The Tenants of Moonbloom

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  “Stop with the Irwins!”

  Norman looked sickly at the mouthpiece, suddenly feeling like crying for the little heap of himself. “Well . . . what should I call you?”

  “Look, this is ridiculous. I’m going to wait until the first. I still have confidence in you. But if I don’t get some satisfaction by the first of the year . . . Well, I’ll have to really re-examine your status, Norman. After all, this is a business rannana, rannana. We don’t rannana rannana rannana . . .”

  For a moment, Norman had the comforting feeling that he was some two months younger, that all this hadn’t become a horror. He watched the headless bodies passing along the sidewalk; he noticed that the last m in Moonbloom was chipping and might soon become an n. Of course the angle of sunlight measured a different hour now, as the days reached the winter ebb. Here was his ball-point pen, the familiar receipt book. But then a mouse ran across the floor—a little lady mouse—and he was instantly crushed by the immense web that had grown up around him.

  “Irwin, I will!” he cried fiercely into the phone.

  Irwin was blown into momentary silence.

  “I’m going to take care of the whole goddamned thing! You won’t have a thing to complain about. If it kills me, I’ll put things in such order that you’ll be amazed. Now let me hang up because I’m going to begin.”

  “All right, sure . . . okay, Norm.” Irwin’s breath became delicate with shock. There was a long stillness in the phone, and Norman realized that Irwin was waiting for him to hang up first.

  Slowly, with the tremor of power in his hand, he did so. Then he drew some sheets of paper before him, ejected the nib of the ball-point, and began searching the watermark in the paper for the place to begin. Norman, scarred, changing, looked into the depths for a beginning and caught a glimpse of it, heard the sound of it, a sort of awful yet uproarious laughter.

  He began writing:

  70th St.:

  Repair elevator

  Wiring for house (Schoenbrun’s air conditioner) Clean walls (paint?)

  Paint elevator (to cover dirty pictures)

  Repair loose tiles in lobby floor

  Replace bulbs in lobby

  Repair dripping sink in Lublins’ kitchen

  Paint out the marks of fire in above

  Plumbing (rusty water)

  Mott St.:

  Basellecci’s wall ***

  Repair Beelers’ toilet

  Install fluorescent fixtures in hallway (Kram)

  2nd Ave.:

  Things beyond my control?

  Plus the wiring

  Broken stove (Leopold)

  Warped window (Leopold)

  Missing tiles in bathroom (Leopold)

  Falling plaster (Leopold)

  13th St.:

  Roof leaks

  Toilets

  Stair banister

  Furnace

  Lights

  Windows

  Cockroaches

  Floors

  Clean Paint } Karloff

  Now all he had to do was go out on his rounds once more, check to see if he had covered everything, ruthlessly determine priorities, and then find out the cost of everything—everything!

  The paper covered with his small, pretty writing reassured him. Everything lined up like ordered troops. He could visualize his own delicately drawn numerals heading each column like officers keeping the ranks disciplined, looked forward to the time when he would be able to add them and, with finality, write the sums. Forgetting his marked face for the moment, he reaffirmed an old belief in codification. The watery winter sunlight could do nothing to his brave list. He smiled and awarded himself a Sunday holiday.

  Next week he would dig in. Muscles appeared in his body. His native town would recognize him. He would take an early train north, and come back Sunday night, refreshed. De Lesseps had nothing on him; rather late in life, he realized he could build a dozen Suez Canals.

  The pain in his brow lay slyly dormant.

  13

  IT WAS A LITTLE too warm for his overcoat as Norman walked through the streets of his native town under the fine drizzle. Indeed, there was nothing to suggest the season in the atmosphere of remembered Sunday quiet; it could have been summer or spring fogged by his memory of the place. The few figures were distant, the shops remote in familiarity. Yet he was oddly relaxed by the monochrome look of the sedate old buildings. He could hear his own footsteps. The rain-softened edges of roofs, the blur of elm branches against the smoky ivory of sky, the dull shine of the iron railing around the green, and the heavy lift and fall of the flocked pigeons, all had the stillness, the inviolate calm of pictures in an old photo album; all was sweet and touching, but delicate enough to shape his frail memories in a form too light to elicit pain.

  He was glad he had come, he thought, anticipating that the day here would show him himself as he really was. It would allow him to hold himself off from the chaos of the recent months, to see his job as no more than a job.

  A car went by with a swish and a whine of tires; he smiled in sudden memory of an uncle’s old Essex, whose wooden steering wheel he had manipulated in a solitary game of speed after the wheels had been taken off the car and it had rested at the back of his uncle’s yard. Full of cheerful sentiment, he peered into the Sabbath-closed coffee shop he had once frequented, and he was moved by the empty cake stands on the counter and the dull sparkle of the grill.

  Now he crossed and walked along the western perimeter of the green, eying the college buildings and the rusty moss along their foundations. A bus hissed by with lighted windows, and he was warmed by sadness. His face was soothed by the gentle mist.

  Soon he reached the beginnings of his own neighborhood, and he remarked the quiet homeliness of the Victorian houses. How small it all was! And then he was in front of his own house, with no feeling of drama, looking at the gray clapboard stained by rain. The familiar windows, that door. My God, he half expected to see Norman Moonbloom come walking out, calling over his shoulder to someone dear inside. For some time he stood there, bemused, comfortably haunted, pressing the house and the ground and the sky upon his heart, only to find with some dismay that, when he closed his eyes, all of it had left no mark he could discern.

  And then a fat man in a raincoat came out of the house. He stared at Norman blankly. Norman smiled and walked on.

  “It’s like walking through the past,” he said to himself, enjoying the role of ghost. He passed the junior high school he had attended and of course remembered it as much bigger. Here he had passed from room to room among other children, weighted with books, unsolicited, circumspect, earnest, smiling on the fringes of pushing boys and girls, often thinking he was part of everything that went on, sometimes feeling otherwise.

  The street widened to contain long blocks of esplanade masted with elms and looking like great green barges sailing into the park at the far end. He passed tall old houses with oval windows in their doors or stained-glass fanlights or shingled towers. He remembered romping here. Romping? No, dreaming, or at least sleepwalking. Suddenly he stopped in the pearly mist as something regrettable struck him; he was not the ghost here, not now—this place and his former life here were ghostlike. No matter how intensely he desired to return to the peace and quiet of the way he had lived most of his life, he was irrevocably cut off. He looked around at the still and shining town in the rain, and his yearning choked him as he realized that the ghastly life of his recent months was all he had. The terrible images of the tenants rose up and strode over the toy landscape, crushing his serene past. And the town did not cry out to him for help, but somehow lumped him with those awful alien figures. What a mistake this had been! If he had not come back, he might have been able to maintain a dream of his old home, might have used his memory of it to sustain him. How he hated all of them, those grasping, importuning tenants, with their filthy illusions, their sickly disguises!

  With a feeling of grief, he waved down the first bus he saw and rode back through the
town. From the lighted bus the streets were grayer, dimmer. The occasional people were like shades, the buildings like tombs. His own house was a blur of nothing; downtown, with his favorite luncheonette, was an unlighted slide that revealed contours without life.

  It was a relief to board the train, where the sound of people’s voices and the feeling of movement returned him at least to his body. For a while he watched the landscape sliding by in the early twilight, not thinking about anything ahead or behind. He rode the air without anger or pain or hunger, a sort of mote being sucked toward a great nucleus of noise and size, unanimated, almost peaceful, until the candy butcher came ranting through the car, pouring his lyrical madness over the plush and damp wool and flesh.

  “Awrange drinks, cheese sandwiches, peanut-butter Nabs, ambrosia, nectar, pâté de foie gras, Hershey bars. This car does not have a diner. Buy now, I accept Diner’s cards and Carte Blanche. Mounds, Nestlés, ham sandwiches made with ham from the very finest of Estonian suckling pigs . . .” Sugarman’s eyes lit up like a blue gas flame. “Ah, Moonbloom, you thought to run away? No dice, little agent; you are hooked, addicted. The withdrawal pains are worse than everything. Meanwhile, how about a spot of refreshment?”

  Norman groaned and steeled himself for what could not be avoided, and the train whistle howled derisively as it sped him back to the city.

  14

  IF ANYTHING, HIS visit home made things worse; as with pressure on a wound, cessation invigorates pain. The Thursday following was snow-flurried and blustery. Blown along as he was, it seemed more than ever that his schedule was shattered, so that at the end of the day he had the feeling that he had shuttled back and forth between the buildings, seeing one tenant on Mott Street, and one on Second Avenue, and so back to Mott Street or Thirteenth Street or Seventieth Street, crisscrossing his own tracks, weaving some chaotic web of intention.

  Basellecci merely looked at him, but the follicles of hair on his head were thin eruptions of pain and something waxy coated his brow and his nose. He handed Norman the money silently, his mild brown eyes thickened, beyond protest. The mouth that doted on the subtleties of pronunciation, and that had never been able to shape his cry for dignity, now had a pursed expression, as though a fine, strong thread were drawing it shut, stilling the appeal he had never been able to make convincing to other people. He stared without anger, without charging Norman, only, more terribly, presenting himself in the revolting manner of those deformed people who have not the discretion to hide their deformities; he just stood in the existing light, the toilet chamber an umber unexplainable background for him.

  Norman attempted to speak, but his words for Basellecci had been used up and he mouthed dry air. He gestured toward the toilet, nodded, and went on.

  •

  Wung was reptilian, his flesh going green, his long, drop-shaped eyes frantic, as though sensing his descent to a place where he couldn’t breathe.

  •

  Beeler sat before a new television set, his blue, enigmatic eyes going from an interview program to Norman and then back again, all quite rapidly. “A Chanukah present from my doll baby,” he said in his ragged voice. “I can’t get over my little Sheryl, going out and getting a expensive set like that. Can you imagine, that little curly-locks? I shouldn’t count my blessings? Immaculate, that child. Her mother started her out like that; it goes into the heart eventual. Driven snow. I’m not religious, but a man needs a altar, a clean place. You’ll admit this is no castle, but with her, it’s a oasis, a senctuerry. Lemme tell you, confidential, while she’s in the other room, I done some pretty dirty things outside—with women, screwing around, you know. Fect is—I should be forgiven—even while my wife was alive. I admit, no excuses. But lemme say this: I never, never brung a woman here, even while Sheryl was away. I respect the virginal spirit of that child too much. Here I get my spirit nourishment and I know that much—you don’t shit where you eat. What else a guy like me got, hah? God? Who knows? I seen too much of people to believe. Money? Nothing—buttons. Guy like me never owns nothing. I had a brain, I went to pharmacy school, worked for years in other people’s drugstores. Didn’t I see the filth, the crookedness? Didn’t I do myself, selling phenobarbital to hopheads, putting on a fancy label with a Latin name and selling to knocked-up high-school kids—castor oil. So tell me, would this be a life without you have someplace and someone which is clean and innocent and sweet?” He gazed at Norman. The fringe of silver hair around the bald scalp made him look like an aged monk, and yet the stitched seams in his cheeks and around his eyes and mouth were hard and wise: it was as though he were two people, or, rather, one disguised man. But there was no knowing which was the disguise and which was Beeler; perhaps he himself had no way or desire to know. “Look at her,” Beeler commanded, waving at the old studio photograph where Sheryl, cast forever as Shirley Temple, smiled sweetly out of time. “Is that a doll baby, is that a doll baby or not?”

  And Norman, just in from the outside, breathed timidly, too heavily assessed for horror, too smashed by the weird irony of Beeler’s heedless dream to assert even his own name.

  And then Sheryl came out in the dragon robe, her face and body almost shaped in Beeler’s image for Norman too. She kissed her father’s shiny pate in passing, her large, coarsely pretty face avid, amused, yet savage. With her full red mouth on the old druggist’s head, she could have been sucking something from him or injecting an odd hallucinatory venom into him. Beeler’s face smiled so deeply that you could see without question that his head had been punctured, one way or another.

  “Daddy, honey,” she said in her smoker’s voice, running her hand along his shoulder as she went toward Norman. Beeler tarnished in the cloudy light.

  “See, I’ve got it all ready for you,” she said slyly, pushing the money into Norman’s hand. Her tweezed eyebrows shone with cold cream, and the lubricated look of her smooth, large-pored skin added unrelated heat to Norman’s ailment. “Save you effort—you look tired, sweety.” She walked him to the door, opened it, and fitted it between the heavy swell of her breasts, so that the dragon there looked apoplectic. “I been thinking about your offer, you know. How about a week from Saturday? I got a shower, one of the girls in the office. You could come up around ten thirty, bring a little booze. We could dance to the radio and like that. Hmmm?”

  “It’s a date,” Norman said in a normal voice, doing something with his face he hoped was smiling. “I’ll see you then.”

  “I’ll look forward,” she said, keeping her eyes on him as she closed the door so that he couldn’t look down at the money in his hand. “And by the way, don’t forget about our john.”

  Resignedly, he counted the money and was not surprised that it was now ten dollars short. A drop in the bucket of his blood. How many murders can you be hanged for, anyhow? he thought. It seemed he was at the bottom of his fall and was only writhing around at the same level. Either he would rise up from his abyss or the mercy of a great stone would bury him there; it seemed not to matter either way.

  •

  Leni Cass paid him with a check, and he didn’t even remind her that checks were no good to him, were worth no more than his receipts. Shame made her speak to another, better Norman over his shoulder, and her immense, lovely eyes had yellowish matter in the inner corners, as though for too long she had been seeing herself in humiliating postures and was now infected by the ugliness of her real role. Norman promised her something, which bewildered her; he himself had no idea what it was.

  •

  Karloff shoved him with surprising strength when Norman told him that the following week he was coming there with water and soap and paint, and was planning purification by fire. The ancient’s eyes were glittering with a blue-and-yellow complex; walking away from Norman after his assault, he moved on petrified limbs and sat down with a movement that hinted he might never get up.

  “Go, go, vas kenst du tuhn tsu mir?” he asked rhetorically, in a voice like a clatter of stones. He smiled with vi
cious scorn and held his two great hands apart. “A hundred years ago I vas spilled all over vit boiling vater, from every inch duh body. Duh old vomans say, ‘He cannot liff, erh shtaben.’ Dey put me around all over vit mud. I vas cover, around duh aigen, duh mout . . . mine klayna petzel looked it vas a butt fuhn a tsigar like in a ash tray. Over a year I lay in dis mud fuhn duh oit—I vas like dead, cover vit oit, duh flies bumpin’ my face, duh sounds fuhn duh peoples, duh other children, duh horses, duh cows, duh birds, duh boats, duh gahntsa velt, and I’m laying like in mine grave. But all duh time, all . . . duh . . . time, I’m breathing, I’m tasting, I’m hearing, I’m knowing!” He made silence something that could be heard. The length of his consciousness was like that of a long, long steel string, and his striking of it made the deepest, most resonant note Norman had ever heard. No daylight came into that room, and Karloff was made of the brass light of a naked bulb; he was filthy with age, like something dug out of damp ground, the crevices filled with a green cuprous mold, his eyes reflecting things that were no longer there. “You vill clean, vat—vat vill you do?” he said with great and inhuman pity.

  And the thought of Karloff’s approaching death suddenly filled Norman with dread: he imagined some immense thing crashing to the ground and reducing everything in sight to piteous rubble. A hundred years of knowing! Of knowing what? What an ant’s life had Norman Moonbloom led! The aged presence compressed him. He hoped to be distilled there in the reeking room with the ancient monstrosity peering at him, daring him to tamper with life and death.

  “Anyhow, I will do it,” Norman said with great courage.

  Karloff just sat there, knowing.

  •

  “Ah, you,” Ilse moaned with a flagellant’s smile. “Rent, rent, rent. I shall never be done paying you, shall I?”