“Who’s next?” Spinelli said.
Someone else stepped up. The afternoon wore on, like many other afternoons. The jukebox went on playing. From a dozen tables he heard the click of balls, the scratch of chalk, quiet voices or loud laughter. Spinelli had forgotten he was there. Sometimes he gave Zupan a few dollars for holding the bets. Zupan needed the money. He tried to remember where he had been that day. Had he eaten with the Horns? The sequence of events was no longer clear. Had he closed the bedroom door? Had the bed been made, or was the sheet twisted and the pillow on the floor? Where had he put the knife? The Negro gentleman turned to Zupan and said, “That fella just got hot, thas all. Say, you wouldn’t care for a cup of coffee now, would you?”
Zupan stared at him for a moment. He saw a kindly face but he did not trust it. He felt something crawling in his skin. The man was putting on his coat but Zupan was already moving toward the exit and didn’t look back. He raced down the stairs just as he had raced down such stairs as a child and felt instantly light and free, unburdened, unattached to any living thing. Outside a light rain had begun to fall. He ducked into the subway and smoked another cigarette at the bottom of the stairs. Women came down the steps in high heels and skirts that showed their knees. Some had packages, others just their purses; some might have eaten in the Automat. Zupan watched them without thinking; thoughts occupied his mind like pictures from a carnival or kaleidoscopic shapes. The women came and went. Some had their hair up and some had their hair down. Sometimes one of them looked into his gray, metallic eyes and quickly turned away, startled or afraid. He looked away too. Then he threw his cigarette down on the ground and put his hands in his pockets. So many women and the sound of their heels. He stood there with his head full of pictures, pictures of women and a picture of the knife in his hand.
When it stopped raining he came back up. After the rain the air was fresh and cool and the streets were wet. After the rain you could feel the moisture in the air. It was getting dark. The streets were emptying out. Soon it would be night. Then the air might be cold or icy. You would have to wear a coat. You would see a solitary figure on a street corner from your window high above the street, surrounded by a pool of yellow light beneath a lamppost. There was a drugstore on the corner, open in the evenings, with a pale fluorescent light and a septic smell. You sat at your window for hours at a time watching the cars go by and dreaming of distant places that had no geography but were more like regions of the mind.
A car backfired. Zupan crossed and recrossed the street and walked through Union Square. The man in the camel’s-
hair coat was there, sitting on a bench with a newspaper covering his head. “Hey! Can you spare a cigarette?” he said, but Zupan walked away. The office buildings were dark but in the apartment houses lights were coming on and the moon was out. All these buildings around the Square made up a kind of habitat. From it he made occasional forays or incursions into other territories, but by and large he stayed put. Sometimes he didn’t go out for days. Then he sat at the window and looked down into the street. He always made sure he had provisions for a week. One day he might try to stretch the week into a month, and then perhaps a year. He had all the time in the world.
It was late when he got back, later than he had intended though not so late that he didn’t have time to spare. He opened the door cautiously. It was just three steps from the door to the center of the room, and he stood in the center of the room for a long time peering intently into the darkness. He stood very still straining his ears and scarcely breathing. But the silence was complete. Nothing had changed.
He knew the room well. Even in the dark he could find his way. Moving in the dark, he felt invulnerable. He opened the window and the crepe-paper curtain rustled in the breeze. When he stood by the window he felt at peace. In the yard there was a tree and beneath the tree there was a stone over which he might stumble one day. Lights were coming on in the house across the way. The evening was settling in. Behind a screened window he saw the child with the golden hair. He stood there for a long while, not moving, with his eyes fixed on the window. The night air was warm and still and very dark. Now he heard the music of a violin, infinitely sweet, as it drifted up and caught his ear, and then the sound of laughter, low and intimate, and the tinkle of ice in a tall glass, and the sound of distant traffic moving through the night. Her window was open. The shade had been partially raised. He thought he saw the edge of her white robe and then the flesh. She is taking a shower, he thought.
He waited patiently. All the world had reduced itself to that single window, now empty, now filled with a woman’s flesh like an explosion of light illuminating the universe for just a moment. It made an imprint in his mind. He would bear it within him forever.
And it must have been midnight when she threw open the French doors and stepped onto the balcony. It was as if she too had come to listen to the music of the violin. She wore a black gown that fell open to her thigh when she raised her foot to the parapet. The light of the moon made her skin seem very pale. Languorously she raised her arms and stretched her body as though to receive the night. She must have stood there for an hour, her head thrown back, her bare arms raised. She knows I am watching her, he thought, though she would not turn her face, and he knew that she was there for him alone.
IV
Harriet didn’t understand why anyone needed a rifle in the city and was certain that it was illegal but Hirsch told her it was a hunting rifle for which you didn’t need a permit. Once he sat by the open window cradling it in his arms. Charlie had brought the gun to the office wrapped in canvas along with three boxes of ammunition and a hunting cap. Walt had stood by smirking, understanding perfectly well the nature of the transaction. However, in the past, Charlie had also supplied other office workers with recreational items, tennis rackets and fishing rods for example and a classical guitar for Solly, so there was really nothing unusual about seeing him come to the office with one kind of package or another. Solly too seemed to know what was going on and surprised Hirsch by asking him what kind of rifle it was, though Charlie had done more than a satisfactory job of disguising it, so that it might just as easily have been something for the lawn like a croquet set or hammock. Then Solly sent him uptown to deliver a check to the majority stockholder’s daughter. Solly was always sending him on errands, some personal, like paying his traffic tickets or buying him tobacco, so that Hirsch thought of himself as much an aide-de-camp as a liaison officer. Solly also confided in him and even sought his advice on certain delicate matters, such as the color of the lingerie to buy his wife for her birthday. When Hirsch was called into Solly’s office, Walt and Charlie inevitably came out of their room and were visibly perturbed.
The majority stockholder’s daughter lived on Fifth Avenue. Hirsch arrived at the building with his empty briefcase under his arm and the check already in his hand. He stood in the street for a long while looking at the building while the doorman watched him from behind a newspaper. A woman in high leather boots came by with a big black dog on a leash that growled at him, then a little girl on roller skates with big eyes and an enormous head of hair. Hirsch got by the doorman and announced himself on the intercom. The lobby was cool and dark, illuminated by a single chandelier. Hirsch inspected himself in a gilded mirror and rode up the soundless elevator. When he got out on the third floor the majority stockholder’s daughter already had her door open and was leaning into the hallway holding a very short terrycloth robe together at the throat.
“I’ve been waiting for you all morning,” she said in an angry voice, her face twisted into an ugly scowl, and grabbed the check out of his hand with such violence that her robe fell open for a tantalizing instant. Then she looked at him appraisingly. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “I’m a prisoner here. Look.” This time she opened the robe of her own accord, turning around to reveal an intricate network of fairly fresh welts on her buttocks. “He beats me every night. You te
ll them that. I can’t even use the phone.” It wasn’t clear to Hirsch whether she was referring to her husband or her father. He could not imagine that it would be the father. That left the husband. But he wasn’t sure she had one. She must have been forty. She was not unattractive, though there were already deep lines in her face. Suddenly she was crying
hysterically and gripping his arm with considerable force. “Please tell them,” she said. “I’ll do anything you want if you help me.”
“Some broad,” the doorman said with a wink when he got downstairs.
Hirsch walked all the way down to Times Square, somewhat agitated, stopping only to watch a film being shot in a roped-off area in the street. A man and woman in evening dress seemed to be arguing with their director. The man held a champagne bottle and the woman a stemmed glass. She kept pointing at the camera while the man held her chin up and turned it first to the left and then to the right while the cameraman shook his head impatiently. When he got back to the office, Solly with his usual prescience had an amused look on his face. “Welcome to the club,” he said.
Hirsch tried to call Harriet but there was no answer in the house. Then he took a coffee break. Walt and Charlie had preceded him and were already sipping coffee from their Styrofoam cups. It wasn’t long before Solly joined them too, and then a few of the girls drifted over, so that it seemed as if half the office had crowded together spontaneously in the small recess in the narrow corridor just beside the emergency exit as though for an impromptu office party celebrating the holiday season or perhaps someone’s long-awaited transfer or promotion, just as Hirsch himself might conceivably be feted when his letter of resignation was accepted.
“I sure could go for a donut,” Charlie said.
“With or without the hole?” Walt said.
Hirsch and the girls all laughed heartily. Even Solly chuckled indulgently, as it was company policy to make the two auditors feel at home, like members of the team in fact, though it was generally understood that their intentions were nefarious and they would gladly bring down the entire organization if they could. Solly slapped Charlie on the back and winked at everyone. This caused some coffee to spill on Charlie’s trousers and set off another round of merry laughter. Then everyone began to drift away. Another day was ending. The sky was turning gray and it looked like it might rain.
Hirsch took the subway to Times Square. He stood on the steps of the Library for a while looking into the street. Then he took the subway home. It was the rush hour now.
Everyone was preoccupied, reading newspapers or staring into space. The train swerved on the tracks. The doors opened and closed with a pneumatic hiss. People got on and off. The dim lights of the stations flashed by. Here and there a face registered on his consciousness, making a particular impression that might weaken with the years but might also be recalled at unexpected times. Or perhaps one face in particular might haunt you and become a kind of emblematic form around which other forms gathered to tell the story of an unlived life. Such are the divagations of the mind. Hirsch stared into space too. He saw Harriet there and saw Harriet’s author touching her knee. He saw the empty apartment and heard the telephone ring and ring. No one answered. He tried to penetrate the silence of the empty rooms but could not unveil the secret of their life. Only Harriet’s presence could connect him to that place.
She was not there, though it was clear she had been in the apartment during the day. Her underclothes were thrown carelessly on a chair and her silver slippers were perfectly aligned under the bed. Furthermore, one of the windows had been slightly raised, perhaps to dispel some cigarette smoke. Hirsch smelled the air. He had promised to pick up a carton of cigarettes for her at the department store near the office when he went to get his pipe tobacco, which would be on sale during the Christmas week. Hirsch had in fact worked there during the Christmas season when he returned from Europe, though no one of course remembered him. Then he had stood at a crossroads in his life and had drifted for a while, not knowing what to do. Everything had seemed possible then, so many roads and so many journeys. But he was frightened and alone. He began to read the want ads every day, looking for something in the clerical line after it became clear that nothing would be found in the literary line. He showed up at job interviews in a suit and tie and was given simple tests which he often failed, forgetting how to add or subtract. And once he saw her on the steps of the Library talking to someone not unlike himself, a young man smoking a pipe, but did not think to approach her.
Hirsch closed the window and lowered the blind, looking through a slat at the building on the other side of the yard where window shades were half-drawn and lights were beginning to come on. Then he made himself a meal and ate it standing up. Then he sat in the dark room waiting for Harriet to return.
Walt and Charlie were always waiting for him at his desk when he came in in the morning, equipped with long lists of requests and demands in their never-ending search for incriminating documents. They wanted to look at ancient invoices, tax statements, inventory lists. They conducted lengthy interviews in Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable. They stared at the big computer for hours at a time as it punched out payslips. They even squeezed themselves into Mr. Kroll’s tiny cage to watch him stamp his papers.
“What you’ve got to watch out for,” Walt said, “is your plumbing. Cesspools are a tricky thing.” For some reason Walt and Charlie had gotten it into their heads that Hirsch was in the market for a house and were therefore always giving him house-buying tips.
“And he ought to know about that,” Charlie said with a high-pitched giggle, “he’s got it coming out of his ears.”
Walt ignored him. He was much shorter than Charlie but put together more solidly, with a rugged, square-jawed face and that habit of rolling his shoulders pugnaciously when he held forth. Perhaps he really did have a background in law enforcement. “I’ll tell you something though,” he said. “You can’t beat the Big Guy. Sooner or later he’s gonna get you. You cheat a little here, you cheat a little there, but in the end it catches up with you. Now we know there’s a lot of funny stuff going on around here and you can be sure of one thing: we’re gonna get to the bottom of it, if it takes us another ten years.”
Hirsch smiled in spite of himself. It didn’t surprise him at all that Walt and Charlie were there for the duration, so to speak. They would be there long after Hirsch himself was gone, probably even after Solly was gone, certainly after the ugly women in the other room were gone. Some of these women would get married, no doubt. One was going out with someone in Maintenance, another one was already married to a broker of some kind who came by to pick her up from time to time. They were actually an attractive couple. Hirsch tended to be sentimental when it came to romantic connections, living vicariously through them. Some would never get married: the particularly obese woman in Payroll and perhaps her assistant or helper, also inclining toward obesity but still a step away, with strong thighs and big, inviting breasts, so that it was perhaps the fatter woman who lived vicariously through her. Gross had struck up a conversation with her once, that is, with the assistant or helper, and thought she was interested in him.
Hirsch wondered if Walt and Charlie might not be interested in some of the girls in the other room too. Since they interviewed just about everyone, even the janitor, you couldn’t really tell, but sometimes one or the other of them would be engaged in a particularly long and, one might even say, intimate conversation with one of the uglier women in Accounting, that is, until one or the other joined them, Walt if it was Charlie doing the talking and Charlie if it was Walt doing the talking, and then the three of them would engage in a spirited conversation, with Walt and Charlie, in turn, clearly trying to impress whomever chanced to be the object of their attentions on that particular day. Hirsch tried to listen in on these conversations but could only catch odd words here and there. He supposed they were boasting about various triumphs in their auditing careers, embel
lishing their roles in disallowing certain expenses in cost-plus contacts. This might have seemed an unlikely subject of conversation for mid-morning flirtations at the coffee dispenser, but clearly auditing was all they knew, and the women after all were in Accounting and would therefore be in a position to appreciate the heroic exploits that were being described. Hirsch noticed that these women would dress more alluringly in the days following these intimate talks, wearing their skirts a bit shorter and tighter and their blouses unbuttoned at the top, clearly interested in maintaining the connection, but Walt and Charlie rarely spoke to them again unless it was on official business. It seemed to Hirsch that there was no personal attraction involved as far as Walt and Charlie were concerned but rather force of habit, some reflexive male imperative that led them to try to impress women as such, indiscriminately. Hirsch on the other hand was attracted to specific women, even some of the ugly ones. Something indefinable, a look, a gesture, the smoothness of a knee or the swelling of the calf, would strike a responsive chord, initiating a chain of subliminal associations leading him to a certain point or moment where memory and desire were conjoined. Then he too would strike up a conversation, pawing shyly at the ground and reviewing his own career in highly colored terms, representing himself as something of the poet manqué, relating his adventures up and down the European Continent in that unforgettable summer when he had come to Paris and thought to conquer the world. Hirsch believed that the women in Accounting found these tales far more exciting than anything Walt and Charlie might have to offer, and could say for a fact that they made little effort to conceal their admiration and even their consternation. Sometimes their jaws dropped as he spoke, sometimes they batted their eyes incredulously.
Walt and Charlie must have had an inkling of what Hirsch was saying to fascinate the women in Accounting to such an extent and were clearly jealous, but other than sneering at poets and other effeminate types they were at a loss for words. When things didn’t go their way they generally shut themselves up in their room, for hours at a time, as though devising some new stratagem, and sure enough, when they came out again, it was in a spirit of unfamiliar cooperation, with one of them seeking to occupy Hirsch’s attention while the other went into the other room to hold forth undisturbed. Whenever they were about to go into action in these various schemes they became very busy, darting back and forth like engineers preparing to dynamite a strategic installation. Then they stood back and waited for results.
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