Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 8

  “A five-spot cools him.”

  “Shall we begin?” I said, motioning her to the couch.

  She lit a cigarette and got right to it. “I think we could start by approaching ‘Billy Budd’ as Melville’s justification of the ways of God to man, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Interestingly, though, not in a Miltonian sense.” I was bluffing. I wanted to see if she’d go for it.

  “No. ‘Paradise Lost’ lacked the substructure of pessimism.” She did.

  “Right, right. God, you’re right,” I murmured.

  “I think Melville reaffirmed the virtues of innocence in a naïve yet sophisticated sense—don’t you agree?”

  I let her go on. She was barely nineteen years old, but already she had developed the hardened facility of the pseudo-intellectual. She rattled off her ideas glibly, but it was all mechanical. Whenever I offered an insight, she faked a response: “Oh, yes, Kaiser. Yes, baby, that’s deep. A platonic comprehension of Christianity—why didn’t I see it before?”

  We talked for about an hour and then she said she had to go. She stood up and I laid a C-note on her.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  I had piqued her curiosity. She sat down again.

  “Suppose I wanted to—have a party?” I said.

  “Like, what kind of party?”

  “Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”

  “Oh, wow.”

  “If you’d rather forget it . . .”

  “You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’d cost you.”

  Now was the time to tighten the screws. I flashed my private-investigator’s badge and informed her it was a bust.

  “What!”

  “I’m fuzz, sugar, and discussing Melville for money is an 802. You can do time.”

  “You louse!”

  “Better come clean, baby. Unless you want to tell your story down at Alfred Kazin’s office, and I don’t think he’d be too happy to hear it.”

  She began to cry. “Don’t turn me in, Kaiser,” she said. “I needed the money to complete my master’s. I’ve been turned down for a grant. Twice. Oh, Christ . . .”

  It all poured out—the whole story. Central Park West upbringing, Socialist summer camps, Brandeis. She was every dame you saw waiting in line at the Elgin or the Thalia, or penciling the words “Yes, very true” into the margin of some book on Kant. Only somewhere along the line she had made a wrong turn.

  “I needed cash. A girl friend said she knew a married guy whose wife wasn’t very profound. He was into Blake. She couldn’t hack it. I said sure, for a price I’d talk Blake with him. I was nervous at first. I faked a lot of it. He didn’t care. My friend said there were others. Oh, I’ve been busted before. I got caught reading Commentary in a parked car, and I was once stopped and frisked at Tanglewood. Once more and I’m a three-time loser.”

  “Then take me to Flossie.”

  She bit her lip and said, “The Hunter College Book Store is a front.”

  “Yes?”

  “Like those bookie joints that have barbershops outside for show. You’ll see.”

  I made a quick call to headquarters and then said to her, “O.K., sugar. You’re off the hook. But don’t leave town.”

  She tilted her face up toward mine gratefully. “I can get you photographs of Dwight Macdonald reading,” she said.

  “Some other time.”

  I WALKED into the Hunter College Book Store. The salesman, a young man with sensitive eyes, came up to me. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “I’m looking for a special edition of ‘Advertisements for Myself.’ I understand the author had several thousand gold-leaf copies printed up for friends.”

  “I’ll have to check,” he said. “We have a WATS line to Mailer’s house.”

  I fixed him with a look. “Sherry sent me,” I said.

  “Oh, in that case, go on back,” he said. He pressed a button. A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie’s.

  Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian décor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, “Wallace Stevens, eh?” But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master’s, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine’s over Freud’s conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing—the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.

  “Like what you see?” a voice said behind me. I turned and suddenly found myself standing face to face with the business end of a .38. I’m a guy with a strong stomach, but this time it did a back flip. It was Flossie, all right. The voice was the same, but Flossie was a man. His face was hidden by a mask.

  “You’ll never believe this,” he said, “but I don’t even have a college degree. I was thrown out for low grades.”

  “Is that why you wear that mask?”

  “I devised a complicated scheme to take over The New York Review of Books, but it meant I had to pass for Lionel Trilling. I went to Mexico for an operation. There’s a doctor in Juarez who gives people Trilling’s features—for a price. Something went wrong. I came out looking like Auden, with Mary McCarthy’s voice. That’s when I started working the other side of the law.”

  Quickly, before he could tighten his finger on the trigger, I went into action. Heaving forward, I snapped my elbow across his jaw and grabbed the gun as he fell back. He hit the ground like a ton of bricks. He was still whimpering when the police showed up.

  “Nice work, Kaiser,” Sergeant Holmes said. “When we’re through with this guy, the F.B.I. wants to have a talk with him. A little matter involving some gamblers and an annotated copy of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ Take him away, boys.”

  Later that night, I looked up an old account of mine named Gloria. She was blond. She had graduated cum laude. The difference was she majored in physical education. It felt good.

  [1974]

  DEBORAH EISENBERG

  WHAT IT WAS LIKE, SEEING CHRIS

  WHILE I SIT WITH ALL the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time then I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

  The doctor prepares to look at my eyes through a machine. I put my forehead and chin against the metal bands and look into the tiny ring of blue light while the doctor dabs quickly at my eye with something, but my head starts to feel numb, and I have to lift it back. “Sorry,” I say. I shake my head and put it back against the metal. Then I stare into the blue light and try to hold my head still, and to convince myself that there is no needle coming toward my eye, that my eye is not anesthetized.

  “Breathe,” Dr. Wald says. “Breathe.” But my head always goes numb again, and I pull away, and Dr. Wald has to wait for me to resettle myself against the machine. “Nervous today, Laurel?” he asks, not interested.

  ONE Saturday after I had started going to Dr. Wald, Maureen and I walked around outside our old school. We dangled on the little swings with our knees bunched while the dry leaves blew around us, and
Maureen told me she was sleeping with Kevin. Kevin is a sophomore, and to me he had seemed much older than we were when we’d begun high school in September. “What is it like?” I asked.

  “Fine.” Maureen shrugged. “Who do you like these days, anyhow? I notice you haven’t been talking much about Dougie.”

  “No one,” I said. Maureen stopped her swing and looked at me with one eyebrow raised, so I told her—although I was sorry as soon as I opened my mouth—that I’d met someone in the city.

  “In the city?” she said. Naturally, she was annoyed. “How did you get to meet someone in the city?”

  It was just by accident, I told her, because of going to the eye doctor, and anyway it was not some big thing. That was what I told Maureen, but I remembered the first time I had seen Chris as surely as if it were a stone I could hold in my hand.

  IT WAS right after my first appointment with Dr. Wald. I had taken the train into the city after school, and when the doctor was finished with me I was supposed to take a taxi to my sister Penelope’s dancing school, which was on the east side of the Park, and do homework there until Penelope’s class was over and Mother picked us up. Friends of my parents ask me if I want to be a dancer, too, but they are being polite. There is Penelope, and there is me.

  Across the street from the doctor’s office, I saw a place called Jake’s. I stared through the window at the long shining bar and mirrors and round tables, and it seemed to me I would never be inside a place like that, but then I thought how much I hated sitting outside Penelope’s class and how much I hated the doctor’s office, and I opened the door and walked right in.

  I sat down at a table near the wall, and I ordered a Coke. I looked around at all the people with their glasses of colored liquids, and I thought how happy they were—vivid and free and sort of the same, as if they were playing.

  I watched the bartender as he gestured and talked. He was really putting on a show telling a story to some people I could only see from the back. There was a man with shiny, straight hair that shifted like a curtain when he laughed, and a man with curly blond hair, and between them a girl in a fluffy sweater. The men—or boys (I couldn’t tell, and I still don’t know)—wore shirts with seams on the back that curved up from their belts to their shoulders. I watched their shirts, and I watched in the mirror behind the bar as their beautiful goldish faces settled from laughing. I looked at them in the mirror, and I particularly noticed the one with the shiny hair, and I watched his eyes get like crescents, as if he were listening to another story, but then I saw he was smiling. He was smiling into the mirror in front of him, and in the mirror I was just staring, staring at him, and he was smiling back into the mirror at me.

  The next week I went back to Dr. Wald for some tests, and when I was finished, although I’d planned to go do homework at Penelope’s dancing school, I went straight to Jake’s instead. The same two men were at the bar, but a different girl was with them. I pretended not to notice them as I went to the table I had sat at before.

  I had a Coke, and when I went up to the bar to pay, the one with the shiny hair turned right around in front of me. “Clothes-abuse squad,” he said, prizing my wadded-up coat out of my arms. He shook it out and smiled at me. “I’m Chris,” he said, “and this is Mark.” His friend turned to me like a soldier who has been waiting, but the girl with them only glanced at me and turned to talk to someone else.

  Chris helped me into my coat, and then he buttoned it up, as if I were a little child. “Who are you?” he said.

  “Laurel,” I said.

  Chris nodded slowly. “Laurel,” he said. And when he said that, I felt a shock on my face and hands and front as if I had pitched against flat water.

  “SO are you going out with this guy or what?” Maureen asked me.

  “Maureen,” I said. “He’s just a person I met.” Maureen looked at me again, but I just looked back at her. We twisted our swings up and let ourselves twirl out.

  “So what’s the matter with your eyes?” Maureen said. “Can’t you just wear glasses?”

  “Well, the doctor said he couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong yet,” I said. “He says he wants to keep me under observation, because there might be something happening to my retina.” But I realized then that I didn’t understand what that meant at all, and I also realized that I was really, but really, scared.

  Maureen and I wandered over to the school building and looked in the window of the fourth-grade room, and I thought how strange it was that I used to fit in those miniature chairs, and that a few years later Penelope did, and that my little brother Paul fit in them now. There was a sickly old turtle in an aquarium on the sill just like the one we’d had. I wondered if it was the same one. I think they’re sort of prehistoric, and some of them live to be a hundred or two hundred years old.

  “I bet your mother is completely hysterical,” Maureen said.

  I smiled. Maureen thinks it’s hilarious the way my mother expects everything in her life (her life!) to be perfect. “I had to bring her with me last week,” I said.

  “Ick,” Maureen said sympathetically, and I remembered how awful it had been, sitting and waiting next to Mother. Whenever Mother moved—to cross her legs or smooth out her skirt or pick up a magazine—the clean smell of her perfume came over to me. Mother’s perfume made a nice little space for her there in the stale office. We didn’t talk at all, and it seemed like a long time before an Asian woman took me into a small white room and turned off the light. The woman had a serious face, like an angel, and she wore a white hospital coat over her clothes. She didn’t seem to speak much English. She sat me down in front of something hanging on the wall which looked like a map of planets drawn in white on black.

  The woman moved a wand across the map, and the end of the wand glimmered. “You say when you see light,” she told me. In the silence I made myself say “Now” over and over as I saw the light blinking here and there upon the planet map. Finally the woman turned on the light in the room and smiled at me. She rolled up the map and put it with the wand into a cupboard.

  “Where are you from?” I asked her, to shake off the sound of my voice saying “Now.”

  She hesitated, and I felt sick, because I thought I had said something rude, but finally the meaning of the question seemed to reach her. “Japanese,” she said. She put the back of her hand against my hair. “Very pretty,” she said. “Very pretty.”

  Then Dr. Wald looked at my eyes, and after that Mother and I were brought into his consulting room. We waited, facing the huge desk, and eventually the doctor walked in. There was just a tiny moment when he saw Mother, but then he sat right down and explained, in a sincere, televisionish voice I had never heard him use before, that he wanted to see me once a month. He told my mother there might or might not be “cause for concern,” and he spoke right to her, with a little frown as she looked down at her clasped hands. Men always get important like that when they’re talking to her, and she and the doctor both looked extra serious, as if they were reminding themselves that it was me they were talking about, not each other. While Mother scheduled me for the last week of each month (on Thursday, because of Penelope’s class) the cross-looking receptionist seemed to be figuring out how much Mother’s clothes cost.

  When Mother and I parked in front of Penelope’s dancing school, Penelope was just coming out with some of the other girls. They were in jeans, but they all had their hair still pulled up tightly on top of their heads, and Penelope had the floaty, peaceful look she gets after class. Mother smiled at her and waved, but then she looked suddenly at me. “Poor Laurel,” she said. Tears had come into her eyes, and answering tears sprang into my own, but mine were tears of unexpected rage. I saw how pleased Mother was, thinking that we were having that moment together, but what I was thinking, as we looked at each other, was that even though I hadn’t been able to go to Jake’s that afternoon because of her, at least now I would be able to go back once a month and see Chris.

  “And all
week,” I told Maureen, “Mother has been saying I got it from my father’s family, and my father says it’s glaucoma in his family and his genes have nothing to do with retinas.”

  “Really?” Maureen asked. “Is something wrong with your dad?”

  Maureen is always talking about my father and saying how “attractive” he is. If she only knew the way he talks about her! When she comes over, he sits down and tells her jokes. A few weeks ago when she came by for me, he took her outside in back to show her something and I had to wait a long time. But when she isn’t at our house, he acts as if she’s just some stranger. Once he said to me that she was cheap.

  OF COURSE, there was no reason for me to think that Chris would be at Jake’s the next time I went to the doctor’s, but he was. He and Mark were at the bar as if they’d never moved. I went to my little table, and while I drank my Coke I wondered whether Chris could have noticed that I was there. Then I realized that he might not remember me at all.

  I was stalling with the ice in the bottom of my glass when Chris sat down next to me. I hadn’t even seen him leave the bar. He asked me a lot of things—all about my family and where I lived, and how I came to be at Jake’s.

  “I go to a doctor right near here,” I told him.

  “Psychiatrist?” he asked.

  All I said was no, but I felt my face stain red.

  “I’m twenty-seven,” he said. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

  “Well, some people are,” I said.

  I was hoping Chris would assume I was much older than I was. People usually did, because I was tall. And it was usually a problem, because they were disappointed in me for not acting older (even if they knew exactly how old I was, like my teachers). But what Chris said was “I’m much, much older than you. Probably almost twice as old.” And I understood that he wanted me to see that he knew perfectly well how old I was. He wanted me to see it, and he wanted me to think it was strange.