The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  She had photographed the man on Houston Street straight on. He’d caught her eye because of the simple irony of his situation: a man with an extravagantly unkempt, almost Prussian mustache, holding a sandwich board for a shop that trafficked in electric razors. Stubble like iron filings clung to his cheeks, chin, and neck. He resembled a penniless officer in a nineteenth-century novel, one of those fat books by some brooding, Christ-mad Russian. The picture was funny, in a quick, droll sort of way, but as she continued to stare at the man, the simple irony began to fade. The sandwich board obscured his body from his Adam’s apple almost to the tops of his shoes. There was no visible evidence of arms, hands, knees. Those parts that made him a man—his heart, his gut, his cock—all of it had to be inferred. Which was always true, to some extent; didn’t trousers, a shirt, and a jacket require a similar leap of faith? And here was the part that Josef would love: the man had erased 95 percent of his visible humanity in service to a product he either chose not to use or could not afford—but just as the sign rebuked him, he, in turn, undermined it. The photo could be a statement about the ways that industrial capital co-opted the soul while the self sought the means to sabotage—or at least make a mockery of—the terms of its own imprisonment.

  Then again, it might just be a funny picture of a man in need of a shave, possibly even a man who couldn’t read the words he’d been paid a nickel to promote.

  AFTER TAKING THE picture, she ducked into an Automat—not her sort of place, but the broad front window gave her a view of the street that made her feel like she was inside a giant glass camera. Two tables to her left, a woman huffed at a cup of coffee. Lilly’s cup from the same urn had come to her watery and lukewarm, but this woman blew on hers like she’d been served directly from a steam pipe. She was small, narrow-shouldered and flat-chested—petite, if you were being polite; mousy, if you were not. She wore a pale blue blouse and her soft, dented cloche was a type that had not been stylish for half a dozen years. The woman’s eyes were fixed on a book open flat on the table. It was clothbound, something from the public library, or perhaps one of her own, its dust jacket stored reverently at home where the jostling indignities of the daily BMT commute couldn’t fray its crisp edges. She saw no rings on the fingers that encircled the cup. There were no bags from Macy’s or Gimbel’s, no sacks from the pushcarts, in the empty seat next to her. Had she taken a break from work? Was she stealing a few free moments outside some office, away from the other girls, away from the tyranny of the telephone and the pile of typing and filing mounted on one corner of her desk? And that book: Was it a romance full of white-throated maidens, torn bodices, and roguish highwaymen, all offering an escape from a world of apartments, elevators, bus rides, and outer boroughs? Or could it be a Bible? Was Lilly witnessing devotion amid the grab and gabble of the city? The woman’s posture seemed somehow to fold in on itself, as if her shoulders could bend so far forward they would almost touch, like the covers of the book in front of her. All through this examination and dissection, the woman seemed not to feel the hot greedy glare of Lilly’s eyes.

  Lilly was studying the way shadows pooled in the hollows beneath her eyes when she saw a glint, a sudden flaring of light in all that shadow, that told her the woman was crying—or was about to. It had taken patience and the sustained effort of staring to realize that she had been looking at a woman who did not want to cry in a diner and who blew on her wan coffee not to cool it but in an attempt to stanch the tears that were boiling behind her eyes. Something in that moment of recognition plucked the silver filament that joined Lilly to the woman, and without warning, she raised her head from her book, her face naked and unguarded. The woman appeared startled, embarrassed, and then—what? Angry, wounded, violated? Before Lilly thought to express some kind of fellow-feeling or apology, her hand twitched and the Rolleiflex went click.

  Lilly turned away, staring now only at the window. The blood thrummed in her veins, but it was not from being caught in the act of intruding on another’s privacy. It was because she knew that the shot was a good one, and she was eager to see it emerge in the darkroom. Outside was a tumult of taxicabs and pushcarts and men and women waiting for the crosstown bus, but the window also threw back her own portrait. What would someone see in her? she wondered. What would a casual observer, or a dedicated starer, glean from the exterior she offered the world?

  When she turned away from the window, the woman was gone and a young man had taken her place at the table. He was slight, though perhaps it was more charitable to call him trim, or compact, and his table was empty: no cup, no food, no book, nothing. He looked as if he had fallen into some trouble. His shirt was a deep ocean blue but the tails were hanging half out, and the collar was torn like a broken wing. His necktie, a pennant of red silk shot through with bolts of silver lightning, hung askew. But what caught her attention wasn’t the quality of his clothes or the state of their disarray. It was the way he stared—yes, a fellow starer—at the chair that sat across from him. There was something tragic about him, alone and disheveled among the shiny chrome surfaces of the Automat but determined to interrogate the furniture. She aimed the Rolleiflex, clicked the shutter, but she was not done with him. Those eyes and the sense he gave of a man who had fallen, or was in the act of falling, made her think of her studio, and her portraits, and how this could give her the one good reason she needed to delay packing for a few hours more.

  “IT SEEMS THERE is someone here for you.” Yeats pointed a finger and when Michael turned to look, a woman put a hand on his shoulder as if she knew him, and her lips formed some useless words.

  She was older than Michael but not old. Her crimped black hair was pulled away from her face. Her eyes were huge and as dark and inky as her hair. She spoke again. She had a full mouth, high cheekbones, and a nose that she must have hated when she was a girl. Michael thought of a shark’s fin, the prow of a ship. If he were to share these thoughts with Francis—if he could ever share such thoughts again—his brother would screw up his face and say she sounded dreadful, but she wasn’t. She looked regal, possessed of a swift beauty.

  Michael managed a smile and the woman sat in the chair next to his. She had given up talking and had taken to staring hard at him. He feared she might think he was a nutter—he said as much to Yeats—and he pointed to his ears and then with both hands chopped the air in front of him: broken, empty, all gone. Then he touched his mouth and made the same sweep-it-all-away gesture. She squinched her eyes (I understand, I’m sorry) and he shrugged (What can you do?). She smiled herself and then Michael did the same. Natural and spontaneous this time. The woman had a boxy camera slung around her neck and after some fussing in her handbag she came out with a fountain pen and a feathery blue airmail envelope, both of which she offered to Michael. He shook his head and rubbed both hands over his temples, and she nodded to show that she understood.

  She stood and Michael felt a surge of panic. She couldn’t leave, not when they were getting on so well. But she held out a hand and it was a hand that said not Good-bye but Come with me and that’s what Michael did. He looked to Yeats’s side of the table for some guidance but the old man had disappeared. The thought suddenly struck him that she might be as ghostly as Yeats, which was why she’d been able to grasp his meanings so quickly, based only on a few choppy gestures. But her hand felt solid enough. Her fingers were long and delicate, though the nails were blunt. As short as his own, in fact. He held her hand as he rose from the table and when he was on his feet she took his arm and guided him out of the diner. It wasn’t chivalrous, but he let her push open the door, as a test. He hadn’t noticed Yeats opening doors or moving furniture, and now that he thought about it, weren’t ghosts always moving things about? The seminarians all believed that St. Columbanus was haunted by a wax-faced monsignor who had expired over a secret stash of French smut and by the spirits of novices done in by some fatal combination of sodomy, spoiled meat, and self-flagellation. Weren’t they rumored to spill books from the library s
helves? Hadn’t he, late at night, heard a stifled moan drifting from the lavatory, or the stairwell, or the empty room at the end of the corridor?

  SHE WAS BEING pushy, she knew that. Why, she was practically abducting this boy from the café—an illiterate deaf-mute, of all things! When she’d first seen the way he stared at that chair, so intently, she’d wondered if he wasn’t somehow addled. But his eyes had a quickness to them, and who was she to pass judgments about staring? That alone should have told her that the two would hit it off—if that’s what you could call leaving with a man, a boy, really, with whom she had never shared a word.

  Now she was on the street, steering him arm in arm toward her studio, four blocks away. It was another in a string of bright, hot days. There were moments when the sky was so achingly clear and outlined the rooftops so distinctly that the buildings seemed positively radiant, as if the skyline had been etched with a chisel and thrown into relief by this shimmering blue backdrop. Beneath this sky, the private parks and pocket-size plots burst with flowers that had been gorging themselves on sunshine and heat. Whatever miseries the people on the street nursed in their hearts, they had the consolation of being in a living city, a city that was racing forward. This vitality, which Lilly had so loved, now only reminded her of what she was leaving, and where she was returning to.

  Lilly hadn’t walked so close against the body of another, her feet falling into rhythm with his, since her last night in Prague. Her friends had thrown her a bon voyage party, where they had made toasts and said sweet and funny things about her, but really she would have preferred to skip it all and spend the night packing and repacking her suitcases and the large trunk that contained her equipment—everything she would need to create a replica of her home studio. The best part of the night was the walk with Josef, after the last toasts and the kisses and the hugs, each with its wet smell of the damp end-of-February air. They wandered away from the restaurant, tracing a languid path toward Lilly’s flat. Arms linked, her head against his shoulder, they circled Wenceslas Square, passing the café where they had first met, then strolled to the middle of the Charles Bridge, watched over by bronze saints who raised their hands in greeting, or warning. The night was quiet and the lights glittered on the river. Everything around them was so serene that it was easy to believe the city was sleeping, rather than brooding, and that in that dreamy space they could walk unobserved—feet ticking on the cobblestones, the city theirs alone—to a room with an empty closet and trunks labeled for transit lying at the foot of a soft bed. Her train left the next morning. A week later the Wehrmacht would enter Prague unopposed.

  A BLOCK FROM Lilly’s studio they passed an empty lot like a missing tooth in a row of dingy tenements. The buildings were bandoliered by fire escapes that sagged into the street, and at the back of the lot, laundry hung in lines above piles of trash. Boys filled the space, yelling and hooting—a baseball game was in its fourth inning and the Giants were staging a rally. Some of the boys were stripped to their undershirts. Others wore knickers and had their sleeves rolled above their elbows. The ground was pounded smooth, and the improvised bases marked a rough-cut diamond: a cigar box for first, a lid from a bakery tin for second, a square of folded and stained canvas at third, and for home plate, a hardback book spread facedown, half its pages torn out and gold letters still visible across its cracked spine.

  The pitcher, a gangly kid, went into his windup and fired the ball fast and straight. The batter should have mashed it into the pile of broken furniture and old tires out among the pennants of Tuesday’s wash. But he was late with his swing and he popped the ball foul. It went up and up and drifted like a lost balloon toward the street. Michael and Lilly had paused to watch the game and both followed the lazy arc of the ball against the charred brick and scuffed brownstone. One of the boys darted toward the sidewalk, his hand outstretched, as the others cheered or booed him. Michael had never so much as seen a baseball game before, had never caught a ball like this in his life, but he reached out a hand and waited for it, thinking it would settle inevitably into his palm. The boy’s world in that moment was the ball and only the ball, and as he neared Michael he lunged and grasped the ball in his open hand, crashing into Michael and sending him sprawling into a pile of bricks and broken timbers.

  Michael opened his eyes to shattered brick and splintered wood, and that’s when the shock hit him. Déjà vu more intense than any he’d ever felt. Something about these objects, the angle of his view. He saw it all happening again—the bright flash, him reeling, the pieces of what was once a building flying all around him. Was this a memory? A premonition? He tried to hang on to it, to pick it clean of details, but it receded as quickly as it had come. He shook himself and attempted to sit up. The blow had knocked the wind out of him and his arm tingled as though crawling with a thousand ants. He would need to ask Yeats about this. Yeats knew something about visions.

  The woman stood over him now, concern written across her face. She shouted and pointed and swatted two of the boys on the head, then pulled them back when they tried to retreat. The boys hauled Michael to his feet and he found that he could stand unaided. He made a show of dusting off his sleeves and adjusting his tie. I’m fine, I’m fine. He straightened his trousers and presented himself for inspection. The woman’s face softened and with her thumb she dabbed at a spot on his cheek. The boys returned to their game. Michael crooked his arm and Lilly slid her hand around his elbow. From across the street, you would have thought they were sweethearts.

  Lilly stopped at a four-story building that ran half the length of the block. A spandrel of soot-blackened terra-cotta crowned the entrance: TAPSCOTT NEEDLE CO. The letters were curvaceous, their serifs blooming into leaves and flowering buds. Flanking each side of the name was a bobbin of thread with a single strand that looped through a needle’s eye, the only ornamentation on a building that was otherwise grimy brick and smudged glass. The first three floors were still occupied by the needle trades, though none operated under the Tapscott name. That business had gone bust in 1930. The current tenants made ladies’ undergarments on the first floor, men’s hosiery on the second, and canvas belts and straps on the third.

  On the fourth floor was Lilly’s studio, a vast space interrupted only by columns that ran in two rows from one end to the other. The rest was brick walls, wide-planked floors, high ceilings, and a broad bank of windows facing the street. Lilly had done her best to clean the windows with newspaper and white vinegar, but there was so much grit on the outside that she could not scour away. She had planned to use the studio only for her work, but the water closet that she intended for a darkroom included a toilet and a sink large enough to be a tub. She could wash her clothes here, could provide for her hygiene. She had a daybed in the corner farthest from the nighttime lights that bled in from the street and the sun that poured through the windows in the morning. Perhaps it wasn’t a respectable neighborhood, but to Lilly, the studio felt airy and full of possibility.

  “HAVE YOU CONSIDERED that she may be a harlot?” Yeats said. He was leaning against one of the columns and polishing an apple on his sleeve.

  Michael gaped. “She doesn’t seem the type—does she?”

  Yeats reviewed the facts: Michael had been taken by a woman he did not know to a room in a neighborhood that could be charitably described as seedy. No words had been exchanged, but it was likely that the woman sensed from Michael a certain willingness to be led.

  “Janey Mack.” Michael’s voice was a hot whisper. “A harlot.”

  “I take it this is to be your first experience of sexual congress?” Yeats took a loud, crunching bite of the apple.

  Michael gave him a puzzled look. “My—well—wait a minute: Why are you eating?”

  “The fruit plucked from the branch,” Yeats said. “The Edenic overtones. I thought you would appreciate the reference.”

  “Even if you’re right about this,” Michael said, “you can’t stay. That is out of—”

  “I’ll
excuse myself, though I don’t imagine it will be a lengthy absence.”

  Lilly had been sorting through a cabinet where she stored plates of film and the flashbulbs for the mirrored eye that perched above the camera. Now she was at Michael’s side. She led him by the arm across the room, away from the door. “If you wouldn’t mind,” she said. “Could you come over here?”

  Michael craned his head back toward Yeats. “What is she saying?”

  “Words of love.” Yeats took another bite from the apple.

  Michael looked from Yeats to the woman’s face. In the time they had spent together, he had believed there was some connection between them. He was able to seize on her meaning, and it seemed that she could read him, could know him, without need for words. Now he wondered if all of this had been a deception, merely the tools of her trade. Not that he didn’t want to—to—know her. He had wanted this moment—well, perhaps not this exact moment, but the shedding of his virginity, the touch of a woman. It had boiled in his blood for years. He had imagined—he had hoped, dreamed, prayed even—that it would be Eileen. When he thought of her now, her image came in flashes. Her face flushed from running, the wind-flattened grass all around her. Eileen kneeling at the rail to receive Communion, her eyes shut and her tongue out, while he, the altar boy, held the brass patent beneath her chin. Eileen, dressed all in black, her face black-veiled. But when had that happened? He knew the other moments and what surrounded them, but Eileen all in black? Again he wondered if this was a memory or a premonition. Or was it a dreamy reminder that things between them were over, were dead, could never be?

  And if all of that was over and done, then why not this? Why not with this woman? Must he be a monk to punish himself? Hadn’t he already tried that?