Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Marlene, meanwhile, was having a rather more pleasant day. She lounged like a pig in bed until eleven, when guilt flogged her out on deck and into the bath. Then, throwing on one of Karp’s huge T-shirts and a pair of disgusting maternity jeans, she entered a frenzy of straightening things, cleaning the loft as well as it could ever be cleaned, and catching up on several years’ worth of correspondence.

  Two hours of this, and she was famished. One avocado and a half package of frozen crab: crap! no mayo; no eggs, even.

  She walked over to the lift shaft, swung open its wide iron door and yelled down, “Stu! You home?”

  An agreeable shout came up from the open shaft door on the floor below. The shaft was cool and empty, except for its cable and the pallet hook hanging three floors below. Marlene stepped carefully into the open shaftway and climbed down the steel ladder bolted to the shaft wall, swinging wide over sixty feet of nothingness to clear her big belly, a maneuver that, had her husband observed it, would have sent him into foaming fits.

  But he was not there, thought Marlene, and one could not, after all, become an absolute slug. The loft she entered was, of course, the same size as her own loft, but configured quite differently. The sculptor, Stuart Franciosa, had built a neat two-bedroom apartment with all modern cons out of approximately one-third of his space, and left the rest raw as a studio. Into this studio Marlene stepped from the maw of the lift shaft.

  He waved to her from behind a plywood workbench, one of several placed around the loft in the good northwest light from the huge windows. Franciosa was a slim, dark, saturnine man, dressed in a black seaman’s sweater and clay-encrusted jeans. He had flecks of clay drying in his short dark hair.

  He embraced her warmly, then stood away and looked her over with a professional eye. “Stupendous! You’ve never looked better—glowing like a ripe apricot.”

  “A palpable lie. I look like shit warmed over.”

  “Who’s the artist here? In point of fact—you know, it just occurred to me this minute …” He pushed her hair back and tilted her head up and to the left. “Let your mouth fall open and close your eyes!” he ordered.

  “What?”

  “No, really, just do it, like you were getting your jollies.” Marlene obligingly mugged an orgasmic expression.

  “Amazing! You look exactly like the statue of St. Theresa of Avila by Bernini.”

  Marlene laughed. “I came to borrow some mayo.”

  “Take.” He watched her as she went into the apartment and returned a few moments later with a paper cup.

  “Working on anything interesting?” she asked, glancing at the forms standing draped in damp cloths on the worktables.

  “Not really. I’m doing mostly jewelry commissions. One must eat.”

  Stuart Franciosa was doing the kind of sculpture Rodin might have been doing if he had lived to be a hundred and forty: graceful yet massive pieces based on the human body, but subtly modified, antic, self-parodying, referential, romantic: in turns, or all at once. These were starting to sell, but slowly. He earned his rent by making tiny virtu objects and jewelry, witty and erotic, that had become the rage among the upper crust of New York gay society. He manufactured them himself out of gold and platinum, which was why his loft was built like a fort: strap barring on the windows, thick steel door, industrial locks, alarms.

  “Where’s Larry? At work?”

  “No, he has the swing shift tonight. He’s lolling in bed, the slut.” He was looking at her peculiarly, in a way that might have been misinterpreted as evincing lust. Marlene was starting to wonder if he might be bisexual when he blurted out, “Look, Champ, will you do something for me?”

  “Will it take long? I’m going to have a spontaneous abortion if I don’t get something to eat.”

  “I have half a sausage and pepper hero from Paoletti’s.”

  This proved a sufficient bribe. She sat on a stained, legless Chippendale sofa, eating her sandwich, and watched as Franciosa worked. He moved a worktable close to the sofa, placed a wooden turntable on it, constructed an armature of aluminum tubing with the speed and dexterity of a balloon-animal artist, and began to slap masses of ochre clay from a bucket onto the armature.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just a little sketch.”

  “I used to model in college. For some friends.”

  “Do tell. Now, that’s about ready.” He had constructed a rough mass about two feet high approximating the shape of a reclining woman. “Now,” he said, “take off all your clothes.”

  Somewhat to her own surprise, Marlene did so. Franciosa arranged Marlene and some soft pillows on the sofa, moving her so that she was seated with her head thrown back and her left arm and leg trailing limply. It was a fairly comfortable position, the loft was warm, and she found it amusing to look exalted while Franciosa sculpted away at the clay mass.

  After perhaps an hour had passed, Marlene was roused from her pleasant, if guilty, somnolence by the sound of someone entering the loft, someone who issued a delighted shriek.

  “Marlene! What a tummy! My dear, let me look at you!”

  These words were delivered in the sugared accents of Louisiana, and shortly thereafter their author appeared before her, beaming. Larry Bouchard was a small, elegant tan person, whose fine-boned Creole features were perpetually lit by the apprehension of some delicious surprise, which, if he liked you, he would communicate in the most extravagant and amusing language. He was dressed in a beige leather coat over medical whites.

  He strode over to Marlene’s sofa and without asking placed his hands on her naked belly, pressing gently and skillfully on her womb.

  “I beg your pardon!” she said in astonishment.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, dear. I do this all the time. Yes, it’s right in the groove. Four weeks, I’d say. Not more than five.”

  “Larry, I’m working here, huh?” said Franciosa grumpily.

  “Oh, be quiet, Stuart! Always flashin’ out these peremptory orders—I mean to say! I was just leavin’ fo’ the mill anyway.”

  He blazed his remarkable smile at Marlene and said, “Just imagine! The patter of tiny feet in this grim environment! An’ ah shall be a godmother at last.”

  Marlene laughed. “Larry, you’re too much.”

  He strolled toward the door. “Not at all. Ah am barely sufficient.” He blew a kiss and vanished.

  Franciosa was smiling and shaking his head. Larry was not the first Larry that had lived in the loft; Marlene had met at least two previous others. But she liked Bouchard the best, and she suspected that Stu Franciosa did too, which was fine with her.

  She stretched and said, “I’m out of position. Do you want to keep going?”

  “No, let’s call it a day.” He threw a damp cloth over the work before Marlene could get a good look at it. “Drink? Dope?”

  “No, thanks, I’m supposedly off everything until after. God! Four weeks! I can’t believe it! Do you think he’s right? My doctor says more like five to six.”

  “Oh, I’d believe Larry. By all I’ve heard, he’s a formidable nurse. Put in something like eight years in obstetrics. Getting a little burnt out now, unfortunately. He’s working the children’s cancer ward at Presby.”

  “Oh, God!” said Marlene, vibrating with the increasingly familiar pangs of Parent Fear. Suddenly she needed a cigarette and a drink, neither of which she was likely to get. She had just hauled herself to her feet and begun to look around for her clothes when she heard the unmistakable heavy tread of her husband on the stairs.

  “Agh! It’s Butch!” she cried. What was he doing home so early? She dressed in a flash, stuffing her underpants into a pocket, and headed for the lift.

  Franciosa, an amused look on his face, remarked, “Hurry home before hubby finds out you’ve been doing naughty.”

  “Oh, fuck you too, Franciosa! He can’t get in because the bolt’s on the door.” Then she giggled. “Yeah, secrets of a housewife’s day.”

  “I’ll n
ever tell,” he called as she clambered up the shaft.

  Karp was standing in the doorway, playing Death of a Salesman with his pathetic shopping bag.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick? Come in! Sit down! What happened!”

  Karp moved silently through this rush of exclamations like a specter through a graveyard mist and collapsed on the red couch. He kept his shopping bag between his feet, like a refugee from an undeclared war.

  “I quit,” he said. “Resigned. Bang. End of story.”

  To her credit, Marlene said nothing at this but, prompted by generations of working-class genes, went to the cupboard and poured out a tumbler of red wine from the half gallon and handed it to Karp. That was what was done when the man of the house was on the bricks.

  Karp looked at the glass as if he had never been handed a stiff one before, which was nearly the case, and drank half of it down. He made a castor-oil face, then dutifully chugged the rest.

  “Now, tell!” said the wife.

  Loosened by the wine, he told, succinctly and fairly, blaming no one but himself. It was the death of the girl. He couldn’t allow it to be passed off as an unfortunate error, or made into a political football. A sacrifice was required.

  Marlene said, “ ‘Now all the truth is out, be secret and take defeat from any brazen throat, for how can you compete, being honor bred, with one who, were it proved he lies, were neither shamed in his own nor in his neighbors’ eyes? Bred to a harder thing than Triumph, turn away, and like a laughing string whereon mad fingers play amid a place of stone, be secret and exult, because of all things known, that is most difficult.’ “

  Karp looked at her open-mouthed, in frank amazement.

  “Yeats,” she said. It’s called ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.’ Sister Marie Patrick made us memorize it in tenth grade.”

  He shuddered: the wine and the reaction from the day’s events. “Guy knew what he was talking about. Place of stone is right.” He looked at her looking at him with her steady if skew-eyed gaze. “I guess you think I’m a schmuck for taking the fall for Peter. With the baby coming.”

  “That’s almost insulting,” said Marlene.

  “Sorry.”

  “You should be. My father was on the street for nine months in ’51, and he had two kids and one on the way. We always had food on the table and a roof—which reminds me, it’s a good thing we don’t have a mortgage on a house in the suburbs. Anyway, if worse comes to worst, in six months I’ll go back and you can watch the baby.”

  “A cheerful thought,” he said, but the idea amused him. “From putting asses in jail to putting asses in diapers.”

  She smiled. “Serve you right. But really, what will you do? Go private?”

  Karp let out a gush of breath, pursed his lips and considered. “No, I don’t think so. I’m still a little confused. It was like—I don’t know—having a sort of low flu for weeks, years maybe, and then suddenly it lands in your gut and you puke everything up without warning. Then it’s over and you feel kind of light-headed, weak, but basically OK. You just have to sit in bed and it’ll be OK.”

  The phone rang and the message machine recorded a plea to call from a reporter on the Post. It rang a minute later. Ariadne Stupenagel wanted a word. Neither of them made a move to answer it as it rang at intervals thereafter.

  “Ah, fame,” sighed Marlene. “So you’re going to take to your bed?”

  “No, I don’t mean literally. I mean I’m going to take some time. We have about eight weeks’ paid leave, so we can coast a little on the money end. Then we’ll see.” He smiled in a way that Marlene had not observed often enough, a relaxed expression instead of his usual tight grin. She knew it wasn’t just the wine. A new Karp was emerging.

  “So what will you do with your well-earned leisure?”

  “Oh, hang around the shanty. Pinch your ass in the morning. Work on my jump shot. Shit! That reminds me …” He looked at his watch. “I have a basketball game to go to tonight. Want to come?”

  “Well, you’ve recovered fast. I thought you’d mope more.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m basically shallow, Marlene. I put my career in the toilet—what the fuck, right? Tomorrow’s another day. Besides, these are gonna be great seats. Bernie Nadleman is holding a couple of tickets. Hustlers and Sixers. We can see Dr. J. So, want to come?”

  “Only if he’s an obstetrician,” said Marlene.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By the end of the first quarter, it was obvious to Karp that the New York Hustlers, while possessing talent and speed, were not a very good basketball team. He had a fine view of just how bad they were, because Bernie Nadleman had provided a seat in the second row behind the Hustlers’ bench. The team played in a decrepit arena in Flushing Meadows, a part of the old 1939 World’s Fair construction. It was small, dank, and smelly, like a two-thirds scale Madison Square Garden without the memories.

  Karp had not attended many basketball games in the past decade, but he had not lost his appreciation of the game, or his skill in assessing a team. The Hustlers were playing well as individuals, but lacked the unspoken, nearly mystical connection between players on the court that separated winners from losers in the pros.

  Fred James, the power forward who had replaced the slain Marion Simmons, had been shooting well all through the first half, racking up eighteen points by halftime. But when the Sixers inevitably discovered that he had no idea where the open man was, they double-teamed him continually, and since one of the men working him was Julius Erving, he got only six points in the second half.

  The small forward, Jim Lockwell, was an aggressive rebounder, who got the ball a lot and lost it a lot too on unwise passes. He also could have used some free-throw practice. He missed five straight shots in the first quarter.

  The Hustlers’ center, Barry Croyden, seemed to be competing with Darryl Dawkins for who could make the loudest slam dunk, but in nothing else. At post, he seemed confused, as if he were playing by himself against five people. He was an effective rebounder, but three of his outlet passes were stolen. Croyden fouled out at the beginning of the fourth quarter. He did, however, score sixteen points.

  Johnnie Bryan, the point guard, and at an even six feet the shortest man on the court for the Hustlers, was probably the best all-around ball handler on the team, but seemed incapable of using these skills in cooperation with his teammates. He did a lot of fancy dribbling that did not lead often enough to plays or points.

  To Karp, the most interesting man on the court was Doobie Wallace, the shooting guard. Wallace was an exciting player, an in-yo-face competitor with enormous natural athleticism. Fast, a great jumper, he seemed to radiate energy as he penetrated and went up for flying, twisting shots. His problem was that, for a guard, he was not all that interested in guarding. He scored points, but the people he was supposedly in charge of, working off their more tightly knit team, scored somewhat more points than he did, which was not the way to win basketball games.

  And, in the event, the Hustlers lost, 118-98; toward the end the team became shockingly dull, barely going through the motions. The dispirited fans shuffled toward the exits, to which they had started a few minutes or so before the final buzzer.

  When Karp stood up, Nadleman spotted him and gestured, pointing to his open mouth. Food. Karp nodded and the coach said, “Ten minutes.”

  It turned out to be twenty-five, but Karp had nothing better to do. They got into Nadleman’s black Chrysler and drove to a big, brightly lit pastrami emporium on Queens Boulevard. Seated and chomping immense sandwiches, they discussed the game. Nadleman seemed eager to talk, although frustrated and irritable.

  “I tell them, watch the ball, watch the ball. What ball? They’re fuckin’ snoozing out there. Bryan watches the ball, I give him that, but one, he’s six foot tall and unlike Cousy he’s got no shot. What he has got is attitude. You see him out there in the third quarter? The NBA record for dribbling without moving the ball.”

  “Wallace looke
d good. James has a lot of talent there,” Karp offered.

  “Wallace always looks good. It’s his main thing. He’s good for eighteen, twenty-two points, you could put it in the bank. On D he takes a vacation. He won’t fill the lane. He won’t go for the loose ball. You know what his assist average is so far? Point nine.

  “James, I agree, talent up the wazoo. If he would start thinking, we might start winning games again. You notice how he goes up in the air and hangs there for about a minute or so while he figures out what he went up there for?

  “So to make a long story short, my D is in the toilet, nobody’s rotating to the open man, my center isn’t blocking shots the way a guy that big should be. Our fast break is sluggish. I mean the kids are physically fast, but they get up court and sort of mill around. I got no transition game to speak of, and if I see one good secondary break a game, I’m lucky.”

  “What’s the story on your bench?” Karp asked.

  Nadleman shrugged. “Run-of-the-mill, except for Murphy, who’s a pain in the ass.”

  “No, what I meant is it seems to me that if your people aren’t playing ball the way you want them to, then park them. Give somebody else a chance. You got Murphy. You got that other big center, what’s-his-name.”

  “Blanding.”

  “Right, Blanding, and you got that rookie forward from Temple, the kid, Kravic. You can’t lose any worse than you already are, and you could put together a different chemistry. Anyway, the starters will get the point. Play my way or don’t play.”

  Nadleman nodded, frowning. “Yeah, I could do that, but if I didn’t show some wins right away, Chaney would be all over my ass. How come I’m not using his expensive players? Wallace gets his million per for sinking shots, not for warming the bench. If I had a winning season, then maybe I’d have some clout with the front office. Meanwhile …” He shrugged helplessly.

  “I take it Mr. Chaney is not all that sensitive to what it takes to run a ball team.”

  “You could say that,” Nadleman agreed. “Sensitivity is not Howard’s long suit anyway. Besides, he’s completely focused on the new arena. You saw the pit we play in. Chaney’s working with the city to build a new one; it was part of the deal he cut for bringing the Hustlers to New York. He’s a businessman, as he’s always telling me. He expects value for money; he pays for good players, he expects good play. He also seems to think they’ll play better in a fancy new arena.”