by Rafi Zabor
Vergil was still pushing the knife at him. The little bastard wasn't letting up.
Johnny Coyle banged the butt of the snubnose revolver on the bartop. ''Compj'endeV Coyle's voice insisted with climactic severity. ''Comprende, motherfucker?"
"What a nice job you have," Sybil said once they were strolling on the avenue arm in arm.
"Hey, I got the ring back, didn't I?" Jones raised the ring in a handy access of streetlight and noted that in its absence from his hand the stone had acquired here and there another mottled droplet of red. His hands had stopped shaking about five minutes ago.
"Yes, and you did it with such aplomb. You could have a record company job, you know. The pay is better and it's a bit safer."
It was true. In the simultaneous days of their first involvement and the
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Bear's repeated debuts, Jones had proved himself organized and adept at publicity and general tactics. He had handled business negotiations with the allegedly real world and had composed himself into an interface with the Bear's at least sHghdy paranoid sense of it to find his abihties already in place, his engines gassed up and throbbing—as long as he was doing it for the Bear. He had impressed a few significant people, but try to parlay the situation into something for himself apart and the usual hams were strung and crucial tendons severed. In the aftermath of the Bear's arrest his inabiUty to cope with the wilderness of grotesque formaHties—composed in equal parts of police, court attendants, prison-system bureaucrats, music journalists and a widespread blanket of denial that anything had happened to anyone at all—had been nearly complete. Jones had been something like the sole surviving votary of a vanished sect, bereft of everything occult and bearshaped that had been of use and sense to him. He knew that it was this spherical ineptitude that eventually had sent Sybil packing. She had needed to see some progress, and circumstances had found him fi-esh out of the stuff. Could he do something with himself now? Sybil was obviously dangling the sex-scented lure, and he had a whole host of good reasons for going for it, wide-mouthed with beating gills. Why not make something of his life now that he was on his own? It was a good question, but he could feel all his old internal compUcations swarming up a way for the answer to come out No. Fact was, he still felt Hnked to the Bear by chains he could not see but which had absorbed all his sense of faith and service. What a contraption, this self he'd wound up having to live with. It was his own construction, of course. He wished he knew the way out, but no one had thought to mark the exits. Fire, he thought. It was not a very crowded theater.
They dined at a chi-chi but not too pricey pasta place. Jones ordered clams stigmata and the moose-and-squirrel combination plate but Sybil didn't get the joke.
When the leavings of their meal had been cleared away and they lingered over coffee, Sybil laid out the proofs of the cover art. It was not bad—a blue-filtered photo of the Bear, his face compressed with the intensity of playing and the saxophone gleaming bluely; a slanted, artful insertion of white block letters above his head for the title—but Jones didn't know if it would look like much when reduced to CD size. "It'll do," he told Sybil. "I only wish the album didn't end the way it does."
At the end of the long ballad, during which the Bear's saxophone tone had grown now explicably more bitter, came a short blues, then the interruption of toppling tables, the cop's announcement, breaking glass. They had decided to fade it after the pistol shot.
"I think it sounds pretty dramatic as is." Sybil shrugged, and took a sip.
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"That wasn't what I meant."
"Would you Hke another coffee or do you want to take a stroll over to my place, come up for a sip of something," her eyes dipped, "especially nice I know you like."
"You're pretty frank," said Jones.
"You're pretty too, Dean," Sybil parried.
So that he found himself, a short walk after this truncated cadence of espresso, sitting with Sybil in her living room as she smoked a joint to loosen up. Jones only took the odd toke. It was nice to know they were going to make it, but it hurt him that Sybil needed loosening. By the time she stopped dodging his caresses she had something of a doper's laugh going, and Jones had always been a fairly serious lover. When, finally, he was sprawled hungrily over Sybil's rounded and welcoming naked form in bed, O Sybil, he thought, looking down at her in the dusky light: the warm ship that sails beneath me in the night.
Her eyes brimmed with happy light and her ripe breasts were raised to him. This did not seem like a strategy or a ploy, did not seem some sneaky way of getting him to play along with the big economic plan, record company job and then maybe a couple kids, though of course it was not a bad idea. It seemed like she really dug him. It seemed to be for real. He remembered how it had been between them before. It had been just fine for them both. It wasn't bad right now.
He sucked at the big sweet buds of her breasts until he was sated and she seemed sufficiently lost in preliminary bliss, then lowered his mouth to the joint between her legs, already running with sap, and licked along the length of her opening. She had always been a sweet-tasting woman. Jones anticipated her returning the favor and then the final sweet conjunction, the Big Hello, the two-backed animule feeling good and wagging its tails for the sheer pleasure of the activity. He swallowed down some of her loxy, viscous flow and before applying himself seriously to the nub of the matter let out a low spontaneous growl, louder than he had thought to make it and surprisingly deep. Deep enough to almost sound like—
He heard a low stifled laugh burst from above him in response. Not the tone he had been anticipating, if there was to be a laugh, at this juncture. Damn grass. Doper's laugh. He paused a moment until she stopped, but as his tongue entered her more deeply the laugh came again and convulsed her unwilling belly and finally she twisted her hips away from him and lay laughing on her side.
"What," he said.
"Your brother," she managed to say before disappearing into fresh-gasps
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of laughter and tucking her legs up to her stomach, showing him only her hind parts.
Even though he knew that women would always remain a mystery to him, Jones was a patient man. He waited for her to subside before asking, "What about my brother." Brother? He felt a hot flush pass with angry anticipation over him from top to toe.
Sybil fought for control of herself and lost. "Your brother," she said.
"What."
"Your brother is an hairy man. And you are an smooth man." Having concluded, she lost herself to laughter completely.
Jones knew this particular riff, the Bible via a hip old comedy record from the sixties he and Sybil had listened to once. He deflated, subsiding sideways onto an elbow and a crook of arm to support his learning head until she was ready for conversation. He looked her in the eye, and with all the subtlety of the pie-in-the-face of farce she rolled, still laughing, off the side of the bed and landed heavily on the floor. Jones watched her curved back and rounded ass disappear with a too-sawy sense of loss. He waited until what rose from the unseen floor beside the bed was the relative silence of recuperating breath. In the meantime he scanned the tasteful shaded lithographs on her bedroom wall, admired the rich reds and blues of a kilim flung with calculated carelessness across the back of a chair. Sybil had such good taste.
"Sweetie," he inquired finally, "what exactly do you mean."
The unseen Sybil conquered her gusts of breath, and there was a factual blankness in her voice when at length she replied, "I mean, you always knew, didn't you."
"What did I always know," Jones asked her, already clocking in depressing detail the previously unsuspected answer. What a sap I am not to have seen it.
"Can I come back up there?" Sybil asked.
"Make yourself at home," he suggested.
When Sybil climbed back onto the plateau of her bed she had compressed herself into a semblance of her business self. When she noticed him goggling at her b
reasts, so warm and globey, as if at paradise lost, she extracted a hissing white sheet from her heavier bedding and gathered it to her body. For punctuation she cleared her throat.
Here we go, thought Jones.
"You knew it was always him," she said.
"No, but I should have figured."
"The first time I sat down in the booth with him—remember?—I went weak in the legs. Dear Jesus I just about spilled my cup. But the actual
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prospect, good Lord, of doing it with him—are you kidding?—was too terrifying to contemplate seriousfy."
"So you transferred the feehng over to me. The proxy. Did you ever imagine him when you were doing it with me? You did, didn't you. Aw shit, you did."
"Jones," she said, her lovefy grey eyes going marginaUy wider—he noticed that, a lawyer, she had mastered the movie-actor trick of not bhnking as she made an important speech—"it may have started that way, but as things developed, as I got to know you, to see who you really are ..."
"That's a movie line," he told her. "Spy stuff. Drop it." There were conflicting waves of heat and energy passing through his body, and, trying its best not to acknowledge the violence of this riptide, his mind was managing not to peer too deeply into the waters. But impact, thank you very much, had been achieved. Yet there was one more thing he wanted to know. "You were imagining him this time too," he asked Sybil, "weren't you. And that was why . . ."
The beautifully mottled grey irises of her eyes were large and startled but she did not bhnk.
"I think I have to get out of here," he said.
"Jones," came her voice—in which despite his turmoil he could detect a note or two of sincere music—from a deepening distance, and there was a lovely arm reaching out toward him somewhere in the picture, but Jones was pulling his pants on and checking the pockets, Jones was looking for his socks and thinking about his shirt, his shoes, and about making the transit to the door of her apartment without suffering a second, possibly lethal, wound. He was getting his shirt on without awkwardness or a hitch and keeping his eyes on the carpet and the intricate figures that composed it. In short, thank you very much, his exit was going reasonably well under the circumstances.
He got out of the bedroom without looking her in the eye and across her living room without incident, sweeping up his old suede jacket from where he'd left it on the back of the sofa, but as he fumbled with what were certainly too many knobs and levers and chains festooning her entrance door he was aware of a rustling sound pursuing him from across the apartment and looked up to see grey-eyed Sybil Bailey, wrapped in a white sheet like Athena, advancing upon him with a face full of intelligence and concern.
"I'm not walking out on you forever," he told her, thinking coward, coward, -ivoi-ni, "it's just that I really didn't see this coming, silly as that may sound, and I have to walk away from it for awhile. Okay? I'll be in touch."
"Jones?" That arm reached out to him again. "Don't go out there. Sit down on the sofa. I'll make you a drink. I won't bother you. Sit down with it for as long as you want and then we can talk."
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"I can't. I really can't. You talk too well and you know how lousy I am in an argument. Maybe I'll be back in half an hour. Keep the home front burning. I need a breath of air. I'll come back in half an hour or phone to say I can't. Okay? How the fuck do you open this lock?"
She had to do it for him.
Going down the squared-off helix of her stairway he felt the weight coming down on him and shrugged it off, wanting to do about ten minutes of nightwalk and get some streetscenes in his eyes before he had to deal with it in detail. At that hour, West Houston Street was ideal, three lanes of asphalt bare in both directions except for windblown bits of scrap. Walk and Dont Walk blinking at him, a car alarm getting all worked up about a block and a half off. Over toward Sixth warning lights blinked around a Con Ed excavation—Dig We Must—from whose pit rose a banded-orange-and-white smokestack pouring steam into the air: another boatload of souls Charoning off to the boroughs of Lethe.
Jones turned to walk north along MacDougal, and after a silent townhouse block with the sober facades of the funeral place, the Mafia restaurant and Dylan's old house came the trashy block of falafel trinket shops and beyond them the Empire State Building rising phalHc against a scud of moonlit cumuh. But it was a sidebar joke and the wrong signifier. Because what was hitting Jones now was not the mirage of some sexual insufficiency but hollow illusion at the core of every self he had ever tried or imagined himself to be: there was not a person there, there was lack of being, an ache, there was nothing, or nothing much. He would never add up to a self on his own in this world, would never become a sum sufficient to spell out Man. Though three letters ought to be easy enough. The Bear's sidekick at his very best, therefore no one really, and in the end of course he had failed the Bear at that.
Good Lord, did rejection from a woman really mean all that? It hardly seemed possible.
He had progressed another block and the prospect had altered.
Hey, look at New York City. Big dark brick walls, ranks of high blank windows, dully silvered clouds passing sideways across the black; up there the lit and looming thrust of Empire, and down here an infinity of self-loathing, no end of opportunity for failed promise and thwarted desire.
What was the worth of any human life: that was the question.
From this perspective the prospects did not look good.
Jones had reached Washington Square Park, whose trees were waving bare and pleading in the wind. What the hell, if it looks cool let's cut through the park. As he scanned the park's segmented expanses for troublemakers, found none, and walked up the path between the trees, on whose branches
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early black buds had begun to form, he noted the new contents of his emotive self.
How could I have been such a doormat all my life! How could I have been such a schmuck! It was the Bear that robbed me of my life, he heard himself thinking with unexpected speed and vehemence. The Bear took over and there was nothing left for me. He stole my birthright. Jones thought of Sybil spread beneath him in her bed, then pivoting away. Usurper. Even though his heart began to burn more bitterly than he would have believed possible, he was able to hear a voice in him protesting: Help, I don't want to think this. But hatred for the Bear flooded him, and it was as if all the rooms they had lived in together over the years were turning themselves inside out and reversing their meanings. I might have been somebody, Jones told himself, but the Bear took over as if it was the most natural thing in the world and I became nothing but a sidekick and all I might have been just dried up and blew away like leaves, like rind, like that scrap of newsprint on that patch of stunted city grass. He was a special case. / of course was nothing. I let myself be robbed! When you come right down to it, I hate him, I hate Sybil, I hate every brick of which this city that has denied me over the years is built, and I am walking beneath the dark and stars of a useless fucking sky.
What about me
Stop this, he tried to tell himself. It's the worst. I have never felt so soiled by thoughts. This is the nadir, the lowest of the low. Help.
How to be human, how to be human, I don't know how it's done.
What is a man anyway?
This is bad. Maybe I better get out of the park.
He had emerged from between the trees and reached the center: the plaza, the wide parched fountain in its middle, and at the top the triumphal arch that stood lit against the receding wallscape of Fifth Avenue like a monumental pair of pants. Jones decided to leave the park beneath the arch and cut east toward home on Eighth Street. He lit a quick cigarette against the wind, listening to his lighterflame in his cupped hands, and blew out smoke before he heard the voice behind him and saw three forms detach themselves from the wrought-iron tracery of a bench backed up to a length of rail.
"Got some smoke for me?" one of these forms asked him from beneath a shock of w
hite-blond hair. Jones looked at the pale raw face and thought. Here we go.
"Sure," he said, and started walking. "Have a Lucky. They're toasted."
"Toasted?"
"Says so on the pack. Take it. Read. Improve yourself." He tossed them the pack of Luckies, hunched his shoulders to buffer himself and increased
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his pace toward the arch and safety, but they got in front of him. Ah youth, he thought, and the legs it walks on.
The three were lean and angular and what he could see of their faces seemed ravaged, raw. "Hey we need a light for these," one of them said, tossing the pack casually up and down in one hand.
"Right," Jones said, reaUzed that giving them the pack had been too legible a sign of weakness, and dug for his trusty Zippo in his jeans. The amazing thing was that he had lived in New York for so long without getting mugged. And here he was, going through a change of life at this late date. His heart knocked hard and fast on the moment's breastbone door. Listen to it. Thump thump thump. What exaggeration.
"Hey thanks," and one of them closed his fist around the lighter and took it from him. "Got any cash?"
"Ah yes, I was wondering when you—"
"I said money^^ and this time the voice was hard: a typical hunter-gatherer, perhaps. He saw their three heads pivot through three circuits, clocking the park for possible cops. Jones didn't see any either.
"A few bucks," he allowed. "T-twenty, twenty five." A stammer. How pat.
