Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  He made the poles of the canopy shine. How had things gotten so contentious with Larry? How had it come to that?

  "Am I good or what, Mr. George?"

  "You missed a spot there," George said. He gave Connie a vicious smile.

  "Go play in traffic, George."

  The afternoon sun warmed Connie's back. He worked on his knees, rubbing the Brasso into the pole with a strip of T-shirt, as his mind went soft with a sadness. The sun setting over the park, and the listless vehicles moving down Fifth, and how is it that any of these buildings ever got built in the first place? Things could stop adding up, and the world's steady, inconsiderate pulse would not hesitate to shoot a shiver of despair into him.

  The harsh exchange with Larry. The agents across the street. The assignment had a crappy reputation, and not one of them seemed to care for it. Last year one agent, trying to keep up on foot with the kids in a Midtown crowd, drew his sidearm in wits-end frustration, letting off a round over the roof of a taxicab which nearly ran him over. The incident made the papers and the agent got reassigned.

  The housephone buzzed, George went inside. Connie worked until both poles shone brilliant in the sun. He thought of a song he liked and smiled, thought of his children and Maureen, of Susan and David and Justin in the rooming house.

  Connie had been taught the principles of Christianity. Religion didn't sustain, and his churchgoing faded at puberty, though he enjoyed for a time his service as an altar boy and the theatrical qualities associated with the altar/stage, the sacristy analogous to what he heard Johnny Carson refer to as the greenroom, where players waited to be called onto the show.

  His mind's ability to produce intense hatred for people, places, inanimate objects. He feared he did not know how to love, to show love, to receive love—his darkest fear.

  Larry, for money, took pictures of people who did not want their pictures taken. He lived to be hated, got his rocks off playing the antagonist, yet Connie also sensed a vulnerability at the core of Larry's mortal soul.

  He read something in a book as regards any person you wanted to hit over the head with a hammer, that beyond rehearsing how you would strike the blow, to help release the violent impulse you might instead imagine them as a child.

  Before they became enemies, Connie didn't know Larry as a paparazzo staking out the house for photos of the president's widow and her kids. Larry, without a camera in sight, said hello a few times, and they sat on the wooden bench against the stone wall of the park together, conversing easily. Larry, Connie thought, had problems, but wasn't a pathological liar. Connie did not believe Larry fabricated a history from whole cloth to deceive him. No, Larry spoke from a genuine place to serve a specific deception. Larry wasn't afraid to make comments like I don't know or I'm not sure. Dyed-in-the-wool bullshit artists have an answer for everything.

  Larry bonded with Connie to get inside information about the family's itineraries. He used real-life circumstances to betray Connie, the connection founded on a fallacy.

  "Good enough," Walter said, out of his painter overalls. He turned to head up Fifth.

  "Your brother?"

  "Yeah." Walter's brother worked as a super in a house on 98th.

  Connie got up and examined the poles from a variety of angles. You polish over here, it shines over there, someone once said. A sacred power bears holy witness to every effort we make. He lit a smoke and walked across the street, the temperature seven degrees cooler beneath the shade of the park. He hopped up to the top slat of the bench where he used to hang with Larry, prior to their friendship's reversal.

  Ramey and Slovell looked at Connie, their moving mouths on display through the windshield. Connie assumed himself their subject, given how they stared. Let them talk. Beads of sweat evaporated on Connie's back from his brass-cleaning efforts, as he inhaled the verdant scent of nature behind him in the park.

  A man across the street turned into the house. After a moment George appeared at the sidewalk's edge and pointed Connie out. The man went to the corner and waited for the light to change. A bit of confusion in his step, which Connie thought a pose. Pseudoconfusion. Connie watched the man approach.

  "How you doing?" Connie said, jutting his face at him.

  "Not bad," the man said, "and yourself?"

  "So far so good."

  "Okay, so," and the man double-checked the manila envelope he carried, "are you, let's see, Cornelius Sky?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay," the man said, and handed it to Connie. "I wish I could say it was good news."

  "What is it?" Connie felt its weight, his hand a scale, the nine-by-twelve envelope a dark gift, and they were playing a guessing game.

  "An order of restraint."

  "Order?"

  "But it's really not my place," the process server said.

  "No, please."

  "From your wife. You're separated or something, right?"

  "Okay—I mean, yes."

  "The order makes reference to your habit of showing up in the middle of the night."

  "Does the order use the word habit?"

  "Good question," the man said. "It states it wasn't a one-shot deal, that it was a recurring incident, and believe me, I'm not judging. It's nice around here."

  Connie straightened out the fasteners and removed a sheaf of stapled pages. He couldn't read for his racing mind, only picked up words here and there. He went through the motions one goes through when shocked. His eyes scanned Maureen's name, his name, a legalistic maxim here and there.

  "I wouldn't take it too personal," the man said. "It's a form, basically, and they type in different—"

  Connie hopped off the bench and left the man midsentence before he spun and said, "Your shtick is tired—stop playing dumb, you little bullshit artist," then trotted across the avenue. He grabbed the Brasso and rags, moved past the Datsun showing no sign of Larry through the service entrance.

  On the cement bags he perused the order: Showing up in a state of severe drunkenness at various late-night hours, on numerous occasions . . . Attempting to enter the apartment using violent means, beating his fists against the door and yelling obscenities . . . Attempting to break into the premises . . . thereby frightening both the children and Mrs. Sky.

  The basement collected a late-afternoon dampness and he caught a chill. He liked the smell of the bags, smelling of a concrete thing. He put the sheaf of pages back into the envelope and let it rest on his chest. The housing cops probably put her up to it. He folded his arms behind his head, closed his eyes. A space opened up behind his breastplate, the spot in his body where he believed tears originated. It hurt so good to be served an order of restraint. I'm such a terrible creature, a ghoul of the first order. What has become of me? An order of restraint? Violence is not my thing. Beyond which, to put a hand on a woman? A child? Order of restraint, are you kidding me? Who ever the fuck protected me?

  He curled tight onto his right side. His mind had its way with him a while, when he heard a noise: the zipper on a solitary pair of jeans banging against the spinning metal drum of a dryer. Which reminded him. He got up, went and removed the lint from the machines, cleaning each mesh basket with one sweep of his hand, removing the lint all in one piece if he could, as it brought him a pleasure to do so. He put the garbage out on the sidewalk before calling it a day at the job.

  * * *

  He made a few stops on his way downtown and arrived at the rooming house feeling no pain. There wasn't much in this world—not a birth, not a death, not an order of restraint—which a drink could not help to facilitate.

  He let himself into his room and noticed a stain on the window shade, and with it came a small wave of pity. "Go ahead then," he whispered to his emotion, "do what you're going to do." He sniffed the air and walked across the hall.

  "You're just in time," Susan said. "Are you hungry?"

  And Connie knew in her smile, seeing her face, and a glance at the food on the hot plate, that their connection was a lost cause. Or tha
t he himself was the lost cause. They might see each other awhile longer, this might be the end of it, who knew? The sex connection was strong but a partnership was not in the cards, and it produced a sad recognition as he stood in her doorway. Anger flash-flooded his system regarding this life—and why do we know we're going to die, could someone explain it to him?

  "I could eat," he said.

  "Come in, why don't you?"

  She wrapped her arms around him and they kissed once, twice. The simmering concoction featured carrots and potatoes and meat, sweet and pungent.

  She wore a skirt and a T-shirt displaying the portrait of a good-looking black woman with a perfectly shaped Afro.

  Susan had attended Goddard College in the 1960s, one of those progressive, liberal outposts up in the Green Mountains of Vermont, more therapeutic community than institute of higher learning. The events of her life since graduating, as she would later share with Connie, included a stint of midlevel drug dealing. She and her husband moved cocaine by the kilo, Susan herself the Colombian mule. She had until last summer hung with the SDS crowd, the Weathermen, people like that, before everything fell apart and she managed to wash up in this rooming house, if not well, at least alive and not in prison.

  "Do you like Indian food?" She liked to cook and bake, a pleasure inherited from her Oklahoma mother. She produced a canister, tapped out some spices into the simmering food, and gave it a stir.

  "Would you mind taking that shirt off?" Connie said.

  "Right this minute?"

  Some writing under the portrait of the woman: Free Assata! and below it, Break the Chains!

  "Could you put another shirt on? I like how it fits you, but I don't like her."

  "Who?"

  "Her," Connie said. "Joanne Chesimard. I don't care for her. I don't dig her. I don't dig what she's about."

  Susan looked at him a moment, cleared her throat. "Why?"

  "Why? A stone killer's why. The trooper she and her friends gunned down, and here ten minutes later she rates as a fucking folk hero on a T-shirt? Are you joking?"

  Susan waited a moment before she spoke. "Do you want to talk about killers? Do you?"

  They managed, mainly through strategic silences placed into the conversation by Susan, which served as speed bumps to Connie's drunken self-righteousness, to navigate away from a blowout. But she did not remove the shirt.

  One morning at his 34th Street Blarney Stone, Connie read a quote in the New York Times by a self-styled revolutionary: You identify the enemy by the uniforms they wear. A picture of the guy, goatee and beret, posing on the steps of Columbia's library. It sounded like such idiotic dogma and infuriated him. Civil-service jobs were held up as something of a boon where Connie came from, to get work as a cop or garbageman or fireman, and these jobs required, well, a uniform. He knew the guy in the paper was speaking in metaphor, but still. And here you got a dead trooper on the Taconic over a routine broken taillight stop who was making, what, fourteen an hour plus all the overtime he can grab to keep the kids in parochial school?

  And it wasn't just the likes of Joanne Chesimard who stirred Connie's ire, because he could in fact imagine the thousand daily indignities, intended or not, thrown at black people from, yes, the pigs—but not just the pigs, all white people practically. But none of it justified murder. Call it hateful retribution, call it spiteful payback, and I'll hear you, but don't tell me you identify the enemy by the uniforms they wear, don't say that stupid shit to me.

  What really burned Connie's ass was these rich white kids. Embarrassed by their family money, their trust funds, and Greenwich Village town houses, they set about to apologize for their good fortune, the power of their shame sufficient to fuel the building of bombs. Go ahead and blow it all up, take the whole fucking block with you, why don't you?

  They talked this stuff over, Connie in his doorman's uniform, drinking liquor and eating Indian food on Susan's narrow bed. Why, Connie thought, did I bring the whole stupid subject up? Why am I so willfully belligerent? Do I actually give a shit one way or the other? I felt the weight of my fleeting connection to her so I picked a fight. What have I ever committed to? Have I ever stepped up to the plate on behalf of something other than the next drink? That's the question behind my indignation. You envy Joanne Chesimard her courage, robbing banks for something vastly beyond personal avarice. What do I stand for? Anything, anything at all?

  They ate and talked. Susan had a small library. Her "core concentration" was in English (Goddard didn't use traditional words like "major"), and her book stash contained novels, classics mostly, with some good junk thrown in too. Not a pretentious bone in the woman's body, and here she is feeding me in our shared rooming house, so why would I accuse her of guilt politics?

  They decided to take a walk. Coming out, Susan pointed to a brownstone across the street.

  "I used to live there. Me and my husband. We had the ground-floor apartment. Two fireplaces. A private garden in the back. We used to wonder about the lost souls who lived across the street in the rooming house."

  A mugginess in the air, the lights of skyscrapers reflecting off low cloud cover, moving up Eighth Avenue.

  "What time is it? Maybe we can second-act a show if you want," Connie said.

  "Sounds good."

  Their pace took on the assurance of destination. They made their way arm in arm past the hysteria of 42nd Street. They looked up 45th, saw a crowd huddled beneath the Morosco's marquee, and turned into the block.

  "I don't like violence of any kind," Connie said, apropos of nothing, although Susan understood it referred back to their conversation in her room. "It scares me."

  A couple dressed in flowing scarves and shawls moved past them, the man saying, "And the dialogue's so clunky," the woman saying, "Noel Coward he's not."

  Connie and Susan cozied up to the intermission crowd, the sidewalk extra bright and warm. Connie looked up into the hundreds of bulbs of the Morosco's canopy, and the images of his dead parents from the dream returned to him, infusing him with sorrow.

  Susan told him a story which he accepted as an olive branch. Abbie Hoffman had befriended the Beatles. Abbie, in Lennon's limo, gave John a tour of black Harlem's ghetto as part of a pitch to shake John for some cash for The Cause, the tour evidence as to how fucked The System was. Lennon went home and wrote not a check but some lyrics: If you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is brother you have to wait.

  Susan further conceded that the money from her drug-dealing days went nowhere but into her pocket, or up her own nose.

  Connie for his part confessed an uncanny knack for having managed to avoid one difficult stand, ever—a life lived loyal to the throughline of his cowardice.

  "Selfish in plain English," he said.

  "Don't say that," she said, kissing his cheek.

  A loud bell sounded intermission's end. Bolstered by a tight mass of bodies, they took tiny, choppy steps into the theater and found two empties down close on the aisle. They held hands and admired the room's grandeur, the chandeliers, the red velvet seats. They swallowed quick hits off Connie's pint before a human hush rose and moved through the room like a wave, as the house lights started to fade.

  Chapter four

  He came to in the rooming house, a noontime sun attempting to sneak its way past the melancholic window shade. Dried blood inside his mouth produced a struggle for air, blood caked to his gums made it hurt to swallow. He went to shift his body on the bed and realized he was dressed, shoes and all. And also he realized he had at least to some extent shat himself.

  Accompanying his terrible physical and psychic hangovers were images that evoked a series of shameful winces. Whole sections of drunks rushed back that would make him want to go into hiding—or have a fast drink.

  The night before, Connie and Susan had exited the theater together, after catching the second half of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst. Smitten by the vision of Mis
s Dewhurst, Connie recalled strange identification with the character played by Mr. Robards, who seemed hell-bent on self-destruction in an oddly maudlin fashion. He recalled the brightness of the stage when the curtain rose, and how the actors listened to one another, the power of their silences holding the house ever so still.

  They went around the corner to McHale's on Eighth for a few drinks and Susan abruptly took sick. They caught a cab back to the rooming house, where Connie stood over her in the shared bathroom as she threw up, rubbing her back.

  He smoked and drank in his room, watching Don Rickles work the audience of The Tonight Show. Rickles pulled an elegant, well-spoken Jamaican lady out of her seat, and after setting her up with a few beats of gentility, his arm around her waist, Rickles inquired if the woman would like to come home with him and be his live-in maid.

  And there's Johnny, convulsing, swirling behind his desk, choking on a smoke.

  Hold on. Everybody laughed at Rickles. Connie didn't watch Carson alone: he stood at the bar in Grant's and watched it on the Motorola.

  He ran out of booze. Encountered David on the staircase, accused him of blocking the way, made ridiculous threats.

  He lay in bed now, blinking at a fault line in the ceiling's paint job, the heat of shame pressing into his face.

  An object poked his back. Connie reached behind himself, produced the rolled-up manila envelope. Some items you hope to misplace, some you can't shake. If the night didn't coalesce with the order of restraint in hand, the blood inside his mouth and nose got explained, and the hangover's fallout intensified.

  The distance, Connie thought as he stood at the bar. You can spit from Grant's to my living room. My wife, my kids, my home!

  Whitey asked him who he was talking to, the men looked at him, standing at the end of the bar alone, and chuckled.

  Connie stared at his room's bare bulb, ears red with humiliation. He struggled to sit up.