Indeed, when Jane Sprague hung up after talking to him, she felt apprehensive and sad. She got up and wondered why she couldn’t see her feet any more. Oh, she knew she was pregnant and had Jim’s baby growing like a polliwog inside, and of course she knew that their making love had brought it about. But there was a huge WHY lowered like a veil over her brain. Like everyone else, she and Jim had had sad childhoods but not terrible ones. They had sneaked out of infancy and adolescence with only their intellects impaired, and they consoled each other over and over for that with mindless tenderness. The thing was, they had never owned anything of great value, had never had to fear the consequences of precious possessions. Now, as a result of their habitual consolations—an act that always left Jane a little frightened, as though such delight couldn’t belong to her—she was swollen with something too good to be true or recognizable.
She walked through the apartment humming the tone of her husband’s voice on the telephone. He had asked again what he was supposed to buy for her on his lunch hour, had spoken vaguely about the mishaps he had encountered with an upper plate he was working on in the dental laboratory, had asked how she felt. And yet, as always, he had transmitted some feeling he could not articulate, and she was left with this new brand of uneasiness.
Finally she went downstairs to get the mail, just to ease herself. At the mailboxes, she met Sarah Lublin and felt comforted.
“Your face is changing,” Sarah said with a smile. “That means a boy.”
Jane smiled and touched her face, somehow able to accept that without the confusion she experienced from the rational. “Well, you have children,” she said. “How does it feel? No, I mean to be a mother . . . a mother?” She had to tilt her head a little at that fantastic word; she, Jane Colwell of the harassed and puzzling girlhood. All she saw of herself was a short girl with a stained brown dress, smiling politely on the fringes of other people’s laughter. “I mean,” she went on, taking the letters from the brass mailbox and looking at her name framed behind cellophane on the envelopes, “you have the boy and the girl.”
“Oh, with children you worry and are always running to them. They never let things be, they bother their father. And yet, they keep him, my husband, they keep him . . . interested. He could be a cold stone, I think, but he listens for what they are doing, he touches them. I think he would be very bad off if he could not touch them and listen to hear what they are into. He has had very bad times and he would perhaps never think about anything else except for them. Yes, with children you get out of yourself and you allow yourself to accept the future. Of course they tire you, and you never run out of things to worry about, but still . . .” She stared apprehensively at the envelope she had just taken from her mailbox, her expression indicating that she was reading a language she hadn’t seen for some time. “Oh my,” she said in a quietly appalled voice. “It is from my husband’s uncle. I just know what he says.” Sarah looked up at Jane, ascertained that this vague and absent girl would not be able to repeat what she was told in the relieving mood of confidence, and went on to shake out the sudden dust of anxiety that the scrawled writing on the envelope had dropped on her.
“This uncle of Aaron’s, he was in The Hell too. His family is gone, and he has been living in Baltimore with some friends. Aaron sends him money. Always he asks to come and live here with us, but of course my husband would not have it. He grows angry each time, and each time the uncle’s letter becomes more strong, more needy. I know this man. He is cunning, he has learned to take from others. I never dare take either side in my husband’s arguments with himself. It is apparent that either way, to take him or not to take him, is painful for Aaron. Still, somehow I know it would be difficult, most difficult, if he comes.” She shook the letter with a little flapping sound. “I don’t look forward,” she said. “This letter.”
“I don’t know,” Jane said, looking at her hands clasped on her belly. “Things are so funny, children, letters. I wonder if they really mean me when they write my name on the envelopes. And a name . . . Does that really . . . What are your children’s names again? I forget.”
“And the apartment is small,” Sarah said, with the envelope against her lips, splitting her breath. “It would be peculiar for the children. He’s an old man, perhaps not so clean. The apartment . . . Oh, and I wish that they would take care of that sink, with its dripping, and the elevator. I speak to the agent and he listens politely, but you know how these people are. Aie, I tell you . . .”
“And Jim,” Jane said, leaving it at that, so the two of them stood in the morning sunlight of the entry, the gold color of the bank of mailboxes gilding their faces; they were like floaters in the lake of words to which they couldn’t find beginning or end. Until, imbued with something of each other, they went back to their own apartments, sadly dreamy and adrift.
•
Aaron Lublin almost bumped into Sherman Hauser, who had just emerged from the candy store where he had bought cigarettes and now stood for a few minutes, bemused by the covers of the girly magazines. Had it been possible for them to avoid each other, they would have done so, not because there was hostility between them, but because there wasn’t, because there was nothing. To Sherman, the short Polish Jew was as much background as the colored shipping clerks in the grocery jobbing firm where he worked, human, he supposed, but hardly on the same route of the maze as he was. And to Aaron, the nattily dressed man with the presumptuous Homburg was only part of the cold and alien stone of the city to which he was exiled.
“Morning,” Sherman said, bending his lips slightly.
“Rather cold,” Aaron said. He fell more or less into step with the longer-legged man.
“Winter practically, gonna have worse.”
“Of course the children do not mind it. They like the snow, and it is nice to have the park so near.” They entered what was becoming a stream of people headed for the subway.
“Oh yeah, my Bobby,” Sherman said, his bony face becoming pulverized by that tenderness which had no transitory state and so came out like a sudden rawness. The dim, morning eroticism faded from his mind; the black howl of his recent exchange with Carol became, in retrospect, no more than a normal marital spat; besides, there was the ease of true common ground here. “He loves to play with your boy and girl. My wife tells me they play nice together.”
“My girl is maternally inclined; she likes to be the little mother. Her own brother does not accept this gracefully, but your son apparently does.”
“Ah, he’s a son of a gun, that Bobby,” Sherman wailed in a tone of grotesque frailty.
Aaron just glanced sideward with masked repugnance. “Yess-s,” he said, gradually allowing the thickening stream of people to separate them, so that by the time they descended the subway steps they were out of sight of each other.
•
Basellecci went into the accounting office and dropped his envelope on the girl’s desk. “For Mr. Kaplowe,” he said. “My own personal tax information is there, as well as some things from the school. He will know.” Around him, typewriters and adding machines made an exaggerated parody of summer-insect sounds.
“Fine, Mr. Basellecci,” the girl said.
Basellecci responded with a strained, rather gray smile and turned back toward the door. He passed a cubicle where a man sat playing a silent tune on a small calculator, his sleeves rolled up to reveal blue, tattooed numbers on one forearm. Aaron looked up and met Basellecci’s eyes, mistakenly thought he recognized their common past, and then disdained even the doubt by going back to work without facial reaction of any kind. Basellecci felt the clench of pain in his lower abdomen and attributed it to the rocklike face of the accountant. His pained smile turned to a scowl, and he went out angrily.
A few minutes later he was in the doctor’s office explaining both his symptoms and his own diagnosis.
“I am very certain,” he said to the patiently amused doctor, “that it is all a result of my emotions because of the environment of my
toilet chamber. My lower parts,” he said delicately, “clench like a fist with anger and anxiety. When, after many days and some laxatives, I do achieve a painful movement, it is hardly relief; the pain persists.” The doctor gave him a brief examination, which included the indignity of a rectal exploration. Bent over in that humiliating position, Basellecci vented his hatred on the accursed wall, on his whole apartment and building, and finally on Norman Moonbloom. In that posture, he felt squeezed of all his youthful dreams of dignity and joy, and, like many people separated from the place of their youth, blamed even the land and the city that had betrayed him to age and failure.
“Madonna mia!” he cried at last as the cruel finger touched some deep tender place. “Such a thing to happen to a man!”
As he drew up his pants and his dignity with a white, bitter face, the doctor, a young Italian with a tiredly compassionate expression that was reduced by chronic amusement, sat back in his swivel chair, the tips of his fingers together as though to complete a circuit of thought.
“I would like to have you take some tests, Mr. Basellecci. There are indications of some kind of obstruction.”
“After the holidays perhaps,” Basellecci said, waving an exasperated hand. “In the meantime, could you perhaps give me some medication for present relief?”
“Yes, I’ll give you a couple of prescriptions, one of which is a tranquilizer,” the doctor said, writing on his pad. He looked up with an absently frightening expression. “But I don’t want you to neglect this. I want you to have those tests.”
“Yes, yes,” Basellecci agreed, disdainful of the threat, which, after all, was only of some future humiliation.
And in the afternoon, going back up the stairs of the reeking, dark hallway of his home, he was startled by the hooded, inhuman-looking eyes of the young Chinese as they passed on the first landing.
Wung took the hostile glance as his due, without anger, without the recourse of defiance. Going outside, he was too relieved to be deserting the scene of his insane dreams. Something was draining from him during his orgiastic nights; he had a dim recollection of bland, powerfully loving Chinese faces, and he was murdering them constantly. As he walked down Mott Street, he wondered for the millionth time how he had gotten behind his face, did not dare think that he had been born there and that he was severing himself from what he was; the tie was already frayed by abuse, and when it parted—void!
At the bus stop he kept his eyes and his consciousness on the full figure of Sheryl Beeler until, sensitive to glances like his, she met his eyes and gave him the delightful pain he took for pleasure.
Kram came down the same steps a few minutes later and slipped on some small piece of garbage. Falling, he imagined helpless crippling and cried out in a rare spasm of fear, and then landed surprisingly on his feet. He walked outside shakily, his forehead damp; he felt an immense self-disgust, as though he were a half-crushed insect.
•
Some half a mile uptown, Leni Cass paid her bill and went out of the luncheonette to the bus stop, trying to exorcise her feeling of shame and unworthiness. She had just been to a studio for a reading and had seen by the casting director’s expression that she had failed. And yet she hadn’t been able to resist smiling sexily at him and flaunting her body as she walked. In that abyss of humility, she had known that he could have gotten her to sleep with him by a single word, so desperate had she been to mark him in some way. On the whole ride crosstown, she trembled and felt sick, dreading the sight of her son, Richard. She sat erect, a rather severe expression on her face, reclaiming at least an outward semblance of dignity. She had images of herself splayed out nakedly under the bodies of the many men she had made love with. A vileness filled her so she could hardly breathe. Furtively she began crying in the warm quiet of the almost empty bus.
And in the hallway of the apartment house, she was pushed back under even that surface of dignity when she found herself smiling seductively at Wade Johnson, who terrified her with a slight bow, his rage suddenly localized in his groin.
“Good day, Miss Cass, ma’am,” he said. There was vibrant threat in his voice.
And unable to return to a milder mood in time, Wade Johnson greeted Milly Leopold in a like manner before going into his apartment.
And Milly Leopold carried that intimidating excitement into her own rooms, where J. T. glimpsed its flush, saw it as a goad, and tried to escape her by coughing with insane fury, so that the blueness of his face spread out through the air and stifled Milly with grief.
On the floor below, Ilse Moeller slammed her window shut against the sound, remembering a similar cough coming from a slatted freight car in a Dresden station. She hurried out of her apartment, later than usual because she had to go on an errand up to Connecticut, to her employer’s house.
She rode in an almost empty local, picked up the papers at her boss’s home in Stamford, and then rode back to the city on a train from Boston. A man came through selling candy, his sales spiel interspersed with jokes and preposterous philosophic sallies. Ilse sat brooding at the rusty landscape rushing by the grimy train windows; the smoke of a Port Chester factory chimney chilled her with reminiscence, and she huddled into herself, nagged by the silly dialogue of the Jewish-looking candy butcher.
“Hersheys, Nestlés, peanut brittle, awrange drink, tequila, and dream-inducing mushrooms,” Sugarman called. “Chewing gum, peanuts, Almond Joys, Mounds, aphrodisiacs, and sundry items.” Last night, for the first time in his life, he had been unable to perform sexually with his lady of the evening, and he was near the bottom of his well of inexplicable mourning. Not that the woman had mattered, not that Sugarman had ever planned on perpetuating himself or had ever been concerned with manifestations of his manhood, because he saw himself as a neuterized figure, an implement of this, his humble ritual. “Let the good sweet juices of melted chocolate sweeten the tentacles of your soul. This is fresh chocolate made with the milk of rare Arabian mares taken at the full of the moon. There is chocolate and there is chocolate. Who’ll buy? Awrange drink, ice cold, specially toasted peanuts. This offer is for a limited time only.” Yet somehow that small genital failure, perhaps only a result of weariness and lack of enthusiasm for his partner, had somehow managed to tighten a lid of futility on him and to fill him with a more acute depression than any he remembered. He began to wonder about his relationship to life, to doubt that it existed at all.
And thus hollowed, he went home. In the hallway he met Del Rio, burdened with pail and scrub brush, on his way in to clean the bathroom.
“Del Rio,” he said.
“Hello, Sugarman,” Del Rio answered affably. Sugarman was the only one in the house who did not offend him by filthy habits.
Sugarman went sighing up the stairs, and Del Rio set to work on the bathroom tub and floor, snarling at the occasional cockroaches and silver fish that darted out of his reach with more than human cunning. And when he was done, he went out into the hallway to find Paxton waiting to get into the bathroom and Louie coming down the stairs with his little toilet-article bag.
“I’m not your goddamn maid,” he shouted at the two of them. “Why do I have to clean that place every other day? I never see you two slobs make a move to clean it. You splash water on the floor and attract the roaches; you don’t flush the toilets half the time.”
“Perhaps we are not so repelled by the functions of our own bodies,” Paxton said, walking past Del Rio with his effeminate gait.
“Don’t sass me, you little black queen. I know dirt is your natural element,” Del Rio snarled furiously.
Paxton stopped just inches from the powerfully built fighter, his dark, knobby face angled into a malevolent squint. “Now, Del Rio,” he said softly, the breath hissing around his words as though he had sprung a leak because of extreme pressure. “Hear me, doll. In sex I may have my circuits crossed, and there is no denying the evidence of my pigmentation. But listen to this, you punchy bastard, I know what I am, and from my heritage I have an agil
ity with the razor that does not extend merely to shaving.” He stood like a pygmy lion tamer within the breath of the savagely breathing man long enough to establish his lack of fear, and then, with a sardonic smile, entered the bathroom and slammed the door.
“And you too, dimwit,” Del Rio cried to Louie on the stairs, prevented by law and fear from making a physical attack. But even Louie got his revenge, just by teetering sickly on the steps, his eyes rolling samples of his weird, inner pain.
Del Rio threw his clothes on and stormed down the stairs, blackened by his own cruelty, which was a sign to him of the disorder always threatening his spirit. As he passed Karloff’s door, he swung hard and crashed the side of his fist on the old man’s door.
Inside, Karloff stood up in desperate rage, and the house vibrated around him like a settling penny, until there was stillness of a sort and he sat back down, staring with his terrible eyes at the beaten door.
8
NORMAN SAT ON EVA Baily’s tapestried chair unable to get used to the strange clarity in his head. His nose, his ears, his eyes, all shot sensation into him at alarming speed.
“Yes, I’ve been sick,” he answered, fondling the plastic cover of the receipt book.
“Well, there’s always something,” she said, anxious to get into her own preoccupation. “I don’t seem to have the time to get sick, not that kind of sick anyways. I worry myself sick with that boy, but I can’t get to lie down and convalesce.” She smiled wanly in appreciation of her own succinctness, but did not pause long enough for Norman to interrupt. “The things a boy can get involved in! Not that he’s bad, understand. High-strung is more what it is. You take a placid, dull sort and it’s not so likely he’ll get into trouble. But someone like my Lester . . . I think of him like a son. He’s lived with us since he was four and his mother, our sister Clara, died of polio. The father went in an auto accident the year before. It all seemed to have happened together. First my husband. You may have wondered why my name is Baily, same as my sister Minna. Well, he was a distant cousin. But anyhow, all those things happening together, it was almost like Lester being born to me. Now, of course, he’s gone and gotten . . . involved with some girl. He thinks he’s a man, but as soon as there’s trouble he runs to us. Well, that’s as it should be. Plenty of time for him to get independent. Of course, there’s ugliness in certain things, people get hurt. Don’t think I don’t feel sorry for the girl, but still, that kind of a girl . . .”
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 10
