The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  But he did not burn the letter. He reread it several times during the day, each time returning it to his desk drawer and locking it there. Then he unlocked the drawer to read it again. As the day passed he was aware of an insistent hunger in himself. He recalled memories, experienced longing, intense desires he had not felt in years. The doctor was concerned by this change in him, this disturbance. He tried to blot the letter out of his mind but could not. Yet he would still not burn it, as though if he did, he had shut the door on certain possibilities in his life, other ways to go, whatever that might mean. He was astonished—even thought of it as affronted, that this was happening to him at his age. He had seen it in others, former patients, but had not expected it in himself.

  The hunger he felt, a hunger for pleasure, disruption of habit, renewal of feeling, yet a fear of it, continued to grow in him like a dead tree come to life and spreading its branches. He felt as though he was hungry for exotic experience, which, if he was to have it, might make him ravenously hungry. He did not want that to happen. He recalled mythological figures: Sisyphus, Midas, who for one reason or another had been eternally cursed. He thought of Tithonus, his youth gone, become a grasshopper living forever. The doctor felt he was caught in an overwhelming emotion, a fearful dark wind.

  When Flaherty left for the day at 4 p.m. and Silvio, who had tight curly black hair, was on duty, Dr. Morris came down and sat in the lobby, pretending to read his newspaper. As soon as the elevator went up he approached the letter boxes and scanned the nameplates for an Evelyn, whoever she might be. He found no Evelyns, though there was an E. Gordon and an E. Commings. He suspected one of them might be she. He knew that single women often preferred not to reveal their first names in order to keep cranks at a distance, conceal themselves from potential annoyers. He casually asked Silvio if Miss Gordon or Miss Commings was named Evelyn, but Silvio said he didn’t know, although probably Mr. Flaherty would because he distributed the mail. “Too many peoples in this house.” Silvio shrugged. The doctor remarked he was just curious, a lame remark but all he could think of. He went out for an aimless short stroll and when he returned said nothing more to Silvio. They rode silently up in the elevator, the doctor standing tall, almost stiff. That night he slept badly. When he fell deeply asleep a moment his dreams were erotic. He woke feeling desire and repulsion and lay mourning himself. He felt powerless to be other than he was.

  He was up before five and was uselessly in the lobby before seven. He felt he must find out, settle who she was. In the lobby, Richard, the night man who had brought him down, returned to a pornographic paperback he was reading; the mail, as Dr. Morris knew, hadn’t come. He knew it would not arrive until after eight, but hadn’t the patience to wait in his apartment. So he left the building, bought the Times on Irving Place, continued on his walk, and because it was a pleasant morning, not too cold, sat on a bench in Union Square Park. He stared at the newspaper but could not read it. He watched some sparrows pecking at dead grass. He was an older man, true enough, but had lived long enough to know that age often meant little in man-woman relationships. He was still vigorous and bodies are bodies. The doctor was back in the lobby at eight-thirty, an act of restraint. Flaherty had received the mail sack and was alphabetizing the first-class letters on a long table before distributing them into the boxes. He did not look well today. He moved slowly. His misshapen face was gray, the mouth slack; one heard his breathing; his eyes harbored pain.

  “Nothin for you yet,” he said to the doctor, not looking up.

  “I’ll wait this morning,” said Dr. Morris. “I should be hearing from my daughter.”

  “Nothin yet, but you might hit the lucky number in this last bundle.” He removed the string.

  As he was alphabetizing the last bundle of letters the elevator buzzed and Flaherty had to go up for a call.

  The doctor pretended to be absorbed in his Times. When the elevator door shut he sat momentarily still, then went to the table and hastily riffled through the C pile of letters. E. Commings was Ernest Commings. He shuffled through the G’s, watching the metal arrow as it showed the elevator descending. In the G pile there were two letters addressed to Evelyn Gordon. One was from her mother. The other, also handwritten, was from a Lee Bradley. Almost against his will the doctor removed this letter and slipped it into his suit pocket. His body was hot. He was sitting in the chair turning the page of his newspaper when the elevator door opened.

  “Nothin at all for you,” Flaherty said after a moment.

  “Thank you,” said Dr. Morris. “I think I’ll go up.”

  In his apartment the doctor, conscious of his whisperous breathing, placed the letter on the kitchen table and sat looking at it, waiting for the teakettle to boil. The kettle whistled as it boiled but still he sat with the unopened letter before him. For a while he sat there with dulled thoughts. Soon he fantasied Lee Bradley describing the sexual pleasure he had had with Evelyn Gordon. He fantasied the lovers’ acts they engaged in. Then though he audibly told himself not to, he steamed open the flap of the envelope and had to place it flat on the table so he could read it. His heart beat in anticipation of what he might read. But to his surprise the letter was a bore, an egoistic account of some stupid business deal this Bradley was concocting. Only the last sentences came surprisingly to life. “Be in your bed when I get there tonight. Be wearing only your white panties.”

  The doctor didn’t know whom he was more disgusted with, this fool or himself. In truth, himself. Slipping the sheet of paper into the envelope, he resealed it with a thin layer of paste he had rubbed carefully on the flap with his fingertip. Later in the day he tucked the letter into his inside pocket and pressed the elevator button for Silvio. The doctor left the building and afterwards returned with a copy of the Post he seemed to be involved with until Silvio had to take up two women who had come into the lobby; then the doctor slipped the letter into Evelyn Gordon’s box and went out for a breath of air.

  He was sitting near the table in the lobby when the young woman he had held the door open for came in shortly after 6 p.m. He was aware of her perfume almost at once. Silvio was not around at that moment; he had gone down to the basement to eat a sandwich. She inserted a small key into Evelyn Gordon’s mailbox and stood before the open box, smoking, as she read Bradley’s letter. She was wearing a light-blue pants suit with a brown knit sweater-coat. Her tail of black hair was tied with a brown silk scarf. Her face, though a little heavy, was pretty, her intense eyes blue, the lids lightly eye-shadowed. Her body, he thought, was finely proportioned. She had not noticed him but he was more than half in love with her.

  He observed her many mornings. He would come down later now, at nine, and spend some time going through the medical circulars he had got out of his box, sitting on a throne-like wooden chair near a tall unlit lamp in the rear of the lobby. He would watch people as they left for work or shopping in the morning. Evelyn appeared at about half past nine and stood smoking in front of her box, absorbed in the morning’s mail. When spring came she wore brightly colored skirts with pastel blouses, or light slim pants suits. Sometimes she wore minidresses. Her figure was exquisite. She received many letters and read most of them with apparent pleasure, some with what seemed suppressed excitement. A few she gave short shrift to, scanned these and stuffed them into her bag. He imagined they were from her father, or mother. He thought that most of her letters came from lovers, past and present, and he felt a sort of sadness that there was none from him in her mailbox. He would write to her.

  He thought it through carefully. Some women needed an older man; it stabilized their lives. Sometimes a difference of as many as thirty or even thirty-five years offered no serious disadvantages. A younger woman inspired an older man to remain virile. And despite the heart incident his health was good, in some ways better than before. A woman like Evelyn, probably at odds with herself, could benefit from a steadying relationship with an older man, someone who would respect and love her and help her to respect and love
herself; who would demand less from her in certain ways than some young men awash in their egoism; who would awake in her a stronger sense of well-being, and if things went quite well, perhaps even love for a particular man.

  “I am a retired physician, a widower,” he wrote to Evelyn Gordon. “I write you with some hesitation and circumspection, although needless to say with high regard, because I am old enough to be your father. I have observed you often in this building and as we passed each other in nearby streets; I have grown to admire you. I wonder if you will permit me to make your acquaintance? Would you care to have dinner with me and perhaps enjoy a film or performance of a play? I do not think my company will disappoint you. If you are so inclined—so kind, certainly—to consider this request tolerantly, I will be obliged if you place a note to that effect in my mailbox. I am respectfully yours, Simon Morris, M.D.”

  He did not go down to mail his letter. He thought he would keep it to the last moment. Then he had a fright about it that woke him out of momentary sleep. He dreamed he had written and sealed the letter and then remembered he had appended another sentence: “Be wearing your white panties.” When he woke he wanted to tear open the envelope to see whether he had included Bradley’s remark. But when he was thoroughly waked up, he knew he had not. He bathed and shaved early and for a while observed the cloud formations out the window. At close to nine Dr. Morris descended to the lobby. He would wait till Flaherty answered a buzz and, when he was gone, drop his letter into her box; but Flaherty that morning seemed to have no calls to answer. The doctor had forgotten it was Saturday. He did not know it was till he got his Times and sat with it in the lobby, pretending to be waiting for the mail delivery. The mail sack arrived late on Saturdays. At last he heard a prolonged buzz, and Flaherty, who had been on his knees polishing the brass doorknob, got up on one foot, then rose on both legs and walked slowly to the elevator. His asymmetric face was gray. Shortly before ten o’clock the doctor slipped his letter into Evelyn Gordon’s mailbox. He decided to withdraw to his apartment, then thought he would rather wait where he usually waited while she collected her mail. She had never noticed him there.

  The mail sack was dropped in the vestibule at ten-after, and Flaherty alphabetized the first bundle before he responded to another call. The doctor read his paper in the dark rear of the lobby, because he was really not reading it. He was anticipating Evelyn’s coming. He had on a new green suit, blue striped shirt, and a pink tie. He wore a new hat. He waited with anticipation and love.

  When the elevator door opened, Evelyn walked out in an elegant slit black skirt, pretty sandals, her hair tied with a red scarf. A sharpfeatured man with puffed sideburns and carefully combed mediumlong hair, in a turn-of-the-century haircut, followed her out of the elevator. He was shorter than she by half a head. Flaherty handed her two letters, which she dropped into the black patent-leather pouch she was carrying. The doctor thought—hoped—she would walk past the mailboxes without stopping; but she saw the white of his letter through the slot and stopped to remove it. She tore open the envelope, pulled out the single sheet of handwritten paper, read it with immediate intense concentration. The doctor raised his newspaper to his eyes, although he could still watch over the top of it. He watched in fear.

  How mad I was not to anticipate she might come down with a man.

  When she had finished reading the letter, she handed it to her companion—possibly Bradley—who read it, grinned broadly, and said something inaudible as he handed it back to her.

  Evelyn Gordon quietly ripped the letter into small bits and, turning, flung the pieces in the doctor’s direction. The fragments came at him like a blast of wind-driven snow. He thought he would sit forever on his wooden throne in the swirling snowstorm.

  The old doctor sat in his chair, the floor around him littered with his torn-up letter.

  Flaherty swept it up with his little broom into a metal container. He handed the doctor a thin envelope stamped with foreign stamps.

  “Here’s a letter from your daughter that’s just come.”

  The doctor pressed the bridge of his nose. He wiped his eyes with his fingers.

  “There’s no setting aside old age,” he remarked after a while.

  “No, sir,” said Flaherty.

  “Or death.”

  “They move up on you.”

  The doctor tried to say something splendidly kind, but could not say it.

  Flaherty took him up to the fifteenth floor in his elevator.

  1973

  Rembrandt’s Hat

  Rubin, in careless white cloth hat, or visorless soft round cap, however one described it, wandered with unexpressed or inexpressive thoughts up the stairs from his studio in the basement of the New York art school where he made his sculpture, to a workshop on the second floor, where he taught. Arkin, the art historian, a hypertensive bachelor of thirty-four—a man often swept by strong feeling, he thought—about a dozen years younger than the sculptor, observed him through his open office door, wearing his cap amid a crowd of art students and teachers in the hall during a change of classes. In his white hat he stands out and apart, the art historian thought. It illumines a lonely inexpressiveness arrived at after years of experience. Though it was not entirely apt he imagined a lean white animal—hind, stag, goat?—staring steadfastly but despondently through trees of a dense wood. Their gazes momentarily interlocked and parted. Rubin hurried to his workshop class.

  Arkin was friendly with Rubin though they were not really friends. Not his fault, he felt; the sculptor was a very private person. When they talked, he listened, looking away, as though guarding his impressions. Attentive, apparently, he seemed to be thinking of something else—his sad life no doubt, if saddened eyes, a faded green mistakable for gray, necessarily denote sad life. Sometimes he uttered an opinion, usually a flat statement about the nature of life, or art, never much about himself; and he said absolutely nothing about his work.

  “Are you working, Rubin?” Arkin was reduced to.

  “Of course I’m working.”

  “What are you doing if I may ask?”

  “I have a thing going.”

  There Arkin let it lie.

  Once, in the faculty cafeteria, listening to the art historian discourse on the work of Jackson Pollock, the sculptor’s anger had flared.

  “The world of art ain’t necessarily in your eyes.”

  “I have to believe that what I see is there,” Arkin had politely responded.

  “Have you ever painted?”

  “Painting is my life.”

  Rubin, with dignity, reverted to silence. That evening, leaving the building, they tipped hats to each other over small smiles.

  In recent years, after his wife had left him and costume and headdress became a mode among students, Rubin had taken to wearing various odd hats from time to time, and this white one was the newest, resembling Nehru’s Congress Party cap, but rounded—a cross between a cantor’s hat and a bloated yarmulke; or perhaps like a French judge’s in Rouault, or working doctor’s in a Daumier print. Rubin wore it like a crown. Maybe it kept his head warm under the cold skylight of his large studio.

  When the sculptor again passed along the crowded hall on his way down to his studio that day he had first appeared in his white cap, Arkin, who had been reading an article on Giacometti, put it down and went into the hall. He was in an ebullient mood he could not explain to himself, and told Rubin he very much admired his hat.

  “I’ll tell you why I like it so much. It looks like Rembrandt’s hat that he wears in one of the middle-aged self-portraits, the really profound ones. May it bring you the best of luck.”

  Rubin, who had for a moment looked as though he was struggling to say something extraordinary, fixed Arkin in a strong stare and hurried downstairs. That ended the incident, though it did not diminish the art historian’s pleasure in his observation.

  Arkin later remembered that when he had come to the art school via an assistant curator’s job in a muse
um in St. Louis, seven years ago, Rubin had been working in wood; he now welded triangular pieces of scrap iron to construct his sculptures. Working at one time with a hatchet, later a modified small meat cleaver, he had reshaped driftwood pieces, out of which he had created some arresting forms. Dr. Levis, the director of the art school, had talked the sculptor into giving an exhibition of his altered driftwood objects in one of the downtown galleries. Arkin, in his first term at the school, had gone on the subway to see the show one winter’s day. This man is an original, he thought, maybe his work will be, too. Rubin had refused a gallery vernissage, and on the opening day the place was nearly deserted. The sculptor, as though escaping his hacked forms, had retreated into a storage room at the rear of the gallery and stayed there looking at pictures. Arkin, after reflecting whether he ought to, sought him out to say hello, but seeing Rubin seated on a crate with his back to him, examining a folio of somebody’s prints, silently shut the door and departed. Although in time two notices of the show appeared, one bad, the other mildly favorable, the sculptor seemed unhappy about having exhibited his work, and after that didn’t for years. Nor had there been any sales. Recently, when Arkin had suggested it might be a good idea to show what he was doing with his welded iron triangles, Rubin, after a wildly inexpressive moment, had answered, “Don’t bother playing around with that idea.”

  The day after the art historian’s remarks in the hall about Rubin’s white cap, it disappeared from sight—gone totally; for a while he wore on his head nothing but his heavy reddish hair. And a week or two later, though he could momentarily not believe it, it seemed to Arkin that the sculptor was avoiding him. He guessed the man was no longer using the staircase to the right of his office but was coming up from the basement on the other side of the building, where his corner workshop room was anyway, so he wouldn’t have to pass Arkin’s open door. When he was certain of this Arkin felt uneasy, then experienced moments of anger.