A Diet of Treacle

by Lawrence Block

  “The hell you don’t. You’ll know what I’m talking about when we get you, punk, and don’t think we’re not going to get you sooner or later. You were clean until today. We didn’t know you were alive. Now we know and we won’t forget until we nail the lid on.”

  Shank kept silent.

  “Sooner or later you’ll be holding and we’ll be on to you. Sooner or later you’ll slip and we’ll grab you. We’ll watch you so hard you won’t be able to hit the toilet without looking over your shoulder to see who’s there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” the cop said.

  “You try to watch every guy who’s selling and you’ll need more men than you got on the whole force. You got any idea how many guys are selling?”

  “A fair idea.”

  “Lots of them, aren’t there?”

  “Too many.”

  “Well, how are you gonna—”

  “We won’t watch ‘em all,” the cop said. “Just the ones we know about. And we know about you.”

  Shank said nothing for a moment. He was enjoying the conversation but at the same time he was annoyed the cops were on to him.

  “What the hell,” Shank said. “I don’t know what you’re so burned about. I wasn’t holding anyway.”

  The cop laughed again.

  “I wasn’t,” Shank defended himself. “I—”

  “You took a good three ounces off the Mau-Mau,” the cop said. “Probably more. And in case you’re wondering, we busted the Mau-Mau just after you left. It’s the third time for him, the third intent rap, and this means the Mau-Mau has a home for the rest of his life as a guest of the United States Government. You might want to think about that for a while.”

  The cop left.

  Two hours later Shank smashed Mrs. Herman Rodjinckszi’s mailbox with a hammer and reclaimed the envelope.

  5

  The Hoi Polloi is a small Chinese restaurant one flight above the street on Eighth Street off Sixth Avenue. Anita Carbone had never been there before, but now she was eating pork with Chinese vegetables. Although the food was good, its taste was lost on her. Something very strange was happening to her and she was doing her best to keep up with it, to figure out what was going on.

  Joe Milani sat opposite Anita and filled his mouth with chicken chow mein, washing it down with tea. Soon, she knew, the meal would be finished and the waiter would present her with the check. And she would pay it.

  She had never bought dinner for a boy before. When she went out to dinner with a date, he paid for the meal. No young man had ever so much as asked her to pay her own way, let alone to swing the entire check.

  But this was different, Anita felt. She had picked up Joe Milani all by herself. He had been sitting alone, and she had found him, and otherwise they would never have been sitting at the same table in the Hoi Polloi.

  Of course, she argued with herself, she hadn’t exactly picked him up. She had gone to the Village again, admittedly, but not for the purpose of meeting Joe. He had been on her mind, of course. He had been rather interesting in The Palermo, naturally, and certainly not the type of fellow she had been used to—nothing run-of-the-mill about Joe Milani. But she hadn’t been consciously scouting him when she had wandered through Washington Square. Not really.

  When she had seen him there, it had been only natural for her to stop and say hello. It would have been rude to walk right by him without a word.

  So when you looked at it that way…Anita’s thoughts trailed off.

  “Two cents,” Joe said.

  She glanced up, startled.

  “For your thoughts,” he explained. “You look real deep. Buried in thought. Wouldn’t be fair to offer you a penny for your thoughts, not when they’re so profound. So I’ll make it two cents.”

  Anita smiled.

  “What are you thinking about? Tell me.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. Just thinking.”

  He waited.

  “Emptiness,” she said. “You know how somebody says his mind is a blank? Not like that exactly. Not that my mind is blank, but what I’m thinking about…well, everything. And everything I’m thinking about is blank.” Joe offered her a cigarette and she took it, put it between her lips and lit it. She thought that she could smoke in the restaurant, that it was all right, but that she should remember not to smoke outside on the street because her grandmother would be mad at her. She thought how funny her grandmother was about things like that and she wanted to laugh but didn’t. She remembered when Joe had offered her a cigarette in the park, and she had explained that it wasn’t right to smoke in the street if you were a girl.

  Depends what you smoke, he had said. And she had laughed, a little uncertainly, and then later on he had mentioned pot and she had remembered the marijuana smokers in her own neighborhood, the marijuana smokers and the heroin users. Her disapproval had shown at the time and he had laughed at her, telling her that marijuana was not bad for you at all, that a New York Public Health Report had certified it as harmless, that it wouldn’t hurt you a bit. She had not been sure whether she should believe him or no.

  “Emptiness,” he repeated, waking her up again. And she nodded slowly and focused on the tip of her cigarette. It was glowing dully.

  “It’s all set up,” she said. “All patterned out. My whole life, practically. I live with my grandmother. She’s a nice old lady. And she keeps the place looking good, Joe. It’s supposed to be a slum—you know, East Harlem, a slum, it says so in the paper. But our apartment—I’ve seen worse, believe me.”

  He nodded. She closed her eyes for a moment and pictured the apartment, her grandmother curled up in the cane-bottom rocker, rocking slowly, shriveled, small. Anita opened her eyes.

  “I go to Hunter,” she said. “If you come from New York and you do well in high school you go to college for free. I did well in high school, Joe. They told me I was very bright. So I went to Hunter. You know what I’m majoring in?”

  “You told me,” he said. “History, isn’t it?”

  “Government—not very different, really. It’s sort of interesting some of the time. The courses.”

  Joe nodded and thought about Smollett.

  “And I go out on dates,” she went on. “I’m not a wallflower. I’ve even got a steady boyfriend. Isn’t that a stupid word? Boyfriend. He’s a friend and he’s a boy. His name is Ray. Ray Rico. He’s good-looking and he’s smart. Goes to Cooper Union, studying to be an engineer. You’ve got to be a whip to get into Cooper Union. He’ll walk out of that school and walk into a job with IBM or somebody at ten thousand dollars a year. You know how much that is? Two hundred dollars a week. That’s a lot of money. And the more he works for them the more money he makes. He told me he ought to be able to go as high as twenty-five thousand. You know what’s funny? When you don’t make much money it’s so much a week. A steno makes sixty-five a week, not three thousand and something a year. Nobody makes four hundred a week. You don’t think about it that way. It’s funny, I guess.”

  Joe smiled. “I worked in a drugstore once,” he said. “I made seventy-five cents an hour. While I was in high school. Deliveries, dusting the stock, sweeping the floor. That type of scene. You ever hear anybody talk about making twenty bucks an hour?” But Anita’s eyes were staring into the far-away. What was she looking at, Joe wondered. Emptiness, perhaps. Space.

  “All in a pattern,” she said. “When Ray graduated from high school he knew what kind of a job he would finally have. Now he knows he’ll marry me. We go out once, twice a week. A movie, a cup of coffee. At first he kissed me once at the door every night before I went inside. On the mouth. Now we sit on the roof once in a while and he touches my breasts. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? But that’s what he does. He touches my breasts. I guess pretty soon he’ll start putting his hand under my skirt. Then when there’s nothing else to do but go to bed—we’ll be married. And he’ll graduate and get his good job and we’ll buy a little house on the Island. A split
-level. I’ve seen pictures of them. Small and ugly but very chic, very modern.”

  She closed her eyes and saw the pictures of the split-levels. She remembered wondering why anybody would want to live in one of them.

  “I’ll have an electric kitchen,” she said. “Electric range and electric refrigerator and electric dishwasher and electric frying pan and electric coffee maker and an electric sink. They’ll probably have electric sinks by then. They’ve got everything else. And we’ll have two-point-three children and one of them will have to be a boy and one a girl and God knows what the fraction will be. And we’ll have a big television set and we’ll sit in front of it every night. All of us. All four-point-three of us. We’ll stare at that screen and let it think for us nice and electrically. Real togetherness. We wouldn’t watch television alone. It wouldn’t be right. Do things in a group. The family that prays together stays together.”

  “You make it sound pretty sad,” Joe ventured.

  She looked hard at him. “That’s just it,” she said. “I make it sound terrible. And, you know, it is not that terrible. Not for most people. They would tell me I’m insane to make such a fuss. Look at me, I’ve got a nice guy, he’ll make money, we’ll have a good life. It’s nice. Isn’t that a great word? Nice. And it fits. It’s nice. For everybody else in the world it’s nice and I don’t want it.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Anita put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything. I think I’m cracking up. Can you believe that? I think I’m cracking up. A nice intelligent nice Italian nice bright nice nice nice girl and I’m positively cracking up. Let’s get out of here, Joe.” She glanced at the check for the first time—no more than a dollar-seventy. She was pleasantly surprised. She put two dollars on the table and they walked out.

  They walked over Eighth Street to Macdougal to the park and found a bench to sit on. On the way she didn’t know whether to take his arm or no.

  They sat on the bench and were silent. She observed the passers-by and she wondered who she was. She had to be somebody. She watched boys, men with beards, girls with very long and very wild hair, and she wondered if she were one of them. She thought about the girls and boys in her classes at Hunter, the other girls and boys in her neighborhood, and she wondered if she were like them. She had to be like somebody. You couldn’t be all by yourself, she thought. You would go crazy that way.

  “I talked a blue streak,” Anita said. “Before. In the restaurant. I really went on. I ran off at the mouth.”

  “You had things to say.”

  “I never said them before. I hardly thought them.”

  “But they were still there.”

  “But I hardly even thought them,” she said. “I could never tell them to anybody. Not to Ray. If I tried, he would look at me as though I were insane. And I met you for the second time and I can tell you everything.”

  “Maybe it’s because you don’t know me.”

  “Or because I do.”

  Joe lit a cigarette and gave one to Anita who took it without hesitation, smoking it for the first time without the persistent sensation of there being something inherently wrong with the act.

  “What do you do, Joe?”

  “Not much.”

  “I don’t mean for a living. I mean what do you do? You know what I mean.”

  He shrugged. “I live with another guy. I mentioned him. Shank. The guy I was with at The Palermo.”

  She nodded.

  “You sure you want to know all this? Some of it isn’t pretty. You may want to go away from me. You may not like me as much anymore,” Joe said carefully.

  “I want to hear.”

  “He sells marijuana,” he said. “He makes a living. He pays the rent, slips me a buck now and then. He supports me, you could say. I don’t cost much. Food, rent, a buck now and then to ball with. Nothing much else.”

  “He’s a…pusher?”

  “Not a pusher. He buys and sells. You could call him a connection, sort of. Strictly small-time. He makes enough money so that we live. Not in style but we live.”

  Anita thought about that. Joe lived because Shank was willing to support him for reasons of his own. By all rules Joe was something contemptible—low, cheap, worthless. But for some reason this did not bother the girl. She judged it unimportant, his earning a living or no.

  She felt comfortable with Joe. She could relax with him, a far more important consideration to her.

  “So I bum around,” he went on. “With Shank, with other people, by myself. I wander. I look at things. That’s about it, I guess. I smoke a stick here and there, lie around the pad, sit in the park. I’m a waste of time.”

  “Could I live with you?”

  The question startled her at least as much as it startled him. She hadn’t planned on saying that. She hadn’t even realized it had been on her mind. But it was out now, in the open, and he was staring at her.

  “You don’t mean that, Anita.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No. Maybe I made it sound like a picnic. You don’t understand. It’s no picnic. It’s a drag, actually. When all is said and done it’s a drag. You come on about split-levels and fractional children and you miss making a lot of important connections. You’re hipped on forests so much you forget how much you hate trees.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s where it’s at. You don’t understand at all. You think this is roses or something. No worries, no sweat. Just dig everything because it’s real. You missed a few changes, Anita. You think I’m here because I love it so damn much. That’s not it.”

  “I know.”

  “Sure you do. You think it’s a perfect scene. You think it’s free and romantic and wonderful and anybody who works for a living is out of his head. You think you can beat the world by making a scene like this.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He ignored her. “You just don’t understand,” Joe said. “You think I make the let’s-be-beat scene because I like it. I don’t. I don’t like it at all.”

  “Then—”

  “I make it because there’s no other scene I could make. I make it because everything else is just a little bit worse. Not for the world. For me. Personally. It’s not the world’s fault. It’s my fault and I’m stuck with it.”

  “I know,” she said. And when he tried to interrupt her she shook her head. “I understand,” she went on. “But you don’t. You think you’re the only person who thinks your way. Maybe I can’t…can’t make it…either. I don’t know the words yet. I don’t know how to talk the way you talk. Just how to think and even that I’m just learning. I don’t know who I am. But I know who I’m not. There’s a difference. And that’s why I want to come and live with you. Why I still want to. Unless you don’t want me.”

  She felt his hand on her arm. She closed her eyes and stopped talking.

  “You don’t love me, Anita.”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then—”

  “I don’t love Ray, either. But I could marry him, still without loving him, and the whole world would throw rice at us. Does that make so much more sense?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Then why can’t I live with you?”

  He smiled gently. “Your grandmother won’t like it,” he said. “Even with a nice Italian boy like me. She won’t like it at all.”

  “I’ll tell her I’m taking an apartment with another girl. I’ll tell her something. I don’t care what she thinks. She’ll leave me alone.”

  “Ray won’t like it either.”

  “He’ll find another girl. One who’ll fit in the split-level a little better. He’ll live.”

  Joe Milani had no comment.

  “I’m just a virgin,” she said slowly. “I won’t know what to do. But if we go to your place now you can show me, and tomorrow I can move in after I tell my grandmother som
ething. And—”

  “Are you very sure, Anita?”

  She started to say yes and then she changed her mind. Because she was not at all certain and she saw no reason to conceal her uncertainty from him. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m not certain about anything. I’m all mixed up inside and I’m going to pop any minute. Now stop asking me questions. I know what I want right now. I want you to take me home and make love to me. That’s all I want.”

  He stood up, held out a hand for her. She hesitated only for a second. Then she took his hand and straightened up and they began walking out of the park. When Joe and Anita slipped into the small apartment together, he could not help but sense a vague uneasiness.

  Shank was there, sitting on his bed, a paperback novel in one hand. His eyes flicked from the book to the girl, then to Joe, and back to the girl. His lips never moved. His eyes somehow signified he recognized and remembered the girl, and was reserving judgment.

  “Shank,” Joe said. “Anita.”

  That was the introduction. Anita smiled at Shank, hesitantly, and Shank nodded shortly before returning to the book. Joe was disturbed by the feeling he could swing either with Shank or Anita—but the three of them?

  “Shank—”

  Eyes came up. Hard, cold.

  “Could you do a brief split?” Joe said.

  “Huh?”

  “If I give you a quarter will you go to the movies? A little brother routine. Like that.”

  “Oh,” Shank said. “Really?” He stood up, smiled strangely, and closed the novel, tucking it away in his hip pocket. He took out a cigarette and lit it, dropping the match to the floor. “Congratulations,” he said, speaking the words to Joe while his eyes were busy reassessing Anita. He had bold eyes. He stared hard at her breasts and loins until she flushed. Then he smiled, pleased, and headed for the door. He left it open and Joe had to close it.

  Then he walked over and put his arm around Anita.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She raised her head.

  “Messy,” he said. “Shank can be relatively evil. A mean stud.”

  “I don’t like him,” Anita said quietly.