3

The next morning I found a parking space on Washington Street directly across from the library. Since I was twenty minutes early I decided to stroll in the park rather than cross over to work; I didn’t particularly care to join my colleagues, who I knew would be sipping early morning coffee in the binding room, smelling still of all the orange crush they’d drunk that weekend at Asbury Park. I sat on a bench and looked out towards Broad Street and the morning traffic. The Lackawanna commuter trains were rambling in a few blocks to the north and I could hear them, I thought—the sunny green cars, old and clean, with windows that opened all the way. Some mornings, with time to kill before work, I would walk down to the tracks and watch the open windows roll in, on their sills the elbows of tropical suits and the edges of briefcases, the properties of businessmen arriving in town from Maplewood, the Oranges, and the suburbs beyond.

The park, bordered by Washington Street on the west and Broad on the east, was empty and shady and smelled of trees, night, and dog leavings; and there was a faint damp smell too, indicating that the huge rhino of a water cleaner had passed by already, soaking and whisking the downtown streets. Down Washington Street, behind me, was the Newark Museum—I could see it without even looking: two oriental vases in front like spittoons for a rajah, and next to it the little annex to which we had traveled on special buses as schoolchildren. The annex was a brick building, old and vine-covered, and always reminded me of New Jersey’s link with the beginning of the country, with George Washington, who had trained his scrappy army—a little bronze tablet informed us children—in the very park where I now sat. At the far end of the park, beyond the Museum, was the bank building where I had gone to college. It had been converted some years before into extension of Rutgers University; in fact in what once had been the bank president’s waiting room I had taken a course called Contemporary Moral Issues. Though it was summer now, and I was out of college three years, it was not hard for me to remember the other students my friends, who had worked evenings in Bamberger’s and Kresge’s and had used the commissions they’d earned pushing ladies’ out-of-season shoes to pay their laboratory fees. And then I looked out to Broad Street again. Jammed between a grimy-windowed bookstore and a cheesy luncheonette was the marquee of a tiny art theater—how many years had passed since I’d stood beneath that marquee, lying about the year of my birth so as to see Hedy Lamarr swim naked in Ecstasy; and then, having slipped the ticket taker an extra quarter, what disappointment I had felt at the frugality of her Slavic charm … Sitting there in the park, I felt a deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection.

Suddenly it was nine o’clock and everything was scurrying. Wobbly-heeled girls revolved through the doors of the telephone building across the way, traffic honked desperately, policeman barked, whistled, and waved motorists to and fro. Over at St. Vincent’s Church the huge dark portals swung back and those bleary-eyes that had risen early for Mass now blinked at the light. Then the worshipers had stepped off the church steps and were racing down the streets towards desks, riling cabinets, secretaries, bosses, and—if the Lord had seen fit to remove a mite of harshness from their lives—to the comfort of air-conditioners pumping at their windows. I got up and crossed over to the library, wondering if Brenda was awake yet.

The pale cement lions stood unconvincing guard on the library steps, suffering their usual combination of elephantiasis and arteriosclerosis, and I was prepared to pay them as little attention as I had for the past eight months were it not for a small colored boy who stood in front of one of them. The lion had lost all of its toes the summer before to a safari of juvenile delinquents, and now a new tormentor stood before him, sagging a little in his knees, and growling. He would growl, low and long, drop back, wait, then growl again. Then he would straighten up, and, shaking his head, he would say to the lion, “Man, you’s a coward …” Then, once again, he’d growl.

The day began the same as any other. From behind the desk on the main floor, I watched the hot high-breasted teen-age girls walk twitchingly up the wide flight of marble stairs that led to the main reading room. The stairs were an imitation of a staircase somewhere in Versailles, though in their toreador pants and sweaters these young daughters of Italian leatherworkers, Polish brewery hands, and Jewish furriers were hardly duchesses. They were not Brenda either, and any lust that sparked inside me through the dreary day was academic and time-passing. I looked at my watch occasionally, thought of Brenda, and waited for lunch and then for after lunch, when I would take over the Information Desk upstairs and John McKee, who was only twenty-one but wore elastic bands around his sleeves, would march starchily down the stairs to work assiduously at stamping books in and out. John McRubberbands was in his last year at Newark State Teachers College where he was studying at the Dewey Decimal System in preparation for his lifework. The library was not going to be my lif ework, I knew it. Yet, there had been some talk—from Mr. Scapello, an old eunuch who had learned somehow to disguise his voice as a man’s—that when I returned from my summer vacation I would be put in charge of the Reference Room, a position that had been empty ever since that morning when Martha Winney had fallen off a high stool in the Encyclopedia Room and shattered all those frail bones that come together to form what in a woman half her age we would call the hips.

I had strange fellows at the library and, in truth, there were many hours when I never quite knew how I’d gotten there or why I stayed. But I did stay and after a while waited patiently for that day when I would go into the men’s room on the main floor for a cigarette and, studying myself as I expelled smoke into the mirror, would see that at some moment during the morning I had gone pale, and that under my skin, as under McKee’s and Scapello’s and Miss Winney’s, there was a thin cushion of air separating the blood from the flesh. Someone had pumped it there while I was stamping out a book, and so life from now on would be not a throwing off, as it was for Aunt Gladys, and not a gathering in, as it was for Brenda, but a bouncing off a numbness. I began to fear this, and yet, in my muscleless devotion to my work seemed edging towards it, silently as Miss Winney used to edge up to the Britannica. Her stool was empty now and awaited me.

Just before lunch the lion tamer came wide-eyed into the library. He stood still for a moment, only his fingers moving, as though he were counting the number of marble stairs before him. Then he walked creepily about on the marble floor, snickering at the clink of his taps and the way his little noise swelled up to the vaulted ceiling. Otto, the guard at the door, told him to make less noise with his shoes, but that did not seem to bother the little boy. He clacked on his tiptoes, high, secretively, delighted at the opportunity Otto had given him to practice this posture. He tiptoed up to me.

“Hey,” he said, “where’s the heart section?”

“The what?” I said.

“The heart section. Ain’t you got no heart section?”

He had the thickest sort of southern Negro dialect and the only word that came clear to me was the one that sounded like heart.

“How do you spell it?” I said.

“Heart. Man, pictures. Drawing books. Where you got them?”

“You mean art books? Reproductions?”

He took my polysyllabic word for it. “Yea, they’s them.”

“In a couple places,” I told him. “Which artist are you interested in?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed so that his whole face seemed black. He started backing away, as he had from the lion. “All of them …” he mumbled.

“That’s okay,” I said. “You go look at whichever ones you want. The next flight up. Follow the arrow to where it says Stack Three. You remember that? Stack Three. Ask somebody upstairs.”

He did not move; he seemed to be taking my curiosity about his taste as a kind of poll-tax investigation. “Go ahead,” I said, slashing my face with a smile, “right up there …”

And like a shot he was scuffling and tapping up towards the heart section.

After lunch I came back to the in-and-out desk and there was John McKee, waiting, in his pale blue slacks, his black shoes, his barber-cloth shirt with the elastic bands, and a great knit tie, green, wrapped into a Windsor knot, that was huge and jumped when he talked. His breath smelled of hair oil and his hair of breath and when he spoke, spittle cobwebbed the corners of his mouth. I did not like him and at times had the urge to yank back on his armbands and slingshoot him out past Otto and the lions into the street.

“Has a little Negro boy passed the desk? With a thick accent? He’s been hiding in the art books all morning. You know what those boys do in there.”

“I saw him come in, John.”

“So did I. Has he gone out though.”

“I haven’t noticed. I guess so.”

“Those are very expensive books.”

“Don’t be so nervous, John. People are supposed to touch them.”

“There is touching,” John said sententiously, “and there is touching. Someone should check on him. I was afraid to leave the desk here. You know the way they treat the housing projects we give them.”

“You give them?”

“The city. Have you seen what they do at Seth Boyden? They threw beer bottles, those big ones, on the lawn. They’re taking over the city.”

“Just the Negro sections.”

“It’s easy to laugh, you don’t live near them. I’m going to call Mr. Scapello’s office to check the Art Section. Where did he ever find out about art?”

“You’ll give Mr. Scapello an ulcer, so soon after his egg-and-pepper sandwich. I’ll check, I have to go upstairs anyway.”

“You know what they do in there,” John warned me.

“Don’t worry, Johnny, they’re the ones who’ll get warts on their dirty little hands.”

“Ha ha. Those books happen to cost—”

So that Mr. Scapello would not descend upon the boy with his chalky fingers, I walked up the three flights to Stack Three, past the receiving room where rheumy-eyed Jimmy Boylen, our fifty-one-year-old boy, unloaded books from a cart; past the reading room, where bums off Mulberry Street slept over Popular Mechanics; past the smoking corridor where damp-browed summer students from the law school relaxed, some smoking, others trying to rub the colored dye from their tort texts off their fingertips; and finally, past the periodical room, where a few ancient ladies who’d been motored down from Upper Montclair now huddled in their chairs, pince-nezing over yellowed, fraying society pages in old old copies of the Newark News. Up on Stack Three I found the boy. He was seated on the glass-brick floor holding an open book in his lap, a book, in fact, that was bigger than his lap and had to be propped up by his knees. By the light of the window behind him I could see the hundreds of spaces between the hundreds of tiny black corkscrews that were his hair. He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat The lips were parted, the eves wide, and even the ears seemed to have a heightened receptivity! He looked ecstatic—until he saw me, that is. For all he knew I was John McKee.

“That’s okay,” I said before he could even move, “I’m just passing through. You read.”

“Ain’t nothing to read. They’s pictures.”

“Fine.” I fished around the lowest shelves a moment, playing at work.

“Hey, mister,” the boy said after a minute, “where is this?”

“Where is what?”

“Where is these pictures? These people, man, they sure does look cool. They ain’t no yelling or shouting here, you could just see it.”

He lifted the book so I could see. It was an expensive large-sized edition of Gauguin reproductions. The page he had been looking at showed an 8½12 × 11 print, in color, of three native women standing knee-high in a rose-colored stream. It was a silent picture, he was right.

“That’s Tahiti. That’s an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

“That ain’t no place you could go, is it? Like a ree-sort?”

“You could go there, I suppose. It’s very far. People live there …”

“Hey, look, look here at this one.” He flipped back to a page where a young brown-skinned maid was leaning forward on her knees, as though to dry her hair. “Man,” the boy said, “that’s the fuckin life.” The euphoria of his diction would have earned him eternal banishment from the Newark Public Library and its branches had John or Mr. Scapello—or, God forbid, the hospitalized Miss Winney—come to investigate.

“Who took these pictures?” he asked me.

“Gauguin. He didn’t take them, he painted them. Paul Gauguin. He was a Frenchman.”

“Is he a white man or a colored man?”

“He’s white.”

“Man,” the boy smiled, chuckled almost, “I knew that. He don’t take pictures like no colored men would. He’s a good picture taker … Look, look, look here at this one. Ain’t that the fuckin life?”

I agreed it was and left.

Later I sent Jimmy Boylen hopping down the stairs to tell McKee that everything was all right. The rest of the day was uneventful. I sat at the Information Desk thinking about Brenda and reminding myself that that evening I would have to get gas before I started up to Short Hills, which I could see now, in my mind’s eye, at dusk, rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream.

When I pulled up to the Patimkin house that night, everybody but Julie was waiting for me on the front porch: Mr. and Mrs., Ron, and Brenda, wearing a dress. I had not seen her in a dress before and for an instant she did not look like the same girl. But that was only half the surprise. So many of those Lincolnesque college girls turn out to be limbed for shorts alone. Not Brenda. She looked, in a dress, as though she’d gone through life so attired, as though she’d never worn shorts, or bathing suits, or pajamas, or anything but that pale linen dress. I walked rather bouncingly up the lawn, past the huge weeping willow, towards the waiting Patimkins, wishing all the while that I’d had my car washed. Before I’d even reached them, Ron stepped forward and shook my hand, vigorously, as though he hadn’t seen me since the Diaspora. Mrs. Patimkin smiled and Mr. Patimkin grunted something and continued twitching his wrists before him, then raising an imaginary golf club and driving a ghost of a golf ball up and away towards the Orange Mountains, that are called Orange, I’m convinced, because in that various suburban light that’s the only color they do not come dressed in.

“We’ll be right back,” Brenda said to me. “You have to sit with Julie. Carlota’s off.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We’re taking Ron to the airport.”

“Okay.”

“Julie doesn’t want to go. She says Ron pushed her in the pool this afternoon. We’ve been waiting for you, so we don’t miss Ron’s plane. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin and Ron moved off, and I flashed Brenda just the hint of a glare. She reached out and took my hand a moment.

“How do you like me?” she said.

“You’re great to baby-sit for. Am I allowed all the milk and cake I want?”

“Don’t be angry, baby. We’ll be right back.” Then she waited a moment, and when I failed to deflate the pout from my mouth, she gave me a glare, no hints about it. “I meant how do you like me in a dress!” Then she ran off towards the Chrysler, trotting in her high heels like a colt.

When I walked into the house, I slammed the screen door behind me.

“Close the other door too,” a little voice shouted. “The air-conditioning.”

I closed the other door, obediently.

“Neil?” Julie called.

“Yes.”

“Hi. Want to play five and two?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I did not answer.

“I’m in the television room,” she called.

“Good.”

“Are you supposed to stay with me?”

“Yes.”

She appeared unexpectedly through the dining room. “Want to read a book report I wrote?”

“Not now.”

“What do you want to do?” she said.

“Nothing, honey. Why don’t you watch TV?”

“All right,” she said disgustedly, and kicked her way back to the television room.

For a while I remained in the hall, bitten with the urge to slide quietly out of the house, into my car, and back to Newark, where I might even sit in the alley and break candy with my own. I felt like Carlota; no, not even as comfortable as that. At last I left the hall and began to stroll in and out of rooms on the first floor. Next to the living room was the study, a small knotty-pine room jammed with cater-cornered leather chairs and a complete set of Information Please Almanacs. On the wall hung three colored photo-paintings; they were the kind which, regardless of the subjects, be they vital or infirm, old or youthful, are characterized by bud-cheeks, wet lips, pearly teeth, and shiny, metallized hair. The subjects in this case were Ron, Brenda, and Julie at about ages fourteen, thirteen, and two. Brenda had long auburn hair, her diamond-studded nose, and no glasses; all combined to make her look a regal thirteen-year-old who’d just gotten smoke in her eyes. Ron was rounder and his hairline was lower, but that love of spherical objects and lined courts twinkled in his boyish eves Poor little Julie was lost in the photo-painter’s Platonic’ idea of childhood; her tiny humanity was smothered somewhere back of gobs of pink and white.

There were other pictures about, smaller ones, taken with a Brownie Reflex before photo-paintings had become fashionable. There was a tiny picture of Brenda on a horse; another of Ron in bar mitzvah suit, yamdkah, and tallas; and two pictures framed together—one of a beautiful, faded woman, who must have been, from the eyes, Mrs. Patimkin’s mother, and the other of Mrs. Patimkin herself, her hair in a halo, her eyes joyous and not those of a slowly aging mother with a quick and lovely daughter.

I walked through the archway into the dining room and stood a moment looking out at the sporting goods tree. From the television room that winged off the dining room, I could hear Julie listening to This Is Your Life. The kitchen, which winged off the other side, was empty, and apparently, with Carlota off, the Patimkins had had dinner at the club. Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin’s bedroom was in the middle of the house, down the hall, next to Julie’s, and for a moment I wanted to see what size bed those giants slept in—I imagined it wide and deep as a swimming pool—but I postponed my investigation while Julie was in the house, and instead opened the door in the kitchen that led down to the basement.

The basement had a different kind of coolness from the house, and it had a smell, which was something the upstairs was totally without. It felt cavernous down there, but in a comforting way, like the simulated caves children make for themselves on rainy days, in hall closets, under blankets, or in between the legs of dining room tables. I flipped on the light at the foot of the stairs and was not surprised at the pine paneling, the bamboo furniture, the ping-pong table, and the mirrored bar that was stocked with every kind and size of glass, ice bucket, decanter, mixer, swizzle stick, shot glass, pretzel bowl—all the bacchanalian paraphernalia, plentiful, orderly, and untouched, as it can be only in the bar of a wealthy man who never entertains drinking people, who himself does not drink, who, in fact, gets a fishy look from his wife when every several months he takes a shot of schnapps before dinner. I went behind the bar where there was an aluminum sink that had not seen a dirty glass, I’m sure, since Ron’s bar mitzvah party, and would not see another, probably, until one of the Patimkin children was married or engaged. I would have poured myself a drink—just as a wicked wage for being forced into servantry—but I was uneasy about breaking the label on a bottle of whiskey. You had to break a label to get a drink. On the shelf back of the bar were two dozen bottles—twenty-three to be exact—of Jack Daniels, each with a little booklet tied to its collared neck informing patrons how patrician of them it was to drink the stuff. And over the Jack Daniels were more photos: there was a blown-up newspaper photo of Ron palming a basketball in one hand like a raisin; under the picture it said, “Center, Ronald Patimkin, Millburn High School, 6’4″, 217 pounds.” And there was another picture of Brenda on a horse, and next to that, a velvet mounting board with ribbons and medals clipped to it: Essex County Horse Show 1949, Union County Horse Show 1950, Garden State Fair 1952, Morristown Horse Show 1953, and so on—all for Brenda, for jumping and running or galloping or whatever else young girls receive ribbons for. In the entire house I had’nt seen one picture of Mr. Patimkin.

The rest of the basement, back of the wide pine-paneled room, was gray cement walls and linoleum floor and contained innumerable electrical appliances, including a freezer big enough to house a family of Eskimos. Beside the freezer, incongruosly, was a tall old refrigerator; its ancient presence was a reminder to me of the Patimkin roots in Newark. This same refrigerator had once stood in the kitchen of an apartment in some four-family house, probably in the same neighborhood where I had lived all my life, first with my parents and then, when the two of them went wheezing off to Arizona, with my aunt and uncle. After Pearl Harbor the refrigerator had made the move up to Short Hills; Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks had gone to war: no new barracks was complete until it had a squad of Patimkin sinks lined up in its latrine.

I opened the door of the old refrigerator; it was not empty. No longer did it hold butter, eggs, herring in cream sauce, ginger ale, tuna fish salad, an occasional corsage—rather it was heaped with fruit, shelves swelled with it, every color, every texture, and hidden within, every kind of pit. There were greengage plums, black plums, red plums, apricots, nectarines, peaches, long horns of grapes, black, yellow, red, and cherries, cherries flowing out of boxes and staining everything scarlet. And there were melons—cantaloupes and honeydews—and on the top shelf, half of a huge watermelon, a thin sheet of wax paper clinging to its bare red face like a wet lip. Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!

I grabbed a handful of cherries and then a nectarine, and I bit right down to its pit.

“You better wash that or you’ll get diarrhea.”

Julie was standing behind me in the pine-paneled room. She was wearing her Bermudas and her white polo shirt which was unlike Brenda’s only in that it had a little dietary history of its own.

“What?” I said.

“They’re not washed yet,” Julie said, and in such a way that it seemed to place the refrigerator itself out-of-bounds, if only for me.

“That’s all right,” I said, and devoured the nectarine and put the pit in my pocket and stepped out of the refrigerator room, all in one second. I still didn’t know what to do with the cherries. “I was just looking around,” I said.

Julie didn’t answer.

“Where’s Ron going?” I asked, dropping the cherries into my pocket, among my keys and change.

“Milwaukee.”

“For long?”

“To see Harriet. They’re in love.”

We looked at each other for longer than I could bear. “Harriet?” I asked. “Yes.”

Julie was looking at me as though she were trying to look behind me, and then I realized that I was standing with my hands out of sight. I brought them around to the front, and, I swear it, she did peek to see if they were empty.

We confronted one another again; she seemed to have a threat in her face.

Then she spoke. “Want to play ping-pong?”

“God, yes,” I said, and made for the table with two long, bounding steps. “You can serve.”

Julie smiled and we began to play.

I have no excuses to offer for what happened next. I began to win and I liked it.

“Can I take that one over?” Julie said. “I hurt my finger yesterday and it just hurt when I served.”

“No.”

I continued to win.

“That wasn’t fair, Neil. My shoelace came untied. Can I take it—”

“No.”

We played, I ferociously.

“Neil, you leaned over the table. That’s illegal—”

“I didn’t lean and it’s not illegal.”

I felt the cherries hopping among my nickels and pennies.

“Neil, you gypped me out of a point. You have nineteen and I have eleven—”

“Twenty and ten,” I said. “Serve!”

She did and I smashed my return past her—it zoomed off the table and skittered into the refrigerator room.

“You’re a cheater!” she screamed at me. “You cheat!” Her jaw was trembling as though she carried a weight on top of her pretty head. “I hate you!” And she threw her racket across the room and it clanged off the bar, just as, outside, I heard the Chrysler crushing gravel in the driveway.

“The game isn’t over,” I said to her.

“You cheat! And you were stealing fruit!” she said, and ran away before I had my chance to win.

*  *  *  *  *

Later that night, Brenda and I made love, our first time. We were sitting on the sofa in the television room and for some ten minutes had not spoken a word to each other. Julie had long since gone to a weepy bed, and though no one had said anything to me about her crying, I did not know if the child had mentioned my fistful of cherries, which, some time before, I had flushed down the toilet.

The television set was on and though the sound was off and the house quiet, the gray pictures still wiggled at the far end of the room. Brenda was quiet and her dress circled her legs, which were tucked back beneath her. We sat there for some while and did not speak. Then she went into the kitchen and when she came back she said that it sounded as though everyone was asleep. We sat a while longer, watching the soundless bodies on the screen eating a silent dinner in someone’s silent restaurant. When I began to unbutton her dress she resisted me, and I like to think it was because she knew how lovely she looked in it. But she looked lovely, my Brenda, anyway, and we folded it carefully and held each other close and soon there we were, Brenda falling, slowly but with a smile, and me rising.

How can I describe loving Brenda? It was so sweet, as though I’d finally scored that twenty-first point.

When I got home I dialed Brenda’s number, but not before my aunt heard and rose from her bed.

“Who are you calling at this hour? The doctor?”

“No.”

“What kind phone calls, one o’clock at night?”

“Shhh!” I said.

“He tells me shhh. Phone calls one o’clock at night, we haven’t got a big enough bill,” and then she dragged herself back into the bed, where with a martyr’s heart and bleary eyes she had resisted the downward tug of sleep until she’d heard my key in the door.

Brenda answered the phone.

“Neil?” she said.

“Yes,” I whispered. “You didn’t get out of bed, did you?”

“No,” she said, “the phone is next to the bed.”

“Good. How is it in bed?”

“Good. Are you in bed?”

“Yes,” I lied, and tried to right myself by dragging the phone by its cord as close as I could to my bedroom.

“I’m in bed with you,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said, “and I’m with you.”

“I have the shades down, so it’s dark and I don’t see you.”

“I don’t see you either.”

“That was so nice, Neil.”

“Yes. Go to sleep, sweet, I’m here,” and we hung up without goodbyes. In the morning, as planned, I called again, but I could hardly hear Brenda or myself for that matter, for Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max were going on a Workmen’s Circle picnic in the afternoon, and there was some trouble about grape juice that had dripped all night from a jug in the refrigerator and by morning had leaked out onto the floor. Brenda was still in bed and so could play our game with some success, but I had to pull down all the shades of my senses to imagine myself beside her. I could only pray our nights and mornings would come, and soon enough they did.