Landlord-like, he squinted at the rough-stuccoed walls, peered up at the brown shine of the bulbs, to check their wattage. He performed actively as he walked the length of the hall, allowing no gleam of want to invade him. He rang the bell marked “M. Schoenbrun.”
Marvin Schoenbrun said nothing, but stood aside for him to come in. He was dabbing at a small red hole nicked into his cheek by shaving, a morbid expression on his exquisite face.
“Won’t take but a minute,” Norman said, sitting down and writing out the receipt in his small, considerate handwriting, which was too well formed to reveal character.
The room showed too much décor. Lamps and pictures were faultlessly and artfully arranged. A cluster of sea shells lay on a low round table and several others hung at varying heights on almost invisible wire, giving the desired effect of streaming down. A Biedermeier chair paid conversational attention to a Spartan couch covered in black sailcloth. The walls wore black-framed prints. You sensed the thought that a breach of taste might precipitate a more disastrous cracking.
“There you are,” Norman said.
“While you’re here,” said Marvin, as careful with spoken consonants as Norman was with written ones, “I was wondering whether there would be any difficulty about my having an air conditioner installed.” His face would have been beautiful in some other age; now it was embarrassing.
“In October?”
“Mainly I want it for the filtering action. I have a sinus condition. And besides, with the windows open, the soot is dreadful.” His after-shave lotion was too strong and sweet, and Norman wondered why he felt uncomfortable looking at him. I can no longer stand anything too immaculate, he thought. Dust is my destiny. He smiled at his silent pomposity.
“Well, I’m afraid there would be a problem,” he answered. “See, the electrical system is kind of antiquated. Antiquated . . .” Norman shook his head. “What it is really—it puts a severe strain on the wiring when you turn a toaster on.”
“What is the voltage?” Marvin asked, looking at the tissue he had been pressing against his cheek.
“The voltage?” Norman echoed.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Uh, well, it’s very low,” he said in the discreet tone of a doctor preparing the loved ones for an imminent death.
“Not one-ten!”
“Worse,” Norman said darkly.
“It can’t be.”
“It is,” he sighed regretfully.
“Well what is it?”
“What’s worse than one-ten?” Norman asked cagily.
“Nothing!”
“That’s what we’ve got.”
“I don’t understand. You wouldn’t even have lights. How do the lights work?”
“I’ve asked that question myself.”
“Oh, it’s too silly. In any event, it probably wouldn’t take an air conditioner,” Marvin said bleakly. “Everything is just too ridiculous for words.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Do you?” Marvin looked at him from a cage of scorn.
“Every time I look in the mirror,” Norman said cheerfully. “If you knew my history . . .”
Marvin looked inconsolable.
“You’ve fixed this place up beautifully,” Norman said, standing. “I would imagine young ladies were quite impressed.”
Marvin made a face of distaste.
Oh, Norman said to himself, suddenly reaching a total. Like that, of course. Poor fella, how can I compete for ridiculousness?
“Sorry about the air conditioner.”
“Yes, yes,” Marvin said. “All right.”
“Good night.”
“Good night,” Marvin answered, frowning at the red-dotted Kleenex.
•
“Come in, come in,” Stan Katz said from behind a wide shine of smile. “Don’t just stand there, don’t be strange.”
Norman barely smiled back. The first time he had been faced with Katz’s grin he had thought it expressed gaiety, but after long exposure to it he had recognized that what he had considered dimensional was really only painted on with clever fool-the-eye shadows. Now he felt no obligation to return it.
“Have to forgive the appearance, Moonbloom; we’re in the midst of our fall house cleaning.” He waved a trumpet at the littered room, which, as usual, showed signs of recent orgy. From the other room the sound of loud singing cut off suddenly.
Norman nodded and sat gingerly on a chair strewn with cracker crumbs. “I would like to ask a favor of you, Katz.”
“Name it, Moonbloom, you have but to ask,” Katz answered, his smile intruding on his speech so his M’s were closer to N’s.
“Well I’ve asked you before and I really . . .”
“Moonbloom-moom!” a skinny, black-haired man shrieked ecstatically from the doorway. He was stark naked except for sunglasses and a towel Arab-fashion over his head. “Is it Moonbloom of the Broom Street Moonblooms? Or Bloomin’ Moonbloom of Coon Lagoon?” He had a pencil-thin mustache and a long, swanlike neck, and would have been quite unbelievable to anyone seeing him for the first time.
Norman smiled tiredly. “Hello there, Sidone,” he said.
“And hello there, Moonbloomin’ Moonbloom!” Everything was delivered with the fervor of a man who laughs harder than anyone else at his own jokes’ punch lines. “How they hangin’, Moonbloom? Look at him, Stan, how peaceful he looks, how natural! You would almost expect him to move. Ah, those embalmers, are they experts.”
“He has a favor to ask, Jer,” Stan said, slouching in a battered armchair and running his fingers dotingly over his horn, tracing the intaglio cartouches on its body, depressing the valves with feather touches, his smile revealing its structure as a multitude of minute quivers and electrical arcs.
“For Moonbloom—the moon!” Sidone declaimed ardently.
Norman sighed, waiting for the intensity of idiocy to recede at least enough for him to be faintly heard. The room was messy. There were cigarette ashes still in their original, cylindrical shape and lying in the grooves they had burned on tables and counters. There was a smell of spilled beer and unemptied ash trays and an odor like bitter punk. A plumber’s candle stood in a saucer; a woman’s stocking hung from a wall fixture; a drumstick rose mastlike from an empty whisky bottle, capped with a prophylactic.
Sidone put a cigarette into a long holder and lit it.
Norman sat forward. “Now I know you fellas are musicians and . . .”
“The secret’s out, Stan,” Sidone said. “Moonbloom’s on to us.”
“All right,” Norman said with some impatience. “I know you have to practice, but you could practice during the earlier evening. Some of the other tenants . . .”
“Say no more, Moonbloom,” Sidone cried. “I know your problem. We are annoying people. Well we are annoying people. Stan, you must buy a mute for that horrid horn.”
“And you, Sidone, must buy a pair of those new sponge-rubber drumsticks,” Katz replied.
“Now really, fellas . . .”
“No, no, don’t thank us,” Sidone insisted. “It’s little enough we can do. I mean, what kind of world would this be without a fella helping the next fella. A little love goes a long way, Moonbloomm-m. Love, I say. Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, a tata, a zeyda . . .” Sidone exploded into maniacal laughter and covered his privates with both hands.
Norman sat in the howling, writing out the receipt. Katz handed him the money, and Norman took it from him without expression, quite able to bear the mad volume of laughter. But then he was struck by the odd lack of smile on Katz’s face; Katz looked naked and almost helpless without it. There was the feeling of conspiracy, as though he had crept around into Norman’s hiding place and sat down there with him.
“We’ll try to be more quiet,” he said under the cover of his friend’s wild laughing. Norman stared at him, wondering what he saw. And then Katz’s lazy-looking tromp l’oeil smile was there again and the small barb of curiosity was cut off from the sur
face and left lodged in Norman.
In the hallway he heard the brief refrain of the trumpet playing the traditional bullfight theme, a machine-gun riffle on a drum, and then silence. The back of Norman’s neck began to ache as he went to the next door and rang the bell.
•
“I still don’t know why you have to collect the rent every week,” Carol Hauser complained. The Hausers were new tenants.
Her husband, Sherman, hissed by habit.
“Well it is a damn crazy thing,” she said, turning her carefully wrought head to him. “Like a rooming house. I mean, this is an elevator apartment. It’s ridiculous.”
“The man told you all about it before we took the place. What are you bitching about it now for?” Sherman ground the words to small pieces and fed them to her. Large and bony, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses, his hair meticulously pompadoured, he had the look of someone ready for sudden death and concerned that it find him at his best. The girly magazine he had been looking at earlier lay in the crevice between the chair cushion and the arm. “What do you have to keep on for?”
“I’m talking to him.” She moved her head slowly back to Norman. “And cash—why cash instead of a check? It’s inconvenient.” Even though she faced Norman, she seemed to be speaking to Sherman. Indeed, both of them ignored the agent; he was merely the catalyst that evoked their perversely pleasurable bitterness. Norman accepted the fact and kept his eyes fixed on the artificial fireplace with its artificial birch logs glowing in a red-bulb fire.
“He told you in the beginning. It’s their business. The rent was reasonable, there was nothing under the table. You were happy enough to get it. Now you have to keep asking dumb questions.”
“Can’t I open my mouth without . . .”
“Ah, crap.”
“Animal,” she snarled, keeping her pudgy face and Du Barry hairdo absolutely still. She wore a beaded dress and high heels; with her thick, plump body, she seemed dressed for some pornographic purpose.
The lamp shade had a device that gave the effect of a river flowing. Norman studied it and came to the conclusion that the water on the lamp shade was real enough to put out the red-bulb fire.
“Well pay him, for Christ sake,” Sherman said.
“Why don’t you?”
“Because you have the goddamn money and you know it.”
“It isn’t necessary to use that gutter language.”
“Hah!”
“What do you mean, ‘hah’?”
“I mean you’ve heard worse.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” she said, welcoming savagery.
Norman stood like stone, half hoping he would be taken for an artificial figure in the room with artificial fire and water. He held his breath as the man and woman leaned redly toward each other.
And then the child came in, all blond and gold in Doctor Dentons, blue-eyed, shapely, beautiful. Slowly, Norman let out his breath, wondering whether the small boy could be an even more cleverly made artifact.
“I want ice cream,” it said convincingly.
“Come kiss Daddy.” Sherman’s voice revealed another octave. His homely, groomed face dissolved to reveal a particularly intense ugliness.
Carol fussed with the shining yellow-white hair, her heavy lips slack with a febrile delight. “Bobby wash his face?” she said with babyish enunciation.
“I don’t wanna. I want ice cream, a whole bunch.”
Norman had the uneasy feeling it was a real child. He cleared his throat, surprised to find real phlegm.
“Oh yes,” she said, walking toward the doorway to another room. “Sherman, wipe his nose.”
For a second Norman thought she referred to him and he quickly pulled out his handkerchief. But Sherman dabbed at the boy’s nose and Norman put his own handkerchief back. He laid the receipt on the leather-topped, gold-bordered table next to a china swan. The mother, father, and child were hooked up now, their circuit temporarily completed. Grouped next to the revolving river of the lamp shade, they could have been a subtle caricature of a holy family. From their positions around the little boy, they could not see Norman, and the last thing he noticed before leaving was the man’s hand, creeping with animal accuracy up toward the woman’s buttocks, and the woman smiling with unconscious lust while the child stood between them in drowsy boredom.
As he went down the stairs for his last two calls, he noticed that the window was dull with night. Like a blackboard, it waited for something to be inscribed upon it. Gradually, tediously, he was working toward his own time. Tomorrow he would take care of Mott Street and Second Avenue, and the next day Thirteenth Street. Only two more tonight, and then darkness and the vague lazy corral of his freedom. He shuffled and almost tripped over a raised tile. He raised his feet more carefully until he was before the door of the Lublins. He pushed the button and wondered whether the buzz he heard was a signal to them or something that existed only within his own head.
•
They were just two rather short, dumpy people, not American in feature or stature. Their children, a boy and a girl, had been vitaminized into somewhat better color. The room was neat, slightly dowdy; it had the air of having been furnished according to the taste of several other people, as though décor were something the Lublins paid no attention to.
“The kitchen sink drips, Mr. Moonbloom.” Sarah Lublin’s tone was hardly one of complaint. She might have been commenting on the climate—something you really could do nothing about. Her face was so full of character that she ignored it. She had a large, rather hooked nose, full, wide lips, deep-socketed eyes of a sort of Wedgwood blue, and clear, smooth skin. “It keeps me awake,” she said. “I wait for the next drip, I hold my breath and wait.”
Her husband, Aaron, had similar skin, faintly yellowed, and his hair was black and false looking, combed flat to his skull. He sat with the girl and the boy on his knees, his hands on them with an impersonal reverence. He shrugged at Norman, asking for tolerance for a woman’s foolishness.
“When my head is on the pillow, there is nothing,” he said. “No drips, no creaks, nothing. I learned to sleep, long ago, as though there might not be time to again. Women cannot be that way. They are curious beyond everything else. It kills them to think that they might miss something. She must know if it will drip one more time, one more time. Even if it kills them, they must know.”
Sarah’s slight smile stayed on one side of her mouth. “The way he sleeps . . . before even he touches the pillow—in mid-air.”
“A washer it needs perhaps?” Aaron touched the large-faced girl’s ear as though looking for something.
“I’ll send the superintendent to take a look,” Norman said, idly watching Aaron’s hand, half consciously waiting for it to stop moving so he could read the numbers tattooed on the forearm.
“What superintendent?” Aaron said, his sarcasm as bland as his wife’s complaint.
“He’s got a lot to do,” Norman answered. “He takes care of three other buildings.”
“I have never seen him, not once,” Aaron said, his voice just that much lighter in tone to indicate what was probably humor for him. “He is like a myth to me. There are rumors of him; I see ash cans on the sidewalk. Once in a great while there is evidence of someone having washed the hallway. But the actual man—never.”
“One superintendent for four buildings?” Sarah said, counting out the rent money with fingers that appeared sensitive to the feel of currency.
“It’s an economic problem,” Norman explained smilingly. “We’re practically a nonprofit organization.”
Aaron smiled slightly as he recognized deceit. His arm rested on the arm of the chair.
Norman lip-read silently, 3241179, not really sure of the last number.
“But the receipt is always for less than we pay,” Sarah said mildly.
Norman smiled a little chidingly. “The rent is reasonable?”
“No complaints,” Aaron said quickly, his alacrity indicating an old, w
ell-developed talent for self-humiliation. “We are merely having conversation.”
“I understand,” Norman said, putting the money into his wallet.
The girl got off Aaron’s knee and went into another room. The boy, more delicately built, waited a discreet minute to assert his independence, then followed her. Aaron watched them go with hard, vigilant eyes. Sarah watched him watching them. Her arm was white and unmarked and yet Norman sensed numbers there too.
“We’ll see what we can do about that faucet.” Norman stood in his large, dusty-looking blue suit. “I’ll make a special note of it.”
“Yes, a note,” Aaron said, and went to check on the children, who were too quiet.
Sarah sighed. “He sleeps better, but I get more rest.” She looked at Norman intimately. The furniture was their own, yet the place looked like a furnished room. Even the family photograph on the dark, clubfooted table had the quality of a hotel-room reproduction. There were things that Norman did not want to know.
“Good night,” he said.
“Yes, sure,” the woman answered.
•
The Spragues threatened him with that drowsiness he had felt with Arnold and Betty Jacoby, though less dangerously. Had he been actually less tired, he might have been amused by them. Instead, he felt a kind of vertigo.
Jane had huge, semiconscious eyes and irrelevantly voluptuous lips. Each time she moved and noticed her pregnant body, she expressed faintly annoyed surprise.
“He wants the rent, Janey,” Jim Sprague said in a bewildered way. He had a lean, Lincolnesque face, and every word he uttered seemed like the beginning of a maze.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 3
