All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories

by E. L. Doctorow

  Is it not my house also? Anya Borislav said to the lawyer.

  Of course, the lawyer said. My apologies.

  So let him be grateful to me as well. That we are giving the mestizo everything, including a roof over his head. But I tell you, she said to Ramon, this is not a hotel and I am not a maid. You understand? Your bed you will make yourself, your room you will clean, and your wash you will take to the Laundromat, and your food you will eat elsewhere.

  Ramon ignored her. I have conditions, he said to the lawyer.

  What conditions?

  That the money I am owed is paid to me now.

  Jelena has not been paying you? Borislav said.

  No, nor have I asked her. She is my wife. Since we are married and filing a joint tax return it is not income if it is passed from one of us to the other. So I will need from you the money I’m owed before I consent to live in your house and suffer the insults of Mrs. Borislav.

  At this the woman rose from the table and began to scream and curse in her native tongue. Spittle flew from her lips.

  Borislav stood and tried to calm her but she pushed his arm away and screamed at him. Anya, he said, please, please. We know what we are doing!

  It was that remark that Ramon remembered later. Borislav and the lawyer had agreed to pay him the money. But what was it, exactly, that they knew they were doing?

  BORISLAV’S HOUSE WAS of red brick with a roof of green tile. It stood out in this neighborhood of small two-family homes on small lots. The inside reflected the same taste—probably Mrs. Borislav’s—as the restaurant: heavy, dark furniture, thick rugs, lamps with tasselled shades, and toylike things on every surface—things of glass, things of silver, things of ceramic, dancing ladies in swirling skirts, horses pulling sleighs. Only when Ramon had climbed the stairs to the third floor did he find a window that was not heavily curtained. His room was across the hall from Jelena’s. It was small with a narrow bed and a chest of drawers, but its window was covered only with a pull shade, and when that was rolled up the seaside morning light streamed in so that he awoke with the sun on his face.

  In secret, of course, he was excited to be living so close to Jelena. When it came time to walk home after work, they had the same destination. He opened the door with her key and walked behind her up the stairs and said good night only when they stood at their doors. There was a bathroom, too, that they shared and so he got to know the products she used for her hair, her skin, her eyes. Her potions, creams, sprays, and soaps gave him a behind-the-scenes look at how she took care of herself. With respect, he always put the seat down. And so he felt in this illusion of their intimacy something more like the married state.

  What puzzled him was her reaction to this closeness. He had expected her to object to having him as a housemate, and to be even angrier and more remote than before. But she was not. She was formal, perhaps, but no longer offhand in her treatment of him. She regarded him judiciously as he spoke to her. And when it became apparent that Mrs. Borislav regularly checked his room and went through the entire house to see if he had stolen anything, Jelena told him this would be unforgivable if the woman were sane. Anya Borislav, Jelena confided, is not a little crazy. I don’t know how Borislav endures her.

  One Monday morning, Jelena said, I’m going to the beach. Would you like to come with me? And so there he was applying sunblock to her thin back, while the gulls wheeled about and the little birds with stick legs went running along in the wet sand, just out of reach of the incoming tide. Jelena’s bathing suit hardly deserved the name, some bits of cloth and a strap or two. Ramon did not own a suit. He’d removed his shirt and rolled up his trousers. There were very few bathers this workday morning, but the beach was embellished with the refuse of the weekend past—hunks of charred firewood, beer bottles, McDonald’s wrappers, plastic bags, balls of aluminum foil, wet newspapers, and the occasional used condom. But they had found a reasonably clean spot where Ramon had only to dispose of a few pieces of broken glass and so here they were in the sun with the hushing waves rolling in and the gulls crying and Jelena’s vertebrae easily countable as she bent forward and he rubbed the sunblock over her back.

  Afterward, they sat side by side on their towels and watched the waves.

  Ramon, would you like to hit me?

  No. Of course not. Jelena, what a strange thing to say. Why?

  I have been rude to you when you have done something only for my sake. I would deserve it.

  No, I understand your mind, Jelena. Nothing is settled for you. You are new in another country. You are loosely attached. My mother, just before she died, told me that she had never really got used to the States, though she’d lived most of her life here. Of course, everyone is different, but it takes time to make yourself American.

  Well, if not you then someone will have to hit me. Maybe Alexander. He knows to do it.

  Who hits you? Alexander? Is that your boyfriend?

  Yes. In a way of speaking. But it is best if you hit me, Ramon.

  She turned to him, removed her sunglasses, and he saw that she was crying. Forgive me, she said, I am the worst of people. I don’t know anymore what I am doing.

  Ramon’s heart beat faster. Is Alexander coming here?

  He says. But he speaks through Borislav. I am of no importance. Oh, I am so wretched, she said. And she got up and walked to the surf and stood there as, even in his misgiving, he recorded her lovely figure, the long legs, the small, firm haunches, the huddled shoulders as she stood at the water’s edge hugging herself.

  LEON SAID, RAMON, you should talk to me first. You have made a mistake.

  You know those people?

  Of course. It is my business to know. When they came into his restaurant Borislav’s stature should have risen in your estimation to the level of the totally untrustworthy.

  I am in love with Jelena.

  It can be felt as love when you want to fuck someone and can’t.

  We are man and wife. In my love for Jelena, I will fuck her.

  You would have been better off still walking her to the door and leaving. Now you are in there with all of them and you are vulnerable.

  What can they do?

  They will speed things up. And you could be out on your ass with no job and a court appearance. And I am a busy man, Ramon. I don’t need this thing of my brother for our lawyers to divert themselves and the P.D. to smirk at.

  I will not touch her.

  They don’t need you to. You’re in the house, the husband, you’re right there—what is it your movie people say—on location? You’re on location, Ramon! It is a federal law—they made it to punish domestic violence against women. She gets hit and she gets the divorce right now, and the whole thing is done not in two years but in two weeks. And here is this Alexander flying in on her green card to be married.

  She would have to bring charges against me. Jelena would not do that.

  Oh, please, Ramon. What am I dealing with here? So they give her a couple of black eyes, a broken nose—you think she would like more of the same if she refused to bring charges?

  None of this will happen, Leon. So, as I understand it, it’s not for Jelena, the daughter of Borislav’s late uncle, to make a better life for herself in America?

  We’re still looking into that. It may be no more than what it seems. There are other ways to have got him in, long before this. So if they’ve taken these pains, and it is not what it seems, we have something to learn. He hasn’t been a faithful boyfriend, we know that. Listen, Ramon, in the meantime just get out of there. Leave your clothes like you’re coming back. They’ll wait. They need you around to make the strongest case. You’ve got your cash. Let them look for you if they want to set you up.

  THEY TOOK THEIR LUNCH to have on the beach. But it began to rain—a misty rain with the combers rolling in, and everything was gray, the sky, the seawater, and there was no line at the horizon.

  They sat on the boardwalk with their bags of sandwiches and drinks on the bench
between them. Jelena had pulled up the hood of her sweater. He could not see her face.

  I love you, Jelena.

  I know. You are reliable, Ramon. As a husband should be.

  You’re making fun.

  No. I have come to respect you. I find myself thinking about you without meaning to. You are very odd.

  I made a decision to love you when Borislav showed me your picture and sent me to marry you.

  A decision.

  Yes, this was an arranged marriage, and they are the best, when the decision is to love someone you don’t know. Those have always been the most sacred, the marriages arranged before there is love and by other people.

  The old way, from long ago, yes, and there is a good reason that it was given up.

  Well, I know that my mother and father’s marriage was arranged by their parents. The two young people sat there in embarrassment while their families negotiated. They had not met before. My mother told me that. And she and my father were together for forty years. And when he died she wept, how she wept. Neither my brother nor I could console her.

  Well, Ramon, that may be, but you and I have not sat in embarrassment while our parents negotiated. So where were the parents? It is a written green-card marriage, yours and mine.

  But it is still a sacred bond. Whether the marriage is arranged by one’s parents or by a drunken idiot, with the bride kissing the wrong man, and all for the wrong reasons—it is the same. Whether through one’s family or out of a desire to go to another country, it is the same mysterious thing going on underneath, doing its work in the manner of fate. And once it is done there can have been no other thing.

  That is very philosophical, Ramon. Your brother told me you are a graduate from college.

  And there is the sea in front of us, Jelena, that you have come over, to be in this country. And so that’s the way it is.

  Ramon carefully slipped her hood back and touched her cheek and she turned to face him. He leaned forward and kissed her lips.

  Here is what we will do now, Jelena. We will find a taxicab and leave. Just the way we are. We will buy what we need in the city. I have money.

  Ramon—

  It is no longer safe for you here. Or for me. Come. Anyway, it is too cold here in the rain. Take the sandwiches. Aren’t you hungry? I am. We will eat on the way.

  WHEN LEON CAME in that evening, he found Ramon and Jelena standing at the window looking at the lights of the city. They were holding hands.

  Leon coughed to get their attention. They were flustered, as if they’d been caught doing something forbidden.

  Leon shook his head and smiled. Is this the lovely Jelena? So it is! Snatched from under their foreign eyes. Ah, my brother, he said, I should have known. I should have known.

  Leon went behind the bar and brought out a bottle of champagne. Come, we’ll drink to it. He set out the glasses and popped the cork. Let the war begin, he said.

  The Orphans’ Home (3:12)

  NOW THE BRONX IS A BOROUGH OF HILLS AND VALLEYS BUT YOU don’t see this if you live there. What you see is the picture of where you’re going and the dusty windows of the stores you pass and the miles of old apartment houses six stories high, and the buses you dodge and the stoops you read the chalk legends on and the parks with no leaves on the trees. Occasionally you notice, where the tar is worn away, the gleam like a bare foot in a holey shoe of an old streetcar track. But you don’t notice what a place of rolling hills it is unless you are old and hanging between your shopping bag and your cane; or unless you are an orphan. And I am talking about an orphan of my mind who takes these trips regularly, feeling every hill its height and every valley its depth; and who hopes to find a certain street in the valley of the Third Avenue El. It is a noisy market street crowded with pushcarts and open-front stalls, and it flows like a river through the richest fields of the earth: fruit and vegetable stalls with oranges and apples, grapes, plums and pears, peaches, tomatoes, all banked up in pyramids; and stacks of celery in their crates, corn in its green husks, bushel baskets of potatoes, and huge, misshapen green peppers. Open dairy stores with cheese in nets slung from the ceiling. Clean and hallowed butcher stores with only smoked meat showing, but the good clean rich fresh meat is behind the heavy doors, the white clanking doors in the back, and the butcher wears a wool hat, and a sweater under his white smock. Appetizer stores with smoked fish and kegs of olives and barrels of pickles and trays of nuts and bins of dried fruit, and sawdust on the floor. And stores where live fish swim in tanks until the fishman lifts them out with a hand net, grabs them by the gills, slaps them down on the block, which stuns them, and cuts off their heads—fat steaks of fish wrapped in polished paper from the big roll. And along the curbs peddlers display from their pushcarts pairs of shoes tied by the laces, or billows of ladies’ silken underpants, or miniature amphitheaters of spools of sewing thread and packets of needles and pins and buttons and ribbons every color of the rainbow. And the cries of life echo from the stalls, from the street, from the fire escapes above, the cries of survival—merchants of free enterprise plucking their customers from the river that stomps by, slow, eddying, full of shoals, dangerous. A boy has to watch his step in these treacherous shallows—he can be squeezed against fat women with their bundles or stuck on the umbrella battens of spiteful old men. As he smells the life of the people from their homes, and the smells of oranges, cheese, chicken and fish and cheap new shoes, he must keep a practiced lookout for what is behind him and what is in front. Six, seven years on this earth, he is prey of big kids—Negro, Irish, Italian—who swoop, hover, sting, invisible as darning needles; of cops; of the Truant Officer; of Retribution, pulling him back by the ear to the home, to the Hebrew Home for Orphans some hills away, some deep deep valleys faraway, ascents and descents too tilting, too steep, for such small rubber sneakers, for such bunched-up drooping socks. And if he is lucky he has copped an orange or a celery stalk first. Or a plum whose pit remains in his mouth till it is as bare and juiceless as a stone. He may release it when the Scholar gets to him, and beats him on the shoulders, the head, the back, with the book of prayers, the book of wisdom; himself an orphan, a full-grown bearded black-coated orphan by choice, teeming with wrath and merciless pity. Afterwards the Welfare Lady will take the kid and dry his tears and mother him in her fat arms, and the smell of her will not be unpleasant as she cups his head and sits him on her lap and fails to tell him that though he runs away every week in the year, that rich fertile avenue he today discovered, that newfound land he came upon only by good fortune, is the street where they always look and always find him because he always goes there and nowhere else. Why? she may wonder sitting with him in the building of green tile walls and brown ceilings. Why there? Oh Momma Momma because I’m hungry. But some years will pass before, one day in his run over the hills of the Bronx, he goes in another direction and they never find him to bring him back. He is gone to make his way down every harvest street in the world. In the meantime the Scholar and the Welfare Lady bounce his life between them, tough to gentle, gentle to tough, like the old, half-dead volleyball bestowed for games in the school yard. Now three things make up my songs, the words, the music, and the attitude. And of these the least understood is the attitude. I mean in this song some critics think I am talking about Life or America or the Futility of Orgasm or some goddamn thing, but I am not, I am talking about the place where I grew up, The Orphans’ Home: Agon danced a lively tune Misero played the violin Such performances are given To benefit the orphans’ home Children who lack a daddio Whose mommas left you on the doorstep Let’s have a big hand for Agon And the violin of Misero They’re here every night but Wednesday To dance and play a tune or two When you finally leave these portals Others will sit in for you

  Short-Order Cook (2:35)

  I am asked how I made it. About making it there is no one way, there is no highway that will lead you there. That way you cut, it is like the little band that Moses led, and when they got there the sea closed behind th
em. Of no use to anyone chasing after. But you won’t know that if you listen to people telling you how to make it, telling you to do this or that indispensable thing as if there is a road with paving. The ones who know the directions are the ones who never get there. I have done some hard traveling, is how I made it. Whereas Missy made it in one song. But let me tell you about my ethnic period, when I was early in the game. I didn’t go see Woody. I’d gotten all I needed of Woody. I went to stand in the beefy blueblack shadow of John Malcolm, who lived on his farm in east Tennessee. When I got there, old John was cooking up his supper. The sun was going down over the hills, and it was orange and pink in the western sky, and sitting on John’s porch, and lying in his yard, playing with his hounds, looking at their boots, drinking water from his pump, were all these fretting guitar pluckers who looked just like me. So I had to laugh at my proud noble dirty lonesome self with his heartfelt wanderings and his pious worships. You knew these kids were waiting for a word from the master. You knew they were hoping he’d take up his guitar and sit on the porch steps and invite them to play along with him. Which he didn’t do. He just ate his supper and got in his truck and went to town to shoot some pool. And you knew what they wanted from him because it was what you wanted. But if he sang or didn’t sing, listened or didn’t listen, it was all the same. It wouldn’t do anybody any good, one way or the other. And no matter how dirty your jeans or dusty your boots or filthy and tangled you were in the hair, you couldn’t ever be John Malcolm. He, as a matter of fact, was clean-shaven and neatly dressed. And when he left the only music I had heard that day was music I didn’t have to leave MacDougal Street to hear. And that was the end of my ethnic period. When you talk about making it you are talking about a generation that comes out like a new season on the earth. You are talking about a teeming nation with a craving for nourishment. My friends, you are talking about the all-night diner where you go for the one who can serve up the emotion. Who can serve it up like a good short-order cook: greasy, and on a dirty plate; but fast, and hot. And that is what this song is about. Esso Texaco Gulf and Shell Mark the highway going to hell Stop at the diner, I mean to tell The short-order cook, he feeds you well. It shows the challenge to the short-order cook, who never appears in the song except as the waitress calls to him the orders she gets. And each order the waitress calls out is more complicated than the last, and more difficult for him to fill. From something simple like Draw one through a ring, which is coffee and a donut, or Gimmee the earth before Columbus, which is a waffle; to Paint the stripes and cut the grass and satellite some succotash, which is the spaghetti special but instead of the tossed salad lay on a vegetable. Till finally a customer comes into the diner and asks for God, he orders God, and the waitress calls over the counter to the short-order cook: White on rye and hold the bread! Sorry Mister, the cook is dead.