by Tadzio Koelb
“He said Jean Harlow should have been a bigger star, if only she hadn’t have died.”
“What?”
“I think so, too.”
“No, Jacks, not the friend. What did the boy…what did Art say? He came to see you. Why did he come to see you?”
“Oh. He was looking for his mom.”
Kunstler gave a long groan. “He’s looking for her? Shit. Has she been around here?”
“No. But I had the number for Helms.”
Kunstler thought, If there was a button I could press that would shoot him into outer space right now, I guess I would push it, but he only said, “What does that mean, Jacks, the number for Helms?”
“Art needed to find his mom and so he asked for the phone number for Mr. Helms. And I have his number because he’s our supervisor, so I gave it to Art so he could find out where she was working today.”
“A telephone number for the cleaning company? Okay, I need that. I need that number. Anything you gave him, I need. You have the number on you? No? Back at your place?”
“You’re looking for Inez, too?”
“Yes. For both of them. It’s important. Do you know where she is?”
“No. But Mr. Helms knows. Is everything all right? Don’t you have his number at your place?”
“Let’s just get a move on.”
They walked back to the lodging house, the little limping man and the big lumbering one, Jacks talking the whole time, Kunstler trying to hurry them. Kunstler waited around the side of the brick house to steal the tiny bit of shade it hoarded down its wall and hoped the old lady wouldn’t spot him and come offer more grief while Jacks went in to get the number. Kunstler heard the smooth easy sound of cars driving by in the distance and nearby some birds making a racket. There was still the important thing he had to ask Jacks and he wished he could have a drink to do it on. He didn’t know what he would do about the answer. He found he was thinking about the sharp knife from the kitchen; he shook the thoughts away, and told himself the oppressive heat had leaked into his mind.
The nail had gone completely black on his swollen, throbbing thumb. Squeezing the knuckle with his other hand seemed to relieve the pressure a little so he did that while he walked back and forth in a tight circle beside the lodging house and wondered where he had lost his cigarettes. Running had shifted his bandages and he really needed to fix them, but he wasn’t going to ask to use the bathroom at Jacks’ place. When Jacks finally came back he said, “Jesus Christ. Did you get lost?”
“Sorry, Abe, I had to talk with Mrs. Lakatos.”
“Sure. I should have guessed she’d have you in for lunch when she knows I’m waiting.”
“It wasn’t for lunch.”
“I know it wasn’t.” Jacks was toying with a slip of paper, and Kunstler yanked it away from him. He turned his face towards the paper but didn’t really look at it. Instead he tensed up, his whole body suddenly taut and sprung, and said, “Okay. Listen now, Jacks. This is important. Let me ask you something. What else did he say, what else did the boy say? Art?”
“What do you mean?”
“God damn it, Jacks. Do you know that talking to you sometimes is a good argument for gun laws? I mean what other God damn words came out of his mouth, is what I mean. I mean did he talk about me? Did he tell you anything about me?”
“No,” said Jacks simply in his dull bellow.
“You’re sure? He didn’t say anything about me when he was talking about trying to find his mother?”
“No. He didn’t say nothing about you.”
Kunstler relaxed a little and looked back down at the slip of paper. “Is that a four or a nine?” he demanded.
“That’s a four. Say, Abe, do you want a clean shirt? I could bring you one of mine.”
Kunstler looked at his own ruined clothes, but when he imagined himself floating through the city in one of Jacks’ huge things like a nightshirt or worse he said, “I guess not. At least I know what I look like in mine. There’s no telling what they might mistake me for in one of yours. Which way to a pay phone?”
Kunstler started out at a limping trot and Jacks called after him. “See you, Abe!” He called it again—“See you! See you round!”—so that finally Kunstler turned and gave him a wave. He decided that the minute he could he would have to find a drink.
It wasn’t that the guard was lonely. On weekend shifts, as a rule, he barely said three words to anybody, and that was exactly why he took as many weekend shifts as he could—which was plenty, since no one else wanted them. The building was practically an empty shell from Friday night to Monday morning, one in a series of empty shells that made up the small office district, echoing and unvisited, a kind of graveyard where they buried all the man-hours that had died in them during the week. After college he had worked in an office for a short time that had still been much too long, and he thought of it frankly as a form of death. Maybe even better would have been to call it a form of murder that was also somehow suicide: people killing one another and themselves to be the ones who stayed latest and did the most of a thing that wasn’t important to any of them in the first place, or at least had never been important to him. He understood that in their minds they had mostly worked themselves to death for promotions, but it was hard to see the point in that because as far as he could tell his boss and the man above him had been even more anxious and unhappy than anyone. There has to be somebody somewhere getting a hell of a deal out of all this, he told himself, but I’ll never meet him, and I won’t like him if I do.
He had taken the job for exactly the same reason he had gone to college: because people told him it was a good opportunity, the kind of thing a solidly middle-class young man did to “get ahead in the world,” which was the other thing solidly middle-class young men did. From almost the minute he sat down at his desk on his first day he wanted out. Not just out of the company where he worked, but out of all companies, all offices, with their quasi-royal executives building fiefdoms out of carbon paper and mimeo ink. He wanted out so much he was stupid enough to join the army to get it.
Now about once a month he told his sister on the telephone how odd he still found it that it had been the army and the time he spent in Korea, every minute of which he hated, that made him understand how much he hated everything that had come before it, too, when you would have expected him to think fondly of anything that wasn’t the war.
Of course his sister didn’t want to hear about it, because her husband, who had never been in the army, thought going to Korea had been a fantastic and patriotic thing to do for people who weren’t too busy making a lot of money the way he had been, and apparently that kind of stupidity was contagious. Although the guard didn’t like to admit it, that was actually one of the reasons he insisted on talking about it, on repeating to her how the idea of living through hell only to find himself back at work in an office, well: the idea made him sick. It seemed insane—even sinful, somehow.
One night when he was on a really impressive R & R bender in Tokyo he admitted this sin to a fat corporal who asked him what he would prefer to do, if he hated working in an office so much. He didn’t ask in the sarcastic way most people seemed to, the one that assumed the answer would be a blank face and a shrug because there was nothing possible to say. The corporal had been honestly curious, asking with the real, almost tender inquisitiveness the guard had only ever found in people who were pretty much pickled in alcohol.
The guard was shocked and dimly angry when he realized he wasn’t sure of the answer. No one had ever asked him before. Worse, he had never asked himself, and he was aware suddenly in the extravagant way drinking makes you aware that it might have been years before he got around to considering it so straightforwardly if not for Korea. It almost made him angry to think he might get something good out of the war after all, but he set that aside for the moment and tried to approach the question carefully, with respect and thoroughness, both amplified by the next round, which meant he took a long
time answering. In the end, although the corporal wasn’t awake any more to hear the answer, the guard had decided that he liked bebop jazz, and the books he had been made to read in his literature classes at college, and building things in the garage. Sometimes he liked camping or hiking (but not fishing). Above all he liked to have company when it suited him and the rest of the time to be let alone, and wanted to have a job where no one expected him to get excited about shaving soap or elastic or whatever it was they were selling or to smile at people he didn’t like.
When they cleverly ended the war without anyone bothering first to win it, he came back and started searching for something that suited him better than the office had. The forestry service had been too isolated, and he realized he preferred to be someplace where he could sit on a bar stool and talk to someone if he felt like it, but driving a taxi involved dealing with too many strangers, trying to keep them happy. One night in a jazz club he learned from the guy next to him at the bar that having shot a gun in blind panic fifteen years earlier pretty much entitled him to a job where he wouldn’t have to do much and what he did have to do could happen weekends and nights when no one was around, a job where promotions didn’t exist to worry about, and no one wanted to talk to you about anything. He thought it seemed like a good deal, so he became a security guard. Because it was the weekend, the building and the neighborhood were empty. To the guard it seemed it would be only right if the whole city turned out empty on a day hot as that, when anyone with half a brain should be heading to the shore. All you needed was a few bucks and a towel and you could get some relief. It was even better for him: he would go on Tuesday, when only the tourists and some schoolkids would be there and all the local working stiffs had gone back to killing themselves for someone else. Although right now he was trapped in a wash-and-wear uniform that made him stream with sweat, he supposed he might eventually be the only gainfully employed man in Trenton who would actually have found enough space on the beach that week to lie down flat without having his foot in someone else’s coleslaw.
Even on the weekends, though, people passing through to other places came into the building sometimes because they needed directions or a bathroom. If it was directions, he gave them as best he could. If they wanted the bathroom, he would say, “You and me both, buddy,” and that was generally the whole of it, because while he had access to the one in the dentist’s office on the ground floor, he wasn’t allowed to let other people in there, and wasn’t about to explain all that to them. So he wasn’t surprised that they came in, because they could have wanted directions, or the john. What surprised the guard was that despite their intrusion on his solitude, he had been happy to see them. Not the man, that is: the kids. He thought it was something like the way city people are happy when they go on a drive and come across deer grazing or a butterfly shows up on the windowsill: a little glimpse into a world you don’t usually get to see. These kids weren’t going to get jobs in offices doing things they didn’t care about, and they certainly weren’t going to join the army and kill people they didn’t know for just about any reason anyone could think to tell them, which meant they already knew what it had taken him three years in an office and a tour of duty in Asia to learn.
When they pushed through the doors he gently dropped the book he was reading into the open drawer and put his hands on the desk and tried to appear official, which was pretty much all the job ever consisted of. It was hot enough that he didn’t bother to put on his cap, although he should have. He already had the epaulettes and the gaudy alloy badge, and he had clipped in the uniform tie despite the weather. The kids stood there for a moment looking uncertain of themselves. It occurred to the guard that they were wearing their own uniform: variations on a T-shirt above low-slung jeans that were tight until the knee and then splayed out like the leg on a draft horse. He could almost imagine them all having hooves underneath, like something playful and devious out of a myth. They seemed anxious, too, like animals, shy as they approached him the way even the tamest animals can get sometimes when faced with the unfamiliar. There were three fans going, two small blue-bladed plastic jobs that swung side to side near the door, their slapping clatter echoing from the stone walls and the mirrors, and one big, tilting metal type that sat near the desk and blew straight at the guard’s chest and head, so they had to come right up to the desk to talk to him without yelling. It struck him when they got there that they weren’t really the yelling type. They addressed him politely, and never questioned that he couldn’t let them into the building, even to look for someone. “If it’s a real emergency,” he offered, “you can call the cops. I can let them in.” They didn’t think that was necessary.
Instead he gave them the pen from the weekday visitors’ log and tore a corner from one of the rearmost pages to write on. The smaller of the boys composed a note, folded it, put the name of the lady they were looking for on the outside, and then they left. The guard looked at the little folded note. In small writing, the sort he associated for some reason with men wearing bottle-bottom specs, it read Inez Kunstler. He set it under the corner of his lunch box so the fan wouldn’t blow it away. They said good-bye as courteously as they had said hello, and left the guard to go back to his book.
The little man was anxious, too, when he came in, but aggressive about it, like a clockwork set so tight it just can’t be still until the spring winds down. The door had swung open suddenly, in a rush, and planted him there, surrounded by a swirl of street noise, staring red-faced and heaving at the guard. His shirt was half untucked and covered in sweat and dirt and something that was probably blood. The guard let the little man stand there looking confused for a minute. Then, yelling to be heard over the noise, the guard said, “You just here for the fans, buddy? Or can I help you?”
“I need to get in,” the little man yelled back in a high, rough voice. “I have to see someone.”
The guard expected the little man to come closer, but he didn’t, so he called back across the fan-rattled room, “There’s a lot of different companies in this building, pal. You’re going to have to be more specific.” He waited while the little man searched his pockets and finally found a small piece of paper or something from which he hollered out a name. “You’ve got the right building,” the guard answered, and the little man took a step forward, but he stopped short again when the guard continued, “but that office is closed.”
The little man looked as if he didn’t know the word. “Closed?” he yelled.
“Sure,” the guard yelled. “Weekend. Everybody’ll be back on Monday.”
“I’m looking for someone working there now. Cleaning, I mean. She’s there right now. She starts after people close. That’s when she works.”
“Listen. Why don’t you come over here, so we can talk?” The little man approached, limping a bit as if he had hurt his ankle or his knee, although if he was in pain, his face didn’t show it. His shirt was even dirtier when you saw it close up, and there was a rip down one side. “Shit, pal,” the guard said. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer.” The little guy didn’t answer; he just looked past the guard to the two elevators at the back of the foyer. The guard said, “You call the cleaning company? They might know how to reach her.”
The dirty little man was still looking towards the pair of elevators in the narrow hallway just behind. Then the little man said, “I guess I know how to find her.”
“What was that?” the guard asked, even though he had heard clearly enough. It was just that he didn’t like the way the guy had said it—and then there was something uneasy about the way the little man stood there, like he was anticipating something, and about the way the guy’s eyes kept gliding past his own, that made the guard uncomfortable. Without thinking about it, the guard stood up, and finding himself standing he also found his hand gripped his belt in a way that let his thumb touch the wood butt of his pistol in its holster. “What time does your friend finish?” he said. “Maybe you can wait for her outside.”
The little man looked up at him with this thin, blank stare. Then he made a sudden rush for the freight elevator. The guard had to grab and hold him back, press his whole body against the pushing. The man just kept pushing, moving to one side or the other as if the guard would somehow forget to follow him. Then the man was grabbing at him as if to yank him out of the way. The guard gave the little man a push that sent him falling backwards on his ass.
For a moment the guy just sat there on the granite floor, his face red but otherwise unchanged. The guard, enunciating carefully, said, “Mister, I haven’t fired a gun at anything but a target since nineteen fifty-three, and I like it that way just fine, but you know they don’t give me this thing for nothing.” He had his whole hand on the gun butt now. The man started to get up, and the guard said to him, “Slowly,” and he went slowly, standing finally with his back to the wall of the mirrored hallway. Over the man’s shoulder the guard could see the two of them reflected again and again into the infinite distance.
The little man started tucking in his shirt, and the guard took a breath. “It’s an emergency,” the little man said, finally, as if he were sharing a secret.
“Sure,” the guard said. “Then it’s easy. You call the cops. If they agree it’s an emergency, it’s open house. I let everybody in.”
The little man simply said, “No.”
They stood there for a while after that. His certainty about not calling the cops made the guard nervous, but he told himself that a man who doesn’t like cops won’t be quick to do anything that will get someone on the phone to them. He also noticed that the little man wasn’t slipping his eyeballs around looking for the way past him any more, and he figured that was a good sign. He said, “Listen. First things first. Why don’t you tell me her name?”