“Oh God,” he said in the ashy light, “all this for me?”
18
HE WAS AT his office by eight o’clock, fully awake after some three hours’ sleep and scornful of those drugged risers who had slept deeply for eight or more hours. If his limbs felt somewhat alien and fragile, it was a small price to pay for the wonderful ringing clarity of his brain.
A child, hanging on the iron rail up on the sidewalk, stared down at him in open-mouthed curiosity. Norman waved without interrupting his furious house cleaning. He threw away papers by the armload. The dust flew; to the child, Norman was like an unusual engine warming up amid clouds of smoke. In a half-hour the place had the stripped-down aspect of a warship’s bridge. Norman surveyed it with a savage smile, and the filing cabinet seemed to hunch up against the wall, intimidated. He gave a short bark of laughter and sat down by the phone.
First he called the elevator people and demanded in Irwin’s voice that they repair the elevator immediately.
“We’ll schedule a man for January seventh,” the man said dryly. “We’re booked up till then.”
“I said this week,” Norman-Irwin replied with a sharp quietness of command.
“Hey, buddy—you’re only one small job. You don’t give orders like that,” the man said, nevertheless slightly uneasy under the brassy voice Norman affected. “First come, first served.”
“One small job?” Norman said incredulously, feeling himself falling into the part; Del Rio would have been awed by his ability to project. “I guess you didn’t hear me. I said this was Moonbloom Realty.”
“Moonbloom?” the man said in genuine ignorance.
“You’ve heard of Uris, Zeckendorf, Levitt?”
“Yeah, I heard of them.”
“Well, put them all together and you have Moonbloom. You’re lucky I’m even taking the time to reason with you. Do you know that my time is worth . . . two hundred dollars an hour? Now I don’t like to throw my weight around, but we rannana rannana rannana. I’d hate to rannana rannana rannana . . .
When he hung up in the middle of the man’s fervent promise to have service by the middle of the week, Norman lost his breath in laughter. He stopped only when he felt a pain in his chest; then, with a deep breath, he collected himself and dialed Irwin’s number.
“I just wanted to explain why the check I’m sending you is a little smaller than you probably expected, Irwin.”
There was a sputter of words from Irwin, and he waited patiently to go on.
“Four tenants moved out because the apartments they lived in became uninhabitable. I’m working on repairing them.” Norman’s voice had the tiredly patient sound of a father.
“This is getting utterly impossible, Norman,” Irwin said, the indignation making his voice go up like xylophone notes. “I don’t know what’s come over you. You were always so sensible, so down to earth. I used to look at you every so often and I’d say, ‘My brother is one guy you can depend on.’ Are you getting deranged, or what?”
“What did I say that’s got you so upset?” Norman asked, enjoying fraud as though it were an unaccustomed liquor.
“I’ve heard every kind of excuse from the rotten agents I’ve had, but yours beats them all.”
“Irwin?” he said politely.
“Well, for Christ’s sake, telling me the goddamn buildings are shrinking!”
For some reason the silence was like the sound of a voice stuck on the letter “Y.”
“Norman?”
“YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY . . .”
“Are you there?”
“Yes, Irwin.”
“Well, what do you have to say?”
“Only that some things are beyond explanation.”
“That’s no answer.”
“Perhaps, Irwin . . . perhaps buildings can shrink.”
“I don’t know what this is all about. All I know is that if I wasn’t up to my neck with some tax people right now, I’d come over there and straighten this out, one way or another.”
“Please don’t worry, Irwin. Everything is going to be wonderful.”
“I don’t want to hear anything. Just you hear me—that next check better be here in two weeks. And by God, it better show me that those buildings have grown back to normal size.”
“Rest assured, Irwin.”
“Don’t talk, don’t say a thing. I can’t stand to hear your voice. Just do, do!”
“I’ll do,” he promised with a diabolic smile that would have maddened Irwin completely.
“You . . .” And Irwin hung up, leaving Norman with the phone in his hand like a dumbbell he was having difficulty lifting. Finally he placed it in its cradle and caressed it dreamily for a few minutes. Then he cleared his eyes and dialed Gaylord’s home number.
“H’lo,” a child’s voice answered.
“Is this Knight?”
“Nosir,” the child replied.
“Is this Henderson six, oh five eight seven?”
“Yessir.”
“Isn’t this Knight then?”
There was a long pause. Finally he heard the breath in the phone again. “This here mornin’.”
“What’s your name, sonny?”
“Harner.”
“Harner what?”
“Hamer sir.”
“Your last name, Hamer?”
“Knight.”
Norman sighed delicately. “Is your father there?”
There came the sound of whispering. “Who speakin’ please?”
“Moonbloom,” Norman said impatiently.
A whisper again and then, “He not here.”
“You tell him to get to this phone or I’ll fire him.”
The whispering, then “Oh my gooness, he just now come in,” Harner said woodenly.
“Yeah?” Gaylord said, breathing stupendously into the receiver; in Norman’s ear it sounded like a power saw.
“Now, Gaylord, I want you to stand by. All leaves canceled,” he said, feeling the presence of jehad. He was small as Bonaparte, but knew the importance was not himself; rather, perhaps, he was Marshal Ney, animated by obedience to the spirit of his impulse. This was the great campaign—what happened afterward was Irwin’s problem. Let Irwin throw all the tenants out afterward; the fulfillment was in the immediate future. Later was as irrelevant to now as the Hereafter was to life. And he was alive, burned down fine, responsive, passionate. “This afternoon I’ll meet you at Karloff’s room. We are going to wash and paint and burn filth.”
“What do you mean?”
“And tomorrow we paint the Lublins’.”
“What, what is all that?”
“We’re going to work, Gaylord,” he said, almost singing. “We’re going to fix everything.”
“Oh my God,” Gaylord moaned. “Oh my God almighty.”
19
THEY RENTED A pickup truck and loaded all the paint and plaster into it, together with brand-new pails and scrub brushes and mops. “I got pails already,” Gaylord moaned, depressed by the extravagance. “No, no, we need new,” Norman insisted. “The best.” Gaylord scowled as he drove toward Thirteenth Street. “I don’t know what got into you,” he said. “What you trying to make out of my life. Them junky buildings, all them nutty people. What they care for paint and all? You act like you gone crazy, all of a sudden painting and cleaning. This job was only tolerable because I could take it a little easy, do things slow. Pay so lousy I work as a night elevator man three days a week to keep the wolf away. Forty-dollar-a-week man ain’t suppose to kill himself like a laborer. What the devil you trying to do—make the world over?” “Uh huh,” Norman said smilingly, “for me.” Gaylord snarled and drove brutally, jerking to stops, turning corners so acutely that Norman crashed against the door or into him. The pails rattled in the back, cans of paint fell over—they were like a mobile earthquake going someplace to happen.
When they got out at Thirteenth Street, Norman paused a while to study the truck while Gaylord stood sullenly against the fend
er, his arms crossed, his eyes blankly on the squeezed building.
“I kind of feel we ought to paint something on the sides of the truck,” Norman said, his frivolity like that of an aged widower out in the world for the first time, hectic with freedom.
“Ain’t our truck,” Gaylord reminded him. “They’d charge you for defacing.”
“Something like ‘Moonbloom Renovating,’ or ‘Renewers Inc.’ How’s your lettering, Gaylord?”
“Goddamn it, Moonbloom, you got me all set up for inhuman labor now. What you think you are, a sultan or something? I draw the line someplace. You push me too far, I just walk off right now, leave you and this truck full of stuff. You can’t drive neither. Don’t crowd me now.”
Norman smiled wistfully, shrugged, and then went to the back of the truck. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
A bum stood watching them carrying their equipment into the hallway, his veinous eyes bulging with curiosity. Gaylord moved doggedly, but Norman was full of the enthusiasm of the neophyte, taking the steps two at a time, overloading himself dangerously, gasping on the edge of laughter.
“Wha’ yuh gonna do, tear down tha’ buildin’?” the bum croaked.
“That’s up to the building,” Norman shouted back, giving the effect of a whole crew. Gaylord grunted derisively.
Norman knocked on Karloff’s door.
“VAS?” Karloff roared.
“Just Moonbloom,” Norman answered.
“I cannot get up; mine legs are sore. So come already.”
Norman opened the door and felt a thrill of dismay at the sight of the room with its centerpiece of Karloff. The murky depth of the walls and the sense of rounded corners where the filth seemed to destroy all geometry faced him, together with the old man, as something appallingly large; his own presumption excited him almost unbearably.
“We’ve come to do the place,” he said.
The mountain of a man stared at him, the ancient slopes and gullies lit by the sickly yellow of the small bulb. “If not for mine legs,” he rumbled, “I vould . . .”
“It has to be done,” Norman said, waving Gaylord in.
Karloff watched them bring in buckets and cans of paint. He sat there while they tore down the malodorous curtains and removed the filthy bedding, his eyes going from anger to curiosity and finally to helpless bemusement. The sound of Gaylord filling buckets in the hallway seemed to grind at the sides of his head; his eyes narrowed to the width of a thousand other wrinkles as Norman began to sweep. The dust rose chokingly, and he shook slightly with a slow, profound cough. Gradually his mouth lifted at the corners, came up enough to make the line of his sunken lips straight; for him, this was smiling. When the first water was sloshed onto the floor and the coarse shush of the brush began a rhythm, he began to speak. After their first curious look at him, Norman and Gaylord went back to their work, listening to him, during the whole afternoon and evening they spent there, only as they would to the words of an ancient choral background whose meaning just left flickers of understanding in them.
“I ran from home. Mine tata gehsucht, ‘He is a animal, a peasant.’ Vell, I vas strong. I vished not to sit praying, mine nose in a book. Mine body vas full vit blood. Ven duh goyim yelled names on me, I could not look up to God and pray. I smeshed duh face in fuhn dem. I leffed too much. I liked horses, I liked to drink. So I ran fuhn mine house and I vent about Roosia, and dere vas no end to dis country. Ve had dere skies so big, fruits so sveet . . . And such pipples vas dere, like is no more—men bigger as me, men vich could drink vodka a gallon, vich could sing in duh snow vitout duh coats on. And in duh city vas such different kinds pipple, not like now, vit all duh same like little dollies. No, no, faces like fuhn Hell, fuhn duh angels, fuhn duh jungle. How terrible it vas!”
The room was invaded by the sly smell of detergent, and the odor of the rich, dark filth grew weaker. Gaylord worked slowly, steadily, as though under a spell. Norman, who had removed only his jacket, worked in vest and tie, looking more like a demonstrator than a laborer, his face shinging and strained as he listened to the hoarse running of the voice, hearing it as a river of lava, molten enough to flow, yet grinding and awkward because of its chunks of cooling crust.
“Vat vas children den—vite and tin, all aigen, eyes, beat up, loved. Duh cities so full fuhn colors, so much blood, so much cries, such leffing, such veeping. How dey vas like animals and hoomans both. Dey could kick a man to dett and den cry for his soul. Dey could do crimes on dere children but could love dem terrible . . . terrible. . . .”
The day slipped down like water, and the other tenants—Paxton, Sugarman, Louie—could be heard ascending the steps after a brief, curious hesitation outside Karloff’s room.
“And in duh voods, duh steppe, duh mountains—such big, big nights, such voomans like could burn you up altogedder. Ve screamed, ve howled, ve fought—oh, oh, I could leff such leffs. And duh horses. Oy, ich gehut ah faird, vit coal-bleck skin, so big like a elephunt. I rode him vit no seddle. And den I liffed in ah Cossack town—duh spetzel Yid—dey luffed me. . . .”
They scrubbed him into a tiny island, and he seemed desolate there, like the last of life on an empty ocean. And the more Norman felt the sorrow of it, the more he smiled; it was as though his expression were the mirrored image of the strange species of grief inside him. Gaylord took out the piles of rubbish. The sharp, mercilessly clean tang of paint beat like an astringent wind on the isolated figure of the old tenant.
“I vent in ah vawr vit dem, duh Cossack. Ve vent across Siberia and ve fought duh klayna, duh Jepenese. And ve vus killed, many fuhn us, duh men, duh horses. I vas shot duh neck troo, so I could not speak for many month. And after I vas a tailor, a baker, a cook fuhn a river boat, a pimp fuhn duh koorva, a coachmans fuhn a dook. I vas in jail six month for I kill a man. Ich gehven ah bum. Mine femily vas dead; mine brudder did not vish to know fuhn me. I come here to America, I vork, I fight, I am couple times in jail here. I marry, I have childrens, I eat, I make love to mine vife, to odder man’s vife. I eat, I drink, I vork, I sleep. I grow old. Duh vorld dies more and more. I eat, I sleep, I drink. The children are dead, duh grendchildren are old. I eat, I sleep, I drink. I em alone. I eat. I drink. I get veek so I cannot valk. I eat. I sit. I . . .”
It was very late as clocks reckon, and Karloff sat in a strange white room with a large bright bulb making everything glow unnaturally. With questioning eyes he looked at the Negro sitting on the snowy bed, smoking tiredly and staring at the floor. Then he turned to the thin, burning-eyed white man, who returned his gaze with a smile of tormented joy.
Norman gestured to the bag full of groceries he had placed within Karloff’s reach, and to the chamberpot on the dark circle of floor around his chair. “We’ll go now,” he said. “You’re set up for now. I’m going to call your grandson. Someone will come for you soon.”
Karloff began nodding, his head like a burnt-out planet, his eyes receded into an infinite past. “Yess,” he said slowly, beginning to nod. “Yes, yes, yesss . . .”
Norman and Gaylord lugged their equipment wearily out to the truck. And when they started off, to a rattle of pails, Norman sighed loudly, ecstatically. “How terrible—like the old man said, how terrible.”
And they rocked through the city like voyagers on a queer and funny odyssey while some modest church bells chimed a tune of holiday.
20
WHAT BEGAN IN physical stimulation became, after a day of the varied and strenuous work, a sort of hallucinatory cruise of time. He went from tiredness to exhaustion, until finally, in the second day, he achieved a lightheadedness that made him feel inexhaustible. But it had its effect on his reception of time and on his ability to give his feelings their proper proportions. From one cellar or another he heard Bodien’s clumsy wrangling with pipes or the ripping of the electricians. He lived in the acoustics of concrete sound, which muffled whatever music his crowded brain might have been making. The rasp of plaster knife, the swish of brush, the routing, cutt
ing sounds of Gaylord healing walls and floors by the age-old method of enlarging the wounds—things must get worse before they can get better. His hands became caked with paint and plaster, his face streaked, his hair aged by them. If Gaylord had any doubt of his madness, it was banished by Norman’s insistence on wearing the same pants, vest, and tie, and defending himself by saying dreamily, “No disguises; this is all happening to Norman Moonbloom.”
And in this role he fell heir to even greater intimacies. As a laborer in the tenants’ kitchens and bathrooms, he assumed a familiarity that transformed his very species to them; people will tell their maids things they might hide from their immediate family. Underfoot, silent, diligent as a dog burying his bone, he seemed eminently trustworthy, as ideal for confidences as a religious image. To some, speaking nakedly in his presence was like talking to themselves, but better, of course, because they did not have to fear the sounds of their own voices. In one way they had to despise him in order to confide. They heaped things on him and transcended disgust for their acts. One parades nakedness to provoke, but also it is an act of complete trust. Maybe he was an ear of God.
On a Tuesday noon he was fitting tiles in the Jacoby bathroom. The mortar covered that part of the floor, and he placed the sloppy shape by feel. Betty Jacoby came in, took something from the medicine cabinet, looked at her face in the mirror with expressionless anguish, and then plopped down on the cover of the toilet, staring at the oozy area surrounding Norman.
“Can one live in constant tension for a half-century, Mr. Moonbloom?” she asked, speaking to the floor.
Norman hmm’ed as his fingers slithered for the slot.
“People might wonder why we keep secrets from each other, Arnold and I. I’m sure by now it never occurs to anybody that, more than most men and women who have lived together for so long, we are protecting something quite different.”
Absorbing her voice, Norman nevertheless hummed distractedly as he more or less got the tile in and fumbled with another. There was no question that he used too much of the cement, but frugality was hostile to his purpose. Perhaps he was gradually getting better at it. He was humming “Bei Mir Bist Du Shoen.”
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 18
