“No, I should have done it long ago. You were only the ...” “Catalyst” was the word he meant, but he didn’t feel up to explaining.
The apartment would not be ready for several days, so Joe took a double room at a hotel downtown. While Hughie studied the various signs regarding fire exits and checkout time and room service, Joe imagined them talking when the lights were out, as they used to. There were things that must be brought out, amorphous, churning parts of himself like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond. They could surface only for his brother, in the dark. He would place them in Hughie’s keeping, where they would be safe.
“Hughie,” he said after they had been in bed for five minutes. “Hughie?”
“Mm.”
Joe spoke very slowly. “I’ve lost the way. I have to get back to a more simple way. Get away from ... how I’ve been living.”
There was no response except a deep snore.
The next day, a Sunday, Hughie had a date to take Carol to the aquarium at Coney Island and invited Joe along. It would cheer him up, he said.
Carol was a robust girl with spectacular red hair tied in a ponytail and smooth straight bangs. Hughie had said she was twenty-five, but in her white culottes and yellow tank top and sneakers she looked like a high school cheerleader. All through the roar of the subway she chattered good-naturedly; they had to bend close to hear. If she had known Joe was coming, she said, she would have brought along one of her housemates, but this way she had two dates at once.
Joe had not ridden the subway for some time. It was steamy and dirty, and he wondered how people tolerated it. At the aquarium he was pressed into service by Carol—she was too impatient to read the signs posted on each tank but wanted to know everything. Then she would dash away before he was finished. Fondly, she held Hughie’s arm and pulled him along, peering and pointing into the blue-green waters. Joe trailed numbly after, unable to summon any interest in the fish. This was how it must be, he thought, taking children on instructive outings.
After the aquarium they walked on the boardwalk, eating hot dogs and ice cream. Carol said she loved amusement park rides—she recounted a school trip to Rockaway’s Playland years ago—and finally induced Hughie to ride the Ferris wheel. He seemed a happy captive, but Joe, waiting below, couldn’t help wishing they were alone, dawdling at the water’s edge, watching the eternal waves roll in. While Hughie took Carol home, he went back to the hotel and lay half-mesmerized by the hum of the air conditioner, dreaming of how much better things would be just two days from now, when they set up house together. There was no escaping the frenzy of the working day, but he would have the evenings to rediscover the simple pleasures. Somewhere amid that oceanic blandness he would find what he had lost, the self everyone was alleged to possess, but which had slid through his fingers like a fish. His body was stiffening in the cold, but he hadn’t the will to rise and turn off the air conditioner.
The first few nights in the new apartment, he fell asleep cocooned in peace. When he missed a body at his side, he curled his arms around a pillow. Mornings he woke to silence, or to the sounds of Hughie moving about serenely in the kitchen. Evenings they took walks, but here the streets possessed no carnival excitement, so they would return early and a bit dejected. Hughie would want to play checkers or watch over Joe’s shoulder as he reviewed copy and layouts—usually of glamorous women luring men by their perfumes or the smoothness of their skin. He was full of questions, but by now Joe thoroughly loathed talking or even thinking about the cosmetics account—he saved this routine work for late at night, when his mind was dull. Before he went to bed Hughie liked to watch the eleven o’clock news, sighing and fretting over sensational local crimes. This had irritated Vanessa, who would launch into sermons about the warped priorities of television news while Joe tried to telegraph that it was no use. Now he felt the same sermons itching on his tongue.
One evening around nine, Hughie surprised Joe by bringing Carol home after a movie. She carried a pizza, which she set down on the table where he had spread out his papers—a promotional brochure for a brokerage firm, suggesting real estate investments. He moved them aside.
“Anyone mind if I take my shoes off?” said Carol. “My tootsies are on fire.” She bent down to undo her sneakers, fastened with Velcro. Joe winced.
They wanted to know what he was working on.
“How the very rich can keep a step ahead of the taxman. What I’d really love to do is ‘Gimme Shelter’ in green boldface caps, with a cartoon of Mick Jagger astride the Trump Tower.” He looked up at their baffled faces. He had forgotten. He was so disoriented, so mired in confusion, that he had utterly forgotten whom he was talking to. “Taxes and business,” he amended. “Nothing very interesting.”
They opened the pizza. Joe listened as they enumerated all the places they had eaten pizza in their lives and compared the quality. Again he wondered what it was like inside Hughie’s head, but now the prospect was terrifying. A funhouse maze where everything changed shape and position with no warning and no reason, where reason itself was one more imponderable to be accepted on faith. No. Hughie was clear about the important things, love and death, trust and devotion, loneliness and fear. That was why Joe had left to go with him. But it was also why even with Hughie there would be no escape, he saw, not ever. Like everyone else, Hughie suffered in darkness. Joe had seen him mortified, had seen on his face and still saw the blunt awareness of all he was unaware of, the world rising, monolithic and impenetrable, before him. Hughie could see its vastness, the dimensions of all he would never know; what he did not see were its intricacies. How did he see the circumstantial fact of his own life and death, then? How could he live, or know what he wanted or how to choose? To Joe, every choice seemed impossible, right down to the choice now at hand, a slice from the plain half or the half with anchovies. How could you ever choose, without knowing much more, or much less?
After the pizza they watched a situation comedy on television. There appeared to be a household of only women and children, and a good deal of bickering. Joe was lost, his mind veering in a mist, now and then colliding with the plot, which he found incomprehensible, a surreal barrage of non sequiturs. But Hughie and Carol were following, laughing at the same places as the canned laughter. Velcro laughter. They were holding hands on the couch. The mists in his head parted and Joe saw the future. Hughie and Carol would want to marry, eventually. Then where would he go? They might have babies, why not? They would be following the paths of ageless generations before them, being fruitful and multiplying, earning their bread in pain and joy. And if the babies turned out like their parents, so what? They too would live and love and suffer and die like everyone else. While he would be the uncle. Uncle Joe, who had never managed to find his own life. The children would grasp that, retarded or not. He would be invited for birthdays and Thanksgiving dinner and would bring expensive gifts. He would be consulted on many matters—balancing the checkbook, taxes, insurance, vacations. Maybe Hughie and Carol would buy a modest house someday; he would go along to make sure they got a fair deal. But after such excursions they would go home, and where would he be?
He had to escape. If only he could rip his skin off like Velcro, in one huge resounding tear, and beneath would be the true man, fresh and eager as a newborn, who would know what to do and how to be, free of doubt and torment. The pure inner man revealed, ready to begin. Indeed, sitting quite still, he could almost feel it starting. His body seemed to fill with air like a balloon stretched to the bursting point. The tension was unbearable but necessary. It was important to sit utterly still to contain the tremendous pressure. Only his eyes moved, settling on Hughie and Carol, who seemed very far away, at the end of a telescope, cheerfully eating ice cream and never suspecting what momentous change was about to occur. Of course it would be painful like any metamorphosis, but he was not afraid, no more than his mother had been afraid the first time. His fists clenched and his teeth clamped together as his body grew rigid.
/> “Hooch, what’s the matter? Do you feel okay?” Hughie got up from the couch and stared.
Joe heard his brother’s voice from far off but couldn’t respond. He tried to draw himself inward. No one must touch him right now.
“Hooch! Say something! Come on!” Hughie stood before him, arms hanging at his sides.
“Should I get him an aspirin or something?” he heard Carol say. “What should we do?”
He wished they would stop their talking and leave him be. No one had ever told him it would be so painful, this waiting to be born. He was almost losing consciousness, yet he was intensely conscious too, of all the earth’s matter, inside and outside, pressing on his skin. He heard a faint, familiar noise like something being ripped apart. Yes, soon all the katydids and grackles in the park would be singing, heralding his transformation with their screeching caws.
“Hughie, do something,” Carol shrieked. “Do something! Look at him shake!”
The Painters
THE PAIR OF CHILDREN looked Asian, two or three years old, their glossy heads like lacquered bowls bobbing in the sunlight. Kneeling at the wide-open window, they pulled white tissues from a box and sent them wafting down on the breeze. A flimsy-looking iron gate reached to their stomachs, but every few seconds they popped up to lean out over it, clapping their hands as the tissues caught on the branches of trees, wrapped around a lamppost, and fluttered leisurely to the concrete below like great snowflakes.
Not a soul in sight. Della watched from across the street, a floor above them—the fifth; they would not see her if she waved. If she called out, the sound could startle them, make them lose their balance. She shut her eyes and curled her hands into fists as one child leaned way out, the tops of the bars pressing into his legs. The police? It was her first day here; she didn’t even know the opposite building’s address. And the time it would take, the heavy footsteps clattering up the stairs ... Meanwhile they would fall and she would relive this moment all the years to come, remembering herself watching at the window of the empty bedroom in her new apartment, her new life, thinking about how she would remember herself at the window, watching. ...
Just then a dark-haired woman appeared from the invisible spaces of the apartment across the street, plucked each child from the windowsill, and snatched up the box of tissues. Shut the window, thought Della, but the woman receded into the invisible spaces.
Della turned to savor the emptiness that surrounded her, mute and undemanding. The apartment was a stroke of luck, found quickly by an acquaintance who was adept at such things—inexpensive, airy, and in good shape, apart from dark walls enclosing an aura of shabbiness. Devoid of identity, but not for long. The moving truck would be arriving any minute, bearing half the contents of her former home. Once Ezra had told her, those rooms had felt like the scene of something unsavory, a parody of the life she thought she was living. Della had packed feverishly, all thought suffocated by the radio tuned to the most raucous station she could find. This irritated Ezra, who was an announcer for a classical music station, but in his guilt and confusion he had dared not complain, only hovered nearby looking pained, clearly uncertain whether it was more urbane to offer help or not. Are you sure you don’t want to keep it? he had urged. It would give you some stability. It doesn’t seem fair for you to be the one moving out. Della had answered, No, you keep it. Live in it with her. Look where stability has gotten me.
Numbed by the heat, Della sank down to the floor, leaning against a mud-colored wall, and ran her fingers along the floorboards: good hardwood floors, and recently scraped. She ran her fingers down her bare leg: good long legs, recently suntanned over the July 4 weekend, before Ezra told her. In her youth she had been a ballet dancer—faceless in the corps but swift and exhilarated, fulfilled; her enduring fringe benefits were a litheness of movement and a knack for twisting up her hair in sleek knots. Good legs, she thought, yet they hadn’t counted in the long run. For all she knew, the new woman was drab and stumpy.
When the movers left hours later, it was as if Della stepped out of a dream. With the old chest of drawers, the washing machine (Ezra had insisted), the armchairs, desk, and stereo surrounding her, it was plain to see that she would have to live here. Her life, whatever that meant, her flesh’s short span of animation, would trudge forward in time, in the unending cycles of light and darkness, its own cycles and wants felt within these walls.
She slipped the new keys in her pocket and walked out onto the hushed and darkening street. Perhaps she would be mugged, even killed. Only the first moments would be dreadful, and then the rest of her life effortlessly taken from her. But she passed no one menacing, only a heavy old woman in Bermuda shorts inching her way forward with a walker. On the lively avenue she sat at a small plastic table and ate two slices of pizza, and on her way home took note of a Chinese restaurant, a delicatessen, and a barbecued ribs place.
She felt very little conviction about trudging forward. Nevertheless tomorrow, once her telephone was installed, she would find painters; the landlord, snarling, had refused any repairs—“You’re getting a bargain as it is!”—but it was not possible to live, with convictions or not, between those dark green and mud-colored walls. She unrolled a narrow futon—bought to replace the double bed where she had slept in an illusion—stretched out on her stomach, and fell into a deep sleep.
Three days later the painters appeared promptly at nine, recommended by the same able acquaintance who had found the apartment. They were not really painters, she had told Della, but artists. Of course they were as good as or better than real painters, but cheaper. And they spoke English, they could understand instructions, which many real painters didn’t these days, and in addition could do carpentry and practically anything else Della might want done. In short, a find.
Della was accustomed to painters in white overalls arriving with surly mumbles, laden with supplies. These painters, in jeans and navy blue T-shirts and backpacks, arrived empty-handed, greeted her, and introduced themselves as if it were a social occasion. The man’s name was Paolo and he looked intimidating: stocky, strong, and dark, with longish straight black hair, sharp assessing eyes, and a cigarette drooping from his lips. The woman, Margie, who did more of the talking, had an efficient, calming manner, something like a neophyte nurse or a schoolteacher. She was an inch or two taller than Paolo and was fresh-faced and blue-eyed, with very white teeth and hair so blonde it was almost white, cut like a man’s except for wisps of bangs brushing her eyelids. At once Della wondered whether they were a couple, if they lived and slept together as well as painted together. Probably not. Paolo, whose few words were spoken in a slight Spanish accent, was too forbidding for Margie, and she seemed too ingenuous for him.
“Okay, where is the paint?” he said after a tour of the four large rooms.
“Oh, I didn’t know—I guess I thought you would take care of all that.” She felt foolish—had she expected an ambulance corps, a vehicle equipped for any contingency?
Paolo shrugged. “We’ll go out for the paint. Do you have brushes, rollers, a ladder?”
Della shook her head. No expression altered his face—only a formidable neutrality.
“No problem,” Margie said cheerily. “We’ll put it all in the truck.”
“Oh, do you have a truck?”
“Brand-new. Our pride and joy.” Margie darted to the window to point out a dilapidated maroon pickup parked across the street, its back piled with an assortment of wood and metal. “Now we don’t have to lug our stuff through the streets. Paolo does very large pieces.”
Della glanced up at the building opposite. The babies, thank goodness, were sitting sedately at the windowsill, dipping wands into a bowl set between them and blowing bubbles through the iron bars. The bubbles caught the summer sunlight in patches as they drifted radiantly upwards.
“This job could take a while,” Paolo said. “It’s going to need a lot of plastering. Whoever did it last time painted right over the cracks.” He came to the
window to crush his cigarette on the bricks outside, glanced below at the small flower garden, and put the butt in his pocket. “It could be slapped on in three days, but we don’t do that kind of work.”
“You also may need two or even three coats to cover up these weird colors,” said Margie. “What colors did you have in mind?”
“White. All white. As much as it takes.” Suddenly she felt light and happy and protected in their presence. Even Paolo’s gruffness was soothing: no smooth promises. “I’ve got the time. I took a month off from work to move in and fix the place up.” Della worked for a publishing firm, designing book jackets. Her vacation money would pay these strange painters who fit in no ready category. In her old life, the painters sent by the landlord had been gray-haired men or teen-agers who spoke Greek and nodded enigmatically to whatever she said and left their cigarette butts on the floor.
“Are you going to be here the whole time, then?” asked Margie.
“Yes, I’m going to paint with you.”
The first morning, after they all changed into shorts, Della painted a closet in the room where Paolo was scraping and plastering the ceiling. It was a room she intended to use as a studio in case she did any free-lance work, or as an extra bedroom in case her son, Frank, came to stay. Frank was in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, building a school or a hospital, she had forgotten which, but that would not last forever. Paolo worked in silence, standing bare-chested on the ladder he had borrowed from the super, a cigarette pasted to his bottom lip. Della had given him a saucer for an ashtray, which was balanced on the top rung.
His voice startled her. “Are you going to live here alone?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a nice place. Light.”
That seemed to be all. From the living room came pounding music. Margie, pulling a radio from her backpack, had asked if Della would object to the rock music of WAPP. Della would object to nothing except Ezra’s creamy tones.
The Melting Pot Page 17