“Listen, you idiot, you’ll pay your rent or I’ll have you thrown out. You don’t amuse me and you probably don’t even amuse your son. You’re a phony, a poseur, and the only thing you could act convincingly would be what you are—a bum!” But it was only a flash fire, lit by the shock of physical injury, and almost immediately after he had said it he waved disgustedly; his disgust was as much for his own outburst as for Wade’s nonsense.
“Heyy-y, Norman,” Wade said in amazement. “What’s come over you? I declare, I detected a tiny glimmer of passion in you just then. Could it be that the man from the lower depths is coming out into the light? No more underground, no more remote control. Look at him, look at him, Wadey, he’s stirring, his blood is bothering him. See those intelligent eyes, almost human. Oh, if he could only speak, imagine the things he could tell us!”
“You’re really clever, Wade. Too bad you’re afraid to demonstrate it anyplace but in here with the captive audience of your kid.”
“Ah, very good, you little bastard. I’ve never seen you put up your fists before. I feel it’s all my doing, I’m a regular Pygmalion. Or could it be a Frankenstein? I can see you getting completely out of hand.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Norman said wearily, still able to touch ground with his toes. “Give me the money.”
“No, no, don’t regress now. Make me give it to you,” Wade said, standing over Norman with his weight-lifter’s body. “Consolidate the little advance you’ve made today.”
“I swear, if I were a little bigger, I’d like to . . .” He smiled angrily, impatiently.
And suddenly, like a child, Wade wearied of him. He dropped the money on the chair next to Norman’s and picked up the football. “Heads up, Wadey,” he shouted.
Norman wrote out the receipt, pocketed the money, and went to the door. For a minute or two he looked back at the man and the boy and the blur of the ball between them. The slatted shadows of the Venetian blinds imprisoned the two figures in separate cages and laid long bars over the backs of the books in the shelves. Back and forth the ball went, spinning something not quite invisible between them while the man murmured encouragement and the boy grunted with effort. And then, in the same rhythm as his encouragement, Wade began to murmur something else, and Norman closed the door on it in bafflement, still hearing it in the hallway.
“Little lady mouse,
Rosy in a ray of blue,
Dame souris trotte:
(Little Lady Mouse)
Debout, parresseux!
(Up now, all of you!)
(Verlaine)”
Norman moaned, seeing Wade elude him like a sorcerer. It occurred to him for the first time that he might be inadequate for this job too. If a man of five foot seven and a hundred and thirty-eight pounds could lumber, he lumbered up the stairs to Leni Cass’s door.
“Enter, Moonbloom,” she said too gaily. “I was just mixing myself a bourbon, and bourbon and I hate to drink alone.”
“No, I don’t want anything,” he said more curtly than he intended, following her inside.
It seemed to upset her, and she gave a brittle laugh that whitened her face slightly. “Well, then, I’ll drink alone,” she said. She took a big swallow from a glass with harlequin diamonds on it and watched him silently write out the receipt, her big eyes somewhat frightened.
“Uh, Norman, about the rent . . .”
He looked up so suddenly that she almost jumped.
“It just happens that things got a little loused up this week, and I’m—how is it said?—financially embarrassed.”
He stared at her, unable to articulate to her what she was really piling on him. And his look was as cold as possible because he was stunned by the speed with which the subtle conspiracy was being consummated.
She couldn’t have known that, of course, and so was just shaken by an expression she had never expected from him. “Don’t you have any comment on that?” she asked shakily.
“You’re saying that you can’t pay the rent?”
“Well, I’ve had a little trouble lining things up, and ex-hubby’s check is . . .”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked in a flat voice.
“You’re not acting like you. This is embarrassing for me, but of all times for you to turn stranger. I never asked you before. . ..”
“I wish you had—before.”
“Well, what should I do? What are you going to . . .”
“All right,” Norman said, getting up. “What can I do?” She followed him to the door, trying to thank him, but he had no patience left for graciousness. “Don’t thank me, I’m not happy about it.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice behind him, unable to afford anger or self-respect. He heard her close the door quietly with an excess of humility and abasement, and that angered him further.
•
“How about that stove burner?” Milly Leopold asked, her Mother Goose face slightly soured by resentment. “It’s been a long time. It’s like you don’t feel you have to, so you don’t. Well, I suppose I can’t force you. You know quite well that J. T. and me can’t just move out or anything. I just put it up to your conscience is all.” She turned to the chair where J. T. sunned himself in a small amber beam of afternoon light. J. T. coughed profoundly, the sound not brought out, but resounding broadly from within like a threatening volcano.
“I’ve been sick myself,” Norman barked. “I’m putting things in order, trying to get caught up. I said I would take care of it. You’ll just have to wait your turn.”
“Oh, we’ll wait,” she said sarcastically.
“I don’t know what you think I’m running here,” Norman said. “It’s ridiculous. All the buildings are falling apart. I’m just the agent, you know. You all seem to expect me to get down on my knees and start plumbing and hammering. What did the last agent do for you? Don’t tell me all these things just started to go wrong when I took the job. I bet the last agent did nothing. I bet he wasn’t hounded like this. What is there about me that makes you all think I’m going to be able to renovate everything from top to bottom?”
For a few seconds she appeared intimidated by his unusual outburst, amazed too. But then an element of slyness crept over her face; she had discovered a promising weakness in him, and she cast her eyes downward and spoke forlornly to her right toe. “No, no, that’s true; the other agents never did anything for us. Nobody ever has. People like us . . . Well, we just don’t have recourse. Oh, you’re right, we’re just lucky to have a dry place to live, J. T. is lucky to have a chair and a bed to . . .”
Norman stared at her with a quiver of anger. From the chair the Vesuvian rumble began. The late light struck the colored-glass shade of the old lamp and cast pale lozenges of red and blue on the ivory-lace covering on the table. All around was such a dustiness, a mustiness, a sense of antique intimacy, that he almost imagined a smell of old people’s underwear; he could visualize the two of them naked under the yellow light of a bare bulb with their ruining bodies slowly, sluggishly seeking a furtive ease, the painter’s chest crunching from the exertion, her mouth making a silently horrified “Oh my.”
“You don’t have to talk like that,” he said weakly. “I said I would . . .”
“And the warped window in the bedroom,” she said, exacting more and more as his grip loosened. “And the missing tiles in the bathroom, and the falling plaster over the fridge.”
“Yes, okay,” he agreed, writing on the inside cover of the receipt book. “Warped window, tiles, plaster.”
“Because all those things upset J. T., and when he gets upset he coughs to beat the band, and I just know you wouldn’t want that on your conscience.” She moved closer to him as she spoke, and he backed away, still writing, suddenly afraid to look up at her. “I’m sure that you’re not like the other agents,” she said. “I can see by your face.”
•
At first, Ilse Moeller noticed nothing different about his face. She moved about the room in a gr
een-knit dress, waiting for him to write out the receipt, touching personal things with her peculiarly heavy hands, smiling unattractively. “Here he is again,” she said in her tart voice. “On his mission, so dedicated, so businesslike.” Why had she come to this city, she wondered for the thousandth time. They were all around her, by the millions here, with their sly, melancholy faces, sleepy looking, bored, hiding accusation behind eyes thousands of years old in the art of secrecy. There were other cities, where Jews were in a tiny minority, where you could go for weeks, months even, without seeing one. An inner spasm went through her in Norman’s presence; she recognized it as revulsion and it made sense to her. “A miniature Rothschild, eh, Moonbloom? What was it you said you were—a bookkeeper before? It is a natural talent, adding and subtracting. It makes you strong.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked coldly. “Are you trying to be humorous?” He looked at her with dull eyes, holding the receipt out to her without moving, demanding that she take it from him.
“You seem to be not in a good mood, Moonbloom. Do I rub you in the wrong manner?” She sounded almost hopeful, gazing with morbid interest at his small, unsmiling face.
“I don’t get your joke,” he said harshly. “Perhaps you’d better try your humor on someone else.”
Ah, she thought, noting with satisfaction the little threads of blood on the inner walls of her body, he is human, he does feel something oppressive in me. Her smile was like that of a victim of Bell’s palsy, her mouth creeping up one side of her face so extremely that it seemed her flesh might split.
“See, now it comes out,” she said gaily. “You denied it before, but it is revealed. You do dislike me after all.”
There was something noxious about her face. She was an exceptionally clean person; you could tell she scrubbed her face almost raw, because her skin had an abraded look; her clothes were always spotless, and Norman had never seemed to notice any smell in the room. It had given the apartment a curious quality of emptiness. Now, for some reason, he sensed a terrible odor, which escaped him in an olfactory way but which reached directly to his brain and filled him with revulsion.
“I don’t understand you,” he said carefully. “You seem eager for me to dislike you.”
“Oh no, that is a strange thing to . . . I, of course, am only . . . teasing.” She seemed unnerved by his very simple deduction and covered her breasts with crossed arms, shaking her head in mild reproof. “You seem to have a very poor sense of . . .”
“Humor,” he supplied. “Yes, that seems to be the consensus.” He stared for another few seconds at her, then jerked his head sideways impatiently and went to the door. “We seem to talk at odds.”
She had no response to that, but only stood covering her torso and staring at him with glittering eyes, fascinated by something just beneath his hairline.
He nodded and left her, somehow scalded by the after-vision of the green of her dress.
10
KARLOFF’S PERPETUAL ANGER seemed somewhat frayed, and he led Norman into the room, walking on stiff, tottery legs. With his great hunched size, his movement had the frightful majesty of a wounded elephant. Norman held his breath until the old man sank with a grunt onto the chair.
“Ehr gehocked offen mine tier, deh fashtunkenah momser,” he growled, running his eyes suspiciously up and down Norman’s body.
“Who, Mr. Karloff, who beat on your door?”
“Ahh,” the old man said, nodding, his down-pulled mouth fighting upward toward a faint smile. “Who, who? Ich vays, dun vurry. Uber ich nit geshluphen. Hah, I em not easy. I vait, I let him come close, he should think I am through. And then—grab him by throat, take him along ahlso!” His eyes peered out savagely, slyly, like those of a beast waiting in a thicket for the man who has wounded him.
“Was one of the other tenants bothering you, banging on your door?”
Karloff tossed his hand derisively. “Dem,” he snorted. “Dey are notting. Not dem.”
“Who, then?” Norman asked, gazing at the decaying mask.
“Who, yes, who?” Karloff suddenly grinned, causing an explosion in the network of lines on his dark face.
Dismayed, Norman made a face. Karloff thought it was Death who had knocked on his door. Caught in the whorls of senility, he planned to seize that which would seize him. What shape did the intruder have for the old man? Norman looked at the massive gnarled strength in the ancient hands, the veins hard and black under the loose, liver-colored skin, and he shuddered for the human being Karloff might mistake for his one enemy. God help Del Rio or Paxton if they trespassed! He himself kept the table between them as he wrote out the receipt and took the damp bills.
Then he looked around at the room, which seemed to be melting into a solution of filth. Whole families of roaches trooped across the walls. Here and there were clottings of now unidentifiable food remains, and, with a final swoop of disgust, Norman saw a swarming mass of tiny ants in the cubed conformation of the sugar they were devouring.
“Mr. Karloff,” he said in a firm voice, “I don’t think I would have the heart to put you out of here, although that would be the sensible thing. This place is the most revolting mess I have ever seen. The whole building will be condemned. Perhaps you are not capable any more, but . . .”
Karloff brayed mockingly, his purplish mouth opened wide.
“But I’ve just made up my mind about something. I am going to have this place cleaned, maybe painted. I’m going to tear down those curtains and burn them with your bedding.”
Karloff began laughing, almost silently, his eyes narrowed so they appeared to be just two more lines in the crowded road map of his face; his large hand slowly beat the time to his amusement.
“I’m not kidding!” Norman said loudly, feeling anger pumped into him with each slap of the old hand.
“Oy vay,” the old man rasped, rocking, beside himself in his almost soundless laughter. “Listen to him, duh graysa mench . . . oy, oy . . . ah reguhla . . . eee-e . . . ah reguhla Tartsen fuhn deh apes!” And now his laughter broke thickly, lumpily out of him; it rolled around the room and poured over Norman, who became wild with an emotion he thought was rage.
“You’ll see, you’ll see, Karloff,” he cried, standing near the door and sweeping the room with his hand. “I’ll scrub this place to the bare wood. I’ll burn the rubbish and disinfect the floors and walls. I’ll take every piece of food out of here and see that you only have enough to eat. I’ll paint the walls white, I’ll scrub right around your chair, and you’ll be the only dirty thing in here. This place will be so shiny it’ll blind you. I’m getting sick and tired of all this.” He seemed to be floating on a swift rush of something, and he flailed without sense or reference. “On Mott Street I’ll put in fluorescents in the hallways as bright as arc lights. I’ll rip out Basellecci’s wall, I’ll fix stove burners and faucets and elevators and wiring. I’m sick and tired of all this ridiculous . . .”
And suddenly he was staring at the old man’s puzzled face and he was stunned by his own echoing insanity. He tried shaking his head, attempted a smile of sorts; his head kept ringing dementedly. “It’s just that I . . . I mean, there has to be some order. I’m going to . . . to clean up. I have to. . ..” Karloff shrugged helplessly, and Norman looked at the floor. “I mean it,” he said. Then he spun around and went out of the reeking room, Karloff temporarily immobilized behind him.
•
“Do you know,” Sugarman said to Norman with the expression of a preacher revealing hell-fire, “that last night my manhood slipped away from me. I could not summon the rod of my virile office, and instead was landlord to a dead and harmless worm who lay upon my belly like the crude likeness on a mummy case. I was the victim of a coarse woman’s scorn and laughter. That was less than nothing. But the demise of something valuable, which I had not yet determined the extent of—that was the mortal blow. The logarithms of life are written in exceedingly small numerals; what chance have you at answers when the pointe
r has softened to the consistency of melting rubber? Can I find my way without the needle to the compass? I have visited the shores of melancholia often in my errant life, indeed it is home port for me. But always there was my rod, my staff to comfort me. One thing made me a positive creature. I could enter things, could plug into mysterious sources of power. In the times of dire emptiness I could hope, yes, even perhaps subliminally dream of perpetuating Sugarman, of extending his raucous cry over the track-bound carcass of this America. I might be buried like a dormant root, but my fruit would spring up through the cinders of the roadbeds and the prone ladder of the ties. I had always had that vague trump card of life. But last night I played it and it was revealed to be a blank, an unprinted piece of paper. She laughed, that Lysol-smelling tart, laughed and farted hysterically. So, this is what I present to you today, Moonbloom. I pay you in the same small change, but there is no warmth in the payment; you might just as well pick pennies from a dead man’s eyes.”
Through the disorder of his own recently tumbled nerves, Norman looked at the morose, yet stubbornly vigorous, face of the candy butcher, and he felt a trio of impulses: irritation was tepid and came in the thickest stream, but there was the cold trickle of pity, and, right in the pit of his belly, the hot fount of irresistible laughter. He snorted, hissed, finally brayed.
“Oh, Christ . . . Sugarman . . . what the devil . . . oh for . . .” He held on to the table and shook, surprised at a physical relief. Through watery eyes he beheld his tenant’s miserable and outraged face. He was mortified at the excess of his own voice. The room rang, and it was strange to him, because he had never laughed like that before; his fascination with the phenomenon perpetuated it. Sugarman sat like an affronted rock. If only he would smile, or display positive anger. But he just sat there, parodying himself, mournful, self-pitying, wretched, yet richly abundant.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 13
