“It is terrible that you should come in on a family affair,” Sarah said. “We are not in the habit of . . .”
“Enough,” Aaron said wearily. “Leave the man alone now, let him go.”
“I’m sorry to intrude myself,” Norman said severely. “You asked me something and I answered.”
Alerted by old instinct, Aaron covered his rudeness. He stood up with a slight, false smile that was worn thin by much use. “Of course, I did not mean to imply . . . That is, I appreciate your allowing . . .”
“I don’t want to intrude,” Norman said. “I just . . .”
“I understand,” Aaron bleated. “You are very kind to . . .”
“No, no, it’s nothing,” Norman said, feeling he would like to jump through the window, but frozen there by the horrid amenities.
“These things are very complicated,” Aaron said.
“I understand.”
“No, no, it is my place to . . .”
“Of course.”
Suddenly Hirsch’s dry old voice smacked mockingly at both of them. “ThankyouMoonbloomnicemeetingyou.”
They stared at him, saw mutually the incredible blight he was, and then turned from each other. Sarah led Norman through the wrecked air to the door. Behind him he could hear the children jumping up and down in the bedroom. He went out the door without looking at Sarah, without responding to her soft, timid “Good-by.”
Neither Schoenbrun, Katz and Sidone, nor the Spragues were home. He went out of the building trying to figure out how he would plan his calls to adjust to that break in his routine. For a while, in the darkening street, he was able to be only mildly irritated by the simple problem, but then, as other things began to crumble in him, that slight disordering of his usual pattern suddenly seemed to undo him.
He stopped next to a street lamp and put his hand to his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said in a shocked voice to the evening.
9
STILL HOLDING FEEBLY to the idea that the day before had only been a result of his physically weakened condition, he had taken two sleeping pills last night. Now he walked up the Mott Street stairs with the Seconal drowsiness that bore a surface resemblance to his old calm. Indeed, in the few seconds while he waited for Basellecci to answer the door, he almost convinced himself that the day would be like the flat screenings of old. Yesterday was buffered by the barbiturate, wrapped and muffled like an unpleasant dream. He prepared his bland smile.
But the Italian teacher’s face was shot through with gray, and Norman had a premonition that today would be worse.
“Come in,” Basellecci said curtly. “I am just pouring the coffee.”
Norman sat down with his back to the open door of the toilet chamber. “I’m getting so I look forward to your coffee,” he said.
“That is very well,” Basellecci answered grimly. “But I may not be well enough to serve you soon. I have been to the doctor, you know. This is no longer a joking matter.”
“The wall?” Norman asked with a sigh.
“The wall.”
“I’ve been meaning . . .”
“Yes, yes, sure, you’ve been meaning. The doctor says I have an obstruction inside the rectal. This is no longer psychosemantic, it is not figmet of my imagination.”
“The coffee is, as usual, delicious,” Norman said appealingly.
“It is practically all I live on lately, all I can keep down.”
“Are you that ill?” Norman asked, appalled.
“What do you think I have been exclaiming of with such vi-o-lence? There, there is my oppressor!” Basellecci cried, pointing to the toilet, his face working so strenuously that Norman would not have found anything inappropriate in his words if he had said “J’accuse!” The flesh beside his nostrils was white, his mouth scored by vertical lines of arid pain. “I have given great appeals to you, I have considered you to be of human persuasion. But you, with your polite little smile, have nodded at me as were I a shallow-leveled moron, have humored me and said, “I will see what can be done, Mr. Basellecci, I will look into it.’ I charge you, I charge you with the fate of my bowels!”
The need to smother his hysterical impulse to laugh made Norman almost as angry as his tenant. He pushed the coffee cup away from him and stood up.
“I’ve been sick myself, Mr. Basellecci. You don’t know what things I have on my mind. There are a million things to do in this and the other buildings I take care of. I haven’t meant to humor you. Only I must put things off in order to organize what has to be done. You only see your problems, naturally. But I have a couple of dozen other tenants. I have limited funds, and it’s a problem for me to try and figure out how to repair things. I’m only one man.”
Norman’s indignation seemed to act as an antidote to Basellecci’s anger. Deeper than his pain, Basellecci was essentially a man of reason; indeed, reason had cast him into his blandly lonely life. He held up his hands placatingly.
“Yes, of course, I become carried off. One forgets that things exist outside of yourself. You live alone and you become susceptible to obsessions. I admit, things get out of disproportion, magnified. There is a selfishness involved, thinking only of yourself. I lie in bed in the other room and I think about that wall. I become enraged. I start to think about the priest in Italy who persecuted me when I was a child, who held me up to scorn because I argued with his word. I think about the ruffians who molested me because I wished to study and be gentlemanly, about the coarse girls who questioned my manhood because I was fastidious, about the unclean little politicians who made me crawl for a passport because I had no friends or money. I am reminded of the ignorant clerks who make fun of my English and my unknowing of the baseball players. And it is brought to me of how difficultly it is to dwell within dignity, to construct something of gracefulness and beautifulness. And I begin and end with that . . . that wall. It is the gateway to the ugliness for me, and it follows me even to the farthestmost limitation of the city, notwithstanding how distant.” He spread his arms wide, as though to glide on the current of his words, and his face traced the frailest draft of humor and self-denigration. “So you see . . .”
“Yes, I see,” Norman said with some stress; for the first time it occurred to him that sooner or later he would have to deal with that wall. “No, no, I don’t feel like any coffee,” he said to Basellecci’s silent offer of the banished cup. And then, when the Italian teacher shrugged with an almost smug expression of martyrdom, Norman qualified harshly. “No, it’s not that I’m angry; it’s just that my system is still out of kilter from my sickness. Coffee gives me heartburn.”
Basellecci nodded, deadpan. “And so . . .” He gestured at the toilet chamber without turning toward it, his eyes half closed. “You perhaps really will . . .”
“Yes,” Norman said from between his teeth. “Yes yes yes yes!”
“Ahh,” Basellecci replied, his ailing smile more than Norman could bear.
•
“I mean, man, this one broad is really taking me far,” Jerry Wung said, watching Norman’s face. “She likes to have a nigger and a Chink work on her at once, me on the bottom and him on top. And that’s not all; last night she called me up and we like did it over the phone! What it is, she begins to talk . . .”
“Why are you telling me all this? Am I supposed to applaud, or what?” Norman said, his voice coldly even.
“Well no, it’s just like a discussion of sex, you know.” Wung was smiling, but seemed to be running out of oxygen, for he breathed with his mouth wide open. “Are you shocked, is that what it is?”
“No, I don’t care one way or the other,” Norman said, faithful to the act of writing out the receipt.
“Isn’t it sick?” Wung could have found relief even in condemnation. “I mean, wow, if my family ever could have seen the way I live! They were real greenhorn Chinks, quiet, calm. They never yelled at the kids. It was like you just couldn’t do anything wrong no matter how you tried. Like they had some kind of invisi
ble spell. They even died quiet. Man, it killed me how they died. I felt like sticking them with pins to make them yell, to make them scream dirty words and thrash around. I mean, I hated them, the way they just lay there and looked at me out of those kooky eyes. Sound strange for me to say that? I know, I know. I look in the mirror at myself and it shakes me up. I don’t know what my old man and old lady were, what went on in them. I got out on the streets here and I didn’t talk their language. They used to just touch me like, that’s all. My brothers and sisters used to dig it, but it was just spooky to me. Most Chinese kids are well adjusted like, you know? I used to feel like the ugly duckling, like I had the wrong face and the wrong address. I don’t see my brothers and sisters. It’s mutual. Hey, I just wonder if the old lady and the old man could have stayed calm under those queer old faces if they knew what I’m doing now. I mean it just wasn’t human the way they died and looked at me, so contented, so sure. You see, they weren’t real, those cats weren’t real. I dream about them at night, and it’s like nightmare. I grab some broad’s boobs and get real rough, and it’s like I’d like to wake them old Chinks up. I went to an analyst last year, when I was working more regular, told him about the dreams and my screwy sex life. Ah, but it was a waste of money. I drew a bum head-shrinker. He got so interested that he forgot to take notes—a regular voyeur.” Wung slashed his mouth with a violent smile and went ranging around the room. “Not that I don’t enjoy myself; I don’t want you to think that. I mean, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I got this new bitch now, and she’s got something really novel. . ..”
Norman got up and walked to the door; in that moment he grasped a new emotion and, fearing to look at it, pocketed it unseen and reached for the doorknob.
“Hey, Moonbloom,” Wung called beseechingly. “You’re a good Joe. Lemme fix you up one night, hah? I mean, we could have a ball. It would be better with you along, it would help a lot. How ’bout it, hah?” He hung in the air over his body, haunting himself, his face full of appeal.
“I don’t, can’t . . . We’ll talk about it some other . . .” Before nausea overtook him, he slammed the door. Then he stood in the dark hallway wondering why a simple “No” should have been impossible to summon right then.
•
“I still have to pour a potful of water into the toilet to make it flush,” Sheryl Beeler said. “It’s a little disgusting, you know?”
Norman nodded as a round stone plopped into his lower body with a disturbingly lascivious effect. “There’s a million things,” he said, watching old man Beeler walk slowly out of the room, the white-fringed back of his head reflecting a queer joke.
“You married?” Sheryl asked, dropping down on the couch so that her heavy breasts bounced. She lit a cigarette and then blew the smoke in a fan-shaped cloud toward him.
“Noo-o,” he answered, trying to make it wry; it came out like a wail. “Confirmed bachelor.”
“I bet you’ve got a whole stable of girls though.” She ran her hand down the silken sleeve of her kimono, raising the hairs on Norman’s body, among other things.
She was too ridiculously obvious. Who was she buttering up and for what? He saw himself too clearly for even clever flattery. And yet his desires were new and graceless, and they made him mentally clumsy. He chuckled pathetically and said, “Aw, no, you have the wrong . . .”
“The money,” Sheryl said, jumping to her feet. She went to a table and slid some bills out from under a doily. When she handed the rent to Norman, she pressed his hand.
“How about a date?” he barked at the pressure.
Sheryl giggled and bumped cutely against him. “My, my, you’re a fast worker. You quiet ones.”
Her weight pushed him against the door, and he gave a short, phlegmy chortle. “No, I only . . .”
“We’ll talk about it, huh,” she said, squeezing him out through the half-closed door. “Maybe next time.”
In the hallway he squeaked and stared at the air with horrified amusement. “Good God,” he whispered. “I’m like a child.” And then, still dazed by his spasm of idiocy, he began to straighten the bills to put them into his wallet. Something rational rose up through him, and he counted the small bills. Five dollars short. He started to turn to the door, his knuckles raised to knock. And then knowledge sprouted in a sick smile on his mouth. He lowered his hand and used it to put the money in his wallet, his face that of a long-suffering parent.
•
Kram limped away from him.
“I slipped on the steps,” he said, shielding with his warped body the drawer from which he took the money. “It’s a crime, that hallway, no light at all. I could have broken my neck if . . .” His coldly tranquil eyes showed a spark of disorder, and the remembrance of that repellent moment was converted to anger at the unimportant hallway. “I have a good mind to sue you. You wouldn’t like a judge having this place described to him, would you?”
“I’m sorry you hurt yourself,” Norman said, afflicted by the unusual sight of a splotch of paint on the normally immaculate drawing table; it was like a grievous wound in that room.
“Don’t be sorry,” Kram said icily. “Just put some lights in that hallway, or I’ll sue, that’s all.”
Suddenly Norman chuckled, his hand waving apology as he did so; he wanted to say, “Wait, wait, I’m not really laughing at you.”
But Kram, normally immune to laughter, was not himself either. “Do you think it’s funny? Are you daring me to make trouble?” he snarled.
“No, no,” Norman said, realizing it was not that funny anyhow. “I was just remembering how, a few weeks ago, I asked you if you had any complaints and you said you didn’t and I remarked how you seemed to be the only one who didn’t.”
“And that strikes you as funny? What an odd sense of humor you have,” Kram replied, merely irritated now.
“One of my other tenants said that I was essentially humorless.” Norman looked out of the window in the general direction of Sugarman. “But when I think about it, it occurs to me that no one is really humorless. Only some people’s jokes are so private. . ..”
Kram looked at him suspiciously, distrusting an opponent who acted like a dreamer. “You have to look out that you don’t offend people with your private jokes. Not that jokes bother me, understand. I mean if I didn’t start out with some kind of sense of humor . . . Well, you know what I mean.”
Norman turned to him, and for a moment everything that was between people and that made intercourse bearable fell away from him. He saw the deep bruise in the man’s spirit; with remarkable vision he glimpsed the hunchback in all sizes, from the damaged embryo to now. And in that brief clarity, anything less than naked honesty seemed impossible. In a blurred voice, he said, “You mean because of your body.”
Kram only opened his mouth slightly, but his eyes crumpled with light. And within the confines of that narrow patch of nakedness, Norman could see the twin prongs of revulsion and offering. They stood in the morning sunlight—one straight and frail with something like total innocence shading his face, as though the oversized hat had left its shadow after he had removed it; and the other new also to such a light, groping for what he had learned to despise in his fight to survive, exposed down to the distorted skeleton, and afraid as he had never been before. And all of it took less than a minute, so they both learned that time was unmeasurable, except in fantasy. The building stank around them, seemed to settle slightly, as though it were planted in unimaginable muck. Perhaps a howl went up between them; they would not remember afterward.
“I can’t afford to get hurt,” Kram said in a hoarse voice. “I have no one to . . . There has always been only me. If I couldn’t go out to get those photographs, if anything happened to my hands . . .” He strained upright, and his face stretched with an expressionless agony. “It’s not death I worry about,” he said.
And Norman, out of the short glare now, was too repelled by what he had said and what he had been given back. “I’ll do something about
the hallway. I’ll have lights put in,” he said in a threatening voice. “It’ll be as light as day in the hall, brighter even. There’ll be a problem with the lights blinding you.”
“There’s no need for you to . . .”
“No, that’s all right,” Norman said, observing his own frenzy with bewilderment. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it.”
And he left Kram chewing on the air, lost in his own perfectly clean apartment, the nudes for some gent’s magazine waiting for his final touch and reflecting the shine of the light from a window that opened only on an air shaft.
•
Wade Johnson and son were throwing a football the length of their living room. Norman ducked as Wade Junior’s wobbly pass came at his head, and then grimaced slightly for his timidity as Wade snatched it out of the air.
“Whatta ya say, Norman,” Wade said without looking at him. “No, no, Wadey boy, grip it tight and not so near the end. Okay now, let’s see a jump pass.” He underhanded it to the boy, who took a serious grip on the ball, fended off an imaginary tackler, and then jumped and threw. The ball hit Norman in the center of the mouth.
“I’m sorry to be in your way,” Norman said bitterly, swallowing the salt of his split lip and feeling the blood run down in a thin stream over his chin.
The boy looked dreamily sad and muttered a shy apology as he scuffed the floor with his foot. But Wade laughed and said, “My God, he bleeds! Norman, I feel closer to you now.”
“Just give me the rent,” Norman said, holding a handkerchief to his lip and feeling an odd grief for himself. “I don’t want to see any football games, I don’t want to hear any poetry. The money—then I’ll go.”
“Poor Moonbloom, you aren’t going anywhere. Wade Junior and I are going—you’ll abide. Hey, Norman, I haven’t been to school for three days, called in sick. Soon they’ll can me, and the boy and I will be heading west. Probably pull out owing you a few weeks’ rent—just for appearances. Yeah, we’re gonna go by way of Wisconsin, where we’ll see his mother’s grave. Wade’s always been curious about what kind of view she’s got. Then to Colorado . . .”
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 12
