by Pamela Erens
Patrick did not come. One evening as I entered the building I heard Giglio’s voice amid the softer tones of the workmen and I darted into my apartment with a sense that it was wiser to conceal myself. Then I was ashamed and walked about the apartment noisily, opening cabinets and turning the sink on and off, to prove I was not afraid of my landlord. Most nights the building was silent when I returned, and I would linger on the ground floor to track the progress of the work being done there. Amid the drywall and pieces of pipe and coiled wire, beauties, as Patrick had hoped, were being revealed. The workmen’s painstaking demolition had revealed an extra row of molding in the front room and an ornamental keystone on the fireplace. A brand-new chandelier with curving arms sat in a corner, waiting for a chance to illuminate the refurbished interior. When I saw these things my confidence failed me and I vowed to spend more time at the law library. Once there, I doodled heavyheartedly on the pages of my notebook and pictured boarding a bus to Pennsylvania, knocking on the doors of relatives of my mother’s who had never met me and had probably never even heard of me. The aunt who called me after my uncle’s death was herself long gone. I pictured some matron, a woman with grown children, idle and dissatisfied in late middle age, taking me in. She would give me a room—wouldn’t there have to be a well-swept attic room with floral curtains on the windows?—and allow me to live there, a harmless eccentric, turning the pages of my books and going for my little walks. I would be the man that every modest-sized town possesses, the one in the shabby cardigan who pushes the grocery cart home from two miles away, shambling down the busy commercial road, returning four times a week for his two containers of yogurt, quart of milk, and favorite brand of crackers.
Each evening when I got home I looked for the note that would be propped on the mantelpiece next to my photograph:
I stopped by to say hello.
I’ve been meaning to come see you but I could not
leave the office.
I’ve been meaning to come see you but I was sick.
I was in an accident.
I was too shy.
As the days went by and no note appeared I thought that perhaps Patrick was waiting for me to get in touch with him. He had given me a gift—might it be my move? Patrick was shy. The photograph was his way of reaching out. What was he reaching out for? What did I want him to be reaching for? I didn’t dwell on these questions. I only thought about the thrill of what he’d said to me—that he found me “interesting.” But I could not imagine dialing the number on the business card. What if he were put off by my forwardness?
When the day arrived for me to appear in court I woke at the same hour as always, yet as soon as I opened my eyes I had the sense that I was already hopelessly behind schedule. I was not due in court until one, but I skipped breakfast and straightaway put on my new shirt, an old suit jacket, and a tie. From my nightstand I removed my notebook of legal research. I looked it over one more time and then pushed it aside. My research was pointless. I had no case—I’d never had a case. What good were my notes on the woman whose fiancé had died before she could move into his rent-controlled apartment? What did her story have to do with me? My notebook was filled with such case histories, as useless as fragments of fairy tales. In a different state of mind I might have been able to take these fragments and weave a clever argument, forge analogies. Hadn’t I been trained as a lawyer? But I had no heart for cleverness today. It all seemed like lies, lies and evasions. I had no argument.
When I entered his store earlier than usual Carl looked up at me in mild surprise but said nothing. He watched as I went to the shelf and returned with the book I wanted.
“No time to stay today,” I said. “I’ll just take this.”
Carl received the small blue volume from my hands, licked his finger, and turned one page after another. Finally he set the book down, and with his lean old-man’s fingers, white hair springing from the knuckles, he punched the price into a battered adding machine. The machine whirred and spat some numbers onto a receipt which he tore off and saved for himself. “Three seventy-five,” he told me.
It occurred to me that I might be making a mistake. There would always be a gap now on the shelf between Wallace Stevens and William Butler Yeats. Worse, one day some other book would come to fill that gap, and it would be as if this book had never existed. But I paid my money and left. This poet is very dear to me, I would say, when I handed the book to Patrick. He has been my companion for a long time. Do get past the unfamiliar diction, the excessive formality. You will be rewarded.
Hungry now, I stopped for a fried egg and toast at the Stardust Diner. Marion blinked at me quizzically and glanced at the clock over the front counter. When I left the tip she scooped it up suspiciously.
I walked on. At the New York Public Library I let my gaze pass momentarily through the ornate doors to poke and pry among the thousands of shelves of books within, and I felt an unexpected trickle of hope. You do have an argument, I told myself. Perhaps not an argument a judge can understand, but a true and good one all the same, an argument housed in all those books in there. In one, Aristotle says that the best life is not a life of politics or of making or doing of any kind. He says that making and doing are good and useful, but that the real purpose of houses and pots and bread is to free our minds for contemplation, the one task they are really designed for.
I walked on again, snatching at the possibilities, beginning to construct a judge who was listening to this brand-new reasoning. He was a wiry, noble-looking man in his sixties or seventies, with glasses that he took off and put on as my points particularly struck him.
Your Honor, I said respectfully, I recognize that I have no legal claim to this apartment. But isn’t it possible that I have a moral claim? John Locke wrote that no man is made for the use of another. Confucius said the same, long before Locke: a gentleman is not an implement.
No. I stopped short at a corner and a homeless man, thinking I was stopping to give him some change, said, “Thank you, sir.” I looked down at him and his cardboard sign, and I fished out a quarter to drop into his plastic container.
No, I had started where I ought to end up. I had to lead the judge to this conclusion. I must begin differently.
Your Honor, Locke wrote that what gives a man a right to property is that he has mixed his labor with that property. Hegel added that when a man exercises his will upon a thing, he makes that thing a part of himself.
Your Honor, I have spent thousands and thousands of hours within the walls of my apartment, reading and thinking. Those walls, the furniture, even my carpets, have absorbed my most sincere and relentless labor. My labors have been not with hammer and nails but with the tools of analysis, inference, reason. I am a solitary soul, unfit for traditional work. Is it so wrong, so inconceivable, that one in a hundred or one in a thousand men should be like me, should be allowed the leisure to pursue higher things? Some people inherit such leisure, but I have not. I am not a drunk or a social menace. I work; it is just that my work does not make or do.
I suppose you will say, Your Honor, that I should find other ways to support my habit of reading. I should write articles or teach. As for teaching, please remember that I find it almost unbearable to be in the company of other people. As for writing, I have never wished to reduce the complexity and uniqueness of the great thinkers to pale summaries. In the time it would take me to write one insignificant article I could read half a dozen truly valuable books. Should only geniuses, only people who offer a verifiable brilliance to the world, be allowed a life among books? Thoreau said that it would please him to imagine a government that could tolerate the existence of a few men who wished to live aloof from it, “not meddling with it, nor embraced by it.”
I walked through Midtown, past Union Square, blind to everything around me, refining my words in an attempt to fashion the right mix of wise self-assertion and deference to the court, but when I reached the broad expanse of the Bowery I finally slowed my steps and looked aro
und. Trucks idled beside the old four-story tenements; a man hurried by in a grease-stained jumpsuit. Something about this neighborhood, still untouched by improvement, always riveted me. You could glimpse the taproot of the city here, Manhattan’s origins in industry and manual labor. Nearly everything I could identify in the shop windows or open-air lots was either heavy or dirty: auto parts, pianos, restaurant vats, steel cable, newspapers, gasoline. There were mechanics’ garages and places to rent U-Hauls. I had the sense that this neighborhood would soon slip into the past just like the others, that in fifteen years it would be filled with gleaming office buildings and chic restaurants. But for now it remained unassimilated. The only other part of Manhattan that so fully gave me this illusion of suspended time was Central Park. Whenever I ran my hand over the bark of old trees and looked out onto marshy lakes and open meadows that had remained nearly unaltered for a hundred and fifty years, I could feel that in season after season the land continued to be saved from the future and for the future.
I moved on again, and the street signs and shop signs gradually acquired a subscript of Chinese characters as the neighborhood of the old working class blended into the neighborhood of the new one. I resumed my composing. Your Honor, I see myself as one link in a chain reaching back even beyond Aristotle, to the beginning of cognition and contemplation, one link that makes it just a bit more likely that the chain will remain intact. I liked Chinatown. I was fond of the glass-fronted photographers’ shops, the secretive cultural associations, the bakeries and jewelers, the sharp odors of root vegetables and leather. I stopped at a bakery and bought myself two almond cookies and a cup of strong tea. How to wrap up my peroration? Now the civic buildings began to appear. I passed the main criminal courthouse and up ahead I spotted the address to which I was headed. Your Honor, let me ask you this: Does the world need four more high-priced Manhattan rentals? Or do the immortals need one more true reader? Yes, they do. They desperately do. Somebody must keep their books and thoughts alive.
Finally I arrived at my destination. A metal barricade on one side of the building gave the impression that trouble was expected. I passed a metal detector and stood with my arms outspread while a plump woman passed a silver rod up and over my body. The rod never touched me, yet the woman’s actions felt intimate, unclean. When I entered the room on the third floor where the trial was to take place, I saw that Paul Giglio and his lawyer were already seated in the spectator benches. There was another trial in session, and in order to quell my nervousness I watched the stenographer, a turbaned man sitting at the front of the room. Eventually I raised my eyes to the judge, who looked nothing like the judge I had been mentally lecturing. She was petite and Asian and wore deep-red lipstick and large silver earrings shaped like crescent moons. Her small hands darted in and out of her robes and I observed the impatient curl of her mouth as she listened to the defendant speak.
An hour and a half later, I walked out of the courthouse lobby and onto Centre Street, where I caught a whiff of river water. I turned and followed that scent as if it would save me. I must get to the bridge, I thought; there I’ll be able to think. To Giglio’s lawyer’s questions I had replied with a simple yes or no. The most difficult was the first. Is your name John Frederick Ronan Gorse? Yes, I said quietly. Was John Frederick Ronan your uncle? Yes. Did he pass away in March of 1984? Yes. Did you move into Apartment Two at that time? Yes. I observed Judge Marjorie Ng’s busy hands and fringe of bangs. “Mr. Gorse, do you have any questions for Mr. Giglio?” she asked. I stood up clumsily. Judge Ng was waiting, I thought, to hear something that would surprise her, something that would reveal this case to be more complicated than it seemed.
“Your Honor,” I began. My voice shook. “Please don’t take my apartment away. I can’t survive if you do. Thank you.”
I collapsed into my seat and the judge looked at me in dismay. “Thank you, Mr. Gorse,” she said finally. She called for a ten-minute adjournment, grabbing a disorderly stack of papers as she went. Giglio stood and stretched. The turbaned stenographer unscrewed a bottle of Evian and drank avidly.
When the judge returned she announced that I had ten days to remove myself and my belongings from the apartment owned by Paul X. Giglio Associates. Then she turned to her clerk and asked for the name of the next case.
The Brooklyn Bridge rose before me, its great harp strings waving in the white sky. I stepped onto the pedestrian ramp, feeling the heavy vibrations of the traffic beneath, and climbed toward the openness at the top, toward that feeling of suspension. A helicopter overhead silenced everything except the roaring in my ears. With every footstep I reviled myself. Aristotle on the best life! Hegel and Locke! Would the likes of Hegel and Locke ever have defended a man like me? A man who produced nothing, contributed nothing, perhaps understood nothing? The only argument I had been able to muster in the end, the only truth I had been able to speak, was this: I want, I need. Was that worthy of the greats? And was that all my life amounted to?
When I got to the New York tower I stopped and looked out toward the familiar sprawl of Brooklyn. Even on this dull winter day the East River was full of life, shooting up in white peaks and crashing against the pilings. There was a smell as of damp bread in the old stone. Lady Liberty poked out, a gray shadow, on her barely visible slip of island. Ahead lay the opposite shore, as far somehow as if it were another country, with houses and neighborhoods full of people busy and unknown, and beyond them, invisible to me, more water, and beyond that, more land, more people.
Where could I go? I did not continue out over the water but instead backed against the tower, sheltering myself from the crowds. A teenager loped by, an aggressive beat leaking from his earphones. I worried some loose threads on the book in my pocket. I would watch Patrick as he turned the fragile pages, listen as he read the poems aloud. But it is so gloomy, he would say, placing his finger on a page, appealing to me. Yes, I would answer.
I turned back down the footpath, made my way slowly to land. There is always, I thought, somewhere to go, if only for a few hours. I crossed the busy intersection at the foot of the bridge but instead of entering the Broadway-Nassau station I continued westward, to Fulton Street, and descended there. Commuters stood two deep in the stale air on the platform; the beginning of rush hour had already arrived. The ground shook with the departure of a train. Once I had stood in this station as a body was carried off a car. People had murmured contradictorily about a heart attack, a knifing, and I remembered now the stretcher, with the sheet pulled up and the man obscured beneath it. I stood back, against the wall, willing the train to come.
At Twenty-Third Street I pushed out of the crowded car and made my way past well-groomed townhouses and canopied greengrocers to the bare industrial stretches nearer to the Hudson, where the wind blew hard and cold down the unsheltered avenues. Just off Eleventh Avenue I found the squat, functional building where Patrick’s firm was located. A name next to an entryway buzzer revealed that the company occupied the second floor. I stood gazing upward—Patrick might be only a dozen feet away from me right now, practically within reach of my outstretched arm. He might be sitting at a desk just above my head. I stood for a long time absorbing his presence but when I heard the elevator rumble toward the ground floor I took fright and exited the building without looking back.
People moved past me with their dogs and their groceries, dodging me and making sounds of annoyance, until I realized I had spent several minutes standing in the middle of the sidewalk. I began to ask passersby if they knew about a Buddhist center nearby, a place to meditate. Some people did not answer, others shrugged their ignorance, but after a while a woman wearing a colorful scarf stopped and gave me directions to the Chelsea Zen Center, three blocks away. I thanked her and hurried on.
The Chelsea Zen Center occupied a small storefront nestled unobtrusively between a shoe repair shop and a dentist’s, so unobtrusively that at first I passed it and had to double back. The interior, furnished with upholstered sofas and a coupl
e of low coffee tables, was as modest and casual as someone’s living room. A young man at a folding table told me that the evening meditation session was about to begin. I made to follow some other latecomers, but he tapped on a goldfish bowl full of five- and ten-dollar bills and said that a donation would be appreciated. I rummaged in my pocket and came up with a wadded bill. The door to the meditation room was propped open; people were sitting silently on mats or chatting quietly. There were rows of shoes and purses and knapsacks outside the door. I looked into the room but did not see Patrick. A man in a robe carrying a tall stick quietly shut the door, and I heard from within the sound of a high, pure bell. As I left the center I thought about retrieving my money from the goldfish bowl but the young man was still there, looking vigilant.
The subway I rode home was unfamiliar, packed to the doors, overheated. When I arrived home, fumbling for my key, I discovered a neat round hole in the outer door where the lock cylinder ought to have been. Startled, I gave the door a push and it swung heavily open. The vestibule door too had a hole through its middle. I wondered how long it would take before street people and vandals made the same discovery I had.
Fortunately my own apartment was locked up just as I’d left it, my rooms still private and secure. I bolted the door from the inside, took a few deep breaths, and went to make myself a cup of coffee. When I had drunk enough of it to calm my nerves I made a second one and placed it on the kitchen table opposite me. I moved the chair over as if inviting a guest to join me. Then I set about making two ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I put the second sandwich next to the second coffee cup. I ate standing up, watching the other place setting, and when I brought my dishes to the sink I brought the other dishes there as well. I cleaned up and went into my bedroom to get a pillow. I laid it on the living room floor and, removing my shoes, seated myself upon it, attempting to get into a cross-legged position. The best I could muster was a froglike arrangement that left my ankles dragging awkwardly on the floor. I straightened my back and conjured up the sound of that beautiful bell. I imagined that I was Patrick, his long legs folded under him, his fingers gently clasped. I imagined the quiet in his mind, his slow, calm breathing.