Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  * * *

  ·

  He ordered Jacks to borrow a car from one of the factory men—a relic, Kunstler called it when it showed up. “Jesus, that’s just fine,” he said when Jacks pulled up. “Pre-war, but which war?” Jacks laughed his hard, toneless laugh at that until Kunstler almost regretted having said it. The three of them together drove with the girl’s things in the rumble, and Kunstler’s suitcase under their feet in the cab. The flat wasn’t much bigger than where Kunstler lived before but it had its own kitchen and bath, and more privacy than any lodging house offered.

  The super was a slim man with slack arms and a pale, bald head over which he pushed a slab of greasy hair. Kunstler said to him, “This is Jacks, he drove us. Don’t worry, he’s not staying. He has to take that car back before King Arthur notices it’s gone. Don’t you, Jacks?”

  “That’s right,” said Jacks. “It’s pre-war, but we don’t know which.”

  “Your apartment,” said the super to Kunstler. “Keep who you want, as long as they ain’t noisy.” He handed over a set of keys, which Kunstler handed to Jacks, who started pounding up the stairs with the girl’s luggage, a case in each hand and another under his arm, the bags knocking against the balusters.

  “Don’t break the place, Jacks,” Kunstler called. To the super he said, “I guess now you see why he’ll be going.”

  “Sure,” said the super.

  “Sure,” said Kunstler. “And this is Inez.”

  “Miss.”

  “Oh, not miss,” said Kunstler. “She’s my wife.” There was a sudden silence on the stairway until Kunstler, his eyes never leaving the face of the super, called up, “Third floor, Jacks,” and Jacks started walking again.

  “Oh,” said the super. “Of course. Well, then, Mrs….”

  Inez didn’t speak, so Abe said, “Kunstler.”

  “Right,” said the super. “Kunstler. Ma’am.”

  Kunstler shook the man’s hand again. Then he picked up his bag, said to the girl, “After you,” and driving her ahead of him, he walked up the stairs.

  “Why did you tell him that?” whispered Inez as they climbed.

  “What?”

  “You know, about us. I could tell he didn’t believe you.”

  “So?”

  “So now he’s going to tell everyone about how we aren’t married.” They stopped climbing for a moment, and Kunstler rested his case on the stairs.

  “The hell we care. People are always trying to assign you some sin or another,” said Kunstler. “I’d rather choose for myself which one I get than let a bunch of gossips pick it for me. It’s like letting someone else pick your clothes for you, or tell you what position to sleep in. Anyway, don’t you want to be married?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so. Of course.”

  “To me?”

  She looked at him hard and said, “Yes.”

  “There you go, then. Right down there: I pronounced us man and wife, by the power vested in me by my own goddamn self, with Jacks and that bald weasel as witnesses. So let’s celebrate. Let’s go on up and have a drink, and dance, and do whatever the hell else we want, because like he said, the place is ours.”

  “All right,” the girl said. She began to cry a little, but smiled, too, and said, “Bald weasels be damned.”

  He watched her climb a few steps before lifting his bag to follow. He thought, I am really hiding in plain view: in the super’s moist palm and weak disapproval he had all but disappeared, because no one ever thought to look past the first layer of sin to the next, past the shabby dressing to the wound beneath. The blind from which he looked out on the world was built of a wide-shouldered suit, of nails torn to the quick and too dirty to come clean, of Wildroot and aftershave, of the damp hand of the super when he shook it—but mostly of the girl, and he knew it. Her ringlessness was just more camouflage. Though it would hurt her when the neighbors reading her finger went out of their way to call her Miss, it made Kunstler feel not proud, exactly, but something like satisfied and assured to know of their awareness and condemnation, since he knew that their disapproval was also in some way indemnity, because from that condemnation they made deductions, and therefore thought they understood what he was: a man too selfish to wed the poor girl—practically a child—who shared his bed, a man of base appetites with a factory job and forty dollars a week that he chose to spend on liquor. A man to be judged in each case, certainly, but also in each case a man.

  He knew for certain that day on the stairs that it was more than just the girl now, that he would want to complete the picture, return to the world what poverty and war had taken: the secret strength of the absent father, his raised hand a signpost, a switch to turn on the future, reconstructed in the son, what was silent in Kunstler to be spoken at last by another. Thus Kunstler would no longer be an angry spectator of the past: through the child he would have his revenge against time. This is how you cheat death; this is how you sail the slow, dark lake of mortality. This is how by means of the girl Inez he would manufacture the future and build a house for his name. One day, he foresaw, she would be drunker than ever, a swaying, bewildered drunk, and Kunstler would set her on the bed on her knees, open the concentric tubes of her girdle and dress and body, ready her for the waiting shadow and the plan which right that moment was taking shape in his mind, so that even as he quickly carried the girl, smiling in tearful pleasure, through the doorway of their new apartment, he was already thinking of the dark tunnel and the flesh between the parted bushes, the promise offered by the rustling grass; he was already on his way to Cadwalader Park.

  When her father died at last it had been with all the windows open. Afflicted by the petty thievery of mortality, he had loitered ill for months: illness seated in his grimy hair and wispy beard, illness astride his convulsing chest with its outdated clothes growing every day dingier and larger, too, on his receding frame; illness spread cloudy across his eyes, and her father aware, naturally, and not ignoring his bodily retreat but neither really accepting it, never fighting or embracing the darkness to come, an ambivalent prisoner attempting halfheartedly to appease his captor. Without the will to battle his end or even the honor just to go, to fold up and disappear, instead he would rot there in the midst of them, shrinking apathetically inside the yoke of his celluloid collar and asking always with his pitiful face for forgiveness. Meanwhile the household shrank in keeping with his reduction, the furniture departing piece by piece to pay for other things.

  The doctor, who visited so briefly that he would barely withdraw his shiny head from its hat, called always for fresh air in the sickroom—called for nothing else, it seemed, before moving on, her mother towing tearfully behind as far as the door. Towards the end snow sometimes blew in, and her father had to be wrapped deep in blankets, all the few they owned, so at night the girls slept near the coal fire in a worming, hungry pile beneath their coats, and in the day they quietly crawled the streets of Trenton with a score of other children in the wake of the departing coal carts for whatever was left behind, as sooty with the will to live as the old man was pale with lingering and apathetic death.

  They were made clean to go sit with him. The others he spoke to by name but to her he said, “My girl,” as if to remind her what she was beneath the unsightly miscalculation of her features, even though the others called it doting and slapped her for it after. Later they would travel one last time into the sickroom with its few remaining pieces of dark furniture, the flotsam of their shipwrecked gentility, and the window not open any more but closed to retain the smell of poverty and death, all that remained alive of him.

  * * *

  ·

  Her mother’s tearful despair was a thing she never felt. She sometimes believed it was because even then she had been ugly and known it, and the ugliness protected her from pain, or rather was a pain so great in itself that all others were small by comparison. It was impossible to remember, after all these years. She remembered the room, though, where the others cried, s
pread in a strange weeping arrangement amid the scattered, departing mahogany. On the floor just under the bed there had fallen a tasseled pillow, she remembered, and she knew as she looked at it that it was already a relic of the past, a dream, that it would disappear from her life and never be seen again, but the gold rope edge was so fine with all its twisted, fraying strands, that for just a moment she regretted it.

  As the afterthought, as the others had called her, unformed and untrained (and in her blossoming still breastless and unbeautiful), she was left behind to help in her mother’s work, which would consist of stitching clothes for other women, pumping the cast iron pedal in the ever-twilight until their heads ached and their legs cramped, or washing a household’s sheets and linens in the alley behind. If they were lucky her mother would be allowed for a while to teach a girl the piano, which paid better and didn’t try her eyes.

  “You were born too late,” her mother never ceased to remind her as they lay in the part of the small room they reserved by a curtain for their private affairs, sleep and the chamber pot. There had been days, she said, before his illness, not glorious but charming and lively, and full of comfortable ease, when they sang together in the evenings by a square piano in the little parlor; and her father had been a dapper man. At his passing the others all remembered and were driven to recollect it, but seeing how the memory hurt them she felt glad she had been too young to recall their brightest times. All she remembered was later, the bad days, when the other girls stole the food from her plate and warned her not to tell. It had been as if no father had ever watched her.

  In the little curtained room she learned to baste and darn, to take the pinned clothes off a woman without pricking her, and to fold the clean linen before it was completely dry so it would take a sharp crease. Later in the alley where the washing was hung she learned other things, too, about the certain kind of young men who didn’t care that her chest was flat and her lips hard and fleshless. She hadn’t understood then their writhing insistence, but it was easy enough to satisfy and when it was done they would give her gifts, a swift gesture of transferral made without eye contact, without warmth.

  * * *

  ·

  That was how it was and would be with all men until the man her husband, and she submitted to it and to them because she understood the nature of exchange, without which for her everything was impossible, because until the war her sex meant she was never allowed to do any but the most meaningless work and so was condemned to poverty, which it seemed to her was as much a feature of her woman’s form as any physical part. The only ladder meeting this wall of constraint was a man, so she traded the little she had, which was the still body beneath the one that bucked and jerked, and in return received as much or as little as these others were able or willing to offer her. If they were mindless fools whose fists she knew better than their faces or their eyes, if they remained as anonymous to her as a nameless puddle where you would drink only in the most desperate thirst, she accepted it because she understood this was to be the levy inflicted upon her by her natural lack of charm and attractiveness, by the weak body that was still never more than a woman’s, however deficient in beauty.

  These forgotten men never knew how far into them she saw, never suspected that in time it was far enough to understand that in their own ways they, too, were weak, weaker than she was who after all could endure the men and all the rest of it, and she learned there was a price weak men paid for the insufficiency each felt in a different way but all were condemned to experience. If this was no surprise to her, there was nevertheless something she hadn’t expected: that to know these frustrations was in some sense at last to understand her mother and her grief, to see what it was for her to have found a man with some quality, whatever that might have been before he accepted to shrink and die in his soiled clothes of a gentleman, what it was for her to suffer the cruel chance once having found him to lose him again.

  Thus she had known as she opened the door to the room that contained the furnace that whatever happened to the body of the man her husband, she would not easily accept to give up what in life he had been: someone who would never stoop to what was easiest but instead challenged himself to what was hardest, who was not afraid of fighting, audacious and confident enough to lie to anyone about anything when it was needed. For the benefit of them both he had without flinching fought and lied his way into a bare living all along the Jersey coast, holding jobs sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week or more, always telling people that whatever it was they needed doing, he could do it, whether pilot a barge or foal a horse. He was a man who, if things went wrong and they threatened to beat him, never ran but instead fought them back no matter what, because that was the way he remained the master of his own life and form and mind, even though afterwards he sometimes inched home bloodied and delirious from pain.

  She knew that in what he did there was no sin, or rather that sin was only a name given to desperation by those who never felt it themselves, an idea to comfort them, to cool their blushing superiority. To her the man’s lies were at worst predictions, wagers made in good faith against the future that sometimes he won and that, if lost, were accepted and then forgotten: the present was too urgent in those days to leave any space for the past. If sometimes when he was drunk he would slap her, it was not with the same impotent fury as the weak ones had done, who used the power they had—to protect her from absolute poverty, from the violence of even baser men—as a means of control. He offered her more than they ever had, too, for with no weakness to overcome he was free to share, and he willingly shared everything, since he didn’t fear her: the booze he taught her to drink and the cigarettes he taught her to smoke, the food he worked for all over Trenton, or bartered, or when necessary stole, his room and his bed and the quiet, firm unspeaking in which he housed his strength.

  Here was something not just to accept—as until then she had accepted the forgotten men and all the other painful necessities that constituted life—but to want, and to have it she would do whatever was needed, would move from one flophouse to another at a minute’s notice when the bills came due, running quietly through dark streets with her few belongings tied in a piece of oilcloth under one arm, or care for him when he returned half broken from a failed ploy or a night spent drinking and fighting to relieve the frustration of helplessness that always threatened to settle on the heads of those who didn’t take care to shake it off. All this was easily suffered just so long as they could be alone, for with him she found all she wanted, to be isolated from the world with the one person she trusted, to orbit him like a moon. She didn’t need those other things women were expected to want, the accessories of domesticity, the meaningless kindnesses that were no more than gestures to their helplessness. The man her husband was the bridge she crossed, not from loneliness, which was a deformity of her bones, but from the terror of lonely suffering, and if the sensation she experienced in his presence was not exactly love, it was still and always something that she felt greatly, deeply, something even more than the astonishment and envy with which she at first regarded the flexibility he imposed on a whole world of rules, using them as vines use the spaces between the bricks in a wall. She admired him.

  So when the moment came to face the terrible thing that had never been her own making but was the making instead of her ever-dying father and her grieving mother, and the man her husband’s war, lost despite everything and in the face of public victory, and her own lot, which was ugliness and nature’s darker part, and then the making also of the wire rope factory where her strength had grown to match the animal thickness of her brow and jaw, when she did away with the empty body that no longer contained him but worked mockingly on in his absence like a train whose driver has fallen from the locomotive, when later she opened the door to the whistle and dust of the furnace’s dark burning, when she took up without looking at it the kitchen’s sharp knife, she did it in the dawning and veiled awareness that this was but a passage, that even as th
e carapace disappeared, the true thing that had been the man her husband was liberated, freed to find its place and grow again within her, that soon within her he would be reborn.

  He went to Cadwalader by car. It was because of the woman on the bus, one of the half-dozen people there or more who caught it with him at the same time almost every morning. She wore everything up-to-the-minute, sweater-girl style—and wore it all wrong, for his money. She was too skinny, for one thing, and although Kunstler figured you didn’t need a second, she wasn’t quite young enough for it, either. He didn’t like her sharp face: it was too pointy, it lacked flesh, promised nothing more welcoming than pencil-tip breasts, slatted thighs, a bony wasteland. Thinking of her bullet bra, he said to himself, She has brought the wrong caliber gun.

  She had glanced at him a few times before on other days, he had noticed, when they were sitting so they couldn’t help but see each other, sideways looks that she very nearly kept to herself before turning back to her magazine. Today she was right across, faced him over the swaying corridor of the bus with her head tilted in such a way that her hat seemed in danger of falling off, and he could see she was looking at him without hiding it this time. Instead she wore an expression, one he assumed she had learned from the pictures or the glossies: it was the one that said she was having a thought and, come hell or high water, she intended to share it. He almost expected her to raise a finger pensively to her chin. He would have read the news to cut her out, but reading on the bus made him sick, would cause the back of his throat to climb, so he left the newspaper folded in his pocket, and tried instead to look at nothing.