Last Bender

9.1

One month later Sally graduated Summa Cum Laud. At first she announced she would not be attending the graduation but would instead have a party at the loft. We were seated in the kitchen out on the Island when Sally said, “I hate crowds and diplomas and honors are bullshit.” Cynthia was seated next to us stirring sugar into a cup of tea. She looked at Sally and said nothing, then she looked out the widow and breathed heavily. Sally said, “What.”

“Have we not had enough grandstanding? When will you kids grow up?”

“It’s my graduation.”

“Is that what you think?” She stood and went to the fridge and took out some milk.

“Hours and hours while they speak, rain or shine. It’s like standing in a herd of buffalo.”

“Excuse me?”

“Buffalo. You know, normal people.”

Her mother nodded as it dawned upon her what she meant. “Oh. Normal people,” she said sarcastically. “Like Lea and Bea.”

Sally looked away with a condescending smile. “I don’t mean them, obviously.”

I said, “He’s been married three times, this is her second and they’re both Communists. Didn’t their journal appear on some list?”

“FBI,” Sally said.

“Exactly,” Cynthia said. “You have no idea who those other people are. And it has nothing to do with them anyway. I hate them too, I just know that they are never they, and they, whoever they are, are there for the same reasons we are. Which makes us not an us and them but a we. A small price to pay for two months in Europe.” She smiled condescendingly back.

Sally smouldered the whole way into town, moving only to check my blind spot if I had to change lanes. Joseph sat glumly in back snoozing and gazing like a dog out the window. We left Maureen and Lydia behind. They were going to take the train into town with Cynthia and Raph once they had figured out a rehab. There was even talk of renting a car and driving her to the airport.

Bubbe and Isaiah couldn’t stay. Bubbe had to get back to her students in Geneva and Isaiah had business in Antwerp and Tel Aviv. They left an envelope for Sally containing ten one hundred dollar bills and a note that said, Pocket change for Europe. Love Bubbe and Pop. But Lea and Bea were anxious to attend, as was Simone. On the day of graduation we ate breakfast together, scrambled eggs and onions, bagels and lox, coffee and cantaloupe and fresh squeezed orange juice.

Sally had her white cap and gown laid out on the bed. She stood in her bra and underwear in the dark staring at it with apprehension and disgust. I put my arms around her from behind and kissed her neck, which smelled like Dr. Bonner’s peppermint soap. Her hair was henna blond and cut to just below her ears. She wore lipstick and mascara and eyeliner and blush. Her nails were painted red but they were still cut close and looked a little weird. She turned around. The black lace bra was rough against my chest. She had shaved her legs and armpits. Her skin in the dark was very pale and sweet smelling. I put my hands into her hair and she said, “Don’t do that. My mom will kill me.”

“It’s just for one day.”

“I hate make believe. It just fills me with disgust. Fulfilling her dreams. I hate it. I’d rather dash them to the ground than serve–” I kissed her lips, first the top one then the bottom. She closed over mine. “They’re all out there waiting to see me.”

“The door is closed. We can be quiet.”

“You won’t grunt?”

“Do I grunt.”

“Like a pig.”

“Like this?” I tried to grunt like a pig.

“No,” she laughed and kissed the side of my head. She broke away from me and put the gown on. It was smooth and a little scratchy. I felt her body beneath the nylon, every bulge of fat, bone and muscle, the connective tissue, the cartilage and tendons, of her ears, her knees, her thighs, her ribs, her breasts, the bumps of her nipples, as if the gown were another skin. She pulled down her underwear and undid my belt, opened the top button and unzipped my pants. Then she sort of fell backwards on the bed and lifted up her knees. I dropped to the floor and went down on her, my cheeks brushing now her thighs and now the gown that covered my head. “No grunting,” I said. She growled low. I undressed and we had a quick intense and silent fuck. I felt nauseous when I lifted off of her. We smelled funky. I rubbed the cum into her clit and lips with my fingers and finished her off that way. We were weak, it was hard to stand.

“Oh, can’t we just lie in bed all afternoon?” she asked.

“Now, now, mama’s orders.”

She groaned a long groan and used the sheet of the unmade bed to wipe herself clean. She put her underwear back on, and I pulled up my pants, and we came out into the bright loft full of family, barefoot. There was a wet spot on the back of the gown but it was near the hem so it wasn’t really noticeable. But it almost made me laugh out loud, and I couldn’t stop looking at it.

“Look at you,” Cynthia said, standing up from the table, which was set with food and dirty plates. The windows were sunny. The buzzer crackled and emitted a short, sharp buzz. Cynthia pushed the talk button and got garrrrgle. “Why can’t they fix a simple thing like this. I’ve been to the board twice now.”

Raph said, “It’s all the noise. They blame us. You saw the sign.”

Joseph and Sally snickered. Sally said, “Yuppies.”

Joseph said, “They actually wrote, ‘We shall overcome’. As if their struggle against noise were somehow equivalent to the civil rights movement!”

“Let no injustice stand,” I said.

Lea got up and said, “As long as one man is in chains I am not free.”

“It’s getting late,” Bea reminded us.

Simone said, “Can you blame them? 200 grand for an apartment. You don’t want your ceilings to shake at 3 am.”

“What’s that got to do with a buzzer?” Cynthia asked. “At the meeting I wasn’t the only one. A working intercom–it’s a matter of security.”

Simone said, “You’ve left the city.”

“And they make snide remarks about absentee owners and their adult children.” Raph said.

“Bea’s right, we’re going to be late,” Cynthia said.

Raph fixed his tie. There was a knock at the door. Sally got it. “Look at you, a vestal virgin,” Christopher said. Sally blushed deeply. Sylvio followed him in. She kissed his cheek. He was beaming. They were all beaming. It was Sally’s day.

“Keeper of the flame,” I said.

“Hestia,” Sally said.

We headed out the door and took two checker cabs up to 114th and Broadway and made our way onto the South Lawn. There were thousands of people milling about, taking pictures. Babies in carriages, women in saris, men in dashikis, Japanese businessmen, American Brahmins and bored teenagers, old people moving slowly dressed in summer clothes, and the graduating class of 1982, bored and nervous and elated to be done, congregating in their places. We found seats but not all together. Christopher, Sylvio and Joseph sat apart high up while I found myself with Simone, Antonia, Powell and Dean. There wasn’t much for us to talk about, so we listened to the less than benign gossip around us and I watched people in the crowd, uncomfortable before it began. The procession started with Pomp and Circumstance. Everyone collaborates in a happy ending. I watched the clouds above and the pigeons flocking in and out of the columns.

When they had first formulated the plan of her going to Europe, she asked if I could go but I didn’t want to. I had no money and was tired of taking it from Roy. And this was at the height of her studies, before the break at Passover. I wanted her to go. I needed to be home for a while, back in the apartment, where there were no rolling ottomans or crowds or crises.

As the date neared and the plans jelled I started to have doubts. There didn’t seem to be any way to sabotage the trip and I became more and more alienated, when I had to have my wisdom teeth out, a procedure which required me to go to Roy and borrow the money, which he then told me was mine to have. I was lying in bed in a Demerol induced stupor when she ran down her preliminary itinerary. She was to meet her mother in Rome for two weeks, and then Christopher in Florence. They would travel together to Paris and London, where she was going to stay for a month, dividing her time between The British Museum and the Lake District.

I had imagined for the summer another interregnum, another idyll. We would see the erhu master at the Asia Society, have cocktails in the elephant room at the Museum of Natural History, watch Seven Samurai at Theatre 80 and Mean Streets at St. Marks; we would duck into the National Book Store for the air conditioning, and go through boxes of mildewy books on Seventh Street, sweating. Then have weekends at the beach. I had it all planned out.

I looked up at Butler Library. That was where I would be working part time through the summer, as a bookshelver. When I thought about that I didn’t care so much that Sally would be away. The columns and steps were so grand but it was a run down monster of a building. The inside smelled and looked like a police precinct house. I went to Eakens’ office on the sixth floor. The shelves were full of books with slips of paper sticking out of the top and old, bumpy bindings the color of an overripe hass avocado. His desk was covered with catalogs and papers. He stood and said, “Ah, Alex. Come on now. Did you hear about the Reagan Library?”

“No.” I hadn’t heard.

“Well, there’s been a fire.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Is that bad?”

“As a matter of fact, no. They saved all ten comic books.” He laughed. “What must it be like waking up each day knowing how many people hate you. But they don’t know, they surround themselves with soothsayers. Nothing has changed in two thousand years. The wheel has simply turned a few times over. So, let’s go to the stacks then before any pesky librarians come along. Librarians are the bureaucrats of the academic world. Without them nothing happens, but the gears move at their own bloody pace. They know where everything is you see.”

We took the elevator down to a different stack level. “These are the stacks, what we’re in now is the stack tower. Books are heavy. When they built this place, it was the tallest stack tower in the world. Now it’s fallen into decrepitude. It’s a disgrace. And we can blame Mr. Reagan and so called men of his ilk who would lobotomize a nation so they can make a few million more than they might otherwise. It is greed pure simple that drives him, put that pious face on it as he does. He’s like a pedigree dog in appearance. And yet Edmund was beloved.”

It was dark and dusty. The metal shelves went on and on as far as I could see, in dim light, with patched plaster and a musty odor. It was like a cave for aging cheeses only these were books, the bindings and the glues slowly turning to vapor.

“A person working here long enough will have inhaled many books by the time he retires.” We walked over to a group of shelves and said, “These are return shelves. The books come up in the elevator and get sorted here. Then they go onto the shelves. This is a book truck.” He pushed a three-shelf, waist-high wooden truck in my direction. “You load this up and put the books on the shelves. If any need repair, bring them in, but they might not fix them unless someone wants it. Then you take it out yourself and return it. If a book circulates, they repair it. That’s us of course. Well, I’ll teach you how to glue bindings and such. Do you think you want the job?”

“You haven’t asked me any questions.”

“Good lord, no I have not. Do you too think Ronald Reagan is an ass?”

“Yes.”

“Then we shall not have any trouble working together. I am not a man to condemn a man because of his political beliefs, and this is not even my country. But let me tell you, there is no country that is not my country when it comes to certain things. And Reagan is is one of them.”

Sally got her party. It was at the loft, much like all the others, only her parents were there, and her grandparents and her aunt and it was catered from Zabar’s. At the end of June we all drove her out to the airport, except for Lydia, who was living in a halfway house in Phoenix. I said goodbye to Sally last, at the security gate, while the family stood back. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying. A paperback of Anna Karenina was crammed into her carry on bag. Her blue backpack, looking like it weighed 80 pounds, lay belly up on the floor. We hugged tight and long. I could feel myself trying to melt but I was still mad at her, I knew it, and I couldn’t let go, even now that she was leaving. It was between us. And now she knew. Before she didn’t. That’s what I found out, melting a moment too late, after she had gone down into the duty free store.

Then I took the bus back to Grand Central alone. Joseph, Raph and Cynthia were heading out to the beach house. I was headed home. In the morning I had to go shelve books, collate journals and repair bindings for two hours. It was peaceful work. I began to understand books as unique objects worthy of preservation, and that their good order is an integral part of this.

The afternoons I spent at Pain et Poisson, where in some hours I made ten dollars in tips. Dorothy put me on as a sub now for the evening counterperson and for brunch, though the morning rush was out. That 6am-1pm shift was the best and the most brutal.

The 1pm-7pm was awful. Dorothy was there to talk to at least, and the regulars. I was far more likely to see Douglas Eakens there than at Butler, where he was a busy librarian. My boss there was a guy in an office I barely ever saw. He signed my time card and said hello and goodbye. It was summer. Not much happened in the summer. It was perfect for learning the call numbers, and how the stacks worked, if you can call it that. It was my first exposure to their notorious conditions, a primitive hoard of books presided over by student shelvers.

At Pain et Poisson there was an overlap shift on busy days, a 5pm-11pm, and that one I liked. I liked evenings. You came on and it was busy enough to have two people, and then the other depressed guy would leave, and he will have done all the side work in the afternoon when it was dead. But, of course, I had to cut for the next shift, the busy morning. There were a few evening regulars, a retarded guy, another guy who was on his way to work somewhere. He slept days. That was his one reliable line. Upon meeting anyone for the first time he would say, “I sleep days,” like that. And Dorothy came in to re-count the drawers.

I must have looked bad. One day she asked, “Have you heard from her yet?” It had been a few days.

“No, it’s only been days,” I laughed.

She was seated on the other side of the counter doing a crossword. “Oh, if Patty saw me sitting here doing the crossword. The thing is she can stand across the street and watch us. I’ve seen her do it. And then I go down and work for her at Park Place and it’s the same thing. Only Park Place is dirty.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t eat there. I don’t like falafel from places like that. When you can smell the basement in the restaurant, you know the animals have taken over.”

“Uhhh…” Dorothy said. “So do you miss her?”

I demurred. “I miss her, yes. I was mad, I wanted her to go, until the second she did. And suddenly all the stuff I was pissed off about didn’t matter. I felt like I was a crazy person. You know? Like I had been possessed and now I wasn’t and she was gone. And the other thing, she didn’t know I was mad until that minute. She hadn’t realized at all before. And everything I did I did because I thought she knew I was mad at her and just didn’t care. Fuck. How could anyone be that dense? Maybe it’s because she was writing.”

“She won’t ever be done writing if she goes to grad school. I guess that’s what Ed and I are going to do. I want to go back to Ithaca, my family’s still there. We’re both going to apply to Cornell and if one of us gets in, we’ll go.”

“You’re going to go? You’re going to leave the city?”

“Maybe next year.”

I suddenly felt like crying! And we weren’t that good friends! We were work friends.

“I’m sure she feels the same way. I would if Ed were gone, and he’s the most irritating person I know. I figure anyone that irritating who I love this much has to be the one. It’s too nutty otherwise.”

Antonia came in with Dean. “Heard from her yet?” Dean asked, dumping half and half into a mug of coffee.

“It’s only been a few days,” Dorothy said, looking up from her crossword.

“Hi,” Antonia said.

“Oh, hello,” said Dorothy. They had been friends in college and now there was some inscrutable presence between them, which had never been explained. They always were polite, and they never spoke.

Antonia said to Dean, “Sylvio said he might meet them in Paris and instead of going north, they would go down to Provence and then Barcelona to see the Gaudi buildings.”

“So how’s shelving books compare to slinging hash?” Dean asked. “And by the way, good technique on the head there.”

“A compliment from the master. I am humbled,” I said, swallowing bile. Sylvio was going to meet them. They were going to Barcelona and not the Lake Countrey. I wondered when and if Sally would tell me. “When-when-when–” I said. “Did you say something about Sylvio? How is he?”

“Gag!” Dean practically shouted. “You, Alex!”

Antonia snickered. “Never thought you were a liar before Alex.”