“That’s not how I talk.”
“Sure it is, Lena oh she’s top-drawer.”
“What bosh.”
“And he won’t listen to me, I’m saying Franzy they’re out to here there’s no getting around them I would’ve thought … and he says, Lena—and he’s starting to get mad now, see—Lena can do no wrong. Puppy, I say, it’s not a matter of doing wrong all I am saying is I would have thought Lena was just a tad zaftig for a man of your special and refined tastes, so you know what we do? we go straight back into the theater, see it again.”
“And guess who paid for the tickets again?”
“You sure did and another tub of buttered popcorn. So I notice while we’re watching he’s pretty quiet this time, no translating from Swedish or any of that shit and when we get to the scene where Börje and Lena attempt to make love in a hitherto unknown position up in the Rumskulla oak tree, biggest tree in Europe, forty or fifty feet circumference, I see Franz bending forward in his seat to read the captions.”
“She doesn’t need to hear all this,” Franz asserted, softening and having surmised the point of Krieger’s story, or at least the object of its abstract direction. He’d spilled some wine down his front. Annoying, that.
“Börje is talking about how she’s slept with twenty-three guys,” Krieger went on, “and Lena answers, Yes but the first nineteen weren’t any fun, Börje says, Why? and she answers, quote, I slept with them because they wanted to sleep with me, so that they could have orgasms. I couldn’t believe that anybody could like me the way I look: drooping breasts, big belly, fat. Like, it was as if Franzy’d never seen the movie before. He was outraged. I thought, The man’s gonna have a cow right here in front of us all but instead, he got up and walked out.”
“This is such slander, I wasn’t outraged I was tired,” Franz said, suddenly weary.
Out the corner of his eye Krieger took in Hannah; she seemed unflustered, unmoved by the level of discourse tested on her. Was she wise and bored? or slow?—no, not with those fast-flicking irises she wasn’t slow. Impressive, the eyes, nonpareil, almonds, like they are supposed to be, like he’d read they were supposed to be shaped, classic purity in this runaway’s face. And the dirt under her nails was endearing. A soldier, she. To whom one might defer, under the erratic modulations of wine perhaps, elsewise. He quickly continued.
“Franz Wrynn tired of I Am Curious (Yellow)? Forget it. What’d happened was that he’d managed to watch it through all those times without once noting Lena’s two most substantial—what to call them—baby’s blessings. What is that great one about the phallus? America’s favorite one-eyed matinee movie idol?”
“She’s got beautiful eyes.”
“Hannah?”
“No, I mean, but I meant Lena.”
“What color are they?”
“The girl here doesn’t care, and neither do I, it’s getting late.”
“It is,” Hannah allowed, setting down her glass.
“Some more,” Krieger reached to pour. “He hasn’t been back to see it since, Franz hasn’t.”
“Well hell that was only last week, I think they’re blue.”
“What?”
“Her eyes, they’re blue.”
“You were going every night, though, and no, they’re not blue.”
“It’s a great film and I’d go see it now.”
“Why don’t you take Hannah here?”
“Listen,” said Hannah.
Krieger jerked his head toward Wrynn, while talking to Hannah, “I bet he can’t sit through the whole thing sentient and alert.”
“Listen.”
“Those lovely young pouches wagging and all that soft female skin, why, you’ll have nightmares for a month.”
“Get your jacket,” Franz instructed Hannah.
“I don’t have one.”
“Francis can buy you one on the way you know that leather shop get you a little something in suede with fringe down the sleeves?”
Hannah raised her voice, “Do I get this job or what?”
“You want that?” Krieger interjected.
“Well. Yes.”
“You drive all the way from Kansas to New York so that you can become a waitress?”
“Obviously, no, but it’s a—I need somewhere to start.”
“Well then you’ve got it, right Franz.”
“I don’t care.”
“You got it, Hannah. But we’ll talk later. I’ve got a much better idea than you working in a sweat-job like that. It’s like a noose around your neck. Look at me, upstanding white-collar corporate slug fresh out of college, foreign travel ahead the promise of amenities and promotion, and where will it all get me? absolutely nowhere is where and you think I don’t know it. You have got to be born like Wrynn here have a little inheritance to work with not necessarily Social Register, not necessarily outfitted with fashionable equipment like family crest embroidered tuxedo slippers and a herd of polo ponies you slingshot from Saratoga to Palm Beach, summer, winter, summer, winter, up and down the pajama and cocktail circuit, but, do a little this little that to be free, stay outside the system.”
“Krieger’s got a thing about polo ponies,” Franz said.
“That may be but meantime, as you know I’m broke and so … the job?”
“You heard the man, you’re in, but as I say, we’ll talk.”
“Hey you, whatsername, Hannah,” Franz called, having left the room and returned, his tone more serious, his face fallen.
Hannah answered, “Yes?”
“Let’s do a raincheck on the movie.”
“See there, he’s already backing out.”
“I’ve been up all night three nights running.”
“What did I tell you?”
“You want her to see it so bad why don’t you take her?”
“Here’s a citizen fresh in from the Bible Belt, amber waves of grain, and you’re telling me you’d rather put on that white-noise machine of yours and go beddy than introduce her to the big city? It’s a total dereliction of duty.”
“What about you? It makes more sense for you to take her.”
“Can’t. I’ve got something going and anyway I’ll see Hannah later, right?”
“Oh, let’s go,” Franz sighed.
“There’s the spirit. You’ll love it, Hannah.”
She had seen movies at the theater where she’d worked, but never one with subtitles, nor one where the screen was covered in so much flesh. There was the exhilaration of being where she was, the rush of the exotic, simply to be sitting there next to this stranger, and of being a stranger herself, come all this distance on her own, relying on fate and nerves to see her through—and there was the exhilaration too of watching Lena whom Hannah thought different from any character she had ever seen back in Babylon, Nebraska, on film or off, since no one, with the possible exception of mama Opal, had ever shown so much openness and will. She could not follow the sequencing, a difficulty exacerbated by the demands of shifting focus from caption to action, and so she surrendered to the actress and her mellifluous if incomprehensible Swedish, and knew that while she herself could never do some of those things that Lena did—it was sad to see her on the floor, lying there on her side, crying, sucking her thumb, while that man whose body looked thin like James Riding’s took her from behind, his hips pumping with devastating insistence, some kind of sex machine—Lena was surely very much alive, was committed to being alive, and protesting against anything that might jeopardize it. So engrossed was Hannah it was not until the famous scene with the two-thousand-year-old oak that she remembered Franz was sitting next to her. His eyes were closed. From the grimace on the face it seemed unlikely he was asleep but Lena’s anguished cries, made the more pathetic through the distortion caused by a tear in one of the speakers, distracted her. When Hannah looked up she saw Lena naked, rushing across an indistinct space, a rifle held waist-high, and she closed her own eyes against the violence which was about to follow.
Franz’s lips fluttered as he snored. The expected explosion never came. Hannah glanced up; Lena was once again in someone’s arms, it hardly mattered whose.
When the credits ran and the lights came up Hannah could see that Franz was indeed asleep. She tapped him on the shoulder but elicited only a shift of position and a faint groan; the diamond stickpin on his mackintosh rose and wearily sank, and she watched him for a while as the audience, talking and laughing, wrapped up in their own concerns, left their seats. She wondered how a person could come to this—not that he was destitute (as was she) or that he wanted pity (neither did she). The wrinkles which settled across the polish of his forehead were not unlike those she remembered her father Nicky having: these were city lines. The city clawed your skin right off you, abraded it along the planes most exposed to its invisible carbonic razors, the sulfur, soot, the particles that lay on your skin which when you sweated were not washed away but leached out, spread, and absorbed right back in. She searched the faces of all the others (most had gone—a few couples straggled) and saw how tired everyone was. That was it. More than the city working you over from without, it could exhaust you, within. She resolved at that moment never to be worn out by it, not at least within. Franz here needed a week’s sleep. She pulled the stickpin from his lapel and, careful not to disturb him, slipped it into his breast pocket, so that no one would be tempted to steal it from him.
Out under the marquee the street dissolved inside a spring fog. Puddles to catch the prismatic abundance already gathered in broken sections of the sidewalk. The harbor smell—fishy and warm—revived a remembrance of her childhood here, and while her mother Opal never allowed her to wander unaccompanied in the city, Hannah found that she possessed an uncanny, almost innate sense of direction that led her to Krieger’s door downtown, even though his instructions about how to come home from the theater were vaguely given, interspersed with more ideas about Lena, Börje and their tree. In the narrow foyer she pressed the button labeled PBK and was buzzed in without having to identify herself over the intercom. The apartment was on the top floor, a floor-through barbells flat—two rooms, one front, one back, and a connecting hall.
Krieger opened the door and smiled. Down the corridor inside the apartment Hannah could hear music. “I can come back later,” she began.
“Don’t be ridiculous, come on in, start getting it into your head that this is home, all right? this is where you’re staying until you’re set up.”
Hannah could see the girl was dancing alone, singing along—“How sweet it is to be loved by you”—off-key, locked in vigilant conspiracy with herself to keep some emotional skin stretched between what was inside and what outside (or so it seemed to Hannah; once more, inside, outside). She stared at her, an apparition at the end of the corridor, and felt Krieger’s fingers, as they had her by the wrist, “So did Franzy make it through?”
Hannah told him.
“You mean you left him in the theater sleeping?”
“I didn’t want to bother him.”
“Love it, I love it.”
She hadn’t meant to sound as defensive as she did when she said, “I used to work in a moviehouse and Mr. Johnson my boss, he always let people sleep there all night if they needed,” but the words had already escaped. It was perhaps her first indication of the goodness, or at least impassionate cool, Krieger was at any moment capable of, when rather than take advantage of this lapse (how quickly New York had her second-guessing herself, apperceiving her moves and words to measure them against all potential responses—what was this?) he let the matter drop, even digressed, to smooth Hannah’s embarrassment.
“Who was it said, New York is not America?” he said, then raising his voice, “Hey, Mona?”
“Huh,” she answered.
“Mona, meet Hannah.”
“Huh?” louder.
The prudent choice, Hannah had already come to conclude, would be to leave, at once, even before another colorful if unassimilable piece in the Krieger puzzle was presented. Nebraska, its landscape of sky which could only exaggerate the events that took place beneath its great blueness, seemed sufficiently far away as to be on another planet altogether, viewed from the vantage of Krieger’s place. What an insufficient villain uncle would seem here, she realized. Here all was amplified. Krieger was right. It was as if New York were an echo chamber and all the voices of America—perhaps all the voices talking and talking in the world—were thrown by some ventriloquism into this one place. Krieger was shouting. She had never seen eyes like his before. They were merry, fractious. The fingers had stayed at her wrist, which she withdrew once she’d noticed.
“Come here I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
Mona continued dancing, shoulder-length ironed-straight hair flung erratic by her self-absorbed head shaking. She had bangs that lifted and dropped on her smooth forehead. Hannah thought of Lena, but Mona was the finest filament by comparison; her short sleeveless paisley dress twisted on the tall, pipestem body. Her arms were graceful, her fragile knees knocked as she dipped and thrust her pelvis to the bass line.
“Come on,” Krieger said.
Hannah followed him into the front room, which was spare. A lamp in a corner, the shade crooked. Some pillows, a couch, oval table.
“Mona, this is Hannah.”
“Huh?”
“This is my new friend Hannah, she went to see I Am Curious with Wrynn tonight left him there sleeping when the thing was over.”
“Yall left him there?” she drawled.
“Left him there, comatose,” he reiterated.
Mona pondered this, limbs caught in a tableau vivant. “Far out,” she pronounced and began to dance again.
“I wasn’t trying to do anything that would hurt him, just—”
Krieger fastened a hand to Hannah’s shoulder, “Don’t give it two more thoughts, Hannah. Franzy’s a zoological study, protozoological study, ineradicable as a cockroach, creature Linnaeus would have paid a lot of shekels to get a good gander at under his microscope. Look; I’ve left him myself in places a hell of a lot worse than the theater, he always shows up next day unscathed. Anyway, you liked the movie? that’s all that matters. Come here,” and led her back into the bedroom, incense-laden with a waterbed illuminated under black lights positioned over the headboard and an even dimmer source from the tropical fish tank.
“Maybe I’d better go back and make sure he’s all right.”
Ignoring her, Krieger said, “You sleep in here tonight.”
“The couch’s fine.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Listen, I’ve got to leave early in the morning and there’s no point waking you up. I’ll take the couch, be back in a couple days, here’s the spare set of keys, eat whatever you find in the icebox. We’ll talk when I get back.”
Was it possible Hannah felt disappointed? “What about her?”
“Mona? she’s my friend.”
What was the draw? she wondered.
“Business associate, really.”
“What about the restaurant?”
“Twenty questions—you really interested in being a slave?”
“No, I need the money.”
Avuncularly, “Give it a whirl. No substitute for experience, right? My aunt, she was the one who brought me up, she went overseas only once in her life and all she came back with from her travels was an ugly little ashtray, didn’t even smoke, but the ashtray had the inscription in the dish—chi non va non vede chi non prova non crede—who goes not will not see, who does not try will not believe.”
Hannah had been listening to the music. “Do I need special clothes?” peering back down at the other girl, and thinking that it would be something to be that uninhibited, free; no, not free, but—no, it was dumb.
Krieger scowled, then smiled.
“How would I know? They wrap a cute apron around your waist shove stacks of dirty dishes at you, you come home stinking
somewhere between fra diavolo and pesto, and suddenly you’re straight out of Macbeth—multitudinous stench of clams undined—you can’t wash it off and the multitudinous seas really are incarnadined, but with tomatoes instead of blood. But anyway we’ll talk, goodnight …” and after fixing her eye he left the bedroom, shutting the door behind.
The movement much later which broke in on her sleep passed underneath her body, thrusting in a solid wave first her hips, raising them as her head and feet dropped to configure with the reverberating bed. Her shoulders drawn she was lolled to right, level, and the silent mass returned below to resurrect her head and by cross-wave patterns sink stomach, buffet hips, then thighs and feet just as the torso began to rise once more. When this wave broke at the far side of the mattress a modest gurgling sound was heard before it surged back, swelling under her in more confused combinations. He was outlined against the fish tank (alive with yellow tangs and triggers) crawling toward her—wave-tossed—on his hands and knees.
“Hannah?”
She did say “What?” as she stretched her hand out to prevent him from falling on top of her, but he was immediately in her arms murmuring, kissing her along the hollow of her shoulder, her skin moist and sweet-smelling. He licked her forehead, smooth as paper, and his head moved down upon hers, his tongue exploring until it found her mouth where it drove in deep and anxious. Hannah tried to edge away. Her moaning like the water beneath them came in surges and his hands had both of her frail legs lightly under his own as he separated them. He maneuvered his mouth away and began to tongue her ear. She wondered why she didn’t resist him more. The hands at her narrow back felt good as he pulled up her sweatshirt and lifted her up like a child, licked along her ribbed chest in search of breasts. But then the hands seemed to get rough, the teeth at her navel oddly abrasive, and Hannah began to withdraw in breaths, not words which Krieger could understand if he were listening (wasn’t); instead, he acted against her own panic which had grown. He got her unlacy underpants down and was astride her just as she managed to conjure up an image of Nicholas, mama Opal, a skating rink—no, a roller rink, ruckus over that floor, worn like glass from the turning rubber wheels on the skates and drowned in a calliopelike music which bled from speakers hung from the ceiling in every corner.
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