by Alon Preiss
One Friday evening, he’d been working late, as a second-year associate, and some other second-year associates wandered out into the secretaries’ area, which was all deserted then, at nine in the evening, and Henry came out of his office and offered them some cigars and port. This was back when Henry still drank. And Daniel felt a little drunk, and someone told a little story, and suddenly it seemed appropriate for Daniel to say, “When I used to live in Alphabet City – you know, that’s what it was called back then, over by Avenue D – there was a store, and I forget the name. There was this guy who ran the store, his name was Ivan and he was a Trotskyite. It’s funny, his name was Ivan, but he wasn’t Russian, and he was a Trotskyite, and his store felt like something out of Dr. Zhivago, which was the point, I think. And there were a bunch of other artists like me who lived on the street, and around one in the morning, sometimes we would all gather in Ivan’s junky store.” And smoke pot, and laugh, and talk radical politics, and revolution ....
“You were an artist?” Henry said, interrupting.
“What kind?” another associate said. Daniel tried to explain, wound up blushing. He realized then that to talk about his life ever again would require too much digression. From then on he descended into a sort of shell: he had not lived before he entered the office. He had never had an independent thought, he had never loved and laughed and lost. And from then on, he thought very rarely about Ivan and about his old home. Daniel knew that he could never go back there. He smelled like a suit, now. He would be pounced on, heckled, robbed, killed. He smelled like a suit, and he could never go back.
The Equinox, Ivan’s store, was on 8th Street, under a street-lamp that had burned out many months ago. Filled with trinkets: kitschy ’fifties artifacts; plastic toys; junk jewelry; old magazine covers, framed; action figures; original Barbie dolls; moth-bitten rugs; bongs; stuff like that. The store never changed, though life on the street changed, back and forth, a state of constant flux.
During the 1980s, the street went through a renaissance, and little bistros moved in, struggling would-be yuppies paid for big apartments that looked out over the projects. When the city collapsed, and 8th street with it, the murder rate climbed, and three friends of Ivan’s were killed, shot in the head, shot in the back, stabbed repeatedly with an old, rusty knife. But Ivan never changed, not ever. He still clung fiercely to his radical Leninist politics. Ivan needed to talk about politics, every day, almost every moment. This was what he lived for.
Ivan had lived in a squat for twenty years before getting kicked out by the city. His plight had been prominently featured in the Village Voice, which had come to the editorial defense of every squatter in the city. When the forces and farces and feces of capitalist fascism had finally managed to throw him out on the street, he’d repainted the back room of the store and now slept there, on a mattress.
Irina, the Russian girl from Yaroslavl, was a few years older; in the intervening years, she’d watched her country fall apart, and had fallen herself into the arms of many unworthy men. She first wandered into the Equinox a day after an upsetting event which had left her stranded in America, perhaps forever. She found it difficult to breathe in the heavy atmosphere, thick with mold and dust. She looked at this middle-aged, pony-tailed man behind the counter, averted her eyes and muttered at the floor: “I have had terrible tragic happening and am lost far from home. Need place to stay and will work for nothing.” She said it too fast, and with no feeling at all. The man laughed, and asked her, “Can you add and subtract?” She nodded. “Can you clean stuff? Like bathrooms and floors and stuff?” She nodded again. “OK,” he said with finality. “Fifty dollars a week, off the books, so that’s like the equivalent of more money than fifty. You can sleep on the floor of the store after we close. You work six days a week, nine in the morning till nine in the evening, then clean up, and during the day you give the place some culture and atmosphere. And if you get in any trouble, don’t tell the cops you live here.”
“OK,” she said, and she figured this sounded all right after all, her American adventure. She figured, after all, that fifty dollars would amount to a lot.
The fourth day at The Equinox, a boy came in, maybe eighteen years old. He said his name was Linus, and Irina laughed. “After only a week in America,” she said, “already I know that’s a stupid name.” He did not seem to belong here in this neighborhood, though Irina was not sure, exactly, who did belong here. He did not seem rich, but there was something in his eyes, or in the dark luster of his now unkempt hair, and in his all-too infrequent but blindingly white smile. Linus did not dress poor, he did not dress rich. He belonged to no world. He seemed out-of-place and uncomfortable. “What is your last name?” she asked.
“No last name,” said Linus. “I dropped out of college, and dropped my last name, and now I live above The Equinox. Be careful of Ivan, he’s insane.” He smiled, hoping to impress her. “I’m an artist,” he added, filling in the silence.
“What kind?”
“Haven’t decided.”
“I don’t think you’re very funny. Maybe you try too hard. Or maybe it’s just my bad English.”
“Well,” Linus said, “just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood. I’ve seen you in the window, straightening things up, staring at the shelves. As I said, I live just above the store, so come by whenever.”
“Why would I want to go visit you?” she asked. “Why would I ever want to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Linus said. “You’re here for some reason. You look as though you’re bursting to tell someone about it. I’m a nice fellow, pretty much, and so you might want to come by. I have a big TV.” He shrugged. “I can’t think of any other reason, really.”
Her eyes focused on a junkie on the sidewalk, walking and puking at the same time. How was it possible to walk and puke at the same time? She had never seen such a thing. She had never imagined that such a trick were possible.
“Tonight, maybe,” Irina said, in a sad resolved little voice. “Tonight,” she said again, more firmly. “If that’s OK. I’m bored, very bored here, already. It might be better than doing nothing, going to visit with you.”
An hour or two later, Ivan came back to the store. She could smell the drink around him, from a few feet away. He grinned. “This is awful,” he said. “Hiring you for nothing’s messed me up, Irina. I’m free to drink and carouse.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He came up to the cash register, leaned on the counter. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You don’t need to be deferential. I don’t run a fascist dictatorship.”
“I know,” Irina said. “You run the dictatorship of the people. Is that what you call it in English?”
Ivan nodded, smiling. “My own little refusenik, a Solzhenitsyn on the East Side. Listen, share a glass of wine with me. We’re closed for the day, I think.” He locked the front door, flipped the Open/Closed sign around.
He walked to the back room, returned a moment later with a bottle, California red, and two glasses. “I won’t let you refuse. Why would you want to refuse?”
Ivan popped the cork, poured two glasses, and handed one to her. She took a nervous sip. He pulled up a chair, gestured for her to sit down, and she obeyed, but the enforced friendliness bothered her.
“How is it, sleeping on the floor of the store?” he asked.
“All right,” she said.
“Hurt your back?”
She nodded. “A little bit.”
He thought a moment. “Then tonight, you’ll sleep in the back room. The next day, I’ll sleep there.”
“It’s your room,” she said. She smiled suddenly. “If I had my own room, I wouldn’t give it away. If I were boss, Ivan, I would make you sleep on the floor and I wouldn’t worry about poor Ivan’s back. I would sleep on my bed and dream happy dreams and ignore poor Ivan groaning in pain in the next room.” She was laughing, trying to convince him to leave her alone. In truth, she did not want to sleep in this old
man’s room, under any circumstances. She didn’t want to be his friend; she didn’t want to be a girl who shared his bed with him, whether or not Ivan were in it at the same time. She didn’t want to be anything to him.
“Old Ivan would be found dead in the morning,” he said, “replaced by noon, and another blow would be struck for social Darwinism. The funeral home stays in business another week. How American you are after only a few days.” He smiled, and she smiled back, although she found him not funny at all. “Is it better here in America?” he asked suddenly. “Better than Russia? People think it is, that’s why they always come over here.”
Irina stared out the window. “Worse, I think,” she said.
“Worse than now? Or worse than under Communism?”
“Both were bad,” she said. “But I think America is just slightly worse.” Shrugged. “I don’t know, Ivan. I just come here. I had terrible tragic happening which I can not discuss. Then I come here. I don’t think I know America.”
“You don’t need to live here to know us,” Ivan said. “You should have some distance in order to analyze anything.” He took a sip of wine, thinking. “For instance, I’ve read all about your country, for years, in books and journals. I even used to write for a journal that hasn’t been published in a decade. So I have maybe more perspective on you and your roots than you do. I liked Lenin. And then Trotsky was OK. Lenin on his deathbed said: ‘Don’t give the country to Stalin. He’s a son-of-a-bitch. Sell the whole store to Trotsky.’ But I don’t know what happened with that. Then Stalin sold out the People, lost the dream entirely. He was not a Communist, let me tell you. He was just an opportunist. If he’d been in Germany, he would have been a Nazi. He was just a Stalinist, he just cared about whatever was good for Stalin. Then Kruschev was pretty good, because he was a real Communist. Brezhnev just cared about the caviar and the women, not about the People, but everyone still had food on the table. And Gorbachev ruined everything.”
“I hate Gorbachev,” Irina said, choosing just to agree when she could.
“He sold everything out,” Ivan nodded. “He ruined what was left of the dream. During the best years of the revolution, you people didn’t know how good you had it.”
“Yes, we did,” Irina said.
He took a big gulp of wine, re-filled his glass. “Have you been meeting anyone?” he asked. “Is there anything for you outside these walls?”
“Tonight,” she said, “I’m supposed to go meet upstairs boy. You know, boy who lives upstairs.”
“Just upstairs?” he said.
She nodded.
He thought. “A rich kid,” he said gently. To Ivan, perhaps this was wealth, Linus’ tired averageness. “Be careful of rich kids, Irina, they have no scruples.”
“OK,” she whispered. “I know, already.”
Linus – not his real name, she was sure of it now – had a tiny apartment, just a small bedroom and small living room. The living room was empty except for a huge television which overwhelmed everything. When Irina arrived, he was sitting in front of the television, playing some video game she didn’t recognize. He gave her a beer and she sat beside him for a while, watching the little video men, little soldiers with rifles, running around a rice paddy, shooting other soldiers, running back and forth, up and down, shooting and shooting.
Linus had gone to Columbia for one semester, he told an uninterested Irina. He hadn’t cared about Plato, Socrates, music humanities. He had something to say, something to communicate to the world, even if he were not yet sure exactly what that would be. So he’d left, and his parents had agreed to let him discover his true worth on his own. They’d written him a check, which, it turned out, did not buy quite as much as he had imagined that it would. He was quickly running out of money, and he didn’t know what kind of job he could get. He spent a lot of time watching his big TV and drinking beer, which he bought at the corner deli even though he was clearly too young. He tried to write poetry, but he didn’t know how. He tried to read some of the intellectual journals sold at the bookstore just across the park, but he couldn’t understand them. Now he feared that his bad Fall semester grades had nothing to do with his brilliance and everything to do with his stupidity.
“You’ve been drinking all day,” Irina said. “Just like Ivan.” She shook her head. “Otherwise, you would never have told me all this.”
He nodded. “I don’t even know you.”
“You didn’t want to listen to me,” she said. “You just, deep down, wanted to unburden yourself, to tell all these things to me, or to anyone at all. You weren’t even trying to impress me. You just wanted to talk and talk.”
“I suppose so.” He stared at his beer.
“Americans all talk, all the time,” Irina said. “That’s the first thing I notice. They talk all the time and never hear each other.”
Still staring at his beer bottle, clenched in both hands, Linus said, “The other day, I got so lonely that I went out to find a prostitute.”
“Linus,” said Irina. “I think the real problem here is that I also don’t want to listen. Thank you for inviting me here, but I think that I just don’t want to listen to you at all.”
And she left Linus’ apartment, walked down the stairs and stood outside Ivan’s store on the black, empty street where, years and years earlier, Daniel had stood on many occasions, looking forward to an evening of the subversive talk that now bored Irina so desperately. Daniel was still here, on this empty street. His influence was felt in small ways, perhaps. His encouragement might have helped Ivan to continue, to believe that there were some purpose for his existence, for his little store, for his dwindling ideological beliefs. Daniel’s presence might have still been in the store, the warmth and laughter of the young Daniel, before he’d gotten a little recognition for his trouble, before he’d moved across town, before he’d met a beautiful woman and married her. Did Ivan remember Daniel? Did he have any suspicions about Daniel’s whereabouts, would he have been disappointed to see the ordered and sterile apartment where he slept now, and to see the middle-aged lawyer Daniel had become? What would Ivan say to Daniel now?
Daniel woke up around six in the morning. The sheet had slid over onto Natalie’s side of the bed, and Daniel now spent four minutes watching his toes.
He got out of bed, went to the living room and sat down on his exercise bicycle, spun his legs furiously as he stared at the early news. Natalie staggered into the kitchen, heated up a frozen bagel in the toaster oven. On the news, the big story was those Turks in Germany who burned to death in a fire-bombing attack by Neo-Nazis. Helmut Kohl refused to go to the Turks’ funeral, knowing that Turks in Germany cannot vote, but Neo-Nazis can. “That reminds me,” Daniel said, puffing.
“Of what?” Natalie muttered. She kept the light low in the kitchen, and her eyes still drooped. To Daniel, on his exercise bike, feeling his muscles strain to keep going, Natalie’s state of semi-consciousness seemed a luxury. An hour later, Daniel would wonder why Natalie had been up so early. It hadn’t yet occurred to him. Sweat dripped into his eyes.
“Remember Emmett?” he asked. “The pudgy guy who got kicked out of the firm for hitting that partner in the head with a hammer?”
“No.” Natalie peered at the toaster oven.
“You remember,” he said again, with some effort, as he gasped for air. “This guy pounded a little old partner over the head with a hammer.”
“I don’t remember,” she insisted. She walked over to the coffee machine and poured a large amount into a great, bowl-shaped coffee mug.
“Did he kill the guy?” she asked.
Daniel puffed a bit more. He pushed the handlebars forward, pulled them back in, puffed again. “No,” he said.
“I think he would have killed the guy if he hit him in the head with a hammer.”
“Well, he didn’t kill the guy.”
“What was he doing with a hammer at work anyway?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that he had a hammer at
work, he hit a partner in the head with it, and the partner wasn’t killed.”
“Well, I still don’t remember him.”
Daniel slowed down on the bike. He walked over to the coffee machine, poured himself a big mug of coffee, took a gulp. He should from now on drink the coffee first, he decided, then do the exercise bike. He was trying to figure out how to withstand more than seven minutes on the machine, and maybe a chemical jolt was the answer. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, felt very briefly light-headed.
He was just beginning his forties – he thought about his age all the time, though he swore that he could never remember the specific number – and he was beginning to look a lot like a lawyer, or like a partner, anyway. His hair had receded; not too much. He still retained a small tuft of hair pushed back across the top of his forehead, sandwiched between two peninsulas of scalp, the sort of thing that looks OK – even sexy, Natalie insisted to him – for about 23 months.
But his stomach, now, was balloon-like. Diets helped him lose weight in the face or arms, but his stomach always grew. His wife said it was cute, and rubbed it for good luck.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Daniel said. “This seems suddenly very normal, you know, the two of us standing here drinking coffee together before work.”
She nodded her approval. Then: "I‘ve always thought that what matters most is the marriage.”
“Why?” Daniel said, before he had a chance to stop himself.