by Jack Livings
* * *
Their temple was a dingy brick outpost amid a wide, flat waste of black earth crisscrossed by arcing railroad tracks, peppered with piles of scrap metal and creosote-soaked ties, electrical cabinets looted for their copper wire. A sad collection of former trees held up a latticework of power lines. Abandoned freight cars, like caskets awaiting the gravedigger’s backhoe, peeked out from the tunnel at the north end.
Yet on that night the snow was smothering it all, obscuring the tracks, burying the elevated Miller Highway that passed over the yard (a more recent addition than the YMCA, which had sacrificed its roof to the roadway’s substructure), and by the water the jagged black pilings and disintegrated piers were outlined in white, almost glowing against the river.
John had walked south from the tobacco shop, humming Tamino’s aria from The Magic Flute, the tempo a little hot to match his pace, thoughtlessly looping from coda back to the opening bars. The snow had picked up, and the wind was cutting into his coat. His injured hand, the skin split at the knuckles of his first and second fingers, across the transverse metacarpal ligaments, notable because during neither of his hospital visits later that night would he avail himself of medical services, was mercifully numb from the cold.
When John reached the exposed overlook of Freedom Place, the Hudson lobbed pillars of snow at him, possessed, it seemed, of an animal intelligence intent on driving him back where he’d come from. The long iron stairway down to the yard was ramped with snow, and he held fast to the frozen railing with his good hand, skiing the descent. At the bottom, a tin signal shed was peeling apart in the wind.
Once inside the YMCA, he shuddered off the snow and slipped between the thick curtains hung in the library vestibule. Up the mezzanine stairs, he held out three dollar bills, awaiting the flashlight beam from the cutout in the booth. Beam lit the bills. Sal’s hand emerged and took two. Nothing new tonight. John knew not to speak to Sal. He descended the stairs. He knew not to tombstone anyone, not to lean in and ask what was showing. Simple courtesies, house rules. The sacred observances.
He took some satisfaction from adherence to these shibboleths, the same satisfaction his father had once taken at restaurants where he was welcomed warmly, seated expediently, attended to with precision. One earned one’s place of value, his father believed, by understanding what was expected of him—not politesse or, worse, friendliness, but adherence to the standards that defined a gentleman. If a plate of food failed to satisfy Albert’s expectations, he sent it back; it would have been disrespectful to the chef, he explained to his son, to accept substandard fare. What were they, women, falling all over themselves out of fear some stranger might dislike them? How was anyone supposed to know how to act if they weren’t all playing by the same rules? This was the compact, broken at the risk of sacrificing civilization, a precious concept each man carried within him when he went forth into the world. Like explorers into the heart of Africa, said Albert.
Like Jameson? John said, seventeen at the time.
That’s a point of contention and you know it, Albert said.
I read the diaries, John said. What’s the point of contention?
That goddamn school, his father said around a load of pommes frites. Jameson, he said, sacrificed his own legacy when he purchased that girl’s life. And he did it so no man need ever again go through the trial of watching such a thing. Why else would he have made a visual record of the event? He was an observer. He never touched the girl! You can’t apply the standards of the modern age to that benighted era.
He bought her for six handkerchiefs and watched them carve her into pieces, John said. How much would you sell Fil and Tracy for?
How do you think her life would have turned out in a place where the tribal elder would sell her for six handkerchiefs? said Albert. Hm? Do you think this was a place where she would marry and raise children and spend her afternoons drinking iced tea in front of the television? She didn’t even put up a fight. She knew her fate. She might even have been exalted for it.
Like we can trust Jameson’s story, anyway, John said.
Albert put down his fork. Civilization is tectonic plates heaving against one another, he said. Glaciers carving valleys. Vast, collective movements. Individual lives are ground up and forgotten in an instant. These things unavoidably exceed the understanding of a teenager.
Not all teenagers, John said.
All teenagers, Albert said with a laugh. They were talking about the war now. It was a slow, murky river of disagreement from which flowed the tributary arguments that had come to define their relationship. Albert had forbidden John from enlisting though he agreed that there was no substitute for the lessons learned in war. It cooled a man’s impulses, made him less susceptible to the trifles that plagued weaker men, more perfectly oriented him to succeed in the world. If he survived. But what of those whose bodies survived but whose minds didn’t? Albert’s first apartment in New York, 1931, had been in the West Seventies, and if he craned his head out the window and looked west across the rail yard (the same rail yard where John sat at that very moment in 1978) he could see the squatters colony called Camp Thomas Paine. The camp had been populated by forgotten soldiers of the 1917 war. They kept the pathways swept clean and ran the camp with a semblance of military order, but it was unmistakably a place for the lunatic and socially unfit. There was the outcome as likely as death: survival in name alone. No, not for his son. John could locate his sense of purpose without the war. A fair trade in exchange for not having to risk getting his head blown off.
I’m a pacifist now, John said.
A wise indulgence, Albert said.
Better a pacifist than a coward, John said.
Wait until you have a family of your own. Then you’ll see what cowardice is, Albert said, forking steak into his mouth.
Albert Caldwell was not one to be caught in the tectonic meat grinder. He lived as though he’d created an extra dimension beyond time and space, one that enabled him to stand out from the dull grain of the city like a chess piece atop an empty board. Over time John recognized his father’s godliness as the true seat of their disagreement.
Fifteen years later, the father’s omniscience was as secure as ever. Whether John was buying apples or on an audition or in bed with a woman, his father was there, peering over his glasses, judging, praising, chastising, casting aspersions, opining on the quality of his son’s choices, from clothes to bus route to meal to mate. So present was the old man’s voice that John rarely had a thought that didn’t lead to an internal dialogue with his father.
John lit his pipe. He’d recognized the movie immediately. The French Connection. Has Hackman ever not worn a raincoat? Does he have some kind of contractual thing with London Fog? It’s a short man’s solution, of course, a way to elongate the torso, but in Hackman’s case it just looks like he’s a perv. No, wait. This isn’t The French Connection. It’s The Conversation. Oh hell. The only thing good about it is the first scene. The whole film’s a gimmick. A theory with a movie built around it. A movie made to convince everyone that the director is an artist, that’s what it is. A showpiece. There’s no story, and the whole premise is based on a misunderstanding. A cheap, stupid idea. John kept flexing his hand to irritate the skin over the knuckles, each one a fat baked ham about to split open.
* * *
He’d moved into a sublet after she left. Out of a misguided sense of hope that she’d return, he’d held on to the lease at their apartment, though he couldn’t bear to stay there anymore, not after what had happened. The sublet was a studio so claustrophobic that it might have been the cabin of a sailboat with a single hazy porthole at the bow. It was at the top of a set of comically narrow and crooked stairs, a dark, snaking flight of risers that could have been carved into sandstone in some prehistoric cliff dwelling. Climbing them predisposed him to the queasiness that overtook him when he was inside.
Even now it made him sick, a tapping at the back of his throat, when he pictured it
, the crooked plywood cabinets, the daybed piled with deflated pillows of various sizes, the spindle-legged desk the color of eggnog, the single wobbly dining chair with a ripped wicker seat, the stuffed chintz chair with greasy armrests. The fireplace had been jammed full of cardboard boxes of clothes, not his. The gap between daybed and chintz chair was just wide enough to allow passage to the filthy window, through which it was sometimes possible to assemble an approximate sense of the weather. Candlesticks encrusted with dusty wax were fused to the air conditioner casing. The kitchen was four squares of linoleum, an oven that whanged into the refrigerator when he opened it. Inside were shoes, not his. The bathroom was wedged in behind the kitchen. Heavy porcelain fixtures, H&C, a standing waste, crumbling grout and crooked tiles and a tub streaked ochre. The little casement window operated by a rusty crank. It was in the ancient ruin of a sink that he threw up every morning, exhausted, his body a sack of wet bones he willed into a standing position long enough for him to complete the expulsive ritual. Then he went back to bed and lay there for another hour of sweaty recriminations. He saw her everywhere, and he saw his boy everywhere. Through a crowd on Columbus, getting on a bus, the two of them holding hands.
He’d stayed in the sublet for months, though he couldn’t afford rent on both places. Some nights he would wander up Broadway and over on 83rd to their building, take the elevator to the eighth floor, walk to the door, position his key. There was an empty apartment on the other side of the door, but he would imagine that she was inside, alone, and he was aware that he’d pushed his own loneliness into the spotlight, and that he was grieving then for himself more than for his son or his marriage. He was not inexorably drawn to the apartment. The door did not exert a magnetic force on him. So, then, why was he there? To test his broken spirit, of course, but why test it in this way, standing there at the door performing his grief—not real grief but a pantomime grief that existed alongside his actual grief, like a pool of gravy under a grisly, cold slab of meat. He was audience and actor when he stood at the door, imagining that she was inside, standing on the other side of the door, listening. What would he do if he were to unlock the door and find her there? He would enter. She would beg him to reconcile. She would fall to her knees, her cheeks wet with tears, throw her arms around his legs, and wail into his pants leg, Please please please, and the apartment would be in disarray, her clothes flung over the backs of chairs, bras on the floor, the sink piled with dishes, the white glow of the television in the bedroom, a damp towel reeking of mildew lumped on the sofa, empty bottles of wine; the nest of a broken woman. He would refuse her.
And there the fantasy would fall apart, not because he’d reached satisfaction but because of his own embarrassment. How could he play this game when he should have been mourning his boy? How could he miss her when the boy was gone forever? Defeated by his own spinelessness, he’d leave and walk south to Cinema West.
The Conversation. You don’t know who you’re tangling with! the guy with the mustache was yelling. Harry Caul. That was Hackman’s name in this one. John chewed on the stem of his pipe while he watched. He crossed his legs the way he pleased, in the manner of the French café patron, the way a schoolboy never should because it was how women sat, and in defying his father’s ancient instructions he felt a bit more like an adult. The soundtrack crackled at the high end, and echoed eerily, as most of the chairs were empty. There were voices in the stairwell, beyond the vestibule, loud enough to gain the interest of one of the moviegoers sitting nearest John. His chair creaked when he looked back into the dark. Outside, the wind was howling.
In the sublet John would watch Hawaii Five-O and Archie Bunker reruns on channel 11 until the station sign-off, and then he’d twist the UHF knob until he found a movie to watch while he tried to masturbate. He barely slept, and when he did, it was the sleep of an animal on the jungle floor. Too exhausted to make use of his sleeplessness, he lay in the white glow of the TV and felt shitty. There was a telephone that never rang. He had begun to go bald.
There were voices outside the library, odd because no one who wanted to be allowed in would dare speak above a whisper.
He relit his pipe, the wheel rasping against the flint, sparking, the flame bowing down to worship the bowl when he drew. This conceit in movies that every gesture, every word had power and meaning, this absurd convention of moments, moments that changed lives, moments in which irreversible decisions were made, ultimatums delivered and enforced. Anyone who lived that way would die of exhaustion. He only wanted peace from the never-ending skid of emotional engagement. When life becomes a series of interconnected dramatic events, you can’t think straight, and that was his whole problem. He couldn’t eat an orange without thinking of their last trip to Florida, or of standing beside her at the kitchen counter, cutting an orange with the red plastic-handled knife she’d bought on Bowery, without the voice of his father commenting on the weakness of remembering those things. Buy a box of macaroni and he was at their last Christmas dinner, when they’d been fighting, burned the bird to a crisp and had to make do with what was in the cabinet. Every graffiti-tagged wall was an illuminated manuscript, a record of their every trip down the sidewalk together. The city was two filmstrips that had been laid atop one another, present and past, both projected onto the screen simultaneously. And in every shot, the little boy.
He’d given Bronwyn’s well-being more consideration in the time since they’d split up than he ever did while they were together. Her friends had turned against him, and he had flipped the switch that allowed him to hate them back. They had no idea what she was like.
Months after he’d moved out, months after he’d last seen her, he would put on a shirt that had been laundered ten times since, and there on the cuff, tickling his hand, a long blond hair, hers. Undoubtedly hers. Off to the bathroom to puke in the sink. He could not imagine her without imagining the boy. So there were three filmstrips. Past, present, and the boy.
The voices outside were actually only one voice, a spice importer named Bonny Patel who rented some upstairs office space from Sal, and who sometimes drifted down to chat with his landlord in quiet British English, hanging around if an old black-and-white was on the bill. He was a Cary Grant fan. There was a gentleness about Bonny, an insistence on ascertaining the well-being of whoever he was speaking to. He had so perfected the art of concealing himself behind questions that invariably his conversant was left feeling invigorated by Bonny’s attentions, but wondering who, exactly, he’d divulged himself to.
Usually he wore a double-breasted suit open to allow his not-insubstantial belly to breathe, his shirt open at the collar, a pair of English monk straps. When he spoke, he did so with his hands, moving them in a deliberate, artful fashion that irritated Sal, who, to be fair, would have been equally irritated had Bonny stood with his hands in his pockets or had he lacked hands entirely. Sal’s end of the conversation usually consisted of dry air punctured by throat-clearings.
In the hallway Bonny was calling Sal’s name. He didn’t stop calling when he entered the library, feeling his way toward the spiral stairs. Sal’s head popped out of the booth.
Bonny, what the hell? he said in a whisper that was itself an act of violence.
Where is Vikram? Bonny said.
How should I know? Sal said.
You have not seen him?
No!
Bonny climbed the iron stairs that led to the mezzanine, a clanging, squealing ascent, and once he’d cleared the top his heavy footfall shook the floorboards as he hurried around to the projector booth.
Something has happened to him, Bonny said. He left hours ago. I’m sure something has happened to him. He’s been robbed, beaten by one of these gangs.
The man sitting in front of John leaned back and said, See there? I knew it was about money.
I haven’t seen him, Sal said.
Please, we must search for him. Please, the lights, Bonny said.
Be quiet, Sal said. He slipped through the booth’s
door. Sal was, on a good day, a jagged personality, one of those raw, vibrating nerves who took over corner tables upstairs at the Fairway by spreading around their small rubber-band-bound notebooks, a solitary creature whose every public act was intended to ensure the uninterrupted continuation of his seclusion. When confronted with the vicissitudes that tore up the lives of other people, Sal didn’t have much to offer in the way of compassion. His was a limited menu, one that offered only bland, starchy fare and subsistence portions.
He left before dark, Bonny said.
What do you want me to do about it? Sal said.
He is lost in the snow. I’m sure he’s been robbed. Beaten. I called the bank and there is no answer.
No shit. Banks closed hours ago. Bonny, it’s simple. He went home, Sal said.
He is not home, Bonny shouted, eliciting some noises from the audience. He directed himself to the dark mass below. I will pay you. Just one hour of your time. I will pay each of you to search for my boy. Help me find my boy, and then you can return to your movie.
Shhhh! went a chorus of voices.
Money, said the man in front of John. Always money.
John, in the second row from the back, had turned around to look up at the voices on the mezzanine.
Bonny tried again. Only an hour and I will pay and feed you all!
No one responded this time. Standard determination: engaging with a nut only encourages him.
Christ almighty, you keep it down or I’ll throw you bodily out of here, Sal said.
Bonny then committed an act of sacrilege. On the wall just to the side of where they stood were the rockers that controlled the library lights, and he reached out and mashed his hand against them. Ten banks of fluorescent tubing flickered on above the audience, who en masse turned around in their chairs to squint up at the perpetrator of this inhumane act. They were a motley bunch, patchy goatees and comb-overs, brown and orange sweaters straining at the gut, clutching smoldering cigarettes and potato chip bags, their eyebrows working against the sudden onslaught of light, the overall effect not unlike that of a squad of cockroaches caught on midnight patrol out in the expanse of the kitchen floor, their antennae dipping this way and that, reeling at the shock of exposure.