American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

I pushed the door, and froze, because standing in front of an easel, painting, was a slender blonde in pink bra and panties.

  “Sorry!” I gasped, closing the door again. From outside, I shouted. “I’m your neighbor across the hall. I locked myself out, and I wanted to use the fire escape to get over to my window.”

  The door swung open and she faced me, still in her underwear, a brush in each hand and hands on her hips. “Didn’t you hear me say come in?” She waved me into the apartment, pushing away a carton full of trash. “Just step over that pile of junk there.”

  I thought she must have forgotten—or not realized—she was undressed, and I didn’t know which way to look. I kept my eyes averted, looking at the walls, ceiling, everywhere but at her.

  The place was a shambles. There were dozens of little folding snack-tables, all covered with twisted tubes of paint, most of them crusted dry like shriveled snakes, but some of them alive and oozing ribbons of color. Tubes, brushes, cans, rags, and parts of frames and canvas were strewn everywhere. The place was thick with the odor compounded of paint, linseed oil, and turpentine—and after a few moments the subtle aroma of stale beer. Three overstuffed chairs and a mangy green couch were piled high with discarded clothing, and on the floor lay shoes, stockings and underthings, as if she were in the habit of undressing as she walked and flinging her clothes as she went. A fine layer of dust covered everything.

  “Well, you’re Mr. Gordon,” she said, looking me over. “I’ve been dying to get a peek at you ever since you moved in. Have a seat.” She scooped up a pile of clothing from one of the chairs and dumped it onto the crowded sofa. “So you finally decided to visit your neighbors. Get you a drink?”

  “You’re a painter,” I burbled, for want of something to say. I was unnerved by the thought that any moment she would realize she was undressed and would scream and dash for the bedroom. I tried to keep my eyes moving, looking everywhere but at her.

  “Beer or ale? Nothing else in the place right now except cooking sherry. You don’t want cooking sherry, do you?”

  “I can’t stay,” I said, getting hold of myself and fixing my gaze at the beauty mark on the left side of her chin. “I’ve locked myself out of my apartment. I wanted to go across the fire escape. It connects our windows.”

  “Any time,” she assured me. “Those lousy patent locks are a pain in the ass. I locked myself out of this place three times the first week I lived here—and once I was out in the hall stark naked for half an hour. Stepped out to get the milk, and the goddamned door swung shut behind me. I ripped the goddamned lock off and I haven’t had one on my door since.”

  I must have frowned, because she laughed. “Well, you see what the damned locks do. They lock you out, and they don’t protect much, do they? Fifteen burglaries in this goddamned building in the past year and every one of them in apartments that were locked. No one ever broke in here, even though the door was always open. They’d have a rotten time finding anything valuable here anyway.”

  When she insisted again on my having a beer with her, I accepted. While she was getting it from the kitchen, I looked around the room again. What I hadn’t noticed before was that the part of the wall behind me had been cleared away—all the furniture pushed to one side of the room or the center, so that the far wall (the plaster of which had been torn off to expose the brick) served as an art gallery. Paintings were crowded to the ceiling and others were stacked against each other on the floor. Several of them were self-portraits, including two nudes. The painting she had been working on when I came in, the one on the easel, was a half-length nude of herself, showing her hair long (not the way she wore it now, up in blonde braids coiled around her head like a crown) down to her shoulders with part of her long tresses twisted around the front and resting between her breasts. She had painted her breasts uptilted and firm with the nipples an unrealistic lollipop-red. When I heard her coming back with the beer, I spun away from the easel quickly, stumbled over some books, and pretended to be interested in a small autumn landscape on the wall.

  I was relieved to see that she had slipped into a thin ragged housecoat—even though it had holes in all the wrong places—and I could look directly at her for the first time. Not exactly beautiful, but her blue eyes and pert snub nose gave her a catlike quality that contrasted with her robust, athletic movements. She was about thirty-five, slender and well proportioned. She set the beers on the hardwood floor, curled up beside them in front of the sofa, and motioned for me to do the same.

  “I find the floor more comfortable than chairs,” she said, sipping the beer from the can. “Don’t you?”

  I told her I hadn’t thought about it, and she laughed and said I had an honest face. She was in the mood to talk about herself. She avoided Greenwich Village, she said, because there, instead of painting, she would be spending all her time in bars and coffee shops. “It’s better up here, away from the phonies and the dilettantes. Here I can do what I want and no one comes to sneer. You’re not a sneerer, are you?”

  I shrugged, trying not to notice the gritty dust all over my trousers and my hands. “I guess we all sneer at something. You’re sneering at the phonies and dilettantes, aren’t you?”

  After a while, I said I’d better be getting over to my own apartment. She pushed a pile of books away from the window—and I climbed over newspapers and paper bags filled with empty quart beer bottles. “One of these days,” she sighed, “I’ve got to cash them in.”

  I climbed onto the window sill and out to the fire escape. When I got my window open, I came back for my groceries, but before I could say thanks and good-bye, she started out onto the fire escape after me. “Let’s see your place. I’ve never been there. Before you moved in, the two little old Wagner sisters wouldn’t even say good morning to me.” She crawled through my window behind me and sat on the ledge.

  “Come on in,” I said, putting the groceries on the table.

  “I don’t have any beer, but I can make you a cup of coffee.” But she was looking past me, her eyes wide in disbelief.

  “My God! I’ve never seen a place as neat as this. Who would dream that a man living by himself could keep a place so orderly?”

  “I wasn’t always that way,” I apologized. “It’s just since I moved in here. It was neat when I moved in, and I’ve had the compulsion to keep it that way. It upsets me now if anything is out of place.”

  She got down off the window sill to explore the apartment.

  “Hey,” she said, suddenly, “do you like to dance? You know—” She held out her arms and did a complicated step as she hummed a Latin beat. “Tell me you dance and I’ll bust.”

  “Only the fox trot,” I said, “and not very good at that.”

  She shrugged. “I’m nuts about dancing, but nobody I ever meet—that I like—is a good dancer. I’ve got to get myself all dolled up once in a while and go downtown to the Stardust Ballroom. Most of the guys hanging around there are kind of creepy, but they can dance.”

  She sighed as she looked around. “Tell you what I don’t like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist . . . it’s the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. Ugh! If I lived here I would have to stay drunk all the time.”

  Suddenly, she swung around and faced me. “Say, could you let me have five until the twentieth? That’s when my alimony check comes. I usually don’t run short, but I had a problem last week.”

  Before I could answer, she screeched and started over to the piano in the corner. “I used to play the piano. I heard you fooling around with it a few times, and I said to myself that guy’s goddamned good. That’s how I knew I wanted to meet you eve
n before I saw you. I haven’t played in such a goddamned long time.” She was picking away at the piano as I went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  “You’re welcome to practice on it any time,” I said. I don’t know why I suddenly became so free with my place, but there was something about her that demanded complete unselfishness. “I don’t leave the front door open yet, but the window isn’t locked, and if I’m not here all you’ve got to do is climb in through the fire escape. Cream and sugar in your coffee?”

  When she didn’t answer, I looked back into the living room. She wasn’t there, and as I started towards the window, I heard her voice from Algernon’s room.

  “Hey, what’s this?” She was examining the three dimensional plastic maze I had built. She studied it and then let out another squeal. “Modern sculpture! All boxes and straight lines!”

  “It’s a special maze,” I explained. “A complex learning device for Algernon.”

  But she was circling around it, excited. “They’ll go mad for it at the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “It’s not sculpture,” I insisted. I opened the door to Algernon’s living-cage attached to the maze, and let him into the maze opening.

  “My God!” she whispered. “Sculpture with a living element. Charlie, it’s the greatest thing since junkmobiles and tincannia.”

  I tried to explain, but she insisted that the living element would make sculpture history. Only when I saw the laughter in her eyes did I realize she was teasing me. “It could be self-perpetuating art,” she went on, “a creative experience for the art lover. You get another mouse and when they have babies, you always keep one to reproduce the living element. Your work of art attains immortality, and all the fashionable people buy copies for conversation pieces. What are you going to call it?”

  “All right,” I sighed. “I surrender. . . .”

  “No,” she snorted, tapping the plastic dome where Algernon had found his way into the goal-box. “I surrender is too much of a cliché. How about: Life is just a box of mazes?”

  “You’re a nut!” I said.

  “Naturally!” She spun around and curtsied. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

  About then the coffee boiled over.

  Halfway through the cup of coffee, she gasped and said she had to run because she had a date a half-hour earlier with someone she met at an art exhibit.

  “You wanted some money,” I said.

  She reached into my half open wallet and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Till next week,” she said, “when the check comes. Thanks a mill.” She crumpled the money, blew Algernon a kiss, and before I could say anything she was out the window onto the fire escape, and out of sight. I stood there foolishly looking after her.

  So damned attractive. So full of life and excitement. Her voice, her eyes—everything about her was an invitation. And she lived out the window and just a fire escape away.

  June 20—Perhaps I should have waited before going to see Matt; or not gone to see him at all. I don’t know. Nothing turns out the way I expect it to. With the clue that Matt had opened a barbershop somewhere in the Bronx, it was a simple matter to find him. I remembered he had sold for a barber supply company in New York. That led me to Metro Barber Shop Supplies who had a barbershop account under the name of Gordons Barber Shop on Wentworth Street in the Bronx.

  Matt had often talked about a barbershop of his own. How he hated selling! What battles they had about it! Rose screaming that a salesman was at least a dignified occupation, but she would never have a barber for a husband. And oh, wouldn’t Margaret Phinney snicker at the “barber’s wife.” And what about Lois Meiner whose husband was a claims examiner for the Alarm Casualty Company? Wouldn’t she stick her nose up in the air!

  During the years he worked as a salesman, hating every day of it (especially after he saw the movie version of Death of a Salesman) Matt dreamed that he would someday become his own boss. That must have been in his mind in those days when he talked about saving money and gave me my haircuts down in the basement. They were good haircuts too, he boasted, a lot better than I’d get in that cheap barbershop on Scales Avenue. When he walked out on Rose, he walked out on selling too, and I admired him for that.

  I was excited at the thought of seeing him. Memories were warm ones. Matt had been willing to take me as I was. Before Norma: the arguments that weren’t about money or impressing the neighbors were about me—that I should be let alone instead of being pushed to do what other kids did. And after Norma: that I had a right to a life of my own even though I wasn’t like other children. Always defending me. I couldn’t wait to see the expression on his face. He was someone I’d be able to share this with.

  Wentworth Street was a rundown section of the Bronx. Most of the stores on the street had “For Rent” signs in the windows, and others were closed for the day. But halfway down the block from the bus stop there was a barber pole reflecting a candy cane of light from the window.

  The shop was empty except for the barber reading a magazine in the chair nearest the window. When he looked up at me, I recognized Matt—stocky, red-cheeked, a lot older and nearly bald with a fringe of gray hair bordering the sides of his head—but still Matt. Seeing me at the door, he tossed the magazine aside.

  “No waiting. You’re next.”

  I hesitated, and he misunderstood. “Usually not open at this hour, mister. Had an appointment with one of my regulars, but he didn’t show. Just about to close. Lucky for you I sat down to rest my feet. Best haircut and shave in the Bronx.”

  As I let myself be drawn into the shop, he bustled around, pulling out scissors and combs and a fresh neckcloth.

  “Everything sanitary, as you can see, which is more than I can say for most barbershops in this neighborhood. Haircut and shave?”

  I eased myself into the chair. Incredible that he didn’t recognize me when I knew him so plainly. I had to remind myself that he had not seen me in more than fifteen years, and that my appearance had changed even more in the past months. He studied me in the mirror now that he had me covered with the striped neckcloth, and I saw a frown of faint recognition.

  “The works,” I said, nodding at the union-shop price list, “haircut, shave, shampoo, sun-tan . . .”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “I’ve got to meet someone I haven’t seen in a long time,” I assured him, “and I want to look my best.”

  It was a frightening sensation, having him cut my hair again. Later, as he stropped the razor against leather the harsh whisper made me cringe. I bent my head under the gentle press of his hand and felt the blade scrape carefully across my neck. I closed my eyes and waited. It was as if I were on the operating table again.

  My neck muscle knotted, and without warning it twitched. The blade nicked me just above the Adam’s apple.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Jesus . . . take it easy. You moved. Hey, I’m awful sorry.”

  He dashed to wet a towel at the sink.

  In the mirror I watched the bright red bubble and the thin line dripping down my throat. Excited and apologizing, he got to it before it reached the neckcloth.

  Watching him move, adroit for such a short, heavy man, I felt guilty at the deception. I wanted to tell him who I was and have him put his arm around my shoulder, so we could talk about the old days. But I waited while he dabbed at the cut with styptic powder.

  He finished shaving me silently, and then brought the sun-tan lamp over to the chair and put cool white pads of cotton soaked in witch hazel over my eyes. There, in the bright red inner darkness I saw what happened the night he took me away from the house for the last time. . . .

  Charlie is asleep in the other room, but he wakens to the sound of his mother shrieking. He has learned to sleep through quarrels—they are an everyday occurrence in his house. But tonight there is something terribly wrong in that hysteria. He shrinks back into the
pillow and listens.

  “I can’t help it! He’s got to go! We’ve got her to think about. I won’t have her come home from school crying every day like this because the children tease her. We can’t destroy her chance for a normal life because of him.”

  “What do you want to do? Turn him out into the street?”

  “Put him away. Send him to the Warren State Home.”

  “Let’s talk it over in the morning.”

  “No. All you do is talk talk, and you don’t do anything. I don’t want him here another day. Now—tonight.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Rose. It’s too late to do anything . . . tonight. You’re shouting so loud everyone will hear you.”

  “I don’t care. He goes out tonight. I can’t stand looking at him any more.”

  “You’re being impossible, Rose. What are you doing?”

  “I warn you. Get him out of here.”

  “Put that knife down.”

  “I’m not going to have her life destroyed.”

  “You’re crazy. Put that knife away.”

  “He’s better off dead. He’ll never be able to live a normal life. He’ll be better off—”

  “You’re out of your mind. For God’s sake, control yourself!”

  “Then take him away from here. Now—tonight.”

  “All right. I’ll take him over to Herman tonight and maybe tomorrow we’ll find out about getting him into the Warren State Home.”

  There is silence. From the darkness I feel the shudder pass over the house, and then Matt’s voice, less panicky than hers. “I know what you’ve gone through with him, and I can’t blame you for being afraid. But you’ve got to control yourself. I’ll take him over to Herman. Will that satisfy you?”

  “That’s all I ask. Your daughter is entitled to a life too.”

  Matt comes into Charlie’s room and dresses his son, and though the boy doesn’t understand what is happening, he is afraid. As they go out the door, she looks away. Perhaps she is trying to convince herself that he has already gone out of her life—that he no longer exists. On the way out, Charlie sees on the kitchen table the long carving knife she cuts roasts with, and he senses vaguely that she wanted to hurt him. She wanted to take something away from him, and give it to Norma.