Last Bender

4.1

Saturdays are slow unless it rains, and there are different regulars. A lot of weekend warriors of course. Fathers dragging their teenaged children down the Negro streets at dawn. A guy with grey hair and a look of pained happiness came in with two daughters, young teens, or, more execrably, tweens. As they adjusted to the light he said, “When I lived here this was a grocery.” Yeah. But what he wanted to say was, I once bought heroin in this place. “I can’t believe how much it’s changed.” They were comfortably dressed, he in durable earth-toned cottons, a loose fitting suit jacket and no tie. The girls both wore jeans. One had on a black, and the other a cranberry T-shirt, each with the logo of their corporate sponsor displayed in bubble letters.

“One thing I really miss is no one defecates on the street anymore,” I said.

It took a second, but the light filled his eyes and he began to laugh; alas, too late, he had lost his girls and they were starting to melt down. Their eyes bulged out and they began to twist around on themselves like two sticks of licorice.

“So girls, I’m just going to poke around a bit. I won’t be long.”

I could watch the girls wait while he poked around. Or I could read, or stare out the window and watch the legs and bags go by. It matters what a person does at work, and I am in the ironic position of being my own boss. I must constantly remind my recalcitrant, lazy, resentful, obdurate donkey of an employee not to slouch or read on the job, not to curse at people who offend or bore him, not to allow spiteful invective to flow out under his breath, to be on time, to show up when scheduled. I am my own lawgiver. It is a form of personal anarchy and yet, in the full spawn of freedom, I have never been more vigilant. Probably it is the old psychoanalytic self-loathing that suggests that one’s subjugation of one’s rebel self is born of resentment, because this churl won’t follow the very rules of behaviour you have laid out for yourself, and which you don’t like in the least. And so the others will suffer, or in the case of the self-employed, the hearings all take place in one chamber, and the man who acts them out is a psychopath.

The older of the girls was in a mooselike phase. I pitied her. How could I not? At her age–I refuse to recall it. And I have quite a few teenage customers to remind me of what it was to have young skin, and to inhabit it so completely you imagine no one else realizes what it is like to be alive. And there are the books they read instead of sleeping.

It is one of the gratifying aspects of selling old books that the few people who actually give a damn always seem to find you, and it can start in junior high school. When I first opened there were a couple of harmlessly alienated nutcases, one of each sex and gender, who crept in the front door at around the age of 12 or 13, and went to hide separately in the back, in one of the alcoves, reading on the floor every day after school. It took years for them to even look at me. Now they’re in their twenties. That makes them my first graduating class.

I always have a few young regulars, usually the children of aging hipsters. I have allowed Flarfists to give readings, and a group of earnest anarchists to use the store for what I suppose you could call workshops, or symposia of two, three if they’re lucky, and during the winter my employee is happy to close up early and leave the space to them. They’re non-leader, Saul King, first started hanging out when he was a junior in high school. He went away for college but returned to his parents’ duplex loft space on Duane Street. Now he and his comrades make the trip in from Williamsburg to hang out in their spawning ground.

I first encountered the adolescent book loner, plaid skirt and all, at a place I worked in briefly on Madison Avenue. She was about the only thing I could stand about the place, and I never learned her name or exchanged two words with her. The store was a father and son operation. Both men smelled bad and were mean spirited and contemptibly stupid. It was an untenable situation from the start, but I couldn’t just quit on my first day, even when it became apparent that the old man was a lunatic, and losing his mind as well. At least it so appeared to me then, when I could easily recall the titles of things, and the names. In any event, the charges against him stand. He was so cheap, he washed his hands in Comet.

Things in a small business are different than in a conglomerate. And working on the floor in retail was a lot different than shipping and receiving. I just thought it was OK to read when there was nothing to do. I didn’t realize, as any sane person would have, that there is never nothing to do as far as the boss is concerned when the boss owns the store.

“Leeshin! Boy! Putsch down shat book,” the old man croaked, lishping through hish beard. “Jewemey! Look at him, the boy, heesh schreading!”

“Dad! I’ll handle it, O.K.?” When Jeremy spoke to him, he did so with a brutish stretching of the neck, and in a near growl. Everything the old man said irritated him. His face twitched and he would hunch into his shoulders until the old man stopped speaking.

The old man wore a thick tweed jacket with wide lapels that didn’t quite fall flat on his chest, and big ties. Jeremy was off the rack, but he wore a suit the way a guy who has to wear one wears one. It was his dour expression, and the skin thick from heavy shaving that made everything he did in relation to the old man more thuggish. Otherwise he was mannered if rudimentary, capable anyway of conversation much of the time, which is more than I can say of his father. So it is understandable that in confrontations with his father, the civility conferred upon him by his suit deserted him utterly, and he barked back at the old man.

“He doesn’t mean it,” Jeremy said to me. “But it’s not something we do, read when it’s slow. Go straighten up a shelf or something, put the cookbooks in order.” As I walked away I heard him hiss, “Dad! He worked at Gaylords.”

Gaylords was a fucked up place but in the end, it wasn’t Leonard’s or Norman’s money. There wasn’t a single person in that entire hive who didn’t have a boss. Everyone was operating, or hanging out, or whatever. Top to bottom. But these guys, they had no boss. It was all theirs, every penny of it. They owned all the debt. All they could see was how much money they were losing. Even when they made money, it seemed like they were losing it. Working there was like being trapped in a sauna with two nasty men you don’t know, and who won’t shut up.

It was total folly that brought me to McGans (McGans was the name of the store; the old man and Jeremy were named Klingonstein. I always referred to them as those Klingons. Those Klingons are driving me crazy. I can’t stand it!). I had met Simon in the park to go oak galling. This was our third such excursion, and the weather was much colder than the other days, and less productive of the once abundant oak gall. Thanks to our, or rather, Simon’s thorough cognizance of the oak groves of Central Park, we had taken all that there were to take, always leaving a few behind, so that the wasps might continue to breed.

I was beginning to really enjoy unemployment. Sally and I could luxuriate late in bed if she didn’t have a morning class, and I loved going out gathering things with Simon for the evolving project of turning his apartment into a Renaissance Pagan temple. What had begun as a fortuitous accident had become a regular outing. He was starting to gather the stuff he would use to make pigments, size, gesso, plasters, and glues. The oak galls were crucial to his purpose. And afterwards we were looking for a place to get coffee and eat and walked by the store. There was a crudely lettered sign in the door:

WANted EXPeRIeNCed FlOOR CleRK

“That must be you,” Simon said, checking out the storefront.

“No, I think that would be you.” We stopped walking.

Simon examined the window with a professional eye. “I have a job.”

“I was hoping it might take a little longer.” I looked at the name of the store, spelled out in white metal letters above the door, McGans. “Sounds like a bar.”

“Let’s check it out.” We walked in. It looked all right, bestsellers, four or five shelves of poetry. There was a cash register in the middle of the store, six feet behind the doors. Jeremy was there. In back by the literature sat the old man at a little table reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of diner coffee. He was saying, “Jewemy, szhey put schicowy in here and szhey burnzsa coffee.” Jeremy didn’t even turn to look at him. I should have known right then that it was a show in its last season.

I don’t think I even asked myself if I could work there. All I asked was, can I not take a job? “What the fuck,” I thought. I looked up. Simon was by the cookbooks in back and Jeremy had left the register to go straighten books, between him and me. The old man put down the coffee and said to me, “Can I help you?” His eyes swam around in their sockets like tetras in the dark. He had this rank growth of salt and pepper beard and damp lips.

“The sign,” I said. “In the window?”

He looked at me critically and said, “You’re inteweschted in a job?”

“Yes.”

“Well, go fill out sze appwicaschin. Jewemy!” he said.

Jeremy, who had been squatting, stood and said, “Not now dad!”

“Zschisch boy, he wantsch a job.”

Jeremy put himself together, brushed off his suit and looked at Simon, who had taken down the latest Joy of Cooking and was chuckling quietly as he leafed through it. Jeremy cleared his throat and said, “Applications are in the drawer.”

I followed the old man to the register. He lifted the counter and pulled open the door and quickly sat on the high stool. He handed me the application and said, “What kind of exschpewiensche do you have?”

“Five years, at Gaylords.”

“Oh?” he smiled at me. “Whatsche your name?”

“Alex, Alex Ploomis.”

“Oh, like a plumbah? Ha ha.”

I handed him the application. He read it over and looked at me. “When can you schtawt?”

“What’s the pay?”

“What we’re zshey paying you at Gaywordsch?”

“$4.10.”

“I’m a schmawl bizsnizs. I can’t compete wit dat! Zshey buy at a dischcount! Give me zschat dischcount and I’ll make money too. Itsch money! I can give you fweescheventschie five.”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t take that. Simon.” He turned around and raised his finger. “Let’s go. Thank you.”

Jeremy chimed in. “Dad!”

“Awight, now look boy, whatsch your name, Aweksche, da Pwummah. Wike Wichawd Nixszin.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ll schtawt you at fweescheventschie five and aftew a month I’ll give you a waise to four.”

“I guess. I’ll have to think about it. Can I call you?”

“Szchink about it!”

Jeremy trotted over to us and said, “Just give me a call tomorrow. We’ll talk.” He nodded his head in such a way that I was to know that we two could strike a deal. O.K.

Out on the street the wind had picked up and the air had gotten cold and raw. Simon lifted the lapels of his long black cashmere coat, and I did the same with mine. He said, “That guy was following me around the store.”

“He wasn’t, was he? He just went to straighten those books.”

“Then why didn’t he want to stop when that crazy old man started talking to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.”

“Oh, I’m right.”

Weeks earlier I had quit Gaylords, on a bizarrely sunny, 60 degree day in January. Everyone was outside walking around, half of them in winter gear, which they were discarding into pockets and unzipping. There were cyclists and runners in shorts. I flew from the building, ebullient to be free finally of this thing that I had hated for years and years. Suddenly all the fear was gone. I had Sally. It was a spring-like day. I headed downtown without a thought in my head. I read the Times in DeRoberti’s, and sipped a double espresso, admiring the subway tiles and booths, half eavesdropping on the banter between the old lady behind the counter, with short white hair, pink lipstick and a pack of Marlboro 100s in her hand (she always had one going), and the baker and the baker’s son, and the neighborhood men. I worked the crossword. An old man in need of a shave, with a flat face, wearing a wool herringbone cap and thick, black-framed glasses, stood in front of a case of pastries. In his left hand was the slightly crushed end of an unlit cigar, which he held right in front of a tray of breasts de la casa, the tit cookie. A white dome surmounted by a strawberry, as in Herrick’s poem:

Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast:

 

Have ye beheld (with much delight)

A red-Rose peeping through a white?

Or else a Cherrie (double grac’t)

Within a Lillie? Center plac’t?

Or ever marked the pretty beam,

A Strawberry shewes halfe drown’d in Creame?

Or seen rich Rubies blushing through

A pure smooth Pearle, and orient too?

So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neate Niplet of her breast.

 

I wandered down First to Houston, crossed against a half dozen lanes of oncoming traffic and went into the pet store to look at the fish and the snakes.

The owner held forth from behind a mighty old cash register, crammed in at the rear of the store. He looked like he might have had a biker past but it was long ago. He had a round head and a huge belly, which kept him at arm’s-length from the register. He wore tinted glasses and had a beard and a bald spot on top. His wife, a short, wide blond with a bent nose, did most of the bustling, and the talking too. The only thing he talked to was the makaw, whom he called Ichneumon.

The shelves in that part of the store went to the ceiling and were packed with aquariums and cages that rose up the black walls till they vanished in the dark. To reach the top they had ladders attached to rails. All behind him were little nets and cage toys and powders, drops, dissolving bricks of food and minerals. It was like the back pages of a comic book. On the counter there were novelty tanks and key chains and a few brightly coloured betas fanning themselves and pulsing in tiny glass bowls.

In the other room the tanks bubbled, gurgled and buzzed to the intermittent squawk of the macaw. I watched black mollies and angelfish and shimmering shoals of neon guppies. There was a 200-gallon salt-water tank with grimy coral and sponges, a lethargic angelfish and a cobalt lobster that looked so cool I thought of nothing else for weeks. The turtles lived in shallow tanks on the floor. A turtle in a tank is a beleaguered looking thing. They know what is happening to them, while the bronze and copper snakes, safe in their Cycladic beauty, are too regal to care.

From there it wasn’t far to Simon’s, past Russ and Daughters, where my father took us on Sunday mornings. Every other Sunday we rode the local down from Grand Central and stood on line for smoked fish. Then we’d go next door for cream cheese at the dairy and after that to the bagel bakery. Beyond this was Katz’s, the last outpost, where I called Simon. A lot of timeservers were gathered there and the old men behind the meat looked worn out, their eyes bloodshot with fatigue and worry. The pastrami had so much fat and gristle on it, what you spit out was enough to feed a small dog.

Ludlow south of Houston was hard and mean looking. It was difficult to know where to walk. Junkies lined up outside of rubble-strewn vestibules. There was garbage on the sidewalks and strewn out in the street, bags of food and nameless stupid trash, rotting, and drifting and blowing across the asphalt and concrete. There were always rats, day or night, but night was worse. The only people I saw didn’t want to be seen. There was just fear, and filth, and broken glass. Well, what did I care? It was daytime, and the sun shone down on Ludlow Street as bright as any other. His window was open. The curtains waved in and out like flags.

“Simon,” I yelled up. “Simon!”

He stuck his head out of the third floor window and scrutinized me between the bars of the fire escape before tossing down the sock with the key in it. The building was dim and crooked. There was an old mildew smell in the entrance, beneath the strong stench of piss. The steps sank and creaked going up. The walls were covered in layers of graffiti, except where the plaster was broken. On the second floor there was an apartment that smelled so strongly of cats the scent had permeated the walls from within and was now emanating into the hall. None of this prepared me for the foul and unfamiliar odor that greeted me at the door to his apartment. I banged on it and he undid the locks and let me in. Behind him, Albert Ayler was playing Summertime loudly through a paint-covered boom box set up on a Formica table next to an enormous white cooler.

He stood in the galley kitchen to the left, in a pair of grey shorts, a kettle of boiling water in one hand and a dripping wooden spoon in the other. The air was thick and steamy, and it felt like dissolved cartilage. On the stove were two giant stockpots full of boiling liquid. A brown scum was forming on top while gelatinous noodle-like things churned about in the milky broth. Coming from the cooler was a strong shit smell. There was smoke in the air. A half a joint smoldered in an ashtray on the kitchen counter, by the mug and tea bag he was getting ready to pour hot water on. He said, between a few abrupt bursts of laughter, “Tea?”

“What the fuck is that smell?”

“It’s shit man.” He laughed some more. “You caught me! I bet you wish I hadn’t thrown down that key. I’m trying to make white paint. It’s for the temple. I got this recipe from Cennini and went out trying to buy all the stuff I needed. I didn’t think I could do it but you can find absolutely anything in this city. I found these terracotta teapots on Canal and they’re just perfect, cause they’ve got this well–” he was trying to show me with his fingers, “where the tea goes, but I just coil up this, I put a coil of lead wire–” He looked around, found a spool and handed it to me, “so it’s above but not touching a well of vinegar. The fumes have to saturate the coil, right? Then I pack it in fresh horse dung in that cooler.” He pointed his long finger at the cooler, as if to accuse it.

“Can you go out and buy fresh horse shit?”

“No man, I go to the park and collect it. There’s a seed mat in there to keep it warm. The shit has to ferment, and the gases and heat work on the coil. When it’s done cooking, I should have pure white lead crystals that I can grind and make into paint.”

“Yeah? And what’s cooking in those pots?”

“Size,” he sighed, “for tempering gessoes for panels. You soak and boil the necks of goat and sheep parchment. They aren’t literally necks, that’s just what you call the trim from cutting sheets out of animal skins. There’s this old Italian guy out in Queens, Howard Beach, who makes parchment, and rabbit glue, and fish glue. You should smell his place. He used to live on Macdougal Street, but they kicked him out. The man had to go to Queens just to make a living! The first time I saw him he was making fish glue in pots on a stove just like this one. He wasn’t expecting a black man, I can tell you that. You should have seen the look on his face, like I was there to rob him. So I quoted a little of the Vita Nuova in Italian and that set things right. He’s cool, but the skins are creepy. He’s got them hanging up all over the place. Once I went there and there was a goat hanging by the hind legs over the bathtub. He said his niece had just had a baby. But I can’t complain, he sells me a couple of garbage bags of necks and gives me pointers on how to boil them down. So what brings you here? Did you finally quit?”

“Yeah I quit.”

“Thank god. You were the last one left. Emma’s gone, Tammy’s gone, Danny’s gone, all the guys that were there when you started, that whole crew is gone.”

“So you’re up and about early.”

“Haven’t been to sleep yet.”

“I can’t stay in here in this stink.”

He walked over to the pot, sniffed the steam, and stuck the spoon in, turning the pale slithery pieces of skin around in the water, examining them as they passed by. “Well, you wanna go up to the park with me then?”

“I am not going with you if you’re going out collecting fresh horse shit.”

“I walk when I get shit! I don’t get on the train.” I looked at him. “Today I’m after oak galls. It’s dangerous work. Illegal.”

“Can you explain on the way?”

“I don’t need a coat?” he asked. I followed him out of the kitchen and into the living room. Bookshelves covered the walls and there were books open on the table, a beautiful hardbound Paracelsus, the Dover Il Libro dell’Arte, by Cennino d’Andrea Cennini and a beat-up selected Browning, between the caterwauling boom box and the festering cooler of crap. Against the walls, on the floor, were buckets and brushes and trowels and sacks of lime, gypsum and sand. The books had been cleared off the shelves on the left-handed wall and he had chipped plaster away from the lath in one area, exposing it like a surgical wound.

There were two rooms off of the living room, both overlooking Ludlow Street. The one to the right was his bedroom, to the left his studio. He went into his bedroom.

“You need more than a T-shirt.”

He came out in a yellow tank top and short shorts. “This is like, too hopeful?”

“You’ll be cold.”

He looked disappointed and retired back to the bedroom, emerging moments later in black jeans, black T-shirt and a denim jacket. On his shoulder was an old canvas mailbag.

It was too late to walk if we were going to get anything done so we took the F to West 4th and changed for the AA. We got out at the Museum of Natural History and headed into the park. He knew where all the oak trees were, even in winter. We walked north. Pretty soon there weren’t many people other than the occasional borderline case wandering the woods. The trees were bare and the paths and lawns were covered in leaves. There was an atmosphere of ruin and neglect, cracked concrete and overgrown shrubs and trees.

At an intersection of three walkways was a stand of tall oaks. “See? Like this one here,” he said, pointing to a coarse, nearly spheroid eruption in the bark of the tree. It did indeed suggest a gall. Whoever named the thing saw from the tree’s point of view and not the wasp’s, or he would have called it a womb. He took out a small saw, cut it off and placed it in the bag. We came to another tree that was covered in them. “Oh yes!” Pausing between each excision to check for people, he began rapidly removing all of the oak galls. “So just keep a look out. Tell me if you see anyone coming.”

“Where did you go last night?”

“Work. It was fabulous, unbelievable. I worked with these two guys, Ronnie and Blake, and we were listening to the Staple Singers from like midnight, till like six in the morning, and we put together these outrageous windows, with lighting. You wouldn’t believe the handbags. The colors! Then we went to Orchidia for breakfast and then I came home and didn’t want to sleep, so I started to boil those parchments. Not working Gaylords is great. So what finally did you in? What happened? Why’d you quit? Or did they fire you?”

“I was in a terrible mood when I got there. It was bright out, and Sally and I had a sort of argument about where we were going to stay, and then Roy called, you know, first time in a year, just out of the blue. And even though it was cold, you just knew it was going to be a nice day. I mean, January? This is like end of the world weather. I keep pinching myself. So it was in the air, something was going to set it off and then it would be over. So I go in there and first thing it’s Leonard going on and on and on about you. ‘Did you see what he did?’ ‘What are you talking about what did he do,’ I say. Because, you know, I told Norman what I saw the day you quit. So now Leonard’s coming after me. Then he tells me that you were yelling at him, as if I hadn’t been there, right? I just looked at him and said, ‘I don’t see how you can say that. He wasn’t yelling at all, just trying to defend himself against your stupidity.’ So he snarls at me, and you know, it’s hard not to laugh, and I did. I laughed at him. He looked so absurd snarling through that beard–”

“–and those square glasses!”

“That’s right, the square glasses. So I know he’s pissed off now and he leaves and I try to forget about it but then Norman comes in. I hadn’t talked to him much since the day of the fight, when I told him what had happened, assuming they’d fire Leonard since he shoved you first.”

“And I didn’t hit him.”

“Right. So, Norman sits me down in his office and asks what happened just then. I told him and I said it happened because they were wrong to fire you instead of Leonard. Then Norman says, ‘That was weeks ago.’ ‘And everyone’s still creeping around on all fours looking behind them!’ ‘Well you know Simon can be pretty scary.’ I said, ‘You mean because he’s tall?’ and he says, ‘No, it’s his look. He gets a dangerous look in his eye. Leonard felt threatened.’ I said, ‘Then how do you think Simon felt when they were saying all that stuff I told you about in the storeroom.’ ‘Well, that’s not how Leonard saw it and there weren’t any witnesses. It’s Simon’s word against Leonard’s.’ So, I’m like, ‘I’m not a witness?’ He gave me this look then, scoffing. So. Then it was like, ‘If you’re not happy here.’ And I’m like, ‘Happy? Is anyone in this place happy?’ It was one of those days when you can’t pretend anymore. The guy said the magic words and I went off on him. I told him he should fire Leonard and give you his job.”

“No thank you.”

“Well, so I told him to go fuck himself. I walked out of there. Ever since you left it was just hell. Unbearable. Paranoid. Like the Kremlin. And self-important. I mean, this stupid little world of theirs, it’s like fuck.”

“Well now you do sound happy.”

“It’s only been a few hours.”

“Look.” He was sweating and the sawing had deposited a film of sawdust on his forehead, which he wiped off with his hand. I looked in the canvas sack and there were just tons of them. He shook it merrily. “Let’s not tempt fate. These are enough.” The sun was low in the sky and a cool breeze started to blow. Clouds were drifting in. The hills and rocky outcrops caught the late sun and glowed. Gnats, awakened by the warmth swarmed into the light. I was feeling drowsy and a little cold as the shadows darkened in the dips and turns.

“If I keep getting these window jobs and maybe pick up a few shifts at The Empire Diner, I think I can save enough to go to Milan. But I gotta stay there for at least six months–”

“Six months!”

 “–before heading down to Rome. And I can’t go to Italy without seeing Florence and Naples. Oh, and Venice.”

“That’s like, the rest of your life.” The idea of the city without Simon was devastating. Who would I go oak galling with? “What about your apartment?”

He rubbed his face and nodded gravely. “I’d have to sublet it. And I don’t know how far along I’ll be. I’ve got this idea for the big room, I want to make some panels and maybe plaster and fresco the ceiling to look like a dome. I mean, I was thinking about how cave paintings and frescoes are both painted onto lime. And then I remembered the Browning poem, The Bishop Orders His Tomb? So I looked it up and there were the floors and walls, and he says: Nay, boys, ye love me–all of jasper, then! Only, maybe mine will have the 36 decans inscribed, or portraicted there. Everything done small. Panels on the lower walls would each contain panels, and the frescoes above and on the ceiling compressed, with chaplets, boxes with scenes. Tromp l’oile marble and roses trellised against the sky.”

We walked to Rockefeller Center and took the F train downtown. As we pulled into Broadway-Lafayette, Simon said, “You wanna get off here and say hello to Tammy?”

“Sure.” We got out and walked east on Bleeker to her apartment. She was living in a storefront on the north side of Bleeker just east of Elizabeth, with three white Egyptian cats with long legs and triangular heads. When we got there they were strutting back and forth in the window like runway models, beneath a plastic palm tree.

“Hey,” Tammy said. We stepped into the living room. There was a big radiator and against the back wall a futon facing a 9’’ black and white TV and next to it a lamp. There were three cushions, and a lot of lighting equipment. Stacks of coiled cable, booms, lights, clamps, a lighting board. “The truck broke down and we had to put it somewhere.”

The TV was on and she had obviously been lying on the futon reading The Voice and half-watching the 4:30 movie, The Valley of the Dolls. The phone and an ashtray were on the floor next to the bed along with a can of Diet Coke and a pack of Marlboros; it was off the hook, the receiver was lying on her pillow.

“Lemme get off the phone,” Tammy said and mumbled, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up. She stretched and lit a cigarette. She looked like she had just gotten out of bed, or at least, she hadn’t left the house yet, showered, or changed into clothes. Her hair was short all around and some of it stuck up in the back. Her nose was a little flat and her skin was cadaverous. “What do you want? Some coffee or something? I can’t wait till the end, when she staggers down the beach. Doesn’t it make you want to get high?”

“Ever see Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?” Simon asked.

“That’s what Matthew was just talking about, that movie,” she said.

“Matthew from Larchmont Matthew?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Coffee might be good,” Simon said, as if he were gingerly probing reality to determine what is good and what is not.

We walked to the back of the space where the kitchen and bathroom were. It was like a roach nexus. You could tell by the smell before you even walked in the room and saw how dim it was, and dirty. She pulled an aluminum pot off the stove and filled it over a stack of filthy plates and glasses and mugs. It only took a few seconds to see the first one, darting across the top dish. She sat the pot down and lit the stove with her lighter and got the Cafe El Pico out. But she had disturbed the dishes and now the roaches were swarming out of the sink and up the walls. She made a helpless, almost totally muted noise in the back of her throat. “So what are you guys up to? I haven’t seen you around much,” she said to me.

“It’s his girlfriend,” Simon said.

“So I hear,” she said, coquettishly droll. “What’s her name?”

“Sally Babel.” The water boiled and she poured it over the grounds into three mugs. “I quit Gaylords today.”

“Hey that’s great. That place was so gross. I don’t see how you guys took it for so long.”

We sat on the floor by her bed watching the movie and talking. Tammy had left Gaylords just nine months after she had started, to go to Purchase. She had been back in the city for a year doing lighting, fashion shows and a lot of dance.

“So what’s in the bag?” she asked. Simon unzipped it and rolled the oak galls back and forth. “Ew,” she said, laughing. “Gross. What are those, tree cancers?”

“No, no, excrescences formed in response to a wasp’s eggs,” he said. “Oak galls.”

“Oak Galls. I get those. There must be a wasp around here stinging me at night, or laying her eggs in me. Oak Galls. Gaws. Very evocative, that. So what are they for? Is this like a macrobiotic thing?”

“No, it’s to make black ink.”

“That’s so cool.”

After the movie we left, walked down Bowery and across 1^st Street to First Avenue, where the traffic from Houston converged on mobs of moving people. Time pooled around us. It was dark. The air was warm and still, yet just beyond us it seemed to whip and go. “What do you do with those things anyway?”

He shook them. “They’re full of tannic and Gallic acid, so you soak them in water and mix in iron salts which gets pure black ink. But at first it’s clear. Without a dye you can’t see it. It only darkens on the page.”

We said goodnight and I went home. I felt great, but tired, like it had been a complete day already. Yet it was early; normally I would have just gotten home from work. I decided to lie down in the dark for a while. I watched the lights roam the walls and listened to the radiators knock and hiss. I fell into a mindless repose until I was awakened by the phone. It rang for a long time and then it seized me, that it was Roy. I had forgotten. And I had forgotten the argument with Sally. Sally and I had been arguing that morning about where we were going to stay that night. We had, on her insistence, settled upon a rather formal and complicated schedule, which involved an even division of nights between the two sleeping quarters with periodic ‘nights off’, which in theory were to be spent doing as we will. On those occasions when our two separate lives brought us together, (this also in theory, since my separate life was confined to Tammy and Simon, both of whom I met at home mostly) we could opt for bedding down for the night together without it being a violation of the rules. I say all this was in theory because in fact we slept wherever we happened to have had sex and there were few nights that we actually spent alone and even those ended with long seductive phone calls and desperate cab rides. Now, because of her workload at school, and the large number of mice darting across the kitchen floor, she was arguing for a change. I was stuck in the unenviable position of defending a system I neither understood nor cared for, which she attributed to spite and I attributed to an attachment to tradition. But it was not a violent exchange and there was no bitterness in the negotiation, it was just her way of conducting business; the goal was the same in either case. Sex. The exchange of vowels between us implied it and the consonants declared it.

Into this verbal melee came Roy’s call. It had been over a year since anyone had seen him or talked to him. Other than the hints dropped at the party by Lydia we had had no intelligence of his whereabouts. The strictly generic communications between Roy and our mother or the psychiatrist were of the sporadic and uninformative kind he did so miraculously well. And our father he neglected totally. The man, who suffered anyway, suffered most from Roy’s contempt and lack of affection. Roy was generous with practically everyone but him and he knew it. Roy was the only man, outside of politics, he pursued.

Roy wanted to meet me and Sally and Lydia at The Phoenix Park Restaurant, on the Bowery. I told him to hold on and looked at Sally, who was sitting up in bed drinking a mug of coffee and gazing out the window, considering her next point in the dispute. The morning sun was on her face, which was pale and lined from sleep. The sky was bright blue. The glass felt warm. I said, “It’s Roy, he wants to meet for dinner.”

She shook her head slowly and said, “No.”

“It’s been over a year. Lydia is going.”

“Just what I need,” she mumbled and turned away from the window to look at me. “It’s settled then that we’ll stay at the loft?”

“OK,” I said into the phone. “Nine it is.”

“Well you just ignored me!”

I smiled. “Don’t get indignant. We’ll stay at the loft. I’d say that is an even exchange.”

Now it was night and he was calling to pester me about something. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock. 8:30. At least I wouldn’t be late. I let the machine answer his call, which was obscured by street noise and laughter and then phoned Sally. “Alex, I’m running out the door, what?”

“I fell asleep. Can you pick me up on the way down? I’ll meet you on the corner of Second Avenue and 1st Street.”

“Which one?”

“Northwest.”

“O.K. Five minutes.”