And then he would get weak again, propping himself up on a pillowed couch, his arms hanging limp, fingers touching the carpeting. Normally, Harry Towns ignored his internal machinery and simply pushed on. Now he wondered for the first time in his life about the source of his strength, such as it was. Doctors had recently made news in the Times with a table that allotted points to a person for each of life's personal disasters. Loss of a spouse was worth ninety, a physical illness seventy-two, a job gone up in smoke eighty-five. And so on. Adding up his own setbacks over the past year, Harry Towns, with dead folks, bones gone soft, a shattered family, and grave financial setbacks, broke the bank at three hundred. According to the table, it was a safe prediction that he would currently be found strait-jacketed at Matteawan, staring blankly at the walls. Yet here he was, at one moment foaming with energy, at another surprised and impatient at being depressed and a bit scattered. One night, a producer, renowned for forcing a long list of film workers into nervous collapses, got annoyed at Harry Towns and said he would see to it that he never worked again. Gripping a restaurant table with one hand and feeling the heat of his own eyes as they burned into the other man's, Towns said, “Don't threaten me.” To Towns's surprise the producer, toupee slipping over one ear, said, “All right, but whatever you do, please don't yell at me.” Where did Harry Towns come up with this strength? Short years back, in the only job he had ever held, he had gone into paroxysms of fear whenever the boss's secretary phoned and said, “Mr. Baldwin wants to see you.” Why was he suddenly able to back down the Baldwins? With soft bones. And no money. And no family. And dead folks. Sitting in the park one day, a couple struck up a conversation with him. The man, a former film actor, had eyes that couldn't be fixed, pinballing wildly in his head. Towns assumed this was a result of years of being fucked, literally and figuratively, by studio executives. The girl, attractive, great-breasted, was the daughter of a man who had set up multimillion-dollar foundations dedicated to curing public ills. Seemingly attracted by Harry Towns's ease and calm—he was alone, reading a news magazine, apparently comfortable with himself—the couple clung to him, the girl finally saying, in desperation, “You've been with us awhile and gotten a hint of the way we are. Do you think we should stay together?” Normally, Towns would have rejected this authority. But this time, he considered carefully and said, “If you have to ask …” Who knows, it may have been the wrong thing to say. But what was he supposed to be, a trained therapist? They certainly did want to hear something from him. The actor's eyes kept pinballing wildly; the girl nodded with a knowing curl of a smile, and they went off, with what ostensibly was Harry Towns's nugget. What interested him was the way they had been drawn to him. Out of an entire parkful of people. He was some person to ask about staying together. Then again, maybe he wasn't such a bad choice. Maybe he could do things like that, too. Harry Towns, a latecomer in the guru game. Wouldn't that be something.
How had he suddenly come up with all this meat on his bones? Had he borrowed some of his dead parents' flesh? That was certainly an unattractive way to put it. But wasn't it possible he had now taken into himself some of his mother's brashness and ferocity, his father's ability to bend in turmoil, like bamboo, and not crack in half? Until the hurricane died down. Some of Harry Towns's own material had been sprinkled in, and who knows—if each man were more than the product of what filtered through him in a lifetime, then perhaps ancient legend, myth, and wisdom ran through his genes, too. If this were true, didn't his composition make Harry Towns a pasted-up man, ready to fall apart if someone struck exactly the right chord, tapped him along one of his seams? He preferred to think of himself as some kind of strong, functioning mutation of a man. Could you get along if you were one of those? Have a few laughs? His guess was that you could. Still, if such were the case, why did he need someone else around? Why the hunt for sweet and easygoing girls? If a man were possessed of sufficient life force, why did the magazines keep insisting on a “partner,” for “real fulfillment,” in order to “complete oneself.” Why couldn't he go right ahead and be an island, after all, with visiting days on Sunday, or perhaps none at all? Did he require a mirror? To show him he was good? If Harry Towns was good and knew it, why did he need a mirror for verification? Answer him that one.
Meanwhile, setting islands and mirrors aside for the moment, there were shards of loneliness to contend with, some unaccountable, others easy to pinpoint. At an Italian restaurant where Harry Towns ate alone one night, a man from a nearby table approached and said, “Three of us were admiring your shirt. We never saw a shirt like that and wanted to tell you that.” Towns thanked the man and said his wife had picked it out. He knew that if he traveled the earth ten times over, he would never run across someone who could pick things out the way she could. He suddenly remembered her style of swimming (they had taken an awful lot of vacations—probably to change the unchangeable)—fast, light, immaculate, and with a delighted smile. He could go on with the list, but it wasn't profitable. So he felt bad for the rest of the dinner and then he was all right again. Despite the high risk of sudden loneliness, Harry Towns, for the most part, preferred to eat dinner alone. For the time being, that's the way he wanted it.
There were still the sudden shockers to deal with. One night, an old bum shuffled out of an alley, called Towns “Nickel Nuts,” then shuffled away. Why did he have to do that? Towns would often size up an athlete or a cop and wonder what his chances would be against the fellow. But he was afraid of old bums. They might pull some old-bum trick on you. With an old-bum contraption. Something they had picked up in Singapore. On another occasion, he stopped to listen to a steel band in the park. A Spanish transvestite requested “My Yiddishe Mama,” then winked at Towns and said, “For you, baby.” Astonishingly, Towns was moved by the band's Latin rendition of the sentimental melody. Sudden, erratic behavior. And there was another area that was even more uneasy for Harry Towns. The girl from Brawley had given him an animal-skin bracelet and made him swear he would never take it off. Dutifully, Towns had worn it, even after he had put her out of his mind, figuring why fuck around, it will fall off eventually anyway. One day, many months later, she called and said she was passing through, could she drop by and say hello? Harry Towns said yes, of course, and hung up. At that moment, the bracelet fell from his wrist. Naturally and of its own accord. What were the odds against that happening? A trillion to one? Previously, when a person asked Harry Towns his sign, he would consider the conversation finished and the person, too. Did he now want to open that can of peas? He decided he didn't—but it was up there on the shelf, grinning at him—slyly insisting on a confrontation.
For all of his new fragments of insight, Harry Towns flailed around and sought out ways he could be hurt. There were fewer of them than ever before. His mother and father were underground, so they couldn't get him there. The IRS could do just so much damage. There was his son, of course, and the second he thought of the boy, he knew they had him. One day, during one of the weak times, he started to cry about losing his boy suddenly. When Harry Towns was young, he remembered crying a lot, being ashamed of it, and wondering if he was ever going to get past bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. He was positive he was an older crier than any boy on the East Coast. He remembered stopping just before he left for college—as he saw it, just in the nick of time. Now he was back at it again. In his forties. Was he going to keep crying all the way through? Until they carted him off? It was a possibility.
At the moment, the tears related exclusively to his boy. If he could just see to it that nothing happened to him. On his own behalf, there wasn't much he could do about holding off major convulsions such as blindness and impotence. And of course, if he came up with cancer, his goose was cooked. But he made a promise to himself to work on a fallback position, even if he wound up with one of those. Despite a recent turn in that direction, Harry Towns tried to avoid dealing out advice to anyone, but he was convinced that every man had an obligation to do at least that. Both
his mother and father had died with enormous grace and lack of selfishness—never mind raging against the night—and don't think that didn't give Harry Towns an advantage. He would take that against any inheritance you could dream up. Which is not to say he had it made. That the world was going to be his oyster. One night he bought a supermarket ready-roasted chicken and, in the course of eating it, plucked out the wishbone. It was the first time he had ever found himself holding both ends. This gave him a heady, uncertain feeling, but there was some pleasure to it and only the tiniest wisp of loneliness. It would be fun having someone on the other end—who could argue forcefully against that?—but there were pluses in having both ends for himself. All bracelet coincidences to the contrary, Harry Towns remained a man who wouldn't touch a symbol with a ten-foot pole. But how was he going to let that one go by?
He had no idea of how he was going to fare, although he was first on line in the curiosity department when it came to finding out. He sensed he ought to do the following things: go to Sofia, or places like it (with modest expectations); keep an eye out for a sweet and easygoing girl (what did he have to lose?); try like hell not to get hit with a brick. Treat each human being he came across with generosity—until such time as he found reason not to. That last one was vital to Harry Towns. And it didn't mean falling all over people, either.
He felt that if he made a strong effort to do each of these things, he had a chance of coming out all right. In Vegas terms, he was even tempted to give himself a slight edge.
A Note on the Type
This book was set in a typeface called Primer, designed by Rudolph Ruzicka for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and first made available in 1949. Primer, a modified modern face based on Century broadface, has the virtue of great legibility and was designed especially for today's methods of composition and printing. Primer is Ruzicka's third typeface. In 1940 he designed Fairfield, and in 1947 Fairfield Medium, both for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
About Harry Towns Page 15
