“Mayor’s a pal of yours, huh?”
“We can see this area. From my secretary’s office.”
“Blum?”
Buddy nodded. The food had given him color.
“She has a good view, huh. The best.”
For a liar, his father had steady eyes. “The whole office has a good view, Bunty.”
“Which way do you face?” He couldn’t help it if he sounded like that actor talking to old Von Stroheim from the opposing battlement.
Buddy had his elbows on the table. “Everywhere.” He spoke from behind his fists. “We have the whole floor.” He shrugged. He took no joy in that now, the shrug said. But a newsboy from Brooklyn twitched one corner of his mouth.
“One whole floor up there?” Through the cafe’s other window they could see the building complex he recognized from slides, a dull safe-deposit gray, up against the Strozzi Palace of the Federal Reserve. “You must own a bank.”
The sky outside was scudding to a wind. Going to be one of those rough equinoctial days.
“Maybe we do. You never came downtown to see.”
One of these days that came anytime of the year, any country. The waves were whipping a little, past these buildings that were all of silver, no matter what the dawn was saying.
“Maybe we should all go to live down there. Maybe we should of, long time back.” He felt sick. Glad.
“You might get lost down there, friend. Your last letter was sent to two offices back.” Buddy put his palms on the table, to stop their tremor.
He means what kind of a son am I, can’t remember his father has an office at One Chase.
Listen Buddy. What’s this all of a sudden you been holding the fort and I’m the shirk? You approved of me not going, all along the line. You all but connived. Or would have, if my number had come up. Pulling strings, like Gramps did for Uncle Charlie in the last one—oh yeah, I heard.
The greaser was looking at them; the place was filling up.
“I go round the world, Buddy, the whole world,” he said. “And I don’t get lost. Only here.” He got up and went to the counter to pay. One of the two workmen who had come in first was joshing the other. “Pay for your coffee just because you’re my boss, ah c’mon.” He winked at the counterman. “Section boss he is, since yesterday. Nah c’mon, bigtime.” He paid.
The money in his pocket sluiced through his fingers. He paid.
Buddy was already at the door. Below his own eye level, his father’s shoulder was the same substantial bulwark it had always been. He pressed a hand on it and opened the door.
Going up the hill to the Chase, Buddy took his arm. He seemed to need it. A strange sensation. He held his own arm stiff. Available without seeming to be. “Sure you don’t want to go to a hotel?”
No answer. Why are we going to the office?—his father had said, still white about the gills, as they left the apartment, handing the keys to the guard—We are going to the office because that is where I feel safe.
When they reached the Plaza, Buddy disengaged his arm. To one side of the patterned stone well in the center, a huge white plaster thingum, gaily striped in black, froggied its open spaces at them, galumphing on the gray air. “The new Dubuffet. Like it?”
Public games. Two of the early morning populace passed under it, mute and dogfaced.
“Looks as if it’s kidding the place.” The town had opened its streets to these outcroppings, and closed its eyes. “Thingum-lingam,” that card Jasmin had said, passing one.
“Rockefeller took a lot of flak for it.”
Flak. On a civvy tongue. It scraped him. It violated old movies. He had no other right.
Going up in the elevator, his ears clicked. The elevator brinked. After Europe’s, it had the self-assurance of a plane. He stepped from it, eyes wide as a blind man’s. Buddy led him to a gilt-marked door.
“Q. Bronstein,” Bunty said. On his own passport it was spelled out. “I like that.”
“Get a lot of mileage out of that Q.”
A lot, a lot. A little, a lot. A son, a son. His father’s linear reality walked before them, like a duck.
“You didn’t eat, did you. You can eat here.” Buddy held out a small key. “Blum had it made for me at Tiffany.”
Gold. He had no interest in the inscription. “What do I do with it?”
“Open up.” Buddy was panting.
The door gave without fuss. No alarms here. His father passed under his arm, stumbling like a man coming up out of a submarine. Murmuring “Show you later,” he shucked coat and hat on a desk, went in the door marked Q.B., and came out with a couple of pills in his palm, and a glass. “Seconal. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
“C’mon then.” He downed a pill. “This stuff won’t take for a quarter-hour yet. I’ll hold off on the other one. Give you the short tour.”
“Okay.” He saw Buddy was still trembling.
The place was quiet as a dead beehive. All shades were at weekend half-mast. He had walked into a part of his childhood which he had forgotten—the Saturday half-day office—and knew at once he would miss forever, if he took no care. Limegreen quiet. Clerks here or not here, but all with lives folded like locust-wings behind them. Kept well back of what was needed here. Cherry voices, thick with orderliness. All tame ghosts, ready for Monday. The telephones sentient; no real death here. Night coming on, with its uptown complications, but there’s a chance you could stay; there’s a cot in the washroom. And a couch. He and his father had done it once; he must have been about five. Brooklyn, and a death. They had come here to escape the hysterical drawstrings of the house. And to be where Buddy had to be in the morning. Even with his grandmother dead, he could feel his father lapped in that earthly satisfaction. The letters on the door then were his grandfather’s: A.B. “In Abraham’s bosom,” his father said, bringing him a play pad and pencils. “Yes, it’s good here.” He had already half-learned to read from the lettering on such pads, and ledgers and bill-forms. The office lingo exchanged above his head stuck there like the “hundreds and thousands” candies he always got here, which congregated in his palm, mixing their tiny colors with his dirt, before he got them down. There was a word in the washroom, not quite rubbed out, what was it? “Give that Caliban of a cleaner his time and goodbye,” Abe had said. On the moved-out cot, waves of selling and buying rocked him to sleep as neatly as the painted cross-stitching on his home nursery towel. Above his head, on the darkish, diplomaed wall, the word, “Actuary” glimmered like a furl from Abe’s feather-pen, which stood on the desk in a bell of shot, and had come from a time called the sesquicentennial.
And all night long, he woke to watch the desk, hoping that the beautiful birds of chance might fly out of their pigeonholes.
You never liked offices, Betts. You drank to get out of them and “into” life, as you said—and got jammed halfway. I think you never tasted an office young enough. To feel the blood-urge when the beehive is humming, and people are going happily out of their minds with the business that keeps them sane. And porky with eating that’s paid for. And sexed, with the sweet pinch of ass and swell of cockfight that underwrites all deals.
You never felt the mysticism of those afterhours down here or the Sunday ones, which comes of having the power to support a church without ever entering it, because rich men pass through the eye of the needle every time the telephone rings, and afterwards there is always a little typist-perfume lingering in the world of big ideas. But you’ll have to plug it in. Give old Batface its bit of barmecide.
Funny, that until I pushed in that office door after so long, I never thought of the place. Though it’s no secret to us that the man must confront the childhood. For the words in the washroom to burn up again in all their flaming colors, and the Calibans to crowd around us with their steamy brushes. And for the hundredfold innocences to roll again in the grundgey palm.
I pushed in that door—and out flew all the beautiful, sorry birds of chance.
Whe
n that happens, you can speak to a father in his lair.
We’d made the tour I could see he thought was such a big one. If you could walk with me now on the periphery of this so-called office, you would be tracing a high, miniature counterpart of this island, and its escarpments, the size of watch parts from up here, connecting on and on.
“Mainland can’t be told from island any more, can it,” I said. “You sure can see that from here.”
He liked that. I could see the world-dwarfing glitter in his eyes, as if you could cap an eye with gold, the way you can a tooth.
People in the street know that mainland-island bit by now. I made my naked eye-lens zoom down there, so that in my mind I saw them as I wanted to—just as knowing in their shabbiness. He had his mainland, I mine.
Inside the place here, there’s a real heartland of rooms that provision for nearly everything; you can imagine them connecting with lives outside, on and on. I like best the kitchen commissary that supplies everybody, from the hall large enough to entertain a government, to the director’s boardroom, to the coffee shop where the collars wilt from white to blue. I could tell from the cookery smells that there were Helgas here.
We peeped into the circular room that is a small stock exchange, where I could see how it would be on a business day—men crowded, beef-heads and lantern-jaws, curly and bald, diplomaed and rough diamond, hook-nose and North Shore pug, all at the round table-trough, while the lights jabbed on and off, on the big wall. It would be like a horse-auction I saw once in Brittany. You would never catch the flicker of the eye that says, “Buy!” Or the death-loll of the tongue that says sell.
Nearby, a door said Comparisons. Didn’t ask what meant; didn’t want to ask him anything more for a long while. Besides, I could figure it; the sellers and buyers both will want to know how well they’ve managed it. Money’s not so different from other constructions. Elbow-space. The pigeonhole pockets opening and shutting, while the brick builds in the bank vaults. And when all the plumbing’s in, government to government, state to state—and all the wires that you can teletype sugar and wheat and other futures on; when you’ve bonded people and their mutuals for the best tax shelters, how different is the lingo from Corinthians? You’ve got your cathedral. With a little bit of Borromini at the top if you want it, to make a girl lean back.
I’d tell him that later. Someday. In my own way.
You take much Seconal these days?—I was about to ask him, when he one-upped me. He opened the door on you. Batface.
I didn’t know you at first. The thingum he calls “the Zebel thing” is in front.
“Like it?” he said. Computer banks are getting smaller all the time. For the same performance. Still, for our needs—size gives confidence. Never thought we’d get Zebel though. To dress it up. This is the front office, you know. You and I came in the back.”
How you can have a front and back to a near-perfect circle, is Buddy’s lookout. I walked over to the great screen and flattened my palm on it. Not aluminum. Steel. Trying to look like a cosmic spider web, but only fifteen-foot high and within the building code. Shining through the plate-glass entry, Zebel’s metal mesh winked at the populace through dozens of light-slots, each one hooded in the very shape of the Rockefeller eye. Spiders of the world, unite!—I thought. You can do better; Art gets smaller all the time. But I liked Zebel; he was a man with a joke.
“Good as the Dubuffet anytime, Buddy,” I said. “Both of them understand Americans.” Zebel must’ve known my father wasn’t ready yet. For any flak. No matter; he did the right thing. You can’t hide a computer with art.
I stepped behind the Zebel to the good, clean space where the computer is. You are your own description, Batface, in magnetic light. And thoughts that get larger, all the time.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh God, god.” And a 7090. “The Lord is my shepherd.” Here you are.
“Had a course in them once, didn’t you.” He was yearning with pleasure. I’d admired something he had.
He didn’t even mind that I knelt.
I was at Betts’ grave again. His silent, magnetic grave. Knowing better now why I’d chosen his to visit, out of all those I could have touristed to. Vietnam, if I’d wanted to. People could do that all through the war, like vivandières. But I could never see any percentage in visiting the dead. For either of us. Yet I’d taken a plane and a bus to get to it—and a ramshackle limousine that rattled like a paddy-wagon and then broke down, leaving me to walk two miles unhelmeted, as if this was the right way that transportation to a grave should end.
Back here where no beetles were honing, Batface told me why I had done it. My father’s computer could tell me that without being asked. Betts taught me what Tufts had taught him. From bicycle to bicycle, I learned it, under the Babbidge-light the stars were sending us from the past, while we rode through people, machines and nature—all waiting to be hemmed in. In the lab, sweating next to me over the holy buttons, he taught me. The way Tufts taught him. With no words, and never an embrace. That’s why I went to New Delhi. To give him his percentage. He taught me obligation, Buddy. I thought it was love.
“Yeah, Buddy, I had a course. Like to find out someday, how this one ticks.” I put my hand on a familiar part of it. New Batface, larger and meaner to feed, but still the same.
“You would, huh.” Buddy put his glass of water down; he hadn’t taken the second capsule yet. He was glowing with a look I knew of old, without recognizing until now where he got it from. Old Abe’s—when a wayward boy was found to be still a possibility.
“Yeah. I thought I was over it. But I was lying to myself.”
He stared absently at the capsule. When you’ve taken a hundred of those, they’re like aspirin, like speed or anything. Or the wee, gummy pipe that Jasmin put me onto, once—a souvenir, brought to her with all the fixings, by a girl she’d nursed with in Hongkong. I suppose that not getting as gone as she did for those four hours, put me into the terror I have of it. I can’t stand to see anybody I like put themselves out. While I sit there alive-oh, and the double-bloody minutes, theirs and yours, go nihil-nihil down the windowpane.
“Got something else to show you, Bunty, something else. You don’t mind?”
“Mind? No, I don’t mind.” I minded his humbleness, though. Like his letter, theirs, it wasn’t to me, but to my youth—which made a nothing of me. And makes them angry in the end. Or depressed.
“Come on, then.”
He led me away from here, down and around corridors I planned to learn, to a door with no lettering. The whole place is like I imagine a brain to be, if you could live in it. Nothing in it too far from the rest.
This particular door was unlocked. There was nothing to steal here, that’s why. Barring a few of those worn possessions which drop off a family as it jogs, never to be seen again, unless—like here—they’ve been saved. Two morocco-leather couches whose heads make a corner, all the torn places showing tan under the black. A piano. Some pillows much too silly to have lasted. In the jointure of the couches, where the telephone used to be and still was, a crocky brass lamp. At the foot of one of them, a crumpled old throw. I walked over to finger it. Said to be camel’s hair once; by now it must be human skin. Its mottle was what memory is. Old on the eyeballs. The piano still said Kranich & Bach. Tackety-tock. Abe used to play a piece called Sentimental You on it, when he visited us. And the Continental Foxtrot.
“My corner,” I said. “At 101.”
“Abe’s old office in Brooklyn, first. Then mine.”
Not just 101 for me either; 101 was just the last. “I used to envy kids with houses—I didn’t think you could save apartments.”
Buddy laughed. “Saving is like spending, kid. A lifetime job.” He sat down suddenly.
“Abe’s office? How’d you come to bring it home?”
“I went bankrupt once and had no office. When you were just born.”
I sat down on the other couch. Sentiment is any story you haven’t been told. The more
watery ones, usually. “Anything else I ought to know?”
“Why? I look sick or something?” He said it craftily, like they do. Wood-touching. Only his shoulders looked changed to me. Lost a little hope.
“Just saving. Like you said.”
He fingered the phone. “She had an abortion the following year. After that, only misses. So you’re the sole heir.”
On the wall opposite me was one of my own brass-rubbings, sent him the winter before. I was already hung on a wall, a family artifact. Creepy. It was a start.
“What was she doing there, Bunt? In that glass thing?”
“Gambling. Signaling?”
“I went to college, too.” His ugly style. And Abe’s. “Fuck the psychology.”
“In the dorm, we had two girls we were always breaking in on.”
The men more often managed without signaling. Or with more success. Like yours, Betts. Or those are the friends I get.
“I should never have let her build that fool place.”
That last little bubble from the bottoms? He couldn’t mean it. He could.
“You couldn’t help it. You’re rich.”
“That a putdown? From the ranks?”
“Sure is. Learned it from you.”
I walked over to the piano to calm myself. Picked out a tune. Onka-bonka. Going to the front. Outside, the world is fair. “She said you give the parties now. You give that one?”
“I have a secretary, is all. Easier for Blum to send the invites. And then, if I want a few of my friends—” He stumbled. “I mean, like Leskel. Hard to separate business from pleasure these days. In our business.” Then he did what they do, if we’re handy. “It was your party, after all.”
“She says she couldn’t give the kind you wanted.”
“So? I never wanted the parties, kid. Those parties. I’m a busy man. In a world she … Parties.” He spat into the air. It was a good tycoon imitation.
Eagle Eye Page 13
