Paxton struck a match, and the sound was large in the little office. He sat puffing clouds of smoke, and Norman thought about the Negro, pictured his ugly, malicious face hurrying through foreign streets, imagined him in postures of lust, in a position of repose as he lay in some dark room thousands of miles from his childhood. He smiled sadly, feeling a proprietary glow, and with his face almost touching the cold lettered glass, he awarded Paxton some of his love.
Finally Paxton sighed and stood up. “Well, baby, tempus is fugiting. Those airlines have cold, cold schedules.”
“Have a good life,” Norman said, shaking his hand and smiling.
“You too, Moonbloom, you too,” Paxton answered.
Then he left, and Norman watched his short, slight figure move down the street, the coat over his shoulders and billowing behind him, his dark glasses making him look like a celebrity.
And in that moment, Norman discovered that losses increased him too.
•
That evening he was the victim of a typical Moonbloom miscalculation, something that he was surprised hadn’t happened before. A week earlier, the Hausers had moved out; memories, or the lack of them, had been too much for them, and they had decided to take their emptiness someplace else. Norman had looked at the bare rooms, at the silhouettes of cleanliness where the false fireplace and the pictures and mirrors had been, and he had made up his mind that the apartment should be painted and the floors redone. With the mysticism to which he now was subject, he felt that people’s sorrows must soak into the walls and floors that surrounded them, and that new tenants should have new canvas upon which to paint their lives. He had painted the rooms in his favorite color—white (not for purity, but for its inherent depth), had scraped the floors with a rented scraper (ending with a surface as duned as the Sahara), and now was just in the process of shellacking them. The smell pleased him, and he liked the process of brushing shine onto the dull wood. His movements echoed in the empty rooms, and his occasional whistle made a bugling sound; overhead he could hear Sidone’s and Katz’s feet. He made great virtuoso strokes, stopping now and then to squint at his handiwork. His hands became tacky with the drippings of the shellac. His strokes became, of necessity, shorter, more acutely curved. Suddenly he wondered why this was so, and he looked up.
“Oh boy,” he said. He had shellacked himself into a corner of the room. He looked out over the gleaming waves of the floor, looked back at his small dull island, and then read the instructions on the can. It took twelve to fourteen hours to dry sufficiently to be walked on. “Wow,” he said wistfully. Then he took up the brush and made the shape of his perch a little neater. Finally he leaned back against the wall and began to wait.
Sounds that had until then made no inroads upon his consciousness now made clear intaglio impressions. He heard the water in the pipes, the steam in the radiators, the dim traffic sounds, the almost imperceptible noise made by the walls of an old building. He heard doors closing in the hallways, heard voices tacking the never silent air, heard electricity in wires, heard wind carefully shaping the complex architecture of the city, heard the strangest beatings and flushings. He shifted within his small dwelling and wondered how he would measure the elapsed hours.
He shifted several other times before he realized that he was hungry. In his pocket was a candy bar. He ate it and chewed the nuts under the chocolate with tiny bites. Still hungry, he thought of the great wealth of Sugarman and muttered an impersonation of him.
“Awrange drinks, cheese sandwiches, Hershey chocolate bars—male and female, pâté de foie gras . . .”
He began to feel drowsy and tried to doze; it would certainly pass the time. With his eyes closed, the lights gave him the impression of sunlight. He lost contact with time and could have been whiling away a boyhood afternoon. Just beyond the periphery of hearing, his grandmother’s voice called a gentle admonition, an aunt offered him something, his grandfather chuckled shyly. He might have been in his quiet, quiet bedroom with a book across his knees, with serenity covering him body and soul.
But distant, sarcastic laughter opened his eyes. He saw where he was and recognized the remote laughter to be Hirsch’s, the resultant shouting to come from Aaron Lublin. The rooms stoned him with hollow bits of feeling. He pictured the flowing-river lamp shade, the red-bulb fire, the lumpy, livid face of Sherman, the bright tawdry figure of Carol, the golden unreality of the child. Yearning for his laughter, he tried to remember some jokes, but found they had all melted together into one tremendous mass. He wondered what time it was.
But really, he reasoned, this is too silly. So I’ll just walk on my toes to the door. I can come back tomorrow and touch up. What prevented him from doing it? Perhaps he felt that any flaw in the gleaming coat of shellac would be like a hole in the earth’s crust, through which burning lava would burst forth. Whatever the reason, he realized he would stay where he was until at least twelve hours had gone by. He looked at the window and saw the black of night. How many hours until dawn?
His body became cramped and full of restlessness. He had an urge to urinate and felt a pain in his kidneys. Hunger teased him with pictures of food. Upstairs became noisy with many footfalls and dropping sounds, squeals of women, laughter. It seemed he lived in the walls. He was chilly, too, and this kept him from really sleeping. “Oh God,” he sighed, and composed himself for some sort of half-sleep. The light seemed to cast a blackness that resembled darkness. He dozed, woke, dozed again, innumerable times. Sometimes he forgot where he was, sometimes he remembered. He heard the roar and swish of a sanitation truck, the rattle of garbage pails. Upstairs was quiet for a while.
A sharp cry of terror and anguish woke him; there was the crash of something falling over. He gazed at the room and felt a terrible loneliness in the white walls. Outside, the light was a warm gray, and before his eyes the electric light paled to a match flame.
Some time later he heard a man’s voice screaming, and thought it might be Sidone’s, because it seemed to come from directly overhead. He looked at the floor and decided that its hard gleam indicated that it was dry. He touched it with his fingers, but they were too coated with shellac to feel anything, so he tried it with his lips. It was dry. He stepped from the island onto the icy shine and painted his resting place. Then he took the can and the brush, walked out of the apartment, and went upstairs to find out what had happened.
22
“WHY DID YOU do a thing like that?” Sidone screamed at the ashen Katz, who sat with his head back on an armchair, so that the blue-red welts on his neck were displayed. “Do you know what a thing like that does to me? Are you crazy completely?”
“You’re now my worst enemy,” Katz said hoarsely, staring at the light fixture, from which dangled the piece of severed rope he had tried to hang himself with. “For two hours I worked at it, and when I finally managed to . . . you had to come along and . . .”
“You’re inhuman and lousy, do you know that?” Sidone shouted. “You were my friend. I trusted you. I lived with you for three years, more than I could stand to live with anyone, including my mother. I said, ‘Katz is my buddy, we get along. He knows how ridiculous everything is, and we can laugh together.’ Then I have to come back from sleeping with that broad, all set to tell you how funny it was, and what do I find? You, gurgling and twitching on the end of a rope! Is that your idea of a joke?”
“I’ve been a failure all my life. I failed at being a baby, I failed at being a son, I failed at being a musician. I almost had it made as a suicide. There’s no hope for me any more. My father is laughing at me from Hell.” Katz was dressed in a neat blue suit and had a handkerchief in his breast pocket, and except for the fact of his speaking, he could have been a professionally prepared corpse.
Norman, coated with shellac and porous with exhaustion, stood in the morning sunlight looking from one to the other. “Now now,” he said with a weak smile, not expecting them to pay any attention, although his rate of growth had accelerated and he was,
on some level, nearly six feet tall now.
“Yeah, yeah, don’t make excuses,” Sidone snarled. “You betrayed me. You were always smiling and full of fun. But now it all comes out. All the time, on the sly, you were moody!”
“It was my father,” Katz croaked wretchedly at the ceiling, his face all welded together with pain.
“Yah yah, don’t start all that Freudian shit! You were my friend and you turned out to be a scheming Jewish fink!”
“I loved him,” Katz went on. “And he loved me, he did. But he couldn’t say it, he couldn’t say it even at the very end. I used to help him in the hardware store. We hardly talked, and when we did, it was nasty. He’d yell, ‘What for did you mark the saucepans sixty-nine cents? I told you seventy-nine. Hey, musician, you stupid bum, if you’d stop with the bluhsin, stop with the whores and the shnapps, maybe you’d be able to hear something. Stanley, Stanley, you retarded bum, you shmegeggy . . .’ But I’d catch him looking at me from the darkness where he was bent down under a shelf, and he’d be staring at me like he could eat me up, like a starving man. And I’d try, I’d try to say something that would make him . . . But I never could, and he never could. He died a failure and cursed me with failure. Maybe this was my last chance to succeed. For eternity we’ll sit across that big campfire of Hell and he’ll say cruel things to me and it will be his torture and mine. Ooooooooo-ooooo . . .”
“Goddamn it, Katz, do you know what you’re doing to my nerves? Haven’t you got the least bit of consideration? Don’t try to make excuses. The fact is, you were trying to pull a nasty trick on me.”
“Don’t you have any pity, Sidone?” Katz wailed, pulling out of the long-diving “oooo-ooo” just in time.
“I have plenty of pity, even compassion,” Sidone cried indignantly. “You’re the one, you’re the one with no pity. You’re the intolerant one.”
“Me?” Katz said, astounded. He sat up and began rubbing his bruised neck. “Me?”
Sidone turned to Norman. “Tell him, tell him,” he demanded.
“How can he say I’m the one?” Katz asked, both hands pointed toward his wounded neck and face. “Does it make any sense?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sidone said angrily, as Norman turned back and forth trying to choose. “I had a horrible childhood too. Everyone had a horrible childhood. My father deserted us, my sister was mental, all my teachers hated me, I’m a latent hemophiliac. Do I try to take it out on others? No, not me. I drink whisky, I make ficky-fick with the girls to give them pleasure, I take an occasional reefer just to be social, I drum diligently for money, I tell jokes. Why can’t he live wholesome too?”
“But my father,” pleaded Katz.
Norman contemplated. He looked at the drumstick capped with a condom, he looked at the woman’s stocking on the light fixture with the severed rope, at all the burned grooves in the furniture. The sun felt warm on him and he felt like collapsing and he felt very strong. The building burbled and mumbled and made ready for the day. Jim Sprague’s voice called through the hallway, “What do you mean, Janey?” and his wife answered tenderly, “When?” The two musicians stared at him with haggard faces.
“It’s all very strange,” Norman said, looking to them smaller than ever. “The point is, I’d appreciate if you fellas would kind of push the furniture into the center of the rooms.”
Sidone made a face of incredulous bewilderment and leaned forward. Katz seemed to become slightly more animated by curiosity.
“You see, I’m going to paint your walls. I’m painting everybody’s walls.”
“Oh,” Sidone said, holding his hands out, palms upward, a crooked, dazed smile on his mustached mouth. “Naturally, nothing could be more reasonable.”
Katz just put his head back on the chair and began to cry quietly, his features relaxing as though for sleep.
And Norman left them, walking on the great wooden stilts that made him so tall, and as he went out into the brilliant cold morning, his fingers felt unutterably weary and cold. But he was filled with excitement; there was no doubt in his mind that the summit was very near. Moonbloom, in his massive, soiled fedora, his thick, black overcoat, his blue suit with its old, old Red Cross pin in the lapel and shellac and paint stains all over it, traveled through the city, aspiring.
23
NORMAN HELPED A one-armed electrician put in massive fluorescent fixtures, working under the man’s flashlight and following his directions with trembling fingers. It seemed he was so close to the finish now, and he began to worry about recognizing victory.
“Is it this?” he asked himself when the switch was thrown and the electrician came up to stand with him in the artificial daylight of the Mott Street hallway. For a few minutes he stood there with his mouth opened, ready to smile or cry or shout. There was a faint buzzing from the long, glowing tubes; the electrician gulped in the smoke of his cigarette and blew it out with a long breezy sound. Kram would no longer be in danger of falling, but nothing further happened.
He collected the rents and searched carefully for hidden omens in the tenants’ faces.
“You look so down in the mouth,” he said probingly to Eva Baily.
“Lester has gone off and married that creature,” she said bitterly. “After all we’ve done.” Her Indian face appeared inconsolable and ready for the clay. But as she handed him the money, a slight dawn of smile softened her lips.
“Yes?” he said curiously.
“You look thinner than ever.” She put her hand on his arm, and he smelled vanilla and allspice and broth.
“I’ve been working very hard. You’ve seen the hallways?”
“They look perfectly lovely.”
“It’s the best I could do.”
“Well, you need nourishment.”
“Pardon?”
“Lester left yesterday, and I’ve got a huge leg.”
“Well . . . I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Minna and I are so broken up. We could never eat it alone.” She gave a tremulous smile, and the hard despair of her eyes became shrouded in mist.
“Lamb?”
“Lamb.”
“Ohh-h . . . Could I take a rain check? This next week or so I’ll be up to my ears.”
She bit her lip and seemed ready to cry.
“I really will come for dinner after that. I haven’t had a home-cooked . . .”
“Oh, wonderful,” she said, suddenly looking exactly as she always had. She touched his lapel. “Button up when you go out,” she said.
•
“Any day now, Mr. Epstein,” Jim Sprague said.
“Moonbloom,” Norman corrected. “What will be any day now?” he asked, tilting his head, intent on the answer.
“The baby,” Jim said. “Right, Janey?”
“What was that, Jim?” she asked, knitting an incredibly long sock.
“The baby,” he said.
“What about the baby, silly?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What do you think, Epstein?”
“Moonbloom,” Norman said with a dull smile.
“Oh gee, I am sorry. I don’t know why I keep calling you . . . What do I call you?” His clean young face was disproportionately perplexed.
“Epstein,” Norman reminded him.
“Epstein? But you’re Moonbloom?”
“I don’t know,” Norman sighed, looking around the room for the omen they would never be aware of.
Jane laughed, and they both turned to her.
“No, no, I was just thinking,” she said. “It’s hard to believe. I was such an untidy little girl. Even the nicest of the women at the orphanage used to twist their mouths when they looked at me. Just like yesterday. I just couldn’t seem not to have candy stickiness on my hands and face, and I can remember feeling damp all over. I was always stained and untucked, and my hands were forever perspiring. I had tartar on my teeth, the school dentist said, and I told him I brushed them but it didn’t seem to help. A little girl . . . so sticky and dirty . . . al
ways a little girl. And now I’m this, and what will happen? Will the same little girl be again? What will I be?”
“Do you have pains again?” Jim asked, scraping his shirt with the receipt, trying to find the pocket.
“Well, why don’t you ask Mr. Epstein if he wants something?” she said.
“You’re feeling them again, I can tell,” Jim accused. “Do you want me to time them now?”
“Oh dear,” she said, looking at the long, long sock in dismay. “I wish I hadn’t lost that pattern. I’ll never know when to stop.”
“I don’t know which I want, a boy or a girl,” Jim said, blind with tenderness.
“Silly,” she said, laying the sock across her crowded lap.
Norman eased himself out. If there was answer there, he would never find it.
•
Marvin Schoenbrun’s face was clear and more serene than Norman had seen it before. He let Norman in and, after giving him the rent money, gestured toward the severely simple box resting in his window.
“I thank you, Moonbloom. The air conditioner has made a simply marvelous difference.”
“Have you had it on?” Norman asked.
“No, not yet. But I actually feel better already. Most sinus conditions have psychosomatic origins, you know. Just having the anxiety taken away has done wonders for my passages.”
“Well,” Norman said, a little awed. “As long as it’s made you happy.”
“Oh, ‘happy,’” Marvin said with a wave of his beautiful hand. “One doesn’t think about that. One merely celebrates little things—kindness, for example.” He looked at Norman meaningfully, and his face, without the habitual sulk, was viscous, almost sickening. “There is something for everyone.”
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 20