“L’amour,” Norman said, writing out the receipt.
“Oh, I tell you! You should have heard this chick. ‘I feel the Oriental splendor of your hooded eyes. You are the East, eternally patient.’ Patient? Man, I was beside myself!”
“The rent, Wung?” Norman said sadly.
“Let’s see, the shirt came off here, then we wrastled past the bathroom,” Wung said. He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, the tub, I left my jeans in the tub.” He darted away and came back with a soggy wallet from which he produced soggy currency. “It’s all coming back to me,” he groaned, dropping down on a chair with his head in his hands. “Oh man, where am I going?”
“It’s the spin of the world,” Norman consoled indifferently. “See you next week.”
Jerry Wung got up and bowed deeply from the waist. “Like arrivederci, most honorable Moonbloom,” he said.
“Like Shalom,” Norman answered, returning his bow.
•
Beeler, the retired pharmacist, had never had his own store, and his face was a silvery constant shrug. His bald pate led Norman into the room, whose furnishings had been the last word in 1924. His armchair was tubular, and the coffee table had rounded corners and parallel nickle grooves. Turning, he motioned Norman to sit on a tortured ottoman. Then he sat himself with a grunt and stared at Norman, a cigarette smoldering between his lips, the smoke closing one of his light-blue eyes.
“Sheryl,” he called, without turning his gaze from Norman. “Pay the man,” he said to the big blonde young woman who looked in from the doorway.
“The toilet doesn’t flush,” she said, running her eyes over Norman with dance-hall selectivity. She wore a silk kimono with a dragon embroidered and straining under the weight of full, slack breasts; it had been her mother’s kimono, and seemed exotic to her because she still recalled her mother’s secretive freedoms. She came into the room with a slow, heavy walk and bent over her father to kiss his bald head, her arm across her chest to keep her breasts from swinging.
“Totinka,” Beeler said tenderly, plucking out his cigarette but keeping his eyes on Norman.
“I’ll have the man up to check,” Norman said over the receipt book. Knowing that Beeler was watching him, and knowing that there was no worth-while reason for looking at the big, fleshy form, Norman nevertheless found his eyelids pulling against their lowering. It was like telling someone to stand in a corner and not think of a white rhinoceros. He had to look up at the bulging dragon. Sheryl smiled.
“I’d appreciate,” she said. “A girl kind of depends on the john, you know.”
Norman licked his lips and remembered that his life of continence could result in a congested prostate. “Of course,” he croaked. He cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said more clearly.
“This is my Baby Girl,” Beeler said, pointing first over his shoulder to the big blonde woman, then moving the bony pointer toward a silver-framed photograph of a fat little girl with Shirley Temple curls. “She hasn’t changed, has she?”
“Not a hair,” Norman said, taking the money from Sheryl, who smiled a little defiantly at him. She turned and walked out of the room, letting Norman see the breadth of her hips and the faint declivity of the silk over her buttocks.
“An angel, that child,” Beeler said, lighting another cigarette and setting it between his lips to torture his eye again. “You should have seen how her mother dressed her. Pink dresses, big bows, all starched. People used to stop and stare. My wife loved it.”
Norman got out when the old man turned his blue, indecipherable eyes toward the photograph. As he closed the front door, he heard Sheryl singing the blues in the bathroom, her voice off key and coarse.
•
Kram was immaculate, and his apartment had the sterile look of a laboratory. A cylinder of compressed air stood beside his drawing table, upon which lay the delicate, dragonfly shape of an airbrush and the photograph he had been retouching, a picture of a goddess in a foam-rubber bra. The hump on his back seemed only equipment for him, and so precise and certain were his gestures and his voice and his clear, dark eyes, that Norman often felt Kram was shaped correctly and other human beings, himself included, were mutations.
He handed Norman the money, his clear face unencumbered by any desire.
“Any complaints?” Norman asked confidently, noting the exactitude of spacing in the man’s thin combed hair and the clean shine of his glasses, which did not have the faintest speck of dust on them.
“No complaints,” Kram said, with the slightest shadow of a smile. He was a man used to sleeping on his side and to the impossibility of perpetuating anything. “Everything is as it should be.”
“I think you’re the only person I know who has no complaints.”
Kram chuckled softly. “I used them up long ago,” he said. “There’s nothing can happen to me, good or bad.” He motioned Norman over to the drawing table where the brassièred goddess smiled indefinitely. On the small taboret beside the drawing board, his brushes and tacks and hard pencils were arrayed like surgical instruments. “You see what things are? They are flat and poor and they require my skill to have even a semblance of substance. You should see what she was before I doctored her up. Her skin was like a sponge, her neck was full of tendons, her breasts were so shallow that they didn’t cast any shadows. Everything. Pictures of food come to me looking like garbage, and I make them look good enough to eat. Kids who look like little angels in the magazines—I take the snot out of their noses, the pimples from their cheeks; I make the glaze in their eyes look like a dewy shine. It’s interesting work, isn’t it?”
“It seems to have disillusioned you.”
“On the contrary,” Kram said with a smile. “I was disillusioned before I came to this profession. Retouching has restored me, though in a different way.”
“Well, maybe I could take lessons.”
Kram looked at him strangely, a little humor left in his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think you’re a different case altogether.”
Norman looked at him, wondering at the inward shudder this caused. Then he smiled, because there really was nothing between them, and with a little wave he left the hunchback in his immaculate apartment.
••
Norman chewed the wadded paper that ketchup and onion defined as hamburger. Around him was the ground-up conversation of people on their lunch hour, interspersed with the clacking of thick plates and thin metal, and commanded by the cries of the short-order cook and the countermen as they called out abbreviated orders.
“BLT. Burn one. Grade-A shoot. Lemme have a number three, light on the mayo . . .”
Norman sat amid the grease smells and the nerve-racking clatter, not at all deluded into thinking he was being nourished. But he was used to the terror of those luncheonettes where people swallowed mouthfuls whole, their eyes bulging, their mouths working painfully, as though they were chewing themselves. He was out of it, or had never been in it; an invisible placenta allowed him to move at his own speed. His stomach was used to food prepared for mass lack of taste. By lifelong habit, he heard but did not listen, just as he saw but did not look. Like a cautious mouse in an electrified maze, he remembered his few tentative sorties toward things, his few brief adventures into the barest hint of pain. He kept to a small circumference now, having experienced nothing that compensated for the discomfort of sensation. When he asked himself what his life meant, his invariable answer was, evasively, “It doesn’t mean anything; it is.”
And ding, the act was consummated, his change flung down on a spiky rubber mat. He took a book of free matches for evidence that he had been there.
Out in the sharp sunlight, people were too numerous to notice, bits of face and wool. He belched up the condiments and the onion, gratefully; it covered the bland badness of the meat taste. For an after-lunch treat, he breathed the warmed, autumn air and thought about the fact that leaves were coloring someplace, and that the browned apple core in the litter basket had
filled with juice on a real tree. There was no longing in his thoughts, only the condescending amusement of a man who allows no credibility to dreams except during a time set aside for dreaming. “I’m not more than half alive,” he thought cheerfully, never considering that the state of being fully alive might be impending. “God forbid,” he would have said to that suggestion, not believing in God or the threat.
The four-family house on Second Avenue was the “best” of the four buildings he managed. He looked at its narrow, brownstone façade with an almost boyish smugness. Now, thirty-three years on his way toward wherever it was human beings ended, he was “working” at gainful employment for the first time, and he savored the idea of it, much in the manner of a child who sucks on an unlit cigarette.
Wade Johnson opened his door and grinned dangerously, his hard, meaty, good-looking face searching for outrage. Norman said, “It’s me,” and flinched in anticipation.
“Come on in, Norman, you little Jew prick,” Wade said lovingly. He was as thick-muscled as a stevedore, and his blue eyes were always just a flame width from either rage or merriment. With the treacherously gentle touch of a cat on a stunned bird, he took Norman’s arm and led him into the apartment, which was walled with books. “Sit down and listen to that Limey Eliot, listen,” he said ferociously, shoving Norman into a chair.
“. . . Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning sliding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
He kicked Norman lightly. “Hah hah, that Old Possum, hah!”
“ ‘The Wasteland,’ ” Norman said. “I did a paper on Eliot at Michigan; no, no, I think it was when I was up at Bowdoin.”
“Paper, paper, never mind the goddamned paper. Hear it, man, hear it! You and your goddamned papers!” He leaned over Norman, smelling of rye whisky. “ ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ ” he snarled into Norman’s ear. “Shit, Norman, don’t start jabbering about your papers!”
“Such language for a schoolteacher,” Norman said tensely. “And with your kid sitting right there.” He gestured toward the tender-faced blond boy who sat on a bench, smiling sweetly.
Wade guffawed. “Teacher, who’s a teacher? They don’t want teachers; they want titties, wet nurses. They want people to chew up everything until it’s a pasty gop and then push it into the little drooly mouths. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row . . .’ That’s what they want, those c———s. Or, ‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree.’ They’re like you; they want things that fit neatly on paper. Could I put darkness and light right there in the classroom with their hygienic little souls? Could I say:
•
“. . . I flung her onto a basket of cushions and sailcloth in a dark corner. And I remembered nothing but her white drawers trimmed with lace.
“Then, O despair! The wall became dimly the shadow of trees, and I was plunged in the amorous sadness of the night.”
•
He held Norman in the wake of his voice, grinning sadistically in the afternoon sunlight that churned up around him in dust motes. Finally he shook his head in mock despair. “No, no, it’s no use; you’re still on paper, Norman. You live in a dream, you know that?”
“Really?” Norman said, amused. “And how about you with your raving? What do you call that?”
“Hey, but I feel pain, I’m full of sensation. I’ve got an idea that you could watch a murder committed and just smile your goofy little shit-eating smile. You’re like a body under water, you know that? Yeah, Moonbloom, that’s the image, a goddamned Hebrew body wrapped in water. When you talk—glub, glub, bubble, bubble.” He pushed Norman back into the chair when he tried to get up. Norman laughed helplessly and shrugged.
“Aw come on, Wade, I’m a workingman,” he said.
“Never mind that,” Wade answered. “I’m not through with you. I sit here spending my Saturdays correcting the toilet paper my students hand in, and the spring winds tighter and tighter. I drink and try not to yell at little Wade Junior, here. And then a pair of big Jewish ears comes in, and I can relieve myself.” He turned to the smiling child, who gazed at his father adoringly. “Wade Junior, pal, be a good Joe and fill up another juice glass with Daddy’s whisky. There’s a good fella.. . .” He turned back to Norman, his eyes glittering.
“Do not go gently into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at end of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . .”
It took Norman a half-hour to get away, and at the door Wade said plaintively, “How do I get these bastards at school to let me really teach? I’ve been thrown out of five schools and quit two more. And why, why?”
“Because you’re a bum teacher,” Norman said tauntingly from a safe distance down the hall.
“I’m a great teacher!” Wade howled, his eyes red and laughing and mad. “I could get kids to feel with every square inch, I could get them to love beauty, as I do.”
“God help them,” Norman called back, going up the stairs, relieved to be away from the wildman, his relief a purely physical, mindless thing.
“You skinny Jewess’s get, you circumcised Uriah Heep! You know, you know damn well. . . .” His voice echoed through the corridors and in the stair well, and then was detonated by his door slamming.
•
“Hi, Norman,” she said, the breath behind her voice either natural or learned, but natural now. She opened the door wide, smiling with her rich mouth closed. Her dark eyes were huge and beautiful, as is frequently the case with hyperthyroid, nearsighted people. Norman remembered drawings of the eye in cross section and went inside, his only apparent thought being that somehow his coming for the rent got him in there but that his entry made the one door seem like the back door.
“Leni,” he said, his hand over his heart, as though in avowal; really he was only checking habitually for the receipt book.
“You’re so regular,” she said. “My son Richard’s school hours and you—the only constants in my life.”
“How’s everything?” Little rivulets washed against him—not that he felt anything for her, but if he had been tempted to . . . He saw all the things that kept her from being pretty: coarse black hair, a little too thin at the front of the center parting, skin just on the drab side and vaguely rough, little crow’s-feet leading from her eyes to thirty. She had a broad face, and her rather square, slightly jutting jaw gave her mouth a slightly savage look. Then, too, her teeth weren’t anything to write home about and her . . . “Hope this isn’t a bad time for you.”
“Oh, I don’t know the good times from the bad times. No, I’m not doing anything important. Reading a script for a microscopic part in a microscopic play. I wish I could afford to pass it up.” Her smile purposely covered her imperfect teeth, and yet it brought out her abundant reality. “Do you think I’ll make a good ingénue, Norman? Am I young and willowy enough?” She held her hands out in girlish gesture, her hips wide, her waist short and not too slim, her breasts full and past their early resiliency. The side of her slacks gaped to show a tiny patch of faded pink. “Could I pass for eighteen?”
Norman chuckled uncomfortably.
“Well you’re wrong. I could. You’re as young as you feel, arf, arf. I’m a professional ingénue. I don’t look young enough, but I have the ability to prroe-ject. The limitation of parts is due to . . . Well, perhaps because that’s the only thing I can feel strongly, a desire to be in my teens, indefinitely.”
“And how’s Richard?” he asked, sitting on the plastic armchair.
“You’re changing the sub-ject,” she trilled.
Norman looked innocent.
She grinned and flung herself down on the couch wi
th one leg under her. “Oh that kid—he’s a Method actor. Like mother . . . He’s so convincing. I can’t do a thing with him. The thing is, he wants a father without my having a man. Oh yes, I have problems.”
“You were going with a young engineer, if I’m not mistaken?”
“You’re not mistaken, Norman, I was,” she said wearily.
“Another dead soldier?”
“Oh, you know . . .”
Norman knew. In the nine months that he had been making these rounds, she had indicated relationships with five men. Relations. He shifted dimly. There was quiet except for the sound of her son’s pet white mouse scratching in his cage in the bedroom. Arrested with his hand in his breast pocket Napoleonically, he imbibed his slow, steady nourishment. He saw her pale full neck as she rested her head on the back of the couch-bed, her white-sweatered breasts, heavy in their rise and fall. Slowly, passively, he turned over and over, used to his own pulsing silence. From where he was, she was just weight and warmth.
“I tell you, Normy, I get low and tired. I feel like dropping the Muse and this kooky life and marrying a nice tired businessman.”
“Oh, you’ll probably meet some fascinating man and get your name up in lights,” he said.
She laughed. “I don’t remember ever thinking about that. As a kid I play-acted because I lived in a gloomy house with old parents. Now I’m just addicted to grease paint. Besides, I can’t type or sell dresses, and it wouldn’t be nice for Richard if I sold my body.”
Norman said nothing, and she heard him. She looked at him quizzically for a moment. “And what about you, Moonbloom, what’s with you?”
“Oh me,” he said, shrugging. “I’m New York’s most educated rent collector. I’m trying to make what I’m stuck with into a vocation.”
“Somehow you seem too good for your job,” she said.
“It would be the first thing I was too good for. Maybe that’s what people should do, something they’re too good for.”
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 5
