I nodded. It was about eight blocks from where I lived. “I’ve passed it a couple of times. What should I wear?”
“Don’t much matter,” he said. “But you got to wear a suit when you drive.”
“Is that a fact?” I said. I still had the old suit from my previous incarnation hanging in the closet. It would feel strange to wear it. And I remembered I had sworn I would never wear a suit again.
Ethan eyed me. “You feel trapped, havin’ to go back to work?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Are there varying degrees of free will?”
Ethan nodded. “Yessiree. They’s varying degrees of everything, includin’ chocolate chip decaffeinated cappuccino swirl frozen yogurt.”
*
“Right on time, my man,” Ethan said. “Punctuality a good quality.”
He was waiting for me in front of the garage at nine that night. I walked up to him and shook his hand. It was hard to see his face because the halogen lights shone directly in my eyes. He took my handshake and turned it into one of those thumb-grabbing grips that was so popular on the street. I suppose it was a gesture of friendship.
“Good to see you, Ethan,” I said. I glanced into the building. The night was black but a wide swath of light blazed forth from the entrance like a blast furnace. “Is the boss here?”
“Sure is. Let’s go talk to him. I told him ‘bout you. He interested to meet you.”
I put my hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “By the way,” I said. “Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.”
I couldn’t see his expression, but his voice sounded like he had a grin on his face. “Glad to sign up another indentured servant to enrich the society.”
We walked into the garage. It wasn’t any dirtier or more disorganized than any other garage. However it was more brightly-lit than most garages. There were brilliant lights all over the place, on the walls and on stands. It was dark outside on the street, but inside it was lit up like the most garish boulevard in Las Vegas. And it was oppressively hot, so hot I had to take off my overcoat.
There was an overpowering racket coming from two bays where men were working on cars up on lifts. An unbearable banging sound alternated with a loud clattering noise. Then the noises merged until it felt like there was a drill press hammering inside your skull. The place had an unbelievable stink from the smell of burning rubber and gasoline fumes. I couldn’t breathe. The atmosphere was suffused with a sickly miasma. I felt a bad headache coming on.
A man walked out of the smoky haze toward us. He was shorter than average height with a stocky build. He had a thick black moustache. It was the middle of winter and cold enough to be agreeable to a polar bear and here he was wearing a light open-neck short sleeve shirt. His head was almost completely bald. He stopped in front of Ethan and me and stuck out his hand.
“My name is Max,” he shouted. I could barely hear him over the racket. His face and arms were covered with dirt.
I shook his hand. It was filthy. He made no effort to wipe it clean. His skin was rough. His fingers were twisted and the knuckles were swollen from some form of arthritis. “How are you?” I said. “I’m Tony.”
“Yeah, I know. Ethan told me. You look for job?”
I wanted to step outside where it wasn’t so noisy or hot or smoky. The surroundings were so unbearable. “That’s right,” I shouted. Then I started coughing and couldn’t stop.
“You drive?” Max asked.
“Sure, I can drive,” I said in between coughs.
“Good. You got license?”
I didn’t feel like shouting any more. I nodded and reached into my wallet for the license and gave it to him. He put on a pair of reading glasses that hung around his neck and examined it front and back for a long time. “Very good job,” he said. He handed it back and winked at me. “I know who make it.”
My heart started pounding but I tried to remain calm. I could almost hear my heartbeat over the din. I ignored his comment. “What about the job?” I shouted.
“You got it. Be here tomorrow night nine o’clock. Wear dark suit. White shirt. Tie.”
“That’s it?” I asked him. He knew my driver’s license was phony, but that didn’t seem to bother him. It was probably an indication of the type of operation he ran.
He nodded. “That’s it. See you.”
He made an about-face and disappeared back into the smoky haze.
“That’s one charming fellow,” I said to Ethan as we left the garage and walked out into the frigid night air.
“He’s not so bad. ‘Specially compared to most Israelis. They all got a problem with manners, from what I see. They all nasty sons of bitches.”
Why was it that everyone persisted with these racial stereotypes in our backstreet international cat house? The Blacks didn’t like the Indians who didn’t like the Mexicans who didn’t like the Koreans who didn’t like the Blacks. They were all after the same piece of the pie in a beggar-thy-neighbor dance. The Korean greengrocers took advantage of the Latinos who worked for them, just as the Jews had taken advantage of the Koreans who had worked for them. It was La Ronde as the good old American dream, only now Willy Loman was Wei Lo Man.
I wondered if Ethan had caught Max’s comment about my driver’s license. He didn’t seem to give any sign that he had noticed anything and he didn’t say anything about it. But he did say, “You got to be nice to Max. He the owner and dispatcher. He could give you a good assignment or a bad assignment. Your future depend on Max.”
I nodded. “Thanks. I understand.”
I wanted to continue our talk but Ethan turned and started back toward the garage. “I got to go to work,” he said. “No free will right now.” He waved his hand in farewell.
“How can you stand that place?” I shouted after him. “It stinks like hell.”
“You get used to it,” he hollered back at me. “You get used to anything.”
CHAPTER XXVII
“I teach little deaf children,” Malkie said. “It’s always a joy to see their shining faces when I walk into the classroom in the morning. They laugh and jump up and down and clap their hands when they see me.”
“I should have known you were involved in some kind of altruistic work,” I said. It seemed to suit her character.
She squinted at me. “What does altruistic mean?”
“It means unselfish.”
She wagged her finger. “Oh, no. I’m not unselfish. Teaching the kids is very selfish for me. It gives me too much pleasure.”
We were walking near the Fifty-ninth Street entrance to Central Park across from the Plaza Hotel. It had snowed for the last two days and the park was all clean and white. The snow had not yet had a chance to turn into slush. It was three in the afternoon and it was a sunny day. We entered the park and trudged through the snow. As we walked I had to turn my face toward her so she could read my lips.
I made an effort to speak slowly and distinctly. And I tried to curb my addiction to arcane words, but when I slipped up and said a word she didn’t understand, she would always stop me and ask what it meant. She was so curious about a word that was new to her. And then she would ask me how to pronounce it properly. I came to realize that when she mispronounced a word, it was probably a word she had learned from reading after she became deaf and didn’t know how it sounded.
“How long have you been teaching?” I asked her.
“About five years. I started teaching after I got my Master’s degree. Before that I was just a student.”
How delightful the way she said, “…just a student.” I took her hand and pulled her to me and hugged her. She was shivering from the cold. I kissed the soft part of her neck where it wasn’t covered by her scarf. It was warm.
“Your nose is cold,” she giggled.
I kissed her nose. “So is yours,” I said.
We watched as a group of children slid down a hill on their sleds. When the kids reached the bottom, some rolled off their sleds onto the snow while others pulled their sleds u
p to the top again.
“How old are the children you teach?” I asked her.
“Five to eight years old. Old enough to be fun, but not old enough to be cruel.” She smiled at me. “I wish they would stop growing older once they became eight. That’s when they start to lose their innocence.”
I was curious. “Do you teach the kids in sign language or do you speak to them the way you speak to me?”
She nodded. “Both. Most of the children prefer to sign, but my signing is terrible. I’m almost illiterate in ASL. The children always laugh at my signing because I make so many silly mistakes. You know, I had to learn to sign after I became deaf and it’s difficult to learn a new language when you’re an adult. I guess your brain is not so adaptable.”
“What’s ASL?” I asked her.
“American Sign Language. It is an actual language, you know. It has its own rules and grammar just like any other language.”
“Will you teach me how to sign?” Did I mean it or was this just a coldly-calculated ploy to get into her good graces?
“Sure, I’ll teach you,” she said and then she started a series of graceful hand movements that looked like nothing so much as the flight of two birds in concert.
“What did you say?”
She laughed. “I said, you’re just saying that to get on my good side.”
She had nailed me with unerring precision. It was an uncomfortable feeling to have been so obvious. “No, no,” I insisted. “I really want to learn. Will you teach me?”
“Yes, I will.” She put her gloved hand into mine. “It’s not easy to learn. I’ll start by teaching you the alphabet. But not now.”
“Why not now?”
She shivered. “Silly,” she said. “It’s too cold. I’m freezing to death.”
“Well then, why don’t we go to my apartment and warm up?”
She stared at me. “I’m not ready for that.”
“You’re not ready for what? To warm up?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” she said.
“That’s all we’ll do. Warm up.”
“That’s just what I’m afraid of.”
I grinned at her. “You’re afraid of warming up?”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m serious.”
“I’m not ready to go to your place.”
“All right then. Let’s go to your place. We can warm up and you can teach me sign language.”
“Stop it,” she said. “I’m not ready to go to my place either.”
“Well, you’ll have to go somewhere eventually, won’t you?”
“You’re teasing me,” she said. “I don’t like to be teased.”
“I’m not. I mean it. We can go to your place or my place and I promise you nothing will happen.”
She regarded me with amusement. “But then you won’t learn sign language if nothing happens.”
I spread my hands and shrugged. “I give up. What do you suggest?”
“Don’t give up,” she said and gave me a mock fierce look. “Never give up.”
*
So we went back to her apartment. And, of course, we made love. She was shy and she made me turn out all the lights, so then she couldn’t see what I was saying. She had voluntarily deprived herself of another one of her senses. All she had left was smell, taste and touch. She made very good use of those remaining senses, however. Especially touch. And there was no need to contain my cries. She couldn’t hear my climax. Her sounds were rough moans, not modulated. Almost animal-like. She couldn’t hear herself either. So she had no idea how she sounded. Our congress was soft, it was sweet, it was slow. I thought I would never feel such tenderness again. I had thought my life would just stretch out bleakly before me like an arid roadway on a featureless landscape.
I couldn’t lie still. I leaned over her in the bed and switched on the light. She looked up at me with a sleepy gaze. “Why did you turn on the light?” she asked me.
“I wanted to see your face.”
“There’s not much to see,” she said. “Just a deaf girl who thinks she made a mistake.”
“Oh, no. Don’t say that. It wasn’t a mistake at all. It was the right thing to do. You’ll see. You’ll be glad it happened. I’ll make sure you’ll always be happy.”
Her expression was skeptical. “That’s a big promise. I don’t know if you can keep it. There’s something about you that I’m not sure of.”
“What do you mean?”
She turned her face away from me as if she didn’t want to see my answer. “I don’t know if I can trust you. If you’re telling the truth. Somehow…”
I spoke to her but she didn’t read my lips. My answer was not for her. The words moved past her in sound waves that may have registered on her eardrum but weren’t carried along the auditory nerve into her brain. “I’m telling the truth,” I said. But it was a lie. I was telling the truth, but I was also lying.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I drove by night. That was how I envisioned myself. I was like a character in that old Humphrey Bogart movie, They Drive by Night. It was always dark when I worked. So it was altogether poetic and fitting that my nocturnal excursions provided the source of my income, as if my money came from some shadowy transit hell-hole. I would get my assignment from Max, the dispatcher, and I would drive to a Wall Street or midtown office building and wait for an exhausted well-dressed executive or lawyer in my Lincoln Town Car with the pick-up’s name hand-written on a card on the side window. Then I would drive the passenger home to an expensive apartment in Manhattan or an expensive house in Greenwich.
Or I would pick the passenger up after a party or a night of carousing through the city’s gin mills and drive him home. Once, at a nightclub, I picked up a young woman who was so drunk she could barely climb into the limo. She passed out in the back seat and wouldn’t wake up when we finally arrived at her apartment building. She was so intoxicated I could have ravished her seven ways from Sunday and called in the New York Zoological Society to finish the job and no one would have been the wiser. I had to gesture to her doorman to help me awaken her and we both had to support her as she attempted to navigate her way through the lobby to the elevator in her stiletto heels. Needless to say, there was no tip on that run.
My best customer was Mister Forsyth. He was a clean-cut WASP in his early thirties and was so reminiscent of the people I used to associate with in my previous incarnation. Mister Forsyth worked in one of the glass towers on Park Avenue and lived in an enormous house in New Canaan. He was a pleasant fellow with an easy grin, given to spontaneous outings for which I was well-compensated. And I knew he liked me.
“Tony,” he would say. “Let’s take a trip up to the Apollo for some rap music,” or “Let’s go cruising in Soho and see what we pick up.” And then we would chat amiably about the eternal verities as we drove to our destination.
One evening, Mister Forsyth offered me a proposition.
“Tony,” he said. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“Mister Forsyth, I would never have the wrong idea about you.” I turned around to look at him sitting in the back seat. “You’re a real gentleman.” It never hurt to flatter the customers. It led to more generous gratuities. This was something I had recently learned which I never knew before.
“Tony, you remember my girlfriend, don’t you?”
“Which one, Mister Forsyth?”
He guffawed. “Touché, Tony,” he said. “Very good retort.”
“You have so many girlfriends. Every time I see you, you’re with a new girl.” Another attempt at flattery and a bigger tip.
“The one who’s been in the limo the last few times. The slutty-looking blonde with the big hair. You know her -- Dolly.”
I nodded and wove between two large trucks. “Oh, yes. I remember her. The intelligent one who thought Canaletto was an Italian pastry.”
He laughed so hard he began to choke. With a great effort
, he attempted to regain his composure. “Don’t make me laugh, please.” And then he started to laugh again. “Anyway, Tony,” he said after he had caught his breath. “She likes you. She wants you to be a witness.”
“What? At your wedding?”
Mister Forsyth broke out laughing again. “Tony, you slaughter me.” I looked at him in the rear-view mirror. He was wiping tears from his eyes. “Tony, she wants to include you in the club.” And he started to guffaw again.
This was becoming a little tiresome. “Which club?” I asked him.
“Our little sex club.”
My ears pricked up. “You have a sex club?”
“Well, not exactly. But Dolly wants to start one.”
“And who would belong to this club?”
“Dolly and me,” he said. “And you would be the witness.”
“Please excuse me for being a little confused. Perhaps you could explain the rules of the club to me.”
Mister Forsyth leaned forward in the back seat and put his hand on my shoulder. “Dolly wants to snort a little coke and then have a little sex while you drive us around town. And she wants you to look at her in the rear view mirror while you’re driving.” He leaned back in his seat. “Of course, if that’s not too much of a problem for you.”
I toyed with that one. “The main problem I see is that there’s a statistically much greater chance of having an accident if I’m looking in the rear view mirror while I’m driving.”
“Well, of course, you’d have to look at the road also.”
“I see,” I said. “And what’s the name of this club? The Sex and Coke and Driving Club?”
He considered it for a minute. “That’s not a bad name. It has a certain pithy ring to it. And there’s one important incentive for the official witness of the club.”
“What’s that?”
“A lucrative cash bonus upon completion of the witnessing chores.”
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