The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  I lied and said I did.

  “Dashiell got Karen’s hats listed on the Best Bets page of New York magazine, so everything’s hunky-dory.”

  Euclid liked reminiscing. He lit the next cigarette from the butt of the last and told me of other classmates, rehearsing grievances which seemed as fresh as if he’d left Vermont yesterday. In the gush of names I learned that Junie Alteck art-directed Cypress Hill and Redman videos, Bee Prudhomme had been knifed to death by a lover in a ski chalet outside Helsinki, and Moira Hogarth was a performance artist known for being censured by a Midwestern senator.

  Then Euclid began stubbing his cigarette and waving off the smoke and standing from the table, all at the same time. Arthur Lomb had come through the door, and now I understood why out of the host of Smith Street eateries Arthur had picked Berlin for our meeting. It was like him to underplay and show off at the same time. Arthur wasn’t so much fat as leadenly fleshy, along the coke-bottle lines of his growth spurt at seventeen. Still, I could see why, without anything to suggest a connection to that distant week of cocaine trafficking in Vermont, Euclid hadn’t recognized my old friend as his loathsome employer.

  The ashtray palmed unconvincingly away, Euclid scuttled into the back, and I saw what ten or fifteen years of waiting tables had done to the fragile homosexual prince I’d been so intimidated by, that first year of college. At Camden Euclid hadn’t asked to be liked, but he’d yearned to be pitied. I’d never managed before now.

  Chunky, bearded Arthur Lomb scowled at Euclid’s retreating back, then brushed real and imaginary ashes from Euclid’s place at my table, and sat.

  “You don’t want to nosh? It’s on me.”

  “I heard it’s your place.”

  “Right, I’m bleeding cash all over the place. What’s a little more?”

  “I’m good, I want to hit the road.” My rental car was sitting on Dean Street. I was anxious on behalf of its disc player.

  I’d invited Arthur to drive up to the Watertown prison with me, to visit Mingus. He’d declined. He’d already visited, earlier in the summer. But he wanted to see me, and proposed we drop in on Junior together. That was our mission this morning, and now that I’d put aside the distraction of Euclid I was impatient to have it done.

  “Okay, after you,” said Arthur. “Coffee’s on my tab, kids,” he shouted into the back.

  I took my package and we stepped together onto Smith, the block Euclid claimed all belonged to Arthur: a smashed barbershop with an old glass pole, a botanica, window full of votive candles and folk art, with ghetto apartments above it, and four or five of the understated, sexy little bistros Berlin was meant to undercut. The aesthetic was awfully precise, cute serifs hand-painted on tiny signs or directly onto the discreetly curtained windows. In acts of kitsch or voodoo they’d appropriated local-historical monikers: Breuklyn, Schermerhorn, Pierrepont. One called itself the Gowanus Tart Works, exhuming the name Isabel Vendle had worked so hard to bury.

  “Fuck you talking to my faggot waiter for?”

  Arthur wore a Yankees cap. I still hadn’t forgiven him his flip-flop from Mets fandom when we were twelve. That betrayal stood, in my mind, for Arthur’s easy adaptation to black style, his glomming onto Mingus Rude. The same inhibition that stuck me to the losing Mets had barred me from the minstrelry which would have allowed me to follow Mingus where he was going.

  It was a form of autism, a failure at social mimicry, that had kept me from the adaptations which made Arthur more Brooklyn than me, in the end. I’d had to hide in books, Manhattanize, depart. So it only followed that Arthur Lomb would still be here, gobbling up Smith Street’s commercial real estate just in time to cash in on the yuppie entrepreneurs, a fat local fuck.

  It was too much trouble to blow Arthur’s mind making him recall that the faggot waiter had once fondled his then skinny, narcotized ass in a dorm stairwell in Vermont. Lomb and Barnes could recover their small history, or not, without my help. I had no difficulty keeping secrets from Arthur. I’d done it my whole life, in the case of the ring.

  I said, “He told me you own the block.”

  “I’ve got five buildings, sure. You believe what they tell you, I’m Smith’s Don Corleone.”

  I wondered if it mattered to Arthur that his holdings were around the corner from our old school. Probably not. Probably you had to leave and come back, as I had, to feel the juxtaposition, the crush of time, as we now retraced our sixth-grade walks home to Arthur’s chessmen and graham crackers. Once upon a time me and Arthur Lomb cornering Smith onto Dean were merely the most yokeable pair of humans on the planet.

  The evening before I’d been given a Francesca Cassini–guided tour of my own life. “Imagine the two of you alone in this big house! ” she’d cried repeatedly, and I wanted to reply: I don’t have to! She’d rounded up some fugitive snapshots of myself and Abraham and created a new family album, one to follow the last of those Rachel had assembled and abandoned, the ones showing me in my mother’s arms, and Abraham, younger than I’d ever seen him, standing at his easel before paintings that were sold or lost before I or the film was conceived. Francesca’s album gathered school photos, my desperate grins against powder-blue backdrops, as well as a few from my Fresh Air summer, me and Heather Windle, pond-wet hair twisted into horns. The last pages showed Abraham and Francesca on an Italian holiday, my father shading his eyes on hotel terraces, restaurant patios, in vineyards. This was a satisfactory conclusion to the tale which preceded it—the two men alone in the house.

  More interesting to me were the new paintings, ten or so, hung in the corridor and stairwell. These were on boards, like my father’s jacket art. The style had no relation to his book designs, though. It recalled the paintings on those easels, and others, the nudes. These weren’t nudes but portraits: small, penetrating studies of Francesca with her glasses off. They weren’t flattering, but they weren’t exposés, either. What struck me was the lack of any strain to make the paintings differ. Several were nearly identical. In that sense they resembled the film, or, anyway, were indebted to the film in their diaristic patience. Something here might or might not change, they seemed to say. I have no particular stake one way or another, but if it occurs I will be here to record it.

  I couldn’t ask my father about them that night, couldn’t get words in edgewise. Francesca was overexcited at my being in the house, and her chatter was something all three of us could only wait out. My father went to bed. Francesca ran a while before exhausting herself. Once she did, I rang my own number twice, checked my messages. There were none from Abby.

  Francesca slept in. I’d asked Abraham to wake me for my date with Arthur at Berlin. He and I sat alone with coffee, but I couldn’t remember anymore what I’d meant to ask about the portraits. I told him I liked them.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you going to try to show them?”

  “I never think of it.”

  “You still work on the film?”

  Abraham shot me a look of stern Buster Keaton panic. “Of course, Dylan. Every day.”

  The abandoned house wasn’t abandoned. I had to count stoops from Henry’s yard to know which it was. Brickwork all along the block was repointed, the brownstone lintels and steps refreshed, the gatework repaired and reblacked—the block was like a set for an idealized movie that fudged poverty into sepia quaintness. Even the slate was straight and neat, repointed like the brick, where it hadn’t been replaced with poured concrete.

  I was gazing dizzily at the cornices, wondering how many rotting spaldeens still clogged gutters, when Arthur called to me; I’d drifted past him. He’d stopped to talk with a black woman on Henry’s stoop, or what had been Henry’s stoop, and though like Euclid she was no longer skinny, I knew the woman was Marilla. Her braids had grown long, and were bundled in a nest atop her head. She had a morning drink in a brown bag by her side on the bottom step.

  “You remember Dylan?”

  “What you talking about, Artie? I knew Dylan befo
re I even knew you.”

  The claims of provenance poured from us, like vows to a great cause. If Marilla hadn’t said it, I might have. It was barely different from writing, as I once had, No one who’s ever heard Little Willie John’s “Fever” ever need bother with subsequent recordings of the song. Maybe I’d first found it on Dean Street, my rage for authenticity.

  “You a big old man, Dylan. Where you been at?”

  “I live in California,” I said.

  “La-La went to California. You ever seen her?”

  “No,” I said, my voice almost failing me. “I never ran into La-La.” I considered the joke of La-La in La-La Land, figured it wouldn’t go over.

  “No?”

  “It’s a big place.”

  “I got to see that for myself one day.”

  Marilla wasn’t the least surprised to see me, only that it had been a while. I gathered she hadn’t left the block, that Arthur might be an adventurer who’d roamed far, by her measure. I wanted to convey my astonishment that she was still here, that after where I’d been she could still recognize me, but nothing I babbled about Berkeley or Vermont, about Jared Orthman’s office or ForbiddenCon 7, could have conveyed anything except, well, babble. My astonishment, really, was at my own denial of this place. Standing here with Arthur and Marilla it felt that to stay was the obvious thing.

  “Henry still live here?” I croaked.

  “He comes around,” said Marilla. “You should see these white people stare at us on his own street. They want to call the police and Henry is the damn police.”

  “The new type of people in the neighborhood don’t really get the whole stoop-sitting thing,” said Arthur apologetically.

  “Henry’s a cop?” I asked.

  “Actually, Alberto’s a cop, Henry’s an assistant D.A.” Arthur mused on this. “Pretty much everybody’s either in jail or a cop. Except for you and Dylan, Marilla.”

  “I know some people who should be in jail.”

  Arthur laughed. “We’re going to see Junior, Marilla.”

  “Junior? Damn. He first on the list.”

  Rhodes Blemner’s art director had gotten a startlingly early photograph from the Michael Ochs Archive for the cover of Remnant’s Bothered Blue box, one I’d never seen until finished copies of the set’s first pressing had arrived at my Berkeley doorstep a few weeks before, shipped direct from the Canadian factory. It showed Barrett Rude Junior at a microphone in the Sigma studio, ringed by admiring Distinctions, one hand to his ear, mouth bellowed wide like a bragging Ali. From the look it was one of their first sessions together, the Distinctions still awed by the jewel that had dropped into their setting.

  I wonder if a stranger could have squared that broad, strong face and those neat fingernails and geometric ’Fro, that sharp-knotted tie against paper-white shirt, the whole authority and predatory ease of the thirtysomething Barrett Rude Junior, with the Fu Manchu mustached, yellow-clawed, shrunken-apple-form who accepted the box as a gift from me now. It wasn’t that he should look as good— nobody had ever looked as good as the man on the box. But I don’t know how I could have fathomed time’s work on Barry’s face without my advantage of knowing son and grandfather. That was the gap the man and the box spanned. The singer in the photograph was Mingus at eighteen, on a good day. As for the man clutching the gift, shaking my hand, nails scoring my palm—well, if it was less than a revelation it was more than a joke, the line that came into my head: Junior was Senior now. He even wore Senior’s Star of David necklace, webbed in white at the gap in his robe. When I saw him lower his eyes to the box and discover himself I wanted to tear the thing from his hands and toss it in the street, only it was too late.

  “I wrote the notes,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Inside, there’s a book, a little essay about your career. I wrote it. I hope you like it.” I somehow hadn’t until this moment weighed the odds of Barrett Rude Junior reading my tribute. Now there were a few sentences I might prefer his eyes glossed over. Again, too late.

  “I like it already, baby,” said Barry. He put the box on the couch beside him where he sat. He’d ushered us in, no more surprised than Marilla had been. The apartment was barely changed, only corroded by twenty years of neglect. Barry took up a considerably lesser portion of it. I’d swear certain LPs were right where I’d last seen them, in piles on the floor by the stereo, half out of their sleeves.

  “See, Arthur,” he said, taking just a glance from the television, which was tuned to Judge Judy. The television was new, and I sensed it got more use these days than the stereo. “I always told you Little Dee would do us proud.”

  “Sure,” said Arthur. “Here, Barry, I brought you something too.” He slapped at his pockets until he found it: a fresh pack of Kools, which he tossed to Barry’s lap. “You know that warning about how smoking is bad for your health? Very few people realize I actually wrote those words.”

  “Y’all a couple of gifted children, I’ll give you that.”

  “Of course, they changed them all around, took out most of my best stuff.”

  “That’s their prerogative, though, isn’t it, Arthur?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got to grant them their pre rog ative.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I heard that.” Barry reached to graze fingertips with Arthur, still not neglecting the television show. He’d pushed the cigarettes off with the box set.

  “You want to hear the CDs?” I said stupidly. “They sound really great.” Barry’s publishing stake meant he’d see some money from the box, eventually. It should add to the trickle of royalties which presumably kept him in the house. Maybe I was wrong to think he should be proud of the monument too. Maybe the Barry I wanted to be able to give the box to was the Barry of 1975. That man, like the one in the photograph, was as inaccessible to Barry now as he was to me.

  “I know what all them old records sound like.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I’ll check them out some other time, man.” He spoke slowly and carefully, and I knew I should drop it. “I don’t have no CD player, anyhow.”

  I just nodded.

  “You know that Fran, that girl your old man took with?” Changing the subject, his voice grew gentle again. “She’s all right. She’s been looking out for me, you know.”

  “I heard.”

  “He’s lucky, find a girl like that.”

  “I know.” Everyone agreed, from A to Zelmo. I only hoped Abraham did too. It was then that I remembered what I’d wanted to ask my father about the new paintings. Were the portraits of Francesca an excuse to stare, to try to see through the skin of his new situation, this woman who’d taken Rachel’s long-abandoned place? Was he trying to fathom Francesca? Or had she asked him to paint her, requested he look with that intensity? Who’d sought the confrontation the portraits recorded?

  There was a long silence, filled by the television’s yammer. I began to think of the rental car again, and the road I meant to cover this day. My heart was bogging on Dean Street, but it was Mingus I had to see.

  Barrett Rude Junior focused his eyes on mine for the first time in nearly twenty years, perhaps reading my mind. His gaze at last pierced the caul that had covered it even when he’d found us at his door, and through his short inspection of the photograph and words on the box set’s cover.

  “What brings you round to see this old washed-up singer, Little Dylan?” he said. He gave washed-up singer some of his old melodic juice, and I felt a twinge in my saliva glands, as though I’d dipped my tongue to cocaine.

  “I just wanted to give you the records,” I said. I couldn’t call them CDs now.

  “You done that,” he said, a little coldly.

  “And we’re going up to visit Mingus. I mean, I am.”

  “Huh.” Barry clouded. He grimaced in concentration at something in Judge Judy’s realm, perhaps a ruling going the wrong way. Someone had to keep a watch on such stuff.

  “Ma
ybe if you’ve got any message for him—”

  Barry chopped with a clawed hand. Mingus in Watertown was too distant, that was what the gesture seemed to say. Dean Street was real, Francesca and Arthur were real and worth acknowledging. One brought soup, the other cigarettes. Judge Judy was real enough: she was in front of his eyes. I’d come and proposed that Barry consider California and 1967 and Watertown and those were all too remote, too tiresome.

  “You know I’m watching my morning shows,” he said, addressing Arthur. “I’m not awake yet, man. Come around tonight and we’ll party.”

  “Okay, but Dylan’s gotta head,” said Arthur. “He just wanted to say hello.”

  “Tell the boy I’m watching my morning shows.”

  Arthur walked me to my car, and apologized. “I should have told you not to mention Mingus,” he said. “It sort of shuts him down.”

  “What did Mingus do to him?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  I’d stashed my bag in the rental’s trunk already, and said my goodbyes, promising Abraham and Francesca I’d spend a day with them on the other end of my jaunt upstate, before I returned to California. I was ready to go.

  “Here,” said Arthur. He frisked himself again and produced an unsealed envelope full of cash, evidently counted in advance. He slapped it into my hand. “You can’t give it to them directly, they can’t have money inside. You have to contribute it to their commissary accounts, then they, you know, take it out in cigarettes, or whatever. Hundred apiece.”

  “Who’s they ?”

  “You know how I was saying to Marilla it seems like everybody’s in jail?”

  “Sure.”

  “Robert Woolfolk’s inside too. Watertown, same joint as Mingus.”

  chapter 11

  Iwas an amateur here, as much a neophyte crossing these thresholds as I’d been in L.A., penetrating Jared Orthman’s sanctum. Only now I was an amateur among professionals. All the black and Hispanic moms and grandmoms, all the stolid grown-up homeboys visiting homeboys, all but me knew how to visit a prison. Their expertise began to be shown just past the parking area, still well outside the outermost ring of wire, where taxicabs from the Watertown train station and the Greyhound terminal turned in a circle, where the chartered bus from New York, full of prisoners’ families, off-loaded and waited, the driver smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and picking tobacco from his teeth. There the visitors fell into a line, to trudge through a long shack, a small aluminum trailer on concrete blocks. It had been raining the afternoon before, as I drove out of the city, raining when I took my motel room just outside downtown, raining just a bit more this morning, as I breakfasted on sausage patties at a Denny’s. Now gray-green clouds wheeled above the prison and were mirrored in the puddled gravel at our feet. No one but me glanced up at the sky or down at the ground as I hurried in to take a place. Inside the trailer three guards— correctional officers, they were called—ran a bureaucratic outpost, one where we displayed ID, signed this form, then that one, giving address, stating relationship to prisoner, avowing comprehension of rules, etcetera. All but me knew the prisoner’s number they’d come to visit. I knew only Mingus’s name, causing a bored captain to have to flip open a fat binder to locate the corresponding digits. The bathroom in the trailer was our last chance to pee. Everyone took it, knowing the drill. I took my cue, fell in line. The trailer’s single pay phone was the last we’d see, and it too was in continuous use. I thought of calling home, trying for Abby. But the line of callers was too long.