The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  “Come, tesoro,” she said, leading him to the marriage bed. “For our mutual relief, me from my life and you from art.”

  As they were in the midst of violent intercourse, Fidelman on top, Margherita more loving than ever, the bedroom door opened and he glimpsed a nude hairy body wearing a horn or carrying a weapon; before he could rise he felt Beppo land on him. Fidelman cried out, expecting death between the shoulders. Margherita, shoving herself up with a grunt, slipped out from under them and fled out of the room. Fidelman rolled to the right and left to be rid of his incubus, but Beppo had him tightly pinned, his nose to the bedboard, his ass in the air.

  “Don’t hurt me, Beppo, please, I have piles.”

  “It’ll be a cool job, I’m wearing mentholated Vaseline. You’ll be surprised at the pleasure.”

  “Is your mother watching?”

  “At her age she has no curiosity.”

  “I suppose I deserve this.”

  “Think of love,” the glass blower murmured. “You’ve run from it all your life.”

  He stopped running.

  Venice slowed down though it went on floating, its canals floating on Venice.

  “Leonardo, Michelangelo,” Fidelman murmured.

  “If you can’t invent art, invent life,” Beppo advised him.

  For good or ill Fidelman loved him; he could not help himself; he ought to have known. Beppo was handsome, hardworking, and loved to breathe; he smelled (and tasted) of oil and vinegar; he was, after all, a tender man and gentle lover. Fidelman had never in his life said “I love you” without reservation to anyone. He said it to Beppo. If that’s the way it works, that’s the way it works. Better love than no love. If you sneeze at life it backs off and instead of fruit you’re holding a bone. If I’m a late bloomer at least I’ve bloomed in love.

  “It’s a good way to be,” explained Beppo, “we’re not like everybody else. I like it better with men because the company is more interesting and it’s easier to be friends with somebody who speaks your language.”

  They were together as often as possible, everywhere except in Beppo’s house. Fidelman had stopped going there.

  “Naturally,” said Beppo. “It wouldn’t be discreet.”

  “What does Margherita say?”

  “She’s said it before, I don’t listen.”

  “Will you stay married to her?”

  “Of course. I’ve got two boys and an old mother to think of.”

  “I guess so,” said Fidelman.

  Yet he was for once in his life on the whole serene; discontented only during the day when they were on separate islands, Beppo in Murano and Fidelman selling pigeon feed on the Piazza San Marco. He spent most of his time thinking of Beppo, and the glass blower said he thought of him. They talked it over and one summer morning Fidelman gave up his bird-food business and went with Beppo to Murano. At 6 a.m. they met at the Fondamenta Nuove. They stepped into Beppo’s rowboat and, each taking an oar, rowed past San Michele toward Murano. The water was calm and it took no more than twenty minutes to reach the island. Beppo spoke quietly to the assistant manager of the glassworks and got him to put on his friend as an apprentice and part-time man of all work. He was the oldest of the apprentices, some of them kids, but he didn’t mind because Beppo, who was teaching him the rites of love, also taught him to blow glass.

  Working with the hot molten glass excited Fidelman sexually. He felt creative, his heart in his pants. “With pipe, tongs, shears, you can make a form or change it into its opposite,” Beppo said. “For instance, with a snip or two of the scissors, if it suits you, you can change the male organ into the female.” The glass blower laughed heartily. Fidelman doubted he would be so minded; the thought evoked pain. Still it helped you understand the possibilities of life. And amid the possibilities was working with glass as an art form, though for certain reasons he did not say so to Beppo, who all day long, his face wet, armpits sweated, at intervals swigging from a beer or water bottle, blew varieties of fish and Disney creatures served up to him by an assistant from a wood or steel mold, for further shaping and decoration. For a change of pace he blew wine goblets, slim-waisted vases, flasks of odd shapes and sizes.

  Fidelman, among other things, loved dipping the tapered blowpipe into the flaming opening of the noisy furnace—like poking into the living substance of the sun for a puddle of flowing fire—Prometheus Fidelman—a viscous gob of sunflesh hanging from the pipe like a human organ: breast, kidney, stomach, or phallus, cooling as it gaseously flamed, out of which if one were skilled enough, lucky, knew the right people, he would create glass objects of expected yet unexpected forms. He blew gently into the red-hot glowing mass a single soft bubble of breath—it made no difference if the blower had eaten garlic or flowers—a small inside hole without spittle or seeds, a teardrop, gut, uterus, which itself became its object of birth: a sculptured womb; shaped, elongated by pendulum swing of pipe, the living metal teased and shorn into shape by tongs and scissors. Give the bubble a mouth and it became beaker, ewer, vase, amphora, or burial urn, anything the mouth foretold, or heart desired, or blower could blow. If you knew how, you could blow anything.

  Not yet of course Fidelman, although he was learning. As apprentice he blew as Beppo shaped; or delivered the master fresh fish, birdsof-paradise, woodland creatures that he or another assistant blew into pristine form in molds; he also applied stems to vessels blown by Beppo, the stem shaped by a flick or two of his tool. To permit him to open and work at the mouth of any kind of container, Fidelman aimed a red-hot cone of glass at the bubble’s bottom, Beppo gripping the gob with his tongs and leading it to the point of attachment. With his shears he creased the neck of the bubble and with a tap detached it from the blowpipe; he left Fidelman holding the openmouthed possibility: the open mouth. Every move they made was in essence sexual, a marvelous interaction because, among other things, it saved time and trouble: you worked and loved at once. When a glass object was completed, Fidelman hastily trotted to the cooling kiln in the rear with the thing on a wooden board, to stash away before it cracked. And he handed one tool or another to Beppo, who hardly looked at him during working hours, the assistant assisting for love’s sake however he could. There were no spoken orders once you knew the process. He watched the glass blower and foresaw his needs, in essence a new experience for him. Otherwise he stood by, greedily watching the masters at other benches to absorb what they knew.

  Impatient, agitated at times by all there was to learn, the variety of skills to master, Fidelman persuaded Beppo to stay on and teach him for an hour or two after the crowd of glass workers had gone home, the workshop talk and shouting silenced, five of the six furnace openings banked down, one blazing in a perpetual violet and lemon roar. He practiced then what he couldn’t during the day, and though Beppo, eating an apple or smoking a butt, did not always encourage it, blew forms he had never blown before, or seen blown, evolving monstrosities of glass, so huge and complicated it took fifteen minutes to break their grip on the iron when he wanted to discard them. Many of Fidelman’s creations cracked in midair, or against something on the workbench in a careless move. Those he completed intact stood (or fell) unbalanced, lopsided, malformed. But he worked for the first time in his life, instructed. Up to now he had taught himself and not got over it.

  In the fall Margherita objected to the night work—it was killing her husband. Beppo’s complexion had turned pale, his eyes were bloodshot, the skin around them dark and puffy. She was already half a widow, what more did they want? Abandoning the night sessions they came to work earlier, at half past four, leaving the Fondamenta bundled in overcoats against the stabbing wet cold, the fog cradled on the choppy water plopping against the boats at the dock, a star visible if they were lucky. They navigated by instinct—Beppo’s—and made Murano usually on time, though once in a while they rowed in circles around the cemetery, lost in and breathing fog. “In the end we pay for everything,” Beppo muttered. Suffering from loss of sleep he sometimes c
onked out at his work during the day, Fidelman having to wake him furtively; so in the end they decided that the apprentice himself would stay on alone nights, doing what he felt he had to do. Each assured the other it was for his benefit. “Though in a way it’s mad,” said the master to Fidelman; “the more you give up the more you undertake.”

  However, it was arranged and settled with the assistant manager, who had been assured it was all for the good of the company. Because Beppo left in the rowboat, and the vaporetto, before it expired at midnight, was fantastically slow making its stations, Fidelman considered renting a secondhand rowboat for himself; but then the thought occurred that taking a small room in a house on Murano, maybe with a little garden, would make more sense—be cheaper in the long run, and he could spend more time in the factory. Beppo could stay over when he felt like it, and they would as usual be together on Sundays.

  Fidelman located a tiny room on Campo S. Bernardo, from which he could see the airport on the mainland and Burano and Torcello. But Beppo, when he heard, was infuriated. “You have no consideration for others, it’s plain to see.”

  After he had calmed down, he said, “Why are you so fanatic about this accursed glass? After all, it’s only glass.”

  “Life is short if you don’t hurry.”

  “A fanatic never knows when to stop. It’s obvious you want to repeat your fate.”

  “What fate do you have in mind?”

  “Yours.”

  The apprentice sighed but hurried. For months he tried everything he saw others doing: cut glass in diamond patterns, carved glass as gems, practiced diamond point and acid engraving, flash painting with stains, gold and silver leaf applied in reverse: gods and goddesses in classic poses pretending left is right. In the spring he hungered to be involved with modern forms. Fidelman envisioned glass sculptures, a difficult enterprise, deciding first to experiment with compositions of mixed colors ladeled into and cast in molds. He invented objets trouvés—what better way to find what wasn’t lost?—and worked with peacock’s tails and Argus eyes in targets, casting concentric circles: amber / lavender / black / green. He fabricated abstract stained-glass windows, created Op Art designs of mosaics, collages of broken glass, and spent hours dripping glass on hot glass in the manner of Pollock.

  Beppo from time to time watched, picking his teeth with an old toothpick.

  “You’re doing the same things you did in your paintings, that’s the lousy hair in the egg. It’s easy to see, half a talent is worse than none.”

  His criticism upset Fidelman so badly that he did not appear in the factory for a week. Is he wrong or am I? He went back one night to see what he had done and, when he saw, chopped it up with a hammer. He decided again, as he had more than once in the past, that he had no true distinction as an artist and this time would try not to forget it.

  Fidelman cut out night work and spent the time with Beppo in the city. The glass blower asked no questions and made no comments. He was once again very tender and after a while Fidelman’s heart stopped being a brick and began breathing. They drank with the gondoliers on the Calle degli Assassini and stayed away from painters and sculptors.

  One day when they met by accident on the Rialto, Margherita, her large eyes vague, hair plaited in circles over her ears, her arms around a grocery bundle, stopped Fidelman and begged him to leave Venice.

  “Listen, Fidelman, we’ve been friends, let’s stay friends. All I ask is that you leave Beppo and go someplace else. After all, in the eyes of God he’s my husband. Now, because of you he’s rarely around and my family is a mess. The boys are always in trouble, his mother complains all day, and I’m at the end of my strength. Beppo may be a homo but he’s a good provider and not a bad father when there are no men friends around to divert him from domestic life. The boys listen to his voice when they hear it. We have our little pleasures. He knows life and keeps me informed. Sometimes we visit friends, sometimes we go to a movie together and stop at a bar on our way home. In other words, things are better when he’s around even though the sex is short. Occasionally he will throw me a lay if I suck him up good beforehand. It isn’t a perfect life but I’ve learned to be satisfied, and was, more or less, before you came around. Since then, though there was some pleasure with you—I don’t deny it—it ended quickly, and to tell the truth I’m worse off than I was before, so that’s why I ask you to go.”

  In despair Fidelman rowed back to the factory and blew a huge glass bubble, larger and thicker than any he had blown before. He got it off the blowpipe with the help of an apprentice he had persuaded to stay over, and worked on its mouth in fear and doubtful confidence with tongs and a wet opening tool of smoking wood. Heating and reheating for several nights, he dipped, swung, lengthened, shaped, until the glass on his blowpipe turned out to be a capacious heavy red bowl, iron become ice. When he had cooled it without cracking he considered etching on it some scenes of Venice but decided no. The bowl was severe and graceful and sat solid, upright. It held the clear light and even seemed to listen. Fidelman polished it carefully and, when it was done, filled it with cold water and with a sigh dipped in his hands. He showed the bowl to Beppo, who said it was a good job, beautifully proportioned and reminding him of something the old Greeks had done. I kept my finger in art, Fidelman wept when he was alone. The next day, though they searched high and low with a crowd of apprentices, the bowl was missing and could not be found. Beppo suspected the assistant manager.

  Before leaving Venice, Fidelman blew a slightly humpbacked green horse for Beppo, the color of his eyes. “Up yours,” said the glass blower, grieving at the gray in Fidelman’s hair. He sold the horse for a decent sum and gave Fidelman the lire. They kissed and parted.

  Fidelman sailed from Venice on a Portuguese freighter.

  In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women.

  1869

  God’s Wrath

  Glasser, a retired sexton, a man with a short beard and rheumy eyes, lived with his daughter on the top floor of a narrow brick building on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. He stayed in most of the day, hated going up and hated going out. He felt old, tired, and irritable. He felt he had done something wrong with his life and didn’t know what. The oak doors of the old synagogue in the neighborhood had been nailed shut, its windows boarded, and the white-bearded rabbi, whom the sexton disliked, had gone off to live with his son in Detroit.

  The sexton retired on social security and continued to live with his youngest daughter, the only child of his recently deceased second wife. She was a heavy-breasted, restless girl of twenty-six who called herself Luci on the phone and worked as an assistant bookkeeper in a linoleum factory during the day. She was by nature a plain and lonely girl with thoughts that bothered her; as a child she had often been depressed. The telephone in the house rarely rang.

  After his shul had closed its doors, the sexton rode on the subway twice a day to a synagogue on Canal Street. On the anniversary of his first wife’s death he said kaddish for both wives and barely resisted saying it for his youngest daughter. He was at times irritated by her fate. Why is my luck with my daughters so bad?

  Still in all, though twice a widower, Glasser got along, thanks to God. He asked for little and was the kind of man who functioned well alone. Nor did he see much of his daughters from his first marriage, Helen, forty, and Fay, thirty-seven. Helen’s husband, a drinker, a bum, supported her badly and Glasser handed her a few dollars now and then; Fay had a goiter and five children. He visited each of them every six weeks or so. His daughters served him a glass of tea.

  Lucille he had more affection for, and sometimes she seemed to have affection for him. More often not; this was his second wife’s doing. She had been a dissatisfied woman, complained, bewailed her fate. Anyway, the girl did little for herself, had few friends—once in a while a salesman where she worked asked her out—and it was possible, more and more likely, that she would in the end be left unmarried. No young man with or without long ha
ir had asked her to live with him. The sexton would have disliked such an arrangement but he resolved, if ever the time came, not to oppose it. If God in His mercy winks an eye, He doesn’t care who sees with two. What God in His mystery won’t allow in the present, He may permit in the future, possibly even marriage for Lucille. Glasser remembered friends from the old country, some were Orthodox Jews, who had lived for years with their wives before marrying them. It was, after all, a way of life. Sometimes this thought worried him. If you opened the door a crack too much the wind would invade the bedroom. The devil, they said, hid in a cold wind. The sexton was uneasy. Who could tell where an evil began? Still, better a cold bedroom than one without a double bed. Better a daughter ultimately married than an empty vessel all her life. Glasser had seen some people, not many, come to better fates than had been expected for them.

  At night after Lucille returned from work she prepared supper, and then her father cleaned up the kitchen so she could study or go to her classes. He also thoroughly cleaned the house on Fridays; he washed the windows and mopped the floors. Being twice a widower, used to looking out for himself, he was not bothered by having to do domestic tasks. What most disappointed the retired sexton in his youngest daughter was her lack of ambition. She had wanted to be a secretary after finishing high school and was now, five years later, an assistant bookkeeper. A year ago he had said to her, “You won’t get better wages if you don’t have a college diploma.” “None of my friends go to college anymore,” she said. “So how many friends have you got?” “I’m talking about the friends I know who started and stopped,” Lucille said; but Glasser finally persuaded her to register at Hunter College at night, where she took two courses a term. Although she had done that reluctantly, now once in a while she talked of becoming a teacher.