There was nothing for them to do but wait silently for whoever it was at the door (they assumed they knew) to make his move, tensed on the narrow bed in guilty postures of innocence as if posing before some easily gulled metaphysical camera.
The interval between knocks (usually three or four seconds) was harder to bear than the knocking itself. Peter felt the need to cough, also to urinate—the body’s vengeance on the soul’s deceit.
Their visitor persisted—who but a madman would go on so long? Helena stuck her tongue out at the door. Peter cleared his throat. The bed creaked. Every noise a wound.
Finally it stopped. The silence hung in the air, drew itself out indelibly, like the final note of a song. Listening, they could hear footsteps move away reluctantly, down the hall, recede indistinguishably into the sounds of the night.
Peter breathed again, a long time between breaths.
“God,” Helena said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“Why did we do this to him?” he said.
“Please don’t make it worse than it is.”
“Worse? How could it be worse?”
As if in answer to his question, the door clamored open. “I know you’re in here. Why don’t you answer your door,” a woman’s voice said, Gloria emerging from behind the voice. “Do you think I care if I ever see you again? You left your wallet I wanted to return.” Her eyes, not good in the best of circumstances, gradually adjusted to the dark. “I’m sorry if I woke you.” Then she noticed that there was someone in bed with him, a dark-haired girl—his wife she guessed—a ragged sheet covering them both. “Well,” she sputtered, overrun with confusion. She stood over them, bravely embarrassed, a huge disapproving aunt, whipping her head from side to side, her fierceness a malediction. “So that’s it.” Her contempt beyond expression, she forced herself to the door, then whirled about for a final look, a final word—something. ‘You …” Then, to herself—the others, eavesdroppers: “I shouldn’t have come here. I have my pride.” She threw the wallet at the bed and made her escape; a whiff of her perfume and the comic shreds of her dignity lingered.
Helena glanced cannily at Peter, tittered nervously. Peter looked away, choked shamefacedly on a laugh. Helena nudged him, then shook her head imperiously in imitation of Gloria. “So,” she mimicked. “Well.”
The door opened again, Gloria peering in as though she had lost something. Peter, unamused, began to laugh. Gloria excommunicated them with a stare. “The hell with you both,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said, getting out of bed, surprised to find himself unclothed. The door slammed shut.
“Who’s she?”
“My brother’s girl,” he explained, putting on his shorts, wondering how it was that he managed, almost without exception, to screw everything up.
Helena dressed quickly in a fury of purpose. “Thanks a lot,” she said, feeling around on the floor for her shoes.
The obligation of desire revived him. “You can stay,” he said.
“Sure I can, Peter. Thanks. The thing is, I have more than enough with my own problems. I wouldn’t know what to do, like if your father’s girl friend walked in on us next.” She looked back over her shoulder, allowed herself a moment’s nostalgia. “It wasn’t in the stars for us. Take it slow. I’ll show myself out.” And she was gone.
“I’m sorry,” he called after her.
Afterward, alone, he danced on the fires of hell and, burning, died awake—“Stardust” playing over and over in his imagination—unable to rest, the night a terror of dreams. Hell, out of season, was unoccupied. There was only Peter, and thousands of Coney Island mirrors distorting his image. And as eternity wore on—even the crippled images of himself deserted—the mirrors blank and, for all he could see, bottomless. He was alone. That was the hell of it.
| 13 |
Peter stayed with Gloria, vacating the 113th Street room, for another week of surrogate marriage. Gloria forgave him. “I don’t hold grudges,” she said begrudgingly. “None of us is perfect.” “You are,” he said, patting her ass—a secret kidder. He returned to the Goodwill couch, the bedroom denied him as part of the terms of his return, and banished, spent his nights and days there, half asleep, an exile, retired from the business of the world. He slept for almost three days, between dreams, exhausted, catching up.
“Aren’t you going to go to work any more,” she asked one morning, not wanting to nag but worried about loafers—her father, when he was alive, a loafer.
“Yeah, Glory,” he said, “one of these days I’m going to get up and …” Yawning.
“You’ll lose both your jobs, Peter, and what about school—do you want to throw away everything?” She worked herself into concern.
He opened his eyes only long enough to see that there was nothing to see. “Well,” he drawled, “the machine, the old machine slows down after a while, getting old.” He felt the years assault him, his hair turning secretly gray.
Gloria went to the bathroom to put on, as she called it, her face, and returned with an argument. “What do you think you’re talking about?” she yelled at him. “You’re just a kid. You got a whole lifetime ahead of you. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-eight?”
Almost twenty-seven. “Kind of tired, Glory. Can’t think of anything I want to do—sleep is all.”
“Peter,” she yelped, shaking him roughly. “Tomorrow you’re going to work, you hear me, or so help me, out you go.”
“I think you’re right,” he said.
“Promise me you’ll go to work tomorrow,” she said, “at least to one of your jobs.”
“You have only to nag,” he said, “and I gladly …” While she was waiting for him to finish his sentence, he stole a few seconds of uninterrupted sleep.
“What? Peter, it’s a sickness, sleeping like that.” She poked him in the side with her elbow. “Wake up.” She shook him, dislodging fragments of memory—his father went by, singing to himself.
“Can’t sleep when you shake me like that, Glory.”
She rolled him onto the floor. “Tomorrow you go to work, do you hear me?”
“Take my money,” he mumbled, “take my life, but spare this old gray head.” He dozed on the rug where he had landed, making the best of a hard bed. Money is honey, his father was saying to him—a first principle of natural lore.
“A man who doesn’t work has no self-respect,” she said, prodding him with her toe.
“I’ll work,” he said. “I’ll work. Promise. Work.” His father was going somewhere, leaving. I wish you the best, Peter, he said, everything—all of it. Whatever you do, I don’t want you to be a bum like your brother—and I’d tell Herbie that to his face if he were here.
“No one respects a man that doesn’t work.”
“Money is honey,” he said.
She tried tickling.
“Ummmmm. That’s nice.”
“Get up, Peter. Ira Whimple will be here in a few minutes.”
That got him. He lifted his head from the rug, opened the slits of his eyes. “You’re kidding me?”
“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. Anyway, as I told you before, any friend of Herbie’s …”
He covered his ears, heard the roar of oceans.
“I have to go now,” she said. “I left a shopping list for you on the highboy—you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” she added. “There’s some coffee I made in the pot—all you have to do …”
Her words buzzed harmlessly in the air. As soon as his head touched the rug, he was asleep.
“I want you to see the way Peter can button his own coat,” his mother was saying. “He’s only five and he buttons his own coat with either hand, with his eyes closed if necessary. Come on up here, dear, and show everyone.”
Big for his age—he looked more like fifteen than five—he was embarrassed going up on the stage in short pants.
“He could tie his shoes by himself,” his mother added, “when he was only three and a half.”
The enormous crowd cheered. “You can imagine how proud I am of him,” his mother said. “Go ahead, dear. Show them how you button your coat. He tends to be shy,” she explained to the crowd. “Show them, dear.”
It took him a moment to discover it: there were no buttons on the coat he was wearing. There was a zipper at the bottom, which turned out to be immovable—it was his oldest coat. He tugged at it in desperation, unable for the life of him to get it up; the tab of the zipper came loose in his hand.
The crowd hooted.
“Tie your shoes,” his mother stage-whispered from the wings. “Your shoes.”
He bent down reluctantly to tie his shoes, but because of the tightness of his pants—who but a prodigy could have such luck?—he was unable to reach his feet.
The crowd dispersed, audibly disappointed.
“Ask me to do something hard,” he yelled at the crowd, “something impossible.” No one listened.
“Come on away, dear,” his mother said gently. “You’ve done very well.”
“I’ve done nothing,” he cried.
“And who can say he’s done more,” she said.
The next morning Peter went to work. He fell asleep on the train and missed his stop, was shaken awake and evicted at 242nd Street, which was, he was told, the end of the line. Why the hell was he always falling asleep? And worse: why did he spend so much time awake? Ha! Who’s awake? He stood cross-legged on the platform and dozed. Each waking was an opening of wounds, a discovery of new losses. Too late to pick up the school bus and make his rounds, a man who dreamed of responsibility, Peter planned to call the Collegiate School and offer his regrets, thought seriously about it, wandered into a phone booth and actually called. He was surprised when someone answered—who knows what else he had dreamed was real!
“I’m afraid you have too many other interests,” the woman who ran things, the vice-principal and director’s wife, told him. Still drowsy, Peter was convinced, exalted by the insight—trains roaring by outside the booth—that too many other interests was his very problem. “In that case, I’d better give this job up,” he said, yawning.
“What about the children?” she said. “Think of the children.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he promised.
He took the subway to Columbia, and while planning his day, had breakfast at Bickford’s: the 59-cent special (“Juice, I fried egg, sausage, potatoes, English muffin and coffee”). The comfort of the meal was not only that it was a bargain, but that everything—some things more than others—had the same reliable taste.
Whenever he was awake he had the obsessive urge to do something, aware as he sat, doing nothing, with nothing to do—no appetite even to eat—that he was wasting his life. He had only to look up; at the table in front of him (behind, if he was facing the other way), studying the New York Times, his face almost totally obscured, was someone familiar—the man he had knocked down in the 113th Street bathroom. It woke Peter momentarily. He wolfed down his meal—a breakfast of his own flesh—sitting sideways as he ate, to avoid being recognized. Embarrassed, he left suddenly—food still on his plate—and bumped into the man ahead of him at the door, who, on turning around, turned out to be Harry. “Excuse me,” Peter said, stepping back. Harry nodded darkly, straightened his tie, kept Peter waiting. They went off, not quite acknowledging each other, in opposite directions.
Impelled by regret, also discovering that he was going the wrong way, he whirled around and ran after Harry. “Hey. Hey, wait up.”
Harry turned, apparently startled, his neatly folded Times slipping from his hand. He waited for Peter, with his hands at his sides.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Peter started to say, when Harry punched him in the nose.
Peter nursed his nose with a handkerchief, stunned, his eyes tearing, while Harry hurried away down the street, a nervous glance over his shoulder. A small crowd, mostly students, which had gathered in expectation of a fight, dispersed sullenly. A few jeered at the ignominy of his defeat. “That guy was half your size,” a boy said, contemptuous of failure.
Peter growled, picked up Harry’s Times. “I’ll take any three of you on at the same time,” he said. But when he looked up there was only the boy, only one of him—slight, eighteen, as fragile as tinder. “You okay?” the boy asked.
Peter shrugged, walked away, wandered to 113th Street to see if there was any mail for him, though he hadn’t received a letter from anyone in months. He growled at passers-by along the way, aware of his enemies—they pretended not to notice him.
Expecting nothing, he checked the mail—two stacks of it on a table in the hall—and discovered, in a pile of outgoing letters, a card from Herbie, a picture post card of the Grand Canyon at sunset—Addressee unknown written next to Peter’s name. Unknown or not, he pocketed the card and went out in the sun.
It was a haunted day, the streets around Columbia mostly deserted. A girl with long dark hair was giving out Progressive Party leaflets on the corner. He went by without taking one. “Don’t you care what happens to your country?” the girl called after him. “Don’t you want peace?”
He cared, wanted peace, took refuge in a phone booth. He called Lois and got no answer; then Dr. Cantor, who would not be in for another hour; then, on a whim, an old Army buddy who, it turned out, was no longer living at the address Peter had for him—the address three years old, the buddy hardly a friend, then Gloria at Bloomingdale’s—Gloria the first one to answer him in person. “What do you want?” she argued.
“Not much,” he said.
“I can’t talk now, Peter. Can you call back later, the store just opened.”
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I walk around New York missing you.”
“Thank you.” She lowered her voice: “My supervisor’s standing right behind me, Peter.”
He improvised, not wanting to lose the sound of her voice. “I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
“Peter, I’m going to have to hang up.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you that I love you?”
“You’re a character,” she said. “You really are.”
“Why don’t you take the day off? It’s a nice day out, looks like rain. I want to go to bed with you.”
She came close to a laugh. “This minute?”
His need owned him, desperation his middle name. “This minute, this second. Tell them you’re sick. I’ll meet you at the apartment in twenty minutes.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Do it for me.”
“I can’t.” She hung up.
Peter called again and got a wrong number. “Everybody calls here asks for Bloomingdale’s,” the man said; someone, a woman, laughing in the background. “This ain’t Bloomingdale’s, friend. I haven’t been Bloomingdale’s since the day I was born.”
“Whoever you are,” Peter said, “you’re a fucking impostor.”
“And what if I am?” the voice said.
Peter knocked at the door to Helena’s room, got no answer, knocked again.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
“Who’s me?” She opened the door a quarter of the way, her face, spider-webbed with sleep, making a tentative appearance. She rubbed her eyes. “What do you want?”
Peter thought to use force—a foot in the door worth two in the hall—but decided to try diplomacy first, his own ambassador. “You look lovely,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“I have to talk to you, Helena. Can I come in?”
She blinked her eyes as though she had hallucinated him. “No. I haven’t gotten up yet. Peter, I’m still in my pajamas.”
Suspicious, he tried to see beyond her into the room. “It’s important,” he said.
“Important to who? What do you mean, important?”
Ahhh! He lowered his voice: “Can’t talk in the hall. Met Harry. Explain when I get inside.” He had more than enough guile going for him, his desperate spirit swelling with d
eceit, but he had run out of words … The lecher in him grinned boyishly, peered through her nightgown. “You’re looking good,” he said.
“Come back later,” she said, smothering a yawn, stretching. “Later, huh?”
“When should I come back?”
Helena thought about it, tapping her foot to the music of the problem. “Oh, in about an hour or so. I’ll get dressed and we’ll talk. All right?” Her smile brushed him off as though he were a fly.
He couldn’t wait, and as the door floated to its close he thought of forcing his way in, but out of lethargy rather than choice restrained himself—his urgency a sleepwalker’s need.
To pass the hour Peter walked around the block twice, went to Chock Full o’ Nuts for coffee and a doughnut. Time moved slowly, conspired against him—the city clocks, his own watch dying in the summer heat. He couldn’t wait, he couldn’t. In the desperation of want, he knew the treachery of time.
For a while, for minutes on end, he sat on a bench on Riverside Drive and daydreamed of Helena—her warm breasts, her witch-eyes, other parts—bewitched by recollection, the taste of love on his tongue.
A boy and girl walked by holding hands; they stopped briefly to kiss, which was too much for Peter to bear. He got up, a sigh breaking the bud of his chest, and walked away. Ten minutes to outwait. (Time on his neck like a dog’s collar.) He counted slowly to a hundred and twenty—eight minutes to go.
Peter returned to Helena’s door five minutes early, carrying a daisy, another flower blooming (looming) between his legs. He knocked on the door, a drum roll of anticipation, and waited, hand in pocket, with the anxious dignity of affected ease. Wilting, he knocked again, beginning to communicate his urgency. And again, harder this time, hammering away with the side of his fist—his knuckles sore—the door shivering at his rage. He listened for sounds, knocked again, imagined Harry and Helena frozen together on the bed, paralyzed with amusement. He convinced himself that he heard breathing (his own in his ears), and knocked again. No answer. Tears of frustration hung in his eyes. He twisted the wrist of the doorknob—the door un-giving—twisted the knob back and forth, twisted and pulled until it came loose, like the head of a flower, in his hand. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, felt foolish, returned the knob to its place and fled. An old woman’s hacking cough followed him.
A Man to Conjure With Page 19