The Tenants

by Bernard Malamud

  He apologized for his impatience. It had caused him to express himself badly, Willie—I mean Bill. I think we can get along all right if your purpose is to improve the artistic quality of your work. Nobody says I have to love your ideas.

  “I know your type, Lester.”

  Lesser explained he had been nervous about the loss of his writing time. On the other hand I want to help if I can because I respect your ambition to be the best writer you can be, I really do.

  Bill quieted down.

  “Now all I am asking you to do, Lesser, is after I get a few chapters going along, to look at them and say no more than I am or I am not on the right track form-wise. You just say it and I’ll be the one who makes up his own mind if you right. I don’t plan to hang on to your tail for a free ride, you can bet your ass.”

  Lesser agreed to do his best if Bill was patient.

  “And if you have a little bitsy of extra time,” Bill said, wiping both palms on the apron of his overalls, “I want to catch up on some grammar—about noun clauses and such as that, even if nobody I know has much use for them. But I figure it won’t hurt me to know about them though I don’t want to do anything that will fuck up my own style. Like I like the way you write, Lesser, there’s no crap in it, but I don’t want to write like you.”

  Lesser said he would lend Bill a grammar. He could read it through and if he came across anything that interested him, they could talk it over after the day’s work.

  “Right on.”

  They shook hands.

  “I like to bullshit with you, Lesser, you don’t put on. We swinging real fine.”

  Lesser saw himself swinging.

  He hurried at last back to his work. His inspired idea, possibly for an ending, whatever it might be, lay buried in an unmarked grave.

  After Willie Spearmint became Bill Spear he added hours to his working hours. He no longer trudged into Lesser’s flat at noon to put away his writing machine but appeared conveniently later, at three or half past three; and sometimes he sat late at his kitchen table, staring at the darkened sky. Lesser figured he was at work on his new book but did not know for sure because Bill said nothing and he would not ask him.

  As for grammar, they talked once or twice about noun clauses, gerunds and gerundives, but the subject bored Bill. He said it killed the life out of language and never referred to it again. Instead, he studied his paperback dictionary, making lists of words in a notebook and memorizing their meanings.

  After he knocked on Lesser’s door in the afternoon, sometimes he stayed for a drink and they played records. The black responded to sound. As he listened his body spread an inch and his face took on an expression of repose and innocence. His protrusive eyes were shut and his lips tasted the music. But when Lesser put on his Bessie Smith, Bill, stretched out on the sofa, listened restlessly, squirming as though bitten by bugs.

  “Lesser,” he said in a slow burn, “why don’t you give that record away or break it up or eat it? You don’t even know how to listen to it.”

  To avoid argument Harry said nothing. He removed the record from the turntable and replaced it with one of Lotte Lehmann singing Schubert lieder, which Bill, his stubby fingers locked on his chest, heard contentedly.

  “Nice cat that Schubert,” he said when the songs were sung. Then he rose, stretched his arms, wiggling his fingers, and yawned. He looked sadly at his face in Lesser’s mirror and left.

  “Jesus, man,” he said the next afternoon, “how do you keep yourself working so fuckn long every day?”

  “Same six hours daily,” the writer replied. “I’ve done it for years.”

  “I thought it was more like ten. Yessir, looking at you I thought he’s at it at least ten. Myself, I work close to seven now and hardly have time to wipe my ass. The worst about it is I don’t want to do anything else but sit there and write. It’s getting me scared.”

  Lesser said he wouldn’t advise him to work his hours. A writer had to discover his own rhythm.

  “Don’t nobody have to tell me about rhythm.”

  “You might be more comfortable on your old schedule, quitting at noon.”

  “I don’t appreciate you talking about quitting at the same time as I got my mind fixed on getting started.”

  His moist eyes reflected the windows.

  “All I mean is my way of working isn’t necessarily yours.”

  “What I like to know,” Bill said, “is what do you get out of your life besides your writing? Like what do you do with your nature, man? Like with your meat tool? You got no girl, who do you fuck other than your hand?”

  Lesser said he made out now and then. “Sometimes there are sweet surprises.”

  “I ain’t talking about surprises. I am talking about life. What do you do for fun besides chess and push-ups?”

  Less than he ought, Lesser admitted. He hoped for better once his book was done.

  “With a decent advance I could maybe live in London or Paris for a year. But first I’ve got to do the kind of job I have to as an artist—I mean realize the potential of my book.”

  “You talk and you act like some priest or fuckn rabbi. Why do you take writing so serious?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Man, the way you go about it drags me to the ground.” Bill began to shout. “You’ve bitched up and whammied all my pleasure that I used to enjoy out of my writing.”

  That night he moved a lumpy, urine-stained mattress into his office flat so that he could sleep over if he worked very late.

  Here’s Lesser enjoying Harlem.

  He had asked Willie to go along to a restaurant for a soul-food meal of barbecued ribs, collard and kale, and sweet-potato pie; but the black said it was impossible, LIKE IMPOSSIBLE, so Lesser descended by parachute into Soul City by himself.

  He sees himself walking on Eighth above 135th, drifting uptown alone on the wide dark sea, though the place is alive with many bright-sailed small craft and colored birds, brothers and sisters of all shades and shapes. Anyway, he is walking amiably along, not even thinking of writing, in love with the sights and sounds of this exotic small city on a warm and sunny day, waiting for somebody, blood or chick, young or old, to say as people once did in the not-so-long-ago-past, “Peace, brother, peace to you”; but nobody does, although this red-dress fat lady with an open-eyed dead plucked chicken in her string shopping bag laughs raucously when Lesser, lifting his straw skimmer, wishes her peace and prosperity for this and the coming year. The other passers-by either ignore him or cut The Man with scornful jibes:

  Show-off cracker.

  Ofay spy.

  Goldberg hisself.

  A stranger is a man who is called a stranger. Lesser, pleading innocence, makes hasty plans for departure.

  It’s then that Mary Kettlesmith, in an orange knitted mini way up her perfectly proportioned naked thighs, waltzes by in the company of Sam Clemence, a Mephistophelean type in yarmulke and yellow dashiki, who though he listens with head close to all the words they say has few of his own to offer.

  Are you sportin tonight? Mary asks Lesser in a friendly way.

  All the time, it relaxes me for writing. Too much work, too long, gets you uptight.

  Black cunt, I mean?

  Not that I would mind, Harry says.

  Lemme see the color of your green.

  Sam nods in grave agreement.

  Money? Lesser turns pale. I was hoping to be invited out of friendship and affection.

  Sam flips open his eight-inch mother-of-pearl switchblade, as Lesser, at his desk on Thirty-first near Third, brushes the reverie aside and returns to moving along his lonely sentences.

  Although it was less than an hour after Bill had picked up his typewriter for another long day’s banging that Harry heard—and felt—a kick on his door one dreary February morning, the writer cursing fate, opened it expecting to see Bill’s black head, but the big foot in the door and the cold eyes confronting Lesser’s were unmistakably the pale-faced Levenspiel’s.
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  “Who’s the gorilla in Holzheimer’s old flat? Friend of yours?”

  “Which gorilla do you have in mind?”

  “Don’t play hard to get, Lesser,” the landlord rumbled. “I found a typewriter there on the table in the kitchen. Also an apple less a few bites, and there’s a piss-smelling mattress in the bedroom. Where’s he hiding?”

  Lesser opened the door wide.

  Levenspiel, resting his meaty hand on the door frame, hesitated.

  “I’ll take your word but tell me who is this sonofa-bitch ?”

  “He comes and goes. Nobody I really know.”

  “He’s some kind of a writer. I read a couple of the paper balls he rolls up and throws on the floor. One begins about a small boy in Harlem. Who is he, a colored?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Levenspiel made a face.

  “He’s trespassing on private property, whoever he is. Tell him I’ll throw him out on his ass.”

  Lesser said the landlord was trespassing on his writing time.

  Levenspiel, still holding his foot athwart the threshold, softened his voice.

  “So how’s the work coming along?”

  “On and off, too many interruptions.”

  “Would you consider $1,500 if I made you the offer, Lesser? Take it, it’s pure gold.”

  Lesser said he would keep it in mind. Levenspiel, with a sigh, withdrew his foot.

  “I won’t repeat my troubles to you.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “You can imagine what I endure with three sick women around my neck, you’re a writer, Lesser. You can appreciate the nasty little tricks of life, so yoishe, anyway, for Christ’s sake. I can’t go on like this forever. I’m not such a bad person. I beg you, yoishe.”

  “I’m writing as fast as I can. You push, you distort.”

  “So that’s your final word?”

  “Final once removed. What’s final I seek but can’t find. Maybe it’s a blessing, I wish I knew.”

  Levenspiel then said sternly, “Tell your nigger friend I’m coming back with a cop.”

  “You tell him.” Lesser shut the door.

  He awaited the booming fist. Instead he heard the fire door slam. Stepping out in the hall, he listened, the heavy door held open a crack, until the landlord’s flat footsteps had faded down the stairwell.

  He looked into Bill’s office. To his relief the L. C. Smith, a wordless sheet of pulpy, egg-yolk-yellow paper in its carriage, sat monumentally on the table. No doubt the weight of it had kept Levenspiel from hauling it down five flights, but he would surely send somebody up to grab it.

  Harry carried the machine to his flat and laid it gently in the bathtub. He returned to search for a manuscript but there was none. Gathering up Bill’s ream of new paper, his box of clips, pencil stubs and eraser, he also quickly stuffed some balls of paper, like overgrown bright yellow flowers on the floor, into his pants pockets.

  Lesser returned to his study and picked up his fountain pen.

  Bill knocked on the door, his face gray.

  “I went out to find me a typewriter ribbon. Who took my stuff, you, Lesser?”

  “Yes. Levenspiel found your setup and went out to get a cop.”

  “What the fuck for? What harm am I doing him?”

  “Trespassing.”

  “In this smelly joint?”

  “He had one writer to get rid of, now he’s got two. There’s a further indignity—you don’t pay rent.”

  “Jew slumlord bastard.”

  “Shit with the Jew stuff, Willie.”

  “Bill is the name of my name, Lester,” the black said, his eyeballs reddening.

  “O.K., Bill, but cut out the Jew stuff.”

  Bill stared out the window. He turned to Lesser, his brow creased.

  “What would you do if you was me?”

  “Stay here,” Lesser suggested. “Levenspiel’s car is still parked across the street. Since you’ve got your typewriter here, why don’t you go on with your work while I go on with mine? Use the kitchen table. I’ll shut the door between us.”

  “I’m worrying about my desk and chair in my office. I don’t want any trouble just now because the writing is beginning to roll along more lively. I would’ve had a great day’s work if my typewriter ribbon hadn’t got torn.”

  The fire door slammed. There were voices in the hall.

  Lesser advised Bill to hide in the bathroom.

  Bill, his throat cords taut, answered, “Not me, I ain’t hiding anywheres.”

  Lesser whispered he had wanted to move the table and chair into another apartment but figured Levenspiel would hunt down the furniture if it had disappeared out of the room.

  “I also thought of lugging it up to the roof.”

  “I appreciate your thoughts, Lesser.”

  “We’re writers, Bill.”

  The black nodded.

  A recognizable nightstick rat-tatted on the door.

  “Open it up in the name of the law.”

  Bill slipped into Lesser’s study.

  The writer opened the door. “The bell still functions,” he reminded Levenspiel. He asked the cop to state his business.

  “Our business is legal,” the landlord said. “We broke up your friend’s furniture in the apartment where he was trespassing, but I know you are in possession of his typewriter that I already saw, Lesser.”

  “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  “What are my rights, though they are rare for a landlord in this bastard city, are my rights. I doubt that I owe you any personal apologies, Lesser. Right now I’m about to search every goddamn apartment in the house and if I don’t locate your black friend anywhere, then he’s hiding here.”

  “Bring a search warrant if you want to get in.”

  “Damn right we will,” said the young cop.

  A half hour later, as Bill lay on the sofa with his hands clasped under his head, from his study window the writer watched Levenspiel drive off in his Oldsmobile. The cop remained across the street for an impatient ten minutes, then looked at his watch, threw a glance up at Lesser’s window where he stood peeking behind the drawn green window shade, yawned, and sauntered off.

  Bill and Lesser hurried to his office. When he beheld his smashed table and chair—they had pulled the legs off the table and broken up the chair—and his slashed mattress, Bill, jaw and lips tight, trembling, ultimately wiped his eye with his hand. Lesser, respecting his privacy, returned to his desk but was too disturbed to work.

  Later he asked Bill what his plans were.

  “I have no fuckn plans,” he said bitterly. “My chick and I had a pissass flap and I ain’t planning to go back there, leastways not just now.”

  “Work in my kitchen tomorrow,” Lesser offered, overcoming indigenous reluctance. “Or if it makes you feel claustrophobic we can put the table in the living room.”

  “If you insist on it,” said Bill.

  Lesser slept badly that night. A guest forever is all I need. What is this strange curse on my book that I can’t get the right conditions to finish it?

  But in the morning he had made up his mind: do something about getting Bill another place to work. They ate breakfast. Bill, though disconsolate, devoured three eggs, a can of sardines, two cups of coffee with rolls, as Lesser downed a dish of oatmeal and a cup of black coffee. The writer suggested they search around in some of the second-hand furniture stores on Third Avenue and pick up a few necessary pieces for Bill.

  “There’s no bread in my pants, man. That’s one of the things Irene and I were arguing about. Her new show is postponed and one of her nags on me, though her old man walks on bread, is to worry about when it’s not coming in, and she keeps bugging me to get a gig. I told her, ‘Sister, I have to start my new book off and I don’t give a living shit who is slaving but it won’t be me except on my writing.’ I said if she was short on confidence in me I will find me another bitch.”

  “Forget about money. I still have
a few bucks in my bank account.”

  “That’s fine and dandy of you, Lesser, but could we take the chance of putting another table and chair in just after this bust? Suppose those birdturds come back here today?”

  Lesser agreed. “Let’s wait a day or two and meanwhile you work here and I’ll work at my desk.”

  “Right on.”

  Two difficult days later, neither Levenspiel nor the cop having returned to the hunt, they bought Bill an unfinished maple table, a cane-bottom, solid black chair, a folding cot, and a tasseled, old-fashioned floor lamp with a marble base. Lesser tried to persuade him to move down a floor or two but he objected because there was no view lower down.

  “What view is there up here?”

  “I like to look at the roofs, man.”

  He was, however, willing to move across the hall into Mr. Agnello’s former flat that had the toilet that sometimes flushed.

  They carried the new furniture up the stairs during the evening, with the assistance of Sam Clemence and a friend of his, Jacob 32, a modest gent, Bill said, though Lesser was not comfortable in his presence. Jacob 32, who had uneasy eyes and a pencil-line mustache, was not comfortable in Lesser’s presence.

  They swept and mopped up the rooms with Lesser’s broom and wet mop. The writer also gave Bill a worn afghan for his cot.

  The next afternoon they found a typed notice pasted on Holzheimer’s door: NO TRESPASSING OR ILLEGAL ENTRY UNDER PENALTY OF ARREST! IRVING LEVENSPIEL, OWNER !

  The landlord fortunately had not looked into Agnello’s apartment. But after that, Bill, worrying about his new possessions, agreed to move down to a not-bad back flat on the fourth floor, the opposite corner from Lesser’s. He and the writer hauled down the furniture. Bill wrote busily every day, including Sundays, but after another week he and Irene made up and he returned to her apartment, though only for weekends.

  “Like I concentrate better when I don’t see her during the week,” Bill told Harry. “1 got my first chapter in the breeze at last. If you see cunt you want cunt though she is pissing a lot lately so it ain’t that much of a problem.”

  “Pissing?”