I felt no sensation at all. Or rather, I felt a rather disagreeable chafing and a decided lack of interest in pursuing this activity.
But I was the dutiful plowman. My job was to continue plowing away. I didn’t want to embarrass her by seeming not to want her product.
After some time she must have sensed my reluctance. Abruptly, she pushed me off her, much to my relief. “You came already, didn’t you?” she said.
Actually, I hadn’t. But I didn’t dispute her. It was altogether preferable to put an end to this, rather than pursue what had become a fruitless engagement..
I sat on the edge of the bed. She got on her knees and climbed off the other side of the bed and slipped her robe back on. Her eyes caught mine. “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?” she said. There was a decidedly brittle note to her voice.
It was hard to think of a whore as a master of irony, but I had to admit she had hit the nail on the head.
“Yes,” I said. “We must do this more often.”
CHAPTER XXI
“You got to be out of apartment by end of month,” the Magyar drill sergeant informed me.
I hadn’t expected this but I suppose I should have. “But why? We have an agreement. I gave you the first and last months rent and one month security. You’re still holding two months rent from me.”
Her smile was crafty. “No problem. I give you back.”
She was still wearing her hob-nail boots, but she had traded her flowered housedress for a light brown coat since there was a decided chill in the air. Around her frizzy gray hairs, she had tied a red gingham kerchief. She held that large ring with all those keys in her left hand. As she spoke, her hands made abrupt movements in the air and the key ring jangled like an angry tambourine.
She had come to my apartment early that morning before I had a chance to leave for the park. It was obvious she had been waiting to pounce on me.
“But why are you doing this to me?” I asked.
She leaned her ponderous frame against the door. “Man come to my husband. Says he pay one thousand a month rent. What could I do? I got to eat too.”
From the looks of it, she had a lot of eating to do. Two hundred dollars of extra food a month would go a long way toward satisfying this ravenous bitch.
I tried to play for time. “I didn’t know you had a husband.”
“Shoo, I got husband. He come over with me from old country.”
I’d never seen her with a husband. My first thought had been that she’d probably devoured him many years ago after a bout of mating. It was hard to imagine this massive female with a spouse. He was no doubt small and insignificant and apologetic.
“But it’s not fair,” I said, as if fairness could place a claim on dealings between a landlord and a tenant. “I expected you to honor our agreement.”
There was an unwholesome glint in her eye. “Agreement we got is month to month. You got no lease. You statutory tenant. Is termination at will. You could termination at will, too.”
Her tortured Slavic legalisms sounded like a comedy routine. How could you reason with someone whose ancestors had probably galloped side by side with Vlad the Impaler and gladly participated in his wholesale beheadings? Being ejected from an apartment was small potatoes by comparison. It was certainly preferable to having your head impaled on the business end of a pike.
I didn’t know what to say. “Let me think about it,” was all I could manage.
“Nothing to think about,” she said. “End of month, is all.”
*
I was shaken, I must tell you. The thought of starting a search for a new hovel was disheartening. I’d become comfortable within the confines of my little room. And I’d become comfortable with my routine.
It appeared to me, after these few months, that I’d been successful in my attempt to steal away. No one had come looking for me, as far as I could tell. Maybe no one had even noticed I was gone.
Now, if I had to start hunting for another place, there was the possibility that someone would notice. Attention would be paid. I might make a mistake. I might be found out. The greatest fear of every man is being found out.
I needed advise on what to do, so I turned to my friend Ethan, the black existentialist.
He provided me with his exegesis in a form that Hegel might have used. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
“Looks to me like you got three choices,” he said in his booming bass. “You can move out and get a cheaper apartment, which I don’t believe you can find. You can move in with me. I won’t charge you no rent. I be glad to have you share my place. Or you can offer her more money. They’s all options of free will available to you.” He winked at me to make his point.
“It’s very generous of you to offer your place,” I said. “I really appreciate it. It’s the first kind gesture anybody’s made to me in a long time. But I think I’d rather live alone so I’d have more opportunity to exercise my free will.”
He smiled at that. “One choice down. Two choices left. You a lucky man. Not many men get two choices.”
“So you think I should offer her more money?”
He nodded. “In essence, that you only choice. Seem to me she rather keep you than chance a new tenant. If there really a new tenant at all…” He let his voice trail off.
I looked at him. “You mean, there may not be a new tenant? That she fabricated the story to get more money from me?”
He grinned. “You catchin’ on fast. They’s lots of ploys in this city. Take you time to learn them all.”
I shook my head. “Where’s the decency? Where’s the sense of fair play?”
“You come a long way from the playin’ fields of Eton, my fine friend. You playin’ by the laws of tooth and claw now.”
CHAPTER XXII
Every Wednesday morning I went to the Laundromat. I carried my small laundry bag the two blocks to the store on West Fifth Street between the candy store and the Chinese restaurant and put my wash into the front-loading machines. There were old tattered magazines to read to pass the time while you waited for the washing machines to mangle your garments. The magazines ran the range from Rolling Stone to The New Republic; that is to say, the standard issue subversive and left-leaning publications found in the Village. But there was also a smattering of literary journals and an unexpected occasional copy of the National Review. There were copies of Penthouse and Playboy, but there were also copies of Out. There were even copies of Wide Mouth Bass Fishing.
All this seemed to say, we don’t care what you are or what you believe. We just want you to sit quietly while your wash is being done.
And so I did. I sat and read articles on deconstructionism and The Clash of Civilizations. I learned about Soviet spies in the State Department during the Cold War and why Edna St. Vincent Millay was such a bad poet. I read about Shackleton and his voyage to Antarctica. There was so much I had to learn.
Since it was next to the Chinese restaurant, the place was always redolent with the aromas of Chinese cooking. It was a disorienting feeling, to be sitting in a laundry and smelling Chinese food. If it was late enough in the morning, my stomach would growl with hunger and demand a Szechuan fix.
The Laundromat was run by two gay men. As in all human pairings, one was soft and the other was sharp. They were constantly scurrying about, emptying the machines, folding the laundry and scolding the clientele for minor and major infractions of the posted rules. For a small surcharge you could drop off your dirty laundry in the morning and they would wash it and fold it for you. This service was provided for those who didn’t have the time or the inclination to do it for themselves. Since I had plenty of time and little money, I had no need of their services.
There was a long table that ran the length of the store. It was not really a table, but rather plywood boards on wooden supports. This was where the folding was done. On one side of the table were the washing machines and on the other side were the dryers. And around the table, as people folded their laundry, an a
d hoc fellowship had developed.
It was not always the same society. I belonged to the Wednesday morning group. If I had done my laundry at any other time of the week, I wouldn’t have known my fellow patrons. My group had an unemployed actor who worked as a waiter, a writer who worked as a teacher, a film maker who did odd jobs at a film studio.
I simply told them I was on a sabbatical and, bless them, they never asked from what. I had always adored the sound of that word – sabbatical, with its connotations of rest and study and travel. The way that word rolled off your tongue with its four resonant syllables and its biblical connotations. It was written in the bible that every seven years your debts were to be forgiven and your fields were to lie fallow. This would be my fallow time. I’d always wanted a sabbatical, as I suppose most people do, but most people were not fortunate enough to get one. So I awarded myself a sabbatical.
The Laundromat played music but it was hard to hear over the rumbling of the washers and dryers. The songs were usually from the sixties, from the snatches I could hear. There were rhymes about San Francisco and flowers in your hair and getting higher and higher. It was all so long ago…
But on this day there were no machines available. For some reason, perhaps a breakdown of the perfect logic of the law of averages, everyone decided to do his wash on this Wednesday morning. The Laundromat was filled with people I’d never seen before. Most of the patrons were in a high state of New York distemper and there was a lot of arguing over machines. The usual sleepy decorum of the place had degenerated into a tense approximation of a stock car demolition derby.
I’d been waiting more than an hour for a machine. Not that I minded waiting. I had nothing else to do. And I’d been reading an engrossing article about Danton and the French Revolution. But even my patience was starting to wear a little thin.
A washing machine I’d been waiting for finally became available. I gathered up my clothes and started toward it. But, from the far side of the room, a young woman reached it before I did.
“That’s my machine,” I shouted, somewhat illogically. It was obviously not my machine.
She ignored me and started to put her clothes into the washing machine.
“Just one minute,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for that machine longer than you have.”
She continued to ignore me.
“Goddam it,” I said. “You can’t do that. I was here first.”
She finished loading the machine. You had to give it to her. It was quite a performance. She was cool as ice. Not a sign of recognition. It was as if I were unseen and unheard.
“You think you can do whatever you please, don’t you?”
She didn’t respond. She nonchalantly brushed back a lock of hair and shut the door of the washing machine. Her utter contempt for me was apparent.
“Well, I think that’s rotten of you,” I said.
She put her coins in the machine and turned her back to me.
“I was here before you,” I said. “You should have waited your turn, just like everyone else.”
My argument meant nothing to her. She went back to her seat and picked up a book. It was a paperback of Dickens, but I couldn’t make out which story it was. She sank into her chair and lowered her head, so I could just see the top of it. She had long shiny dark hair which was neatly parted down the middle. Her hands were small and delicate as they clutched the book.
I wanted to embarrass her. So I walked over to where she was sitting, seemingly intent on her reading.
“You think you’re really exceptional, don’t you?” I said.
Her apparent immersion in the book was complete. She must have been an excellent actress. There seemed to be nothing I could do to upset her. Her composure approached perfection. How would you have reacted to an angry buffoon standing in front of you and insulting you?
But she didn’t look up. She didn’t even blink an eye.
“You’re not as pretty as you think you are,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I think you’re rather ordinary.”
That didn’t engender a reaction from her either, but it did cause some of the customers to regard me with suspicious glances. Then the thought occurred to me that it was probably not such a good idea to make a spectacle of myself if I wanted to maintain my anonymity. My only defense was, after all, anonymity. In order to survive, I needed to render myself as unexceptional as the wallpaper.
“Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” I said in a lower voice. “You’ll be sorry you were selfish. I’ll make sure of that.”
A dark rage was rising in my gut. I wanted to punish this insolent female for her inconsiderate appropriation of my washing machine. But I couldn’t do anything about it now. I knew I would spend the next few days devising horrible tortures of the kind I used to watch in those Saturday afternoon movies of my youth (where the actors were all white and wholesome and terribly good-looking) before the hero finally rescued the girl. There was the good old device of hurling her into a pit of writhing snakes or hanging her off a cliff without a piton or putting her in a cage with a rabid ocelot.
For now, though, all I could do was cast the evil eye upon her in parting and consider this incident another one of the four hundred, four thousand or four hundred thousand blows we encounter along our journey.
CHAPTER XXIII
The young black man didn’t seem so menacing at first.
“What’s happenin’, man?” he said.
That unexceptional remark was my formal introduction to the rude beast that crouched just beneath the eggshell-thin veneer of our polite discourse. The chances of a criminal encounter were, of course, much greater in my new neighborhood than in the rich suburb from which I had fled. There the aura of affluence seemed more a barrier to crime than a magnet to attract it. The police blotter in the local newspaper would chronicle incidents of shoplifting toothpaste at the twenty-four-hour drugstore and the passing of bad checks by transients in aging unfashionable cars. There were no murders, no rapes, no brutal beatings. Nothing, in short, that would leave a blood trail on a very clean floor. I’d been vaguely aware of the increased odds of danger in my new setting, but had succeeded in not thinking about it.
I was returning home from an evening of literary readings at Julian’s bookstore. Julian had designated Tuesday night as the time when local writers would gather and read from their works. I thought my friend, Ethan, would enjoy the literary setting, so I invited him to accompany me. He seemed pleased by the invitation.
“Not too many chances to engage in heated intellectual discussion nowadays,” he said as he clamped his big black hand on my shoulder. “So many people concerned with gatherin’ up them material possessions. Glad you asked me along.”
The sessions offered cheap jug wine, almost edible cheese and stale crackers, but they were convivial and inspirational. They gave me silent encouragement to pursue my avocation of scribbling words on paper. I was writing poetry every day now. And it was easier each day to choose the proper words to put down.
The street was dark and quiet. I hadn’t seen the young man as I took the steps down from the sidewalk to my apartment. He just appeared there in front of my door, next to the garbage pail. The sight of him startled me.
I took a step back.
He repeated his greeting. “What’s happenin’, man?”
The only illumination of our subterranean encounter came from the streetlight on the corner. It cast a beam across his face and shoulders. In the halogen light he looked to be about eighteen or nineteen, clean shaven, with a complexion that was lighter than the color of a brown paper bag.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. At this point, I didn’t know what he was after.
“I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “How are you?”
He shook his head. “Listen, man. I need something.”
I looked at him closely. “Do I know you?”
He smiled uneasily. His face was round and smooth, and had a pleasant aspect, if you disregarded his uneasine
ss. “No, you don’t know me,” he said.
“Then why are you coming to me?” I was still uncertain as to the nature of our encounter.
He looked down and scuffed the toe of his sneaker on the cement. “ ‘Cause you got money,” he said.
I was starting to get an unpleasant feeling. Maybe he was just looking for a handout, I tried to reassure myself. “I don’t have any money. But, if you’re desperate, I can give you a couple of bucks for a meal. I know how it feels…”
He cut me off. “No, you don’t. You don’t know nothin’.”
“Please. I don’t have any money. Just take a couple of bucks and leave me alone.” That was how I hoped this conversation would end.
But it was obviously not his plan.
“No, man,” he said. “I know you got money.”
Come let us reason together. I took a deep breath. “How do you know that?”
His eyes narrowed. “I been watchin’ you. You just goof off. You don’t work. You got to have tons of money stashed away. Rich white guy like you.”
I almost laughed in his face. But that would have been unwise. Instead, I said, “I really don’t have any money. I live hand to mouth.” I had to come up with something that would discourage him. “The government sends me a disability check every month,” I lied. “That’s how I get by.”
He shook his head again, more vigorously this time. “You bullshittin’ me. You got money. I need some.” He looked down and scuffed his toe against the ground again.
The street was very quiet. A cold wind blew into my face and made me shiver. Maybe if I talked to him…
“What do you need money for?” I tried to sound like a kindly uncle. I’d once read that if you established a rapport with a criminal, he would treat you better. Or perhaps that was with a jailer. I couldn’t remember.
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