey!”

  Frank Bakes lunged past Lyle’s desk toward us. He grabbed me before I knew it. His arms around me, his stubble scraping my face, I realized he intended affection. He addressed his brother in English that we all might share the moment. “To see you on the street, Nikos—this is my pride! I sell everything I work for to bring you trouble and trouble for Melina.” He gave me a squeeze. He breath smelled of liquor though not of rot, which is why I’m alive today. “Here is my pride! Philly will put you and your pizza shit on the street. He can break your heart like you break mine.”

  Nick said nothing. I knew he wanted out of here, let stand his brother’s illusion. Words blew out of me in an ill-conceived attempt to restore my standing with Susan:

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Frank—but I’m letting Nick stay. He and I are friends, and out of friendship I’ve offered him a new lease. Him and Melina.” Aiming at the others, I said, “The dollar comes second with me.”

  I heard their murmurs, but what fascinated me was Frank; it was like holding someone underwater and watching his face turn color. I explained the flower shop thing and he went red and blue. But just as I thought he was about to pass out, he exhaled and burst out laughing. I laughed with him, afraid to do otherwise, as he raucously pounded my back.

  “Philly! From you the hand of God hits me, eh? Hits me and raises my brother and my whore-for-a-wife. Frank is for shit and they are for the angels. I can laugh to see this.”

  I was speechless. Neil spoke up quickly, “So we’re settled. Everyone’s happy.” To end the episode, punctuate it with a moral, he added, “How hapless a lover’s revenge.” This drew more glee from Frank, his humor snowballing, gathering ice and grit.

  “The Jewish tells me about revenge. Funny, eh Philly?”

  I gave the others a look to say I didn’t know this man.

  “He’s right,” Frank persisted, still hugging me. “The Jewish steals from me my father’s property and jokes how I am helpless.”

  “Hapless, I said.” Neil’s face was expressionless. “If I offended you, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to him!” Susan snapped.

  “They didn’t steal anything,” I said to Frank. “They’re fine people. They bought your building fair and square.” This freed me from his hug but won me no friend in Neil or Susan, who hadn’t appreciated my “they.” Frank didn’t help matters:

  “They get you too, Philly. What you make, they make twice.”

  “I’m perfectly satisfied.”

  “I’m perfectly satisfied,” he sneered. “You so fancy, like a woman.”

  Terrific, I thought—and without wearing an earring, even!

  “Why don’t you just leave,” Susan told him.

  “That’d be best,” Neil agreed, whereupon Frank erupted:

  “You fock you, Jew! I got nothing, not nothing!” His words repulsed them visibly, like grapeshot through innocent bystanders.

  “You’ve got a check in your hand for $90,000 clean!” Neil retorted. “Tell me you got nothing? Baloney! I paid the price you agreed to.” His words notwithstanding, his voice was defensive, taut with self-blame that I felt in myself as well. Frank was wounded, heartsick—in his blind desire to hurt his brother he’d sold his property at a fire-sale price. Perhaps the ugliness he spoke was forgivable, even warranted. To me Frank was a lowlife joke; to Neil he was a sap. Had we given him cause to hate us? Bigotry’s dirtiest trick must be the way it makes you wonder.

  Frank was set to spew again when his brother intervened. In bursts of Greek they raged at each other and we watched it like a tennis match. Then Nick said something that must have scored. Frank suddenly wilted, dropping to his knees before Neil. “I am not really hating you, mister. You will forget me please?”

  “Forgive, he means to say,” Nick said.

  “Whatever,” Neil said. “Just get him to stand and leave. This scene is too nutty.”

  “You will forgive?” Frank wailed, tugging Neil’s jacket.

  “Yes, okay! Go forth and prosper, be happy—but go!”

  Frank stood. “I am not happy. I will remember today every day.”

  His attorney Bill Kelly consoled him. “Chin up, guy. Forget the bitch.”

  “You shut up like that!”

  “Whoa, pardner! No offense. Call me.” Kelly left with a last leer at Alison.

  Frank and Nick faced a decision. They couldn’t leave together, yet for one of them to leave alone, first, might cast him as the coward. Delaying a moment, they postponed the estrangement they would awaken to each morning from now on, awaken foggy, momentarily hopeful, as if after an operation in which body parts were amputated. The seconds that passed were sufficient for poignancy, the brothers’ mutual reluctance evident, before Frank went to Nick, seized his shoulders, said a Greek goodbye, then hesitated. I thought sure he would kiss him, but Frank was Frank and none too subtle, so spat full in his brother’s face, turned on a heel and left. Nick wiped his face with a shirtsleeve, aware he’d gotten off easy.

  Neil had covered his eyes. “Tell me he’s gone.”

  “He’s gone,” Susan said.

  Neil pointed at Nick. “I don’t like your brother.”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s got a sewer for a mouth. What did you say to shut him up?” Receiving no answer, Neil pressed him angrily: “What’d you say, Save it for later? We’ll string the Jew up later?”

  “I say it to him he is talking like our father.”

  “Pop was a gem, huh?” The expression puzzled Nick, who looked to me to translate.

  “Neil is saying he doesn’t like your dad either.”

  Nick nodded. “Frank same. Our father was bad to him.”

  A long silence followed. Neil clapped his hands, “Gee, I’d love to compare notes on family psychology, but you understand—I have other schemes to hatch.”

  “Forget it, Neil,” his lawyer soothed him. “These people are nothing.”

  “Is fine,” Nick said. “I go.”

  I reminded him of our flower deal. “It’s firm as far as I’m concerned. You’re still my tenant. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Nick gave a quick nod. I didn’t expect more. Thanks to me, this morning had brought him an unexpected windfall for which, for a change, he’d hurt no one’s feelings nor committed no sin. He was too modest to gloat.

  “Do I understand, then,” Jeffrey Masters said to me, “that you won’t be evicting Nick’s Pizza?”

  “Or his mother. I paid her to vacate voluntarily.”

  “How much?” Susan asked.

  “Eighteen. Thousand.”

  “Holy Christ,” Jeffrey said.

  Neil said to Susan, “I thought you said Philip was tight?”

  “I thought he was. Cheap car, cheap clothes—”

  “Big heart,” I suggested. Susan turned away to hide her smile. She liked me, was the problem; I think it sickened her. I shrugged to Neil, “Pretty dumb, huh? To give it away like that?”

  “What can I say? You’re a better man than I am.”

  Jeffrey was worried. “Uh, Philip—on those eviction letters? I’ve put in some hours.”

  “Bill me.”

  “Will do.” He grinned at Neil. “We’re set, boss! He’s done the dirty work, let’s bust the deal and move in. Negotiating with tenants prior to purchase? Looks like breach of contract. We can walk away right now.” Jeffrey giggled as fear ripped through me. “Just kidding, Philip. But what a pigeon! Be glad you’re among friends.”

  I exhaled. “Indeed.”

  We started for the conference room. Susan had wandered to the front of the office. Standing before a picture window, he
r profile outlined in light, she looked flawless and unattainable, like a lingerie model. I wanted to eat her, kiss her cheek; I felt distance between us and was willing to bridge it any way possible. Neil called to her, “It’s your sale, honey. Let’s go.”

  “You don’t need me.”

  I complained, “It’s my first closing. My broker’s supposed to comfort me.”

  “You’re a big boy.”

  “You’ll be here when we’re done?”

  She dragged her eyes from the window to me. “Where else? The mall?”

  I saw Lyle go over to talk with her. They huddled comfortably, his hand on the small of her back. When she nodded at something he said, I was jealous. It was the image itself: two young people whispering in the frame of a lighted window. It compared with holding hands and spending a whole night together, things I’d never done with Susan or anyone else.

  The closing went fast, money and papers exchanged like playing cards. Susan was waiting when we came out. She asked me how it went. “I’m the landed gentry now.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I owe it to you.”

  “We should talk. Lyle says you deserve a second chance.”

  “I’m sure he’s right.”

  “Philip!” someone called behind me. “Phone.”

  At this interruption a moment was missed. Had it been anything else I would have remained with Susan, heard her out. But the caller was Timmy Donley and the news, of the stock market, was bad. The Fed Funds rate had risen and the Dow was falling in reflex. A hefty position I’d taken in S & P futures was eroding as we spoke. I had to be there, at the brokerage, the market my time and tide. Susan was not sympathetic.

  “I need a lousy minute! Our signals got crossed before.”

  “I know, and we’ll talk. I promise.”

  “Goddamn it!”

  “Hold that thought. I’ll call you.” And out the door I went. A mistake? Yes and no. I chose the right crisis if you discount human feelings. They say pregnancy makes a woman glow. I well remember Susan’s look through the window as I got into my car. I wouldn’t call it glowing.

  13

  The honeymoon lasted six days. That is, the dream union of commercial real estate and my securities investments was, by the seventh day, no longer fun. Yet that first blush of enterprise makes a memory that, in the words of decrepit sports champions, no one can take away.

  I knew what I was doing and why, those first days. I helped Mrs. Bakes move out and moved myself as well. I took a room over a Chinese restaurant, bigger than my old place, with an air conditioner. In keeping with such improved circumstances, I upgraded my wardrobe from thrift shop to Armani. As for Szechuan every day, my system protested but soon came to love it.

  I stayed tuned to the market, temporarily bearish, while popping over to the building several times daily. An excavating crew was flattening the back garages and the embankment behind them, for parking. The crew was African American. Hovering over the working men, I felt like a plantation dandy. Their sweat and their Kools, the picks and shovels and machinery roar, combined to quite unsettle me in my Vuarnets and tennis shorts. They addressed me as Mr. Halsey with no apparent malice and for this. I was thankful yet oddly let down, knowing money confers respect before you’re able to earn it. One day I ascended a large dirt pile to survey my quarter-acre and several workmen laughed, asking if I wanted my picture taken. I enjoyed the ribbing, the fraternity. That afternoon I brought them a case of malt liquor and refused their money, drinking myself into much fellow-feeling and calling them brother out loud. When the party broke up, the foreman took me aside and respectfully asked me to keep my distance in the future. My presence was bugging his men, he said.

  The next day, the sixth day, I arrived after the work crew had left. I found that the men had uncovered an abandoned well within the embankment, a stone-lined cylinder maybe ten feet deep and buried at the top under two feet of earth. The front-loader had cleaved the embankment vertically, revealing the well in cross-section like an ant-farm tunnel. It was a forlorn-looking structure, like those stone walls you see in New England, back-breaking projects evidently worthwhile to colonial homesteaders when they were living, yet which today, overgrown and collapsed, disappear in impassable forests where no wall would serve any use. The discovery of the well seemed a good excuse to phone Susan. We hadn’t talked since the closing. I thought a newsy pretense would break any ice that had formed. But she was sweet as could be, as impressed with the well as if I’d struck oil, and said she wanted to come see it. I apologized for not calling sooner. “You’ve been busy,” she said. “Just be there tomorrow.”

  That next day, Saturday, the workmen were off. On the cleared ground behind my building the front-loader and bulldozer sat silent and hulking with their shovels at rest like warriors laying down arms. I heard a motor in the alley, then a radio blaring the Red Sox game. A pickup truck appeared. A gaggle of undergrads was piled in back, outfitted for an archeological dig in cutoffs and boots and a milk-fed ruddiness I associate with environmentalists. The driver was different—in his beard and yarmulke, he was decidedly urban compared to his Greenpeacenik passengers. I should have sensed a trick immediately, but as I’m slow to get punch lines, I was slow to get wise as to who he was and what sort of foul joke had been played, until the young man spoke in his father’s voice:

  “You must be Philip. I’m Gershom Graulig.”

  I was cool. She couldn’t have told him—

  “So you’re Susan’s lover. Interesting.”

  “It can be.” My best shot. After that I was mush.

  “I haven’t come to fight. I’ve come to excavate your well, if that’s all right.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “To oddballs like me and my students. I doubt you could convert it to stock certificates.”

  “That a joke?”

  He laughed uncomfortably; how dispiriting it must have been to find his wife was fucking a moron. “A bad joke. Anyway—”

  “Susan told you what I do? In business.”

  “She said you play the market. Sounds great.”

  I thought sure Gershom would attack me any second. He didn’t appear armed, though his students unloading their digging tools had brought blunt objects to spare. “What do you teach?” I asked suspiciously.

  “This is a sociology seminar. ‘Toward a Suburban Aesthetic: Lifestyle Trends Since 1950.’”

  “This isn’t the suburbs.”

  “It was once.”

  “Well, I must tell you, Gershom. I’m reluctant to disrupt my workers.”

  “They’re not here.”

  “Yes, but a bunch of amateurs messing about their turf might upset them, I think.”

  “We’d be doing them a favor. We dig out the well and the embankment above it and that’s less they have to do Monday. We’ve examined some of the biggest construction sites in the city and trust me, no one’s complained.”

  “Examined for what?”

  “For history. For societal structure as evidenced through artifacts, building foundations, garbage dumps. We’re creating a chronological grid of neighborhood evolution, from production economies to service economies to regions of pure habitation. I’m locating precursors to President Reagan’s Enterprise Zones, so-called. You’ve heard of them?”

  “I think only Reagan has.”

  “Too right. But even if never implemented, they permit conservatives a rhetoric of social concern which must be revealed for the hogwash it is.” He was heating up, but let him, I thought; better public affairs than private. “Promoting industrial growth in dying communities can only help if decent, low-cost housing is available. Otherwise labor festers in tenements outside the factory walls while management flees for the suburbs. The precedents exist throughout our history. Lack of housing is what destroys a community. Provide it and the rest will come: growth, security, and neighborhood pride. But it takes active government investment, and Reagan’s blind to that. Willfully, criminally
blind.”

  “I like the man.”

  “What’s not to like? But he’s careless as a child. Until his regime is ousted, people are going to suffer.”

  “They’ll suffer anyway.”

  “Will you?”

  “Not if I can help it.” His onlooking students laughed—a coed group of eight, probably half of them law school-bound, no matter their ecopretensions. My debate with their instructor had devolved to me versus him, a contest that I, not caring if I won, couldn’t lose. My stake here was purely stylistic. Though Gershom had me beat on virtue, I got the laughs and the girl, his girl. Susan was my ace in the hole, a card he couldn’t top. It was as if, provoked, I could have pulled out my dick and shamed him with its size and power, ending all argument. In truth I never would have tried this. These short guys can surprise you.

  Generous in victory, I gave Gershom permission to examine the well. As we walked over to it, he spied me studying his hair. “I know. It’s thinning.”

  “I was checking out the skullcap. Is that a bobby pin?”

  “It is.”

  “What’s it for, exactly.”

  “It affixes the yarmulke to my head.”

  “I mean the cap.”

  “So God can pick us out in a crowd.”

  “Us being Jews?”

  He stopped and looked at me. “You don’t get jokes, do you?”

  “I have wit but no sense of humor.”

  “Susan says I have no sense of humor.”

  “That can’t be the difference, then.”

  He divided his people into two groups, one to inspect above the embankment for foundations or dump sites, the other to sift excavated soil for artifacts. But the second chore couldn’t be done. “You sold your topsoil?” he asked me.

  “My what?”

  “Your topsoil. There must have been a lot of it.”

  Glancing around, I saw that the dirt pile I’d climbed two days earlier was gone, removed. “It was in the way,” I shrugged. “There was tons of it.”

  “I hope you got a good price.”

  “You don’t get much for dirt, Gershom.”

  “Are you kidding? Around here, good topsoil is gold. Twenty bucks a yard, at least. How many yards did you have?”