Women and Men, Page 2

  “Of course,” I went on, “it would help enormously if you told me what it was I should do. I wasn’t lying when I said I did not recognize you, and surely your appearance is unforgettable—” It was a mistake to sound this note. He was now definitely scowling. In haste I applied corrective adjustments: “I mean, I have a remarkable memory for faces, and as it happens—”

  “Shut your fucking flytrap,” he growled. “Gonna say one thing once, and ain’t gonna say it again, so get it straight the one time I say it, because you ain’t gonna hear it any more.”

  I made a mental memorandum on his tendency, only now revealed, to be redundant: it might be his usable weakness.

  “I’m listening,” said I. “I need only to hear it once.”

  “Well, you better,” said he, taking a ponderous step in my direction, “because I ain’t gonna chew my cabbage twice.”

  “Of course,” I said, subtly inserting the tip of the wedge with which I might eventually cause him to topple, “if your statement proves unusually complex, there might well be some advantage in repetition, using alternative terms and varying syntaxes, not only for the sake of sheer verbal charm, but also with an eye to the state of affairs in the English language, in which, as one authority asserts, the only exact synonyms are ‘furze’ and ‘gorse.’”

  He seemed to reflect on my suggestion for a moment, and then he asserted that on further interruption by me he would kick me so vigorously as to bring my mouth and my rectum into juxtaposition, though to be sure he used different locutions to construct that vivid image.

  He concluded with: “Listen to this here: you tell Teddy Villanova to lay off Junior Washburn.”

  I repeated these names sotto voce, and then, because I detected no quickening of elephantine leg in preparation for the lifting of mastodon foot, I said aloud though not very: “Yes, sir. Yes, I will—if ever I meet Mr. Villanova I shall convey that message instanter. In fact, even before saying ‘hi,’ if at all possible. But—and please don’t feel it necessary to strike me again—I do not now know that gentleman, or in view of your apparent feeling towards him, that scoundrel. Nor have I had the pleasure of Mr. Washburn’s acquaintance. I have in fact never before heard either name.”

  This assertion, accompanied by every toadying embellishment of gesture and fix of face, had no effect upon him.

  He lifted the hand with which he had chopped me and, having pondered for a moment, went to the sink and washed it quickly though with care. The mountain of his body approached me again. Once again I had had time to go for my gun, but now I had squandered it in reflection: no, the names meant nothing to me. I do have an excellent memory, and I had not had that many clients to forget. Since leaving college, I have had no male friends.

  “Look here,” I said. “I don’t wish to offend you, but this is surely a case of mistaken identity.”

  He pointed at my throat with a dripping hand. “Gimme that towel.”

  At any rate, my emergency cravat did not fool him. I unwound it and handed it over. He dried his fingers and threw the towel in my face. I was blinded for an instant. When I removed the clasp of wet terry cloth he was gone, having once more slipped through the narrow doorway as deftly as a perch fins among subaqueous rocks.

  Now I did go for my pistol, removing from the shelf the two-volumed Complete Plato, boxed, and taking the weapon from the thick dust behind. Automatic in my besmirched hand, I dashed through the outer office and into the hallway.

  The big man was nowhere to be seen.

  We had but one elevator, for both passengers and freight, and its door was just opening. Peggy Tumulty emerged, carrying a white bag, with stridently colored logo, of the nearest Blimpie Base, which was her alternate source of lunch, the other being a Chinese take-out sweatshop on Lex.

  She waved the bag at me. “Fancy meeting—”

  “See him? Where’d he go?”

  “Don’t have to bite my head off,” said she, disregarding the questions, anguished movements, and gun. She huffily jerked her shoulders and marched into the office.

  I raced to the stairway door, situated between the toilet and The Ganymede Press. I seldom encountered the personnel of the latter because they invariably used the steps rather than the elevator, perhaps for discretion—though in truth one in good condition could make better time on foot than on the old lift.

  Descending, I heard nothing but my own dampened footfalls on the ancient stairs. I was still in my stocking feet, picking up the odd splinter from the desiccated wood. One penetrated my big toe: I limped down the last flight.

  Sam Polidor, the landlord, stood in the wretched lobby, if it could be called that, picking at the scabbed wall near the rank of mailboxes, not built-ins but rather separate black-tin containers of the old-fashioned style used formerly in small towns like the little village, dreaming on the banks of the Hudson, in which I was reared. These current examples were frequently rifled by derelicts, first among them, I suspected, the super, and it was not unusual to find a pool of vomit on the floor beneath.

  Without turning his outsized horn-rims on me, speaking in response to my footsteps alone, as was his wont, Sam said: “Be happy to know a paint job is in the offing. Not today, and not tomorrow, but soon.”

  “Did you see a great big man come down here?” I asked, gasping between each second word, not so much because of the physical exertion as in delayed rage at having been so savagely and undeservedly used in my own office.

  “Never,” Sam said negligently. He looked at me now, first at my nose and then at my pistol. “You’ll murder me because the elevator’s out of order?”

  “Oh.” I lowered the gun, which had been pointing at the swollen knot of his cerise necktie. His shirt was striped with puce over a ground of jonquil. “Do these names mean anything to you? Teddy Villanova? Junior Washburn?”

  I had decided that the man could not have gained the street in the moments since he had left the third floor. Therefore he must be lurking somewhere in the building above. Now my anger began to recede. Whether he had damaged me enough to justify my shooting him after an office-to-office search was in doubt. I am not accustomed to premeditating violence.

  Indeed, I was already at the point from which I might have retired in embarrassment had not I been irked by the insolent grin Sam now displayed.

  “I assure you this is no joke.”

  “I assure you I’m shitting in my pants,” cried Sam, thus identifying his expression as hysterical. He continued in the same state for some time after I had deposited the gun onto the dirty handkerchief in my back pocket.

  “I had too many pistols pointed at me!” he howled.

  I tried to pat his shoulder, but he recoiled even from that gesture of compassion. “Sorry,” said I. “I forgot about the Nazis.”

  “I’m native-born,” he wailed. “It happened to me in midtown.”

  I realized that it was definitely useless to look further for Bakewell if I had not the stomach to shoot him. The gun, so little that three-quarters of it vanished in even my medium-sized fist, was not, if merely displayed, that formidable a threat to a man of his quantity. I had the awful feeling that he would nonchalantly crush it inside my hamburgered hand and pile-drive me again with the other fist.

  The aftereffect of the first blow now, in my static situation, began to assert itself; also, my pierced toe smarted. Sam’s image registered on my retinas as if I were staring through lenses of lemon-lime Jell-O in which banana rounds were embedded. My neck seemed to support a beer barrel, and my thorax was a construction of pipe cleaners. Only mixed metaphors will serve here: I was a chrestomathy of them at this juncture. I sought support against the leprous wall. My hand brushed one of the mailboxes, and the tin container quavered on its rusty nail, then dropped clattering onto the floor.

  Even in my vertigo I was worried about Sam’s reaction. Mean as he was about building maintenance, he took it very ill if a tenant so much as extinguished a cigarette under heel on the premises or lost one Pl
anter’s Dry Roasted peanut from the package, crying “Fire!” or “Rats!” as the case might be. He had an especial, and negative, concern about the wretched mailboxes, “Government property!” and used that technicality as an excuse never to have them replaced or even rehung firmly. The damnable thing was that despite the injustice of his attitude, his persistence in it tended to cow me. I have never been able to cope with the self-righteous, self-pitying assurance of indigenous New Yorkers.

  Therefore although any decent mailbox should survive such a slight graze, I knew guilt in dislodging this one, said, “Sorry, Sam,” and prepared nevertheless, in my faint condition, to hear a complaint.

  But Sam was silent…No, as I ascertained with a slow revolution of head, seemingly in my dizziness the full 360-degree circuit, traveling the inside wall of a fishbowl, no, in fact Sam had vanished. The door of the cellarway was ajar and still trembling.

  I did not immediately plunge to retrieve the fallen container, fearing I would be too weak to rise thereafter. Being careful this time where I placed my wrist, I supported myself against the wall and inclined my head, bringing my eye very near the hinged lid of another box—my own, in fact. One end of a long envelope protruded from it. I found the energy to curse Peggy again, one of her few duties in this period of nonbusiness being at least promptly to fetch the mail.

  Annoyance being with me always a source of strength, I pushed myself erect and removed the envelope. Without looking at its face, I tore it open and extracted the single sheet of paper within. I read the following legend, typed flawlessly, the spellings sic.

  DEAR TEDDY,

  I’m not going to push the panick button. I have my weaknesses, as you are the first to know, but I keep a stiff upper chin when the cards are down. I won’t knuckle under, show the white feather, and I don’t intend for a moment to run away with my tale between my legs. Under ordinary circumstances I would take my medicine, but there is something rotten in the state of Danemark. Be careful the tables aren’t terned on you.

  Yours firmly,

  /s/ DONALD WASHBURN II

  I then inspected the front of the envelope and saw the by now well-known name, for the still mysterious personage: MR. TEDDY VILLANOVA. Followed only by the number of the building, my own name not in accompaniment; and there was no return address. Why had it been put in my box? Who was Villanova? Who, besides being a master of received idioms, was Washburn? Just as a tissue of cliches did not, these days, rule out a Harvard education, his Roman numeral was not necessarily a suggestion of good birth: that sort of thing had already become a popular affectation among the lower middle class in my childhood. My high-school friend, son of a private refuse collector, called himself Dom Mastromarino II.

  I scanned the designations on the remaining mailboxes, for Sam Polidor was never to be trusted when asked for information about the other tenants; not that he was consciously discreet: he neither read nor heard attentively. He had referred on occasion to my nearest neighbors as the “Gung-Ho people,” and to the Wyandotte Club, the after-hours establishment on the second floor, as “those Wyoming guys.” In my own name, simple as it is, Russel Wren, he often transposed the vowels and called me Run, and though Private Investigator was printed on my rent checks and also on the card Scotch-taped to the face of the mailbox, he persistently believed me a salesman of novelties, once showing me a rubber puppy dog he had purchased from a sidewalk vendor—pressing the bulb that formed one terminal of the tiny hose from which it depended inflated and ejected its pink tongue—“Should take on such a cute item in your line, Run.”

  No Villanova was listed on any mailbox. I did not expect to find Washburn. He, after all, was writing to this address, not from it.

  I made my way, still giddy, to the directory board on the wall between the outer and inner doors of the entry-way, a foul six square feet of sticky tile and the oppressive stench of urine, and looked through every name on the roster, there being only eight for the four stories above the street. The ground floor, aside from the loathsome little lobby in which I stood, was occupied by a greasy-spoon, ptomaine-terror-type of lunch counter, with its own entrance next door.

  The first thing I learned from the directory board was that the white-plastic letters for Fun Things, Inc., the actual novelties firm with whom Polidor confused me, had as usual been rearranged by a nonperfectionist wit into FUCING, to do no more than which the original vandal, perhaps the same individual, had jimmied the lock on the protective glass last year. Sam of course never made a repair. He had in fact not noticed the alteration until I pointed it out, and even then he said: “Oh, yeah, Foosing, they went under and moved out, owing me a bundle.” From time to time I had idly reassembled the letters in their proper sequence, but my unknown competitor soon made amends.

  I went through the rest of the board: Alpenstock Industries, 2A, whatever they were; Custer’s Last Dance, 5B, a rock group who used their loft, thank God the far rear one on the top floor, as practice hall; Corngold & Co., 4A, who I believe dealt in costume-jewelry findings, giving Polidor the pretext for a rare bon mot, “for costumed Jews,” he having the habitual New Yorkish derisive regard for his own folk.

  After these, and Fucing, the unused letters from which were confettied pathetically at the bottom of the case, came: Natural Relations, 5A, some sort of marriage-counseling service or perhaps a computer-dating agency, Sam being unclear as to the distinction, and for this lack of clarity I should defend him.

  Next was Newhouse, E., 3A, a name I had never noticed before, but then I had never before scanned the board with such care; and Nice Nelly Fashions, long defunct and replaced in 3B by, these six months, my Ganymede neighbors, who as yet, typical of Sam’s negligence and perhaps of their own, unless they had good reason to avoid publicity, had no listing.

  The Wyandotte Club was the last-named, the penultimate being myself—or rather WERN R. I had been too busy mending FUCING to check on the sequence of the letters in my own name—and had earned the inevitable punishment of the meddler.

  Transposing the R and the N was the work of a moment, but a moment more distinguished by two other phenomena: one, I realized that the unknown Newhouse was registered as of the same office number as my own, 3A, and erroneously so unless Peggy had assumed a pseudonym—or had lied about her real name from the first: I was a bit paranoid from the blow on the forehead, but dismissed the feeling as I became conscious of the second event now in progress: the elevator was descending with its noise so suggestive of the trappings of Marley’s ghost, i.e., as if hung with chains and cashboxes.

  Had Bakewell lain doggo in the third-floor toilet and only now, the coast cleared, taken the descent to the street? I clawed for my gun but found only the wadded handkerchief, as moist as a flayed peach: at some point I must have mopped my brow.

  I was frantically searching the rest of my person when I heard the elevator thuddingly arrive at its ground-floor terminal. I had propped open the inside door of the entry-way so that it would not slam and lock behind me. My keys were on my desk top upstairs, next to a half-eaten bar of Cadbury’s mint-filled milk chocolate. Sam had of late disdained the truth that a commercial building should be accessible during business hours, and if by locking the door he excluded some criminals, he must surely have discouraged some customers as well, there being no intercommunication system from lobby to offices. (Which consideration produced another question: how did Bakewell get in?)

  Not being able to find my gun, I went to kick away the wooden wedge that held the portal open, and then, having provided at least that pitiful, temporary barrier against pursuit (all but useless, for the door of course was never locked against departures—but this is the reflection of a tranquillity that was remote from me at that time), sprint for the policeman who sometimes directed traffic at the adjacent intersection (but only if, at Friday rush-hour, there had been an accident involving more than one car—if you can think clearly after a savage assault by an eight-foot brute, who is furthermore en route to give you more
of the same, I applaud you).

  However, having foolishly inserted the peg, with its crude, hand-carved serrations, too firmly at the outset, I could not quickly free it now. Rejecting the first clause of my plan, then, I turned to run—but was suddenly struck by the failure of Bakewell, if indeed it was he, to leave the elevator. The door had slid open, as I could see from my extreme angle, ten feet away, but no passenger emerged in the now more than adequate time for such egress.

  All in all, I think this was rather intrepid: my face warming from retained breath, I gingerly approached the facility, broadening and deepening, as I went, the portion of the cab available to my vision. When I could see about a quarter of the interior, a tremendous shoe, sole at right angles to the floor, came with it; at a third, I had all of one enormous leg of trouser and most of the other; they were horizontal and diagonal.

  When I was full face with the open car, I saw him in his entirety. His trunk was vertical in the far left comer. His expanse of florid face was impassive. His eyes were closed. I knew he was Bakewell. I thought he was dead.

  2

  I stayed in the hall and examined the body by eye, having a horror of corpses and also being well aware of the injunction, enunciated in first-aid manuals and on TV police shows, against the civilian moving of the victim of any disaster—and I certainly should have had to disturb his body in a search for what brought him down; no symptom was visible.

  Everyone knows, after one visit to a funeral parlor—and, alas, as a child I was dragged on many—that even an embalmed body will be seen to breathe under the fixed stare. Therefore I assigned Bakewell to my peripheral vision, first on one side, then the alternative. If he was not as dead as the cold lasagna on which the tomato sauce has begun to darken, I was a Dutchman. The gaudy and, in the absence of blood, inappropriate metaphor actually came to mind at the moment, as a willed ruse to lure me away from panic—the fundamental purpose of most caprices of language, hence the American wisecrack—but it failed.