The Tenants of Moonbloom

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  “The rent!” she exclaimed.

  Jim frowned. “Well why don’t you have a seat, Mr. Epstein?” he said.

  “Moonbloom,” Norman corrected, sitting down.

  “Epstein is the delicatessen man,” Jane explained, sitting with a ball of yarn.

  “Have a drink?” Jim asked.

  “I’ll have a glass of water, if you don’t mind,” Norman said.

  “Sure thing. Janey, what do you want?”

  “A teeny bit of Scotch,” she answered.

  Jim nodded and went into the kitchen, where he clinked and poured and bumped around. Jane smiled at Norman, and he smiled back.

  Jim stuck his head around the doorframe. “What was yours again, Mr. Moonbloom?”

  “Water,” Norman said. “Just water.”

  Norman and Jane tried a dozen different smiles while they waited. Occasionally she made gestures he couldn’t understand.

  Jim came out with three glasses and set them on a table across the room. Then he sat down. For a moment he studied the situation, made a silent little “Oh” of correction, got up and brought the glasses back. He gave the amber-colored drink to Norman, the plain water to his wife. Norman didn’t bother to correct him.

  “Jim is in dental mechanics,” Jane said, licking her luscious mouth.

  Jim agreed with a solemn nod.

  There was too much silence. Finally Jim sat forward with an intensely interested expression. “Just what can I do for you, Mr. Moonbloom?”

  “The rent,” Norman said, afraid to speak too loudly.

  “Oh, of course.” Jim chuckled and sat back.

  The two of them laughed politely and did nothing.

  “I’ll make out a receipt,” Norman coaxed.

  “Oh Jim, the money,” she said.

  Jim went into the other room and came out with some bills in his hand. Norman took the paper clip off, handed back the post card from Capri, and put the money away in his wallet.

  Neither of them said good night to him. Jim was frowning at the pink houses on the post card; Jane was gazing at her swollen belly, trying to recall how in the world it had come to be there.

  Norman closed the door quietly, afraid to alarm them.

  •

  Gaylord was studying the ash cans in the cellar, and when he heard Norman, he put on his Caliban expression. His round, clever face became slack and oppressed, his eyebrows brooded.

  “With my back,” he said sadly, kicking at the heavy can. “It’s a crime, but what can I do? I never learned a decent trade, never had no advantages. I’m a hewer of wood, I accept my lot.”

  “I’ll help you with them,” Norman said. “Don’t overact.”

  “What do you know of the black man’s burden?” Gaylord said contemptuously.

  “I share it,” Norman answered sourly, lifting his side of the heavy can.

  “And you think any of them give a man any gratitude?” Gaylord said, waving his free hand at the ceiling, above which all the tenants boiled in their strange elements. “Hah! Not them. Just, ‘This leaks, this broke, that broke.’ All they got to say to a man is ‘Do!’ ”

  “A lot of doing you do,” Norman said. “You’re too busy philosophizing.”

  “See, you too. You got no gratitude either.”

  “I’m an ingrate,” Norman said.

  They went up and down the cellar steps a dozen times with the heavy cans, grunting together, coughing occasionally from the stirred-up dust of the ashes. A well-dressed man and woman looked curiously at them as they walked out to the sidewalk, joined to the heavy can, their outer arms extended. Norman was particularly strange to them, his oversized fedora square on his head, dwarfing his delicate face, his dark suit and neatly tied tie making him look like a picture in someone’s attic. Together, with their flapping arms and grim hold on the can, the two men looked dedicated to an Icarian dream. Sweat and effort silenced and joined them. They hefted and groaned, and favored each other on the steps. The last can made Norman’s legs tremble, and he dropped it so heavily that a cloud of ashes rose into the cool air.

  They stood for a few minutes, catching their breath beside the squad of ash cans, looking at the city night.

  “Smell like fall all right,” Gaylord said. “Smell like apples.”

  “It’s October,” Norman said. “Even in the city you can tell.”

  “Stars gettin’ clearer,” Gaylord observed, scanning the building-jabbed heavens.

  “The air is better,” Norman said.

  “Breathe better,” Gaylord qualified.

  “Autumn,” Norman said in a long, weary voice.

  Then they parted without farewell, and Norman went through the city to where he lived.

  3

  HE STEPPED INTO his own apartment, and his deep, relieving sigh was that of a man to whom hermitage is an ever-present temptation. His brother, Irwin, who was prone to guilt pains, had claimed many times that the reason for Norman’s failure, the causes for the blandness in Norman’s relations with people, stemmed from a love of being alone. Norman, divesting himself of his large, dusty clothes and running the hot water in the tub, wouldn’t have argued the point. He didn’t know why he was the way he was. His passions had always been dim to him. As a child he had seemed to be mostly happy. He had daydreamed a lot, conventionally romantic daydreams. He still did. The stretching inside himself had seemed like ordinary growth until his manhood, and after that had puzzled him somewhat. Now, of course, he sensed the imminence of pain but could not imagine how it would affect his personality.

  He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness—he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness.

  Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples.

  When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman’s head, and the resonance of the wild man’s voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity.

  He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed.

  Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of
his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. “I’m a small man of definite limitations,” he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.

  He dried himself with towels stamped with the name of a hotel his brother had owned for several months. Dry and warm in pajamas and an ancient flannel bathrobe, he went into his kitchenette and opened a can of chili. He heated it in a saucepan and stood moving a spoon around, humming absently. His alarm clock ticked in competition with the silently efficient electric clock on the wall. Dimly there came the sound of the traffic on Lexington Avenue, four floors below. He hummed and kept out the larger din of remembered voices. The spicy smell of the chili pricked his nose. But suddenly his humming oppressed him. He felt an unusual self-disgust, which puzzled him, and as he ate with the newspaper opened before him, he pushed down the faint disturbance. When he washed the pot and the dish, he had an image of himself, thin, dark, idiotically placid, sealed into a hermetic globe whose thinness gave him only the flickering colors of the outside.

  For a while he browsed through the books on his shelves. There were the remains of his many pursuits: books on Hebrew theology, textbooks on the anatomy of the human foot, orthodontic techniques, an illustrated history of Byzantine art, collections of English poetry, an anthology of twentieth-century short stories. He decided on a soporific. Pulling a large, wine-red volume out, he took it to his bed and opened randomly to the chapter on the Metatarsus.

  Buses and cars bleated, honked, and roared, with subdued violence; occasionally a human voice rose almost to his window, then fell back down without quite reaching him. And all of it was like silence to him. Though his home city had been small, he was a city boy from way back and he remembered his crying out “What’s that?” at the bursts of silence when he had lived in the country.

  When he was drowsy enough, he switched off the light and automatically turned into his daydream, which had to do with his father. He knew this was not his real dream, just as he knew his real dream was something obscure that he nevertheless felt was deep and profound and often confused with the beating of his heart. No, the favorite fantasy was only another soporific, one that parted the curtains of sleep for him. Like a boy’s night story, it made him smile in the dark. He put himself into the huge form of his father and imagined the world as his playground.

  As usual, it got him to sleep. But all night long he seemed aware of the din and sensed familiar voices. One tiny crack appeared in his shell, and he wore himself out trying to patch it. In the morning he was very tired and didn’t look forward to the day at all.

  4

  THANK GOD FOR a day like this! Even Mott Street was bearable in the clear, liquid air. The dingy grocery shops, the vegetable stand with its overflow of crates and scattered greens, the gutters wedged with paper and orange peels, even the crowding, crooked, narrow buildings, all had a rather exotic appearance in morning sunlight and shadow. Doorways were intriguing, and the air moved lightly over the shoulders of mothers wheeling their children and their groceries. Norman almost was convinced he might get through the day.

  He turned into the turtle-green building and walked past the rubbish cans and the abandoned, one-wheeled stroller, and began the climb.

  Basellecci was a man in a long interim of age.

  “Good morning, Mr. Moonbloom. A lovely morning, is it not?” His colorless, fleshy face and curly gray hair, his sober hazel eyes behind glasses, combined to give him a look of extraordinary moderation. He beckoned Norman in out of the reeking hallway to where he had roasted the air with freshly ground coffee. “I am about to begin my brake-fast. You will perhaps have with me some good Italian coffee? I find it to be the most beneficial for the stow-mack after sleep.”

  “It smells good,” Norman said, sitting in the cramped kitchen. Unfortunately his chair faced the little closet where the toilet was. With its heavy, wooden water tank above it, it looked like a seat in a torture chamber. On one side of it, the wall bulged dangerously, like an enormous contusion; it looked as though a great body of water were pushing at the wall, and Norman imagined Basellecci sitting on the toilet with his pants down and the water suddenly bursting through on him and drowning him.

  “It is my—how you say?—‘pick-it-up.’ I must have my pot with me wherever I go. One must have some remmanant of graciousness, no? Here, it is the instant coffee, or the mud from unwashed tanks. I have transported my pot from Firenze to Cleveland, from Cleveland to Detroit, from Detroit to here.” He fussed happily with cups and saucers. “I have several pots, like changes of clothes. They are of various sizes, of copper, pewter, alumimumum. Coffee is my vice. Harmless enough?”

  “Perfectly,” Norman answered, admiring the cleanliness of the apartment in a building so impregnated with filth.

  Basellecci poured delicately, raising and lowering the pot so the steaming brown stream flexed in air. “Coffee,” he said with a sigh of benediction.

  “Mmm-mm,” Norman said appreciatively as he sipped the roasty liquid that fulfilled the promise of its odor. He kept his eyes away from the terrible toilet. “You have something there, Mr. Basellecci.”

  “Some prefer with milk in the morning, but not I. Oh, sometimes in the evening I will add a drop of Strega or anisette, but normally . . .”

  “And how does your teaching go?” Norman sat back and slowly drew the receipt book out of his pocket.

  “Ah, grazie, bene, bene. Only that some of them, my studenti, do not work, they are sloppy. I do not know why some of them even come. They have no care, they pronounce—terrible! They have no respect for the way a word is made. A word, after all, has shape, texture, yes? Italian is a lovely tongue if it is spoken. They come, these second- and third-generation Italians, to—how you say?—brush up. Ah! Such tongues, such dialects, such accents! From Bari, their parents came—their Italian sounds like Chinese. Or Sicilians with barnyard accents. I say, ‘Do not show off that you have some Italian. Pretend you never heard of it and come fresh to learn correctly.’ No grr-ratzy—grahtseeayy, grah-tsee-ayy.” Basellecci held his fingers aloft, curled in vowel love. His voice rang harshly. With the coffee cup in one hand, the other hand shaping his passion, he was between his sacred and his profane loves, and his neuter face was as near luminescence as it could ever be. “Leem-pehr-may-AH-bee-lay . . .” He looked tenderly at Norman, as though asking him to match such beauty. “Raincoat,” he said modestly.

  “The language of Dante,” Norman said in payment for the coffee.

  “Ahh,” Basellecci sighed, shaking his head reverently.

  Norman cleared his throat and took out his pen.

  Basellecci came off his cloud, feet first. He peered guardedly into the snap-top purse he had produced from his pocket, “What about the wall?” he said, changing their relationship back to what it was.

  Norman got up and walked over to the toilet chamber, a professionally skeptical expression on his face, implying that there might be something unreasonable in the complaint. He forced himself to press the swollen wall. It was soft and faintly damp; he repressed a gag. “Well, I don’t know.. . .”

  “I am constipated all the time,” Basellecci cried angrily. “I sit there and watch that terrible swelling. I cannot relax. My sphincter is paralyzed with dread. Soon I will grow genuinely sick, and then I will sue in a court of law. You must attend to it!”

  “It’s an old building, Mr. Basellecci. However, I’ll look into it.”

  “Look into, look into! What is to look into? There it is—one does not need twenty-twenty eyesight to see it. Go, try it yourself; close the door and sit there. See if you are capable of a movement!”

  “All right, Mr. Basellecci, don’t get excited,” he said. The scalp around each hair of his head rose volcanically at the thought of his being closeted in there with his pants down. “I’ll have someone up to look at it.
”

  “I will sue for mental anguish as well as medical expense!”

  “No, no, we’ll take care of it. Just relax.” This was the wrong word, he realized, grimacing with regret.

  “RELAX! How can I relax? My sphincter is paralyzed, I tell you. I ask little. I know it is a humble house. I am a humble man. I do not expect a doorman, an elevator, air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpets. I am equipped to do battle with vermin, I do not complain that only one window opens or that only one burner works on the stove. I am used to lighting candles for light in my bedroom. But I cannot, cannot go on this way. My system is already poisoned. I am cemented in. I must have relief!”

  “Yes, certainly, Mr. Basellecci, I understand, I certainly will . . . Not another day will pass . . . Leave it to me.” Norman backed out, nodding. “And thank you for the coffee. You don’t have to worry, believe me. . . .” Over and over he expressed his assurances, his regrets, his concern, his compassion, his thanks. He barely stopped nodding before the next apartment door opened.

  “Wung,” he said to the young Chinese, bracing himself as always for contradiction.

  “Whatta ya say, man, how’s the world treatin’ ya?” But his face was dynastic; his eyes were Orientally calm. The low, curving contours of a North Chinese face with that voice made it seem that a Ming vase had been wired for sound. “Like man, I’m gaffed—nowhere. These Village types deject me. Come in, come in. Oh but I’m hung over with talk! Ya-ta-ta, Ya-ta-ta. I mean, can’t these pigs just lie down and do it?” He looped an arm through Norman’s and steered him through the litter of beer cans, lingerie, and newspapers. “Park it while I take a reading, Pops. I’m spinnin’.”

  But he had hands like those Eastern painters who could twist out a bird with a single manipulation of a brush. Norman sat down with the memory of the girl who had betrayed him with a fart. “I’ve got a lot to do,” he said from the edge of the malodorous couch.

  “I know, man. But just let me work my way back. I mean it was almost blotto last night. She talked and talked. By the time I got her to a supine position, I almost didn’t care.”