The Tenants

by Bernard Malamud

  Coconut trees bend low,

  Waves crashin rocks on the shore,

  Dead gulls gonna lay on the beach in the mornin,

  Rotten fish slop in the sea,

  Storm wake up Lesser,

  He hang onto his bed,

  Know it pitch black without tryin no light,

  He try his light,

  It pitch black,

  He run down them shadow-flyin stairs,

  Light Lucifer matches,

  Go in the cellar with a #30 fuse plug,

  When the lights turn on,

  This unknown dude layin on the cement floor,

  One leg sawed off to his knee,

  He layin in front the hot furnace,

  His pants leg bloody,

  Puddle of wet blood on the floor,

  Lesser shriek out,

  Can’t see no bleedin leg layin round,

  He run upstairs to tell Willie,

  What he done did see,

  He gnawin this white bone,

  What that you eatin, Mr. Bones?

  Don’t shit me, Lester,

  I know your real voice,

  What are you eating, Bill?

  Breast of chicken,

  White meat part,

  Honest to God?

  Looks like a big bone,

  It’s pig’s foot, boy,

  Kosher meat, wanna bite?

  Irene moans. Lesser wakes out of unsound sleep and snaps on the bed lamp.

  Lying in bed with her one night under the picture of the black Jesus, Lesser wanted to know when they would tell Bill.

  “What do you want to tell him?”

  “You know what. Either you tell him or I do, or we tell him together.”

  “Couldn’t it wait for a while?” Irene lay with her head in a mass of darkening hair on her pillow. She looked very lovely and it troubled Lesser that she had become apprehensive at his question, her eyes gone somber.

  “Couldn’t we let it die naturally?”

  “It weighs on my mind.”

  “I’d like it better if Willie tells himself—when he tells me it’s over. But if it actually comes to having to tell him, I’d want to do it myself.”

  “The sooner the better or he’ll be knocking on your door on Friday.”

  “Would that bother you so much?”

  “Wouldn’t it bother you if he expected to get into bed with you? You’re not his bitch any more.”

  “Fuck you if you use that word. It’s his word, not yours.”

  “Whoseever word,” Lesser said. “I’m not sharing you with him or anybody. Either you’re committed to me or you’re not.”

  “I’m committed to you, though I’m not all the way uncommitted to Willie.”

  “You wouldn’t expect to go on sleeping with him while you’re sleeping with me?”

  “The sex part isn’t what worries me right now,” Irene said.

  “What does?”

  “For instance Willie was here yesterday.”

  “He was?”

  “For a shower. He showered, changed his underwear and left. I was gone before he got out of the bathroom. That’s how much sex there was. I sense he wants to leave me though I’ll be frank and say that if he stopped writing for any amount of time he might want me again. Not that I’d be available of course. I have other fish to fry.”

  “Like me?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She reached for a comb, sat up and swept several long strokes through her hair.

  “You’ll have to trust me, Harry.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Sex isn’t the important thing.”

  “What is?”

  “The important thing is what happens to Willie after he leaves here. He hasn’t got two nickels to rub together. How’s he going to live and write? I worry about that. Willie’s struggle to be a writer—from being in prison to actually writing the kinds of things he is, his stories and novel, is one of the most affecting things I know about anybody’s life. It moves me an awful lot. He has to go on.”

  “He will.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. It’s true he doesn’t pay rent in that creepy building you’re in, but he’s got very little to live on—a tiny Black Writing Project grant he got in Harlem that pays him a little bread a week. He and I agreed I would help him till he got some kind of advance cash on his book, but what it’s really amounted to is I’ve been supporting him most of the time since he moved in with me. I wouldn’t want him to go back to numbers, or pushing, or anything like that.”

  “That’s the past,” Lesser said. “You’re dealing with a committed writer now.”

  “Suppose he has to look for work, when will he find time to write? He writes slowly and needs a lot of free time. He’s slower than ever since he met you.”

  “I don’t make his choices for him.”

  He told Irene he had worked part-time in a factory when he was on his first novel.

  “I still had plenty of time to write.”

  “Any factory would probably pay him half of what they paid you and expect him to do twice the amount of work.”

  “I worked my ass off.”

  “Willie’d tell them to shove it.”

  “Not if his writing comes first.”

  “I know we’re not,” Irene went on, “but I have this awful feeling as though you and I are a couple of Charlies giving a nigger a boot in the ass.”

  “I don’t feel that way,” Harry said. “All this amounts to is two people—you and Willie—finally agreeing to end an affair. If you aren’t betraying him as a man you aren’t betraying his color. Forget the Charlie bit.”

  Irene nodded. “I know it’s crazy, but he’s been hurt so often because he’s black. You’ve read his writing. I can’t help being sensitive about it. It’s one of the reasons I feel afraid to tell him about you and me, though I know he has to know.”

  “That’s assuming he’ll be hurt. You also said he mightn’t be.”

  “I just don’t know for sure. Willie’s such an unpredictable man.”

  “So am I,” said Lesser.

  The telephone rang: it was Bill.

  Irene put her finger to her lips. Lying beside her in the black’s former place in her bed, Lesser listened to his voice on the phone.

  “I won’t be coming around to say howdo this Friday, Irene,” Bill said tonelessly. “I was thinking I would but my chapter is down on me right now and I got to stay with it till it lets up and I got the right action moving along.”

  “What’s the right action?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t be talking about it.”

  Irene said she was sorry.

  At the same time she gave Lesser’s fingers a squeeze.

  Willie was saying he’d be around in a week or two. “I can think of a whole lot of things I like to do to you then.”

  “Don’t depend on it,” she said quietly.

  After a short silence he said, “Now don’t think I have stopped feeling affection for you, baby.”

  Afterwards Irene, her eyes uneasy, said to Lesser. “I guess we’d better tell him, but I want to be the one that does.”

  “The sooner the better or it might get sticky. I wouldn’t want it to mess up my mood for writing.”

  “Oh, the hell with your mood for writing,” Irene said.

  She seemed about to cry but when she had shaken that off was again affectionate to Lesser, cradled his head on her breast.

  Though Lesser had worried being in love with Irene —Willie in the wings—might complicate his life and slow down his work, it did not. Finishing his book after ten years of labor had of course to be his first concern. But mostly what happened was that he was often high on reverie and felt renewed energy for work. When passing under a leafless maple tree he thinks of Irene and a blessing descends. Then he notices its branches swollen with buds and has this livened hunger to write. Lesser was rid of oppressive loneliness and every dirty trace of jealousy; he felt a fluent br
eadth to his emotions, a sense of open sea beyond, though he didn’t kid himself about objective freedom in the world he lived in. Still, one was, in a sense, as free as he felt, therefore he had never been freer. Because of Irene he lived now with a feeling of more variously possessible possibilities, an optimism that boiled up imagination. Love’s doing. It helped him write freely and well after having had to press for a while. And when you were writing well that was your future.

  They met almost daily now, yet as though in secret, for although Bill was staying away he still had his key to her apartment and might at any time pop in. If he found them together it might go well, it might go badly. Lesser hoped it would not go badly. Irene and he met in the late afternoons, walked in West Village streets and parks, hunting signs of spring; they stopped at bars and ate in restaurants she knew. They talked of their lives from childhood and often embraced. She was not, Harry thought, truly in love with him yet, but was closer to it today than she had been yesterday. He felt she trusted him, though still not sure of herself. Lesser waited, it wasn’t a bad thing to be doing while you were pushing ahead with your book. During evening rehearsals, or performances once the show had opened, he waited for her in a bar near her house. He wanted to see her act but Irene asked him not to come. Once he sneaked into the theatre and watched her in Ibsen for an act. She was better than she said; he’d thought so. She fought her way into a part and that helped the emotion. Her voice in the theatre surprised him; it was lower, stronger than he had thought. Sometimes Lesser waited for her at the movies and afterwards they went to her place to make love. Irene insisted on going up first, then buzzed the buzzer and he, releasing his breath, came up.

  The writer saw little of Bill, very little, thank God, considering circumstances. The black, locked in struggle with his difficult chapter, barely surfaced. All day he typed and at night kept his smoking machine by his mattress as he slept. Sometimes when he had to go somewhere, he left the L. C. Smith with Lesser and was then in and out, hardly stopping to say a word. His face was strained, almost stricken, his tumid eyes clouded. He could barely bring himself to nod to Lesser’s hello. The writer felt especially bad to be sleeping with his girl—to be in love with her—and keeping it from him whose present pain he so well understood. As though Bill’s travail made him all the more victim; for this reason all the more necessary to tell him the truth, whereas, logically, considering the trouble he was having with his writing, maybe it was best to keep the news from him until he was in better shape to hear it—bad news or good.

  “Still, once you tell him I’ll feel a hell of a lot better,” Lesser said to Irene. But she was convinced Willie would almost momentarily appear in the flat to say, “Thanks, Irene, it was real sweet but now I got plans that don’t include any white chick, which I am sure you understand why.” He had been in again to take a shower and had left a little note of greeting: “Hi, sugar, I took a ten-spot out of your loose change. I will be seeing you soon but not that soon as long as this crucial chapter is still acting up so bad. Chow.”

  After another week of not seeing him—they were into early April at last—though one of her eyes at times tended towards despondent, Irene was on the whole more relaxed; she was more easily affectionate with Lesser out of bed, as though she had proved her point: her affair with Willie Spearmint—since there was no affair where there was no Willie—had run its course and was dead on both feet; nor had there been any serious stress, rending of garments, nasty recriminations. It was best to have handled it as she had insisted, and if Willie felt like blaming anyone he had himself to blame first.

  Lesser once asked her whether she missed the mood, the pitch of black life—as much as she had had of it with Willie. “Some,” she said. “But I’ve personally gone through that bit. I see Mary once in a while”—she gazed into Lesser’s impassive eyes—“but I don’t really miss those who weren’t my friends, though I think of some of them on and off. I liked Sam, you have to get to know him. Willie used to take me to Harlem when we first began to go together and that was like a perpetual carnival or trip all its own. But after one of the brothers had talked to him privately—I think it was Jacob—he stopped inviting me and used to go by himself. He even began to say he wasn’t sure that I ever really did understand soul. That hurt me a lot and was one of the things that made me begin to have doubts.”

  Her hair grew in like a black cap on her blond head. Irene folded up and put away on the closet shelf the two thick black bath towels that were always adrift in the bathroom, and she took down, wrapped in brown paper, and hid, the picture of the black Jesus. Her nails had grown in; she plucked her brows thick and shaped them neatly, sometimes they looked like broken wings; she had redeemed her face, and perhaps something inside her, for she seemed kinder to herself. One day she told Lesser she had made up her mind to quit acting. “I’m not a natural. This present play is my last, I’ve decided. I want to really change my life. I’ve had enough of certain kinds of experience.”

  He asked what other kind.

  “Well, you know most of it, and besides that, psychoanalysis. I bore myself silly at the trivia I give out. My analyst doesn’t even try to hide his yawns.” She said she was convinced there was little left to say. “I feel attached to him and a little afraid to be all on my own, but I really feel that it’s winding towards the end.” She then suggested they might want to move to some other city; she was fed up with New York. She hoped to find a job that really interested her, or maybe go back to school for a while.

  “Would you consider moving to San Francisco, Harry?”

  “Sure, when I’m done.”

  In another couple of months or even less, he thought, he would have fashioned the true, inevitable end of his novel; it was working itself out—really moving lately. Then a quick intense last correction of only such pages as needed it and done.

  “Should we think in terms of three or four, or maybe five months at the latest?”

  “Why not?” said Lesser.

  Irene said she would write Willie a note, asking him to pick up a couple of cartons of his things she’d packed up.

  “You could slip it under his door maybe? And once he gets it, then we’ll have to have that talk we have to have.”

  “Write it and I’ll slip it under his door,” Lesser said.

  When they were in the street, later, Irene kept glancing back as though expecting someone to catch up with them, who would say would Lesser kindly split and leave him with his bitch; but if Willie was around he was nowhere in sight.

  One morning after knocking on Lesser’s door, Bill, not really looking at him, thrust into his hand a sheaf of yellow papers, about forty. A few were cleanly retyped but most were soiled and smeared, lines and paragraphs crossed out, with smudged interlinear rewriting, scribbling also in the margins in pencil and purple pen.

  Bill’s face was drawn, eyes fatigued, introspectively bleak until he focused them into strained attention through his granny glasses. His goatee and bushy mustache were badly cut, frazzled, and he looked as though he were afloat in his overalls. He swore he had lost twenty pounds.

  “How’s every little thing, Lesser? I keep on knocking on your fuckn door every night but nobody opens up. Are you hiding on me or really balling it now you got started again? You young bloods have got it all over us alter cockers.”

  He winked with weary slyness, his face burnished dry. Lesser felt a quickened heartbeat, suspecting Bill had nosed out his affair with Irene but after a minute figuring he was wrong, he hadn’t. She had not yet written her letter. Lesser was still concerned that they hadn’t once and for all told him. Jesus, I ought to myself, even now, this minute; then he thought, it’s her picnic really. But since he had built up a relationship of sorts with Bill, circumscribed but civilized, he wished, for as long as they lived in the house he could be openly in love with Irene yet on decent terms with her ex-lover, because they were both writers living and working in the same place and faced with the same problems—differing in de
gree because they differed in experience.

  “I’ve had to get out more often lately,” Lesser explained, glancing at Bill’s chapter in his unwilling hand. “My writing was sitting in a hole for a while. Now it’s out and so am I.”

  Bill, listening greedily, nodded.

  “You have got past your rough swampy place?”

  “That’s right.”

  Lesser sweated in holding back what he felt was the reason for his renewed good work.

  The black sighed.

  “Mine has been smelling up my room for a lot more time than I like to count up. This chapter that you holding in your hand, for weeks I was plowing in a garbage dump, turning up old shoes and broken scissors that other people had dumped and discarded. I was writing like Richard Wright and trying to sound like James Baldwin and that made me write things that didn’t belong to me. Then when I finally raised up some of my own ideas they played dead. Also lots of people who jived around in my mind just laid down and died when I wrote them in language. Man, I don’t appreciate the fright it throws on your gut when your writing won’t go where you are pointing to. Or you are on your knees begging it. Not only does that raise up doubts if you really have a true book there; but even though you know you are well-hung and your LBJ salutes when it sniffs ass, you have these rat-face doubts are you still a man. That’s no good advantage to your morale. When I open my eye in the morning and see that big typewriter machine staring at me like a motherfuckn eagle, I am afraid to sit in a chair in front of it, like the keys are teeth raised to take a bite out of my personal meat.”

  “‘None but the brave deserve the fair,’” Lesser said.

  “Come again?”

  “It’s a poem.”

  “Black or white?”

  “John Dryden, an Englishman.”

  “Right on, I will read it. Anyway, why I came up here is I like you to see how this new chapter chalks up. It’s on that kid you read about last time, Herbert Smith, how he grows up on his street in upper Harlem and finds he has got nothing to look forward to but more shit and stress for the rest of his unnatural life. The mother in it was giving me cramps up my ass when I tried to kill her off. I couldn’t get her to die right but I wrote it like twenty more times and now maybe she’s expiring the way she ought to be. After that comes some other stuff I have my doubts on because it’s the first time I used that technique and don’t know if I handled it right. That’s what’s been giving me my most trouble.”