The Brooklyn Follies

by Auster, Paul

  Same result on Tuesday.

  Same result on Wednesday.

  Not knowing what else to do, I decided to call Edith and ask her what was going on. She and Rachel were in constant touch, and while I felt some trepidation about having to talk to my ex, there was no reason to suppose she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. X marks the spot, as Harry had so eloquently put it. By now, the only contact I had with my former helpmeet was looking at her signature on the backs of my canceled alimony checks. She had filed for divorce in November 1998, and one month later, long before the decree came through, I was diagnosed with cancer. To her credit, Edith allowed me to stay on in the house for as long as necessary, which explained why we had been so slow to put it on the market. After the sale, she’d used a portion of her money to buy a condo in Bronxville – which Rachel, with her usual flair for colorful language, had told me was “very nice.” She’d also started taking adult education classes at Columbia, had traveled at least once to Europe, and, if the gossip mill was correct, was getting it on with an old lawyer friend of ours, Jay Sussman. His wife had died two years earlier, and since he’d always had the hots for Edith (husbands are good at detecting such things), it was only natural that he should make a move on her once I exited the scene. The merry widower and the gay divorcée. Well, good for both of them. Jay was pushing seventy, of course, but who was I to object to a tango dinner or two and some twilight nooky? To be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t have minded a dose of that for myself.

  “Hi there, Edith,” I said when she answered the phone. “It’s the ghost of Christmas past.”

  “Nathan?” She sounded surprised to hear from me – and also a little disgusted.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I need some information, and you’re the only person who can give it to me.”

  “This isn’t one of your bad jokes, is it?”

  “I wish.”

  She sighed loudly into the receiver. “I’m busy right now. Make it fast, okay?”

  “Busy entertaining, I presume.”

  “Presume whatever you like. I don’t have to tell you a thing, do I?” She let out a strange, piercing laugh – a laugh that was so bitter, so triumphant, so full of smoldering, contradictory impulses, that I scarcely knew what to make of it. The laugh of a liberated ex-wife, perhaps. The last laugh.

  “No, of course not. You’re free to do what you want. All I’m asking for is some information.”

  “About what?”

  “Rachel. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her since Monday, but no one seems to be home. I just want to make sure that she and Terrence are all right.”

  “You’re such an idiot, Nathan. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “They went to England on May twentieth and won’t be back until June fifteenth. The Rutgers semester ended. Rachel was invited to give a paper at a conference in London, and now they’re spending some time with Terrence’s parents in Cornwall.”

  “She never told me.”

  “Why should she tell you anything?”

  “Because she’s my daughter, that’s why.”

  “If you acted more like a father, maybe she would. That was a crummy thing you did to her, Nathan, blowing up at her like that. Who gives you the right? She was so hurt … so fucking hurt.”

  “I called to apologize, but she hung up on me. Now I’ve written her a long letter. I’m trying to repair the damage, Edith. I really do love her, you know.”

  “Then get down on your knees and beg for mercy. But don’t expect any help from me. My days as a mediator are over.”

  “I’m not asking for your help. But if she happens to call from England, you might want to mention that there’s a letter waiting for her when she gets home. And a necklace, too.”

  “Forget it, bub. I ain’t saying a word. Not a single goddamn word. Got it?”

  So much for the myth of tolerance and goodwill among divorced couples. By the time the conversation ended, I was half in the mood to hop on the next train to Bronxville and strangle Edith with my bare hands. The other half of me wanted to spit. But give the old girl her due. Her wrath had been so violent, so blistering in its denunciations and contempt, it actually helped me come to a decision. I would never call her again. Never again for the rest of my life. Under no circumstances, not ever again. The divorce had disentangled us in the eyes of the law, dissolving the marriage that had held us together for so many years, but even so, there was one thing we still had in common, and because we would go on being Rachel’s parents for as long as we lived, I had assumed that connection would prevent us from sinking into a state of permanent animosity. But no longer. That telephone call was the end, and from now on Edith would be no more than a name to me – five tiny letters that signified a person who had ceased to exist.

  The next day, Thursday, I ate lunch alone. Tom was in Manhattan with Harry that afternoon, negotiating with the widow of a recently dead novelist about the books in her husband’s library. According to Tom, this novelist seemed to have known every important writer of the past fifty years, and his shelves were crammed with books that had been signed and dedicated to him by his illustrious friends. “Association copies,” as these books were called in the business, and because they were much sought after by collectors, Tom said, they invariably fetched good prices. He also said that outings of this sort were the thing he liked best about working for Harry. Not only did they allow him to quit the confines of his second-floor office in Brooklyn, but they gave him a chance to watch his boss in action. “He puts on quite a show,” he said. “Never stops talking. Never stops bargaining. Flatter, denigrate, cajole – an endless feint and dodge. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I’d swear he’d been a Moroccan rug merchant in another life.”

  Wednesday was Marina’s day off. Without Tom to keep me company, I was particularly looking forward to seeing her on Thursday, but when I walked into the Cosmic Diner at one o’clock, she wasn’t there. I talked to Dimitrios, the owner of the restaurant, and he explained that she’d called in sick that morning and would probably be out for a few days. I felt deeply and absurdly dejected. After the tongue-lashing I’d been given by my ex-wife the night before, I wanted to reaffirm my faith in the female sex, and who better to help me than the gentle Marina Gonzalez? Before entering the restaurant, I had already imagined her wearing the necklace (which had been the case on Monday and Tuesday), and I knew that the mere sight of her would do me a world of good. With a heavy heart, therefore, I slid into an empty booth and placed my order with Dimitrios, who was filling in for my absent love. As usual, I was carrying a book in my jacket pocket (Confessions of Zeno, which I’d bought on Tom’s recommendation), and given that I had no one to talk to that day, I opened Svevo’s novel and began to read.

  After two paragraphs, the man known as Mr. Trouble came knocking at my door. This was the encounter I alluded to some fifteen or twenty pages ago, and now that the moment has arrived for me to talk about it, I cringe at the memory of what happened between us. This person, this thing I prefer to call Trouble, this nightmare being who emerged from the depths of nowhere, masqueraded himself as a thirty-year-old U.P.S. deliveryman with a muscular, well-toned body and an angry expression in his eyes. No, anger doesn’t do justice to what I saw in that face. Fury would be closer to it, I think, or perhaps rage, or even homicidal madness. Whatever it was, when he stormed into the restaurant and asked Dimitrios in a loud, bellicose voice if Nathan was there, Nathan Glass, I knew Mr. Trouble went by the code name of Roberto Gonzalez. I also knew that the necklace was no longer in the cash register. Poor Marina had forgotten to take it off when she went home on Tuesday night. A small blunder, perhaps, but I couldn’t help thinking of how she had employed the word boom when she tried to turn down my gift, and when I coupled that word with Dimitrios’s announcement that she would be out “for a few days,” I wondered how badly the son-of-a-bitch had beaten her.

  Marina’s husband parked him
self on the bench directly opposite me and leaned across the table. “Are you Nathan?” he asked. “Nathan fucking Glass?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But my middle name isn’t Fucking. It’s Joseph.”

  “Okay, smart-ass. Tell me why you did it.”

  “Did what?”

  He reached into his pocket and slammed the necklace down on the table. “This.”

  “It was a birthday present.”

  “To my wife.”

  “Yes. To your wife. What’s wrong with that? Marina serves me lunch every day. She’s a terrific girl, and I wanted to show my gratitude. I tip her when I pay my bill, don’t I? Well, consider the necklace a big tip.”

  “It ain’t right, man. You don’t fuck around with married women.”

  “I’m not fucking around. I just gave her a present, that’s all. I’m old enough to be her father.”

  “You got a dick, don’t you? You still got balls, don’t you?”

  “The last time I looked, they were still there.”

  “I’m warning you, mister. You lay off Marina. She’s my bitch, and I’ll kill you if you ever come near her again.”

  “Don’t call her a bitch. She’s a woman. And you’re damn lucky to have her as a wife.”

  “I’ll call her whatever I want, asshole. And this,” he said, as he picked up the necklace and dangled it before my eyes, “this piece of shit you can eat for breakfast tomorrow morning.” He grabbed hold of it with his two hands, and with one sharp jerk of the wrists snapped apart the gold chain. Some of the beads slid off and bounced on the Formica table; others landed in his palm, and as he stood up to take his leave, he threw them in my face. If not for my glasses, I might have caught one in the eye. “Next time, I kill you!” he shouted, jabbing his finger at me like some deranged marionette. “You lay off her, you bastard, or you’re dead!”

  By now, everyone in the restaurant was looking at us. It wasn’t every day that you sat down to lunch and were treated to such an absorbing spectacle, but now that Mr. Trouble had told me off, the action seemed to be coming to an end. Or so I thought. Gonzalez had already turned from me and was heading in the direction of the door, but the path between the booths and tables was narrow, and before he could make his exit, the towering, broad-bellied Dimitrios was standing in his way. Thus began Act Two. Hemmed in, his brains still on fire, the overwrought Gonzalez started yelling at the top of his voice. “You keep that scum-bag out of here!” he said (referring to me). “You keep him out, or else Marina don’t work for you no more! She quits!”

  “Then she quits,” said the owner of the Cosmic Diner. “This is my restaurant, and nobody tells me what to do in my restaurant. Without my customers, I don’t have nothing. So get your ass out of here and tell Marina she’s done. I don’t want to see her no more. And you – you come in my place again, I call the cops.”

  There was some pushing and shoving after that, but strong and muscular as Gonzalez was, Dimitrios was too big for him, and eventually, following another wave of threats and counter-threats, Marina’s husband vanished from the premises. The fool had lost his wife her job. But worse than that – far worse than that – I realized I would probably never see her again.

  Once calm had been restored to the diner, Dimitrios walked over to my table and sat down. He apologized for the disturbance and offered me lunch on the house, but when I tried to talk him out of firing Marina, he wouldn’t budge. He had been a willing co-conspirator in our necklace-cash register ploy, but business was business, he said, and even though he liked Marina “a hell of a lot,” he didn’t want to take any chances with that crazy husband of hers. Then he said something that burned into me like the scald of a branding iron. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

  But it was my fault. I was to blame for the whole mess, and I despised myself for the wrong I’d done to the innocent Marina. Her first impulse had been to refuse the necklace. She understood what kind of man her husband was, but rather than listen to what she said to me, I had forced her to take it, and that stupid move, that stupid, stupid move, had led to nothing but trouble. God damn me, I said to myself. Cast my body into hell, and let me burn there for a thousand years.

  That was the last time I had lunch at the Cosmic Diner. I continue to pass it every day on my walks down Seventh Avenue, but I still haven’t found the courage to go back in.

  MONKEY BUSINESS

  That evening (Thursday) I met Harry for dinner at Mike & Tony’s Steak House on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Carroll Street. This was the same restaurant where he had made his disturbing revelations to Tom a couple of months earlier, and I believe he chose it because he felt comfortable there. The front half of the establishment was a neighborhood bar where the smoking of cigarettes and cigars was actively encouraged, and sporting events could be watched on a large TV mounted on the wall near the entrance. Walk through that room, however, open the thickly paned double glass doors at the rear, and you found yourself in an altogether different environment. The restaurant at Mike & Tony’s was a small, carpeted chamber with shelves of books lining one wall, a few black-and-white photographs hanging on another, and no more than eight or ten tables. In other words, a quiet, intimate beanery, blessed with the further advantage of tolerant acoustics that allowed one to be heard even while speaking in a hushed voice. To Harry’s mind, the place must have felt as snug and private as a confessional box. At any rate, that’s where he preferred to do his confessing – first to Tom, and now to me.

  As far as Harry knew, my understanding of his pre-Brooklyn life was limited to just a few basic facts: born in Buffalo, ex-husband of Bette, father of Flora, time spent in prison. He wasn’t aware that Tom had already supplied me with a host of particulars, but I wasn’t about to let him know that. I therefore played dumb as Harry marched me through the familiar story of the Alec Smith bamboozle and his subsequent falling out with Gordon Dryer. At first I didn’t understand why he was bothering to tell me these things. What connection did they have with his current business deal? I wondered, and then, ever more confused, I put the question directly to Harry. “Just bear with me,” he said. “In due time, all will come clear.”

  I didn’t say much through the early part of the meal. The uproar at the diner that afternoon had left me badly shaken, and as Harry rattled on with his story, my thoughts kept wandering off to Marina and her idiot husband and the whole chain of circumstances that had led me to buy that cursed bauble from the B.P.M. But Tom’s boss was in good form that night, and with the aid of a predinner Scotch and the wine I drank to accompany my platter of Blue Point oysters, I gradually pulled out of my funk and started to focus on the business at hand. Harry’s account of his Chicago crimes matched neatly with Tom’s retelling of them, but with one notable and amusing difference. With Tom, Harry had broken down and wept. He had been overcome by remorse, berating himself for having destroyed his marriage, his livelihood, his name. With me, on the other hand, he sounded thoroughly unrepentant, even boasting of the remarkable coup he’d managed to keep going for two solid years, and he looked back at his adventure in art forgery as one of the most glorious periods of his life. How to explain this radically altered tone? Had he been putting on an act for Tom to win his sympathy and understanding? Or, coming on the heels of Flora’s disastrous visit to Brooklyn, had that first confession been a true cry from the heart? Perhaps. All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are. Up one day and down the next; morose and silent in the morning, laughing and cracking jokes at night. Harry had been low when he talked to Tom, but now that his business venture was in the works, he was flying high with me.

  Our T-bones were brought to the table, we switched to a bottle of red, and then, at long last, the other shoe dropped. Harry had all but told me he was building up to a surprise, but even if he’d given me a hundred chances to guess what it was, I never would have predicted the startling piece of news that
calmly fell from his lips.

  “Gordon’s back,” he said.

  “Gordon,” I repeated, too stunned to say anything else. “You mean Gordon Dryer?”

  “Gordon Dryer. My old comrade in sin and frolic.”

  “How in the world did he track you down?”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing, Nathan. It’s not. I’m very, very happy.”

  “After what you did to him, I’d think he’d want to kill you.”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but it’s all over now. The rancor, the bitterness. The poor fellow threw himself into my arms and asked me to forgive him. Can you imagine that? He wanted me to forgive him.”

  “But you’re the one who put him in jail.”

  “Yes, but the scheme was Gordon’s idea in the first place. Without him to get things rolling, neither one of us would have served any time. That’s what he blames himself for. He’s done a lot of soul-searching over the years, and he told me he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t live with himself if I thought he still bore me a grudge. Gordon’s not a child anymore. He’s forty-seven now, and he’s grown up a lot since the old days in Chicago.”