“Something in the way you
… moo-ve
Attracts me like no other
… loo-ver,”
and the flesh along his Adam’s apple twitched. Krieger whistled and applauded with the others when the song was over, but Franz could never quite tell whether his enthusiasm was patronizing—he understood how capable Krieger might be of such ingratitude; still, thought Franz, Peter was a good boy, he was good at heart, and if he happened to have bad taste enough to enjoy these stand-ins with the musicians, then bless him, and so be it. There was nothing evil in bad taste, unless you tried to pass yourself off as a connoisseur. Connoisseurship doesn’t wash, Franz had told Krieger, in a free country. This isn’t a free country, Krieger retorted. We’re going to have to agree to disagree; end of discussion. What discussion? countered Krieger; it was just a bunch of tangents.
For Krieger’s part, he had been on the road half the night before. He expedited the business at hand and drove through the day. He had done Franz a little favor, had to call into work sick in order to clear the time—but that was all right, he hated his job at the brokerage anyway, and there was already the prospect of moving on to another (parallel) field that would take him south, out of the country, consultant work in Central America, Belize; change of scene and (he thought) the chance to clean up his act some. Besides, Franz seemed—none of this was stated in so many words, but none of it was lost on Krieger, either—less and less enamored of his side business. He didn’t need the money. He didn’t want trouble. There was a hint, even before Krieger’d left to do this little-favor run, that it might be one of the last. Franz-the-frog had devoured enough flies and wished only to compose himself comfortably on his lily pad.
But he hadn’t heard the half of Krieger’s road stories; moreover there was the young lady, as Franz referred to her, with whom they had to concern themselves. One doesn’t arrive in Manhattan with only a few hundred dollars, no contacts, and no place to live without eliciting some serious sympathy, does one? Krieger did not think so. Franz sniffed, not disagreeing, lay back again into the couch, and recommenced picking his teeth with the corner of a dollar bill which he had folded into a triangle (a bad habit he had given up trying to break). One doesn’t, he said, true enough. What’s that have to do with me?
Hannah was twenty-four years old but she looked like a teenaged boy, skinny, short hair the color of brownstone, a downward cast to the eyes. She thanked Franz for the money Krieger had given her for her car, thanked Krieger once more for having picked her up—a hitchhiker broken down short of her destination—and stood, as she thought she was expected to, extending her hand to shake goodbye.
“Nothing of the sort,” while Krieger’s eyes, uncautious, swept across her sweatshirt, “Franzy here and I are going to help you get set up, aren’t we Franz.”
“I don’t know,” Franz replied, unfolding the dampened bill and sliding it back into the parqueted wooden box which sat on the heavy glass of the side table.
“She’s driven all the way from Kansas, straight through.”
“Not Kansas, Nebraska,” Hannah said.
“All the same.”
“Where’s that?” deadpanned Franz.
Hannah began to explain, but Krieger stopped her—it was just a joke. Bad joke.
“Consider it a favor to me,” he insisted, sitting on the arm of a Sheraton chair whose upholstery was crowded with huntsmen, retrievers, bolting geese. The joints of antique walnut sighed; Franz lifted a finger. Krieger got up, straightened his lips until they were set, a line with two dimpled ends which deepened as he went on, “Or to Franz. He could stand to learn a little about the great outdoors, all the man knows is interiors.”
“She can stay or go it’s up to her, isn’t it?”
“Nothing wrong with interiors,” she replied as Franz spoke, and watched him as he began to comb the thinning strands of reddish hair with the arms of a porcelain figurine, a ballerina with glass-lace tutu. His scalp was gray, entirely freckled. She thought that he looked like a nice man despite—despite what he looked like.
“Stay or go you don’t care? Come on, Franz, you’re not showing Hannah here a modicum of that theater-district hospitality you’re always telling me about.”
“Theater district, what?”
Krieger answered, smiling at Hannah, “You know, a little Jew York, Jew York? little demonstration of matriarchal concern?”
Hannah did get up, and said, “I think I’d better be off, really.”
“No please, stay, I don’t care,” Franz rose forward slightly. “Here, have a cognac.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Of course you drink,” Krieger said, pouring her wine from a jug. “This you’ll like it’s not so sugary, cognac’s no good for you, but wine builds the blood, enriches the phagocytes, something on that order—you ever hear about how Satan came to Noah? Noah was planting vines, Satan came, slew a lamb, a lion, a pig, and an ape, and told Noah he said, Noah, these here are the four ways you behave according to the amount of wine you drink, drink a little you act like a lamb, drink a lot you act like a pig, too much you’re a goddamn ape which adds of course considerable sympathy to the Darwinian approach but anyway—a little, a lamb. Give it a shot. Sit down.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want,” added Franz.
And if you’re a lion? wondered Hannah.
“You’d think we were talking about something very heavy here.” Krieger poured for himself, and Wrynn—“Francis?”
“I didn’t think that,” she said to the window into the neon night darkening over the potted ficus trees and heard the uninterrupted rumble which gave from the streets—such noise, like the air mutilated—and the trains rushing on heavy track below the streets. The city was all vaster, more prodigious than she remembered it to be, which hardly made sense given that she had grown up in the interim. When she was small it seemed small. But now? “Why not, all right,” she said, hoping she’d not come across prim.
“Why not?” Franz agreed as he reached into his breast pocket, pulled forth a coin and dropped it into the slot in the back of a shiny silver-plated pig that sat on the floor at his feet.
“Habit of his—if you own the bar you’ve got to buy your drinks or you end up with nothing but piss for property, right?” Krieger explained as he watched her take a sip, studied her with warm approval. “Not bad wine.”
“Mr. Krieger mentioned your restaurant and the possibility of work,” she started.
“Hannah, I told you to call me Peter, but look at this face, skin of a toad, I love this man and of course he’ll be happy to give you a job, but as I was trying to say it’s grunt-work that—”
“Peter?”
“But I do love your face, I’m being serious, I love this man. He’s got a special truss, a liver truss—”
“He does?” she said, amiable, trying to like the wine, which she didn’t think she did.
“I have no such thing.”
“Like a fitted torture girdle from the fifteen-sixteenth century or something, the thing cost a fortune, you can’t even tell he’s got it on, see? and that’s sheer fabric there, what is that shirt, Franz?” (turning to Hannah) “—old silk, I think it’d look better on you, do they have mulberries out in Kansas for the silkworms to spin in, funny-looking things, mulberry trees, twisty and ugly, but what those nasty worms do in them, very beautiful, hey Franz why don’t you take that shirt off and give it to Hannah, it’d look so great on her.”
“Peter?”
“Never mind, then she’d see the truss.”
“Miss? what’s your name again?”
“Hannah.”
“That’s a decent name, solid. Listen to me. When you get older you’ll understand you look into the mirror and you say what’s that? you say, that’s disgusting, that isn’t me, or it isn’t supposed to be me, it’s a horrid flesh-thing.”
Hannah nodded. Looked at Krieger.
“But under the truss?—god, Ha
nnah, just frightening—”
“Krieger.”
“Francis?”
“So shut up, already.”
There had been only peace and quiet when the car broke toward the shoulder of the road. Hannah slapped both palms against the steering wheel, turned off the ignition, and pushed the door open into the evening. The sun was low and brushed in a good hazel light so she could see that the independent front axle had come loose and this was why the car had lurched to such a precipitate stop, its left wheel, freed of the kingpin, having bolted toward the other lane as the right shot out to the shoulder. She gazed up and down the empty rural road in north Jersey and imagined the pleasure her uncle LeRoy—who surely had found the sententious note she had left for him before setting out on her journey back to New York—would have experienced if he were able to see her in this predicament. Off to see the wizard. Those were the last words of his she could remember. There was no wizard, ass-eyes. Of course she never said that, she seldom said anything to him. She just up and left.
She remembered thinking (it was a way to kill time—and she also thought, How deserted can a country road so near the metropolis be? where is everybody?): were this a cartoon on the big walnut-cabineted television in the front room of the farmhouse—that was left on all the time after mama Opal went away, the television, day and night, until they played the national anthem and even afterward there was snow on the screen to look at—the roadster would have split down the middle, each half careering forward, veering, zooming, zigzagging, kicking up great plumes of dust until in a cloud of curlicues and blurgits the two collided in a tremendous, orchestral racket, fusing each halfback together, maybe, leaving the driver—a wolf or a big rooster with a porkpie hat—in a daze, stick-figure birds going tweet-tweet-tweet on her shoulders. But, later, whenever she thought of this it seemed more something Krieger would have said, and in time she would come to wonder whether the thought hadn’t in fact been his.
Still, the car that had come around the curve in the dusk was a welcome sight. She had sat against the fender for not quite a full hour, her hands rubbing her shoulders self-consciously, and tried to crack her knuckles as the wind ruffled down into the deep pines. She waved her arms and the two beams crossed to the shoulder; she was about to meet Peter Krieger.
Such happenstance; then the ride into town across the George Washington Bridge and the extraordinary view down the west side of the island, the windows burning white in all the thousands of buildings which stood above the waterline and trees along the shore, down through the center of the city to a garage, a short walk, the marquees blazing in Times Square, into an anonymous facade and up an elevator to reach the highly decorated and overfurnished rooms of Franz Wrynn, there in his lavender pantsuit trimmed in lemon, and with a matching blouse parted like curtains to reveal a chest featureless except for the delicate St. Christopher medal. Franz, yawning and nodding. Uncle would have looked upon all this and perhaps he would have sighed, feigned disgust or alarm, but withdrawn somehow, withdrawn into some inner room where the noise could not be heard, gone to oil his rifles, or spit-polish the glass eyes in the heads of his trophy collection, the antelope, the wolverine.
Krieger had bought the car “on the spot” for three hundred dollars and paid her in cash. When he learned that Hannah was carrying a .44 Smith & Wesson revolver he’d bought it, too. Hannah was grateful he hadn’t asked her what she was doing with it. She had taken it from uncle LeRoy, knowing the while she would probably have no real use for it, although she explained to herself that a woman alone on the road might need to defend herself. This had bothered her through three states. It didn’t bother her now.
After, came questions. No, Hannah didn’t have a place to stay in New York, she had driven through from Babylon but she was born in New York and raised there at least until she was nine-ten somewhere in there when she and her mother Opal moved out West. No, presumably her father was still living, she’d have no real way of knowing she guessed that that was one of the reasons she was here although now that she got closer, well, and her mother never talked about him much and when she did the story seemed to skip and slide, never quite fitting together. Always slipping around at its own pleasure, or to avoid its own pain. Her father’s name was Nicholas and, yes, one of the reasons she had come to New York was to try to find him.
“Nicholas,” Krieger said. “Patron saint of children, wolves and pawnbrokers—so, you’re a runaway.”
“What about let’s talk about you for a while?”
“Boring.”
“I doubt it.”
“Believe me, very boring.”
“You grew up in New York?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Come on.”
“I mean it. I don’t remember. It was too boring.”
Hannah saw that the pines had given way to great flats, and that these were giving way to houses in rows and buildings side by side, up and up. Don’t press him, she thought.
The wine was working.
“Yes, it’s good wine,” Hannah heard herself admit. She kept thinking that she ought to be asking more questions, but things seemed settled, even calm, as Franz yawned again. Krieger translated the yawn and Hannah’s compliment, and didn’t want the evening to die yet, so moved into an explanation of how Franz adored the movie I Am Curious (Yellow), how he had seen it seventeen times, although it was only released the month before, and was anxious for the “blue” version to be released—yellow and blue being the two colors in the Swedish flag—yellow being his favorite color after green, green being the color of Emerald City in his other favorite movie, the one Judy was born for, the one she could never again live up to and so began to punch herself (shoot up the smack) almost as self-inflicted punishment (Franz loved Judy and Dorothy, and saw in Lena, the star of this new soft-porn classic, a parallel and a friend), yellow and blue making green to finish out the three—yellow sun, blue sky, green earth.
He was coaxed back to life, as Krieger expected him to be, at the broaching of the topic.
“I followed that beastly obscenity trial blow for blow, there was poor Vilgot forced to defend himself by claiming that Lena didn’t actually go down on Börje, I mean really, gosh did her lips actually touch his weenie? excuse me please do excuse me but that poor Vilgot had to say no at the trial, no ladies and gentlemen her lips were a couple of millimeters away from … me, it, my thing. But honey, I know. I saw it with my own two peepers. She blows him like a horn, believe you me.”
“Like Gabriel?” Krieger smirked.
“I think he’s had too much to drink,” Hannah suggested.
“Franz here, he’s a little direct, a little crass, you’ll bear with him I hope, plus not much of a drinker it’s true,” Krieger whispered to Hannah, then said aloud, “Yes lord, Peter Lindgren, Börje Ahlstedt, Magnus Nilsson, Franz loves them all.”
“I see,” Hannah assented, wondering if this meant—in its own way—she had the job at the restaurant (they were being awfully open, friendly, whatever, weren’t they?).
“Man alive does he get licked. I met one of those darling sound assistants when the trial was on last year, Tage Sjöborg, real sweetie pie,” Franz continued, fingers flouncing at the starchy Byron collar.
“Franzy’s made a special study of Swedish and during the war protest scenes …”
“Krieger here? didn’t know a thing. I had to explain everything to him, Vägra Militär Vämplikt! you know what that means?”
“No,” Hannah said. The room had begun to whirl, its details coming more pointed at her while the whole, what the details made up, became blunted. So this is why they called it tipsy, it wasn’t so awful—she certainly wasn’t going to let them know; closed her eyes, opened them, and matters were stable and restored.
“Refuse military service. And Vägra Däda? Defend yourself by nonviolence. Ulla’s lines at the Institute: negotiation, right? then meditation, demonstrations, sit-ins, lie-ins—”
“Lie-ins are Fr
anzy’s favorite kind,” Krieger said, half wishing he had let him fall asleep on the couch.
“Shush—strikes, counterdemonstrations, hunger strikes, sabotage, economic and social boycotts, tax refusal, civil disobedience, paralysis of the entire society …”
“Most of all Francis here is in love with Lena.”
“Lena who?” Hannah asked, surprised.
“First time he got me to go see the thing he got mad at me about it.”
“Oh heavens, don’t her tell that.”
Krieger poured Hannah more wine: its acid was lessened, she discovered, if she drank it by gulping, as she might if it were water; also, this pleasant whirling sensation reduced the substantiality of both her situation and her companions.
“A toast,” she said. “To my uncle.”
“To her uncle,” the older man echoed, unable to slow his friend.
“—Franz here is pretty up front about his odd proclivities but when we came out and he was going on and on about this Lena I said, But that delicious blond girl, Franzy tell me, I mean I don’t get it. And he said, he said, Get? what’s there to get? Her, I said, I mean you know? Like, so Franzy’s defending her see, She’s so beautiful, so brilliant, her consciousness, etcetera, and I said, Franz, no but I mean the”—Krieger cupped his hands at his chest as Wrynn choked, head thrown back—“you know, the uhmm … I mean, forgive me Hannah, but it’s just the way it went down and here he is going on and on, Listen baby Lena she’s the most—”
Come Sunday Page 13