She handed him a bottle of soda and watched the movement of his neck as he swallowed; when he lowered the bottle, she spoke immediately, as though she had merely been waiting for his attention.
"Tell me this, then, Mr. Nazerman. If your reasoning about your needs is correct, why haven't you found peace? Isn't it possible your philosophy, or lack of philosophy, or whatever you live by, is in error?" she said, trying to bring the sweet smell of her own history to an ugly Jewish man on the banks of a filthy river; for she had a heritage of missionaries, and like her ancestors she was willing to brave a variety of wildernesses.
"People like you have not let me have peace, Miss Birchfield."
"Then it would follow that your philosophy is no good, because you have to five in a world just full of people like me," she said.
He smiled suddenly. "I must apologize to you, Miss Birchfield. I have underestimated you. You have the makings of a debater. But I will not debate with you. Really I am extremely tired of all this. There is no sense going on. Besides, it is much too warm here." He got to his feet slowly, unbending with such deliberation that it seemed he might never stop rising, and she looked up at him with awe. "Also, there are the vicissitudes of my business. I have a strange assistant, my Jesus Ortiz. I understand him as little as he does me. There are times when he seems quite dedicated to his job, and other times when I think he would kill me and rob my safe." He gave a little chuckle. "Who knows but I may go back now to find my store looted and empty."
"One last question," she said.
He waited as she collected the rubbish from their lunch in the paper bag. Finally she stood, too, a full-breasted woman of great warmth and perhaps wistfully unused passions.
"Are there no emotions left to you? I mean, don't you ever feel pity or love or..."
"Yes, yes," he snarled, suddenly wound tight by the feeling of impending disaster, which made his head ache. "I have some respect for fear. Love I will not talk about; it is too offensive—the obscenities committed in its name. But fear ... If a person is capable of such fearful imagination that each time a creature is beaten he feels the pain himself, then I have reason to feel safe with that man. Your brave men, and your passionate lovers, are dangerous. No, give me the spineless, undedicated ones with the quivering, morbid imaginations, those selfish enough to constantly project themselves into any act of brutality; I can hold my own with them." He took a deep, steadying breath. Then he gestured toward the street, and they began to walk.
"For a little while it was quite relaxing, Miss Birchfield. But when you insisted on profundities, you made it tedious, you ruined it."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Nazerman. You're right," she said evenly, capable of some slyness herself. "It's that damnable compulsion to break into people. Plain nosiness, probably." She sneaked a look at him out of the corner of her eye. "But look, if I promise not to probe like that any more, would you consider doing this again?"
"Why, Miss Birchfield? Really, now, why?" he asked as they gained the street.
"Well, that's silly....I mean because I like you. After all, there's nothing more natural. You're a man and I'm a ›
"Oh, Miss Birchfield!" he said incredulously. "Please"
She reddened and looked down at her feet, but went on bravely. "Well then, say there are no good reasons. It is possible that I enjoy your company, and if you thought you could enjoy..."
He frowned, feeling the heat weigh on him with increasing pressure as he approached the store. "It is hard to know, I cannot say...." He had some difficulty seeing his feet on the glare of the pavement.
"How about taking that Hudson River excursion on Sunday?" she blurted out quickly. "It's really a lovely trip."
"You are unbecomingly forward," he said.
"I guess I am. Maybe that's why my classmates called me a 'regular guy.' But there are some advantages to being 'forward.' For one thing, you're more apt to get direct answers," she said with a slightly mischievous smile. "Would you like to go?"
"I do not think so, Miss Birchfield. Thank you, but I am afraid not, not at this time. Sometime when I am..." He shrugged; there was no name for the future.
"Well, just in case you change your mind," she said, her smile intact as she handed him a little card which bore her name, the name of the Youth Center, and her home address and telephone number penciled above the name of the Center.
"Yes, yes, fine," he said, squinting ahead at the gold balls glowing in the sun.
"Good-by for now then, Mr. Nazerman," she said, watching his changing expression.
"Thank you, yes, good-by, good-by," he said impatiently. Then he put the little card in his pocket absently, hardly noticing when she walked away; his vision was darkening already in expectation of the fluorescent dimness of the pawnshop.
FIFTEEN
"I must speak to you," Sol said to the wiry voice in the phone.
"So speak. What are you being so dramatic for?" Murillio said.
"In person, I would like to speak to you in person."
Just the shade of hesitation indicated that Murillio was taken aback by the unusual request.
"What do you expect of my face? You would get no more out of me in person. I am a excellent poker player, Uncle." Murillio sighed, insincerely; he was not a man given to sad acceptances. "Ah, I hope you're not getting cute, Uncle. We got such a nice relationship. I pride myself on having one colleague who never gives me no trouble. You ain't going to get sly on me now, are you?"
"I am not being sly. I do not know what I expect of your face. Just that I feel I must talk to you, personally. May I come to your apartment this evening?"
"Okay, Uncle. You got such a flawless record, I suppose you deserve a few minutes of my valuable time. Up to now you ain't been a pest." He chuckled. Then he was not chuckling and his voice came like the one that gives the time and the weather. "I expect you at ten fifteen tonight, punctual, understand?"
And then Sol was looking at the phone humming emptily in his hand.
"I am sorry, I am sorry," he said aloud. "My health will not permit this. I am certainly not squeamish, but I must guard my health, I can depend on no one. I must draw the line someplace...."
He would be trying to fool himself if he didn't recognize that his nerves were in a bad state. Never mind what physical things might be wrong. The fact was that he was shaky and, while he had small patience with analyzing himself in terms of the life he had lived, he had to accept the fact that there were some things able to pierce his numbness. He still reacted to certain things even while he despised the idea of memory. Something more terrible than a disease of the body faced him. For the first time, his oppression began to show the features of terror, and he was amazed and mystified because he could not think what he feared. Murillio's relationship with the brothel rode his consciousness with galling persistence. He would not strain himself with searching for the whys and wherefores of it; they would reveal their sources with painful clarity if he looked. Enough to know that he must do something about alleviating the most apparent strains.
For now his body seemed affected by his odd indisposition. There were a great number of insupportable positions for his body, positions he could not maintain without his hands or head or legs beginning to tremble a little. Fatigue pushed at him, too, even though the day had been relatively quiet. He found himself yawning frequently or taking great shuddering breaths which ended in sighs. It was all right to scorn phantoms, but to pretend they did not exist was just foolhardy. He would talk it out with Murillio, straighten out at least that one painful kink in his spirit.
He locked up the store and walked across the street toward the cafeteria. He had about an hour to use up before he took the twenty-minute subway ride to Murillio's apartment downtown. The street was lit by street lamps and neons, but, up above, the sky was still light, a cooling blue which faded to the palest denim in the west. And that delicate balance, just tipping toward night, seemed to find its horizontal somewhere around the level of Sol's head. For the f
ew people walking by, it gave a look of uncertainty to his face, an ambiguity of color in that part of the city so stricken with the color of skins. From almost a block away, Cecil Mapp thought he recognized Sol Nazerman, and he nudged John Rider, beside him on the single step, asking if that wasn't the Pawnbroker that John worked for. But John was focused on the close-up pages of Deuteronomy and he just grunted in the pungent summer evening.
In the cafeteria, Sol stared at the array of foods on the steam table. He didn't know exactly what he wanted from Murillio, what he was going to ask for. It would be better not to try to plan now. He would only confuse himself more. Face to face: he had confidence in that magical contact of vision; he would know what he wished to say then.
"Nothin' here suit you, Mac?" the skinny Puerto Rican complained from behind the counter. "How 'bout some chili? Chili's good tonight," he said, ladling some up and dropping it with an ugly plopping sound.
"No. Eggs, two eggs, poached on toast, and coffee," Sol said. Then he stood gazing myopically at the steaming coffee urn and tapping his fork in an absent rhythm on the brown plastic tray.
Only I must do something or I will get a breakdown. Who would help me then! Oh yes, there are good reasons, I know about that; the date of all ... all that. But there are the money pressures, the animals I have to deal with. Look, I'm getting no younger, either. It is natural. The point is that I must not let myself get into a state like that. No, it is ridiculous. I will simply say to Murillio...
"I said, 'You gonna want anything else?' Hey, you food gonna get cold like ice. Hey, Mista!" the food-server said, raising his voice in the bored solicitude he used for the old and the hard-of-hearing.
Sol found a table near the window. He ate with the garish perspective of the street before him but with his eyes blind to it, his attention inward on the dark, wet chewing of his mouth, the monstrous, bestial swallowing and digesting. The involuntary movements of his organs disgusted him, and he dwelt inside himself like a tiny, bodiless creature fascinated by something that lived mindlessly but persistently.
When he was through eating, he found his hands strangely in his way. A few tables away, a burly Negro in a leather stevedore cap let out a huge, pleasurable explosion of smoke from his mouth and then stared with sleepy fascination at the white cigarette in his dark fingers. Sol wondered why he had never tried smoking. How relaxed the man looked! On an impulse, he got up and walked over to the smoker.
"Pardon me, could I perhaps buy one of your cigarettes? I have forgotten to bring my own," he said, enjoying the dexterous little he.
"Sure thing," the man said. "That's all right, man." He held up his hand to forestall payment. "On me," he said. He even lit the cigarette for Sol, but frowned at the awkward way the white man sucked on it.
"Very good," Sol said, letting the smoke seep from his hps in what he thought was a professional way as he looked at the cigarette. "Just my brand, too. I thank you."
The capped man waved away the thanks again and went back to his almost erotic delight in smoking.
For a few minutes Sol found a childish pleasure in making the big puffs of smoke that covered the little Lazy Susan in the center of the table. He enjoyed the fierce glow at the tip of the cigarette each time he drew on it, enjoyed the look of the clean, white cylinder between his cumbersome fingers. He watched himself smoking and found himself cataloging the act, listing it as a therapy that might strengthen him. Unconsciously, he began to hum, a thin, minor-keyed melody whose notes he shaped with the single-syllabled "Dy, dy, dy, dydydy, dy, dy..."
Suddenly the sound caught like a hook in his heart. A wisp of smoke went down with his disturbed respiration, and he began to cough violently. When he recovered from the fit of coughing, he had a strange, cold hurt in his chest, and the pleasure of smoking was gone as though it had never been. The thought of Murillio tightened his stomach once more.
He got up with a sigh and went out into the street. And it was now unquestionably a nighttime street, with darkness above and the stars lost to the people for all the harsh artificial lights they lived by.
He went down the gum-and-spittle-scarred steps of the subway and stood in the dirty light of the platform, where everything had the color of grime and everything was defaced or mutilated—signs, walls, trash cans, everything.
I will just say to him, Look Murillio, I am not being fussy but I am just not a well man. No, that is not good. I will say, for reasons of my own...
The yellow eye of the train advanced through the tunnel, coming from a hundred filthy platforms like the one he was on, heading for a hundred more. The whole city was cancered with these dim tunnels, whose filth spread to the streets above with the people, spread to the whole world. Murillios behind him, ahead of him. Yesterday and tomorrow, all the same. A constant assault, which he strained against, awake and asleep. What was the point? Just to maintain life? He was too weary. There was this pressure in him, a feeling of something underneath, which caused the growing tremors on the surface of him, perhaps heralding some great and awful thrust which would rend him, destroy him. And what was it? he wondered as the train rocked and screamed through the tunnel like a projectile toward him. Was it terror? Of what—death? Ridiculous that he should fear that! No, he didn't—perhaps, even ... He leaned over the platform edge. The wind of the train fanned his face, the light blinded him. The train multiplied its speed, rushed to swallow him up.
And then he was standing back, watching the windows flash by like a streak of light which gradually, as the train slowed, separated into rectangles framing human heads. He watched the doors open, standing and rocking a little, his heart pounding, his brain refusing the immediate past.
For most of the ride he just slumped in an access of exhaustion. His mind seemed empty. He sat, his mouth slightly ajar, staring at the rushing darkness of the tunnel; the roar of the train flushed his brain of the gathering crystals of memory as soon as they began to form. At about the halfway point in the ride, he experienced a sour burning in his throat; it tasted faintly of egg.
"Now even eggs," he said disgustedly, before going back to his cataleptic repose, his head rocking with the sway of the train, his eyes indifferent to the faces of many shapes, the newspapers of many tongues.
The apartment was of white brick, some twenty-five stories high. There was a huge, glass-enclosed lobby, through which Sol could see an elegant, too-orderly garden with white stone benches and floodlit shrubs. A doorman appeared. He raised his eyebrows suspiciously at the bulky, heat-rumpled man who looked to him like a seedy salesman desperate for business. But he had no case of any kind, so the doorman considered the possibility of a crackpot fanatic of even more devious purpose.
"Can I help you there, Mac?" he asked, ready at the least sign to turn the fringe politeness into bullying. "Someone here you want to see?"
"Mr. Albert Murillio," Sol answered, staring dully at the doorman's stagy white uniform.
"Well suppose I just give him a little ring for you," the man said uncertainly, reshuffling his stack of attitudes at the familiar name. "Make sure he's up there. Save you a trip." He went to the wall phone and pressed one of a long column of buttons. "Just check and make sure he's ... Oh, hello, Mr. Murillio? Oh hi, Joe, this is Sweeny, downstairs. Got a fellow down here says he wants to see your boss. What? Oh, wait, I'll ask...." He covered the phone with one hand, and quizzed Sol with his eyes. "Your name, your name," he finally said impatiently.
"Sol Nazerman. He is expecting me," the Pawnbroker said, staring out indifferently at the floodlit garden. He wondered if the vegetation were real.
Only in the almost silent ascent of the elevator did his exhaustion recede enough for him to feel apprehension again. When he stepped out at Murillio's floor, words were tumbling uselessly through his head. Which of them could he use? What did he want of the man? If he didn't know, how could he expect...
"Come in, Uncle," Murillio called from beyond the man in the linen jacket of a servant. "Sit down, sit down," he said as S
ol came down the two steps to the sunken living room. "This is a rare honor, partner. You might have something there, putting us on a personal basis. Want a drink? Name it, I got it; Scotch, rye, bourbon, gin. Hey, you ever try this coffee-flavor brandy? I got it in Haiti. Expensive stuff."
"No thank you. I do not drink. I have a delicate stomach."
"Well, sit down, anyhow," Murillio said, wearing expansiveness like something he knew the look of but not the feeling; and, as the Pawnbroker unbent that much, he smiled energetically. "I tell you, Uncle, I often think I like to get together with you. People I come in contact with are a bunch of dumbheads. I know you're a intelligent guy, been a teacher in the old country and all. Well, I ain't had the regular education, you know, but I got a taste for the finer things. Listen, I know the real-big operators all had a feel for the big things. I read a whole bunch of books, history, art, the whole bit. I get a big kick out of it. It's the only thing that really interest me. I got dough, all the gash I want. It gets boring, you know?"
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