“Hey, you grabbin' my girl,” said the blond boy, and, with a straight face, whipped a blue-veined, grenadelike fist into Stern's ulcer, stopping at the last possible instant and saying “Pow!” instead of landing the blow. Then he threw his head back and howled, saying, “You grab my girl, I got to give you one. Pow, pow, pow!”
“Suivez-moi to my petite habitat,” said the girl, going up ahead of the group. “And a young girl shall lead them.”
Not sure whether further waist encirclements were permissible, Stern walked beside her, and she said, “I used to work in a hardware store. You meet a princely selection of spooks there, it being near the main drag. One such spook came in one morning and said his friend wanted to spend the evening with me for $140. I asked him where yon friend was. He said he was across the street in a building watching the two of us with a telescope and would come down if I assented. I replied in the negative, of course. I'll entertain a man, to be sure, but not a telescoping type. You do agree there are many spooks in this land of ours.” Stern, flattered that she had told him an anecdote, was not sure what to reply and decided he would tell her about his ulcer, testing her reaction.
“I've got something inside me. That's why I'm at the Home. I'm not sure how all this running around will affect me.
“The shits,” she said. “I know them. The shits are a chore.” She whirled around now and slid her fingers under the shirt of the tall, blond boy. “Does the darling midnight fool feel a cha-cha within him?” she asked. The blond boy took one hand off the wheelchair, tapped the underside of her breast, and said, “Flippety-flippety. Hey, Stern, you see that? Flippety-flippety.”
The girl led them to the last house at the edge of a dead-end street; a sign saying “Tina's Beauty Salon” was in the center of the lawn alongside a thin and graceful tree. It had a white luminescent stripe across the bottom of its slender trunk, making it look like a thoroughbred horse's taped ankle.
“My queenly habitat,” said the girl, and led them through the front door and down a long corridor with lined-up rows of hair-drying machines. She opened a door at the end of the corridor and guided them now into a small, sparely furnished room with a single bed and one wall papered with Broadway show posters. The lamplight within was warm, making her features seem smoother and heightening the Tierney resemblance; Stern, weakened now by the bulge of her black sweater, the things she had been saying, and the show posters, wondered how it would be getting a divorce, being bled financially, and starting up anew with the Puerto Rican girl in this very room.
The girl flicked on a victrola, putting a finger to her lips, and said, “I'm just a tattered tenant here.” She closed her eyes and swayed to the music as though it were a treatment; her body lagged a trifle behind the beat, in the slow-motion style of the feebleminded children she watched each day. Holding out her arms to the blond boy, she said, “Step inside this delightful sound.” The blond boy came over, pinched her skirt, and said, “Check your oil.” Then he pointed to the Greek boy, who sat staring out at the stars, rubbing his hands as though washing them in a sink. “Dance with George,” said the blond boy. “Hey, George, dance with the broad.” The Greek boy, his back to the others, a lawyer deciding a case, said, “I don't like dancing. I came out with you to do some jazzing.”
The tall boy suddenly grabbed the Greek's wheelchair and pushed it out the door, saying, “I got an idea.” Inside the beauty parlor room, he picked up a cigarette holder, put on a hairnet, and sat beneath a hair dryer. “Hey, look at me,” he hollered back to Stern and the girl. “I'm an old broad.”
The girl closed the door and said, “Boredom sets in swiftly.” Still swaying to the music, she asked Stern, “What is your work?” Thrilled by her sudden interest and loving the way she had asked the question, Stern said, “Product labels. There's some writing to it, only not literary.” Dancing with closed eyes and lagging behind the beat, she said, “Someday I, too, shall write a volume. I shall include the sweetness and bile of my life.” She stopped dancing now and said, “One of the spooks at the hardware store asked me to do some modeling. Bearded chap. Does figure work mean you work in the altogether, or does one get to keep a doodad on?”
“I don't get into that in my work,” said Stern. “I don't like the sound of what you said, though. I have some friends who are legitimate photographers.”
She changed the record to a fox-trot now and, taking off her skirt, said, “How would I look adorning magazines?”
Stern stopped breathing, and it suddenly came home to him that they were only a mile or so from the Grove Rest Home and that he was supposed to be undergoing treatment. He was certain that he would be caught, and he tried to imagine what untold horrors would await him if he were brought before the Home committee. At the very least they would throw him out, marking his records so that he would be banned from other rest homes when, at some later date, new illnesses came on. Then he imagined one gentile on the committee smiling thinly and saying, “No, no, let's let him stay,” and then seeing to it that he was given a daily allotment of tarnished pills so that his stomach sprouted an entire forest of ulcers.
She put her hand on her hips in a terrible thirties pose and then took off her sweater, saying, “Oh yes, the bosom culture; I'd forgotten.” Her breasts poured forward, capped by slanting, evil, Puerto Rican nipples, and Stern had a sudden feeling that his wife, at that very moment, sad-eyed and chattering with need, was hoisting her own sweater above her head in the rear seat of a limousine, that there was a strange sexual balance wheel at work, and that for every indiscretion of Stern's his wife would commit one too, at best only seconds later.
Like a discharged mortar shell, the tall, blond boy, a salivated look of rage on his face, charged into the room now and said, “Oh, you lookin' at my girl's nips, eh?” He shoved Stern against the wall and shot his fist at Stern's neck, stopping once again at the final instant and saying “Fwot” instead of landing the blow. Then he became convulsed with laughter, doubling up on the bed and howling, “I got you again.” The boy stood up then and kissed the girl's nipples with loud, smacking sounds and said to the Greek, “Good set, eh?” Stern, feeling somehow that the girl's breasts were going to get hurt, walked over to her and said, “We were discussing something and she was demonstrating it.” The tall boy said softly, “Oh, that's all right. I just like to diddle her boobs a little. George and me will take ten outside and kid around with those dryers.” Then, with increasing kindness, he said, “You know the way you say things? Like what you just said? You were discussing something. That's nice. The way you have of saying all the thoughts in your head.”
Stern noticed now for the first time that the boy's T-shirt had holes in it, and he felt very sorry for possibly having taken something away from him. What if his veins acted up and he had to spend six months in a room, unable to swing from trees and make believe he was going to hit Stern in the ulcer?
“We can all stay in here and play around,” said Stern, but the blond boy walked out, saying, “That's all right, Mr. Stern, sir.” To the boy in the wheelchair, Stern said, “You can stick around,” but the Greek youth, rubbing his hands, said, “No, I don't feel like it tonight. You know, some nights you're just not in the mood for jazzing.” He wheeled himself out of the room, closing die door behind him, and the girl put her arms around Stern's neck and said, “Sweet riddance. Now, my knighted author, will you be with me on the highest of all levels?”
Minutes previous, when she had taken off her clothes, Stern had planned merely to stare at her and fix her in his memory. Perhaps he would tap her behind and feel her breasts in the style of the other boys and then race back across the streets to the Grove Rest Home. It seemed to him that somehow if he did more, the Home would definitely hear of it, his treatment would be disrupted at an early stage, and he would be doomed to walk the streets forever with a permanent ulcer blooming between his ribs. And, of course, if he were to go further, within minutes his own wife, skirt gaping and great eyes confident, would
sink back comfortably on the rear cushions of some strange convertible.
He waited for an outraged knock at the door, the clatter of Lennie's machine-shop legs, but nothing came and he fitted his hands over the girl's nylon-covered buttocks, thinking that he had never held a Puerto Rican behind before and that maybe it was a little different. She took his ear between her chipped white teeth, as though she were an animal pawing meat, and said, “Wondrous author of mine, explore forbidden avenues with deponent thine.”
She guided him to the bed, did a dipping thing to make herself nude, and said, “Honest, do you think I'm sensitive?”
“Yes,” said Stern, who loved the things she said.
She pulled him to her and said, “Then thrill my secret fibers.” She put a contraceptive on him and said, “Now, honey, don't spoil it. Really, let's do a good one.” It bothered Stern that she had the contraceptive on hand, but he liked the way she managed it, and the idea of her having one ready suddenly threw him into a frenzy. After a moment, she whispered, “We are as pages in a book of sonnets. Really give it to me.” He said, “All right,” and after a few seconds she rose and said, a little irritatedly, “Oh, you thrilled me, all right. You really thrilled me.” She got into her clothes, and then the irritation passed, and she perched on the bed beside him and said, “Such loveliness I have never known.” Her bare brown Puerto Rican knees excited Stern and he wanted her again. He had loved the things she whispered to him and the sting of her teeth pulling on his flesh like meat. “Tell me of your literary prowess,” she said.
The door opened and the blond boy came in and said, “We're tired of sitting around out there.”
Stern looked out in the corridor and saw the Greek boy's wheelchair against the window. He went outside to him and found the boy crying. “My leg is gone,” he said. “I ain't got two fucking legs any more.” Stern took the boy's head against his waist and rubbed his neck, trying to think of something to tell him. But there was nothing. What could he say? That the leg would grow back again? “Some people have things even worse than legs in their stomachs,” he said finally. He wheeled the boy inside the room, where the girl sat perched on the bed. The tall, blond boy picked up an extra-long broomstick handle and said, “Hey, George, let's give her a ride.” He quickly slid the broomstick between the girl's legs, and the boy in the wheelchair, getting the idea, dried his eyes, wheeled close, and caught the other end, so that they had her straddling the stick as though she were on a fence. They began to lift her up and down on the broomstick, the two of them howling at the ceiling, while the girl shouted, “Lemme off, you bastards.” Stern shouted, “You'll hurt her down there,” but she looked so awkward, he stopped loving her immediately. When she cursed at them, Stern looked at her and said, “I can't do anything.”
“Hey, Mr. Stern, keep her up there,” said the blond boy, and Stern took the Greek boy's end and tossed her up and down a few times, saying, “I'm going to do this a little, too.”
They finally let her down, and for an instant, straightening her skirt, she smoothed her hair and pretended nothing had happened. “Let me tell you further of my book,” she said to Stern. But, after seeing her on the pole, the thought of her terrible Puerto Rican writing disgusted him and he said, “No literary stuff now.”
She bent over then, holding her crotch, and said, “Ooh, you really hurt me down there, you cruddy bastards.” Stern felt good that she had addressed all three of them, not excluding him, and it thrilled him to be flying out of her apartment with his new friends, all three howling and smacking each other with laughter at the pole episode. He wanted to be with them, not with her. He needed buddies, not a terrible Puerto Rican girl. He needed close friends to stand around a piano with and sing the Whiffenpoof song, arms around each other, perhaps before shipping out somewhere to war. If his dad got sick, he needed friends to stand in hospital corridors with him and grip his arm. He needed guys to stand back to back with him in bars and take on drunks. These were tattered, broken boys, one in a wheelchair, but they were buddies. They skidded across the lawn, wildly recalling the night's events.
The blond boy: “You see me kick that guy's ass? Pow, pow, pow!”
The Greek: “We almost ran that broomstick up the broad's kazoo, man.”
Stern: “Did you see me hold that strong little guy at the bar?”
They split up at the main gate, each stealing back to his room separately. “Tomorrow night, maybe we do some real jazzing,” said the boy in the wheelchair as they parted.
Exhilarated as he slipped past Lennie's darkened office, Stern, approaching his room, felt his stomach and was surprised to find the tapestry still prickling raw against it. Perhaps excitement is not good for it, he thought—even good excitement. But it did not really bother him, and it occurred to him for the first time that if necessary, by God, he would live with the damned thing. He opened his door now and saw the half man, bathrobe flown apart, toothache towel around his jaw, sitting on Stern's bed. The sleeping actor's foot stirred momentarily, tapping the edge of the bed in time to some forgotten vaudeville turn. Stern wheeled around in a panic, wanting to flee the room until the half man was out of there and his bed was scrubbed. He went out into the hall, but the half man chased and caught him, gripping Stern's wrist in a death vise. “Question,” he radio-croaked in the dark hall.
“What?” asked Stern, his eyes closed so he would not see the half man, not daring to inhale lest he smell his halves.
“You Jewish?” the man asked, croaking so close his mouth worked against Stern's ear.
“Yes,” said Stern, shutting his eyes until they hurt.
“Me, too,” croaked the man, wheeling Stern around so that he had to face him. “I'm Jewish, too.”
It did not thrill Stern to hear this. It was no great revelation, and it failed to touch him, just as the man's terrible violin playing had not moved him either. He said, “OK,” and freed his wrist, but as he walked away a crumbling chill seemed to invade him, starting between his shoulder blades and pouring through all of him. He turned and kissed the man and hugged him and put his nose up against the man's toothache towel, and then, perhaps using some of the courage he had amassed that evening, embraced the man's bad side, too.
He had counted on firm handshakes and hearty good-byes, exchanged phone numbers, pledges to continue friendships, and deep sincere looks in the eye, but on the morning of his departure he found that the people at Grove hung away from him. He was sitting on the porch with them, after leading the dumb march back from breakfast with Rooney in his arms, and he said to Rooney, “I'm all better and I'm going home today.”
Rooney, who had been clinging to a pole and making waspish comments about the wealth of horse owners, turned to Stern and said, “You didn't say anything about that.”
The old actor overheard Stern and said, “What did you come up for, if you were only staying such a little time? That's really country, boy, really country.”
It was as though by getting healthy he had violated a rotted, fading charter of theirs and let them down. He had come into their sick club under false pretenses, enjoying the decayed rituals, and all the while his body wasn't ruined at all. He was secretly healthy, masquerading as a shattered man so that he could milk the benefits of their crumbling society. And now he felt bad about not being torn up as they were.
“I didn't know you weren't that sick,” said Feldner in his bathrobe. “I had what you got, and I needed the warm of a stew in me every day for two years.”
“I may have to come right back,” said Stern, trying to make the man in the bathrobe feel better.
He went over to the charged-up blond boy, who was leaning on the young Greek's wheelchair, and said, “Maybe you can take a run by my place when you get sprung.”
But the camaraderie of the wild evening was gone. “You weren't even in here much,” said the blond boy, and the Greek youth said, “Yeah, what'd you come up here—to fool around?”
Only Lennie was consistent that morning.
He had taken Stern's baggage out of the room himself, and when Stern tried to help him, he said, “No infractions on last days. There are patients who rupture before check-out, and legal suits come about. Patients to the right as we take baggage downstairs.” At the bottom of the steps, he loaded Stern's valises onto the baggage rack and walked intricately into his office. “Final pill,” he said to Stern, getting one ready in a little cup. When the Negro handed him the pill cup, Stern stuck a folded-up five-dollar bill in the pocket of the intern's jacket. His mother had always stuck bills in the pockets of busboys and waiters and, after each insertion, had said, “I never missed that kind of money. You should see the respect I got for it.” Lennie took the bill out of his jacket, examined it, and put it back in his pocket. He started to turn around, but then he changed his mind and asked Stern, “Anyone around?” Stern said everyone was out on the porch, and the Negro said, “Come on in here then,” beckoning Stern into the forbidden office. “Have a seat,” said Lennie, locking them both in. He sat down himself, releasing gears and switches, and then produced a loose-leaf notebook. He thumbed through it, stopped at a page, and said, “The old actor guy. Guy you roomin' with. He go around saying he got the weakness. He ain't coming out of here. They been trying to get him ready for another operation, but he too weak.” He flipped the page and said, “Girl check in here two days ago,” referring to a young and pretty blond girl who had kept to herself. “She says she restin'. Well, she got something in her from intercoursin' with a man too big for her. Who else you want to know?”
“None of the others right now,” said Stern, wanting to leave the room but afraid to offend the Negro.
“That's all right,” said Lennie, turning to another page. “Rooney, the guy you carryin'. Bones softening up; nothing they can do on him. He be here for the duration.” He flipped again. “Feldner, the Jew fella. He hit Casino. He gettin' out but ain't got no more'n a year.” Without referring to the book, he said, “The half guy you see stalkin' around. He surprisin' everybody. He gawn be around when they all through.”
Stern Page 14
