“Sign that stuff on my desk where it’s marked, will you? The apartment closing is tomorrow.” She packed her mouth with pins. “And bring tea.”
Sold at a loss, to a labor-lawyer with a very large following. Whose wife likes to entertain lords.
“We made you do it all, Blum, didn’t we?” Nobody ever went back. From the Miami Hilton, or the hospital. Or from the addresses, got by a chicanery Blum won’t reveal, to which each month a check for Maeve makes a pilgrimage. There and back.
“I’m taking what I can. The paintings come here. That’s very chic now.”
She has a co-op in Riverdale. Gold and gunmetal, fur and glass, drapes lilypadding the floor, comfort to the breaking-point. Art would upset it. And men. The ones she has never stack up to Buddy. So she never lets them stay. Buddy was buried from it.
I flipped up the lid of the Michelangelo box and put the opal back, on top of all the rest. “Take this too, all of it. Maeve never wanted it.”
“Don’t be sil. I’ll bring it to the bank.”
Maeve and Janacek are revisiting the death-camps, one by one. A pilgrimage, to dwarf the world.
“Some scientists found the edge of the world,” I said. “It was in the paper this morning.”
I went to my room for the tea, and backed out. “No, they didn’t—” I shouted. “Everything on the other side of it’s in here.” Pinnacles and barnacles. A church shrine of piebald marble, loudly ticketed, “Miami.” Where I had to admit it would look good. What appeared to be the contents of the armory-room. And five fur coats.
“Everything’s going to storage. Had to get it out. You can stand it, for one night.”
“Leave a coat,” I said. “The white one.”
When I brought her the tea, she turned off the hairdryer. “Had a girl here one night, didn’t you.”
“Right.” A telephone contact. I paid for it.
“That’s nice.”
“No. Just didn’t want to turn into an axe-murderer.”
“Berkeley’s informal.” Her hair was dry already. “Want my nephew’s address? He runs a sandal shop.”
Sure. She wrote it down for me. “That advanced-study place you’re going to. All graybeards, hah?”
“Not necessarily.”
“All boy-geniuses, then.” She had put the Wall Street Journal clip on her bulletin board. All of them here had, even Push & Shove. I hadn’t done much yet except have an idea. But the ideas of universal life-records, yours and not the FBI’s, could be a catchy one—from the response to the story leaked from the boys on Route 128. Though I hadn’t gone up there since, I hadn’t bothered to sever the connection. Understanding that my itch wasn’t too far from theirs. Good business always has a life-basis in it, even in reverse: dentures, deodorants, headaches. A computer-dating-process with your own mind—as they called it—might fit in somewhere in that melancholy line of prostheses for going on. But the Journal had picked up a personal angle—that I was taking my own equipment along with me. “Like a typewriter—” I said to the interviewer “—that’s all.” I’ve gotten used to it. It’s a common occurrence in computer labs; check IBM if you don’t believe me. The cling between a data-processor and his pet console gets very strong. “Mebbe so,” the man said. “But then, there’s the way you’re taking it. Along.”
If I’d just shipped Batface west—done all the time, the air-cargo people said. But I was going with it, in the freight plane. Like men used to do with bodies, in the boxcar. Or with dogs they loved. “I just wanted to fly a freight again. In Europe, there were groups of us did it regular.” The reporter was a guy from Brown, not much older than me. “Going west, young man,” he muttered, penciling. “That’s still a story in America, would you believe it?” Boy genius goes West. I looked over Blum’s shoulder at the lower heading. Rich boy.
“Girl geniuses too, maybe.” I watched her sadly. I’m a sucker for any woman at a sink. “Maybe even robots.”
“Send me one.”
“Yeah, I will.” Penguin-shaped. Answers to name of Buddy.
The limousine rang for her from downstairs. She gets the partner treatment now. And still checks the desk, windows, lights—like a secretary. She saw me see. “My outfit I have on cost seventeen-hundred dollars. But I still feel guilty a two-hour lunch.”
“You have to be aimless with it.” I gave her a hug. “Bye, Blum darling.”
“Why do you have to go?”
Why do I?
“Just want to spend a little time in the suburbs.”
“Bye, Bunty.” She never fell for Quentin.
“Hold the fort.”
“You coming back, then?”
“Just a phrase.” That you say to a Blum. She knows that.
“The werewolf of Wall Street.” I gave her a kiss, socking it.
She pushed me back, hard. “You just have no contempt for women, that’s all. Maybe for anybody—I’ve been watching you. Just put up some barbed-wire, will you, Bunty? You need it.” She left quick.
It’s too late for that. The rich can be hemmed in just like other people.
I went to the window. Where insights abound, for all those bred to the charms of height. Financial clerks, and other mountain-climbers. Sunset aficionados, on the fire-escape. And even porch-standers, one step above the blackberry-bramble bush. Newsboy philanthropists doing their leather-couch dreaming—with one foot a Montefiore, the other a Rothschild. Soldier-prisoners, imprisoned from the start, stepping alive or dead out of the homing bombers, into the actuarial light.
Lights of the World, Edges of the World, Eagle Eye surveys you.
How greedy I was. I still treasured and mulled over all the people who ever shared my landscape. How else could any one of us be sure we were each one wanted—it had to do with that. “When the leaves turn,” that girl Dina had said “Maybe I’ll be back for mink.” I liked to hear that, in its lonely corner in my mind.
It meant a continuity, however shabby. It meant a kind of life-by-association, however guilty. It reassured me that even my mother, in her shady role of providing coats and abandoning them, would continue to be there. I want to keep them all. All the shabby people. Every one.
To do it I would have to be there to people more than I had; I would have to pay in. Obviously I couldn’t do that to all the possibles in my past, or in the mists to come. It would be more like standing on a street corner, talking very hard to someone, or to a chosen few. As the real one, or the one lost, came up or bumped into us. That way I could be present and open to the chance of all the others. I could be waiting to be found.
Sunset like a line of sludge-water. Indian file of palisades gone pop. And a bale of sky-fog over all. But still there it is as we were taught it, the Demeter-diameter, the radius of the earth, straight or curved.
Why dwarf the world at all?
Then it came to me that I might be one of the ones who were lost. For the first time I thought of myself as one of those. To what others, over there across the thin dividing line that keeps a memory from standing before us in the flesh, am I one of the lost ones—to them?
I was that to Jasmin. To her I am irretrievably lost.
From now on, to be here, I’ll have to bare my breast, teeth, and tongue, even louder. So as to be sure. To be found.
NIGHT CAME, THE SUNSET was gone, but surely some photographer would have saved it, or some retina. Maybe his own. He went into the kitchen and rousted himself a short meal from one of the refrigerators. There were three of them, witness to the levels here. He took a sandwich from the coffee shop one, a chicken salad from the one that furnished for the executive dining room, cut a slice from the molded Beef Wellington kept in reserve for distinguished guests at the director’s table—and laughed at himself for the quickness of his rise. A meteoric career. He left a few traces of himself for the morning Helgas—they too liked to know who they served—then darted into his packed room, and stood there bemused. The shrine had tilted a little with the evening. As religions did, may
be. There was no statue in it, maybe never had been. An arcade for lovers was more its air. He lit the light under its arch, more for it than for himself, then went out the back door of the office, giving a pat to old Batface on the way, as to the family animal. It was that. But not a dog.
THE BARMAN OF THE Lotos looked up as he came in; so did the other men there. The bar had moved on a few blocks, but no one could say where; he’d had to find it himself. The streets along here sweated urine, spilt milk, mucus and fruit-skins, but no small talk. Each hallway passed showed a dim coffin-space. Now that he was on an errand he was wary, but nobody came at him. Maybe he looked as if he had a knife.
“Nobody move,” the barman said. “I talk to him.”
He saw himself in the mirror then, tall and flame-haired in this house of short-legged tawniness, and bearded black. With a woman’s coat on his arm, but no woman.
“Easy does it,” the barman said. “Don’t want no trouble. Put that thing somewhere.”
He looked down at himself. “I have no gun.”
“Who said gun?” The barman touched the coat. Thick paw but deft. “Ain’t that mink? Sure is. You been on Broadway?”
“Never getta that on Broadway. My wife, she was cutter.” A man got up from one of the two tables, to look at the coat. Small, with a sombrero air to him, even in a shirt and boots. He could be a Chicano. Any of them could.
“I’ll handle it. Don’t you fellas see the time?” The barman opened a door to his left, pushed Bunty and coat inside, and closed the door.
He was in the can. Alone at last again with the familiar ruined porcelain-and-brown, he did his little dance of recognition, as all over the world. Pissed. Paused at the doorknob, as usual before company again—girls, journeys. Could almost think they’d expected him. Not the Messiah, surely. He hung the coat behind the door, and walked out.
“You should locka heem.” Another voice, from behind.
“No.” The barkeep shoved a beer at him, quick. “On me. Drink, will you.”
As the policeman sauntered in, he repeated it, his eyes like ant-holes. “On me.”
The cop’s shrewd black gaze picked him out at once. The others in the bar went movie-tense. His own roving inner spotlight stayed cool. Somewhere far back of it, he felt united with them, as if he had seen that movie too.
“New here?”
He nodded. Once he opened his mouth, the syllables would fall out like money and save him. He wanted not to be.
“See your driver’s license?”
“Came on foot.”
“License.”
A point of law flicked by him—habeas corpus?
“Fifth Avenue. You work there—Quentin?”
A man sniggered.
The policeman turned. “Thassan English name.” He swung around, taunting. “Ainit?” He had absolutely regular “white” features, un-negroid, un-national, beneath a blue-black skin. The effect was of two men, one inside the other. Neither of them relishing argument.
“I don’t know.”
“You dunno? Mine sain yo beerzness roun heah?”
“Looking for a friend.”
“You come all the way up here, looking for a friend?”
“Never see him before, Seempson,” the barman said. “Not since I have the place, six month. He just walk in.”
“Yeah, I know, Dominguez. You run a family place. Uh-huh. Why I have to check here every night … Been overseas, Mr. Bronstein? … You have. Asia? … You have … Bring anything with you?”
He saw how evidence worked. The simple pace of it dazzled him.
“A little. Smoked the last of it yesterday.”
“See your discharge, please.”
“Don’t have one.”
“Don’t you. Now why? Now, what do you have?”
He should have had nothing on him but the usual two tenspots, but he’d been to the bank for travel cash, and had also volunteered to buy a present for Blum’s niece, since Blum had to be at the flat all day—and had forgotten to leave his wallet at the office. So he had $750 in cash, plus traveler’s checks making it a thousand—the exact sum Buddy used to send him, kept now like a boundary between him and all the money available. Also in the wallet was his passport, airline ticket, old draft card. And a woman’s charge-a-plate, marked Beatrix Blum.
“Told you. He rolled somebody.” Dominguez was quivering with money-heat. They all were. It lay on the cop’s palm, blossoming like a green bay tree. Or a shaggy green key, made of paper only. Key to his own jauntiness. Like those babes born on dope he’d seen having the bends on television. Born to the money-fix. Simpson’s palm was trembling, too.
“I am a computer-programmer,” he said quickly. Always brought them to attention. “I don’t really know my name is English or American; I was named for Teddy Roosevelt’s son got killed in the First World War. And for my father. I’m living in my father’s office, temporarily. Because the apartment on the license there, that was sold. I never lived there but when I got a new license, I gave that address. My father died, a while back. My mother left before that. With somebody else.”
He saw he had their ear; he was sorting out some of the same bald facts that went with their own Cezanne hats and cardplayer shakes. And sloe-eyed greed. Nothing has ever malformed without a reason. They knew theirs. “I go to California tomorrow, to learn more about the business; that’s what the money’s for. Bee Blum is the woman runs the office here. She was my father’s girl.” His voice ran out. “She was plain Beatrice, once.” He mustn’t smile. He could hear the terrible lesson he was teaching them, in his slim other-language. Of how things were, over the edge of the world. “A friend I had—they used to hang out here. I always meant to come by.”
“When? I know every hombre my bar.”
“Summer.”
Dominguez let out a breath. “Not my time.”
“I am customer from the old place.” The man whose wife had been a cutter. “What your fren name?”
A sharp burst of Spanish from two men at the table. The man waved it back.
“Manuel,” the barman said.
Manuel ignored it. “You say?”
“D-Dina,” he said.
“Como?”
He understood that. “A girl. She traveled with a guy named Freddie. Felipe.”
The barman laughed, spoke in Spanish. The table leered back. Everybody relaxed.
“Freddie was sick,” he said.
“Where?” Dominguez.
“In the bowels. From the war.”
Manuel shook his head.
“I came with a present for her.”
Dominguez translated. A great joke.
Manuel spoke in Spanish to them.
He understood it by the tone maybe, in his animal ear. Shut your mouth, mothers. This is a good boy.
The cop was still poking at his stuff. “Jesus, another student. It ain’t enough they drive cabs.” He addressed the two tables. “This couple he says he knows. Nobody ever heard of them?”
Nobody. It could be their stare was policy.
“This couple, what was their beerzness?” Simpson did have two accents. The man inside the skin dared him to notice it.
“They were living in the park.”
No surprise.
“Girls sometime, the old place,” Manuel said. “No here.”
“Manuel the volunteer,” the cop said.
“You like girls, why you here?” Dominguez washed the bar slowly. “No wives here, even.”
“Hear that, Manuel?” Simpson said. “Well, hasta la vista, boys. You Bronstein. Come on. Give you your stuff outside.”
“Thanks. Think I’ll finish my drink.”
“Suit yourself.” Simpson studied the passport, shook his head over it, handed it and wallet back. “Good night, Dominguez. Ah … my beat ends a coupla blocks on, Mr. Bronstein. Then I plan to cover back. Or maybe I just hang around outside. Got it, everybody?” He left.
“Have a drink with me, Mr. Manuel?”
> “Gutierrez.”
“Gutierrez. To the girls, Mr. Gutierrez.” They drank. He blushed. Forgot something. “Bronstein.”
“Como?”
“My name.”
“Brawnstein.” The two drinks they had could travel in a minute to those bowed receptacles, Manuel’s legs. His boots shone firm. He drank Irish, worked for the police stable. “The mounties.” He grinned. “Simpson, he want to go there.” He wore a sharp white shirt. Like some horsemen, he looked cleaner than other people. “These girl—she pretty, hay, she New York?”
“Not New York.” California? Lindenhurst?
“What color her hair?”
“Dark.”
Now that he had hunted her in good faith, could she begin to disappear into his imagination? It wasn’t her he hunted then; what was his necessity?
“Mebbe this Felipe, he die. I like such a girl. My wife die.” He had a room on the hallway next door; his sister had the kids. “Everstrow, up the river. Big Spanish there. Barrio.”
“Haverstraw.” Dominguez met Bronstein’s eye, almost human, like a fish swimming past you underwater, side-eyed, intent on its own. But seeing you.
“This girl, she drink a little? Ah, sí. I like such a girl.”
Manuel had taken her over. He could leave now. The possibility of her would be visited, from time to time. The human chain goggled at him. The beer pressed his bladder. He made for the can.
Dominguez side-stepped him. “Want something?”
“A leak.”
“Out of order. Sorry.”
Everybody at the two tables was watching him. The coat—he’d forgotten it. He mustn’t smile. He should have bought a round for them, those cardplayers, but had been too shy. Now he couldn’t. They stared dreamlike. As if he was their dream.
“Suit yourself.” He walked out.
Simpson stepped from a nearby doorway.
“Got everything that’s yours?”
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