by Mark Fishman
He lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke that quickly blew away. He looked at the fronts of apartment houses that used to be plain, single family houses and the filthy doorways and the entrances scrubbed clean, windows open wide and shutters closed, a couple of air conditioning units that stuck out of a couple of lucky windows.
There was a four-story brick building up the street. A man stood framed in a window with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking at the morning sky and daydreaming and between sips he rubbed sleep from his eyes with a soft, barely awakened fist. In another window a woman studied her fingernails, then looked down at Loomis Street. In the window above her a man drank from a slim, half-pint bottle clasped in his hand. He wore a blank expression on his sleep-lined face.
The rearing outlines of roofs and chimneys slanted up against the sky. Television antennas and a few satellite dishes perched precariously on the roofs. A ruined two-story house leaned unhappily on its foundation like a block of Swiss cheese, with drill holes punched in the wood and pieces of plaster and brick cracked out of its ground floor walls.
Aoyama kept his head up, smoked indifferently while watching the street, looked like he was forming a mental picture of nothing. He squinted as a thread of smoke went into his eyes. He pinched the cigarette with his fingers and snapped it out in front of him. Okay, he said to himself.
He went down the wooden steps to the sidewalk, stretched, and looked up and down Loomis Street. A man came out of a dingy restaurant wiping eggs and coffee off his lips with his sleeve, then started whistling. Aoyama hated people who whistled as much as he hated people who sang to themselves. He wanted to kick the guy around the block. When they could see each other’s face, the man gave him a warm and generous smile. Aoyama didn’t hold the whistling against him.
He looked up at the few clouds that hung in the sky, weighty and confident like downy, feminine, lily-white buttocks. He wanted to squeeze them, but they were way out of reach like the pure, uninterrupted peacock-blue silkiness of sky spread out behind them. Aoyama brushed cigarette ashes off the sleeve of his raincoat, then started walking up Loomis past the two-story half-decaying house the color of broom-weed that showed plenty of partly exposed rusted iron rods in the fissures where crumbling walls had once been firmly joined.
[ 28 ]
The Venetian blinds in Shimura’s office were raised on the garish neon of nighttime at twenty minutes after ten. Humidity streamed through the open windows on a breeze that ruffled a stack of papers on his desk.
Pohl sat in a chair facing Shimura, nervously tapping his fingers on the armrest. He puffed on a cigarette, turning its coal into an angry glow. A trail of smoke climbed in front of his eyes. Shimura put the phone receiver down, leaned back in his chair. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth.
“Another night, same thing. He’s doing what he’s done every night. Anyway, I’ve got someone following him until he goes home,” Shimura said, trying to sound positive.
Pohl wasn’t listening to him because the only thing he heard was a nagging voice in his own head that told him he’d never have a chance to tell Angela how much he loved her and that he might as well throw himself out of a window.
“She hasn’t answered the phone for a week,” he said, putting a whine into his voice. “I want to marry her, Shimura. I want the same thing Kawamura’s got with Asami. Just like you told me. Why can’t I have what Kawamura has?” He pulled at the cigarette. “You’ve got to find her.”
“There’s nothing on Burnett that puts him with Angela, not now, not anymore,” Shimura explained.
“Tell me, again.”
“A witness, a woman who lives in the same building as Angela, saw Burnett on more than one occasion enter the building and climb the stairs to Angela’s floor. We showed her two photographs of Burnett. The woman confirmed it. She lives on the floor below Angela, and she crossed him on the stairs going up, she waited, looked through the banister, saw him at her door, heard him knock at the door and saw Angela open it.”
Pohl nodded, crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. The breeze blew smoke back in his face. He got up, paced back and forth in the small office spending more time avoiding furniture than walking in a straight line. He stopped behind the chair he’d been sitting in. He gripped the glistening black wood.
Nothing happened. Pohl just stood there, his face pale and expressionless in the glow of lamplight.
Shimura forced a smile. He didn’t know what to tell him because there was nothing to say that would ease the pain. He wanted to help Pohl, they’d been friends for a long time. He wasn’t going to argue about whether or not Pohl’s idea of marrying Angela was a good idea or had anything to do with reality, or if Angela, on her side of it, was even considering marriage.
“Finally, I made up my mind,” Pohl said, “and now she’s gone.”
Shimura nodded. “Sit down, Burt.”
“So it was Burnett who was with her the night I showed up and she wasn’t alone,” Pohl said. “Well, just tell me one thing. Do I have to put up with it?”
“He hasn’t seen her in more than a week.”
Shimura reached for a thermos of black tea. He poured a cup and offered it to Pohl.
“I made the identification for you,” he said. “It was Burnett, but now he’s out of the picture. Leave it alone, Burt — for your own good.”
Pohl didn’t see the cup of tea because his eyes were staring out the window at the skyline. His mind was racing but he wasn’t in gear. And then, his voice low, the words coming slowly, he said: “All right, that’s one thing. And the other is what’s happened to her.”
The phone rang. Shimura put the cup of tea down and picked up the receiver. He listened without saying anything. Pohl fingered another cigarette but didn’t light it. Shimura cradled the receiver, poured himself a cup of tea, sipped it, kept on listening. Pohl’s complete attention was on Shimura.
Shimura’s tone was technical as he said: “Did you do what I asked you to do?” He paused. “Okay. That’s right. Go on home.”
He hung up, took another sip of tea, put the cup down. He leaned back in the chair, pushed it away from the desk, crossed his legs and folded his arms.
[ 29 ]
Violet got out of the taxi and went straight for the doors of the hotel bar on upper Jackson Street. There were people walking in both directions on the sidewalk past the entrance through the glow of streetlights, and some of them turned their heads to look at her. She walked that better-than-average walk swinging her narrow hips enough to make her skirt ripple like water in a breeze. The door swung shut behind her. Just after the checkroom she stopped and looked around the bar as the waiters and barmen smiled and nodded at her.
She went over to an empty, burgundy leather armchair at a low, round table and sat down facing the bar. She was going to wash away her Burnett troubles with a lot of alcohol. She crossed her legs slowly, deliberately, and the skirt slid up her thigh. A waiter brought her a lemon vodka and ice.
There were seven low, round tables in the room, a lucky number for the house, and five barstools at the bar. Four tables were occupied, three barstools had customers sitting on them. Seven, again. She shut her eyes while she took a sip. Lemon vodka and ice felt cool moving down her throat. She opened her eyes. The walls and ceiling and furniture were mahogany. The room was softly lit by wall sconces that pointed their warm flamelike bulbs at the ceiling.
The dining room adjacent to the bar was half-filled, a jazz trio played out of a corner to the clatter of knives and forks on porcelain. A waiter carried a tray of drinks from the bar to the dining room. Violet sipped her vodka, fingered the hem of her skirt. Her head was down but her eyes looked furtively at the customers at the bar.
Her upward gaze caught the back of a man’s head just above his neatly shaved neck. That was a start, the shaved neck was clean, there was plenty of messy blonde hair above it, and she liked the shape of his head. The sting of her gaze made him turn around. He looked at the woman whose eyes
bored into him.
Violet saw the soft gray eyes in the soft light because there was some kind of glow behind them that shone at her. His shoulders were broad but he wasn’t a wide man. He wore a gray suit with a vertical suggestion of violet, a white shirt with an open collar. He pushed his hand through his hair, turned his back to her.
A cigarette burned in the ashtray in front of him. He put it between his lips and took a drag, crushed it out. His glass was empty, he ordered another drink from the bartender, who poured a whisky with ice and set it down on the bar in front of the man. He stared blankly at the cracked ice floating in the whisky, raised the glass and took a mouthful of it. Then he felt the heat again at the back of his neck from a pair of eyes across the room. He swung around on the barstool and his mouth was curved in a smile and his gray eyes were very hot and intent. He met the gaze of the woman staring at him.
He extracted a cigarette from the pack on the bar and lit it. He inhaled deeply, blew a cone of smoke at the mahogany ceiling. He climbed off the barstool with the drink in his hand and went to the table where the woman sat looking up at him. Half her face was in shadow, but the half he saw told him he’d like how all of it would look in full light. And there was the way she was eyeing him.
Violet uncrossed her legs, scratched the skin under the hem of her skirt, and inched the skirt further up her thighs. She kept her eyes fixed on the man standing in front of her. She liked how he looked at her. And so that was it. She nodded emphatically. He sat across from her at the low, round table. It was just as clear and simple as that.
[ 30 ]
Pohl left the building with Shimura. At the exit they said goodnight. Shimura turned to the right and headed for his car. Pohl stood still, listening. He heard Shimura start his car in the vacant lot alongside the building. He frowned, thinking of Angela. His bladder felt like it was going to burst from all the black tea he’d drunk with Shimura.
The headlights of Shimura’s car swept out into the street on the downtown emptiness of night. Pohl wanted to pull the mild night calm down deeply to his lungs but his worrying got in the way, and he turned left and walked gloomily down the sidewalk through evenly spaced circles of light cast by streetlamps. There was a bus stop a few blocks away. He walked slowly, hesitantly toward it, but he really didn’t feel like going home and he wanted the walk to last as long as possible.
He came to a karaoke bar and went in, walking the length of it to the back where there was a toilet and a public phone. He let out a sigh while he emptied his bladder, then in front of the mirror he looked at himself. He put his fingers gently against the healing bruises on the left side of his face where the big man’s fist had crashed into him. The beating had taken his mind off Angela for about an hour, and by the time he’d taken the ice pack out of the freezer at home he was at it again, worrying.
There weren’t many people at the bar. The bartender was dozing standing up. Pohl didn’t order a drink. No one even looked at him as he moved past them to the door and walked out. He went on past the bus stop. The street was almost empty. His mood was a mixture of sadness and anger. He didn’t believe that Burnett was out of it no matter what Shimura had said. He couldn’t stop all the questions swimming around in his head. He was fed up with himself. He shut his eyes, trying to erase some of it from his mind. He opened them, winced and stiffened. He crossed the intersection, went on walking. Then he thought of Violet.
He didn’t know her, but he’d learned enough from Shimura to know that she was an irresistible force that made things difficult for anyone who got in her way, and he began to wonder whether or not Angela had been an obstacle and if Violet was somehow involved in the fact that he didn’t have word from Angela for days, and he wondered if Violet thought Burnett was serious about Angela.
Maybe Angela was serious about Burnett. He hadn’t thought of that. Pohl shook his head, his stomach was tied up in knots. But his mind took it further than competition between two women for a man and finished with an ugly picture of Violet taking Angela out of this world. Now he really wasn’t feeling very good with the taste of death in his mouth. Violet might have killed her. He was chasing after some kind of logic and what he’d come up with didn’t make any sense to him.
His mouth clamped shut, he went on walking until he tripped on the uneven sidewalk. Pohl smiled. He leaned against a lamppost and lit a cigarette. He stood there watching the street, the people, the cars, and a late-night bus pull away from the curb. He took a drag on the cigarette. He went on dragging at it until it was down to a stub, hurled the stub to the sidewalk and stepped on it.
The bar where he’d gone to urinate, the street where he’d tripped on the sidewalk, and the last cigarette he’d smoked were far behind him now because he was making his way down Prospect, heading toward Angela’s place, with her apartment house not far away on Lake Street in the shadowy places between streetlights.
Pohl found a suitable doorway, stepped into its darkness and leaned against the protruding edge of the doorframe, waiting. He watched the entrance of Angela’s building, knowing it was useless to wait for her because she’d disappeared but so determined to see her that what made sense for someone else didn’t matter to him. He lit a cigarette. He was going to wait until the sky brightened enough to tell him to go home.
[ 31 ]
Shimura turned the steering wheel to the right, brought the car to the curb. He was a half-block from where he lived on Ruby Avenue. He walked to the all-night corner market at Ruby and 12th. There was a middle-aged man with dark skin and dark hair and bright brown eyes and a beer bottle in one hand, standing in front of the vegetables laid out in rows next to the refrigerator filled with bottles of sparkling water, fruit juice, soda and ice-cold beer. Shimura opened the glass door and picked up two bottles of sparkling water.
The middle-aged man gathered handfuls of green beans and dumped them in a plastic bag and tied the bag shut, counted out a half-dozen carrots and dropped them in another bag, then selected four ripe tomatoes. He picked up a box of macaroni. Shimura watched him out of the corner of an eye, paid for the bottled water, added some change for a late edition newspaper and stood in front of the market looking at the front page.
What he read said nothing new to him, there was nothing new to tell in the world, now as then, except maybe the location was new, where something happened, or the people involved in what happened were different people, and whatever was behind it all, one way or another, the reason was always the same, it was just one thing, and it would always be just one thing, and that one thing was really two things rolled into one, the most important of them was money, and the other was sex. Shimura looked up from the newspaper at the man leaving the market with his macaroni, vegetables, and a bottle of beer.
[ 32 ]
Pohl looked down at the dozen cigarette butts at his feet. He pushed them with the edge of his shoe, stepped out of the doorway to the sidewalk and started down the street. He looked over his shoulder at the entrance to Angela’s building. A taxi pulled up, a man got out and went into the building. There had been no sign of Angela. A van delivering dry cleaning turned the corner in front of Pohl. He thought about sleep. At last he was looking forward to going home.
A battered red car was parked every night in front of his apartment building on Fourteenth Street and he saw it now as he wearily rounded the corner. At the same time he spotted the car he saw the man he’d collided with the night he’d seen Angela perform for Burnett.
The man walked along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Pohl crossed the street, moved slowly toward him. The early morning light poured lavender into a yellowish-gray sky. The man was smoking a cigar. He came to a stop in front of Pohl, who stared at him. The man wore a loose, turquoise-blue silk shirt that hung over the waistband of his wide trousers. He looked Pohl up and down, smiled at him as he chewed on the end of the cigar. Thick smoke swirled up in front of his face. Pohl couldn’t swallow the coincidence.
“This tickles me,”
the man said. “It’s really funny.”
“I don’t want to know anything.” Pohl was cautious.
“So, we meet again,” the man stated flatly.
“No objection?” Pohl remembered the words the man had said the first time they’d met.
“Know where I’ve been?”
“Not again. Don’t tell me,” Pohl said.
“It’s what I like to do.”
“I asked you politely.”
“I work a lot,” he confided. “I spend my money the way I want to spend it.”
“That’s not my business.”
“Fucking is the best thing I can think of doing.” The man exhaled a cloud of smoke, grinning. “I’ve got the right to do it because I’ve got the money to pay for it.”
Pohl turned away from him, crossed the street, heading for the battered red car. He leaned against the fender, stared at nothing. The man followed him, stood in front of him, waved his hand in front of Pohl’s face.
“I was just fucking,” the man said. “Nobody’s going to bite you. We’re having a conversation. Do you hear me?”
Pohl snapped out of it, his gaze with a parade of questions in his eyes returned to the man in front of him.
The man’s face glowed with a healthy complexion, the cigar stuck straight out of his mouth between thick, pinkish lips. A smile worked its way onto the lips, a perceptive smile that narrowed his eyes.
“Let me answer one of them.”
“One of them, what?” Pohl asked.
“Questions.”
Pohl blinked, folded his arms across his chest and stared straight ahead.
“I’m here to tell you all your worrying is for nothing,” the man said. “Fucking is what you want. It’s the solution to everything.”
Pohl opened his mouth to say something, and his mouth stayed open, but no sound came out. The man reached out, put a warm, human hand on Pohl’s shoulder, then turned and walked away. A cloud of cigar smoke trailed up over the man’s head. Pohl looked at it, and it told him there would be trouble if he didn’t find Angela because she was the fire that got him going and he was the smoldering smoke that came from it, and without her he didn’t exist. He pushed away from the red car, went to the entrance of his building, opened the door and let it swing shut behind him.