“Oh, I will.”
She felt she could stretch up and kiss his lips and that he wouldn’t mind, because she was beautiful. Or her hand was.
• • •
“You can turn off the light, if you like.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’d rather leave it on.”
He slipped out of his shorts and felt for the bed with his shin and lay down beside her as she stared into his sightless face. His hand discovered her good happy body. It was pure touch, pure truth beyond speech, everything she was was moving through his hand like water unfrozen. She was free of her whole life and kissed him hard and tenderly, praying that there was a God who would keep her from error with him, and moved his hands where she wished them to be, mastering him and enslaving herself to his slightest movements.
In a respite, he ran his fingers over her face and she held her breath, hearing his breaths suspending as he felt the curve of her nose, her long upper lip and forehead, lightly pressed her cheekbones—discovering, she was sure, that they lacked distinction and were buried in a rounded yet tightened face.
“I am not beautiful,” she asked more than stated.
“You are, where it matters to me.”
“Can you picture me?”
“Very well, yes.”
“Is it really all right?”
“What earthly difference can it possibly make to me?” He rolled over on top of her, placing his mouth on hers, then, moving over her face, he read it with his lips. His pleasure poured into her again.
“I will die here, my heart will stop right here under you, because I don’t need any more than this and I can’t bear it.”
“I like your lisp.”
“Do you? It doesn’t sound childish?”
“It does; that’s why I like it. What color is your hair?”
“Can you imagine colors?”
“I think I can imagine black; is it black?”
“No, it’s kind of chestnut, slightly reddish chestnut, and very straight. It falls almost to my shoulders. My head is large and my mouth is on the large side too and slightly prognathous. But I walk nicely, maybe beautifully if you ask some people. I love to walk in a sexy way.”
“Your ass is wonderfully shaped.”
“Yes, I forgot to mention that.”
“It thrilled me to hold it.”
“I’m glad.” Then she added, “I’m really dumbfoundedly glad.”
“And how do I look to you?”
“I think you’re a splendidly handsome man. You have darkish skin and brown hair parted on the left, and a nicely shaped strong chin. Your face is kind of rectangular, I guess, kind of reassuring and silent. You are about three or four inches taller than me and your body is slim but not skinny. I think you are spectacular-looking.”
He chuckled and rolled off her. She held his penis. “And this is perfection.” He laughed and kissed her lightly. Then quietly he fell asleep. She lay beside him not daring to stir and wake him to life and its dangers.
• • •
In the late seventies, living in the Village, she read in the papers that the Crosby Hotel was being demolished for a new apartment house. She was working as a volunteer now for a civil rights organization, monitoring violations East and West, and decided to take an extra hour after lunch and go uptown to see the old hotel once more before it vanished. She was into her sixties now, and Charles had died in his sleep a little more than a year earlier. She came out of the subway and walked down the side street and found that the top floor, the twelfth, was already gone. Comically gone, as a matter of fact; the cube where Charles had carefully judged Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven recordings was now open blue sky. She leaned against a building up the street from the hotel and watched the men prizing apart the brick walls with surprising ease. So it was more or less only gravity that held buildings up! She could see inside rooms, the different colors people had so carefully selected to paint the walls, what care had been taken to select the right shade! With each falling chunk of masonry, billowing bursts of dust rushed upward into the air. Each generation takes part of the city away, like ants tugging twigs. Soon they would be reaching her old room. An empty amazement crept over her. Out of sixty-one years of life, she had had twenty good ones. Not bad.
She thought of the dozens of recitals and concerts, the dinners in restaurants, the utterness of Charles’s love and reliance on her, who had become his eyes. In a way he had turned her inside out, so that she looked out at the world instead of holding her breath for the world to look at her and disapprove. She walked up closer to the front doors of the hotel and stood there across the street, catching the haunted earth-cold smell of a dying building, trying to recapture that first time she had walked out with him into the street and then down to the subway, the last day of her homeliness. She had bought a new perfume, and it floated up to her through the dusty air and pleased her.
She turned back to Broadway and strolled past the fruit stands and the debris of collisions lying on the curbs, the broken pizza crusts of the city’s eaters-in-the-streets, fruit peels and cores, a lost boot and a rotted tie, a woman sitting on the sidewalk combing her hair, the black boys ranting after a basketball, the implosion of causes, emergencies, purposes that had swept her up and which she could no longer find the strength to call back from the quickly disappearing past. And Charles, arm in arm with her, walking imperturbably through it all with his hat flat straight on his head and his crimson muffler wrapped neatly around his throat and whistling softly yet so strongly the mighty main theme of Harold in Italy. “Oh Death, oh Death,” she said almost aloud, waiting on the corner for the light to change as a teenage drug dealer slowly rolled his new BMW past with its rap music defiantly blasting her face. She crossed as the light turned green, filling with wonder at her fortune at having lived into beauty.
PRESENCE
Bulldog
He saw this tiny ad in the paper: “Black Brindle Bull puppies, $3.00 each.” He had something like ten dollars from his house-painting job, which he hadn’t deposited yet, but they had never had a dog in the house. His father was taking a long nap when the idea crested in his mind, and his mother, in the middle of a bridge game when he asked her if it would be all right, shrugged absently and threw a card. He walked around the house trying to decide, and the feeling spread through him that he’d better hurry, before somebody else got the puppy first. In his mind, there was already one particular puppy that belonged to him—it was his puppy and the puppy knew it. He had no idea what a brindle bull looked like, but it sounded tough and wonderful. And he had the three dollars, though it soured him to think of spending it when they had such bad money worries, with his father gone bankrupt again. The tiny ad hadn’t mentioned how many puppies there were. Maybe there were only two or three, which might be bought by this time.
The address was on Schermerhorn Street, which he had never heard of. He called, and a woman with a husky voice explained how to get there and on which line. He was coming from the Midwood section, and the elevated Culver line, so he would have to change at Church Avenue. He wrote everything down and read it all back to her. She still had the puppies, thank God. It took more than an hour, but the train was almost empty, this being Sunday, and with a breeze from its open wood-framed windows it was cooler than down in the street. Below in empty lots he could see old Italian women, their heads covered with red bandannas, bent over and loading their aprons with dandelions. His Italian school friends said they were for wine and salads. He remembered trying to eat one once when he was playing left field in the lot near his house, but it was bitter and salty as tears. The old wooden train, practically unloaded, rocked and clattered lightly through the hot afternoon. He passed above a block where men were standing in driveways watering their cars as though they were hot elephants. Dust floated pleasantly through the air.
The Schermerhorn Street neighborhood was a surprise, tot
ally different from his own, in Midwood. The houses here were made of brownstone, and were not at all like the clapboard ones on his block, which had been put up only a few years before or, in the earliest cases, in the twenties. Even the sidewalks looked old, with big squares of stone instead of cement, and bits of grass growing in the cracks between them. He could tell that Jews didn’t live here, maybe because it was so quiet and unenergetic and not a soul was sitting outside to enjoy the sun. Lots of windows were wide open, with expressionless people leaning on their elbows and staring out, and cats stretched out on some of the sills, many of the women in their bras and the men in underwear trying to catch a breeze. Trickles of sweat were creeping down his back, not only from the heat but also because he realized now that he was the only one who wanted the dog, since his parents hadn’t really had an opinion and his brother, who was older, had said, “What are you, crazy, spending your few dollars on a puppy? Who knows if it will be any good? And what are you going to feed it?” He thought bones, and his brother, who always knew what was right or wrong, yelled, “Bones! They have no teeth yet!” Well, maybe soup, he had mumbled. “Soup! You going to feed a puppy soup?” Suddenly he saw that he had arrived at the address. Standing there, he felt the bottom falling out, and he knew it was all a mistake, like one of his dreams or a lie that he had stupidly tried to defend as being real. His heart sped up and he felt he was blushing and walked on for half a block or so. He was the only one out, and people in a few of the windows were watching him on the empty street. But how could he go home after he had come so far? It seemed he’d been traveling for weeks or a year. And now to get back on the subway with nothing? Maybe he ought at least to get a look at the puppy, if the woman would let him. He had looked it up in the Book of Knowledge, where they had two full pages of dog pictures, and there had been a white English bulldog with bent front legs and teeth that stuck out from its lower jaw, and a little black-and-white Boston bull, and a long-nosed pit bull, but they had no picture of a brindle bull. When you came down to it, all he really knew about brindle bulls was that they would cost three dollars. But he had to at least get a look at him, his puppy, so he went back down the block and rang the basement doorbell, as the woman had told him to do. The sound was so loud it startled him, but he felt if he ran away and she came out in time to see him it would be even more embarrassing, so he stood there with sweat running down over his lip.
An inner door under the stoop opened, and a woman came out and looked at him through the dusty iron bars of the gate. She wore some kind of gown, light-pink silk, which she held together with one hand, and she had long black hair down to her shoulders. He didn’t dare look directly into her face, so he couldn’t tell exactly what she looked like, but he could feel her tension as she stood there behind her closed gate. He felt she could not imagine what he was doing ringing her bell and he quickly asked if she was the one who’d put the ad in. Oh! Her manner changed right away, and she unlatched the gate and pulled it open. She was shorter than he and had a peculiar smell, like a mixture of milk and stale air. He followed her into the apartment, which was so dark he could hardly make out anything, but he could hear the high yapping of puppies. She had to yell to ask him where he lived and how old he was, and when he told her thirteen she clapped a hand over her mouth and said that he was very tall for his age, but he couldn’t understand why this seemed to embarrass her, except that she may have thought he was fifteen, which people sometimes did. But even so. He followed her into the kitchen, at the back of the apartment, where finally he could see around him, now that he’d been out of the sun for a few minutes. In a large cardboard box that had been unevenly cut down to make it shallower he saw three puppies and their mother, who sat looking up at him with her tail moving slowly back and forth. He didn’t think she looked like a bulldog, but he didn’t dare say so. She was just a brown dog with flecks of black and a few stripes here and there, and the puppies were the same. He did like the way their little ears drooped, but he said to the woman that he had wanted to see the puppies but hadn’t made up his mind yet. He really didn’t know what to do next, so, in order not to seem as though he didn’t appreciate the puppies, he asked if she would mind if he held one. She said that was all right and reached down into the box and lifted out two puppies and set them down on the blue linoleum. They didn’t look like any bulldogs he had ever seen, but he was embarrassed to tell her that he didn’t really want one. She picked one up and said, “Here,” and put it on his lap.
He had never held a dog before and was afraid it would slide off, so he cradled it in his arms. It was hot on his skin and very soft and kind of disgusting in a thrilling way. It had gray eyes like tiny buttons. It troubled him that the Book of Knowledge hadn’t had a picture of this kind of dog. A real bulldog was kind of tough and dangerous, but these were just brown dogs. He sat there on the arm of the green upholstered chair with the puppy on his lap, not knowing what to do next. The woman, meanwhile, had put herself next to him, and it felt like she had given his hair a pat, but he wasn’t sure because he had very thick hair. The more seconds that ticked away the less sure he was of what to do. Then she asked if he would like some water, and he said he would, and she went to the faucet and ran water, which gave him a chance to stand up and set the puppy back in the box. She came back to him holding the glass and as he took it she let her gown fall open, showing her breasts like half-filled balloons, saying she couldn’t believe he was only thirteen. He gulped the water and started to hand her back the glass, and she suddenly drew his head to her and kissed him. In all this time, for some reason, he hadn’t been able to look into her face, and when he tried to now he couldn’t see anything but a blur and hair. She reached down to him and a shivering started in the backs of his legs. It got sharper, until it was almost like the time he touched the live rim of a light socket while trying to remove a broken bulb. He would never be able to remember getting down on the carpet—he felt like a waterfall was smashing down on top of his head. He remembered getting inside her heat and his head banging and banging against the leg of her couch. He was almost at Church Avenue, where he had to change for the elevated Culver line, before realizing she hadn’t taken his three dollars, and he couldn’t recall agreeing to it but he had this small cardboard box on his lap with a puppy mewling inside. The scraping of nails on the cardboard sent chills up his back. The woman, as he remembered now, had cut two holes into the top of the box, and the puppy kept sticking his nose through them.
His mother jumped back when he untied the cord and the puppy pushed up and scrambled out, yapping. “What is he doing?” she yelled, with her hands in the air as though she were about to be attacked. By this time, he’d lost his fear of the puppy and held him in his arms and let him lick his face, and seeing this his mother calmed down a bit. “Is he hungry?” she asked, and stood with her mouth slightly open, ready for anything, as he put the puppy on the floor again. He said the puppy might be hungry, but he thought he could eat only soft things, although his little teeth were as sharp as pins. She got out some soft cream cheese and put a little piece of it on the floor, but the puppy only sniffed at it and peed. “My God in Heaven!” she yelled, and quickly got a piece of newspaper to blot it up with. When she bent over that way, he thought of the woman’s heat and was ashamed and shook his head. Suddenly her name came to him—Lucille—which she had told him when they were on the floor. Just as he was slipping in, she had opened her eyes and said, “My name is Lucille.” His mother brought out a bowl of last night’s noodles and set it on the floor. The puppy raised his little paw and tipped the bowl over, spilling some of the chicken soup at the bottom. This he began to lick hungrily off the linoleum. “He likes chicken soup!” his mother yelled happily, and immediately decided he would most likely enjoy an egg and so put water on to boil. Somehow the puppy knew that she was the one to follow and walked behind her, back and forth, from the stove to the refrigerator. “He follows me!” his mother said, laughing happily.
�
� • •
On his way home from school the next day, he stopped at the hardware store and bought a puppy collar for seventy-five cents, and Mr. Schweckert threw in a piece of clothesline as a leash. Every night as he fell asleep, he brought out Lucille like something from a secret treasure box and wondered if he could dare phone her and maybe be with her again. The puppy, which he had named Rover, seemed to grow noticeably bigger every day, although he still showed no signs of looking like any bulldog. The boy’s father thought Rover should live in the cellar, but it was very lonely down there and he would never stop yapping. “He misses his mother,” his mother said, so every night the boy started him off on some rags in an old wash basket down there, and when he’d yapped enough the boy was allowed to bring him up and let him sleep on some rags in the kitchen, and everybody was thankful for the quiet. His mother tried to walk the puppy in the quiet street they lived on, but he kept tangling the rope around her ankles, and because she was afraid to hurt him she exhausted herself following him in all his zigzags. It didn’t always happen, but many times when the boy looked at Rover he’d think of Lucille and could almost feel the heat again. He would sit on the porch steps stroking the puppy and think of her, the insides of her thighs. He still couldn’t imagine her face, just her long black hair and her strong neck.
One day, his mother baked a chocolate cake and set it to cool on the kitchen table. It was at least eight inches thick, and he knew it would be delicious. He was drawing a lot in those days, pictures of spoons and forks or cigarette packages or, occasionally, his mother’s Chinese vase with the dragon on it, anything that had an interesting shape. So he put the cake on a chair next to the table and drew for a while and then got up and went outside for some reason and got involved with the tulips he had planted the previous fall that were just now showing their tips. Then he decided to go look for a practically new baseball he had mislaid the previous summer and which he was sure, or pretty sure, must be down in the cellar in a cardboard box. He had never really got down to the bottom of that box, because he was always distracted by finding something he’d forgotten he had put in there. He had started down into the cellar from the outside entrance, under the back porch, when he noticed that the pear tree, which he had planted two years before, had what looked like a blossom on one of its slender branches. It amazed him, and he felt proud and successful. He had paid thirty-five cents for the tree on Court Street and thirty cents for an apple tree, which he planted about seven feet away, so as to be able to hang a hammock between them someday. They were still too thin and young, but maybe next year. He always loved to stare at the two trees, because he had planted them, and he felt they somehow knew he was looking at them, and even that they were looking back at him. The back yard ended at a ten-foot-high wooden fence that surrounded Erasmus Field, where the semi-pro and sandlot teams played on weekends, teams like the House of David and the Black Yankees and the one with Satchel Paige, who was famous as one of the country’s greatest pitchers except he was a Negro and couldn’t play in the big leagues, obviously. The House of Davids all had long beards—he’d never understood why, but maybe they were Orthodox Jews, although they didn’t look it. An extremely long foul shot over right field could drop a ball into the yard, and that was the ball it had occurred to him to search for, now that spring had come and the weather was warming up. In the basement, he found the box and was immediately surprised at how sharp his ice skates were, and recalled that he had once had a vise to clamp the skates side by side so that a stone could be rubbed on the blades. He pushed aside a torn fielder’s glove, a hockey goalie’s glove whose mate he knew had been lost, some pencil stubs and a package of crayons, and a little wooden man whose arms flapped up and down when you pulled a string. Then he heard the puppy yapping over his head, but it was not his usual sound—it was continuous and very sharp and loud. He ran upstairs and saw his mother coming down into the living room from the second floor, her dressing gown flying out behind her, a look of fear on her face. He could hear the scraping of the puppy’s nails on the linoleum, and he rushed into the kitchen. The puppy was running around and around in a circle and sort of screaming, and the boy could see at once that his belly was swollen. The cake was on the floor, and most of it was gone. “My cake!” his mother screamed, and picked up the dish with the remains on it and held it up high as though to save it from the puppy, even though practically nothing was left. The boy tried to catch Rover, but he slipped away into the living room. His mother was behind him yelling “The carpet!” Rover kept running, in wider circles now that he had more space, and foam was forming on his muzzle. “Call the police!” his mother yelled. Suddenly, the puppy fell and lay on his side, gasping and making little squeaks with each breath. Since they had never had a dog and knew nothing about veterinarians, he looked in the phone book and found the A.S.P.C.A. number and called them. Now he was afraid to touch Rover, because the puppy snapped at his hand when it got close and he had this foam on his mouth. When the van drew up in front of the house, the boy went outside and saw a young guy removing a little cage from the back. He told him that the dog had eaten practically a whole cake, but the man had no interest and came into the house and stood for a moment looking down at Rover, who was making little yips now but was still down on his side. The man dropped some netting over him and when he slipped him into the cage, the puppy tried to get up and run. “What do you think is the matter with him?” his mother asked, her mouth turned down in revulsion, which the boy now felt in himself. “What’s the matter with him is he ate a cake,” the man said. Then he carried the cage out and slid it through the back door into the darkness of the van. “What will you do with him?” the boy asked. “You want him?” the man snapped. His mother was standing on the stoop now and overheard them. “We can’t have him here,” she called over, with fright and definiteness in her voice, and approached the young man. “We don’t know how to keep a dog. Maybe somebody who knows how to keep him would want him.” The young man nodded with no interest either way, got behind the wheel, and drove off.
Presence: Stories Page 29