Found in the Street Page 9

  Now the well-to-do in America were all church-goers, proper looking WASPS, and God was a sandwich-man advertising the Republican party. Filthy business! Only Poland seemed different, where the church was a fighting faction. Such thoughts ran through Ralph’s head in the wee hours when the winter dawn broke dismally and late through the unfamiliar windows.

  “I don’t believe in an afterlife,” Ralph said after some particularly boring remark from Mrs Haskins. “And it’s barbaric to embalm corpses and put ‘em in thick coffins, when they won’t keep anyway and—fire is more sanitary and ashes take up less room.”

  Mrs Haskins told him he was just a bit upset.

  The next jolt had come one night at the Midtown-Parking garage, when two blacks and a third fellow who looked more Hispanic than black, had opened the door of the glass office where Ralph had been standing. One had pointed a gun at him.

  “Open the cash box or you’ll get it! Now!”

  Another had giggled nervously, but they had stood like three statues, each with one sneakered foot forward, concentrated on him, and it wouldn’t have been wise to open the drawer and pull out one of the guns then. Joey had just gone to the mid-point in the wall of the long garage where the toilet was, and the trio must have observed this. Ralph had backed a step toward the desk, where the desk met the wall, and pressed a button with his right hand. The bell was the silent one, which summoned the police.

  “Don’t move!” another of the youths said, jutting his pocket forward as if he had a gun in it.

  “I didn’t move. There’s the cash,” Ralph had said with a nod at the cash register that stood on another table more to the front of the office, and if they all focused on the cash register, or shot it open, Ralph intended to pull a gun on them.

  Then Joey came at a run, the trio looked at him, and Ralph picked up a gun and pushed the safety off. The three fled like lightning out of the office and around to the left, as a police siren sounded.

  That was that. Nothing had happened. The police took Ralph’s story. Joey had seen them too. How did one describe apes? Short curly black hair, all about eighteen maybe. Not even their blue jeans, sneakers and black plastic waist-length jackets provided any useful clue, because their clothing was like a uniform. Their gun might have been phony, Ralph thought, but didn’t bother saying so, because lots of phony-looking guns were real, and vice versa.

  Nothing had really happened, yet that incident seemed more real to Ralph than his mother’s death and absence now. The cops’ arrival—that too—had been real. Ralph had not been praised by anybody, perhaps he didn’t merit praise, but he had done the right thing. The invasion had been real, or at least he realized that it had been real.

  But his mother’s death, no. She was just someone he would not have to write to once or twice a month. He would miss her, though she had so seldom written to him, and her letters had been all alike and boring when she had. The eleven hundred dollars that he had to pay were not a nuisance to him; rather he felt a bit ashamed and heartless when he wrote the check for the nine hundred that remained due, as if he were paying off something, saying farewell to his mother in a cold way.

  Another worrisome thing in his thoughts now was the girl Elsie and to a lesser extent the young man John M. Sutherland, whom Ralph had thought so highly of just a few months ago. Elsie might already have sunk to the depths, probably had, but she was rescuable, because of her youth. He only hoped that she did not become pregnant, and did not contract some awful venereal disease like syphilis (said to be curable, Ralph knew) or herpes which was incurable, Ralph thought, or the latest called AIDS, which homosexuals could pass on to normal people. These days everything was mixed, homosexuals often had wives, few people seemed to love anybody or stay with any one person. Take John Sutherland. Ralph was not sure about his promiscuity, but he had a flashy and egocentric look, in Ralph’s opinion. He had not replied to Ralph’s letter—though Ralph realized after he had dropped the letter into Sutherland’s box that he had not written his address on the back—and Sutherland had purposely ignored him when Ralph had tried to get his attention on the street. Ralph had taken pains with his letter, and the letter had been courteous. If Mr Sutherland were not up to something with Elsie, why hadn’t he said as much, been willing to speak with him on the street? Or he could have opened the telephone book and found his name and communicated somehow, but he hadn’t.

  These matters of Elsie’s and of John Sutherland’s welfare presented problems of differing sizes, Elsie’s being by far the larger, Sutherland’s like a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, as the good book said somewhere. Elsie he had seen twice in the past three weeks, though even glimpsing her had been difficult. She was still working at the coffee shop down on Seventh Avenue, though her hours seemed to change all the time. Not only that, but she could duck back in the kitchen when she saw him come in, or she would ask another girl to serve him coffee or whatever. Oh, knock it off! she had said with a frown the first of the two times he had spoken to her, and she had avoided serving him then. Ralph had noticed the two other girl waitresses exchanging smiles, and he wondered if they knew more than he did about Elsie’s nocturnal or anytime activities? The second time, when he had repeatedly and softly called her name, trying to get her to pause for half a minute, she had finally stood in front of him and said across the counter, You mind your own business or I’ll get the cops. This isn’t funny any more. And she had said something else about speaking to the manager who was back in the kitchen (Ralph didn’t believe there was any manager in the kitchen), and seeing that he was not allowed into the shop. That was regrettable. But people who needed guidance, a word of advice, always put up a stonewall resistance. If he’d been preaching Jesus’ footsteps or some such, he could have understood her telling him to get lost, but what he had to offer was commonsense. She was so vulnerable! Ralph felt angry when he thought of her behind that counter at all hours, 5 or 6 p.m. till 2 a.m., or 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., young and pretty, radiating health and innocence. Innocence! Always the magnet for the sexually sick boys and men who ogled her. Ralph had seen the leers by day and by night! He had seen Elsie pause to laugh with some of these characters, seen her flip the wet cloth she wiped the counter with into the faces of these boys and men who would nearly fall off their stools with delight at her attention. All of them trying to make dates with her, and Ralph had no doubt she did make a few dates. If she finished work at 2 a.m., it was easy to imagine her going for a drink somewhere with one of the toughs, who would want to walk her home. And then? Ralph had discovered where she lived, on Minetta Street, and had seen the girl with whom she lived. Ralph had seen Elsie and another girl coming out of the supermarket on Sixth Avenue one Saturday when he hadn’t been working, and he had followed them to the Minetta Street house. The other girl looked about twenty-five, was taller than Elsie, had dark reddish hair and her garb made her look like something out of a Turkish harem, billowy pink pants tied in at the ankles by chains, golden pointed slippers—in October—and the general look of a whore. Maybe the longhaired young woman ran a call-girl business on Minetta Street, and Elsie picked up extra money as one of her girls. Ralph recalled seeing a horrid green on the harem girl’s eyelids, or had it been purple? Perhaps left over from the night before. Anyway, she had looked unwashed, and Ralph couldn’t have cared less about her. Elsie was different, had been different that Saturday, bouncing along in her white tennis shoes, even though both her arms had been full of grocery bags, engrossed in conversation with the Turkish-harem girl. Ralph had thought Elsie might hand the girl the sacks and say good-bye at the door, but Elsie had gone into the house with the girl and with the air of living there. Before this, Elsie had lived on King Street, he knew from having followed her a couple of times, and then somewhere on Eighth Street for a couple of weeks, at someone else’s apartment, of course. A man’s or a woman’s apartment on Eighth Street? Ralph had never learned. How could a young girl have any sense of home, respectability, security, hopping around l
ike that?

  To cap all this negativity, this long season of wrongness, Ralph discovered that someone had scooped him on one of his inventions. This was a cheap and simple way to take salt out of sea water. There was a diagram in the Times, much as Ralph had drawn his own four or maybe six years ago in his notebook. An inlet of warm salt water, yes, indeed, from near the surface, this passing through a heat chamber which converted it to steam, the vacuum which Ralph had thought of, of course, to decrease air pressure and make the water come to a steam point sooner. Of course, it required a generator and a turbine, which Ralph had included also, and these were in the drawing in the newspaper. Ralph’s own drawing and notes were in one of his unruled, blank-page notebooks on a shelf above his table. He could have found the sketch easily, if he guessed the year. Ralph didn’t bother. His fault, of course, for not making a little model, however faulty, and sending it into the patent office in Washington. How many times had this happened? Five, six? Ralph didn’t care to reckon. It would only have made him angrier.

  He had some white paint in the house and he bought more, enamel paint. On his two free days in the middle of the week, he repainted both his bookcases, and dusted his books and notebooks and old magazines, and while waiting for the paint to dry, cleared out his upper shelves in the kitchen and washed them, and was about to repaint them completely, too, but did only the outside. These shelves were fixed to the wall. He must still have looked rather grim, because Johnny at the grocery store said when he walked in: “Don’t give me no lectures this afternoon, Mr Linderman. I ain’t in the mood. And I been good, I swear!” Laughing, Johnny made the sign of the cross on his breast. “No foolin’ around with girls, I swear!”

  “Who said anything about a lecture, Johnny?” Ralph replied, trying hard to smile too.

  “Ah jus’ believes in God. God!” Johnny laughed again, leaning over the counter, watching the dog strain at the leash and wag his tail.

  10

  “Well, we did sit through it,” Natalia said as they came out of the Waverly Theater 2 at close to midnight.

  “Yep. Bad idea of mine,” Jack said. “Sorry.”

  “At least there was some action in the last ten minutes.—I was so bored with that woman, the wife! You can’t care about the story if the main character’s a weak fish. D’you think?”

  “What story, in fact?”

  They were strolling toward home. They had just seen a German film, touted to be good, whose story was about two women who developed “a sustaining friendship”.

  “You notice that the husbands were all dimwits?” Jack asked. “Just backdrops labeled ‘husbands’?”

  “That was deliberate. Gad, all this crap about the sex war—or rivalry. It’s so old hat.” She was walking tensely, glancing at him as she talked, looking away.

  “Want a nightcap somewhere?—Big evening!” Jack laughed. Susanne had their little one in charge at her family’s apartment on Riverside Drive tonight, so they didn’t have to rush home.

  “Dunno,” said Natalia, as if she were thinking about something else. “Let’s just walk a little.”

  A couple of minutes later, Natalia said with the frown with which she often proposed something cheerful, “Let’s go in here. Have a drink or something.”

  She had stopped at a depression in the sidewalk. Steps led down, disco music throbbed. They went in. Jack read BIRD’S NEST in green letters on black above the curtained door. The place was small, darkish, and rather full of people. A purple light pulsed off and on, and during its off second the place was totally dark.

  “Sit?” Natalia shouted. “Let’s stand up!” She headed for the bar to the left. She wanted a Ballantine’s.

  Jack yelled her order. “And a beer! Bud!”

  The dancing was lively. Young people in blue jeans, a black couple, a pair of gay boys, two figures dancing on their own, and two or three swingers who were not so young. A redheaded girl in tight white trousers was blowing her energy like a bomb. The red hair was Afro-style, big as a pillow.

  “Dance?” Jack asked Natalia.

  “In a minute.” She sipped her drink.

  “You picked a good place!”

  “Didn’t I?—Look at that!” Natalia crumpled with laughter, and pointed toward the door.

  A young man was being ousted in classic manner, the bouncer having grabbed the seat of his pants in a way that looked as if it hurt, while his other hand gripped the back of the fellow’s sweater. Hard to throw a fellow up the stairs, Jack thought.

  “That redhead—” Natalia leaned toward Jack, though she watched the dancers. “What do you think she’s high on?—She’s a very good dancer.”

  The girl was dancing with a slender boy who was a good dancer himself and looked Puerto Rican. Some of the crowd was watching them, clapping in time with the music. Something about the girl’s profile reminded Jack of Elsie, though she spun so fast, he couldn’t really see her.

  “Go, boy!” someone yelled.

  A male dancer fell, rolled into a couple of chairs and nearly upset a table, and did upset a couple of drinks.

  Wau-wau-wau…The electronic music meted out its beat, and like the film they had just seen, showed no sign of ending, and had no discernible direction. Natalia succumbed to it, and they moved onto a clear place on the floor. Natalia still wore her top-coat. It didn’t matter. Jack leapt straight up several times, because it felt good. The redheaded girl was swinging her head from side to side as she danced, hard enough to break her neck, it seemed to Jack. Suddenly, when she was just four feet away from him, he saw that she was Elsie with a crazy wig on. Elsie’s blue eyes spotted him, she nodded quickly and her parted lips spread.

  The music grew fainter. That particular number was over, though the beat, like a heart machine that couldn’t stop or even slow down, kept on and on.

  Elsie was stopping. She walked off on high heels, smiling, with one arm casually around the waist of the dark-haired boy who tried to kiss Elsie’s lips and made it to her cheek. Elsie whipped off her wig as she moved out of the dance floor’s lights into the shadows of the tables by the walls.

  “She’s a blonde,” Natalia said, gazing at Elsie. “Cute as can be!”

  “Isn’t she?” Jack found his heart beating hard, not entirely from dancing. Funny. Elsie just might come over and say hello, he thought. That would be like her. Maybe it would be like her, he wasn’t sure. In that case, he would tell Natalia that he had met the girl in a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue. Jack realized that he didn’t want to tell Natalia, now in all this noise, that Elsie had been up to their apartment.

  Their drinks were standing where they had left them.

  Jack wondered if the Latin-type fellow were Elsie’s latest heartthrob? Small wonder old Linderman had his worries!

  “What’re you smiling at?” Natalia asked.

  “That girl,” Jack replied, as the music boomed up again. “She works at a hamburger place down on Seventh. I’ve seen her before.” He had to shout.

  Natalia nodded, then stepped closer to Jack and the bar counter. “Hamburger place!—She’s a show-stopper!”

  Jack said nothing. He saw one black fellow at the table where Elsie sat, and one girl who had long dark hair, unless that was a wig also.

  “Shall we push off? Or do you want another beer?” Natalia asked.

  They left.

  That same week, on Friday evening, Jack and Natalia were invited to the Armstrongs’ for dinner. Jack liked the Armstrong house, a long semi-basement apartment with a garden in back in which Max and Elaine grew vegetables, if they felt like it. The garden had rosebushes, and a couple of apple trees, and a terrace of modest size where the Armstrongs could do barbecues. The house—it merited the name—looked as if it had been lived in for decades instead of the three or four years the Armstrongs had been here. The sofa was sagging a little, so were the armchairs. Max and Elaine had bought most of their stuff second-hand.