“True, true, but what can I do? It’s all busman’s holiday for me. I’m like a sailor with eternal sea legs. I rock in my bed and wake in the dark expecting to see Bridgeport or New Haven floating past in the night like memories. There is no present for me. I am all past. I have spent my youth no place, in transit. I am a wraith, Moonbloom, I doubt my existence. When I enter a room, it is as though someone had just left. I have no social life, no friends. For sex I use women as I would a vending machine. All recedes from me, as though seen through the window of a train, and I see faces as I see the fronts of buildings in the hundreds of hamlets I pass, all overlain with my own ugly puss.”
“Obviously you’re lonely. Why don’t you join the Y or some Over Thirty-five Club?”
“You are being deliberately cynical. Nothing reaches you but vague premonitions.”
“Maybe some time we’ll go into it further,” Norman said as tedium suddenly began rising up over his ankles. He stood and put his money in order.
Sugarman stared at the ceiling. “Moonbloom,” he said spitefully, “your clothes are too large for your body.”
“Noo-o, Sugarman, I’m too small for my clothes.”
“You are no help.”
“Not even to myself,” Norman agreed, reaching the door.
“This house is cruddy,” Sugarman said petulantly.
“No question.”
“Everything is cruddy.”
“Now, now, Sugarman.”
“I’m tired, Moonbloom. After I talk for a protracted time, I get weary unto death. Go, let me dream of that last big train of them all.”
“Sounds Freudian,” Norman said, opening the door.
“Drop dead, Moonbloom.”
“I only wish you well,” Norman said. And he closed the door on the figure of the candy butcher, lying diagonally across his bed, his eyelids down and fluttering.
•
As usual, Paxton seemed busy. He let Norman in with a little feminine gesture of irritation. “Oh heavens, you agayn.” He smoked like one of those machines that supposedly test cigarette filters, but his black face was knobby and calm, removed from the nervous gestures of his hands and shoulders. “Well, come on in, baby, but I am in a sort of tizzy.”
A Dazor lamp stood poised over his typewriter; beyond, the disorder seemed hostile to his attempt at work. The room looked frenzied. There were papers all around, and there was the feeling that the inhabitant of the room could not live without paper, that he was an odd species of creature who could be nourished by nothing else. Books did splits on the battered bed; magazines were piled against the walls and under the bed. Paxton minced to the bed, swept off some magazines and envelopes, and waved an invitation to Norman to sit.
“I’ll be out of your way in a minute, Joe,” Norman said, lowering himself cautiously on the uncertain seat.
“Oh, that’s all right, love. I’m so disorganized anyhow. And je suis fatigué; I need a break. Have a drink, Norm?”
“A little soda, maybe?”
“Soda, soda,” Paxton said, contemplating the debris and scratching his tightly grown hair with a delicate finger. He kept it cut short and did nothing to beautify it, using no grease or lotions. His mouth was classically thick, but his nose betrayed some forgotten Caucasian in the woodpile and was long and sharp. His eyes were globular and moved very rapidly. “I just might have some kind of flat quinine water.”
“Make it water.”
Paxton filled a jelly jar at the sink and dropped into it a melted-down wafer of ice. “Oh, I tell you,” he said, handing the glass to Norman, “that old word-machine is a monkey on my back. Sometimes I don’t know why I bang away on it. I don’t even think about what is going onto paper and to my agent, penultimately to the publisher and ultimately to the ladies in the book clubs. It begins to seem as though I could just go on and on without even having a ribbon in the typewriter. The act of striking keys becomes the be-all end-all. I’ve just got to get out of this room soon or—bughouse!”
“How’s this one coming?” Norman asked, receipt book in hand.
“Oh, très bien, but I’ll get to hate it before I’m done. I’m rotting inside, lovey—it ruins everything. I start with hating the White Citizens Councils and begin hating citizens and wind up hating yours truly. Lamentable, but not hopeless.” He looked at Norman with his prominent eyes, which struck out at people, their cleverness magnified, projected by the receding forehead and the smallness of his other features, so that his face was like an onrushing vehicle, its way lit by the eyes. “I’m just waiting for a royalty check, and then, adieu Thirteenth Street, adieu United States of Some Americans. I go to Paris, where the squalor is rosy, where mold is precious.”
“Then you think one place is different from another? I’ve never been as far away as Europe, but I’ve had my head on the pillows of several states, not to mention six months at the University of Mexico and a summer session at McGill. The light was the same everywhere, and everywhere I displaced the same small amount of air.”
“You, Norman, are an extraordinary case, not typical of Homo sapiens. They say elephants gestate for God knows how long. Without intending insult, let me say that I believe your sainted mother must have been a mastodon. The gook is still in your eyes.”
“Enough,” Norman said with a faint sliver of irritation. “I get a little tired of hearing people say that I’m in a fog. I think it’s just misery loving company. No one can stand to see tranquillity.”
“As you say,” Paxton said with a shrug.
“Anyhow,” Norman went on, mollified easily because his angers were never more than a few inches high, “you apparently don’t like it here.”
“Like? Man, I’m just tired of Niggerdom. I’m small and frail, Dad, small and frail. I can no longer stand to look at my brethren; they haunt me. I’m an artist—they need preachers and warriors. Joyce left home so he could see what he was doing. Lord knows, I’ve got more reason.”
Norman digested that, sipping slowly at the water, which tasted of rust. Those pipes! On the mantel of the dummy fireplace were Paxton’s three published books, literary successes all; but they had earned the author a total of forty-seven hundred dollars over the five years since the first had come out. Norman turned his eyes on the slight, black man, who seemed to be burning away in the clouds of his ferocious smoking.
“Maybe you should get married, Joe,” Norman said innocently.
“Wow, that would be a truly spiritual thing—no confusion with lust there. Oh, baby, I like women, but that would be a perverted relationship. I’m a wholesome American faggot, lover; at least that part of me is somewhat orderly. That’s all I’d need to louse myself up—a touch of bisexuality. Why, I’d never get any work done.”
“Just so you’re happy, Joe,” Norman said, writing out the receipt.
“You’re so wry, baby. I’ll bet you’re the wryest landlord in town.”
“I’m only the agent,” Norman said softly.
“Man, if I had time, I’d like to take you apart and see what’s what,” Paxton said, his ugly face suddenly metamorphosed by an incredibly beautiful smile. That smile was the secret of his charm; it seemed to forgive so much, that the beholder was forced to forgive him. “You have the makings of something, something. . . .”
“Black man speak with forked tongue,” Norman said, handing over the receipt with one hand, the other out for the money.
“Don’t be surprised if one day you open a Paris Review and see yourself flayed and pegged out in print.”
“I’ll look forward, Joe.”
“Take a traveler’s check?” Paxton asked, the flawless, warming smile fixed hypnotically on Norman.
“For you, Joe.”
“Merci, chéri.”
“You’re welcome, Yussel.”
And they parted, somehow both friends and enemies.
•
Del Rio studied drama on the nights he didn’t fight. You could see the complexity of his regimen in the way he looked at you from u
nder the battered folds of his eyelids.
“Rent time,” Norman sang out.
“Hullo, Moonbloom,” Del Rio said, somewhat Marlon Brando in tone; but his swarthy face, thickening under the small jabs of ring opponents (he was a good boxer and rarely absorbed heavier punches) seemed to Norman on its way out of eligibility for the lover roles.
Of medium height and superbly built, he moved lightly, guardedly. At a hundred and thirty-eight, Norman felt ponderous, and he sat quickly. The room was very clean and almost anonymous except for the several books and notebooks. The picture of John Barrymore on the wall looked like something that had come with the room. A red satin robe with DEL RIO in white lettering on its back hung on a hanger on the door to the closet. On the table an open book was guarded by a tall jar of wheat germ.
“There’s cockroaches again,” Del Rio said, taking his wallet from a drawer. “I’m getting fed up. I have to use that lousy can in the hall with those slobs Paxton and Louis. I clean it out myself every other day. I buy disinfectant and do the tub and the sink and the floor and the goddam toilet bowl. I sweep out the hallway on this floor and I keep my room clean. But I don’t have a chance with those stinking cockroaches!”
“I spoke to the old man.”
“Spoke! Get him the hell out of here. Put him in a home for the aged or something. He’s extinct, that old nut. I swear I’m going to call the Department of Sanitation or the Board of Health!” His Indian-black hair picked blue lights out of the approaching dusk, and his face, which had seemed phlegmatic under its armoring of scar tissue, was stirred now by an odd-flavored anger, almost a passion; he might have been expressing a perverse love for that which provoked him.
“He’s a human being,” Norman said mildly, almost flippantly. He felt much safer with Del Rio than he did, say, with Wade Johnson. Del Rio never raised a hand to anyone outside the ring.
“Well, so am I! I can’t stand filth. Besides, anyone who lives dirty like that is an animal, not a human.”
“He’s old,” Norman said, filling out the receipt.
“I can’t see how people can be so sloppy with themselves—their bodies and their minds. They’re messy all the way through,” Del Rio said with a twitch of disgust.
“Not all of us have your discipline, Del Rio,” Norman said, waving the receipt, although he knew the ball-point writing dried almost upon contact with the paper. He thought wistfully how pleasant it must have been to write with a quill and then pour sand over the parchment.
“That’s why the world is so messed up.”
“Because we don’t wash enough? Come on, Del Rio—the Germans are an immaculate race.”
“Inside they’re messy, they’re full of filthy fairy tales.”
“Well, it’s an interesting theory. But how can you be an actor if you can’t identify with all us untidy humans?”
Del Rio flushed like a prepubescent boy accused of having a girl friend. “That’s something else again,” he said harshly. “An actor can be like a scientist. When he performs, he is conducting an experiment. It’s like he’s using his voice and body as a microscope. I mean, I could even play that old maniac Karloff, probably. But I’m always me. A scientist doesn’t have to identify with some gloppy tissue he’s studying.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Norman said, feigning thoughtfulness; he was playing an old, mild game with Del Rio. “It doesn’t seem you could be much of an actor that way.”
“You’re wrong,” Del Rio said intensely. “The passion should be for the craft, not for the subjects. It’s like what I do in the ring. If I let myself get emotional, I don’t fight well. But if I stay cool and watch everything I do and everything the other guy does, I come out fine.”
“I wouldn’t imagine you’d have many friends with your attitude,” Norman said, counting the money slowly and arranging it in his wallet in order of denomination.
“Big deal. I used to have friends and family. They loused me up plenty. I’m better off now.”
“Never lonely?” Norman asked, his pregnant-woman eyes faintly teasing.
“Always lonely,” Del Rio said proudly, his lean, perfect body a testimonial to his ascetic triumph.
“I’m not convinced,” Norman said.
“That doesn’t matter to me,” Del Rio answered calmly. “The thing is, I can always understand my pain—everything is clear to me.”
“Maybe you won’t always be so strong,” Norman said, standing and wondering why he bothered with all the talk. He suddenly felt very tired. The something that had made him feel ill the previous evening must still be in him. For a moment he felt an idiotic panic at the possibility of something incurable, but it was gone with as little aftereffect as a single heart palpitation, and he smiled at Del Rio. “I’ll see what can be done about the roaches,” he said.
“Do that,” the fighter said, standing in the bright loneliness of his room. “I can’t stand dirt.”
“Only dirt?” Norman sighed with the faintest irony.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“Is that another thing that bothers you?” Norman asked from the doorway.
“All right, all right,” Del Rio said impatiently. “Look, I’ve got some reading to do and I want to catch a little sleep—got a fight in Newark tonight.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” Norman said in mock panic. “See you next time.”
Del Rio didn’t answer. As Norman closed the door, he seemed to be narrowing the frame on a picture of the fighter, sitting at his table over the book, his large knuckled hands laced over his forehead, completely motionless as he read. His immobility made apparent the furtive movement of a roach on the molding over his head. Norman grimaced emphatically for the insect’s danger as he closed the door with a little click.
•
Louie, a Jewish gnome, lived under the roof.
“Hi ya, Norman, whatta ya say? Hey, nice day out, hah? Suppose to be fifty-five degrees, but I don’t know. . ..” He was a messenger for a photoprint company and he had large photostats of farm scenes on his wall. There was a small television set with a screen the size of a playing card, a two-burner stove, and a large store of canned foods. Often he was happy. But Norman had seen him lying on his bed with a comer of the pillow in his mouth, frightened and ill looking. “But I got this sore shoulder. Doctor said it’s bursitis . . . yah . . . bursitis. . .. You think they care, down to Delmore Photo, that my shoulder hurts. Nah, whatta they carel One of these days I’m gonna walk out on them. I’m not fooling. Oh, I had a offer from Scarpo, over on Eleventh Avenue—pay three bucks more too. I said, ‘Well I’ll see.’ You think Delmore appreciates I’m loyal? Hah!”
Norman nodded his way in and took his receipt book out for the last time that week. A Western was crepitating softly on television; Louie’s canned supper bubbled cosily on the little stove.
“Think I’m gonna go out by my sister’s next week. She’s got a house out to Longuylin—Massapeeka. Think I’ll go out there and sit in the sun there. She got a pretty yard and kids. The kids call me ‘Uncle Louie.’ ” He chuckled meltingly. “Them kids! I bring ’em out balloons or candy, cheez. . . . Yeah, think that’s what I’m gonna do.”
Norman wondered if Louie talked to himself when no one else was available. The words came out so fast and irrelevant to sensible response that only nodding and smiling were possible. He nodded and smiled at the little man. Louie was fifty-one years old, but his hair was still all black and combed flat to his monkey head like gleaming skin. His ears were simian too, and he had a large nose and small dun-colored eyes.
“I’m gonna catch that picture down to the Apollo. It’s about this monster from the North Pole. Manucci, fella what I work with, seen it. Says the monster comes to New York and knocks over buildings and they bomb him and all. Supposed to be very interesting. I don’t know though—I think maybe I need glasses a little. . ..” He rested his hand on his nose. “But anyhow, next week I’ll run out by my sister, I think. Yeah, visit them, have dinne
r. I sit with the kids while they go out dancing and like that. It’s nice there, big house—Early Colonial split. She keeps a special bed for me in the playroom, foam-rubber mattress. She’s a good cook, my sister. And they like for me to come out. ‘Uncle Louie,’ they call me—ahh-hhh. . ..” He shook his head wonderingly.
Norman slipped into his wallet the money that Louie had had waiting on the table. He wedged the receipt under Louie’s floral plate and stood up.
“Ah, but them guys over Delmore—wise guys, they make fun, you know? Smart guys, mock me—hah ha ha. Some time I’m gonna . . .” His face darkened and twisted, weird emptinesses rolled behind his eyes for a moment. Then his dullness laved him. He squinted at his supper boiling, and looked blankly at the Western, which faded into a commercial for cocoa before his eyes.
“Yeah, but I’m gonna see that picture over to the Apollo. Manucci says that monster is bigger as the Empire State. I don’t know though—I think I need glasses a little. . ..”
Norman left unobtrusively, while Louie was talking.
•
He walked through the evening streets to the subway at Fourteenth Street. The sky arched into superfluous immensities of distance; for Norman, the distance between him and the nearest passer-by was infinite. He felt dull and weary. There was a ringing in his ears that he attributed to a “bug” that must have attacked him the previous evening, and he defended the pulling, pushing sensation in his body, diagnosing a low fever and focusing on his perfect abode some concrete miles ahead. He looked forward to the comfort of doctoring himself. The wind, which had been autumnal during the day, now had the cold, death-damp smell of winter. He couldn’t go around without a coat any more—this treacherous, changeable weather. He mused on the possibility of thermostatically controlled clothing that would keep one’s body at a constant temperature, and didn’t see the drunk vomit hideously, although he passed within a foot of him and was splashed slightly.
When he got home, he put a pot of water to boil for a spaghetti supper and sat down with pencil and paper to recalculate the things that should, but which he knew could not, be done. And each time, as he prepared to write that which seemed to require first priority in his fictitious plan, another face appeared to him and he remembered another complaint. The sisters Minna and Eva reminded him of the elevator; he tried to recall whether it was an Otis or a Westinghouse. The Lublins’ dripping sink plunked into his consciousness with its irritating persistence. Merely a washer . . . But the pencil was arrested at the point by the swelling tumor of Basellecci’s wall. And then there was J. T. Leopold’s stove and the wiring on Second Avenue. . . . The slow crawl of a doomed cockroach made a distracting track across his mind. Leni Cass leaned into his eyes, and he tried to recall her complaint. Had she had a complaint? He got up with a hiss of exasperation, dropped the spaghetti into the boiling water, and stood watching it soften and slide down limply into the pot. He was feverish; there was no sense trying to think straight.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 7
