There were others to consider, but Liebowitz decided communications issued from the girl stinking perfume, dreaming of the sun. He didn’t look down. He didn’t look at her directly. Why not? He was ashamed. Is that any way to feel? It is the way he felt. Besides, Liebowitz thought a direct look might seem aggressive, even threatening, and he didn’t want her to stop. Of course, not looking down, he couldn’t be sure who was doing it. But whoever it was perhaps couldn’t be sure to whom it was being done. Did this make a difference? Yes, thought Liebowitz. A difference between debauchery and election. Unsought, unanticipated, unearned. Not sullied by selfish, inadmissible need. He didn’t think, Filthy need. He made a bland face. It felt good. Some might call this “a beautiful experience.”
In effect, 8:30 a.m., going to work, crushed, breathing poison in a screaming iron box, Liebowitz was having a beautiful experience. People paid money for this. He could think of no reason not to give it a try. Liebowitz was a native New Yorker, with an invulnerable core of sophistication. He realized suddenly that he felt — beyond pleasure — hip. After so many years in the subway without feeling, or feeling he wasn’t feeling, he felt. Getting and spending, he thought. And now he had gotten lucky. He believed he had done nothing to account for it, which was the way it had to be if the experience was miraculous, beautiful, warm, and good. Like the unaccountable sun shining in the advertisement. Or, for that matter, in the sky. Lucky, thrilled, beatified. All of it was assumed with silent, immobilized dignity. He got lucky and floated half blind, delicious, cool, proud to be a New Yorker. He floated above a naked ferocity which, he knew, he couldn’t call his own. The emblem and foundation of his ethical domain — wife, child, responsibility of feeding them, the “Mr.” on his tax forms — and yet, had someone said, “Who belongs to this hard-on?” Liebowitz himself would have led the search. Despite denials and scruples, Liebowitz had a general, friendly hard-on. Even without an object, his sensations were like love.
He came.
Fingers squeezed goodbye, replaced him, zipped up, slipped away. The train stopped at Forty-second Street, doors opened, the crowd dissolved, shuffling huggermugger hugely to the platform. The man with the incipient scowl stepped away. A garden of camellias flashed down his pants leg. Liebowitz looked elsewhere. Bleary, ringing with a chill apocalyptic sense, he was pressed loose and dopey into the crowd’s motions. Moving, he began to move himself, popping up on his toes, peering over heads. The girl with the deathly hair had disappeared. On the platform now, amid figures going left, right, and shoving past him toward the train, Liebowitz was seized in a confusion of vectors, but, gathering deep internal force, his direction, himself, he thrust to the right, on his toes, and saw it — limp, ghoulish scraggle flying away like a ghostly light. Exhilaration building, beating in him like hawks, he felt his good luck the second time that morning. To let things end in the dingy, dirty, booming abyss of the Forty-second Street subway station would be a desecration of feelings and a mystery forever, he thought, chasing amid gum machines, benches, kiosks, trash cans, and innumerable indifferent faces. She went up a flight of stairs, quickly, quickly, and — painful to Liebowitz — as if she didn’t care to know he was chasing her. Was there nothing between them? That’s what he wanted to know. He needed psychological consummation. He was a serious human being. He needed it now and here, in subway light, under low ceilings, in the pressure of heavy moving crowds. He caught her. Against the door of a ladies’ room, the instant she pressed it, he caught her arm, a thin bolt, and stopped her flight. “Miss,” he said, staring, beginning to say, “You know me, don’t you?” A weightless, overwrought rag of girl reeked in his close, tight grip. It whispered, “Get the claw off me, motherfucker, or I’ll kick your balls.” Whispering fire, writhing, murderous. Not a girl. Liebowitz let go.
The boy twisted into the ladies’ room. A dozen faces bloomed in peripheral vision, like vegetables of his mind. A lady in a hat said, “Creep.” Beneath the hat, her small shrill eyes recognized Liebowitz. She said “Creep” as if it were his name. “Mister Creep,” he muttered, pushing away through the liquid of gathering attention. He didn’t run. But he was ready, if anyone moved toward him, to run.
In the brilliant windy street, Liebowitz hailed a cab. Before it stopped, he had the door open. The meter began ticking. Ticking with remorseless, giddy indifference to his personal being and yet, somehow, consonant with himself. Not his heart, not the beat of his viscera, and yet his ticking self, his time, quickly and mercifully growing shorter. I’ll be dead soon, he thought. Tick-tick-tick.
The driver said, “Where, mister?”
“Nowhere,” said Liebowitz from the creaks and shadows in back.
“You can sit in the park for free. This is costing you.”
To Liebowitz, the smug, annoyed superiority of the driver’s tone was Manhattan’s theme. He ignored it, lit a cigarette, breathed in the consolations of technology, and said, “I want to pay. Shut up.”
Storytellers, Liars, and Bores
I’D WORK AT A STORY until it was imperative to quit and go read it aloud. My friend would listen, then say, “I feel so embarrassed for you.” I’d tear up the story. I’d work at a new one until it was imperative to quit and read aloud. My new friend would listen, but wouldn’t say good, no good, or not bad. I’d tear up the story.
Meanwhile, I turned to relatives and friends for help. My uncle Zev told me about his years in a concentration camp. “Write it,” he said. “You’ll make a million bucks.” My friend Tony Icona gave me lessons in breaking and entering. Zev’s stories I couldn’t use. Tony’s lessons were good as gold. Criminal life was intermittent and quick. It left me time to work at stories and learn about tearing them up.
One evening, while I was reading to my new friend, she yawned. It was the fifth time I had read this story to her. The hour was late. She had to get up at dawn to leave for work. But I had rewritten the story and had to read it aloud, start to finish. I watched her eyes go fluid, her mouth enlarge. I saw fillings in her teeth and the ciliations of her tongue. By the time she completed her yawn, our friendship had ended.
After I understood so much about stories and friendship, it was easier to write stories and more difficult not to tear them up. There was bad tension between my new friend and me when I tore up a story she liked, but I did it for her sake and mine. Even as she beamed and clapped with delight, I tore it up and stepped on it.
My appeals to Tony Icona for lessons in quick, remunerative work became more frequent. I told him how hard it was to write stories without being a liar or a bore, and there was nothing, nothing, I was unwilling to do for time. He listened, picked his nose, then said if I ended up in the slam doing time, I’d kill myself. He said one person wanted money and power; the other had ideals. Both got money and power. As for himself, he liked walking on the beach in a tight bathing suit and lifting dumbbells in the sun. “That’s purity, right?”
When my newest friend said the story was good, but I knew otherwise, I’d be angry and she would begin to cry. She couldn’t ignore the solicitous mother in my voice, offering encouragement and music while the story did nothing for itself. She’d let the voice tell her lies, darken her understanding, weaken her will, and incline her toward evil. To make her know it, I broke her nose. Then I couldn’t write. “Don’t you want to read anything to me?” she’d ask, fingering her nose. “It will never be the same, you know.”
When I started again, reading to my newest friend, she’d say, “That reminds me of what happened at work. Can I tell you?” I’d say, “Tell me.” She was an astonishing bore. Listening to her, I tore up all my stories, never wrote stories, broke into cars, climbed through windows, and poisoned dogs. She told me what happened to her at work. I made myself ugly, lonely, and miserable.
I explained my condition to Tony Icona, a man to whom I could speak in a theoretical way. He said, “I can’t sympathize. You got one leg shorter than the other and you’re walking in a circle. But I’ll give you a job in m
y delicatessen. Fifty bucks a week and you keep your tips. If the customers like you, you’ll do all right. If they don’t, you’ll starve and be known as a dope.”
The delicatessen, called Horses, was a giant hall with a long bar, mirrors on the walls and ceiling, and a hundred tables. It rang plates and cutlery; twenty chefs boiled at the steam counters and the floor thundered with speeding waiters in black tie, jacket, and shoes. I thundered among them, a napkin slapped across my forearm. At my shoulder a trayload of relishes, bread, and meat. Ladies snatched my elbow and said, “Please, darling. Could you be so wonderful as to bring me a lean pastrami and a piece of cheesecake?” They’d cling and whimper, lips speckled with anticipatory saliva, pleading for complicity in the desire to eat. Then they’d say, “Was it too much to ask, darling? A lean pastrami?” I felt guilty of revolting gristle and the miseries that brought them to Horses. I’d swear there is no such thing as a lean pastrami, pleading for complicity in truth. My tips were small. I was known as a dope. But I studied other waiters and learned to say, “Here, sweetie, just for you — a lean pastrami. Enjoy.” My pleasure in their pleasure was their pleasure. My tips were tremendous. When next I learned to say, “Eat, bitch. Stop when you get to the plate,” my tips were fantastic.
Sometimes I’d slip into the back of the delicatessen, hide in the meat locker, smoking a cigarette in blood-rancid air, flayed animal tonnage hooked and blazing about my head, and I’d think, There is no such thing as lean pastrami.
After work I’d see my newest friend, the one who told me boring stories. Her name was Memory. She’d take off my shoes and socks, then wash my feet. A swinish indulgence, but I had the corns of Odysseus and ancient sentiments. Besides, she had needs in her knees, and it was her way of making me uncritical when she told a story. So much like a lie. Always a bore.
Telling what happened to her at work, she began by saying what time she got up that morning, what the weather was like, and how it differed from the weather report she’d heard the evening before. The last thing she wanted to hear before shutting her eyes was what tomorrow would be like. She had fears of discontinuity. A city girl, nine to five in an office. The days didn’t return to her bound each to each by daisies. The weather report was her connection between Monday and Tuesday. One night the man said, “Tomorrow it will not rain.” But it rained. Gusty, slapping rain. She said, “Isn’t that strange?” She told me what bus she took in the rain, to get the bus that took her near enough to walk, in the rain, to her office. As always, she bought a newspaper to read during coffee break. The newspaper, the coffee break — with Memory I had mortal fears. I hated her story. I wanted her to go on and on. She told me what her boss said before lunch, and what he said after lunch when they chanced to meet in the hallway outside her office as she returned from the ladies’ room. She told me that her boss — a married man with three kids — for the first time since she’d been working for him made sexual advances. That was the end of her story. She didn’t stop talking or lift her glance to mine. She massaged my corns a bit harder.
I said, “Did you say broom closet?”
“Yes. Isn’t that strange?”
Perhaps she’d been telling him a story and he nudged her and glanced significantly at the broom closet, and perhaps he worked her along subtly, as she told the story, sidling her in among brooms, mops, and cans of detergent, as she persisted in her story …
“You heard the weather report. You got up in the morning. You noticed the weather, rode a bus, and a married man with three kids made sexual advances in a broom closet.”
“The kids weren’t there.”
I put on my socks.
“You didn’t like my story, did you? That’s how it is with me. I thrash in a murk of days. But look. Have pity. Take off your socks. I’m skinny and nervous and finicky. I can’t tell you stories. I have problems with sublimity. I’m not Kafka.”
That night, in a dream, I met Kafka.
A ship had gone down. In one of its rooms, where barnacles were biting the walls, I was reading a story aloud. Sentences issuing from my mouth took the shape of eels and went sliding away among the faces in the room, like elegant metals, slithering in subtleties, which invited and despised attention. When I finished, my uncle Zev rose among the faces, shoving eels aside. He came to me and said nothing about my story, but only that his teeth had been knocked out in the concentration camp. “Write it. Sell it to the movies. Don’t be a schmuck. You could entertain people, make a million bucks. They also killed my mother.” Tony Icona was there. He said, “Starting next week, you write my menus.” With his thumbs he hooked the elastic of his bathing suit and tugged up, molding the genital bulge. The room was full of light, difficult as a headache. It poured through plankton, a glaring diffusion, appropriate to the eyes of a fish. Broken nose appeared, swimming through the palpable light, her mouth a zero. She said, “Have you been introduced to Kafka? He’s here, you know.” I followed her and was introduced. He shook my hand, then wiped his fingers on his tie.
In the Fifties
IN THE FIFTIES I learned to drive a car. I was frequently in love. I had more friends than now.
When Khrushchev denounced Stalin my roommate shit blood, turned yellow, and lost most of his hair.
I attended the lectures of the excellent E. B. Burgum until Senator McCarthy ended his tenure. I imagined N.YU. would burn. Miserable students, drifting in the halls, looked at one another.
In less than a month, working day and night, I wrote a bad novel.
I went to school — N.Y.U., Michigan, Berkeley — much of the time.
I had witty, giddy conversation, four or five nights a week, in a homosexual bar in Ann Arbor.
I read literary reviews the way people suck candy.
Personal relationships were more important to me than anything else.
I had a fight with a powerful fat man who fell on my face and was immovable.
I had personal relationships with football players, jazz musicians, assbandits, nymphomaniacs, non-specialized degenerates, and numerous Jewish premedical students.
I had personal relationships with thirty-five rhesus monkeys in an experiment on monkey addiction to morphine. They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.
With four other students I lived in the home of a chiropractor named Leo.
I met a man in Detroit who owned a submachine gun; he claimed to have hit Dutch Schultz. I saw a gangster movie that disproved his claim.
I knew two girls who had brains, talent, health, good looks, plenty to eat, and hanged themselves.
I heard of parties in Ann Arbor where everyone made it with everyone else, including the cat.
I knew card sharks and con men. I liked marginal types because they seemed original and aristocratic, living for an ideal or obliged to live it. Ordinary types seemed fundamentally unserious. These distinctions belong to a romantic fop. I didn’t think that way too much.
I worked for an evil vanity publisher in Manhattan.
I worked in a fish-packing plant in Massachusetts, on the line with a sincere Jewish poet from Harvard and three lesbians; one was beautiful, one grim; both loved the other, who was intelligent. I loved her, too. I dreamed of violating her purity. They talked among themselves, in creepy whispers, always about Jung. In a dark corner, away from our line, old Portuguese men slit fish into open flaps, flicking out the bones. I could see only their eyes and knives. I’d arrive early every morning to dash in and out until the stench became bearable. After work I’d go to bed and pluck fish scales out of my skin.
I was a teaching assistant in two English departments. I graded thousands of freshman themes. One began like this: “Karl Marx, for that was his name …” Another began like this: “In Jonathan Swift’s famous letter to the Pope …” I wrote edifying comments in the margins. Later I began to scribble “Awkward” beside everything, even spelling errors.
I got A’s and F’s as a graduate student. A professor of English said my attitud
e wasn’t professional. He said that he always read a “good book” after dinner.
A girl from Indiana said this of me on a teacher-evaluation form: “It is bad enough to go to an English class at eight in the morning, but to be instructed by a shabby man is horrible.”
I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West. All now dead, sick, or out of luck.
I was arrested, photographed, and fingerprinted. In a soundproof room two detectives lectured me on the American way of life, and I was charged with the crime of nothing. A New York cop told me that detectives were called “defectives.”
The Collected Stories Page 13