Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821)

by Lethem, Jonathan

  Possibly Zwelish meant the women. Sigismund Blondy, like any tall dissolute specimen, had women around him, in roles likely unclarified even to themselves: exes, friends, liaisons. Zwelish witnessed a certain number of the comings and goings of this elegant flock, which culminated in an introduction at a First Avenue Greek diner during morning hours suggestive of an overnight visit, before collaring Blondy alone one day to say, “Okay, Sig, how do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Five different women I’ve seen you with in the past two months.”

  “Friends, Alan, those are my friends.”

  Zwelish crushed his cigarette under his running shoe, the way he wanted to stub out Blondy’s line of defense. “Don’t bullshit me. I see them lean into you. That’s not friends.”

  “When you reach my age, women lean into you for a variety of reasons.”

  “I could use some friends like that.”

  Blondy felt he’d been offered a significant confidence. Insouciant as he was, he hadn’t ever felt that he could quite ask a man as unattractive as Zwelish how he made do. Before any tenderness broke out between them, however, Zwelish thrust a knife in. “I’ve seen you hitting on those illiterate babysitters, too. The whole block talks about it, you know.”

  This prospect tipped Blondy back on his heels for an instant: that he, who prided himself on his panoramic insight into Seventy-eighth Street, could be under the microscope himself. And, using that instant, Zwelish made his escape.

  *

  A bruising friendship, if it was one. And, like Blondy and me at the movies, many weeks could pass between encounters. Did Blondy only fantasize that Zwelish peered out of his basement window slats deciding whether or not, on a given afternoon, he wanted to see Blondy? In any case, when they did meet, Zwelish generally seemed to have some willful challenge ready, as if he prepared with flash cards. “Not awake yet?” if he saw Blondy with coffee in the afternoon. “Never awake at all anymore,” Blondy would say, always willing to play the decrepit jester, the has-been, hoping he could un-push Zwelish’s buttons. “Want a job, Blondy? You should write an opera about Donald Trump. He’s what passes for a hero these days!” Blondy didn’t compose operas, but never mind. Still, after Zwelish’s initial remark they’d often fall into the earlier style of more relaxed banter. And Zwelish sometimes let his guard down and complained, obscurely, about “modern urban women.” He’d only gloss the topic, and Blondy didn’t press at the sore point. Zwelish seemed to know how vulnerable Zwelish wanted to get.

  “Can’t you get one of those babysitters to do your laundry for you?” Zwelish said one day when he saw Blondy humping a Santa Clausian bag to the Chinese dry cleaner. Zwelish seemed particularly keen and chipper, and rolled up his sleeve to show off a nicotine patch. More bragging. He explained that he’d already stepped down two patch levels, after fifteen years of pack-a-day smoking.

  “I never thought of this before,” said Blondy, “but if you wanted to smoke but were having trouble getting started, the patch could really do the trick, couldn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you wanted to be a smoker,” Blondy said, explicating the joke. “You could step up instead of down.” Zwelish brought out his silly side; he couldn’t help it. “Once you get to the top level, you tear off that patch and—voilà!—you’d want a cigarette urgently.”

  “Fuck you,” Zwelish said, and walked away. His self-improvements were apparently no laughing matter.

  Yet Sigismund Blondy, being who he was, found Zwelish all the more precious for his touchiness. He constituted a test that Blondy, who’d sledded on pure charm through so many controversies, couldn’t pass. He adored Zwelish for causing him, at this late date, to want to do better, try harder, give more.

  It was months later that the real opportunity came: Alan Zwelish’s definitive self-renovation, one that Blondy instantly vowed to treat only reverently, beatifically. Zwelish returned from a mysterious trip in possession of an Asian wife. Blondy heard it first from another neighbor (shades of “the whole block knows”), who included a nosy speculation as to whether the union had been made by online advertisement or some other mechanical arrangement, before he saw her for himself. From Vietnam, it was revealed when they met on the street, and tiny enough to make Zwelish look tall. Doris, Zwelish introduced her as, though he later confided that her name was something else, Do Lun or Du Lan. Bright dark eyes and features so precise they seemed tooled. At this first meeting Blondy clasped Zwelish’s hand, took his elbow, gave his warmest congratulations. Almost bent to kiss Doris, but thought better. She was too self-contained and skittish, a cipher. Zwelish pulled her close to him, seeming for once immune to hurt, a being formed only of pride and delight. Blondy was a part of the family, if only because at the moment anyone, even a passing stranger, would have been. Blondy watched them disappear into the basement apartment, Zwelish gallantly rushing past Doris to unlock the gate, and felt a disproportionate happiness, one he suspected he’d have to make an effort to conceal.

  Zwelish never attacked Blondy now, his sarcasm apparently totally evaporated, and if Blondy ever experimented with a teasing joke (calling Doris “Mrs. Z”), it seemed to go right over Zwelish’s head. Or under it, as if the man were floating. They’d greet each other heartily, with or without Doris in Zwelish’s tow. It was as though Zwelish had advertised the director to Doris in advance as a sterling friend, a local pillar, and then so invested in the notion that he forgot his old wariness. Doris, when she was along, watched carefully. Her English wasn’t hopeless, once you pierced the gauze of the almost total deference she showed her husband, never speaking without checking his eyes for cues. Who knew what else she was capable of, what life she’d led before, what life she’d expected coming here. Zwelish, who worked increasingly from home, who made fewer consulting trips out of town, kept her attached at the hip.

  Soon enough Doris’s pregnancy was noticeable on her scrawny frame. Her posture was too good to hide it past the third month. Zwelish accepted these congratulations, too, but distantly. This was a cold winter, everyone battened into woolen layers and readily excused from dawdling in the open, and Zwelish and his expectant young wife were more and more like figures in a snow globe, viewable but uncontactable from the human realm. They didn’t seem happy or unhappy, just curled into each other, whispering on the street, a totally opaque domestic unit. Blondy couldn’t get a rise or anything else out of Zwelish, and I knew Blondy well enough to feel how this irked him. It explained the reckless choice he made. Likely, given his history with Zwelish already, Blondy knew it was reckless, though he did it wholly in gentleness and out of sheer enthusiasm. One day when Doris was five or six months along and spring had broken out on the street, Blondy ran into her alone as she returned, waddling slightly, from the Korean market. He insisted on carrying her plastic bags to the door of the basement apartment.

  This was bad enough, really, since it wasn’t beyond Zwelish’s established range to feel this as a rebuke for not having accompanied Doris to the store. But worse, much worse, at the door Blondy reached under Doris’s sweater and T-shirt, not without asking first, and cupped his palm underneath the globe that burgeoned there. He did it elegantly—nothing but elegance, with a woman especially, was possible for Blondy. Doris wasn’t jarred. Blondy didn’t linger. Just felt it and murmured something about “a miracle,” and something else about “lucky Alan.” Asked “Boy or girl?” and Doris told him: “Boy.”

  Zwelish, who’d heard their voices and come to the window, now rushed out, unlocked the gate, and pulled Doris inside. He seemed to have some imprecation caught in his throat, which produced a kind of angry hiccup as he glared up at Blondy. Then, with his wife, he was gone.

  Conveniently, Zwelish was alone when he next met Blondy on the street. He lowered his shoulder as they came near each other, and when Blondy said his name, he squared and delivered a sour look. “What do you want from me?” he asked Blondy. “Nothing you wou
ldn’t want to give” was Blondy’s reply.

  “Why’d you call me ‘lucky’?” Zwelish asked.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Lucky Alan.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Blondy said, exhausted at last.

  “Then why don’t you just keep your distance.” Zwelish exited on the line.

  Now came the deep valley in their relations, though Blondy somehow never doubted it would eventually be crossed. Weeks or a month could go by without their passing on the street, and words were never spoken. Blondy was busy then, in the effort that included our own first meeting, the Koch plays. The boy was born, and the little triad was sighted on Seventy-eighth Street, always self-reliant and self-contained, always in a hurry. And, finally, Blondy uncovered the existence of the “whole block”; it consisted of an older woman (meaning, I guessed, Blondy’s age) living in Blondy’s own building, whom Blondy mainly identified with a boring dispute over recycling, and who, it turned out, was eagerly running him down to absolutely anyone, from the market Koreans to new tenants; to the dog-walkers she’d interrogate after their talks with Blondy, as if deprogramming them; to, presumably, Zwelish. One of the dog-walkers, the most garrulous and multifariously connected (he walked the Jack Russell and the corgis and the aging dachshund), spilled it all to Blondy at last. And also said that Zwelish himself had once halted on the sidewalk to take part in the latest Blondy-trashing session. That Zwelish had said he’d never trusted Blondy, was “always just playing along,” whatever that meant. As though Blondy’s affection were so pernicious it had to be negotiated with.

  In the earlier months of this stalemate, Blondy had spotted Zwelish with or without his new family four or five times, then Doris alone with the boy in a stroller two or three others. Blondy hadn’t noticed to what degree he’d pridefully withdrawn from the daily life of the block (this would have been the period of the great escalation in my multiplex encounters with Blondy, when we most frequently “accidentally” rendezvoused and ended up at wine bars) until the garrulous dog-walker stopped him and delivered the news: Alan Zwelish had died, suddenly, of an inoperable brain tumor, discovered only weeks before it killed him. Doris and the child had inherited whatever he had, and an insurance claim was going to keep them in the apartment across the street. Here was the full horror of a relationship that both relied on chance meetings and was subject to utter estrangement: what you could miss in an interval. In this case, the whole end.

  There was only one possible choice at the news. Blondy rushed to the apartment to see Doris. She let him in. Entering Zwelish’s lair for the first time ever, seeing—yes!—the high-end audio equipment and the pile of free weights, as well as the framed Motherwell, and most of all the one-year-old playing in a folding crib littered with the plush toys he suspected were Zwelish’s handpicked tokens of adoration, made Blondy’s heart righteous, as if confirmation of his old guesses proved the claims Zwelish had always refused. Doris sat across from him, rigid in her chair, eyes dry. She offered him nothing, and he didn’t approach her, or the child—this wasn’t a visit, it was a reckoning. He started with the only words to start with, “I’m sorry,” meant as an overture to the explanations he wanted to offer whether Doris cared or understood. But she had a clarification of her own to make, one that threw his motives into irrelevancy.

  “I’m glad he’s gone.”

  Blondy hadn’t misheard. Her syntax was exact and unmistakable, despite the accent. The sentiment laid bare.

  “Why?”

  “He never let me go anywhere.” Doris’s tone was angry, the feeling fresh. “We only fighted all day.”

  Blondy just nodded, needed no prompting to accept the truth of this account.

  “I didn’t love Alan. Now we”—she turned, to make Blondy understand she included the boy—“have this. Much better.”

  Blondy began weeping, openly, pouring out stuff he didn’t know was inside, matters of his fear of death generally, as well as rage at Alan Zwelish for having pushed him away and at himself for having let himself be pushed.

  “You cry,” Doris said, not cruelly.

  *

  Having been chosen or volunteered to receive the confession from Blondy that Doris Zwelish had preempted, I fastened on the real-estate implications. They seemed to me not inconsiderable, given Blondy’s Seventy-eighth Street rent stabilization. “Your response was to move from the block?”

  “I couldn’t confront the recycling lady, to begin with,” Blondy said. “Let alone watch Doris raising the kid before my eyes—what if he came out looking like Alan? The block wasn’t mine anymore. I was like a zombie—they’d be right to shun me after a while. I was embarrassed for myself, but also for Zwelish. Nobody could forget him if I didn’t go.”

  “So it was altruistic, moving away?”

  “Necessary, Grahame.”

  Again I felt a paranoiac certainty that in telling his tale Sigismund Blondy had enlisted me in a theatrical invention—cast me in a role—for the benefit of an unknown audience, perhaps only himself. There was no Alan Zwelish, or Alan Zwelish had never married or died: The whole episode was confabulation. For an instant I wanted to go to the library and dig for an obituary. But then I knew that the story was true. Inventing a smoker who’d quit and then succumbed to cancer was beneath Blondy. No, my feeling of unreality was a sympathetic response, not a clue to a lie: I’d been infected with Blondy’s own fear, that grandiosity had made his human self specious—a zombie. He fled Seventy-eighth Street afraid he’d made it a stage for theatrics. In his nightmares he might have heard this accusation, delivered in the recycling lady’s voice: not that he was molesting nannies but that he treated others as figures in a shadow play.

  The moment I suspected this horror I wanted to assuage it, by speaking of his true and inexpressible feelings for Zwelish. “You don’t choose who you love, Sigismund.”

  Blondy looked relieved that I was chasing a moral in his fable, rather than staring with him into the black hole of his personality. “I like that,” he mused. “You don’t choose who you love. Or who loves you. That was Alan’s problem.”

  “No wonder he was pissed. Whatever he was searching for, nothing could have made him expect you.”

  “Ha!”

  I’d have done anything for Blondy at that moment, and, correspondingly, I loathed Alan Zwelish, though I knew there was more Zwelish than Blondy in me, which was likely the reason I was seated here. I hated Zwelish for showing Blondy death, just as I’d hate a teenager for informing a five-year-old that Santa Claus was a fake. I hoped Blondy would live to a thousand, for revenge.

  “Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it?”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s the next question.” Blondy had unfolded his photocopies again. “Or this: Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal?”

  The King of Sentences

  This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled, not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.

&nb
sp; We worked in bookstores, the only thing to do. Nobody who didn’t—and that included every one of our customers—knew what any of the volumes throbbing along those shelves was worth, not remotely. Nor did the bookstores’ owners. Clea and I were custodians of a treasury of sentences much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Though we mostly handled the books only by their covers (or paged briefly through to ascertain that no dunce had striped the pages yellow or pink with a Hi-Liter), we communed deeply with them, felt certain that only we deserved to abide with them. Any minute we’d read them all cover to cover, it was surely about to happen. Meanwhile, every customer robbed us a little. At the cash registers we spoke sentences tailored to convey our disdain, in terms so subtle it was barely detectable. If our customers blinked a little at the insults we embedded in our thank-yous, we believed they just might be worthy of the marvels their grubby dollars entitled them to bear away.

  We disparaged modern and incomplete forms: gormless and garbled jargon, graffiti, advertising, text-messaging. No sentence conveyed by photons or bounced off satellites had ever come home intact. Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, ensuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. We’d rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the administration’s lousy grammar.