In the middle of the night I woke up, completely. I had been dreaming about Jade. I knew when I dreamed about her. It felt as if a wheel was turning inside of me. I tried to catch the images before they sank back into unknowing but it was like trying to pluck moonlight off of the water. It wasn’t the dream that woke me, though. It was something that my father had said earlier in the kitchen. “That’s why the letters aren’t here,” he’d said. I could hear him saying it and I could see his face, now, the look of pleading, as if he’d been asking me to see through him, to interpret him, to just be patient and give him a chance to be my hero. I kicked the sheet off of me and got out of bed. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I couldn’t stay down with my new knowledge. It rushed through me. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”
But where? There seemed only one logical place: Arthur’s office.
I was frightened—of letting myself down, of betraying myself. I dressed and wondered how I could get from the apartment to my father’s office. I had no money. I wasn’t certain how the buses ran or even if they were still going. The elevated train ran twenty-four hours but I was afraid to ride it. I stood at my window. The glass felt cooler; the rain must have broken the heat. It was two in the morning and no sign of anyone on the street. An almost full moon was out, touching the broken clouds with chromium glow.
I crept out of my room and into the darkened hall. I could hear my father’s deep buzzing snores. Rose must have been sleeping too: if she’d been awake, she’d have poked her husband in the ribs to silence him. Touching the walls for balance, I made my way down the hall, past their bedroom, and toward the entrance foyer. Arthur had taken to leaving his briefcase and keys next to the door. This presumed forgetfulness was new, and I didn’t know if it came from the erosion of age or the delirium of his new romance. But when I reached the door and groped in the dark for the little table upon which he kept his things, all I felt was the smooth, slightly oily surface of the wood. It was Sunday; there was no need to lay out his things.
I stood in the hall. A layer, and then another, of darkness receded and I could see shapes now. The plastered-over beams in the ceiling, the picture frames on the wall, the soft obsidian gap that was the entrance to the kitchen. I slipped off my shoes. My heart was like a barrel end-over-ending down a flight of stairs. With a murderer’s stealth I crept down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom.
Before Rose and Arthur lost control over me and could no longer stop me from spending my nights at the Butterfields’, I had sneaked into and through the apartment a hundred times. I knew just where to step. I knew which spots on the floor twittered beneath my weight and I knew how fast to open a door to stop the hinges from creaking. My way was not the soundless, shadowy glide it had once been—the door to their room, even though ajar, groaned slightly when I pushed it open and the doorknob touched the wall with a hollow click—but in less than a minute I was standing in the faint moonlight of my parents’ bedroom, my feet planted at the edge of their bed’s long shadow, and I had done nothing to ruffle their slumber.
My father wore no night shirt and the cover on his side of the bed had slipped down, revealing his soft, hairy chest and the dark birthmark (the “chocolate patch” of my childhood) on the top of his ribcage. His large head sunk into the center of his pillow and his chin was slightly raised. His snores were steady and sounded every bit as loud as those given out by those big dopey, innocent animals in old cartoons. It was the sound of the fake snore I used to give when I meant to say I was bored. Next to him, Rose slept in her nightgown. She slept on her side with her half-closed fists touching Arthur’s shoulders. Her breathing was regular, deep, and absolutely soundless; oxygen filled her lungs and fed her blood with botanical silence. The light of the moon, divided into twelve bars by the Venetian blinds, quivered slightly on the wall. I stood before my parents’ unconscious forms, my heart beating with a terror more befitting a patricide.
My parents were the very models of tidiness and “good habits.” Newspapers, if not to be saved permanently, were thrown out immediately after reading. A glass that was used for a midday drink of juice was always rinsed out and placed in the blue plastic drainer. Lights were not left to burn in empty rooms and no unoccupied shoe would ever dare show more than its very tip, peeking out from beneath a fringed bedspread. And so as I surveyed their room, looking for a wallet that might pay my way downtown and a set of keys that would allow me to enter my father’s office, I saw nothing but clear surfaces—no piles of change, no rings of keys, no dropped (or even carefully folded) clothing.
Slowly, slowly, slowly I crept across their bedroom, casting my shadow first over the square of broken moonlight on the wall and then laying it like a sword over my parents’ sleeping faces. Finally, I opened their closet. The scent of mothballs, the lumpy darkness. I reached forward, rustling the hanging clothes, chiming the metal hangers. Blind, I felt a suit or a dress wrapped in the dry cleaner’s crackling plastic, a silkish shirt, cool and melancholy to the touch, my mother’s nylon robe. Then came my father’s suit, colorless, made of mystery-fabric, but unmistakably his. I stuffed my hand into its pockets—empty.
There was a break in my father’s snoring. I turned toward the bed. Rose rolled away from Arthur and raised one half- closed hand above her head, grazing the bedboard with her knuckles before dropping her unformed fist onto the pillow. Arthur’s body seemed to veer toward hers, as if to follow its tiny nocturnal migration, but his journey toward her steady, familiar warmth was only hinted at. He remained flat on his back and the snores returned, deeper now, as if coming from a more resigned part of him.
O mother, O father. To be standing in your room. Conscious of you as you were conscious of me during my slumbers, to watch your progress in the womb of sleep, to have the power to plant invisible kisses on your nearly blank faces, or to kneel at your sides and practice the grief of your deaths. I stretched out my hand, as if to touch you, to steady your hold on sleep. My hand completely erased you from my sight, and I marveled at this as I had as a child when I could prove my thumbnail was larger than the moon. I felt myself filling with emotion, as a room might fill with light.
With my back to my parents again, I searched through the unvarying blackness of their closet, and though I must not have stood there very long (because Arthur’s sport jacket was the eighth piece of clothing I inspected and in it I found his wallet and his keys) I would not have been surprised to face the room again and find it lightening with the first spray of dawn. With Arthur’s heavy, tarnished ring of keys on my thumb and a mint- fresh twenty-dollar bill, I slipped out of the room, moving so silently that I was only intermittently conscious of myself.
I closed their door with a soft, final click and went to the end of the foyer. I turned on a light and opened the Yellow Pages to find the number of a taxi fleet. I chose the one with the largest ad and after I spoke to the dispatcher I sneaked into the kitchen and drank what was left of the Gordon’s gin straight from the bottle.
A few minutes later I was sitting on the steps in front of our apartment building, breathing the free night air. It was my first time out on my own but the momentousness of the occasion barely grazed me as it passed. It was three in the morning and whoever was having a late Saturday night was having it elsewhere. The street was empty. The first headlights I saw coming down Ellis Avenue belonged to the cab I’d called, a battered yellow hulk with a checkered fringe painted around its roof.
“Hello,” I said, opening the back door. I wasn’t so stupid as to think that you greeted cab drivers like that, but I did it anyhow. I had put myself in a trance to make it through the time separating my calling the cab and its arrival and I needed to make contact with someone outside of me. The driver was a youngish man. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled and had a pony tail. A huge portable radio next to him competed with the two-way radio from which his company’s dispatcher honked and squeaked like an electronic goose. The driver nodded at my hello and placed his ha
nd on the meter’s lever so he could pull it the moment my backside touched his upholstery. “I’ve got to get downtown,” I said, still not getting into the cab. I was afraid to. My first time out of the house alone should have been a walk around the neighborhood in the sunlight, not a cab ride downtown in the hot darkness, with stolen money and stolen keys in my pocket.
I got in the back seat, gave the driver the address, and began to tremble. I tried to put myself in an adventurous frame of mind, to imagine a trenchcoat on my shoulders and a cigarette plugged into the corner of my mouth—a man with a mission, a man alone. But those second-hand images could only flicker, they could not sustain me. I couldn’t even bear to look out the window, and each time the cab made a turn I felt my insides lurch. My legs were crossed tightly and I hugged myself, with my elbows digging into my ribs and my hands clutching my biceps. I heard a weak, low moan and it took me a moment to realize that it was coming from me.
Too soon, we were in front of my father’s office. It was on Wabash underneath the elevated tracks. I looked out of the cab’s rear window at the deserted street. The streetlights shined down on emptiness. The stores had steel gates over the windows.
“Four-fifty,” said the driver, not turning around.
“All I’ve got is a twenty,” I said, digging it out of my pants.
The driver muttered something and opened a cigar box next to his portable radio and thumbed through a stack of bills. Next to the cigar box was a billy club with nails driven halfway in. He began counting out my change.
“Say, I wonder if you could wait,” I said. “I won’t be very long.”
“The meter’s off,” he said.
I stopped to consider what this meant; it made no sense to me.
“I’ll be about ten minutes. Then I’m going right back to Hyde Park. It’ll be hard for me to get a cab. Could you please wait? Here. Take the twenty, OK? That way you’ll know I’m coming back.” I handed him the twenty and put my hand on the back door handle but didn’t open it. I wanted him to reassure me that he would wait. “OK?” I said.
He put the twenty on the dashboard and turned off his motor, the lights.
I’d been to my father’s building dozens of times. As a young boy I’d pretended to be his partner, lunging for the phone whenever it rang, stuffing my shirt pockets with his pens, riding on the sliding library ladder. It was a small, whitish building, filled with the offices of marginal enterprises: importers of knickknacks, jewelry repair, the editorial offices of a Serbo- Croatian newspaper, a chiropractor, a Hong Kong tailor. I tried the street door on the off-chance it was unlocked, but it wasn’t. There were seven keys on my father’s ring and the first one I tried unlocked the door. (A measure of my state of mind was the intense, practically religious exultation I felt at this.) Inside, I found myself beneath a flickering fluorescent light. I listened for footsteps—perhaps they kept a maintenance man on twenty- four-hour duty. I stood there, transfixed, much longer than necessary. Something in me wanted to stay right there, to not walk up the one flight of stairs to my father’s office. It was the first time in three years that someone in control didn’t know exactly where I was; now, at last, my aloneness was complete and it terrified me. The only cord connecting me to the known world was that cab outside—or had it already left? I didn’t dare look and finally the thought of the driver making off with my money and abandoning me was more palpably frightening than anything else and I ran to the steep, dingy stairway and raced up it three steps at a time.
It was dark on the second floor, a solid, unvarying darkness. I staggered forward and kicked a wash bucket that had been left in the corridor. It went crashing down the hall and I covered my ears and said, “Shhh.” I waited for the darkness to recede. I stared ahead, blinking slowly, trying to tame the blackness with the intensity of my need to see. Slowly, I began to make out shapes. I could see the glass on the doors along the wall. My father’s office was the third one down and I made my way toward it. This time, though, I wasn’t so lucky with the choice of keys. I went through the seven keys three times around before I got the door to open.
I turned on the overhead light and regarded my father’s small office, I knew that I must move quickly, but that was all I knew. I didn’t know which way to turn. I closed the door behind me. I went to his desk and forced myself to sit in his swivel chair: my body was so stiff with fright that it was hard to seat it. Then I went through his desk drawers. I rifled through reams of blank paper, stacks of yellow legal pads, blank contracts, forms, packets, pads, boxes of pencils, balls of twine, envelopes, folders. Somewhere in the middle of going through his desk I took the phone off the hook—I’d imagined it ringing and what that would do to me. I didn’t look very carefully. I was too scared to search well, but I satisfied myself that the letters weren’t in Arthur’s desk. I went across his small office to the file cabinets. They were locked but the key, a small slender one, was on the ring. The files were packed. I looked under Axelrod, under Butterfield, under David, and under Jade. Finding nothing, I even looked under Letters. Everything seemed innocent and impersonal and suddenly I was filled with a boiling sadness for my father and his files, for the work he had done, for the tender, perishable details of his life.
His file cabinet was three gray metal drawers and two of them were sufficient for the alphabet. I opened the third. There were old staplers, phone books, a flashlight, a scarf…But in the back of it was a locked metal box, the size of a bread loaf. I picked it up and I knew that if my letters existed, they were in that box. The keyhole told me that it took a key the size of the one that had opened the file cabinets, but there was only one key like that on the ring. I tried it but it didn’t fit. I don’t really remember what I did next. I was no longer able to move in any deliberate way. I went to the bookcase and randomly removed some volumes, thinking the key might be hidden behind one of them. I picked up ashtrays, fell to my knees and peered beneath the office’s two green chairs. I paced wildly around and around, slapping crazily at my thighs and talking to myself, like a prisoner in the violent ward. Somewhere along the way I must have organized my senses enough to sit at his desk again and go through the drawers because soon I was inspecting the top middle drawer where, on a little interior shelf, which it shared with two sharpened pencils and a roll of mints, I found the key. I closed my fist around it, closed the drawer, and then collapsed onto the desk and burst into tears.
But there was no time for that. Still weeping, I made my way across the room again and, no longer with any energy left to hope, I opened the box.
Jade, our letters were there, all of them, folded and packed into a long brown envelope. Your handwriting was next to mine and I held them both and the words that we wrote.
When I finally left the office and went down to the street, the taxi was still waiting. The driver sat sleeping at the wheel, his chin touching his chest. I watched him for a moment and imagined he dreamed of someone he loved. The night had turned cool and the wind touched me as if for the first time. The sky was slatey, with a few bluish stars poking out of it. The moon, practically full, hovered on top of a nearby office building, like a bright cold dome. I looked at that moon as I had so many nights before, for prisoners love the moon, but now I was not looking at it as a prisoner, and not just as a dreamer, but as a free man, a pilgrim, a navigator charting his course.
5
Left to my own devices, I don’t know what I would have done with my life. But so much was required of me: I had to enroll in school, I had to see a psychiatrist twice a week, I had to stay in contact with my parole officer, and I needed a part-time job. Everything was too mandatory, pressing, and I resented it with a deep, helpless passion.
With the help of my mother’s friend Millicent Bell, I got into Roosevelt University and was even allowed to apply some of my work at Rockville toward college credits. Roosevelt is a big downtown college, with a student body made up of part-time workers, married people, and a lot of people over forty. There was no campus an
d because there was no obvious place to meet and talk, it was difficult to make friends with the people you shared classes with—or, in my case, easy not to. I studied astronomy, though Roosevelt was not much of a school for that. I took math, physics, and I did well in my courses, but none of my instructors seemed to recognize me from one class to the next. Even the guards at the planetarium where I showed up two or three times a week to stare at the dome full of lucious points of fire and light never remembered me, never returned my nods.
My psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Ecrest, and I liked him as much as you can like a psychiatrist you don’t want to be seeing. The parole officer assigned to look after my progress was a nominal Japanese named Eddie Watanabe. Eddie had shoulder- length hair, wore blue jeans, and had one of those peace symbols around his neck, the kind they sell on streetcorners, large as a grapefruit and dangling from a piece of rawhide. It was his strange contention that his being a parole officer represented a victory for “our side.” I would have loved to tell him exactly what I thought of his Beatle song lyrics, his freshly shampooed hair that looked as soft as a night cloud, his fake-o belief in “bein’ straight with each other,” and the enthusiastic, utterly humiliating bicep-squeezes he forced me to endure whenever I told him something he could categorize as “super news.” But Eddie, like so many before him, had a great deal of power over me—exactly how much, I hoped never to test.
Endless Love Page 9
