Lesser finally agreed to read it, because Bill didn’t know he was in love with his girl.
Maybe his reluctance showed because Bill then said in a tense voice, “If somebody doesn’t read this real fast and tell me how it’s going I’ll blow my mind. I was thinking of telling Irene to read it but I’ve been staying away from her while I was writing about my—about this kid Herbert’s mama, so I could write it pure. And besides that, Irene has this shitfuckn habit of saying what I show her is good even when it ain’t that good.”
“How do you think it is yourself?”
“If I really knew I wouldn’t ask you, I honest-to-God wouldn’t. When I look at it now the words look unfriendly to me. Could you read it today, Lesser, and then we can rap it over for about a half hour?”
Lesser said he thought most every good book was written in uncertainty.
“On that—up to where the book gets real terrible to write. That’s where I have to get off that trolley car.”
Lesser, still in conflict, said he would read the chapter after he had finished his day’s work and would then go down to talk to Bill.
“It will be a real relief to me to get this part finished off,” Bill said. “I been a hermit with lead balls for more than a month and looking to pass some time with my chick. Man, she pestifies me but what a sweet lay.”
Lesser did not testify.
“She’s a dissatisfied chick both with herself and you if you let her, and nothing much you tell her sets her right in her self-confidence so she stops analyzing and complaining about herself, excepting what you put to her in the sack.”
“Do you love her?”
“Man, that’s my business.”
Lesser asked no more.
“If I get to see her now depends on this chapter that you got in your hand. If you say I have it right or I’m halfways home, which I think I am, I’ll goof off this weekend in her pad. But if you think it’s—uh—it needs more work, and I agree with you on that, then I will lay in in my office and bang on it some more. Well, read it anyway and let me know.”
Lesser poured himself half a water glassful of whiskey and gloomily began reading Willie’s work.
Since the first chapter was good there was no reason why this shouldn’t be, but Lesser resisted reading it. He considered hurrying downstairs and returning it to Bill, asking out for one reason or another, because in truth he wondered if he could judge it objectively. If I say it’s good, off he trots to Irene’s. Which wouldn’t in itself be bad, because she would then and there have to face up to telling him what she had been unable to say before. Either she told him or they were all involved in a tougher situation than Lesser had allowed himself to imagine.
With increasing uneasiness he read the forty pages, plowing through every interlinear and marginal revision; then in a wet sweat rereading every page. In the end he groaned noiselessly and afterwards was unhappy. Though the opening pages were harshly effective, the chapter as a whole, although worked and reworked, was an involuntary graveyard.
It began with Herbert’s mother attempting one night to stab the boy with a bread knife. He was awakened by her smell. When he escaped down the booming steps she stumbled into the toilet and swallowed a mouthful of lye before throwing herself out of the bedroom window, screaming in pain, rage, futility.—So the chapter opened strongly with four horrifying pages of human misery, but the remaining thirty-six, to put straight the effect of her life and death in her son’s mind, went badly off. Bill took on a sort of stream-of-consciousness and heavily overworked association. He stuffed the pipes. His rhetoric, though dealing with a boy’s self-hatred and his blazing fantasies of sex and violence, became florid, false, contradicting the simplicity and tensile spareness of his sensibility. Here and there appeared insights, islands of reflection, that were original, authentic, moving, but even these he had rewritten so often that the language became a compound of ashes and glue. Part of Bill’s trouble was that he was trying to foreshadow a revolutionary mentality, and it didn’t always fit. Partly he was attempting in his fiction to shed an incubus—his former life. This was not necessarily bad in itself but could be bad if he insisted, and he was insisting. As a result nobody in this long section came halfway to life. At best the boy was a zombie, incapable, except fitfully, of a recognizable human emotion. His remembered mother, of past and future presence, floated around enclosed in a shallow grave with a breath-stained green glass lid. Death had leaked beyond its domain.
My God, if I say that he’ll hate my guts. Why do I keep getting myself into this kind of mess with him? Who’s hiring Willie Spearmint to be my dybbuk?
Lesser considered lying. After inventing and discarding several strategies, then deciding to rely on what he had had to drink and another for the road to help him improvise a better one, he ran in his stocking feet down the stairs to Bill’s flat to tell him what he truly thought about the chapter before his courage gave out.
He needn’t be false or evasive. They had agreed that if Bill should ask him to read any more of his work, Lesser would limit himself to matters of form and would try to suggest better ways of doing what had to be done better. And Bill, on his part, had promised to listen patiently.
He did. Lesser did: fine opening even if not entirely satisfactory chapter. More ambitious than the first, good in itself but no need of this stream-of-consciousness bit—at least not so much of it: it poured forth like lava, heavied up, gave a rock-like quality to the subjective section; which could perhaps be done better in twenty pages, possibly fewer. Lighten, ease up, cut, rework; do this and this, try this, drop maybe this and that, and you may have it more effectively in the next draft. Lesser talked coolly at first, though inwardly questioning his credentials—what made him such an authority on the art of fiction—fifteen years of writing, adding up to one good book, one bad, one unfinished? And in the last analysis could a writer tell another how to write his book? Theoretically possible, but in effect useful? useless? doubtful?—who really knows? Yet, having gone this far, he droned on, both of them sitting crosslegged on the floor, Lesser holding his stocking feet as he talked, his body swaying back and forth in pure sincerity, Bill listening patiently, studying him, nodding gravely, sagely, his swollen eyes, despite a will to objectivity, becoming pinkly glazed, his body tightening; Lesser noting this as he talked on, worrying secretly, growing dry-mouthed as he finished up with a nervous smile. He felt then as though he had just assisted in the act of tossing himself off a cliff. One thing he knew for sure: he had made a serious mistake. I should never have got into giving literary advice to the man. I should have told him about Irene and me. That’s what it’s all about. What a jackass I am.
Then, as though backtracking, he said, “Bill, I truly don’t think I ought to fool around any more with your book. At this stage whatever you think you’re doing right you ought to go on doing. As for what you doubt, maybe you ought to wait till you have a complete first draft before you decide what to change. Once you know everybody’s past you’ll know how to handle their future.”
Bill was still nodding, his eyes shut. He opened them to say, still quietly, “I know every bit of their fuckn future. What I still like to know, outside of what you have said on the stream-of-consciousness, which I don’t have to use your way but have to use my way, is have I got the boy and his mama right as far as I have gone? Are they for real, man? Don’t shit me on that.”
“Up as far as the mother’s death,” Lesser said, “but not beyond that, in his consciousness.”
Rising with a weird cry, Bill flung the chapter at the wall. It hit with a crack, the yellow pages flying over the floor.
“Lesser, you tryin to fuck up my mind and confuse me. I read all about that formalism jazz in the library and it’s bullshit. You tryin to kill off my natural writin by pretendin you are interested in the fuckn form of it though the truth of it is you afraid of what I am goin to write in my book, which is that the blacks have to murder you white MF’s for cripplin our lives.” He t
hen cried out, “Oh, what a hypocrite shitass I am to ask a Jew ofay for advice how to express my soul work. Just in readin it you spoil what it says. I ought to be hung on a hook till some kind brother cuts off my white balls.”
Lesser, having witnessed this or something similar before, hurried from the room.
Ten minutes later he pulled a hamburger in a frying pan off the flame and shut the gas. Lacing on his shoes he trotted down the stairs back to Bill’s.
The black was sitting naked at his table, his head bent over his manuscript. He had on his glasses yet read as though blind. His bulky body, reflecting the ceiling light, looked like a monument cut out of rock.
Lesser, in astonishment, asked himself: self-mortification or cooling off the heated self? Maybe he compares his flesh to his black creation on paper? Or is he mysteriously asserting the power of his blackness?
“Bill,” he said with emotion, “there’s more to it than I told you.”
“I’m quittin my writin,” the black said, looking up gently. “It’s no fault of you, Lesser, so don’t worry yourself about it. I have decided it’s no gig for a man and rots your body bones. It eats my heart. I know what I got to do so why don’t I do it? I got to move my broke ass to get to the true action. I got to help my sufferin black brothers.”
“Art is action, don’t give it up, Bill.”
“Action is my action.”
“Forget what I said and write the way you have to.”
“I got to move on.”
Bill glanced at the door, then at a window, as though trying to determine his future direction.
“What more have you got to say that you didn’t tell me?”
“This,” said Lesser, as though he had been everywhere and there was only one place left to go. “Irene and I are in love and we’re talking about getting married when I’ve got my book done. We thought you wouldn’t care one way or the other because you had more or less broken off with her. You said so to both of us. I wish I’d told you this before.”
Bill, as he reflected, began to believe. A sad and terrifying groan, a sustained tormented lament as though erupting from a crack in the earth, rose from his bowels.
“She’s my true bitch. I taught her all she knows. She couldn’t even fuck before I taught her.”
He rose and hit his head against the wall until his broken glasses fell to the floor. His head bounced with crack and thud until the pictures on the wall were bloodied. Lesser, in anguished horror, grabbed Bill’s arms to make him stop. The black twisted out of his grasp, caught him in a headlock and with a grunt slammed his head into the wall. Lesser went down on his knees, clutching his head in blinding pain. Blood flowed into his eyes. Bill, grabbing him under the arms, lifted him, and dragged him to the window.
Lesser, coming to, grasped both sides of the window frame, pushing back with terrified force, as the black, his veins bulging, shoved forward with savage strength. The window broke and a jagged section of glass, after a day or a week, crashed on the cement of the alley below. Lesser saw himself hurtling down, his brains dashed all over. What a sorry fate for a writer. What a mad sorry fate for his book. In the sky above the desolate rooftops the moon poured a shroud of light into the oppressive clouds surrounding it. Below, a distant red light gleamed in the thick dark. The moon slowly turned black. All the night of the universe concentrated itself into a painful cube in Lesser’s head.
Crying out, he jammed his heel down on Willie’s bare foot. The black gasped, momentarily loosening his grip. Lesser twisted out of his sweaty armlock and they grappled, wrestled around the room, overturning the table, the typewriter crashing to the floor. The lamp fell, light rising eerily from below. They circled each other like lit shadows. Willie’s eyes blazed, his breath rang like struck metal. They grunted as they fought, uttering animal noises, Willie limping, Lesser struggling to maneuver himself to the door. They caught each other again, the black pulling, Lesser shoving him off. They broke, grabbed, and were once more locked together, head to bloodied head.
“You trick me, Jewprick, got me writin so deep you stole my bitch away.”
“Let’s stop and talk or we’re dead men.”
“What’s wrong is I forgot to go on hatin you, whiteshit. Now I hate you till your death.”
Neither let go, Lesser trying to force Willie away from the window, as the black, with his tense bulk, legs set back to avoid Lesser’s shoe, again inched him towards the broken glass.
The door shot open: Levenspiel staring in gross disbelief.
He waved both arms. “You dirty sons of bitches, I’ll get a court order.”
They jumped apart. Willie, scooping up some clothes, ducked around the overturned table and behind the astonished landlord vanished from the room.
Lesser sat on the floor wiping his face with his shirttail, then lay on his back, his chest heaving, breathing through his mouth.
Levenspiel, holding his hairy hand to his heart, looked down at Lesser’s blood-smeared face and spoke to him as to a sick relative. “My God, Lesser, look what you have done to yourself. You’re your worst enemy, bringing a naked nigger into this house. If you don’t take my advice and move out you’ll wake up one morning playing a banjo in your grave.”
Lesser twice telephoned Irene as he washed. No one answered. He combed his hair over the wound on his head, changed his bloodstained shirt and hurried in a cab to her house.
When he arrived Willie had been and was gone. She was still agonized. He had come without shoes, had pulled a pair of sneakers out of one of the cartons Irene had packed, laced them on, washed, soaped his bloody bulging forehead. They had talked bitterly. He was bruised, breathless, enraged, his eyes violent. He had left her with a black eye and swollen mouth. She wept profusely, resentfully when Lesser appeared. Irene went into the bathroom to cry, flushed the bowl and came out crying. She was barefoot, had on a black brassière and half-slip, her hair piled on her head, clasped in a wooden barrette. Her mouth was crooked, her left eye black, both eyes wet and reddened from crying. Her earrings clinked crazily as she moved.
“I begged you to let me tell him,” she sobbed angrily. “Why the hell didn’t you at least say you were going to?”
“There was no chance, it came up suddenly.”
“Shit, there was no chance. It’s your goddamn pride. You had to be the one to tell him. It’s your profession to tell everybody everything. You couldn’t wait.”
“I waited,” said Lesser. “I wait. I waited too damn long for you to tell him. You’re crazy if you think he was about to leave you. It would have gone on like this for years. I had to do something.”
“I know Willie. I know he wasn’t happy with me any more. I know him.”
“Who are you concerned about, him or me?”
“I told you I love you. I’m concerned about Willie.”
“He tried to shove me out of his fucking window.”
She wrung her hands.
“Levenspiel broke it up.”
They held each other.
Lesser said he had read Willie’s chapter and it wasn’t working out. “I told him that and yet I felt I hadn’t told him anything. I had to go down and say how else I was involved in his life. That’s when he flipped. I’m sorry he hit you.”
“He called me filthy names,” Irene said. “He said he couldn’t stand the sight of me. That I had hurt his blackness. He belted me in the eye and left. Then he came back for his cartons, slapped me across the mouth and left again. I locked myself in the bathroom. This is the third black eye he’s given me.”
Crying again, Irene went into the toilet and the bowl flushed.
“Willie doesn’t like things taken out of his hands, especially by whites. He cursed you and said we had betrayed and degraded him. I told him that what had happened between him and me wasn’t all my fault. Then he said he was giving up his writing. I felt terrible. That was when he hit me. This all turned out exactly the opposite of what I was hoping. I hoped he would still feel affection for
me when we broke up. I wanted him to remember whatever happy times we’d had, not to leave hating me.”
“Don’t cry,” said Lesser.
“I wish you had let me tell him.”
“I wish you had.”
“Are you sure you’re right about his chapter? Is it that bad?”
“If I’m not I’m wrong about a lot of other things. It’s a first draft, so what if he has to make changes?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do if he gives up writing. It makes me sick to think of it.”
Lesser didn’t know either.
“I just can’t believe it,” Irene said. “It isn’t natural. The thought must frighten him. I’m frightened and I’m also frightened for you.”
“Why for me?”
“I wouldn’t want you to be hurt by anyone, Harry.”
“Nobody’ll hurt me.” He hoped nobody would.
“Couldn’t you stay with me for a while?—I mean live here?”
“I have my work to get on with. All my things, books, notes, manuscripts are at home. I’m close to the end of the book.”
“Harry,” Irene said insistently, “Harry, they could easily get at you in that creepy empty tenement. Willie’s friends are very loyal to him. They could hide in the hall or on the stairs and wait until you came out. They couldn’t do that here. The elevator man watches. If he saw any strangers hanging around he’d call the cops.”
“Anybody who’s out to get me can get me, elevator man or no elevator man,” Lesser said gloomily. “They could jump me in the street at night. They could drop a brick on my head from the next-door roof—”
“All right, stop. Then how are you going to live in the same building with Willie?”
The Tenants Page 12