"But I don't owe that Sheeny nothin' really. What is he to me?"
Marilyn Birchfield saw lightning from her apartment window. She looked up to a sky that reflected the city's lights but showed nothing of itself, and she wondered if it would rain.
Sol Nazerman came out of his early sleep all drenched with sweat and dry mouthed from gasping in dreams. He saw the sudden flash and heard the rumble of thunder and he yearned for the cooling sound and feel of rain. But he had no hope for it. He lay for many hours without hearing any more thunder, and he was still awake when daylight came, clear and hot and dry.
TWENTY-ONE
Sol got out of the house without waking any of his sister's family. He was so intent on eluding them all in the Sunday quiet that he let the car roll down the driveway to the street before he started the motor. Then he was off with a roar.
Mount Vernon was peaceful in the heat of early morning. The bundles of Sunday newspapers were still tied and waiting before the closed stores. The houses slept behind their wide, awninged porches, and here and there were children's tricycles and toy trucks, abandoned suddenly the day before, as though because of a play air raid or some other child-sized disaster. The wires and tracks and signal towers of the railroad glinted in the sunshine. Already the cicadas had set up an intense and threatening buzz, which reached up to the hot blue sky.
He drove with both hands tight on the wheel, as though he had just learned to drive. All the bright light threatened him like a single massive flame. And he was filled with mysterious dread for the unusual emotion he now seemed to recognize—a sudden and unbearable loneliness. He saw himself as the last living creature on a burning orb. He had known many solitudes before, but the sense of isolation he had now made all that had come before seem only like a bad dream there had been hope of waking from.
The car motor hummed, the uncared-for body of the vehicle creaked and squeaked over each bump. He yearned to cry but knew he was not capable of crying. He pulled off the road near the entrance to the highway and sat with his mouth open. The heat collected around him as he stared at the parched grass that edged the road. Nothing, nothing. His hands fluttered over his body. He adjusted his spectacles. He put his hands on the dashboard, on the windows, into the glove compartment. There was a flashlight in there. He took it out and flicked the switch on; he could just about see the pallid glow of the tiny bulb's filament. Then he aimed that infinitesimal illumination at the immense cauldron of white sunlight; it made him shake his head, and once he had begun it, he found he could not stop. The heat rose to the temperature of an oven, and he sat breathing heavily through his mouth, a gray figure in the motionless car, on the desolate landscape.
Idly, his hands began to rifle his pockets, played with tiny crumbs of lint, with keys and coins. His fingers pondered the thin, dog-eared edge of a card. He took it out and held it before his eyes for several minutes before he was able to read it. "Marilyn Birchfield, 210 West 75th Street, New York City, PLaza 6-3109."
For a few minutes more he moved his eyes from the card to the brilliant landscape. He was parked on a mild slope, facing the highway and the sky. Off to one side, where there was a widening of the road's shoulder, an aluminum phone booth was silhouetted against the blue.
He got out of the car and trudged up the slope over the dry, crackly August grass. The smell of the baking concrete road came to him. There was a humid sweetness from the ground. He went into the booth and, leaving the folding doors open, dialed the number on the card.
"Hello?" She appeared to be startled and drowsy. Her voice sounded rich and lovely to him.
"This is Sol Nazerman, the Pawnbroker," he said.
She was silent, breathed surprise.
"Oh yes, hello," she said finally. "Hello there," she emphasized in welcome. "I'm very glad you called. How are you, Mr. Nazerman? Is there anything wrong?"
"It is so very early," he said apologetically.
"Oh, I don't sleep late anyhow." Then she allowed a pause again, uncertain of his intentions and afraid to frighten him away.
"About your suggestion of the other day—the boat excursion. If you could still see your way clear?"
"Ohh, oh my, Mr. Nazerman, yes, yes certainly," she said, with an excessive enthusiasm that she knew sounded false.
Sol began to see how ridiculous his call was. "It was really presumptuous to call you like this. I am very sorry. Forgive me. I just happened on your card and it occurred to me that the boat excursion ... Ah, but to call you like this. Accept my apology. I am perhaps not quite awake myself. Perhaps another time..."
"No, no, really! I am delighted you called. I'd love to go. It's going to be a scorcher today. It will be ever so much cooler on the boat. Oh, I really am glad you called. I had no idea what to do with myself today. Do you think you can find your way here? Are you driving?"
"Yes I am driving. I believe I can find this address," Sol said, nodding as though she could see him, his glasses steamed in the heat of the booth; his smile twitched in relief. "I am near the highway now. I could be there in less than an hour."
"Oh, I'd better get busy then. I'll make some sandwiches and dress. I'll be ready by the time you get here. And, by the way, I have plenty of cheese," she said.
"Yes, good, good—our little joke, is it?" he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes with his arm. "This is very good of you."
"Nonsense, Mr. Nazerman, I was hoping you'd call. It will be my pleasure, too."
He nodded, appreciative yet impatient of her kindness; he knew the truth of it. "Nevertheless, it is good of you."
She was silent for a moment. Then she spoke brightly. "You just get in your car and hurry along. The boat leaves at nine. I'll see you soon...."
This river was so different from the one he saw every day on his way to and from work. It was wide and generous, bordered by green hills and full of great sweeping turns. The steady hum and vibration of the boat filled him with a restful feeling, and he dared deep breaths of the persistent breeze.
"I guess you're glad you decided to come, after all, aren't you, Sol?" Marilyn said from the chair next to him. She was smiling, and her face seemed appropriate to the wide, sun-filled vista. She wore a yellow dress which cast up a buttery glow under her chin, and her eyes were soft with contentment or some other odd joy. "I know I am." She sighed peacefully. "I like my work and I'm glad I do what I do. But, well, I was brought up in a different kind of place, a happier place. There are times when that city makes me sad and tired. I find myself just yearning for a day like this." She tilted her head back and smiled softly. "How many times our family used to have picnics on a lake, spend the whole day in the sun and the air. People's voices sound so different in the country, happier, easier. My father used to say that people had to get off the concrete of sidewalks sometimes just to remember what the earth is like underneath. He liked to sound like a homespun, country philosopher. Of course, he was born in the heart of Boston, but he was a big weekend nature-lover. He'd take us for long walks, identifying birds and trees. 'Breathe deeply,' he'd say. 'Smell the air the way it's supposed to be, untarnished by soot and smoke and carbon monoxide.'" She laughed wistfully. "Un-tarnished, oh dear! As though our town were another Pittsburgh!"
And Sol, caught by the mood of the place and her voice, responded in kind.
"I seem to remember once," he said, waving his finger pedagogically, his eyes up in a dreaming corner, "that I also took a river trip. On the Vistula, it was. Now whether it was when I was very small and we went by river boat to see some relatives in another town ... Wyzgorod was their name.... But then it seems to me that I went with some students when I was at the university. There must have been two different times. There was much singing and playing of concertinas....I confuse the two trips. Oh, but yes, the time with my mother was a longer trip. We had a stateroom, and I woke in the morning filled with delight and amazement to see the world moving by the tiny porthole. Fantastic how that little detail comes to mind. It must be fort
y years ago. But I recall so clearly the sight of the river and the banks moving by and knowing that I had traveled all that way while I was sleeping...."
The boat chugged softly along, past the neat Hudson River towns. The burble of people's voices all along the deck was like part of the sound of their passage. Marilyn sat without moving, her lips slightly parted, her eyes bright and tender on the Pawnbroker's strangely softened face; she maintained her stillness as though she feared to puncture the delicate surface of his reminiscence.
"We took our food then, too," he went on. "Of course my mother would not have us eat the food that was not kosher. We sat on the deck, just as we are doing now, and we ate and watched the farms and the woods going by." He took off his glasses to blind himself to the present, and his fingers traced the shape of them around his eyes. "The types you saw then! Peasants like animals, a few crazy Russians bellowing songs ... It was a beautiful country, a beautiful river...."
When he put back the glasses with a stern expression, she began unpacking the lunch.
"I don't know about you, but I'm getting hungry," she said. "Not that it takes much for me to get hungry. My appetite is my ruination. Someday I'll just blow up like a balloon and burst."
"You are not too fat," he said politely. "It is becoming for a woman to be, to be..."
"Fat," she said humorously.
"No, no," he protested, his hand up in objection as he smiled. "You are a healthy, attractive woman."
For a minute there was an awkward silence between them; something obviously impossible had been touched upon. She busied herself with the sandwiches and the thermos bottle while he frowned unseeingly at the approaching Tappan Zee Bridge.
They ate in silence for a while. They passed under the great span and left it behind. Then, after Sol had eaten one of the sandwiches, he sat back with the other one, still wrapped, in his hand.
"One forgets how attractive America must be," he said. "Most of my time has been spent in the city. Of course, I live in Mount Vernon, which I suppose is an attractive-enough town. But I derive no pleasure from it. There must be thousands of miles of lovely countryside, and I have heard that some of the mountains are very impressive. Often I have thought I would like to go up some very high mountain. I have the idea it would be very beautiful and peaceful. The world might look quite worth while from those heights. You would not see people or dirt or..." He waved his hands at those things he did not wish to mention.
"And yet," she said, "nowadays Americans all want to go to Europe. They go by the hundreds of thousands. People save for years just to have a few weeks there."
"Why is this so?"
"Oh, I guess people are impressed with the history and the sophistication, the culture."
"They are fools. Europe is a graveyard," he said harshly.
"You have seen it at its worst," she reminded him.
"Not at its worst—as it really is!"
"Would you judge all people by the very worst you have seen?"
"I do," he said coldly. "But this is an unpleasant turning our conversation has taken. Please, I am finding the day very restful. Let us not examine, you promised not."
"Yes, of course. I'm sorry." She sighed and let her head fall back on the chair. "Wouldn't it be wonderful," she said, "if this trip could last for a long, long time? To think of nothing except what pretty scene might appear around the next turning. To talk and eat when we were hungry and sleep when we were drowsy. And then to wake, as you did when you were a child, to see the woods and fields going by and know how much went by while you slept."
"That would be nice—if it were possible."
"For now, we can pretend it is."
"I am not very good at pretending."
"But you will try, just for today," she begged with a smile.
"I will try," he agreed gently.
The country grew wilder and greener, and the houses were farther and farther apart. Occasionally, a swift cruiser passed them; sometimes they passed a tiny rowboat with people fishing. Hills scalloped the sky, and the sun covered the water with a multitude of tiny brilliants, which flashed in their faces and made them close their eyes and talk sleepily of small, almost intimate things.
"It's hard for me to realize that I usually have to read to get myself to sleep," she said. "Right now, I feel I could sleep without the slightest effort."
"I have the habit of reading before bed, too," he said.
"I read mostly novels, the old ones: Thackeray, Dickens, stories of a simple world. Sometimes I read Chekhov's short stories. They're gentle and funny and sad."
"I am fond of Chekhov, too. To me, his writing is as unreal as a child's story. Yet it is lifelike for all that. Perhaps because there is no affectation in him."
"A Day in the Country," she said musingly.
"Ah yes, that is a lovely one."
And then, for some time, both of them dozed. Sol seemed to hear and feel the throbbing, comforting vibrations of the boat even in sleep, and he forgot his age and his life for a while. Once, he woke with a smile and looked over at the woman beside him. She was breathing deeply, her full bosom rising and falling. A tiny pulse in her strong neck throbbed faintly, as though an invisible moth fluttered its wings against her flesh. A tendril of her shiny, dark blond hair swung gently against her cheek. He let his eyes grow heavy again as he faced her and he carried the sight of her into his light sleep.
Later, she woke for a minute or two and stared at his gray face, all slack with sleep. She looked at the blue numbers on his arm and she became sad. But then she convinced herself that the numbers looked fainter, that they might disappear altogether in time. She dozed again.
Late in the afternoon, they walked around the decks, exchanging little nods and smiles of amusement over the various passengers. They went inside, where there was a lunch counter. Sol bought some packages of poundcake and two containers of coffee, and they took the food out to the chairs, where they ate and talked a little and looked at the ever-changing shore.
On the return trip, their chairs faced the sunset. The water was a pink-gold, the sky washed with vermilion and purple and orange. Each cloud was outlined with fire, and the hills of the earth were deep in shadow; it was as if the passengers floated on the edge of day and night and had the choice of either.
"I've never seen a sunset like that," she said in a half-whisper.
"It is very beautiful," he said. "But somehow I do not trust its beauty, it is too blatant, too obvious."
"Sometimes the obvious can be trusted. All appearances aren't deceiving," she reprimanded gently.
"Perhaps not, but it is safer to follow the old Roman law—guilty until proved innocent," he said.
There was a low hot moon and full dark had come when he saw the lights of the city on the horizon. A massive weight settled on him.
"I fear we must stop with the make-believe," he said, gesturing toward the approaching lights. "We are approaching the hard facts."
He seemed to hear the millions of voices like the shrilling of countless animals, to smell the dirt and age and sin of the teeming city. And his sense of doom came up over him like some dark, damning clothes he had put off for the while.
"But we can do this again," she said plaintively. "There's no reason why not."
"Agh, how many times can you use a dream? It wears out so quickly against life. Never mind, it has been a pleasant, restful day. Perhaps I have regained some energy. I thank you very much," he said with cool courtesy.
She just nodded, her lips tight in the dark. She wondered if he would be able to see if she cried. It was dark enough. And he made her feel like crying. Oh, how she felt like crying!
TWENTY-TWO
On Monday, the day after the excursion, Sol had experienced a curious feeling of lightness, a sense of remoteness which had been quite pleasant and had coerced him to a brief idea of ease and peace.
But today, Tuesday, August 26, he recognized the limitations of reprieve. Now the past two days took on the
quality of a crueler deception, and he realized he had only been made more susceptible to the formless, thrusting virulence in him.
Each dark face he encountered in the store tore at him; at times he seemed barely able to function.
His vision played tricks on him. A customer would come up to the counter and it would seem the customer's face zoomed so close that Sol could no longer see the features, was blinded by the magnified surface of human skin. A tide of succeeding skins. The brown, the tan, the red-veined, the large-pored, pimpled, and scarred world of flesh. He spoke to great walls of skin, to cracked lips, to hairy nostrils, to veinous, crusty eyes. And he tried to endure in the sounds of voices, to make understandable what he must, to compensate, like any afflicted person, by developing another sense, by decoding the scattered, at least recognizable words. And the people who had never expected anything but strangeness from him were further bewildered by his singular habit of closing his eyes and repeating, over and over, his wildly illogical offers.
"Two dollars, two dollars," he said, with his eyes shut.
"You crazy!" a voice said indignantly. "Two dollars for a Leica camera! What the hell you sayin'?"
"Two dollars."
"You flippin' you wig, Uncle, you out of your mind for sure," the voice said. And Sol never knew when the customer, whoever he was, had taken his camera and walked out of the store.
"Two dollars," he said from that self-imposed blindness.
And the woman with the pawn ticket looked at him in amazement. She had gotten a loan of fifteen dollars for gold earrings two months before and knew from experience that she should have to pay at least twenty to get them out of hock. But who was she to question a mad bargain? "Well okay! Here the two bucks, let's have them earrings," she said.
But Jesus Ortiz had a peculiar vested interest; for some reason beyond him, there were certain inequities he would not tolerate.
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