The Tenants

by Bernard Malamud

  Lesser said if a family was what she wanted, she deserved to have one.

  “It’s what I want but who deserves anything? Is marriage what you really want, Harry?”

  He said it was and didn’t say more. He did not add, after he had finished his book.

  After Willie was gone, Irene told Lesser, she had considered moving out of her apartment, thinking he might sometime return. She felt she could not face him again after what he had done to Lesser’s manuscripts. Willie hadn’t given back her door key, so when she decided not to move she had had her lock changed. But he stayed away and it sometimes troubled her that she had changed the lock, as though that held some symbolic meaning she wasn’t sure of, concerning herself. She was sorry she did not know where he was now and sometimes worried whether he had enough to eat. She would have liked to talk to Willie as a friend, to find out what he was thinking and doing. He had always generated excitement around him when he wasn’t writing, or at least was not as worried about his work as he later became. Though in the end he had loved his black book more than he had her, Irene thought of him with warmth and affection.

  “Naturally I’m attracted by characters like both of you,” she said to Lesser, “men more deeply involved in their work than with me, maybe because that’s the way I really want it. That’s in my mind although I’m not sure and my analyst won’t comment one way or another. Maybe it’s because I can’t do certain things I admire and want to be close to men who can. I just happen to like guys with imagination, though they can be awfully self-concerned bastards and make life more complicated than it should be.”

  As she spoke, her expression was restless, her eyes vague, her attempted smile neither smile nor not smile.

  When Lesser’s funds began to go seriously low he limited his spending to necessities, except for movie tickets and an occasional meal out for Irene and him. But Irene, who had observed he was parting more reluctantly with a buck, insisted on lending him a few dollars when he was short of cash. Lesser accepted, provided she would let him pay her back when he got the advance on his book. He considered, as he had more than once, asking his agent to get him an advance on the basis of the first draft of his novel but decided not to; he preferred to show only finished work. He could show the section he had already completed but did not like to submit part of a novel; they might get a wrong idea what the rest of it would be like. He couldn’t really tell them what it would be like until he had finished.

  Irene reminded him that if he accepted the nine thousand dollars from Levenspiel he’d have it made.

  “We could get married, Harry, and move to a big apartment with a quiet, well-lit study for you. What difference does it make if you write some other place than this morgue you live in? I’d keep on working and your writing would go on with lots less distraction all around.”

  Lesser said he had thought of that but the writing was going better now and he didn’t want to interrupt the flow of it by having to pack all his things, move into a new apartment, unpack his and her stuff, and have to get used to a new place to work, as well as to a new way of life in marriage. All this would have to wait a little longer.

  “I thought you were wanting more from your life than just writing,” Irene said. “You said that the night we first slept together. You said you wanted your writing to be only half your life.”

  ‘I do and thanks to you I’m less uptight and not lonely. But the book, for the time being, has first priority.”

  “Now and forever, till death do you part. And if not this book, then the next.”

  Lesser, searching in one of Irene’s bureau drawers for a small pair of scissors to trim the hairs in his nostrils, came across an old snapshot. It was Willie laughing at an egg in his hand, not bad looking without his stringy goatee and bushy mustache despite the eyeball prominence of his eyes. The laugh did it.

  “I treated him like a man.”

  “Harry,” said Irene, one late-November night as they sat at her table eating sandwiches and potato salad bought at the corner delicatessen, “tell me what your book is really about. All I know is it’s supposed to be about love.”

  Without revealing much of the plot, Lesser said his book was called The Promised End, title and epigraph from Lear. He said it was about a writer, a black-bearded, prematurely old thirty-five-year-old man who is often afflicted by the thought that he has wasted more of his life than he was entitled to, or essence thereof. His name, in the first draft, was Lazar Cohen. Night after night he wakes in sweaty fright of himself, stricken by anxiety because he finds it hard to give love. His present girl hasn’t discovered that yet but she will. He has always been concerned with love, and has often felt it for one or another person but not generously, fluently, nor has he been able to sustain it long. It’s the old giving business, he can and he can’t, not good enough, too many unknown reservations, the self occluded. Love up to a point is no love at all. His life betrays his imagination.

  Anyway, this writer sets out to write a novel about someone he conceives to be not he yet himself. He thinks he can teach himself to love in a manner befitting an old ideal. He has resisted this idea for years; it’s a chancy business and may not pay off. Still, if during the course of three books he had written himself into more courage, why not love? He will learn through some miracle of transformation as he writes, betrayal as well as bounty, perhaps a kind of suffering. What it may come to in the end, despite the writer’s doubts, is that he invents this character in his book who will in a sense love for him; and in a sense love him; which is perhaps to say, since words rise and fall in all directions, that Lesser’s writer in his book, in creating love as best he can, if he brings it off in imagination will extend self and spirit; and so with good fortune may love his real girl as he would like to love her, and whoever else in a mad world is human. Around this tragic theme the story turns. The epigraph from Lear is, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” Thus Lesser writes his book and his book writes Lesser. That’s what’s taking so long.

  Irene said it was a wonderful idea and she was sure the book would be wonderful too.

  “This is an important letter, Lesser, read it over more than once. I have found out I am a sick man, my doctor gave me warning. I have steady biting pains around my heart. Though I gave up cigars it didn’t help. My family is seriously worried. Lesser, you have caused me grievous and unnecessary personal worry and misery. But I am a mensch. $10,000 is my absolute top offer. Give it your serious personal consideration. I’m giving you ample notice that I have received in the mail a bid from Tishman & Co. to take over this property for high-rise construction, and I am considering selling out to them. They’ll get rid of you in one way or another, leave it to them. Don’t think their lawyers are like my shtunk who couldn’t get you thrown out for what you did to me. They have the means to deal with the City or send in tanks. You will get hurt more than you imagine. Save yourself the pain.

  “But if I sell to them you get nothing—horseshit—and I lose out to capital instead of producing it. Think about this with due deliberation and care, not to mention whatever you have left in the way of consideration for other people’s troubles. No other offer will be forthcoming. Take my word, I am finished with you. This is the end.”

  The building next door had become a huge hole strewn with pale broken bricks and shards of plaster giving off an acrid smell after rain. It seemed to Harry that the house, supported by air on four sides, swayed in a high wind. Cockroaches left without lodgings streamed into Levenspiel’s wretched tenement to stay with relatives; also some hefty rats the writer met hopping up the stairs, sniffing as they traveled. Lesser stuffed his food into the refrigerator, canned goods and all; he often ate cold meals not to create cooking odors, also save time. The plumbing, if not actively sabotaged, deteriorated further. Kitchen and bathroom taps gave forth slender streams of rusty orange water he washed with and drank like wine. For two numbing days the hot water turned cold and stayed like ice as Lesser yelled on the phone in a pu
blic booth at the Rent and Housing Maintenance people. They advised be patient, the landlord was ailing yet had promised to do his best. The writer cooked up pots of hot water to shave with and wash his few dirty dishes. For a week the toilet wouldn’t flush. After trying a few filthy ones in the house, which also wouldn’t flush, he had to pay a dime a shot to use the subway urinal until a plumber at last appeared.

  One night he was awakened by sirens in both ears, a fire in the apartment house across the street. Crouching in his underwear at the window, Lesser saw a glow in a fourth-floor room but no flames. Lights went on here and there in the building. The street throbbed with engines pumping, squirming hoses, men running. What was burning was quickly extinguished but left Lesser actively fearing his fear: a fire would leap alive in the house and finish off what was left of his literary and other remains. He saw himself fleeing naked down the fire escape, holding to his heart his new manuscript. Sometimes as he wrote he would picture the heavy-breathing landlord touching a match to a rubbish pile in the cellar to see what came of it. One nervous night Lesser descended to the basement to have a look around. He searched through the cobwebbed bins and janitor’s paper-strewn hollow former flat. Though he found nothing to speak of he came up tensed. The useless side of my imagination. Lesser muttered against himself for having had his phone removed, stupid time to be saving money. Reluctantly he ascended the stairs. Truly I hate this place. The next morning he wrote badly and had doubtful thoughts of love and marriage.

  He had this crawly feeling he had been watched in the cellar. One-eyed man? One-legged? Nasty thoughts. I’d best control myself, one can make trouble for himself. If anyone was there it was some poor bastard who had crept in out of the night. Maybe Levenspiel had hired a nemesis to stretch his nerves. Against the will Lesser began to search out whoever it might be. If bum or strayed hippie he would call a cop and have the cat ejected. Awful thing to do to somebody without shelter but he had to fend off distraction. Lesser considered having the door lock fixed, to control immigration from the outer city, paying for the job himself. He could have the cylinder changed and send a duplicate key to his nibs, who could then not claim in court that he had been boycotted out of his building; but Levenspiel in his present state of mind might have the lock jimmied off to spite him. A loss of ten or so dollars he could not afford after the big locksmith’s bill for his flat: three strong new ones plus an alarm box.

  Holding the short-handled ax in his moist hand, more as warning than weapon, the writer started at the ground floor and searched each dismal flat. As he rose from floor to floor he found no one present, nothing new. In Willie’s old rooms, where Lesser had looked forever out of a broken window, he was astonished to find scattered over the warped kitchen floor the remains of the furniture he had bought for the black and had, in fury and misery of loss, hacked to bits. Lesser arranged the wood into a pyramidal pile. Instinctively he once more searched the closets for some sign of the manuscript of blessed memory. Not a single page resurrected but he couldn’t help looking. Much that was difficult to reconstruct in the present rewriting, sometimes impossible, he had written well in the destroyed draft—words, transitions, whole scenes he could no longer recall, squeeze his brain as he would. On the fifth floor, except for some sticks of human excrement which looked a year old, and on the sixth, he found additional nothing. No signs of life to speak of. Putting possible presence out of mind he returned to his work. It occurred to him that he ought to have searched the cellar again. For what—winter?

  It is winter.

  The wind wails. Lesser listens and warns it to fuck off. Cold waves lash the barren shore. On the leaden sea something’s adrift he can’t explain. Still suspects Levenspiel’s around on one crutch, or maybe his lawyer? Is it a new prowler, smoke rising from his tracks? If I were superstitious I’d be in bad shape. He remembers, as he writes, the disjunct past, fleeting images. Death of his mother in a street accident when he was a kid. She had gone out for a bottle of Grade A milk and had not come back. Death of his older brother in the war before this war. He had disappeared, “missing in action,” no sign of him ever. No last word. Still waiting in some Asian jungle for a train? Useless deaths. Life so fragile, fleeting. One thing about writing a book you keep death in place; idea is to keep on writing. An aged father he hasn’t seen in years. About time I wrote him again. Once I finish up I’ll fly to Chicago for a visit. He thinks, too, of Holzheimer and some of the other tenants who had lived and died in the house before Levenspiel decreed Exodus. Lesser feels an excess of unnatural fears: daily fears that the day’s addition to his ms. will be stolen, snatched in the street before he can get it into the bank box; that this miserable building will fall like a wounded hippopotamus spewing forth his lost pages; or the writer will be mugged on the subway stairs and lie there unable to crawl home. There’s his abandoned book on his desk being read by the room. The next day—Levenspiel swears Lesser has moved to San Francisco—the wreckers descend, with crowbars rip out the tenement’s intestines, heart (where he wrote), and kick in its shell. End of book, era, civilization? Man’s hasty fate?

  He swears he hears stealthy footsteps in the hall, takes a bread knife out of the kitchen table drawer, foolishly flings open the door and sees no one. Was it somebody real? Negative presence as though on film? The white figure of a black man haunting the halls? He goes to Irene’s doctor and is told he is suffering from a deficiency of vitamin B. He is injected at intervals, feels healthier, and writes faster.

  One morning as the writer, standing in the January snow, is emptying his wastebasket into the dented rubbish can in front of the building, he discovers a barrelful of crumpled typewritten yellow balls of paper. Lesser, horror-struck, drops the lid with a clang on the can.

  Willie’s back, I knew in my bones.

  Setting down his basketful of torn strips of white paper in the soft snow, Lesser in heavy cap and overcoat, holding his frosty breath, again lifted the lid and rooted around in the mass of rolled balls in the can, unfolding some, reading quickly. Willie’s typewriter, sure enough; it typed these stiff inelegant letters. One after another Lesser plucked out and unfolded twenty of surely two hundred paper balls, and carefully arranged the crumpled sheets as well as he could. Some pages were missing, but Willie rewrote so often it was not hard to make sense of what he was saying. There were notes for stories, outlines short and long, pages of fiction barely begun, letters of exhortation to the self, pages from his old novel, pages from a new one about a sadistic pimp and his whore. Judging from the amount of work in the can alone, Willie had been in the house for a couple of weeks, if not longer. Where? Maybe he had been moving from one flat to another. He knew I was looking for him, was he looking for me?

  Afterwards, not knowing why exactly, but thinking in terms of better know than not know, once more he listened from flat to flat, not necessarily to confront Willie but at least learn where he was. Lesser had to keep things in order, make plans if necessary. Maybe telephone Levenspiel and have the intruder bounced to protect their property? Still—so long as he writes he’s not dangerous, or so it would seem. On the second and third floors, Lesser, moving stealthily from door to door, heard no one. On the third, softly pushing open the fire door, listening with held breath to detect, absorb every source of sensation on the floor, oppressed, he heard at last a faint typing in a rhythm he recognized.

  It’s Willie come back, all right. Lesser located the flat and stood, on edge, at the door. He considered abandoning the building but where would he go? Through the mess of moving now? Why should he, his novel unfinished? The book was progressing fantastically at the moment. Excellent day yesterday, eight typed pages—rare for Lesser. He sensed a breakthrough—either total recall of some of the key scenes he had been unable to reassemble, or glorious recombination of events to achieve, hopefully, a better effect than before. The right end too. Besides who’s the legal paying tenant?

  Why had Willie returned? Is it revenge he wants? More revenge? Lesser shivered
in his coat. He concluded he had returned to write; he was a writer. It said so in the desperate notes he addressed to himself that Lesser had found in the can: “I have got to write better. Better and better. Black but better. Nothing but black. Now or never.” He had come back to the house because he had no money for rent anywhere else. Maybe he had returned in order to finish the book begun here? A man liked to stay in place when he was writing a book. You did not want to change around when you were so deep into something.

  Lesser worked later that night, later most nights thereafter. Sometimes he stopped to listen, wondering if Willie had stolen up the stairs and laid his envious ear against the door to hear the writer jive-typing away.

  He read what the other discarded in the garbage. Lesser emptied his wastebasket in the cans across the street so that Willie wouldn’t see his work.

  For a while Willie was rewriting the disastrous last chapter of his novel about Herbert Smith and his mother. The boy is fifteen and on hard stuff, stealing steadily to support his habit. The mother is a lush, smelly, wasted, unable to stay sober for an hour a day. Once in a while he comes to her room to cook up a fix; or sleep on the floor as she snores on her urine-wet mattress. The suicide is omitted. She dies unattended, of malnutrition, as Herbert jerks off in the hall toilet. When his mother is buried in her pauper’s grave nobody’s there to pretend to mourn. The next day the boy appears at her raw graveside and tries to work up an emotion. He tries to imagine her feelings about her life but soon gives up on it. Sick for a fix, he leaves, but on looking back from the fence, sees a white Jesus standing by her black grave. The boy runs back to shoo the fatass dude away.

  This part of the chapter was excellent but that was as far as Willie had gone. Maybe he hadn’t faced up to the rest. Maybe he couldn’t.