Carnovsky's Retreat

by Larry Duberstein

  That day I prowled around, good and restless. Say hello to the girls downstairs, say hello to Freddie upstairs—nothing. Finally I decide I will do a cleanup, sweep the floor. I’ll capture the big dustbunnies that move around on you with the cold drafts. I spend a few minutes at this and now I’ve got them gathered in a nice gray pillow on the floor and set out to search for the dustpan. No can find, so I try for a magazine, shirt cardboard, anything flat. (Newspaper doesn’t do it.) I end up ripping the back cover off the phone-book and I scoop up the pile—but this is my morning’s activity!

  Nor is it done with, because next I am wandering the halls looking for the damn wastebasket. I have the fuzz balanced on the flat and I am shielding it from drafts with body english because God forbid it should whisk away on me and escape back to the floor and then suddenly it hits me smacko that I am some kind of lunatic. Look where I put my time and energy! I could drop dead this very second, on the spot from a heart attack like my father’s brother Abe (on the spot in his own den, with a glass of fresh-steeped tea in his hand—he was alive, he was dead) and what if it was so? What if my life ended right then and there, wandering the corridor and holding my breath for fear a plate of filthy fuzz and mouse-droppings should blow away! What would they give me for a monument?

  And I flipped it, like a pancake, and walked away. Kept on walking two solid hours in zero degree weather, coldest day of the year, around Wallabout Market as deserted as a ghost town and back down to the waterfront again. You could have broken my ears off like a dry biscuit.

  Everyone must have such moments, many of them. I know that what I did was look too close, I put a microscope on it. Yet what stayed with me was this. The cleanup, the dustbunnies, I was doing out of sheer emptiness in the first place. If I wasn’t doing that, I was doing nothing at all. And if you do nothing you are nothing, so you try to keep something happening.

  Plenty of people will overeat because of this rule. They find time on their hands so they move around the house searching and all they find is food. So they eat it, it’s something to do. It’s why Lottie is so fat. If she had a couple of kids to chase around that place she would not be poking her face into the frigidaire every ten seconds, and I told her as much. (To which she replied, “What do you know?” But what else would she say?)

  Anyway I saw my life that day and it starts you thinking. Like the steel beam, it’s a wakeup call and thinking makes you think in just the same way not-thinking makes you not think. You can get lulled, day by day. That’s why I tell Florrie please, not so much of the television for Walter. If he watches loony tunes all day he will go nowhere in this world, he’ll just go blind.

  I’m liking my new neighborhood. This block is all residential but in New York nothing is far away. On Water Street there is a pharmacy, nice grocer, everything. I use the laundry there too—cheap, fast, and a good job. The Chinaman knows me already and knows how I like it done. Fine by him. Anything I ask, he has the same response—“No problem.” It may be his only English. He writes the price on the wrapping and when I pay he smiles, and if I say thank you very much he will give me one more chorus of “No problem” and leave it at that. Fine by me. Loose lips sink ships, but here it’s no problem.

  Across from Wing-Wang is Bulkitis’ News Stand. A hut, a raft with a roof, floating there on the streetcorner. Every morning Bulkitis himself sets out a rack of papers, magazines, comics etc. on the curb. Inside he keeps tobacco, candy, soda and the rest of the magazines. I pick up my Racing Form there and chat with Bulkitis, who is a Giants fan but likable. Sometimes he will ask me to bring him back a soup from the diner, or a coffee and buttered muffin, bran or cranberry. Tanya would shoot me first and ask questions later if she found out I was hobnobbing with a Giants fan, but I try to give him understanding. I say, Tell me Bulkitis, is it that your mama didn’t love you enough? Because you must understand a Giants fan is a disturbed individual who may require some sympathy. Not his fault if mother’s milk was sour. So treat him like a human, it can’t cost us any ballgames.

  I take my breakfast at the South Street Diner. The fishermen are out early, then comes a wave of longshoremen, and then the smoke clears by nine, when I arrive. A bummy bunch in there at that hour, Bowery stragglers, but you can find an empty stool and read your papers in comfort while they fry the food. Two pleasant men who smile hello and dish it up and though you don’t hear them saying much their hands never stop. The food is good and they keep the place nice—a shine on the marble counters, a polish on the cherrywood cases—so their business booms all morning.

  I like sausage and eggs, toast and coffee, and sometimes splurge on the fresh-squeezed orange juice. But I have sampled the house special—fried fish, fried potatoes, toast and coffee for 65¢. Plenty of fish on the plate and none fresher, because these guys stroll down in person and take it off the boat still flapping.

  Reading back my fight with the dustbunnies it sounds as though I don’t care for my work. Not so. I take pride in Carnovsky’s Fine Liquors and also I enjoy the business. That was just what occurred on one particular Tuesday, my slow day.

  It’s no palace there. If a windowpane goes, no one comes to put it back, and plenty are gone, though mostly in the empty rooms. The furniture will impress no one. It was all left behind when I came there and it hasn’t gotten any younger. The walls I paper with calendars that come in the mail—guns and dogs, waterfalls, girls in bathing-suits, girls in birthday-suits. Whatever they send me I’ll put it up, to cut down the drafts. And up on the roof, where I like to go once in a while for a look-out over the water, up there you find yourself standing on a white beach of bird-droppings. It would take a crew of ten men a month to scrape the shit away and still it keeps coming, like an all-year snow.

  But so what. Makes no difference, no one ever visits. My business is all on the phone and in the field selling. I make a call, I get a call, and my boys head out in the truck. I will miss the life. Miss sitting at my desk with my Form and a Gonzales and maybe even a cup of Ryker’s poisonous coffee that he brews up with old motor oil. Miss the hubbub of the boats and longshoremen bitching—music to my ears.

  I built that business and I would rather move beer off a boat than sit on the 117th floor downtown with a stethoscope on my neck nodding sagely. You can have your doctors and lawyers, mama, I’d rather sell beer.

  I get a lot of walking done these days, and utilize the library. Then I take the train to Belmont Park and that’s my day’s work, come and go as I please.

  Two straight days out there without a favorite on top, which happens, though it always makes a sour house when it does. I don’t mind. I never favor a favorite too much. I like a 5-1 horse who shows me he might be ready. Favorites I might pair up in a quinella now and then, to take a shot at the pot.

  Meanwhile they are all talking up the match race in Chicago. I liked Nashua very much, especially after his run in the Wood, but back then Summer Tan was the horse to beat. No one knew Swaps from Heigh-Ho Silver. Now if you saw the Derby you must throw out all the big races Nashua won. A horse of a horse in the Belmont, where he was strictly the one, yet versus Swaps he was clearly second best. And in a match race, second place is last place.

  My friend and ally Mrs. Kearney has taken me up as a cause. Whatever she thinks I am (and God only knows) she treats me like a scholar. She will catch my eye as I pick up The Post and say, Oh Mr. Fish, I believe I have something for you today. A nice lady, Tanya’s age I would say, though not so nice-looking. She is not too accurate with her lipstick, drifts wide at both corners and ends up resembling Emmett Kelly. (It might take an anonymous note to set her straight on this minor point.)

  So it’s Mr. Fish I think I have something for you today and then Mr. Fish takes the Something very gratefully to his study. This is a wide armchair behind a wall of geography books, each book the size of a piece of rock-lath. On the other side I have a tall window overlooking the plaza which is sunny, if anything is sunny, at my time of the morning. And here I check the S
omething over.

  Today it is Mr. Jones, who has turned up after three months in Purgatory. Where has Mr. Jones been? Why he couldn’t say. (Mind, he never touches drink.) Recalls not a thing because he was smitten with amnesia the whole time, forgot his way home and forgot the sound of his name and even lost his wallet so he could not peek inside for a clue.

  Mr. Jones is not a Walkaway, only a stray. They’ll round him up shortly. It’s probably an old war wound, says Doctor What-not, which happens never to have given him a minute’s trouble in the twelve years since he left the Air Force. Come to think of it the old war wound was in the shoulder, but of course the shoulderbone connected to the neck-bone, neck-bone connected to the headbone, and I hear the Word of the Lord.

  I don’t argue that the brain is not a delicate instrument, or that it shouldn’t be expected to sometimes go out of tune like my carburetor. I just say that Jonesy knew his name the same way Widmer’s feet stayed dry. And I am a man, when it comes to knowing, who has been cashing winners all month.

  Another one she found me, on the subject of runaway children. Not the little ones, but teenaged. I gave her my thanks, naturally, and took the magazine into my study where I stared at the pages with my most serious and scholarly frown. I even scratched down a few notes for her benefit. She should feel she accomplished a librarian’s mission in life.

  But every kid runs away and even with the teenaged, where it is admittedly more serious, it’s not what I mean. Because they run away. This differs from those who walk—there’s a speed factor here. If you are a runaway you are saying by your action: find me, help me, make my life bearable.

  Whereas when you are a Walkaway it is saying: goodbye, please don’t ask, believe me when I tell you I cannot explain, you can’t help, I don’t need any help I’m fine so don’t ask, goodbye and please no hard feelings there is money in the bank.

  Do women do it? They must, why not? Tanya might have beat me to the punch, packed up her blue satchel for the beach and kept drifting clear across the water to Europe.

  I thought I had spotted one today and maybe it was so. She was nicely dressed, an attractive lady who somehow looked uncomfortable inside her skin—and who carried a small valise instead of a purse. And she was not going anywhere. Killing time by her lonesome.

  Possibly a rendezvous and she got stood up by the party of the first part. But I should have checked up, and gotten to the bottom of things. I left her in the Chock-Full-O-Nuts with her valise sitting on the stool beside her like an old friend. I should have sat down on that stool myself and greeted her as a comrade-in-arms. Oscar Fish conducts the interview!

  Tell me please madam, did you leave your best clothes on the dock? Did you leave your children lunch money for the next fifteen years? Give us just a few details for our records if you would be so kind.

  The girl across the alleyway undresses in her window. She does it every night (which makes only sense—who doesn’t?) but I mean to say she is like clockwork, same time every night, and which just happens to be the time I am crawling into bed myself, as I have at half-past-ten for the past few decades. The way our windows are arranged I would have to change my habits to avoid peeping at her. At least that’s part of the problem. The rest of it is I don’t wish to avoid.

  Does this make me a criminal? If so then here I am confessing, but I’m not so sure. I feel a need to explain, and to begin at the beginning because I never was sinful and never lustful and I am only truthful when testifying that my wife is the only woman I have ever accompanied to bed. With a few tiny exceptions I could add she is also the only one I have glimpsed intimately from top to bottom close up in the flesh. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, said my late mother, and quite correctly.

  There is an old story in which a man gets the key to a house full of beauties, a beauty behind every door and each one ready for action. And the man goes crazy—from confusion, not lust. He can try a different door every hour on the hour but it won’t make him happy, just busy.

  One woman holds the power to make you happy and not so busy that you don’t have time for the ponies, or shoot snooker, whatever is your hobby. That’s my background on sex. Stay away from the burlesque houses, steer past a prostitute, and ignore the insinuating glances of Kronstein’s busty cousin. Look to your wife.

  When I married Tanya she was a show. The legs of a dancer, face from an artist’s painting, and the head of hair everyone admired, black with copper in the sunlight. A famous head of hair, in the borough of Brooklyn. I married her for love and I still love her after many years. If this were not so, there would be no need to walk away—I could run.

  She still has her beauty, her legs and the rest of it. There isn’t a wrinkle or a bubble or a bump on the backside and I’m glad the truth can be so kind if I must write it down here. I would hate to criticize even in private for God knows I am no Adonis myself. But if anyone is made for sex it’s Tanya, and yet she doesn’t care for it. She’s neutral.

  She allows me, once a week, because that is her interpretation of the marriage contract: twice a week would not be fair to her, zero is no good for me, so once. My Saturday night tittle and that does it for the week. It’s enough. By now I wouldn’t know how to do it on a Wednesday. If she was to suggest it all of a sudden on a Wednesday after dinner—Hey Oscar let’s go at it—I would probably faint. Like Pavlov’s Doggie, I have become a creature of habits.

  All these years, however, I have kept a curiosity. Not a lust that I would plan to act upon, merely a curiosity that was not so idle—to learn a little more about this business. I would never go for such a reason the way Widmer did it and yet having gone I might say let’s now take it under advisement, and not be so stubborn or shy as not to learn. I never sowed wild oats but tame oats like these, why not?

  Thus comes my bare girl to the window across the alley. How far away is she? Not far. I could toss her a beanbag from here. So what choice do I have? But I’m not justifying, I’m confessing. Why do I watch? In order to see.

  You won’t get an education in these matters if you pretend to yourself or to the world that the subject holds no interest.

  It is not only that she shows up at the same moment each night, she will also perform the exact same ritual. It’s like a Broadway show, rehearsed with hash marks, count on it.

  At 10:30 sharp the lights come on and I see her—though only from the shoulders down, since her window is set half a level lower than mine—I see her head for the bureau and begin off-loading jewelry. A little pile of beads and rings and ear-hoops, and then like a shot she pulls the dress over her head and stands there in a little white slip. A real shocker the first time I saw this move—and saw bare legs and shoulders with the shiny smooth that only a woman’s skin has.

  Before you have time to think it’s up and off with the slip, so that now she stands in tiny black underwear, top and bottom. Never a change in this, the white slip and the black scanties, the colors of her secret uniform. Next she flexes her back into two long strips of muscle and gives a little shrug and a tug that wiggles off the top half. It’s a lot of white meat. She starts brushing her hair, so you catch a glimpse of breast swaying this way and that before she turns around and shines them both right on you, and heads for her bed below the window.

  Fiddles the bedspread, plumps up the pillows, and once in a while she will touch lightly her own breasts. (May be that having them on the loose excites them and she likes to get in on it?) As soon as the bedding suits her standards, however, she hits the lights and what remains to be done is done in darkness. I can see her pulling off the panties and tossing it like a hanky, but I am seeing a silhouette, and a silhouette is like clothing. It is the texture of skin, I have learned, that makes naked nude.

  My bare girl goes out on Saturday (like me in the old days, for her once-a-week?) and the show closes down for one night. Reopens on Sunday and runs through the week with never a change in the schedule. No changes in the ritual, not even slight, no visitors, no matinées.
And no head on her shoulders. You might think she could drop an earring and bend her head down into the frame to retrieve it, but never.

  Today at Belmont Park I learned a few things about my friend Billy from Queens. (Amazing to gather such evidence after knowing this man ten years or more.) Billy is in the roofing business, and you can see his truck with the red and black lettering out in the big lot every afternoon. A roofer can’t work in the broad sunlight. He works early and late, and knocks off the hours in between, when the heat hits the asphalt. So you see Billy here and you don’t think twice—he is taking his afternoon sunshine break, that’s all, and the kid knows how to handicap a race. He does it as well as anyone smalltime out here, although modesty forbids me to record the obvious: that Carnovsky, sometimes known as Fish, has had the unbroken history of nothing but winning years dating back to 1939.*

  I see my friend Billy with a hot dog in his hand and hope in his heart and the sun buttering up his face, and always I took for granted that this boy was living the good life in America. A happy-go-lucky with yet a nice reliable business (who is it that doesn’t need a roof fixed up now and then?) and also has a family, two nice boys he mentions, living in a bungalow near the Aqueduct track. And not only that, he has a leg up on today’s Daily Double, so everything is perfect when he suddenly confides in me that he wishes he were dead. He is miserable, miserably unhappy and it does not show at all. And for some reason today, following a decade of silence, he wants to tell me his life-story.

  He got ahead early in life as a kid working with the rumrunners in Sheepshead Bay. This was 1928 when the booze business was illegal so naturally it paid well. (I was not in the booze business when it was illegal and paid well. At that time I was selling shirts on DeKalb Avenue in the City of Brooklyn.) When Prohibition closed up shop he drifted away from the bad boys, still just a kid, and then he bought himself a carry-all from an old roofer who was retiring. It had the words ASPHALT ROOFING painted on the rib-cage. And before he got around to painting out these two words the kid was getting offers to work on roofs, from people in the street.