Marilyn the Wild

by Jerome Charyn

  The old man pointed to a building. “I was going for a knish,” he said. “A kasha knish. It’s foggy out. I can’t see.”

  “Do you have a wife?” Rupert asked.

  “I live with my daughter. The knish was for her.”

  “This aint knish weather, if you ask me. All the delicatessens are closed. Come on.”

  The storm had tailored the old man’s building, cutting it off from its own ground floor with a snowbank that was humped up like an elephant’s back. Rupert charged into the hump, searching for an entrance to the building. He slapped out a crooked furrow with his hands and feet, and brought the old man inside. The building was chillier than the snowbank. “That’s a greedy girl,” Rupert said, huffing for warm air. “I’d kasha her nose for her, but I’m in a hurry.”

  Coming out of the furrow he’d made, he was snatched up by four long overcoats. His enemies, the gorillas of Mulberry Street, had been waiting for him. They spotted Rupert as he stalled to unbury the old man. They banged his arms with their lead pipes, menaced his eyes with their plumber’s snake. “Go quiet, little pest, or we’ll divide you into twenty packages. You have an appointment with Amerigo Genussa.”

  Rupert struggled in the snow, unable to reach his can opener, fork, or spoon. The plumber’s snake ripped into his eyebrow. He was sneezing blood. He had pipes in his shoulder-blades. The refugees arrived, the sweater boys, the brothers wrapped in earmuffs and childish hats. Was it snow, or blood, that was beguiling Rupert? How could four gorillas be off their feet? Only one brother battled with them. Pipes bounced off the head of this refugee. He could tear a whirling metal snake with his fingers. Take two gorillas into his chest with a single arm. Hug the color out of a man’s face. Rupert heard the crunch of bone under the long coats. The four gorillas had rubbery knees. They twitched and groaned near the second brother, who said, “Jorge, that’s enough.”

  He attended to Rupert’s eye with spit on a paper napkin. “I’m César Guzmann. Some people call me Zorro. That’s my brother Jorge. Don’t blink. You’ll get snow in your eye.”

  “Why are you following me?” Rupert said, growing surly.

  Zorro pecked at the blood. “Be polite. I don’t care for myself. But you’ll offend my brother. The good fairy sent us to watch out for you.”

  “I fight with my own elbows, Mr. Zorro, thank you. I’m Rupert Weil.”

  “We know that,” Zorro said, finishing with the napkin. “We buried your lady, Esther Rose. My father hired two cantors to sing at her funeral. The best songs you can find in Latin and Portuguese.”

  Rupert peered out of his bloody eye. “What was Esther to you?”

  “A Ladina without a decent grave. Nothing more. We had a friend in common. Big Isaac. He should be in the ground, not your lady.”

  The gorillas slithered away from Rupert and the Guzmann boys, with lumps in their overcoats.

  “See,” Zorro said. “It pays to keep you healthy. Could you torture Isaac if they took your elbows off?”

  The Guzmanns were delicate people. Zorro wouldn’t have introduced himself without bearing trinkets from his family; he stuck a hand through the neck of his bottommost sweater, his fingers moving like giant pimples under the wool, and dragged up an ice pick and a tiny handgun in a square of dirty cheesecloth. “My father wants you to have a choice. You can dig into Isaac, or blow his tongue away. Don’t worry about the pistola. It can’t be traced. It bites hard for a .22. Drop it near Isaac’s feet and run.”

  Rupert shrugged at the offerings. “I have my tools, Mr. Zorro.” Were the Guzmanns out of their minds? He couldn’t keep from staring at the refugees, who walked into a storm bundled up like chubby snow gods to rescue him from a pack of goons. “Are you a Brooklyn boy, Mr. Zorro?”

  “Never,” Zorro said, making grim pulls with his chin. “We come from Peru. Remember, you have a place to hide. My father can get you into Mexico City, Bogota, Lima, or the ten Little Havanas in the East Bronx. Just ride the train to Boston Road and ask for me.”

  He signaled to Jorge. The brothers fixed their earmuffs and went into the snow with shuffling knees.

  Coen had feathers in his mouth from Isaac’s mushy pillow. Marilyn wouldn’t let him out of bed. He was unbridled now, minus his holster and his socks. The blizzard had simplified their lives; no interruptions from Isaac for thirty-six hours. Rattling fire escapes couldn’t frighten her with Blue Eyes in the house. She licked him clean, until he lost the nervous shivers of a cop. She wasn’t a dreamy girl. She understood Coen’s obligations, his loyalty to her father, his somber ways. She hadn’t slept with too many orphans before Coen. She wouldn’t have believed a man could hold his dead father and mother in the furrows of his chin. He had a deathly feel. His lovemaking was profoundly beautiful and slow. He didn’t spit. He didn’t nibble on her ear with an obscene patter, like her second husband, and her early beaus. He moved in her with the rhythms of a somnambulist, a drugged devotion that pinned her to the walls of Isaac’s flimsy mattress and made her squeal.

  She felt like Isaac, who could taste paradise every night by putting his nose in a honey jar. That’s how greedy she got with Coen. She wanted him to nuzzle her until her orgasms traveled to her fingers and her eyes. “Mother God,” she said, thrown back to her church days when she had to confess the crime of liking to touch her own bosoms. “Make me come, Manfred, make me come.”

  At rare intervals she’d climb off the mattress to fix a meal for Blue Eyes and herself; she clawed into the heart of her father’s lettuce, dropping chunks onto a plate, with cucumbers and a dip of garlic, onions, and cottage cheese. Marilyn was worried about the blandness of this feast She couldn’t vary the menu in a blizzard. It was cottage cheese, or starve, because the refrigerator had been stocked by Ida Stutz. But there was a little red wine in a goosenecked bottle, and they sipped at it judiciously, conserving the bottle, in case they had a visitor. Isaac might come through the window; he had a passion for fire escapes, and he hated climbing stairs. Let her father fly in! Marilyn wouldn’t blush. She was old enough to be caught naked with a man. Isaac must have seen her tits once or twice during the short tenures she’d had with her three husbands. He didn’t complain. Marilyn wasn’t her father’s deputy. She’d sit him on the window if he badgered husband Coen.

  She decided not to skimp with the bottle. She poured wine over Blue Eyes, into the trenches of his body, collarbone, elbows, kneecaps, the line of blond hairs that split his chest, the grooves around his balls. She was planning to devour Coen, drink the wine off her new husband, catch him with her tongue. She fell into his shoulder, caressing him with her forehead and her jaw, while Coen shut his eyes, grunting like a dead man, wind coming from his lungs in low, even squalls, and Marilyn cursing all the wedding rings she had worn, the bridal veils, the embroidered sheets of honeymoon hotels.

  Rupert’s bad eye was beginning to close. He had to sight unnaturally, with his cheek jutting into the storm, or bang out a path with his knees. He bumped along, enduring the windburn on his lips, trying to figure Isaac’s doom. He wasn’t so resolute near Delancey. The traffic was dead. He had a whole boulevard to himself. He could have hopped across on the roofs of abandoned cars if that had been his wish. He wasn’t in the mood to make a crooked metal bridge.

  The window of a men’s slack shop on the north side of Delancey had been smashed in the storm. He saw looters, men and boys in grubby coats, sacking the store; they carried great bundles of pants through the jagged teeth in the window. One of the looters, a portorriqueño with scars on his lip, swerved into Rupert, glaring at the uniform of a housing cop; he came up close to inspect the sneakers, the damaged eyebrow, Rupert’s hairless face, and he smiled. “Yo no sé, man. There’s plenty for everybody. Dig in.”

  Rupert wasn’t interested in slacks, but the looters wouldn’t let him go. His uniform was too valuable; he became their lookout. Rupert stood outside the window with a glum demeanor. He disapproved of anarchy done for profit. These slacks wouldn’t cover the g
ang’s own legs; they’d be sold at a thieves’ market, or hawked uptown, with the looters turning their arms into clothes trees to display the wares. The leader of the gang was a gringo, like Rupert. He wore a stocking cap and an old Eisenhower. He noticed the condemnation in Rupert’s narrow cheeks. “What’s eating you, bro’?”

  “Nothing,” Rupert said.

  “Then why you looking at me with unkindness?”

  “Because I’d like it better if you stole what you need and went home.”

  Boys were coming out of the window who had to be runts, midgets, or creatures under ten. They bobbled under Rupert’s neck, carrying their load of slacks in a line that ended with a blur of snow. This same line could have reached for blocks, Rupert understood. The runts might be marching straight to the Chrysler building. The leader took one of the loads off a runt and pitched it at Rupert. “You must be a rich man’s kid,” he said. “A mama’s baby. You don’t know shit about stealing.”

  Rupert ran for his life. He couldn’t have fought an army of runts. The snow was pitted with obstacles and dangerous traps. He walked on crushed glass, smacked into the domes of submerged johnny pumps, skidded off the carcass of a frozen dog. He arrived on Rivington Street with a raw nose. Could he murder Isaac’s daughter now? He was fortified by the lay of snow in the street. The storm had worked for him. There was a snowbank near the fire escape he had to reach. He could grip the bottom rung of the ladder without performing acrobatics under Isaac’s window.

  Rupert, Esther, and Stanley Chin had wasted whole afternoons spying on the window from a neighboring roof. They had seen Isaac slash like a bloated sea animal on top of Ida Stutz, his policeman’s ass rolling in deep, tortuous waves. Such turbulence seemed comical to them. Rupert had to wonder how his own buttocks behaved while he was down with Esther. Did they slap in the air, waver high and low? Rupert wasn’t a sea elephant. His thrusts had to be sweeter than those of Isaac the Pure. Before Esther died, he saw another woman in Isaac’s window. It was Lady Marilyn. He’d come here alone to watch her shamble across the living room, or go into Little Italy with a shopping bag. She was a skinny girl. She didn’t have her father’s thick neck, or the complexion of a blintze queen.

  Rupert walked up the hump of the snowbank. He was on the ladder, hands and feet. He climbed with his elbows in his chest. The going wasn’t easy. He had to measure the distance between every rung, or slip down the ladder. The wind could be devilish at this altitude; it beat against Rupert’s nose, lashed him into the rungs, the higher he got. He reached Isaac’s fire escape with snow on his chin, his fingers swollen with ice. The fire escape shook as Rupert crouched onto the landing. The bedroom window was dug through with frost. Rupert had to blow on it and rub the wet, murky glass with the cloth over his wrist. The window began to clear: Rupert caught a naked woman through a patch of glass. Lady Marilyn. She was lying on a rumpled bed, with half her body out of the blanket. He had never seen a human creature in such repose. Isaac’s little girl, without a dent on her face. Only the size of her breasts and the roundness of her nipples could have warned you she was fully grown. A crease appeared on her forehead. Marilyn scratched her nose, and the crease was gone.

  Rupert was in misery. Those bosoms reminded him of Esther. She had the same spill on her chest, a soft swell under her arms. Rupert was no connoisseur of a woman’s fleshy parts. Esther had been his only girlfriend, first and last But Marilyn’s tits made him cry. They could turn a boy gentle if he didn’t have an irrevocable mission, and bile in his heart from Essex Street. He would have to murder her with his eyes closed.

  Marilyn had been dreaming, not of Blue Eyes, not of Isaac, not of her mother Kathleen, but of Larry, her first husband, the one Isaac hadn’t picked. He wasn’t respectable enough for the daughter of a police chief; Larry had no permanent occupation. He fingered his guitar for a macrobiotic restaurant, sold scarves in the street. Isaac didn’t chase Larry out of Manhattan; it was Marilyn’s own gruffness, inherited from Isaac and Kathleen, the hysteria of an Irish-Jewish child, that got him to pack the guitar and leave. She was too wild for her men. Her devotion came with claws. She’d wanted to scratch the air around Larry to protect him from her father. But Larry disappeared. She didn’t have to scratch for Coen’s sake. Blue Eyes had a holster and a gun.

  She heard a squeak from the window. Something pushed against the glass. The window chains were rattling. Marilyn could see a line of snow. There was a face in her window, a face with a bloody eye and a sinister nose. She didn’t scream for Coen. She watched the hunching boy, one leg on the fire escape, the other leg in her father’s room. He wore sneakers in a storm, and a crazy police coat. “Don’t be shy, Mr. Snow Pants, come on in,” Marilyn said, with the blanket still in her lap. She wasn’t going to curtain herself for a boy in the window.

  Blue Eyes came out of the bathtub after Marilyn’s call (he’d been soaking off the wine Marilyn had poured on him). Blood in an eye couldn’t throw him off: he recognized Philip’s boy from the circulars Isaac’s men had prepared. But he couldn’t understand what Rupert was doing with a spoon in his fist. Coen was undressed. He could feel a chill on his balls. Rupert climbed out the window. Coen grabbed for his pants and shirt. He didn’t have time to lace his shoes. Marilyn pulled on his shirttails. “Manfred, what the fuck is going on?”

  Blue Eyes left his gun in the bathroom; he wasn’t going to duel with a fifteen-year-old bandit. He had to shove Marilyn’s hand off his back. “It’s your father’s war,” he said. He was out on the fire escape before Marilyn could find another hold on his body. The wind blasted under his shirt. “Jesus,” Coen said. The fire escape was dipping like a boat. He felt certain it would break from the wall and crash into the street. He followed Rupert up the ladder. It wasn’t recklessness in Coen. Nothing could chase him off the fire escape. He had to take little Rupert.

  “Blue Eyes,” Rupert muttered on the ladder. He should have figured Isaac’s sweetheart would spoil it for him. He grew careless about the rungs, leaping crookedly with a squeeze of his hands and a rapid kick. He was aiming for the roof. His foot got caught in the ladder, his sloppy left sneaker wedging under the side bar, between two rungs. “Goddamn,” he said, trying to work his heel out of the sneaker.

  The ladder rocked under the weight of Coen and the boy. Blue Eyes had to hug the ladder with both arms to keep his balance. He went up with the crawling motions of a baby. He pushed snow off his eyebrows, so he could watch Rupert’s struggles with the ladder. “Rupert, wait for me.” The snow smothered his voice.

  Rupert’s heel came free. He abandoned the trapped sneaker and started to climb again. He couldn’t grip a ladder with a naked foot. It slipped off. Clutching with his hand, he missed the rung over his head. He had air and snow in his fingers. He fell. He didn’t shape screams with his lips. No phantasmagoria pursued him as his body whirled. He didn’t have flashes of Esther, Marilyn, or Isaac. He remembered nothing but his father’s face. The squeezed-up skin with forty years of hurt His mouth puffed open. He was trying to say dad.

  Blue Eyes couldn’t break Rupert’s fall. The boy plunged in widening arcs outside Coen’s reach. It was a dangerous wish: Coen didn’t have steel pinchers to fetch a diving boy. Rupert’s body would have ripped him off the ladder. Coen felt that smack into the snowbank with the hollows of his eyes. The shivers came down to his jaw. Was he crazy? Or had the boy begun to move? A hand pushed out from under a pile of snow. Rupert wasn’t dead.

  16.

  THE woman with the suitcase was muttering in the hall. Doctors and nurses jumped out of her way. “Blue Eyes,” she said; Marilyn had invaded Bellevue. She climbed up to the prisoners’ ward and screamed at the metal door. “Manfred, come on out.” The watchman thought she was insane.

  “That’s police business, young lady. You can’t go in there.”

  “I am the police,” Marilyn said.

  The watchman grumbled to himself about the retards who were running loose on his floor. His name was Fred. “Yeah,
you’re a cop, I’m a cop, and the junkies in this ward wear badges on their pajamas.”

  “My father’s a commissioner,” she said. “Now open up.”

  “Lady, do me a favor. Disappear. You know how we get rid of pests? We stuff them in the laundry chute.”

  “Scumbag,” Marilyn said, in her father’s voice. “Did you ever meet Isaac the Pure?”

  The watchman began to doubt himself. “What about Isaac?”

  “I’m the only daughter he has. You understand? Bring me Blue Eyes.”

  “Blue Eyes? Why didn’t you say you wanted him?” The watchman paged Manfred on the house telephone. Marilyn heard the click of an electric lock, and Blue Eyes came through the door. The watchman stared at the two of them; they had the same miserable look: runny noses and raw, scratchy eyes. Lovebirds, the watchman suspected. Goddamn lovebirds.

  Coen picked up Marilyn’s suitcase and spoke to the watchman. “Mind the store, Freddy. I’ll be right back.” Then he took Marilyn over to a closet behind the elevator shafts. He didn’t say a word about the suitcase.

  “They’ll strangle me if anybody catches you up here.”

  “How are they going to manage that? You’re the man with the gun.… Manfred, come with me.”

  “I’m supposed to be guarding Stanley Chin. Isaac rings every half hour. He still thinks Cowboy intends to swipe the kid.”

  “Manfred, are you deaf? I’m splitting, and I want you to come.”

  “Marilyn, I’m a city boy,” Coen said, groping with his tongue. “I wouldn’t dig weekends in New Rochelle.”

  “Jesus,” she said, “don’t play stupid with me. Rupert is lying downstairs with a broken back. He nearly got himself killed on account of Isaac.”