“I don’t think he’ll stay there now that the landlord has found his place again. But if he does and he thinks things over he’ll know I felt good will to him. If we meet I hope we can get to talking like civilized beings. If we can’t we’re in trouble.”
“Harry,” said Irene, “let’s get married and move either to a different neighborhood or some other city.”
“That’s what we’ll do,” said Lesser. “As soon as the book is out of the way.”
Irene was crying again.
Suppose he were to marry her and leave the house, abandoning it to Willie? But if he moved out Willie would have little use of it. Once Lesser had gone the wreckers would descend like vultures on a corpse.
Lesser hopped off the Third Avenue bus and hurried along Thirty-first, hugging the curb so he could watch the roofs ahead and duck if a hunk of iron came flying at him.
At the door he hesitated, momentarily afraid to go up the badly lit stairs. A million stairs, five hundred dreary floors, Lesser living at the top. He had visions of a pack of rats, or wild dogs; or a horde of blacks descending as he tries to go up. His head is riddled with bullets; his brains are eaten by carnivorous birds. There are other fearful thoughts. Enough or I’ll soon be afraid to breathe. He went up two steps at a time. Lesser pushed open the fire door on the fourth floor, listened intently, holding his breath. He heard waves softly hitting the beaches, shut the door with a relieved laugh and trotted quickly up to his floor.
At his door the wound on his head pained as though struck a hammer blow. He felt death had seized him by the hair. I can’t believe it, I have nothing worth stealing. But his snap lock lay on the floor sawed in two. The door had been jimmied open. Crying out angrily, flailing both arms against evil, Lesser stepped into his flat and switched on the light. With a groan of lamentation he ran from room to room, searched his study closet blindly, stumbled into the living room and frantically hunted through masses of old manuscript pages, poured over piles of torn books and broken records. In the bathroom, after looking into the tub and letting out a prolonged tormented sad cry, the writer, on the edge of insane, fainted.
Here’s this tiny accursed island.
The war canoe touches the wet shore and the three missionaries, tucking in striped paddles and holding up the skirts of their robes, hop onto the sand and beach the long bark.
The drowsy air is stirred by whispering voices, insects buzzing, muted strings, a flute in the lonely forest, woman singing or sobbing somewhere.
The Headman Minister, in voluminous black robe with leopard epaulets and hood, and the two missionaries in white robes, wearing black masks, wander from room to room of the long hut, uncovering hidden stores. They find the wrecked man’s everything: Dutch cheese, dried meat, rice, nails, carpenter’s saw, jug of rum, cornbread, compasses, ink and paper.
Sitting in a triangular circle they feast on his dried goat’s flesh and drink his spirits. Though not present he knows what’s going on. It’s that kind of day.
The Headman Minister shatters the empty crock on the ground and rises to his feet.
Bout time we start our mission. Go on and hammer up those records, Sam.
Right on, but is it civilized to break all that music?
Black or white civilized? What orientation do you have reference to?
Just plain human?
He fucked your black woman right in front of your human eye, didn’t he? Was that real nice of him to do that crime?
Sam smashes up the records with a rusty heavy hammer.
Except save that Bessie Smith, a Leadbelly he has, and that old Charlie Parker I lent him.
Right on, says the Headman. Now what about you pullin down those bamboo shelves of his books, Willie? And then we will gut the pages out of them.
Willie doesn’t move.
The Headman Himself, grabbing the bamboo poles, wrenches down five cracking shelves of water-stained, leather-bound volumes saved from the sea. The books fall with a crash. He kicks them with his leather boots as the printed pages fly all over the hut.
He pulls open the stuck cabinet door. A chestful of yellowed manuscripts rests on folded canvas, formerly sails.
I brought some sulfur matches. Make a warm fire.
He toasts both gloved hands.
Warm day anyway, Sam says, sweating.
Those are old books of his he wrote long ago, says Willie. Both been published.
Then it makes no nevermind if we burn them.
The Headman drags out the chest of manuscripts, lifts the box onto his bent knee, turns it upside down and pours out the papers, shaking out the bottom pages, over the torn broken books.
Make a mighty warm fire.
Willie mops his dry brow. Hot day outside.
Where’s this one he’s writin now?
Willie points with pale finger.
The Headman scoops up the pile of closely written vellum manuscript pages from the three-board desk in the lattice-roofed outer room. He searches through drawers and cabinets until he finds the copy of it too, lettered out neatly on yellow foolscap.
You ought to burn up both of these yourself, Willie, on account of this cat stole your white bitch and pissed up your black book. Deprived you of your normal sex life and lifelong occupation according to the choice you made. Must feel like you been castrated, don’t it? You got to take an eye for a ball it says in the Good Book.
Willie privately burns the vellum manuscript and its foolscap copy in a barrel in the outhouse, his eyes tearing from the thick smoke—some heartburn. The hot ashes stink of human flesh.
He dips his fingers into the cinders and smears a charcoal message on the wall.
REVOLUTION IS THE REAL ART. NONE OF THAT FORM SHIT. I AM THE RIGHT FORM.
He signs it NEVER YOUR FRIEND. And pukes in the smoking ashes.
After a night of grief echoing through the years of his life, Lesser searched Willie’s office for his manuscript, though that wouldn’t be the same thing, not a true revenge, because he had abandoned his novel; but the briefcase with the manuscript in it, or any part of the manuscript, was not there. Neither was the typewriter. The writer ran to a hardware store on Third Avenue and bought a small ax. In rage and mourning he hacked up the table and chair he had bought for the black. With brutal force he chopped at his tasseled lamp as it bled sparks, and slashed his stinking mattress to shreds. Lesser spent hours hunting from floor to floor, flat to flat, cellar to roof, for Willie Spearmint, who was nowhere around. The assassin had fled.
Lesser wandered the rainy streets, adrift without his book to write. Harry Lesser’s lost labor, lost time, aching void. Nights he lay nauseated in piss-smelling hallways, sick, grieving, the self to whom such things happen a running sore. Endlessly he cursed himself for having brought home the carbon of the final draft of the book. Each week, for years, he had placed a copy of the week’s work in a safety-deposit box in a bank on Second Avenue. The box also contained a copy of the first draft of the novel Lesser had been rewriting with such unutterably high expectations. Nearing the end of his last draft he had removed the carbon of it from the box to have on hand when he wrote the last word and was ready to note final corrections on both copies, one for the publishers, one for himself. Now they were ashes. He saw himself buried in ashes.
Mourning died slowly. It never fully dies for something truly loved. He read an ink-stained wet letter he found in a puddle. In it a man wept for love of a woman who had died. How can Lesser go on after the loss of his manuscript? It isn’t all, he tells himself, but doesn’t believe it. It isn’t all, it isn’t all. The book is not the writer, the writer writes the book. It is only a book, it is not my life. I will rewrite it, I am the writer. As spring flared with leaves and flowers, Lesser having cleaned up his room and restored whatever he could, began, against the will, to rewrite once again, working from a photocopy of his first draft, typing two carbons of each new page, both of which he deposited daily in the bank box. This slowed him but after a while he didn’t mi
nd. What had happened to him had happened to others. Carlyle had had to rewrite his whole French Revolution, the manuscript accidentally burned in J. S. Mill’s fireplace. T. E. Lawrence rewrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom after leaving his manuscript on a train. Lesser pictures him running after the train. It had happened countless times before. Harry figured this time it would take less than a year to rewrite the book—because he still remembered much he had reworked. He wrote down major changes to remember. He also had a thick ledger of notes for each chapter the destroyer had missed. Willie, if he could do nothing else, or more, had long ago disappeared. His empty flat resounded silence. Alas that he had ever come to this house. Irene, Lesser rarely saw just now; she said she understood. Tears came to her eyes; she had turned her back and sobbed, her hair grown black six inches down her head, the blond strands fading. Levenspiel, despite his threats, did not bother Lesser much. He had his troubles; for one, his crazy mother had cancer and was dying. He had sent the writer a special-delivery letter offering him $7,000, four thousand of it supplied by the wreckers, impatient to be at work dismembering the building. The letter had read in part, “Considering the circumstances I could get a court order to have you legally ejected for immorality and trying to burn my house, but why don’t you accept my sincere offer instead and leave quietly? Be a man.” Lesser carefully considered the offer before ripping it up. He listed the advantages and the disadvantages on a sheet of paper and tore that up too. True, there would be little to eat in the course of a year but he ate little anyway.
He sits at his desk in his daylit spacious study, more spacious than ever, typing as fast as he can. He hopes this time to do a better job than he had done in the previous draft Willie Spearmint had so heartlessly burned.
LESSER WRITES.
The skinny ten-floor house next door is being gutted, torn down floor by floor. The wreckage chutes into the green truck-size container in the street. The huge iron ball the crane heaves at the collapsing walls, and the noise of streams of falling bricks and broken wooden beams deafen the writer. Though he keeps his windows tightly shut his flat is foul with plaster dust; he sneezes in clusters all day. Sometimes his floor trembles, seems to move; he envisions the building cracking apart, collapsing in a dusty roar. Lesser and his unfinished book go shrieking into the exploding debris. He wouldn’t put it past Levenspiel to blow up the joint with a long stick of dynamite and blame it on the times.
Lesser writes extra hours at night. He sleeps poorly, one eye on tomorrow morning when it’s time to write. His heavy heartbeat shakes the bed. He dreams of drowning. When he can’t sleep he gets up, snaps on his desk lamp and writes.
Autumn is dark, rainy, chilly. It scuds towards an early winter. His electric heater has pooped out and is being repaired. He writes in his overcoat, woolen scarf, cap. He warms his fingers inside the coat, under his arms, then goes on writing. Levenspiel provides a mockery of heat. Lesser complains to the housing authorities but the landlord resists cleverly: “The furnace is age fifty-one. What kind of performance does he expect out of this old wreck? I had it repaired two hundred times. Should I maybe install a brand new one for one lousy uncooperative tenant?”
“Let him move out and collect $9,000 cash.”
The bribe has increased but this is where Lesser’s book was conceived more than a decade ago, died a premature (temporary) death, and seeks rebirth. Lesser is a man of habit, order, steady disciplined work. Habit and order fill the pages one by one. Inspiration is habit, order; ideas growing, formulated, formed. He is determined to finish his book where it was begun, created its history, still lives.
A wonderful thing about writing is that you can revise, change images, ideas, write the same book better than before. Some of it already reads better than before, though not all; and Lesser is worried about the very end. He feels he hasn’t conceived it as it should be. But he will, he will. There’s no reason I shouldn’t except that some endings are more elusive than others. As though, with them, you are secretly dealing with death although your purpose is to comprehend life, living. Some endings demand you trick the Sphinx.
Maybe I ought to write the end now and carry on up from where I left off, rise to the mountain from the plain? I might then feel secure. If I got the ending down right, as it must be, I could collect Levenspiel’s bribe, move off this brick glacier and write the rest in comfort, maybe at Irene’s?
Lesser has his doubts.
Sometimes the writing goes really badly. It is painful when images meant to marry repel each other, when reflections, ideas, won’t coalesce. When he forgets what he meant to write and hasn’t written. When he forgets words or words forget him. He types wither for either all the time, Lesser sometimes feels despair’s shovel digging. He writes against cliffs of resistance. Fear, they say, of completing the book? Once it’s done what’s there to finish? Fear of the ultimate confession? Why? if I can start another book after this. Confess once more. What’s the distant dark mountain in my mind when I write? It won’t fade from inscape, sink, evanesce; or volatilize into light. It won’t become diaphanous, radiance, fire, Moses himself climbing down the burning rock, Ten lit Commandments tucked under his arm. The writer wants his pen to turn stone into sunlight, language into fire. It’s an extraordinary thing to want by a man his size and shape, given all he hasn’t got. Lesser lives on his nerve.
Irene said she understood, really.
She had at first been dreadfully upset, hurt at the way things were going. She had hoped her life would go more evenly, predictably, than before. “Though what Willie did to you was an outside act and I oughtn’t to blame myself for it, I suppose. I mean blaming myself for not telling him we were thinking of getting married before you did. But I do feel guilty at what happened to your book. I feel awful.” She was for a while moody, depressed, waked at four in the morning and for hours lay awake contemplating her life, before she fell asleep and slept late. She said she understood only too well how Harry had felt at the destruction of his manuscript, and why he was now so driven in working out this new draft of his book. She had known beforehand his nature; Willie had told her he was married to his book. She said she loved him and would try to wait with patience.
Lesser was grateful to her. Since he worked nights now he saw her weekends only. Saturday afternoon he would pack his shaving kit and a change of underwear, and move in with Irene until Sunday night. After supper Sunday he walked crosstown to Third Avenue and took the bus back to his street. As a rule she did not complain when he left. It was like life with Willie recently, she said with an ironic laugh. But one Sunday when he was tossing his shaving things into his kit, Irene said in sudden irritation, “Really, Harry, all you do is sit on your ass writing. When you come here you sit on your ass reading.”
“Not when we’re in bed.”
“That’s the order of things. You write and read and you leave time to get laid, then you head back home. What sort of life is that for me? Why don’t you fuck your book and save time all around?”
“The only way to get a book done is to stay with it. Why I read your detective stories is to turn off my writing thoughts, though just holding a book in my hand is enough to turn them back on. It’s no fault of intention.”
“I’m not saying the way you are is a fault. In fact I’m not sure what I’m saying, I feel that mixed up.” She sighed, stroking his face with the back of her hand, “I understand, Harry, honestly. I’m sorry I’m impatient.”
They embraced tightly. He said he would call tomorrow. She nodded, her eyes dry.
On the bus it seemed to Lesser that his book was a smaller thing in his mind than when he had thought of it last. But when he arrived home and flipped through the good pages he had written last week, it regained its size and promise.
Lesser sat at his desk and wrote Irene a love letter. Remembering the time of his first love for her, he tried to say honestly that although his feeling now was less intense—life flows, changes, the regularity of sex reducing desire, his book et
ernally in mind—in truth he loved her and wanted her love. After he posted this letter he remembered he had written much the same one last week.
Irene looked lovelier than ever. She wore tight brown boots with gold buckled straps around the calves. Or red suede boots laced with black laces; and moved with pigeon-toed grace. She wore short thick expensive skirts, embroidered blouses, and hats that looked like exotic woolen flowers. She had snipped off five inches of her blondest hair; it hung now to just below the shoulders. Her eyebrows were more thinly plucked, her pink nails long and smooth, with elongated crescents. She wore complex structures of dangling earrings she liked to look at in the mirror. She had given up her gardenia scent, then tried one new kind after another. Lesser loved to watch her dress. She dressed slowly, a cigarette held loosely in her mouth as she selected things to wear. She concentrated on dressing as she dressed. He wondered if Willie, passing her on the street, would recognize her at first glance.
Irene asked Lesser how long it would take him to finish finally and he said six months though he thought closer to ten. He didn’t tell her he sometimes feared the book would fall apart before the end, a fear he hadn’t had with either of his other novels. Irene said in that case she might stay on with her Off-Broadway group if they did another play, she wasn’t sure. She also thought she would go on with her analysis. She had been about to terminate it but since their plans were unsettled she thought she might continue for another six months, though she felt she knew most of the important things about herself. “For one, I’m not career-oriented; I’d rather be married and have a family. Does that disappoint you in me, considering how many women are going the opposite way nowadays?”
Lesser said it didn’t.
“I figure one fucking creative person in the family is enough,” Irene said. She laughed self-mockingly. “What a bourgeois shit I’ve become.”
The Tenants Page 13