4

Over the next week and a half there seemed to be only two people in my life: Brenda and the little colored kid who liked Gauguin. Every morning before the library opened, the boy was waiting; sometimes he seated himself on the lion’s back, sometimes under his belly, sometimes he just stood around throwing pebbles at his mane. Then he would come inside, tap around the main floor until Otto stared him up on tiptoes, and finally headed up the long marble stairs that led to Tahiti. He did not always stay to lunch time, but one very hot day he was there when I arrived in the morning and went through the door behind me when I left at night. The next morning, it was, that he did not show up, and as though in his place, a very old man appeared, white, smelling of Life Savers, his nose and jowls showing erupted veins beneath them. “Could you tell me where I’d find the art section?”

“Stack Three,” I said.

In a few minutes, he returned with a big brown-covered book in his hand. He placed it on my desk, withdrew his card from a long moneyless billfold and waited for me to stamp out the book.

“Do you want to take this book out?” I said.

He smiled.

I took his card and jammed the metal edge into the machine; but I did not stamp down. “Just a minute,” I said. I took a clipboard from under the desk and flipped through a few pages, upon which were games of battleship and tick-tack-toe that I’d been playing through the week with myself. “I’m afraid there’s a hold on this book.”

“A what?”

“A hold. Someone’s called up and asked that we hold it for them. Can I take your name and address and drop a card when it’s free …”

And so I was able, not without flushing once or twice, to get the book back in the stacks. When the colored kid showed up later in the day, it was just where he’d left it the afternoon before.

As for Brenda, I saw her every evening and when there was not a night game that kept Mr. Patimkin awake and in the TV room, or a Hadassah card party that sent Mrs. Patimkin out of the house and brought her in at unpredictable hours, we made love before the silent screen. One muggy, low-skied night Brenda took me swimming at the club. We were the only ones in the pool, and all the chairs, the cabanas, the lights, the diving boards, the very water seemed to exist only for our pleasure. She wore a blue suit that looked purple in the lights and down beneath the water it flashed sometimes green, sometimes black. Late in the evening a breeze came up off the golf course and we wrapped ourselves in one huge towel, pulled two chaise longues together, and despite the bartender, who was doing considerable pacing back and forth by the bar window, which overlooked the pool, we rested side by side on the chairs. Finally the bar light itself flipped off, and then, in a snap, the lights around the pool went down and out. My heart must have beat faster, or something, for Brenda seemed to guess my sudden doubt—we should go, I thought.

She said: “That’s okay.”

It was very dark, the sky was low and starless, and it took a while for me to see, once again, the diving board a shade lighter than the night, and to distinguish the water from the chairs that surrounded the far side of the pool.

I pushed the straps of her bathing suit down but she said no and rolled an inch away from me, and for the first time in the two weeks I’d known her she asked me a question about me.

“Where are your parents?” she said.

“Tucson,” I said. “Why?”

“My mother asked me.”

I could see the life guard’s chair now, white almost.

“Why are you still here? Why aren’t you with them?” she asked.

“I’m not a child any more, Brenda,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended. “I just can’t go wherever my parents are.”

“But then why do you stay with your aunt and uncle?”

“They’re not my parents.”

“They’re better?”

“No. Worse. I don’t know why I stay with them.”

“Why?” she said. “Why don’t I know?”

“Why do you stay? You do know, don’t you?”

“My job, I suppose. It’s convenient from there, and it’s cheap, and it pleases my parents. My aunt’s all right really … Do I really have to explain to your mother why I live where I do?”

“It’s not for my mother. I want to know. I wondered why you weren’t with your parents, that’s all.”

“Are you cold?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“No, not unless you do. Don’t you feel well, Neil?”

“I feel all right,” and to let her know that I was still me, I held her to me, though that moment I was without desire.

“Neil?”

“What?”

“What about the library?”

“Who wants to know that?”

“My father,” she laughed.

“And you?”

She did not answer a moment. “And me,” she said finally.

“Well what about it? Do I like it? It’s okay. I sold shoes once and like the library better. After the Army they tried me for a couple months at Uncle Aaron’s real estate company—Doris’ father—and I like the library better than that …”

“How did you get a job there?”

“I worked there for a little while when I was in college, then when I quit Uncle Aaron’s, oh, I don’t know …”

“What did you take in college?”

“At Newark Colleges of Rutgers University I majored in philosophy. I am twenty-three years old. I—”

“Why do you sound nasty again?”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t say I was sorry.

“Are you planning on making a career of the library?”

“Bren, I’m not planning anything. I haven’t planned a thing in three years. At least for the year I’ve been out of the Army. In the Army I used to plan to go away weekends. I’m—I’m not a planner.” After all the truth I’d suddenly given her, I shouldn’t have ruined it for myself with that final lie. I added, “I’m a liver.”

“I’m a pancreas,” she said.

“I’m a—”

And she kissed the absurd game away; she wanted to be serious.

“Do you love me, Neil?”

I did not answer.

“I’ll sleep with you whether you do or not, so tell me the truth.”

“That was pretty crude.”

“Don’t be prissy,” she said.

“No, I mean a crude thing to say about me.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, and she didn’t, and that she didn’t pained me; I allowed myself the minor subterfuge, however, of forgiving Brenda her obtuseness. “Do you?” she said.

“No.”

“I want you to.”

“What about the library?”

“What about it?” she said.

Was it obtuseness again? I thought not—and it wasn’t, for Brenda said, “When you love me, there’ll be nothing to worry about.”

“Then of course I’ll love you.” I smiled.

“I know you will,” she said. “Why don’t you go in the water, and I’ll wait for you and close my eyes, and when you come back you’ll surprise me with the wet. Go ahead.”

“You like games, don’t you?”

“Go ahead. I’ll close my eyes.”

I walked down to the edge of the pool and dove in. The water felt colder than it had earlier, and when I broke through and was headed blindly down I felt a touch of panic. At the top again, I started to swim the length of the pool and then turned at the end and started back, but suddenly I was sure that when I left the water Brenda would be gone. I’d be alone in this damn place. I started for the side and pulled myself up and ran to the chairs and Brenda was there and I kissed her.

“God,” she shivered, “You didn’t stay long.”

“I know.”

“My turn,” she said, and then she was up and a second later I heard a little crack of water and then nothing. Nothing for quite a while.

“Bren,” I called softly, “are you all right?” but no one answered.

I found her glasses on the chair beside me and held them in my hands. “Brenda?”

Nothing.

“Brenda?”

“No fair calling,” she said and gave me her drenched self. “Your turn,” she said.

This time I stayed below the water for a long while and when I surfaced again my lungs were ready to pop. I threw my head back for air and above me saw the sky, low like a hand pushing down, and I began to swim as though to move out from under its pressure. I wanted to get back to Brenda, for I worried once again—and there was no evidence, was there?—that if I stayed away too long she would not be there when I returned. I wished that I had carried her glasses away with me, so she would have to wait for me to lead her back home. I was having crazy thoughts, I knew, and yet they did not seem uncalled for in the darkness and strangeness of that place. Oh how I wanted to call out to her from the pool, but I knew she would not answer and I forced myself to swim the length a third time, and then a fourth, but midway through the fifth I felt a weird fright again, had momentary thoughts of my own extinction, and that time when I came back I held her tighter than either of us expected.

“Let go, let go,” she laughed, “my turn—”

“But Brenda—”

But Brenda was gone and this time it seemed as though she’d never come back. I settled back and waited for the sun to dawn over the ninth hole, prayed it would if only for the comfort of its light, and when Brenda finally returned to me I would not let her go, and her cold wetness crept into me somehow and made me shiver. “That’s it, Brenda. Please, no more games,” I said, and then when I spoke again I held her so tightly I almost dug my body into hers, “I love you,” I said, “I do.”

So the summer went on. I saw Brenda every evening: we went swimming, we went for walks, we went for rides, up through the mountains so far and so long that by the time we started back the fog had begun to emerge from the trees and push out into the road, and I would tighten my hands on the wheel and Brenda would put on her glasses and watch the white line for me. And we would eat—a few nights after my discovery of the fruit refrigerator Brenda led me to it herself. We would fill huge soup bowls with cherries, and in serving dishes for roast beef we would heap slices of watermelon Then we would go up and out the back doorway of the basement and onto the back lawn and sit under the sporting-goods tree, the light from the TV room the only brightness we had out there. All we would hear for while were just the two of us spitting pits. “I wish they would take root overnight and in the morning there’d just be watermelons and cherries.”

“If they took root in this yard, sweetie, they’d grow refrigerators and Westinghouse Preferred. I’m not being nasty,” I’d add quickly, and Brenda would laugh, and say she felt like a greengage plum, and I would disappear down into the basement and the cherry bowl would now be a greengage plum bowl, and then a nectarine bowl, and then a peach bowl, until, I have to admit it, I cracked my frail bowel, and would have to spend the following night, sadly, on the wagon. And then too we went out for corned beef sandwiches, pizza, beer and shrimp ice cream sodas and hamburgers. We went to the Lions Club Fair one night and Brenda won a Lions Club ashtray by shooting three baskets in a row. And when Ron came home from Milwaukee we went from time to time to see him play basketball in the semi-pro summer league, and it was those evenings that I felt a stranger with Brenda, for she knew all the players’ names, and though for the most part they were gawky-limbed and dull, there was one named Luther Ferrari who was neither, and whom Brenda had dated for a whole year in high school. He was Ron’s closest friend and I remembered his name from the Newark News: he was one of the great Ferrari brothers, All State all of them in at least two sports. It was Ferrari who called Brenda Buck, a nickname which apparently went back to her ribbon-winning days. Like Ron, Ferrari was exceedingly polite as though it were some affliction of those over six feet three; he was gentlemanly towards me and gentle towards Brenda, and after a while I balked when the suggestion was made that we go to see Ron play. And then one night we discovered that at eleven o’clock the cashier of the Hilltop Theatre went home and the manager disappeared into his office and so that summer we saw the last quarter of at least fifteen movies and then when we were driving home—driving Brenda home, that is—we would try to reconstruct the beginnings of the films. Our favorite last quarter of a movie was Ma and Pa Kettle in the City, our favorite fruit, greengage plums, and our favorite, our only, people, each other. Of course we ran into others from time to time, some of Brenda’s friends, and occasionally, one or two of mine. One night in August we even went to a bar out on Route 6 with Laura Simpson Stolowitch and her fiancé, but it was a dreary evening. Brenda and I seemed untrained in talking to others, and so we danced a great deal, which we realized was one thing we’d never done before. Laura’s boyfriend drank stingers pompously and Simp—Brenda wanted me to call her Stolo but I didn’t—Simp drank a tepid combination of something like ginger ale and soda. Whenever we returned to the table, Simp would be talking about “the dance” and her fiancé about “the film,” until finally Brenda asked him “Which film?” and then we danced till closing time. And when we went back to Brenda’s we filled a bowl with cherries which we carried into the TV room and ate sloppily for a while; and later, on the sofa, we loved each other and when I moved from the darkened room to the bathroom I could always feel cherry pits against my bare soles. At home, undressing for the second time that night, I would find red marks on the undersides of my feet.

And how did her parents take all of this? Mrs. Patimkin continued to smile at me and Mr. Patimkin continued to think I ate like a bird. When invited to dinner I would, for his benefit, eat twice what I wanted, but the truth seemed to be that after he’d characterized my appetite that first time, he never really bothered to look again. I might have eaten ten times my normal amount, have finally killed myself with food, he would still have considered me not a man but a sparrow. No one seemed distressed by my presence, though Julie had cooled considerably; consequently, when Brenda suggested to her father that at the end of August I spend a week of my vacation at the Patimkin house, he pondered a moment, decided on the five iron, made his approach shot, and said yes. And when she passed on to her mother the decision of Patimkin Sink, there wasn’t much Mrs. Patimkin could do. So, through Brenda’s craftiness, I was invited.

On that Friday morning that was to be my last day of work, my Aunt Gladys saw me packing my bag and she asked where I was going. I told her. She did not answer and I thought I saw awe in those red-rimmed hysterical eyes—I had come a long way since that day she’d said to me on the phone, “Fancy-shmancy.”

“How long you going, I should know how to shop I wouldn’t buy too much. You’ll leave me with a refrigerator full of milk it’ll go bad it’ll stink up the refrigerator—”

“A week,” I said.

“A week?” she said. “They got room for a week?”

“Aunt Gladys, they don’t live over the store.”

“I lived over a store I wasn’t ashamed. Thank God we always had a roof. We never went begging in the streets,” she told me as I packed the Bermudas I’d just bought, “and your cousin Susan we’ll put through college, Uncle Max should live and be well. We didn’t send her away to camp for August, she doesn’t have shoes when she wants them, sweaters she doesn’t have a drawerful—”

“I didn’t say anything, Aunt Gladys.”

“You don’t get enough to eat here? You leave over sometimes I show your Uncle Max your plate it’s a shame. A child in Europe could make a four-course meal from what you leave over.”

“Aunt Gladys.” I went over to her. “I get everything I want here. I’m just taking a vacation. Don’t I deserve a vacation?”

She held herself to me and I could feel her trembling. “I told your mother I would take care of her Neil she shouldn’t worry. And now you go running—”

I put my arms around her and kissed her on the top of her head. “C’mon,” I said, “you’re being silly. I’m not running away. I’m just going away for a week, on a vacation.”

“You’ll leave their telephone number God forbid you should get sick.”

“Okay.”

“Millburn they live?”

“Short Hills. I’ll leave the number.”

“Since when do Jewish people live in Short Hills? They couldn’t be real Jews believe me.”

“They’re real Jews,” I said.

“I’ll see it I’ll believe it.” She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron, just as I was zipping up the sides of the suitcase. “Don’t close the bag yet. I’ll make a little package with some fruit in it, you’ll take with you.”

“Okay, Aunt Gladys,” and on the way to work that morning I ate the orange and the two peaches that she’d put in a bag for me.

*  *  *  *  *

A few hours later Mr. Scapello informed me that when I returned from my vacation after Labor Day, I would be hoisted up onto Martha Winney’s stool. He himself, he said, had made the same move some twelve years ago, and so it appeared that if I could manage to maintain my balance I might someday be Mr. Scapello. I would also get an eight-dollar increase in salary which was five dollars more than the increase Mr. Scapello had received years before. He shook my hand and then started back up the long flight of marble stairs, his behind barging against his suit jacket like a hoop. No sooner had he left my side then I smelled spearmint and looked up to see the old man with veiny nose and jowls.

“Hello, young man,” he said pleasantly. “Is the book back?”

“What book?”

“The Gauguin. I was shopping and I thought I’d stop by to ask. I haven’t gotten the card yet. It’s two weeks already.”

“No,” I said, and as I spoke I saw that Mr. Scapello had stopped midway up the stairs and turned as though he’d forgotten to tell me something. “Look,” I said to the old man, “it should be back any day.” I said it with a finality that bordered on rudeness, and I alarmed myself, for suddenly I saw what would happen: the old man making a fuss, Mr. Scapello gliding down the stairs, Mr. Scapello scampering up to the stacks, Scapello scandalized, Scapello profuse, Scapello presiding at the ascension of John McKee to Miss Winney’s stool. I turned to the old man, “Why don’t you leave your phone number and I’ll try to get a hold of it this afternoon—” but my attempt at concern and courtesy came too late and the man growled some words about public servants, a letter to the Mayor, snotty kids, and left the library, thank God, only a second before Mr. Scapello returned to my desk to remind me that everyone was chipping in for a present for Miss Winney and that if I liked I should leave a half dollar on his desk during the day.

After lunch the colored kid came in. When he headed past the desk for the stairs, I called over to him. “Come here,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“The heart section.”

“What book are you reading?”

“That Mr. Go-again’s book. Look, man, I ain’t doing nothing wrong. I didn’t do no writing in anything. You could search me—”

“I know you didn’t. Listen, if you like that book so much why don’t you please take it home? Do you have a library card?”

“No, sir, I didn’t take nothing.”

“No, a library card is what we give to you so you can take books home. Then you won’t have to come down here every day. Do you go to school?”

“Yes, sir. Miller Street School. But this here’s summertime. It’s okay I’m not in school. I ain’t supposed to be in school.”

“I know. As long as you go to school you can have a library card. You could take the book home.”

“What you keep telling me take that book home for? At home somebody dee-stroy it.”

“You could hide it someplace, in a desk—”

“Man,” he said, squinting at me, “why don’t you want me to come round here?”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t.”

“I likes to come here. I likes them stairs.”

“I like them too,” I said. “But the trouble is that someday somebody’s going to take that book out.”

He smiled. “Don’t you worry,” he said to me. “Ain’t nobody done that yet,” and he tapped off to the stairs and Stack Three.

Did I perspire that day! It was the coolest of the summer, but when I left work in the evening my shirt was sticking to my back. In the car I opened my bag, and while the rush-hour traffic flowed down Washington Street, I huddled in the back and changed into a clean shirt so that when I reached Short Hills I’d look as though I was deserving of an interlude in the suburbs. But driving up Central Avenue I could not keep my mind on my vacation, or for that matter on my driving: to the distress of pedestrians and motorists, I ground gears, overshot crosswalks, hesitated at green and red lights alike. I kept thinking that while I was on vacation that jowly bastard would return to the library, that the colored kid’s book would disappear, that my new job would be taken away from me, that, in fact my old job—but then why should I worry about all that: the library wasn’t going to be my life.