The Collected Stories Page 10

  Naked before the open door of his closet, where a harem of fifteen jackets languished — mute, lovely receptacles of his arms and torso — Finn was struck by the powerful idea: His. Then the powerful corollary: he hadn’t given any jacket to Slotsky forever. When they split up he should have taken that jacket back, but he had thought Slotsky was already too disturbed by the loss of his roommate. He had been very foolish: no jacket in his closet had the drape, cut at the wrist, lapel, and haunch, or texture, tone, and quality of material that that particular jacket had. The one he loaned to Slotsky. Half an hour later, sitting on the bed in Slotsky’s one room, in an odor of socks, underwear, and Slotsky, Finn had the feeling his seat would stick to the army blanket when he stood up. Slotsky said for the third time, “You want one of my jackets? Help yourself, roomie. I’ve got a dozen classy numbers.”

  “My jacket, Slotsky.”

  “Take a jacket.”

  “I didn’t give it to you forever.”

  “There’s the closet.”

  “You’re being difficult. You don’t have the right attitude. Not about anything.”

  “Toward anything. You think I stole your jacket.”

  “Never mind what I think. I want it back.”

  “Take, take, Fein.”

  “Finn.”

  Slotsky smacked his forehead, then adjusted his glasses. “That’s right. How could I forget? You’re Finn.”

  “This is very disappointing. I expected more from you.”

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do, roomie.”

  Finn walked to the closet. “This one.”

  “That one?”

  “Mine!”

  “I wouldn’t use it for toilet paper.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “I used to wear it because I pitied you.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  Finn was out the door.

  Millicent Coyle had brown hair, blue eyes, a slender body, and she made an impression of cleanliness and optimism. Finn talked most of the evening about Slotsky. He told her about his filthy habits, his obnoxious political beliefs, and, striking at the essential man, told her Slotsky was neurotically sensitive about being a Jew and yet never went to all-campus Yom Kippur services or any others held at the Concert and Dance Theater or the Hillel Center, which had been designed by Miyoshi and cost several million dollars. Not once. He explained that Yom Kippur was an important holy day for Jewish people; at least that was Finn’s understanding. They were parked in the lot outside the Kappa house. When Millicent didn’t seem about to say anything in regard to Slotsky, he began to suspect she was waiting for a chance to scramble out of the car and just say good night. Suddenly she said, “I’ll bet you think we’re all alike at the Kappas’.”

  “Of course I don’t think that. Everyone is different.”

  “I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet, for instance, you think we’re all prudes.”

  Finn sighed. He would have found some answer to her accusation, but she didn’t quite seem to be talking to him; to have sensed, that is, a particular subject in the air between them for the past several hours.

  “Do you like to ski?” she asked.

  “I’ve never skied, but I’ve thought about it. Up the mountain, down the mountain. Groovy.”

  She grinned. She knew he was making a joke. “Well it also gives you a chance to wear your après-ski outfits, you know. You could learn in a minute. I know a guy who has a car like this.”

  “Pontiac? I rented it for the evening.”

  “I love Pontiacs. His is a Mercedes.”

  Almost impetuously, Finn said, “You know when I called you last week I was afraid …”

  “My roommate took the message.”

  “Really?” It seemed relevant. Finn considered. Nothing relevant occurred to him. He plunged on. “I’d been thinking about calling you for a long time.”

  The confession made silence. He felt sweat blossom in his palms and armpits.

  “For months I’ve wanted you to call,” she whispered, leaving the silence intact. “Months.”

  Finn’s heart pumped into the silence. His hand, like an independent caterpillar, pushed softly down the top of the seat and touched her cashmere. He looked at her eyes. Her eyes looked. He held his breath, bent toward her, and her eyes shut. Their lips touched. On her breast he felt murmur. They kissed, slowly drawing closer, pressing more and more of themselves against one another. Beneath her skirt, along smooth tubes, he felt white, touched silky. “I wanted you to call months and months an’ muns-ago.” She crumbled in his ear. “Millicent,” he whispered, shoving against her hand, her hard, fused tubes.

  “Fein,” she whispered.

  “Finn,” he said.

  She pulled free. “I think I need a cigarette. I mean I really need a cigarette, but I’d like to talk a little.”

  Minutes later Finn was tapping the steering wheel with his fingernails. “I’m the only one who knows you’re Jewish?”

  “Well, actually, my mother converted years and years ago.”

  Finn drove to Slotsky’s place and knocked until the door opened on Slotsky in underwear, his face deranged behind fingers shoving glasses against his eyes. “For Christ’s sake. What the hell do you want?”

  Finn shrugged, mumbled. Slotsky stared. The hall light made him look papery. Without a word Finn took off his jacket, then handed it to Slotsky. Slotsky frowned and shook his head.

  “Take,” said Finn.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Take.”

  “No.”

  Shaking his head, Slotsky backed into the room. Finn shuffled after him, jacket stiff-armed at Slotsky’s chest.

  “Take it.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Screw you. Get out of here, creep.”

  “Take it or I’ll jam it down your throat.”

  “Screw you, Fein.”

  Finn lunged, stabbed the jacket against Slotsky’s chest. Slotsky fell, smacking the floor with both palms, and Finn threw the jacket at his head. It caught over his head and chest like a lamp shade. Beneath it Slotsky screamed for help. Finn slammed the door. Slotsky shut up.

  Alone and tired, Finn drove around town, the night droning, crowding into the car, pressing at the borders of his brain. He checked the dashboard again and again … twenty-five miles an hour … three-thirty … twenty-eight miles an hour … a quarter past four … less than half a tank of gas … ten past five …

  And then Finn had a little waking dream in which he saw himself in Slotsky’s glasses and Slotsky in his jacket, and Slotsky took his hand and he put his arm around Slotsky and they danced in the headlights, big Finn, black Slotsky, like ballroom champions, gracefully mutual, dancing for the delectation of millions until Finn hit the gas and crushed them into rushing blacktop.

  Going Places

  BECKMAN, A DAY OUT OF THE HOSPITAL, barely strong enough to walk the streets for a job, carrying a ruined face that wouldn’t heal for weeks and probably never look the same, was shocked to find himself hired at the first place he tried, as assistant to a paint contractor, and thought to tell his parents and write his girl to come back from Chicago and marry him, but, recalling disappointments with jobs in the past, decided to wait, not say anything, and see how things went; to see if they continued to be real as the hard, substantial hand which had enveloped and strongly shaken his hand, less rough and hairy, but masculine, calloused by the wheel and stick of his trade, and a substantial hand, too; if not in muscle and bone, certainly in spirit, for in that shake Beckman was welcomed to the end of a successful interview and a life made wretched by rattling kidneys, the stench of gasoline, of cigarettes, of perfume and alcohol and vomit, the end of surly toughs, drunken women, whoring soldiers, vagrant blacks and whites, all the streaming, fearsome, pathetic riffraff refuse of the city’s dark going places, though places in hell, while he, Beckman, driver of the cab, went merely everyplace, anyplace, until the sun returned the day and he stopped, parked,
dropped his head against the seat, and lay mindless, cramped, chilled in a damp sweater and mucky underwear, lay seized by the leather seat, debauched by the night’s long, winding, resonant passage and the abuse of a thousand streets.

  Everyplace Beckman, anyplace Beckman, he went noplace until two figures in misty, dismal twilight hailed his cab — a man with a pencil mustache; a woman with big, slick, black eyes, orange lipstick, and Indian cheekbones — got in and beat him up while he begged, shrieking, “Take my money.” They did, and they left him for dead.

  They left him for dead, Beckman, who revived in a hospital and asked for a newspaper with his first deliberate words, and read want ads and thought about his life, so nearly his death, with a powerful, urgent thrust of mind entirely unlike the vague motions it had been given to while drifting through the dark streets of the city.

  Something dreadful — running over a drunk, a collision with another car — might have happened sooner or later, but the beating, the beating, was precisely what he deserved, what he needed after years scouring the avenues like a dog, waiting for change to come into his life as if it might hail him from a corner like another fare. Indeed it had. Deserved, too, because he, Beckman, unlike the average misérable, could understand his own experience, and not without pride, he acknowledged the deity which had hailed him in the shape of twilight creatures and presented his face to their fists — as an omen, as a reminder of who he was — Beckman, son of good people who, when he pulled up before their two-story house in Riverdale on his monthly visit, became literally sick.

  They were happy of course to see their son, but Beckman, winner of second place in an all-city essay contest celebrating fire prevention week, open to every child in New York, Beckman, the college graduate, history and economics major, risking life with strangers, ruining health in a filthy machine, it literally made them sick.

  Laughing, telling stories, even a bit cocky, Beckman would finger the badge with his taxi number on it while his mother’s eyes, with unblinking persistence, told him he was miserable, and his father, puffing a cigar against doctor’s orders, sat quietly, politely killing himself, nodding, chuckling at the stories until Beckman left and he could stagger out of the room and grope down the wall to his bed. Behind the wheel, Beckman flicked the ignition key, squinted his mind’s eye, and saw his father prostrate with a headache, and Beckman gunned the motor, gunned house and street, his mother’s eyes and father’s rotten heart and headache.

  There had been omens in his life not so damaging, if hair loss, shortness of breath, and wrinkles around the eyes and mouth were omens, but death had never been so close and tangible, and Beckman had never thought, I am going to die, as he had, sprawled begging, writhing on the floor of his cab. Oh, he had felt the proximity of annihilation just passing a strange man on a dark street or making love to his girl, but the thrill of imminent nothing always came to nothing, gone before he might study it, leaving him merely angry or vacant and low. But now, like Pascal emerging from the carriage after nearly falling from it to his death, like Dostoevsky collapsed against the wall scribbling notes as the firing squad, dissolved by the witty czar, walked off giggling, like Lazarus rising, Beckman was revived, forever qualified and so profoundly reminded of himself he felt like someone else.

  Hitting him, the woman cried,“Hey, hey, Beckman,” a series of words chanted with the flat exuberance and dull inertia of a work song, repeated without change in pitch or intensity while fists rocked his skull and Beckman thrashed in the darkness, flapped his hands, and begged them to take his money and continued begging as they dragged him by his hair over the front seat and onto the floor in back where the mat reeked of whiskey, stale butts, the corruption of lungs, and a million yards of bowel. “Hell your lousy money, Beckman,” said the woman, her spikes in his face and ribs as the man, squealing with effort, pummeled straight down into Beckman’s groin. But the punches and kicks were heralds, however brutal, bearing oracles of his genius, the bludgeoning shapers of himself if properly understood. Years ago he should have had this job with the paint contractor, a steady salary, and his nights to sleep in.

  He would write his girl this first day after work, thought Beckman, a letter of impressions, feelings, hopes, and the specific promise of their future, for now he wanted to get married, and his small gray eyes saw themselves reading that line as he leaned toward the mirror and shaved around the welts and scabs. His brows showed the puffed ridges of a pug’s discolored, brutalized flesh where a billion capillaries had been mashed and meat-hammered to the consistency of stone. Ugly, but not meaningless, and Beckman could even feel glad there had been nothing worse, no brain damage, no broken eardrum, no blindness, and could indeed see qualities that pleased him in the petrified, moiled meat, Hardness and Danger, not in his face or in his soul before the beating, but there now as in the faces of junkies, whores, bums, pimps, and bar fighters, the city’s most deeply kicked, stabbed, and slashed, whom he had carried to and fro in his cab; memento mori twisted into living flesh reflected in his rearview mirror, reflected now in his bathroom mirror, like the rock formations of aboriginal desert and plateau where snakes, lizards, and eagles subsist and life is true and bleak, where all things move in pure, deep knowledge of right and wrong or else they die. Beckman whispered, “They die,” and the ruined flesh gave substance to the cocky twist of his head, his manner of speaking out of the side of his mouth and twisting his head as though whoever he addressed lived on his hip, though he himself was a few inches less than average height. The sense of his small hands flapped suddenly in his mind as the furies dragged him over the seat like a dumb, insentient bag, though he shrieked take his money, which they would take anyway, and his body refused to yield its hideous residue of consciousness even as they mercilessly refused to grant it any. He couldn’t remember when he had passed out or ceased to feel pain or his voice had stopped, but thought now that he had continued screaming after he had stopped thinking or moving, and that they had continued beating him until his undeliberate, importunate voice stopped of its own. They couldn’t have been human and so persisted, but had to have been sublime things which had seized Beckman as the spirit seizes the prophet, twists his bones, and makes him bleed in agonies of knowledge. Beckman, so gifted, saw himself like the Trojan Cassandra, battered, raped on the rowing benches by Agamemnon’s men, and she was Apollo’s thing. But then he looked into the mirror, looked at the lumps above his eyes and at the flesh burned green and blue around his mouth. Not a shaman’s face. He pulled his tongue through space once filled by an eyetooth and molar, licked sheer, delicate gum.

  Enough, this was another Beckman. In truth, no prophet, but neither a bag scrunched into leather, glass, and steel, commanded by anyone to stop, go, ache, count change out of nasty fingers, breathe gas, and hear youth ticked away in nickels. This was Beckman among painters, learning the business, gallon can in each hand, surveying the great hollow vault of the factory which he and the men were come to paint. High brick walls seemed not to restrict but merely to pose theoretical demarcations in all the space now his. He and the gang of painters trudged with cans, brushes, and ropes up a wall toward the sky and the factory’s clangor dropped beneath them to a dull, general boom like a distant sea. The light they rose toward grew sharper and whiter as they entered it climbing the narrow stairway that shivered beneath their feet. Paint cans knocked the sides of Beckman’s legs, the loops cut thin channels into his palms. At the top of the factory, against the white, skylighted morning, they settled their equipment on a steel platform. The men stirred cans of paint, attached ropes to the pipes that ran along beneath the skylight, and moved out on swings into the voluminous air. Beckman stood back on the platform trying to look shrewdly into the nature of these things and feel his relevance. The sun drifted toward the vertical and blazed through the skylight. It drilled the top of his head as he concentrated on a painter swinging ten feet out from the edge of the platform, his arm and trunk like a heavy appendage dangling from his hand. His feet
jerked in vast nothing. His swing was suspended from a pipe running beside the one he painted, and as he moved farther from the platform he left yards of gleaming orange behind him. Beckman felt his breathing quicken as he leaned after the long smack and drag of the painter’s brush. Repeated, overlapped, and soon, between Beckman and the painter, burned thirty feet of the hot, brilliant color. Beckman yearned to participate, confront unpainted steel, paint it, see it become a fresh, different thing as he dissolved in the ritual of strokes. The painter stopped working and looked at him. A vein split the man’s temple down the center and forked like the root of a tree. Flecks of orange dazzled on his cheeks. He pointed with his brush to a can near the edge of the platform and Beckman snapped it up, stepped to the edge, and held it out into the air toward the painter. Thus, delivering the can, he delivered himself, grabbed life in the loop and hoisted it like a gallon of his own blood, swinging it out like a mighty bowler into the future. Concrete floor, towering walls, steeping light hosannaed while Beckman’s arm stiffened and shuddered from wrist to mooring tendons in his neck as he held the stance, leaned with the heavy can like an allegorical statue: Man Reaching. The painter grinned, shook his head, and Beckman saw in a flash blinding blindness that his effort to reach thirty feet was imbecilic. His head wrenched back for the cocky vantage of height and relieved his stance of allegory. He shuffled backward with a self-mocking shrug and set down the can as if lifting it in the first place had been a mistake. The painter’s grin became a smile and he tapped the pipe to which his swing was attached. Beckman understood — deliver the can by crawling down the pipe. Aggravation ripped his heart. A sense of his life constituted of moments like this, inept and freakish, when spirit, muscle, and bone failed to levels less than thing, a black lump of time, flew out of his occipital cup like a flung clod and went streaming down the inside of his skull with the creepy feel of slapstick spills, twitches, flops, and farts of the mind. But the painter had resumed his good work and Beckman, relieved and gratified, was instantly himself again, immune to himself, and snapped up the can. At the edge of the platform he stooped, laid his free hand on the pipe, then straddled the pipe. He clutched the loop in his right hand, shoved off the platform, tipped forward and dragged with his knees, thighs, and elbows down toward the painter. His feet dangled, his eyes dug into the pipe, and he pushed. He dragged like a worm and didn’t think or feel what he did. Fifteen feet from the edge of the platform he stopped to adjust his grip on the can, heavier now and swinging enough to make him feel uneasy about his right side and make him tighten his grip on the left so hard he pitched left. The can jerked up, both legs squeezed the pipe, and a tremor set into his calves and shanks, moving toward his buttocks and lower back.