He heard himself saying to her that maybe he ought to move, too.
"What’s that got to do with that man getting in here?" said Linda.
"It’s how I feel when I go back to my own place," he said, and his heart was thick as a hundred sounds at once.
"Stop smiling," she said. "Or tell me what it is."
"What did he get away with?"
"You couldn’t care less," she said extravagantly.
He laughed, and she said that when he got back from Houston they’d have to have a talk. He said he’d heard that before. He bobbed his head sideways at the bed above them—an unspeakable crudity, at this moment, that sent her into the bedroom.
He turned out the lights and put the chain on the door. He went in expecting her to be sitting on the bed or lying down staring at the ceiling. She was standing beside her bureau, absorbed in a magazine. He held her shoulders and looked at the article she was reading, and asked what the intruder had gotten away with. She put the magazine down and didn’t speak until she was in bed. He had watched her, and now he stood there with his clothes on.
The neighborhood led to her front door and through it. And out again, home again, he envisioned, and he also saw that—after her apartment had changed again, a third apartment, a fourth apartment, and he was walking home in one new way after another, but always through the intersection where the Puerto Rican woman with the blue eyes sometimes had the night shift and once, well after dawn, was being helped by a little girl who had her hair in two braids—he would himself move to a new apartment, so that between his place and Linda’s there was no point in passing through that intersection.
"Please don’t tell me you’ve heard it before," she said. She did not ask if he was coming to bed.
"But I have heard it before," he said.
"And you’ve heard your wife say she was moving because you wouldn’t; and you’ve heard the stereo blasting out the Beatles or Beethoven as you put your key in the front door and your heart fell because you felt it was your fault she was boozing, but you would never tell her it was your fault. And you heard her say When you get back, we’ve got to have a talk; but so what—so what?"
"But when I got back, she wasn’t there," he said.
"I really wouldn’t know," said Linda. She shifted in bed and raised up on an elbow. "She must have been there sometimes. Maybe she’s there now, for all I know."
"I’m going," he said.
"What a sucky date this has been," said Linda.
"Do you think he’s dangerous?" said John.
Linda laid her head down on the pillow. "He’s got a hammer," she said.
"He took a hammer?"
"It was right here on the bed table under the lamp, with the two Polaroid pictures of me."
"That was his hammer," said John.
"But I was using it."
"Listen, I really meant to staple those speaker wires for you."
"I’m glad you didn’t," said Linda wearily.
He moved out of the bedroom. "You creep," she called after him. "We’ve had that talk, so forget it. Lock the door on your way out."
He took the chain off, and as he was letting himself out Linda said, "He took one of the pictures."
"What?" said John across the dark space of the apartment.
Linda raised her voice. "He took one of the Polaroids with him when he called, but I was afraid he’d try to return it." John bet himself that Linda didn’t think he would go. He closed the door softly behind him and locked it.
In the elevator he was relieved. Linda would have to have the lock changed —and by another locksmith, not from around here. That was the answer— of course!—to how the Departed Tenant had gotten in. And the door didn’t lock by itself, so he had to have had a key to lock up when he left. The Departed Tenant had a friend who worked for the contractor, who was also the locksmith in the neighborhood, and he must have done the job or had it done by somebody who worked for him. The key must not have been registered if the Departed Tenant had gotten hold of a duplicate.
The story went on in his head. He came to the lobby door and leaned his head against the glass. It was cool against his forehead, and, staring at his shoes, he remembered again the snapshot in his inside pocket. The tension or whatever it was passed without a sound, and he imagined, there, with his eyes shut, that his hand on the doorknob felt the polite force of somebody on the other side, coming home.
The restaurant was still very much open. He’d been right about the sign. The pet shop and the checks-cashed place were shut up tight. He wanted it to be later. A couple passed, and both of them were chewing gum. He’d seen a girl running for a bus this morning chewing gum.
He approached the corner where his former route joined this one. He saw the bearded man in the big western hat, who might have been the Departed Tenant, cross the street in front of him and disappear, walking south. It had to be the same man, though he wore an army jacket, not the grimy white parka.
At the corner he turned south to follow the man, who stopped down the block at the pay phone. And John stopped, as if, at fifty yards’ distance, he was waiting to use the phone when the man was through, while the man was looking at him as if the call might go on for a long time.
Two large trucks came racing uptown side by side, and a cab was trying to get around them. The man at the phone seemed to be talking. Now he put the phone back on the hook and strode off. John stood watching until the man broke into an easy jog and turned west at the next corner. John went after him past the phone on its cement post and the wire-mesh trash basket.
At the corner he didn’t see the man. The man could not have made it all the way down the block, but he had been going in the direction of Linda’s place. John ran back along the pavement to the phone and dialed her. She wasn’t answering.
He needed to pack. He would scare Linda if he went back now. He made the turn at the next corner, wondering if Linda had put the chain back on. She had an excellent sense of humor. So did he. Sometimes, she said.
At the cafe-newsstand intersection the traffic light was turning red when he saw Linda. She was wearing her purple coat, and she was crossing the avenue half a block ahead of him. A cab passed, and then another.
He stopped, and then he went on. On the far sidewalk she looked around her—everywhere except behind her. And then she went into his cafe. He called to her, but she went on inside. The way she had looked around uncertainly, she hadn’t planned to go to the cafe. What had she planned for the evening?
He would surprise her, but when he crossed the avenue and came to the takeout window and saw that the Puerto Rican woman hadn’t come on yet, Linda was at the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk and shook her head at him, smiling.
"They don’t have a pay phone," she said.
‘They don’t?" he said.
‘There wouldn’t have been anyone home."
"I hope not," he said. "I should get a machine."
They looked each other in the eye. He invited her in for coffee. "How did you wind up behind me?" she said. "Your face looks funny."
He didn’t like that. "I went down to my old pay phone to phone you."
"Why’d you do that?" she asked. "I was trying to catch up with you."
"Did you phone the police?" John asked.
Of course not; the Departed Tenant wasn’t dangerous. He had been phoning earlier, when John was there, to tell her he had reclaimed his hammer, he needed it, he was on his way at last.
"With his master key," said John. But he didn’t know.
She was having the lock changed tomorrow. John told her to see if she could have the key registered. She had thought of that.
"Fair exchange—a quilt for a hammer."
"Not a great quilt, but after all the hammer was his to begin with," she said, and she kissed him very lightly. He felt his heart race.
"The quilt went with the bed," he said.
"It stayed," said Linda.
"He must like you a lot to leave y
ou the quilt."
"I think he liked her a lot. The girl from upstate. The quilt went with the bed."
"But not the hammer," said John. "Hammers are expensive if you’re an itinerant carpenter going to New Mexico."
"I think he loved her," said Linda.
"Will he show people your picture on his way west?"
"What would he say, I wonder?" said Linda.
John produced the picture from his inside jacket pocket. She looked from the picture to him and back again. She was pleased. "I knew it," she said, surprised. She put her hand on his shoulder, and they both looked at the photograph. "This makes better sense," she said. "When I left for work yesterday, there were two pictures. Now they’re all accounted for."
"If that guy had taken one—I mean as a souvenir—there would still have been one left for me," said John. "By the way, the hammer certainly wasn’t on the bed table, so the Departed Tenant must have been and gone."
"What were you doing in my apartment in the middle of the day?"
"I’m a degenerate," John said. "But you gave me the keys."
"I’m particular who I give them to," she said. "Didn’t you know that? No wonder you’re not married."
"Not even half married?" he asked.
She touched his hand. "No, not even half married. Unless it’s someone I don’t know about."
They decided not to have coffee after all. On the way back to Linda’s they discussed the Departed Tenant. Had he really, as he’d said, hoped to keep the apartment and sublet it to someone but couldn’t get permission? Whatever had been going on, they agreed that he had meant well. They agreed that he had moved out of the apartment because he had to.
Larry
The word one heard was "homework," heard sitting at one’s somewhat small but new and not-cheap old-fashioned roll-top desk, the only word one heard aware that one’s mother was leaving was "homework," not "housework." Her last sentence (oration in espahol, a language for New York and for today, one’s father has assured one, for today’s complex horizons while the bilingual subway skips the horizon and goes under it) was heard only in that last word "homework." Like she’s been speaking in some next room.
Well, she had been. And with one’s erstwhile father. But like soundproofed with the door closed, and she seemed to throw it open for that last word homework which now therefore (though no echo) felt chock-a-block with housework, the code-word key-word clearing the voice-print of one’s mother’s ongoing discussion if that was the right word with one’s father who was in the habit of settling pre-contract differences with her out of court until it was too late for any kind of contract. Except, well, you know, a contract. Marriage contract. For a kind of new marriage.
Upon which both together seemed to laugh and she said low in this direction not the phone’s, "Oh Marv you know what I’d really"—succeeded by a murmur, and if not any more a liquor snicker or a courting snort at least a fickle chuckje and a pretty heavy sigh—"You look radiant!"—that came together into Jne untranstonguable impact in the next room the sincerity of which one did not wish to witness, having failed oneself to receive the incoming phone call (failed to make it one’s own, failed to will that it be from Amy), while forced to witness one’s parents in the next room in any case or along any curve clothed or unclothed, because one had acknowledged one’s existence by answering the "homework"-ending sentence "Yeah" (the cornerstone of one’s active vocabulary yet not one’s private).
Well then, ‘‘ Yeah," one answered, letting it slide off into the other things to be said to one’s mother or for that matter to one’s father if one had found the thoughts to go with those things. Not "Yeah, Ma" or "Yeah, Mom," which she, naked or dressed, nude or unnuded or denuded, objected to, but not "Yeah, Susan" (which she wants) either, because one does not feel right saying "Susan," which one’s Dad quite understands, and which one undertook to explain to him one Sunday morning amid much nodding of heads, first his, then one’s, then his and his again and yet again, then out of pity one’s own —out of pity or in time to Dad’s rhythm, one’s own head together or not quite, yet not with his then or now because often these days of raised consciousness he is too busy nodding, naked with one’s mother nodding, nodding, naked together spooning yogurt together, spooning, dripping a blob of white-filmed apricot like it had a cottony mold on it off the end of his yogurt spoon, nodding so as to transcend one’s own "Yeah" in answer to one’s mother’s mysterious oration depicting the life of her leader like that explained fathers and husbands, climaxed by the word homework, not assignment.
But one says assignment—one is in the big league if not big time, no longer in high school where assignment was also said, but college, for one is on the production-possibility frontier fully employed trading off guns and butter or highways and housing along all the points between no butter and all guns (dry) and no guns and all butter (sticky), the frontier (also called product-transformation curve) along whose arc are targeted all the points of well-oiled trade-off whereby one may surrender so many guns to get so much added butter or produce ten less butters to get two more guns, and on this menu of choices, this curve of output pairs—two million tons of food to fourteen million tractors, four million to twelve, six to ten—on this range of combinations, a week or more may be spent in the big time, the big league, firing one’s rounds of animal fat (leading one’s moving target) while spreading one’s arms as wide as there’s bread to spread them on, staying busy on the production-possibility frontier, not falling away inside it where point U marks the warning flash for Unemployed Resources, big lag, let’s say.
For one is in college, one is in the flow now, one can split one’s mind and, for a second, step outside the Gross National Product of which one is fast becoming a part and see that GNP equals Consumption plus Investment plus Government Expenditure and see that if Net National Product is GNP less Depreciation, that’s what one may also be joining, for, big time or not, one feels the onset of time’s warp, and if one’s tennis forehand is improving one yet feels a depreciation in, as one’s father will say over his cocktail-hour joint, the quality of life, one sees this concretely and without bullshit in the cracked handball wall against which one lashes one’s forehand or in the new distance from any such wall when one is at the Manhattan apartment of the revised junta and not in Port Adams though this has to do with the changed equation between one’s married parents, and apparently not to do with what is no less true, that one is in college not high school any more with its occasional substitute teachers yet only in truth a potential continuum of substitute teachers, for one enjoyed modular classes in Port Adams, yes the school was often better not worse than what one’s got now in the big league so that one is inclined, like one of those lines the man calls a curve, to shoot up one’s arm saluting the schlock of collective education and when recognized by the amazing short man in the black shirt up at the blackboard ask a very general question about the point of it all.
But one is only inclined.
The short man at the washed blackboard—one has described him to Amy when she phoned from work and got one out of one bed or another—Manhattan or Port Adams. The phone’s voice so warm that Amy’s employee cheek seemed pillowed on one’s own—even on one’s own breast, or chest, patiently listening to one’s unemployed description of the amazing Professor Roger Rail until this employed twenty-three-year-old older woman radiant Amy warming one’s whole body from cheek to pyjama pants must say, "Got work to do, Larry —oh by the way, babe"—asking for information de pronto (suddenly)—de repente! (suddenly)—impulsivamente, Latin passion oh beautiful Amy Hispanic heat sin la reflexion debida—"oh by the way, babe" (she says), "what’s the name of that nice newspaper guy who’s taking you to the game?"—but not before one has made her outgoing laugh come in along the phone wire bathing the whole side of one’s somewhat unshaven face, for one has been describing Professor Roger Rail. Assuredly an amazing customer the man in the black shirt at the washed blackboard who starts to write upon that
tabula rasa only to abort his oracion, stop his chalk, lean on it and push pensively off into the vertical space just off its surface, and give the assignment for next time, which means the next day that one and one’s fellow classmates with him in Economics meet, but not always the next day from this, he not in a suit but in black shirt and long black sleeves so his white hand fingering his chalk looked there like the pale bald tonsure his scalp makes against the bristling black or dark of his remaining hair. The bald area is time, a time in his life, yet one that has now passed and is surrounded by the hair remaining. He is the medium of exchange here, he is the potential speed with which one’s class leap through the many used but virgin copies of the sacred text, he moves before one a bound variable furnishing the classroom with his unavoidable circulation, he is the velocity of circulation multiplied by M, which stands for one thing suddenly with one oneself and another (Money) with Rail—who thinks in other velocities but not this that one has oneself begun to dream.
And he it is who says, "One may wish to substitute one good for another if . . . well ... if what has happened?" and who says at some later point in the morning’s curve, "One may frame, yes?, a law of substitution which will embrace equality of price, yes?, between commodities, yes?, as well as the phenomenon of increasing scarcity," and who says, "given an extra dollar of income—a raise in New York, a rise in London, yes?—why one may choose to spend the whole dollar or spend some part of it—and since this dollar is in addition to one’s normal income heretofore, one may call it marginal, yes?, and since what happens to it in one’s hand or purse or under the mattress, eh?, or in the tight back pocket of your preshrunk bluejeans or a slot in the old money belt (he tapped his paunch above the silver horseshoe of his western belt) depends on one’s own personal inclination to hold on to it or blow it, and since to be inclined or favorable is propendere in Latin which one may safely bet that less than one percent in this room would read even if they could, why one calls the amount of extra consumption generated by an extra dollar of income the (yes?) marginal (yes?) . . . pro . . . pens . . . i . . . ty ... to consume—or MPC—which one may picture . . . like so"—the chalk consuming itself like a comet, the graph squaring and lining and dashing itself off before one and one’s male and female classmates on the heretofore washed blackboard as if what moves the chalk were that Invisible Hand Rail speaks of, which a great thinker named Smith said guides each individual through his own mere wish for "security and gain" to use his capital "to promote an end which was no part of his intention"—namely, the interest of society as a whole. So let him alone, let him be—and a roomful of hands write down the words (but did he say them? and is this, then, telepathy?) laissez-faire, which is the same in Spanish. Yet if embedded in everyone else’s property one’s property is one’s own, the shtik is more co-op than condominium— face—"One may plot," "One may represent," "One may argue"—and then like magic his back was turned, and he said, "One" to the board chalked erased chalked erased, washed with the manual action of his mind into soft, gray-white nebulae of layers—his thing, one thought, his world! one thought. And one said it to Amy, whose soft, pale hair surrounds one by surrounding her ear and her receiver at her end, which is a desk at a foundation—foundation, the word attracts, envelopes, envelopes and erases all the curves one can think to draw between the vertical and horizontal with their reminders of the hypotenuse of junior year in Port Adams, that shortcut to Diane’s through used-car lot, church playground, shopping center’s parking lot where Mother Susan’s trunk was rifled while she was in buying a last-minute buttondown for one’s birthday with, under the rear collar button, a fag-tag loop Diane with Visine clearing up her eyes crept up behind one one day and snipped off—a beeline, no curve like these curves a professor sweeps away with a black-sleeved thrust of himself and all his Ones enveloped by Amy’s foundation, which is her job, from which at twenty-three years old in the morning from eight miles away her invisible hand touches one’s unemployed pyjama cloth, augments one’s marginal suspense, propounds yea extends one’s capacity to hunt down the curve of one’s desire, down from up where hovering hung-up above the landing pad, strutted, outstretched, and hang-gliding, flapped and blown by winds from the window of the sky, one seems to reach one’s base for the first time, to make love, juntarse (for love is reflexive, one has found out for oneself not in the book), consuming the reflexes as Amy’s real job consumed (when she called at nine-fifteen in the morning) consumed and erased the picture of the ecognome skating his thing, his thought, across the slate walls of a carpeted cave, the bell you see but don’t hear of the mountainous bell curve showing the normal symmetry of error, and the tilted long-tailed
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