“You’re not paying me,” Norman said in a recorded voice. “I’m only the agent. You owe me nothing.”
“Ah, aha, ahaha . . .” She began to giggle, and her laughter was nerve-racking because her face expressed only hatred; her skin resembled the inside of a pelt and was reversed only at the cost of great pain. “You . . . you say I owe you nothing, yes, sure. You people, how your mouths say one thing and mean another.” Norman stepped back involuntarily, but she continued to smile, and her hands fluttered down the length of her body, displaying herself. “What can you get from me? If I have taken the most terrible things in the greatest quantity, taken with my eyes and my ears . . . Oh, all you can get is the rent, that is all.”
“Some time you’ll speak plain and tell me what you’re trying to say. I don’t understand what you throw at me every time I come here.” He said it to her blotchy red face, said it sincerely, believing it. And yet somehow he had the feeling that if he turned his eyes just a little, all of what she meant would be quite clear.
•
And this was the sensation he felt all that day, running in and out of the buildings, losing his route, visiting each of the buildings many times, always so fresh from the outdoors that the crystals of fine snow were glistening on the mammoth crown and brim of his hat. Each of them existed on the edge of unbearable chasms, places that overlooked great and monstrous views. It was as though one tiny adjustment of his vision would bring it all to him, and he feared the unguessable touch that could bring it about. Dimly, he was aware of trying to check his list of things to be done; he attempted to peer past the faces for those defects he had missed.
His expression made the tenants suspect subterfuge; he seemed suddenly quite strange as he avoided their eyes, his small face crowned with the absurd hat and its tiny brilliants of snow. The tension became mutual. They spoke less than usual to him. Some of them suspected he carried some kind of hope with him, but even those were apprehensive about how he would give it to them.
Marvin Schoenbrun thought the agent was going crazy, and he was repelled because a crazy man was worse even than a sane one to him. The Lublins were settling into another chamber of Hell and for the time being imagined Norman’s abstraction would make him merely irrelevant. Sugarman looked at him pityingly and began, subconsciously, to compose an ode. Minna and Eva Baily didn’t renew their dinner invitation. Del Rio didn’t notice one way or another, because he was going mad himself.
“I’ve got me a date tonight,” he said in a steely voice. “I’ve been too nervous. The trainer says I should blow off some steam. It’s been a long time since I’ve bothered with girls, but I’ve got to blow off steam, blow off steam. . ..” He stood, socking the words into his palm, the cords standing out in his neck. The room was so clean it looked cold; but Del Rio burned.
So Norman, at the end of his rope and connected to it at his neck, went out into the dark of millions of cold wet touches, tasting snow and reeling under the invisible fallings.
15
BUT THE FOLLOWING day still only moved him sideways in his pit. He went into the Seventieth Street lobby, catching a quick glimpse of a graying Mussulman in a huge pallid hat in the mirror. Going up in the elevator, he tried to pick the color of paint he should use to efface the rusted pornography. Only semiconsciously, at first, did he sense an approaching noise. Voices—more particularly, one voice. Screaming. But there were other voices too, and the screaming was segmented into short, dry regularities, too precisely spaced to be quite convincing. Norman shuddered as the elevator reached the top floor, and he almost pushed the button to go back down again. Was it only curiosity that made him open the door and step into the sound?
“What’s happened?” he asked Eva Baily, who stood with Betty Jacoby and Sidone at the door to the Hausers’ apartment. The screaming came from inside, harsh, obligatory, and inhuman. Eva was crying and shaking her head. There were more voices inside, and between the screams Norman thought he recognized Sarah Lublin’s voice and even the drowsy monotone of Jane Sprague. He smelled the scent of clinics. “What is it? Is someone hurt? An accident?” he asked. Sidone pointed inside and shook his head, bewildered looking without his sunglasses, his long, oily hair chaotic from bed. A man in a white jacket came out and went to the elevator, calling back to someone, “I’ll go down and get it.”
The screams made welts on Norman’s insides. He became angry at his ignorance and seized Sidone’s arm, noticing briefly his own surprise at the arm’s thinness. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded.
“The kid,” Sidone said. “It’s the kid.”
Still holding Sidone’s arm, Norman looked toward the half-opened door, suddenly aware of the rapid increase of his old sensation of stretching. All he could see was the little entry and a sliver of the living room. The movement he recognized as the lamp-shade river. Someone crossed the thin rectangle too quickly to be recognized. Another figure, in a white jacket and white pants, stood with its back to Norman, blocking off the lamp.
“Did you give the father something?” someone said.
“Both of them,” another strange voice answered.
“Bobby, Bahh-beee,” an unrecognizable voice wailed.
“There, there,” Sarah Lublin said from somewhere out of sight.
The screaming went on uninterruptedly, the intervals between measured precisely.
“The child strangled . . . something he swallowed,” Betty Jacoby said from beside him.
“Ohhh, yess,” Norman breathed, letting go of Sidone’s arm. He stood joined to them in the hallway, making a foursome—not of grief, but, oddly, of commemoration. The moment was significant; it deserved formality. There came the sound of something crashing, a confused murmuring, and then Jane Sprague’s voice saying, “No, no, it’s my fault, I’ll clean it up. I’m sorry.”
The elevator door opened again, and the man in the white jacket returned, carrying a collapsed stretcher. He went inside, turned to look back questioningly at them, and, when they made no move to enter, closed the door in their faces. With the door closed, the screams became more hollow and resonant, the other voices muffled and mysterious.
“But how?” Norman asked, looking from one to another of them.
Eva shrugged.
Betty said, “Nobody knows.”
“Dead?” Norman whispered.
Eva looked at him with an expression of some revulsion.
In the hallway, in the entire building, the silence compressed the din inside the apartment, made it sound immensely important. Norman sweated rivers and groped with his eyes for the injuries to the hallway. Part of him knew that the gigantic city pulsed and moved in its intricate life quite oblivious to the one smothered cell, and yet to him death had appeared for the very first time. The deaths of his family were merely burst daydreams in retrospect. He had lived most of his life in a deep-shadowed glen and had come out into an open ravine where towers of rock rose up all around him, where things falling made great destruction. The screaming was metronomic, the four of them just small pillars in the hard hallway. He discovered several huge cracks in the stucco wall, a missing bulb, a cavity where a tile had been. Betty Jacoby grunted and leaned against the wall. Sidone said, “What are we doing . . . I mean there’s no point to . . .” And then lapsed into silence.
The elevator door opened again, and two men wheeled some kind of machine to the door and opened it. One of the white-clad men appeared and said, “No, forget it; there’s no use.” The two men wheeled the apparatus back to the elevator and went down. When the elevator came up again, a white-haired man with skin like a worn rug hurried past them and went inside. There was a crescendo of crying which quickly settled down. A policeman came up the stairs and went into the apartment.
Betty Jacoby shook her head and said, “I must lie down. Call me if . . .” Then she went down the hall, holding on to the wall. Sidone said, “Well, Katz is inside,” as though that explained his staying.
Finally there came a long, high scream that broke something
in Norman, a sound of struggle, and then no more screaming. The door opened, and someone said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Two white-clad men carried the stretcher out; the blanketed form was too small to take seriously. Norman hurried ahead of the stretcher-bearers and opened the elevator door. He got in behind them and pressed L. The motor whined and dropped them slowly. He stood, half consciously shielding the dirty drawings from the stretcher. One of the men adjusted a corner of the blanket. The whining of the elevator had a peaceful sound, but the lump of the hidden child entered Norman’s stomach or heart or soul. As they bumped to a stop, he unthinkingly tore off the “Did Not Pass Inspection” sign and opened the door for the stretcher-bearers. They passed out of the elevator and through the lobby; Norman looked after them from inside the elevator until they were out of sight. When he heard the ambulance motor start, he closed the door and went back up.
The policeman and another man came out; through the opened door, Norman saw the small table and noticed that the lamp-shade river was gone. That was what had broken, he thought.
•
The funeral was oddly disappointing. Norman, expecting unbearable demonstration, was presented only with lifelessness. The child, in a white open coffin, gave him the nasty floating feeling of a nightmare. The parents were dry. Carol’s hair was drawn back in an institutional bun and showed the dark roots. Her face was boggy and gray-white, and the only resemblance to what she had looked like was in the shape of her mouth and her nose. The brightly painted woman had been the decoration on a mummy case; now the case was opened to reveal the livid remains. A life of divorcement from real feeling had wasted her. She stood over the coffin for some time, her handkerchief against her mouth, as though only her mouth could cry. Sherman stood beside her, much more well groomed. Together they were mute and hideous, not like mourners, but like creatures numbed into animal pain by flaming clothes. Their eyes were gelatinous, and what was left of their faces only expressed the intense bewilderment of people who are told they have been robbed of all their belongings but who are uncertain exactly what they had owned.
Norman looked along the row of mourners, all of whom were tenants. He realized that they knew no more about what they felt than he did, and he contrasted that with the time of his grandmother’s funeral, when he had felt excluded from the shared feelings. A minister recited Biblical words; an old man cried quietly. Katz, two seats down, stared his eyes out at the now closed coffin, trying to open it by the force of his will. He licked his squashed, trumpeter’s mouth; a tear ran down his plump cheek like the slimy track of a snail. He seemed to be muttering something, his lips working. His fingers made rigid arches on his thighs. Beyond him, Sarah and Aaron Lublin sat without expression, much more used to the scene (Hirsch freed them for the occasion by sitting with their children). Right next to him, Norman smelled the toilet water on Marvin Schoenbrun and saw his clean, perfect fingers in repose on his flanneled leg. Around them all the beige walls of the chapel rose up to a white ceiling. Little scrolled fixtures held candle-shaped bulbs, and the entire room had a nonsectarian quality that gave the ceremony an official feeling, like something performed by and for civil servants. At the end of the row he glimpsed Betty Jacoby, dressed in black and with a heavy veil over her face; Arnold was framed against her dress, slumped in his seat and gazing petulantly at the ceiling. An “Amen” made the audience shift in their seats. The minister invited those who so desired to come to the cemetery. A huddle of strangers, family of the bereaved, formed a clot and moved through a side door to the sound of an animal grunting—Sherman or Carol. Norman couldn’t tell which.
Barely able to see, he rushed out, aiming himself toward his office with body and soul.
16
ALL WEEK HE spent his evenings in the office, figuring his position in terms of dollars and cents; it seemed the only way to chart his personal latitude and longitude. Suddenly lost in a forest of lives, he yearned for a tabulator, longed for it as a mariner, adrift in a night without stars, might long for a sextant. By Saturday night, however, he had made a makeshift instrument from a week of plumber and electrician estimates.
He sat in bad light, picking bits of a bad supper from his teeth with a toothpick and staring at the black shine of the night-backed window. “Moonbloom” had become “Moonbloon” and a leg of the remaining n was chipping away, would soon become—what? “Moonbloor”? Above, his brother’s name was, stolidly, permanently, still “MOONBLOOM.” He sensed people passing, occasionally saw the mirror-like window briefly transparent in the light of a passing car. Mostly, though, there was just the image of himself, cadaverous in the overhead light, a sort of grotesque portrait of an executive, based by the desk. The building creaked, and he remembered that people lived over his office too. And what were they like? Could they all be as horrible and dangerous as his own tenants? For a moment he shivered at the thought of the infinitely long list of complaints of all the millions. Good God, he thought, what would the advancement that Irwin had once promised entail for him? Longer lists, more complicated charts of tormenting complexity? It occurred to him that he really didn’t want the “opportunity” Irwin had promised (or threatened?). Why, then, was he laboring so mightily to do something? Because he now seemed to have no choice, because he was not like that mariner setting out from a port, but, rather, one adrift in an empty ocean, his movement no longer dictated by ambition, but by a need to survive. Somehow he had been cast into the inferno of people; at this point it didn’t matter whose hand had done the casting.
Pipes ran, a hissing came from the radiator, a buckling sound from the hair-colored linoleum. He scanned the spread-out papers covered with figures and notations and telephone numbers. On a clean sheet he accumulated what seemed to be the facts.
The total cost for what he considered to be the minimal repairs came to five thousand three hundred and eighty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents; the owed rent, counting what Sheryl Beeler had cheated him out of, came to a hundred and seventy-three fifty. Irwin expected, on or about the first of the year, a total of seven weeks’ rental, roughly thirty-five hundred, out of which he would deposit some five hundred for maintenance. This meant that Norman would be in the red for approximately . . .
He began to laugh, caught himself, and shivered the mirth to a stop. He picked up the pen and tried all over again, conscious that he was floating in a stream of lunacy, yet unable to stop paddling. And was he including what needed to be repaired in the tenants? Suppose he made a list of those things too, tried to find the cost of those breaks and chippings? Three hundred dollars for the Hausers for new hearts; six hundred and fifty for Kram’s new body; eight hundred and twenty dollars and sixty-six cents for refurbishing Basellecci’s dignity; a thousand for a new dignity for Leni Cass; nine hundred for a retread of Ilse’s soul; five thousand for a brand-new one for Katz (souls must come high) . . . He began to laugh again, but stopped, chilled, when it turned to screaming. He looked around wildly, ready for collapse. Then he remembered that he had a date with Sheryl Beeler for that evening, and numbed with amazement, he was able to collect himself, even to the towering fedora, and he got up, put his coat on with mechanical motions, and went to his rendezvous.
•
He knocked softly at the door and was almost bowled over by its sudden opening. Sheryl stood before him in low-cut splendor, as bright as a poster in a red dress and gleaming lipstick and a silvered jewelry sword pointing toward her awesome décolletage.
“Well hi, sweety, I just this minute got in. Come on in and make yourself at home.” She smelled powerfully of some unnaturally sweet flower, and Norman, partly dazed, partly incredulous, came blinking out of the dark hallway. “Lemme just slip into something more comfy,” she said.
Norman couldn’t believe that she had actually said that, and he slumped onto the couch and stared at the depression in Beeler’s empty chair. He heard the water running in the bathroom, the feeble sound of the faulty toilet flushing, and, from another room, the sound of sn
oring, very loud and emphatic. He wondered whether, at this late date, he might lose his virginity; the thought didn’t excite him, because there seemed to be nothing that was real about his presence there.
Sheryl came back in the dragon kimono and swished by him to the television set. Hypnotized, he looked past her broad, silken back to watch the small square burst open into a scene of a smily band leader waving his hand. The sound came like a spilling of hot fudge on hollow metal pans. “Music to dance to,” Sheryl said, holding her arms out in invitation.
Beyond fear, Norman went to her, grasped the warm resiliency of her torso, and began earnestly to do the two-step. For a few minutes he was able to concentrate on the unfamiliar fact of his dancing. He looked down past his arm to the imitation Persian rug, guiding himself in the pattern that made an invisible checkerboard of the floor. One, two, slide, then sideways, one, two, slide. The music oozed over him as he navigated the boxes. Dancing, and this step so appropriate for him, his dance of life. Beeler snored, the toilet tank drained feebly. One, two, slide, one, two, slide. They passed the lamp, and Sheryl deftly switched it off without breaking the rigid form of his dance. One, two, slide. He could barely see the floor, which was now lit only by the cold flicker of the television screen. One, two, slide, one, two, slide. There was a warm trembling against his body as Sheryl laughed silently. One, two, slide, he emphasized, the roots of his hair planted in sweat, so that his head felt like a rice paddy. One, two, slide. Her large breasts made big blunt concavities in him. One, two, slide, one, two, slide. Belly, thighs, the jut of her buttocks just below his hand like a cliff edge. One, two, slide. He was making square holes in the floor and expected momentarily to fall through one of them. One, two, slide, one, two . . . Something was reaching out of him for the warmth. He danced bent over, his body held away at the middle, his head resting in the hollow of her neck. She began to giggle softly and move after his escaping groin. He bent over more and more, and her giggle grew more violent, Beeler’s snoring grew louder, the candy violins of the orchestra rose in sappy crescendo. Suddenly his back reached an extremity of discomfort, and reflexively he snapped erect, plunging like a rivet into Sheryl’s kimonoed loins.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 16