He washed his face in cold water, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, took four deep breaths and dialed, holding back for a moment the last digit. At first he thought, with a little lift in his spirits, that it was the girl from the bar. Maybe, after comparing him to her beau, she had decided to call off the engagement. But then, he realized how absurd that was since the girl in the bar had nothing to do with his story. He let the call go through and on the second ring a woman answered. “I’ve been calling for a week,” she said. “Don’t you have a service?”
“I let it go,” he said. “Looking for a better one.”
“Well, I gave up and wrote you.”
“Sorry for the trouble,” he said and then in a rush and hating himself for the rush, asked, “Are you an editor at Partisan Review?”
“Something like that,” she said. Then cautiously added, “We can meet if you like.” He wanted to ask if she could tell him right now, over the phone, tell him what had happened to his story but he held back, not wanting to seem anxious and unsophisticated.
“Sure,” he said, adding as casually as he could, “When?”
“How’s tonight? I live just across town. You name the place.”
“You don’t mind coming out in all this snow?” he said, immediately regretting he had asked. What kind of man is afraid of the snow? “I mean, I could come to you if that’s easier.”
“I’ll just grab a cab. How’s eight?”
He wondered if she had dinner in mind. He would have to offer to pay for it, and he began calculating his finances. But to his relief, she said, “I’ll already have had dinner.”
“Okay, then, how’s the De Robertis’ Pastry Shop, the café on First, between Tenth and Eleventh, next to Lanza’s?”
“Is that the café with the tile walls that looks like a bathroom?”
He didn’t like his café being spoken of that way. “I guess some may see it like that.”
They fixed the time at 8:30. Just as he was about to ask whether they were going to publish the story in another issue, the line went dead. There were still some hours to go before meeting her and he had time to write or to review the morning’s work. The portable Olivetti, shiny red, hopeful, was quietly where he had left it, waiting patiently on the kitchen table; the two pages he had written beside it, like accomplices. He read over the pages. They were absurd, stupid, illiterate, worthless—and worse, boring. He was stupid and boring, a failure. The Welfare building sailed at him like an ocean liner in the night. “Life is real, life is earnest,” he sang, as the ship loomed larger.
He did not want to meet her hungry and he did not want to spend money for another sandwich at Stanley’s. He scavenged the fridge. The crystal bowl heaped with Russian caviar was not there so he settled for the cottage cheese, large curd, greening at the top, which he spooned directly from the container. Then he considered taking a nap so he would be refreshed and alert and not stupid or dull but bright when he met her. He practiced a smile but it was strained and pathetic. He tried napping, leaving on the kitchen light so he would not wake in the lonely darkness. The Welfare building pressed full steam toward him but he blinked it away and tried to clear his mind of all troubling thoughts but without much success. So he rose with the idea of making himself presentable. He brushed his teeth and gave himself a sponge bath; he cleaned his fingernails and brushed his teeth again. He had reached the limit of his toilette and returned to his desk; maybe his pages would brighten at the cleaned-up sight of him; maybe his Olivetti would regard him more favorably and let him turn out some astonishing gems.
By the time he arrived at the café, he had to shake off the heavy snow twice from his umbrella. His shoes were soaked. He had not changed them for fear of getting his second pair drowned as well and thus having to spend the next day at work in wet shoes.
She was easy to spot, sitting in a booth with a pot of tea and a half-eaten baba au rhum. Her black hair was pulled tight in a ponytail; gold hoops dangled from her earlobes; kohl rimmed her eyes; her yellow sweater was the color of straw in the rain. What was she, twenty? She was more Café Figaro on Bleecker with its Parisian hauteur than someone who usually came into his neighborhood. He was sure he had spotted her at the White Horse, men hoping to catch her eye circling her table, where she sat in among other men chattering for her attention. She had never once looked up at him, even when he was ostentatiously clutching Under the Volcano in his hand.
She smiled in an anxious way that relaxed him and he took his seat and said, “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.” He was ten minutes early, but he had no better introductory words. He felt foolish for having said them.
“I liked your story,” she said, as if she too had mulled over her first words to him and now had let them burst.
“I’m very pleased,” he said. Pleased seemed tempered and not overanxious, showing a proper balance of self-esteem and of professional dignity. But then he overrode his self-control and said, “Are they still going to publish it?”
She forced a little laugh. “I doubt it.”
This was bad news, indeed. But before he could ask the cause of this doubt, she said: “He hates me now.” She made a high-pitched sound like a young mouse broken in a trap.
“I read him in college. We all did. I never thought I’d become his assistant! Anyway, he has a new assistant now,” she said, her eyes glistening.
Johnny, the café owner, brought over the cappuccino, with a glass of water and a cloth napkin. He looked at the young woman and smiled and turning to him said, “Hai fatto bene.”
“You know, it’s just one of those crazy things that happens. Maybe not so crazy when people work so closely all the time,” she added, as if talking to herself.
He wanted to ask, “Please, what thing that happens?” But he was afraid that pressing her would only make him seem unworldly. Instead, he said: “Yes, crazy things do happen,” thinking he would offer, as a current example, the story of the shot man who said he hadn’t finished his homework.
The café was foggy, steaming up like the baths on St. Mark’s he went to once and hated, all that wet heat boiling his blood—and the absurd thing was that he had to pay for it, too. He could leave now, as he had then, with the steam stripping the skin from his bones. But he was listening to her story and was not ready to run. She looked down. “I suppose you can fill in the rest,” she said. And then with a little pinched laugh, added, “After all, you’re the writer.” He waited for her to add, “and as yet unpublished.” But he realized it would have been his addition and not hers and that he was bringing to the table the same feeling of defeat as when he went to the White Horse, where the greetings had gone stale.
“Oh! I don’t know,” he said, with some affected casualness, “I’m not good at realism or office fiction.” He was thinking of a popular novel some years back, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which he had not read but understood had to do with office politics and unhappy commuters with sour marriages and lots of scotch and martinis before dinner. He knew nothing of that world, making him wonder in what America he lived and if he was an American writer or any kind of writer at all?
She gave him a studied look and in a brisk, businesslike tone said, “Of course, I know that. That’s what I like most about your story. I loved that part where a dying blue lion comes into the young blind woman’s hut and asks for a bowl of water and how she nurses him to health.”
“That sounds a bit corny,” he said. “Maybe I should be embarrassed instead of flattered that you remembered it.”
He himself had forgotten the passage as well as most of the story. It had seemed so long ago and somewhat like a friend who, for no reason that he knew, had turned on him.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s an archetype, all archetypes seem corny.”
“So,” he asked, as if he had not already been told, as if, finally, to invite the coup de grâce, “why won’t he publish it?” The steam was clouding him and the wall’s white tiles were oozing little pe
arls of hot water and bitter coffee.
“Look,” she said, with an edge in her voice, “I just came to tell you that I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
“Excuse me,” he said, “I’m a bit slow, more than usual tonight—the steam’s getting to me.” He wished he could close his eyes and find himself home and, once there, obliterate all memory of the sent story or of having received the acceptance letter that was to have changed his life. The espresso machine was screaming.
She looked about the room and then back at him and smiled. “And frankly, I was curious to know what you were like.”
“I hope I met your expectations,” he said. That was so lame. He started to revise but she did not give him time.
“My boyfriend also thinks you’re a good writer. And he studied with Harry Levin at Harvard.”
“Harry Levin’s The Power of Blackness is a great book.” He wanted her to know he knew.
She offered to pay her share of the bill—and a little extra because she had had those two babas au rhum—but he said, in what he thought was a worldly fashion, “Not at all, you are my guest.”
He walked her to Ninth and First Avenue and waved for a cab. “Thanks,” she said, “I don’t believe in cabs, do you? They’re so proletarian.” They stood on the corner shivering and waited until the bus skidded to the stop; snow blanketed the roof and the wipers swiped the windshield with maniac fury. He wanted to kiss her on both cheeks, as he had seen it done in French films, but thought it was too familiar too soon. In any case, the hood of her slicker covered much of her face. She smiled at him very pleasantly, he thought. On the second step of the nearly empty bus, she turned and said, “I don’t have a boyfriend.” He waited until he saw her take her seat. He waved as the bus moved into the traffic, but she was facing away and did not see him.
He thought of returning to the café, but he was sick of coffee and the screaming white tiles, or of going back to Stanley’s bar for a beer, but was afraid he would run into the girl he had liked—still liked—and she would ask what he had thought of her fiancé and he would have to be brave and swallow it and say how solid he seemed and how he was happy for her if she was happy.
He went home and climbed the stairs. A dog barked at him behind a door on the second floor—Camus, The Stranger, the mistreated, beaten dog; the Russian woman on the third floor was boiling cabbage and the hall smelled of black winter and great sweeps of bitter snow, a branchless tree here and there dotting the white expanse—Mother Russia, Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, the bloody ax, a penniless student. On the fourth floor, not a peep. Then suddenly, a groan followed by a cry like a man hit with a shovel: “Welt welt, kiss mein tuchas.”
On the fifth floor, he thought about the groan and the cry on the fourth. He had seen the tattooed numbers on the old man’s wrist and knew what had given them birth—hills of eyeglasses, mounds of gold teeth, black black smoke rising from an exhausted chimney. When he finally reached the sixth and last floor, he stopped at his door, key in hand, thinking to turn and leave the building again for a fresh life in the blizzard. But he was already shrouded in snow and was chilled and wanted to take off his clothes and lie in bed and be whoever he was. There was a song coming from the adjacent apartment: Edith Piaf, who regretted nothing.
His playboy neighbor had returned from Ibiza with a sackful of 45s and a deep suntan. He always had visitors, beautiful girls from Spain and Paris and London, who came to crash and who sometimes stayed for a week or two. One had knocked at his door at two in the morning and asked if he had any coke. He apologized, he did not drink soda; she made a face and said, “Where’re you from?” Another banged at his door at five in the morning blind drunk; she had mistaken his apartment for the playboy’s. “You have the wrong door,” he said, his sleep shattered. “Who cares,” she said, staggering into his room.
He was down to his shorts and T-shirt and had pulled a khaki surplus army blanket to his knees. He sat up in bed with Céline and read. Ferdinand was working in an assembly line in Detroit. Molly was his girlfriend. Ferdinand was a young vagabond and she was a prostitute. She loved him. There was no loneliness in the world as the loneliness of America. And the two had made a fragile cave of paper and straw against the loneliness. He read until he no longer knew what he was reading. Then he gave up. His mind was elsewhere and nowhere. The day had been fraught with distractions. He was a distraction. He thought of phoning someone. Maybe the assistant he had just left at the snowy bus stop—to find out if she got home all right. Maybe he would call some friends, but he did not know whom and, finally, he did not have anyone he wanted to talk with or who would welcome his call. He thought again of getting a cat. A white one he could see in the dark. The cactus looked healthier in the lamplight; maybe it had had second thoughts and decided to give life another try. “Good night,” he said to himself and switched off the light.
But he quickly turned it back on, thinking again of calling the assistant, thinking that perhaps they could soon become friends. They could go to poetry readings at the Y—Auden and other great poets read there, or take in a movie at the Thalia on Broadway and Ninety-Fifth—he was sure she liked foreign films, like Fellini’s La Strada, or Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Maybe on the weekends they would sit over coffee under the bronze shadow of Rodin’s giant Balzac in MoMA’s tranquil garden, and he would read to her his latest work. She would immediately recognize what was excellent and what was not and, with her as his editor and muse, he would write beautiful, original stories and novels. She had already been his champion. Now they would collaborate, nourishing each other on life’s creative adventure and they would never be lonely in Detroit or anywhere else. He tried to remember if he had found her attractive, but she was a blur with a messenger’s voice.
Maybe he had neglected to see that she was beautiful, desirable. He suspected that she was both. He was sure of it. Maybe he’d invite her for a dinner of spaghetti and salad and house red at Lanza’s, where whatever you wanted on the menu they did not have. Maybe at dinner together there, under the frescoes of Sicilian villas grilling in the sun, she would find its prix fixe and soiled menus louche and seductive and thus find him equally, if not more so. Maybe one morning they would wake together in his bed, the raw light from the window on her beautiful, bare, straight shoulders. Maybe one midnight, after a movie and over coffee and a plate of rolls at Ratner’s on Second Avenue and under the eyes of the shaking old Jewish waiters, retired from the Yiddish Theatre, they would realize they were in love. Maybe they were already in love.
He could hear the scraping of a snow shovel in the distance—maybe on Avenue C. His own street would not be cleared for days. He went to his window. The synagogue across the way had been locked tight for two years; its smashed windows covered with sheets of fading plywood. The grocery three buildings to the east of him was closed, the two brothers who owned it were still in Rikers Island for fencing radios, so the whole way to Avenue D might be snowed over, impeding his walk to the crosstown bus on Tenth and D. The snow was building on his window ledge and he would let it mount, better to gauge how much of it was piling up below in the street he could no longer clearly see. With all this snow, the morning bus might be delayed and the subway, too. He would have to get up extra early to get to work, and budget himself the time to shovel Kim’s sidewalk. The laundry was still dark: Kim was in the back recovering from a mugging and beating three days earlier. “Where is your gold?” the robbers had demanded. “Chinks always have gold,” one said, giving Kim a whack on the knee with a blackjack. He would have to shovel the snow for him before he went to work or Kim would get a summons or two. When would he find time to write? Who cared if he did? He would go down in the street and sleep there in the blanketing snow, Céline in hand. Or maybe the Lowry.
He went back to bed, tossing and turning and sleeping a dozen minutes at a time, then waking. He returned to Céline. Ferdinand was still miserable in cold Detroit, but he had no luck in focusing and no better luck with Under the V
olcano, whose drunken protagonist still reeled about in the hot Mexico sun. He went to the window again. The snow had piled a quarter way up the window and was whirling in the sky like it owned the world. He might be late to work or never get there no matter how early he left his house.
There was a knock at the door, alarming at that hour, but then he thought it was his playboy neighbor or one of his wandering drunk girlfriends, or the one always prowling for drugs. He opened the door to the limit of the chain. It was the neighbor, drink in hand.
“I heard you puttering about and thought it was not too late.”
He opened the door, feeling vulnerable in his underwear.
“Just wanted you to know I’m moving out and want to sublet for a year or so. Thought you might like it for your office.” He could not afford two apartments, and was scraping by on one, but he said, “Thanks, give me a day or so to think about it.”
“The rent’s the same thirty-two a month—I’m not trying to make anything on it.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.” It was cold in the hallway and he thought to invite him in but was embarrassed that he would see three days of dishes still piled up in the sink. And then, feeling he was not cordial enough, he added, “Where’re you going?” expecting him to say Ibiza or Paris or San Francisco.
“Uptown, closer to work.”
“Sorry you’re leaving,” he said.
“Well, me too. But Dad thinks it’s time to put on the harness and he got me something in publishing.”
“Oh!”
“It should be okay. I’m told editors mostly go to lunch.”
“I’ve heard that,” he said. He wanted to add, “I’ll send you my novel, maybe you’ll like it.” But he felt humiliated and hated himself for the thought that he would ask.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 27