They split up at the main gate, each stealing back to his room
separately. "Tomorrow night, maybe we do some real jazzing," said the
boy in the wheelchair as they parted.
Exhilarated as he slipped past Lennie's darkened office, Stern,
approaching his room, felt his stomach and was surprised to find the
tapestry still prickling raw against it. Perhaps excitement is not good
for it, he thought--even good excitement. But it did not really bother
him, and it occurred to him for the first time that if necessary, by
God, he would live with the damned thing. He opened his door now and
saw the half man, bathrobe flown apart, toothache towel around his jaw,
sitting on Stern's bed. The sleeping actor's foot stirred momentarily,
tapping the edge of the bed in time to some forgotten vaudeville turn.
Stern wheeled around in a panic, wanting to flee the room until the
half man was out of there and his bed was scrubbed. He went out into
the hall, but the half man chased and caught him, gripping Stern's
wrist in a death vise. "Question," he radio-croaked in the dark hall.
"What?" asked Stern, his eyes closed so he would not see the half man,
not daring to inhale lest he smell his halves.
"You Jewish?" the man asked, croaking so close his mouth worked against
Stern's ear.
"Yes," said Stern, shutting his eyes until they hurt.
"Me, too," croaked the man, wheeling Stern around so that he had to
face him. "I'm Jewish, too."
It did not thrill Stern to hear this. It was no great revelation, and
it failed to touch him, just as the man's terrible violin playing had
not moved him either. He said, "OK," and freed his wrist, but as he
walked away a crumbling chill seemed to invade him, starting between
his shoulder blades and pouring through all of him. He turned and
kissed the man and hugged him and put his nose up against the man's
toothache towel, and then, perhaps using some of the courage he had
amassed that evening, embraced the man's bad side, too.
* * * * *
He had counted on firm handshakes and hearty good-byes, exchanged phone
numbers, pledges to continue friendships, and deep sincere looks in the
eye, but on the morning of his departure he found that the people at
Grove hung away from him. He was sitting on the porch with them, after
leading the dumb march back from breakfast with Rooney in his arms, and
he said to Rooney, "I'm all better and I'm going home today."
Rooney, who had been clinging to a pole and making waspish comments
about the wealth of horse owners, turned to Stern and said, "You didn't
say anything about that."
The old actor overheard Stern and said, "What did you come up for, if
you were only staying such a little time? That's really country, boy,
really country."
It was as though by getting healthy he had violated a rotted, fading
charter of theirs and let them down. He had come into their sick club
under false pretenses, enjoying the decayed rituals, and all the while
his body wasn't ruined at all. He was secretly healthy, masquerading as
a shattered man so that he could milk the benefits of their crumbling
society. And now he felt bad about not being torn up as they were.
"I didn't know you weren't that sick," said Feldner in his bathrobe. "I
had what you got, and I needed the warm of a stew in me every day for
two years."
"I may have to come right back," said Stern, trying to make the man in
the bathrobe feel better.
He went over to the charged-up blond boy, who was leaning on the young
Greek's wheelchair, and said, "Maybe you can take a run by my place
when you get sprung."
But the camaraderie of the wild evening was gone. "You weren't even in
here much," said the blond boy, and the Greek youth said, "Yeah, what'd
you come up here--to fool around?"
Only Lennie was consistent that morning. He had taken Stern's baggage
out of the room himself, and when Stern tried to help him, he said,
"No infractions on last days. There are patients who rupture before
check-out, and legal suits come about. Patients to the right as we take
baggage downstairs." At the bottom of the steps, he loaded Stern's
valises onto the baggage rack and walked intricately into his office.
"Final pill," he said to Stern, getting one ready in a little cup. When
the Negro handed him the pill cup, Stern stuck a folded-up five-dollar
bill in the pocket of the intern's jacket. His mother had always stuck
bills in the pockets of busboys and waiters and, after each insertion,
had said, "I never missed that kind of money. You should see the
respect I got for it." Lennie took the bill out of his jacket, examined
it, and put it back in his pocket. He started to turn around, but
then he changed his mind and asked Stern, "Anyone around?" Stern said
everyone was out on the porch, and the Negro said, "Come on in here
then," beckoning Stern into the forbidden office. "Have a seat," said
Lennie, locking them both in. He sat down himself, releasing gears and
switches, and then produced a loose-leaf notebook. He thumbed through
it, stopped at a page, and said, "The old actor guy. Guy you roomin'
with. He go around saying he got the weakness. He ain't coming out of
here. They been trying to get him ready for another operation, but
he too weak." He flipped the page and said, "Girl check in here two
days ago," referring to a young and pretty blond girl who had kept to
herself. "She says she restin'. Well, she got something in her from
intercoursin' with a man too big for her. Who else you want to know?"
"None of the others right now," said Stern, wanting to leave the room
but afraid to offend the Negro.
"That's all right," said Lennie, turning to another page. "Rooney, the
guy you carryin'. Bones softening up; nothing they can do on him. He
be here for the duration." He flipped again. "Feldner, the Jew fella.
He hit Casino. He gettin' out but ain't got no more'n a year." Without
referring to the book, he said, "The half guy you see stalkin' around.
He surprisin' everybody. He gawn be around when they all through."
The Negro ran through the other patients, while Stern made himself
small in his chair and tried to block out all sound. After the last
patient, Stern found himself putting another bill in the Negro's
pocket, as though he hadn't realized what he was getting and saw now
that he had underpaid.
A sweet and choirlike glow came over the Negro's face as he showed
Stern out of the office and began to push the baggage cart. All the
way to the administration building he blurted out secrets of the Home.
"Nobody know it, but they get tranquilizer every day," he said. "Guy
gonna die, we shift him to Room 12 so we can whip him out of there when
he go and not shake up no one."
And after each batch of secrets, Stern compulsively stuffed another
bill in the Negro's jacket, wanting him to stop and tell no others,
yet paying him for each pair. On the front steps of the administration
building, Stern saw his wife's car. The Negro, a little flustered,
strained for a climactic one and finally said, "Staff get to eat better
than the patients. We get better cuts of meat and all we want." Stern
let Lennie get his bags on the car rack and stuffed a final five into
his pocket.
"You didn't have to tell me any of those," Stern said, getting behind
the wheel and taking his last look at the Grove Rest Home. But then,
lest he hurt the Negro attendant's feelings, he said, "But thanks," and
swept out of the driveway.
* * * * *
"I thought I'd always have it in there, but the parachute is gone,"
Stern told his wife as they drove home. "It feels as though I have a
hot tablecloth around the front of me now, but it's better than the
chute."
She sat beside him with one tanned leg folded beneath her, her great
eyes glistening, wet with expectancy. She wore a cotton jumper, and
when Stern leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her blouse was loose
and he could make out the start of her nipples beneath her half bra.
It got him nervous, and he said, "Why are you wearing your blouse like
that? When you bend over, people can actually see the nipples. That
isn't any damned good."
"It isn't?" she said, teasing him. "Oh well, don't worry; it's only
when you get real close."
"None of that's funny," said Stern. "I just got out of the goddamned
place for my stomach. Do you still go to that dance class?"
"Oh yes," she said, sitting against the door, her eyes huge. "That's
what saved me when you were in there. First we dance like crazy and
then we congregate at the overnight diner on Olivetti Street. That's
the best part. You should hear one of the girls talk. Dirtier than
anything you've ever heard. She's a scream. Then José spins me home,
since he lives out our way."
"Is there any more of that tongue stuff?" Stern asked.
"Don't be silly," she said. "He kisses everybody. It's what they do."
She hung back against the door, her skirt above her browned knees,
and Stern wondered whether she had gone to bed with the instructor,
getting into tangled, modern dance positions with him. How did he know
she hadn't spent the entire five weeks of his sickness at endless,
exhausting, intricately choreographed lovemaking, flying to the
instructor seconds after she had deposited Stern at the Home? She
seemed curled up, contented, shimmering with peace, as though someone
had finally pressed the right buttons and relieved the dry, chattering
hunger Stern had never been able to cope with. Perhaps she had gone
to him in a desperate way, knowing that the instructor, however thin
of bone and feminine of gesture, would never allow her to be insulted
and would attack any offender with Latin fury. In any case, the secret
was locked between her warm thighs. He would never know what had gone
on, and he felt a drooping, weakened sensation and wondered why there
couldn't be a chemical test, a litmus paper you could hold up to women
to find out how many times they'd been to bed since last you saw them.
"Were having a recital and I've got to rehearse practically every
night. It saved me while you were away. I'd have gone crazy."
"I don't know about any recitals," Stern said. "I've got to have
everything easy on me. I don't want that thing coming back. I never
want to go back to any rest homes. If I go back there, I'm really
cooked."
At the Home, several days before Stern left, Rooney, hanging from an
overhead porch beam, had told Stern of a merchant seaman who had gotten
over an ulcer and who subsequently was incapable of being riled. "You
could stick it into him from morning till midnight and he'd just give
you a little smile and off he'd go like a contented cow." Now, as he
drove home, Stern, who had spoken sharply to his wife and had felt
the hot brocade tighten against the front of him, began suddenly to
follow the procedure of Rooney's man. He held the controls gently in
his hands, tapping lightly on the foot pedals and scanning the road
ahead easily, as if too vigorous a motion might topple his head from
his shoulders. He began to do things in a slow and mincing way, as
though he might be able to whisper and tiptoe through life, hushing his
way past death itself. At the tollbooth, he smiled meltingly at the
uniformed attendant, and when the man took his fifty cents, Stern said,
"Thanks a lot."
"Why did you thank him?" his wife asked.
"Why not?" said Stern.
Later, when they approached the outskirts of Stern's town, they drove
past small houses with neatly kept lawns and Stern nodded in a friendly
way to the people who stood outside them. He knew they were all
gentiles and he wondered what would happen in a pogrom. Which ones, if
any, would hide him and his family from the authorities? Probably quite
a few, he thought; ones that would surprise him. Probably the people
with the most forbidding gentile faces. Ordinarily they'd never have
anything to do with Stern, but if it came to a pogrom, with New England
crustiness they'd spirit Stern and his family off to attics, saying to
one another, "No one's going to tell us what to do with our Jews."
As they drove past the man's house, Stern held his breath and closed
his eyes for a second, as though there were a chance it might not be
there. He had been away five weeks, and perhaps part of his cure was
that the man's house would be swept away or that it would disappear as
though it had never been there, much like his vanished ulcer. But the
house stood in the same place, and Stern, as he drove by, inclined his
head gently toward it, as though he would face whatever horrors lay
inside with softness and gentle ways, melting them with his niceness.
As he neared his own house, he wondered fleetingly what he, the man
down the street, would do in the event of a pogrom. Would he startle
Stern by spiriting his despised Jewish neighbors away in his cellar,
hating pogroms as even more un-American than Stern?
In his house, Stern sat down in the easy chair of his sparsely
furnished living room and said to his wife, "Softly and easily. That's
how it's going to have to be. No noise. No upsets."
His son came out with a bandage on his elbow and said, "What's it like
to die?"
Stern said, "I'm not doing any dying for a while. But there'll be no
rough playing any more. Everything with Daddy is soft and easy. Where
did you get the cut? That's the kind of thing I don't want to get
involved in, but where did you get it?"
"I found it on me in the morning," said the boy, beginning to suck a
blanket.
Stern's wife, who had been boiling eggs for him in the kitchen,
hollered in, "There's one last thing you're going to get a kick out of
doing. The kind of thing you'll enjoy. I'll tell you about it later."
Stern started to eat the eggs, but they stuck in his throat and he
said, "What's the thing? I don't want to get into anything two minutes
after I'm back from a rest home."
"I wouldn't tell it to you, except it's the kind of thing you'll enjoy
taking care of. Some kids came by on a bike, older than him, and one
of them cut his elbow with a mirror and called him 'Matzoh.' I've been
furious, but I saved it for you because I know it's the kind of thing
you'll want to settle."
"He doesn't live around here, that bad boy," said Stern's son. "He's
just visiting someone here. I wish you'd make the boy die."
"Daddies don't make small boys die," said Stern. The brocade that lay
across the front of him began to heat up, and he pressed his fist deep
into his stomach and held it there, on guard lest another ulcer begin
to sprout forth and fill his ribs.
"Nobody seems to have heard what I've been saying," he said to his
wife, but then he clasped his son's head and said, "You're right; it
is the kind of thing I'd like to take care of." He took the boy to his
car, squeezing his hand, and for a second it seemed that the child was
really holding _his_ hand, leading Stern and protecting him. He drove
the car in a wide arc, as far as possible from the kike man's house,
and the child said, "You're going too far. The bad boy won't be around
here."
"You point him out to me," said Stern, the front of him on fire,
crouched over as though to give the flames less area to ruin. They came
to a cluster of seven boys who'd gotten off their bikes to rest, and
Stern stopped the car, gripping his son's hand for courage. He went
among them and said, "Someone said something to my son and cut him.
They said a dirty thing to him, and it had better not happen again."
"Don't make them dead," his son said. "They're not the bad boys."
Stern grabbed the collar of one of them, twisted him close, and said,
"I can really get sore, and when I do I can really start swinging. That
better not happen again."
The boy looked at him evenly, without fear, and Stern released him.
He must have been around twelve, and Stern wondered whether he would
remember and two years later, at fourteen, with his body shaping into
athletic hardness, come after Stern and pummel him to the ground.
Stern got back into the car with his son and, continuing in the arc,
he drove slowly through the streets and stopped alongside a small boy
with glasses and large feet who was walking next to the curb, carrying
books.
"Someone said something lousy to my son and cut him," Stern said from
the car. "I don't like the particular kind of thing they said."
"I'm not a little boy," said the book carrier. "I'm seventeen and
finishing high school I'm small and everyone thinks I'm a kid."
"Don't make him dead, Daddy," said Stern's son. Stern felt very sorry
for the small high-school student with his big feet, and yet he was
thrilled to find someone in the neighborhood who read books and wasn't
fierce. He wanted to invite him to his house and give him books, maybe
take him to New York to see Broadway plays.
"Come over if you're near my place," said Stern, and drove off.
"I think the bad boy is visiting over there," said Stern's child,
pointing in the direction of the house that darkened Stern's every
waking moment. Nonetheless, he knitted his eyebrows, bared his teeth,
and gunned the motor, as though, by going through the motions of
outrage, he would somehow become outraged and the momentum would carry
him right up to the man's front door before he had time to change his
mind. He raced toward the man's house, and yet, when he reached it, the
fraud of his facemaking became apparent to him and he continued on,
realizing that he had never intended for a second confronting the man.
In his own home, Stern's wife asked, "Did you find him?" And Stern
said, "I don't want to do any finding. Don't you realize I just came
home from a Home a few hours ago?"
For one blissful second then, Stern's vision blurred and it seemed that
he had gotten it all wrong, that he had not been away at all, and that
he was to leave that very evening for a place where everything would
be made better for him. But then he caught the edge of a chair, his
eyes cleared, and he realized that he really had been away. The thought
that he had come back to find his situation unchanged was maddening.
It was as though he had been guaranteed that the treatment would heal
his neighborhood as well as his ulcer--and that the guarantee had
turned out to have secret clauses, rendering it worthless. The man was
still there. The hospital had not had him removed. His wife had not
somehow arranged to have him eliminated. His father had not gone down
the street to thrust his scarred nose up in the man's face. No hand
had reached down from the heavens and declared that the man had never
existed. He was still right there in his house, not even seriously sick.
Stern went upstairs, and as he sat on the edge of his bed he felt a
small spring inside him stretch and finally break, leaving his body in
a great tremble. He lay back on the bed, as though mere contact with
a bed could cure anything, but he could not quiet himself, and so he
dialed Fabiola.
"A brand new thing has happened," Stern told him. "There's a tremble
in me and I can't control it. The thing is, I've just come _back_ from
the damned rest home. Can you just come back from a place like that and
have something like this happen?"
"Yes," said Fabiola. "You'd better avoid tension or you're going to
wind up back there again. Remember that and call me if you get into
more trouble."
Stern got on his knees now, as though in prayer, clutching fistfuls of
sheet and trying to squeeze out the tremble. The bedroom windows were
darkening with night when his wife appeared, flinging off her shorts,
combing her hair, and saying, "I've got to go to rehearsals."
"Look," Stern said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I really have
to. I've got a new thing and I have to have you here. I'm not talking
about any ulcer but something really new and lousy."
"You mean you want me to give up the dancing? It's the only thing I
have out here."
"You don't know what this new deal is," said Stern. As though to
demonstrate, he began to take short, gasping breaths. It started as a
plea for sympathy, but when he tried to stop he found he couldn't and
he began to cry. "Let's get out of here. Oh, let's sell this house.
We don't belong here. You'll have to handle all the details. Oh, I'm
really in trouble now."
_Part Four_
It was a jangled, careening period that followed, and later he could
remember it only as a black piece torn from his life rather than a
number of days or weeks. He knew that it began trembling on the edge
of a bed at midnight and he remembered how it ended, but he could pick
out only single frenzied moments in between, as though it were all
down on a giant mural he was examining in darkness with an unreliable
flashlight There was no good part of the day for him during this
period, but it was the mornings that seemed the worst because there
were always a giddy few minutes when it seemed he was going to be all
right. But a dry, shriveling tremble would soon come over him, and it
was then that he had to hold on to things, as though to keep himself on
the ground. He held on to chairs and desks and he held on to himself,
always keeping one fist buried deeply in his side, as though to nail
himself down and join together the pieces of human spring that had
snapped within him. Going to work was a stifled, desperate time, and
there was at least one ride when, sealed up in the train, holding the
bottom of his seat with all his might, he thought he was not going to
be able to make it and said to the man next to him, "I'm in a lot of
trouble. You may have to grab me in a second." He remembered that the
man, who smoked a pipe and wore his hat down low, had hardly looked
surprised and said, "I'll keep an eye on you," and then gone back to
his _Times_.
He was certain, on these rides to the city, that he would lose his
breath and begin to bite things so that heavyset men, who'd been
college athletes, would have to sit on him in mid-aisle, pressing
his face to the floor, while conductors signaled on ahead to alert
authorities. Each time the train pulled in, Stern would race gratefully
to the street, sucking in hot blasts of summer air, stunned that he had
made it.
In his office, on these mornings, a motor, powered by rocket fuels,
ran at a dementedly high idle somewhere between his shoulder blades.
He could not sit and he could not stand, and he remembered his narrow
business room as a place to crouch and sweat and hope for time to pass.
A film seemed to seal him off from the others around him. Unable to
think, his mind an endless white lake, he touched papers and opened
drawers and felt pencils, as though by physically going through
remembered motions the work would get done. He did these things in
short, frenzied bursts, holding on to a table with one hand; it seemed
that someone was pulling him into the ground. At noon, his fist socked
deep into his stomach, as though to seal it like a cork, he would run
to a nearby park, where he would fling off his jacket, lie on his back,
and stick his face in the sun, praying that he might sleep or disappear
into the grass. Once he slept a long while in his office clothes, his
face burning up in the heat. He awakened at a crazy, magical time of
day, cool and grateful, the trembling stilled, and for a moment he
thought it might be over. But then the motor turned over quietly and
began to hum.
There was, too, during that period, a numb and choking fear of his
boss, Belavista, that formed suddenly and oppressed Stern. He crouched
within his office and gripped his desk and waited for the Brazilian to
call. The man's confident morning steps in the hall sent Stern looking
for a place to hide. The phone ring became a knife, and once, when it
was late and Belavista summoned him, he flew first to the bathroom
and locked the toilet stall. He could remember that later, in the
front office, Belavista had stood for a long time without talking, his
charred millionaire's face staring out of the skylight, while Stern
died in his tracks. Turning finally, he had said, "How are things going
in there?" And Stern, his tongue shriveling in his mouth, had said, "I
just can't," and had run to put his face up to the park sun, grunting
and squeezing his fists blood red, as though he could force and fight
his way into a sleep.
His house, once he had screamed "Let's sell," became a dirty and
infected place to Stern, and nights, returning home at a desperate
clip, he could remember running lightly across the lawn, as though he
did not want to make contact with the grass; lowering his head, so that
he would not have to see the outside walls; and failing to touch the
alien banister as he flew up to his bed, which was safe and clean and
would go with him to the new place. He spent evenings on his bed, the
cold sheets pacifying him, and he could remember a phone call after
dark in which a man's voice had moaned out at him, "I saw your ad about
the house. I don't want to know about anything but this: what kind of a
neighborhood is it? I mean, is it mixed? Oh, I don't want it to be all
my kind, but it's got to be half and half, a little of everything. I
can't tell you how important that part is." And Stern had moaned back,
"Oh, I know; I really know," joining the man in tears.
There was a time when the house seemed the key to it all, an enemy
that sucked oil and money and posted a kike-hating sentry down the
street to await Stern's doom. But then Stern imagined himself on the
twelfth story of a city apartment building, his house sold, sealed in
now by new kike men, with different faces, occupying the three other
apartments on his floor. He pictured himself high above the city at
night, clawing at the windows. And during what must have been a weekend
he told a solemn Swede who'd come to look the house over, "We have to
stay here and have changed our mind."
The Swede, his head among a forest of basement pipes, hollered down,
"Is it because I'm looking at the pipes?" And Stern said, "No, I'm too
sick to move," and gave his wife the job of evicting the man.
Late at night, as he clutched his sheets in the darkness, ideas seemed
to seize him by the throat, making him rock and cry and pray for sleep.
The deep hot valleys of his wife's body frightened him now, and he
could remember pulling her awake one night and saying, "You've got to
get out of that dance thing. I know you don't go to bed with people,
but the thought that you might is driving me crazy. I don't like to do
this to you, but it'll just be for now, while I'm going through this
thing."
"All right, I won't go to it any more."
"But that's not enough," he said. "What about every second I'm not
with you? It would be easy for you to just pull up your skirt for
someone. The second I leave the house. Or when you're just going alone
somewhere. I'd never know."
"I'm not going to do anything," she said.
"I know, but you could. You could just flip up your skirt and open your
legs and that would be it. It wouldn't take two minutes. And I don't
want any man's thing in you. What would I do if that happened?"
"Well, then, what do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. But it's always going to be that way, all our lives."
And he locked his hand around her wrist, as though only by holding
her that way could he prevent her from flying out of the room in a
desperate hunt for alien bodies.
He waited those nights for the trembling to stop, the engine to stop
pumping. There had always been an end to bad things before--fevers
dropped, homicidal dreams were chased by the dawn, and once, when
he was a boy, his arm, heavy with a great infection, had suddenly
fizzled and gone back to normal. But, now, it was as though he were
an automobile with a broken horn, doomed to blare forever in a quiet
residential neighborhood, all wiring experts having long been shipped
out of the country. Sometimes, writhing and wet on the sheets at
midnight, he would tell his wife, "I'm touching bottom," but it wasn't
really true. He seemed to be holding on to a twig, halfway down a
sheer, rain-slick mountain. How nice it would be to let go. But he
had only $800, and it would be eaten up quickly if he were put in a
sanatorium. He imagined himself in such a place at the end of three
days, the $800 gone, in a terrible panic, unable even to lie back and
be crazy with the other patients. And so he held on to the twig and he
clutched at people, too, pulling at men's lapels and women's skirts on
steaming city streets, telling them he was in bad trouble.
When it got so bad it seemed he'd have to smash himself against
something to make the trembling stop, he would take some stranger's
sleeve in the city and say, "I know this is going to sound crazy, but
I'm pretty upset here and wish you would just talk to me a second." It
amazed him that no one was perturbed by this. People seemed to welcome
the chance to exchange wisdoms at midday with a strangulating young
man. And Stern, no matter how banal their words, would attach great
and profound significance to them, adopting each piece of advice as a
slogan to live by. "I'm going to tell you something that's going to
help you, fellow," an elderly gentleman said to him. "I was in trouble
once, too, and I decided then and there never to give anyone more'n
half a loaf. You remember that and you'll never go wrong again." And
Stern said to him, "You know, that's right. I can see where, if you
follow that, you'll always come out right." And he went off, determined
to stop giving up entire loaves, convinced he had come up with the key
to his trembling. A Negro ice-cream salesman told him, "You got to
stop lookin' for things," and a retired jewelry executive, seized in a
restaurant, advised him against "letting any person get hold of you."
In both cases, Stern had said, "You know, you've really got it. I'm
going to remember that."
He recalled being in many places and then running, choking, out of
them. Once in a darkened, cavernlike restaurant, he ordered six
lunchtime courses and thought to himself, "This is the end of it. I'm
going to sit here like all the other men and eat, and when I leave this
table it's all going to be over." But the service was slow, he lost his
breath, and when the juice came, he gulped it down, threw out clumps
of dollars, and flew from the pitlike restaurant, clawing for air.
Another time, floundering across the hot city pavements, on an impulse
he plunged into a physical culture studio and signed up for a six-year
course. "I want to start right this minute," he said, and was shown
to a locker. In shorts, he went into the gym, where the only person
exercising was a great, bearlike man with oil-slick hair and huge,
ballooning arms. He said to Stern, "Come here. Were you in the Army?"
"I was a flier," said Stern.
"I took a lot of crap from a drill sergeant in the Marines," said the
man. "He'd stand out there, and the bullshit would come out of him in
quart bottles, but do you know the only thing that saved me?"
"What's that?"
"His arms. They weren't even sixteens. I've got eighteens, myself. He'd
stand there, and the shit would flow about how tough he was, but all
you'd have to do is look at his arms and it didn't mean anything. How
am I supposed to respect a man who doesn't have arms?"
"You can't," said Stern.
"Well, I'm going to do some arm work," the man said, and began to curl
a great dumbbell into his lap. Stern watched his arms expand and said,
"I can't seem to get started today." He dressed and then ran, gasping
and unshowered, for the daylight.
Once, when the sound of Belavista's slippered footsteps down the hall
sent him spinning into the streets, he ran into a telephone booth and
called Fabiola.
"This thing isn't getting any better," he said. "It's like I swallowed
an anthill. I'm jumping through my ass. You've got to send me to
someone."
"Psychiatry's up in the air," said Fabiola. "There's the cost, too.
Take a grain of pheno when you feel upset this way."
"I don't care about any expense. I don't think you know what's going
on with me. It isn't the ulcer any more. I'd take a dozen of those
compared to this new thing."
"All right, then," said Fabiola. "There's one good man. He's ten per
session, and he _has_ helped people."
"I really want to see him, then," said Stern.
The psychiatrist was a rail-thin man who talked with a lisp and whose
office smelled musty and psychiatric. It bothered Stern that he had
only one tiny diploma on the wall.
"Can it hurt me?" Stern asked.
"No," said the man. "Sometimes you dig down and come up with something
very bad, but generally it helps."
"There's probably something lousy like that in me," said Stern. "How
much is this going to cost?"
"Twenty a session."
Stern began to choke and said, "I heard ten. Oh God, I can't pay
twenty." He gasped and sobbed and the man seemed to panic along with
him.
"Maybe there's something about money," said the lisping psychiatrist.
"Some people think it's dirty."
"No, no, it's the amount. Oh God, don't you just want to _help_
people?" He got up, gasping, sucking in musty, psychiatric air, and the
psychiatrist, gasping and white, too, said, "Maybe you think money has
a smell. We could go into that."
"No, no," said Stern, "we're not going into anything. Imagine how
you'd feel expecting ten and then hearing twenty." And with that he
ran, crouching, through the door, with the panic-stricken psychiatrist
hollering after him, "You've got a money neurosis."
One night, when for an hour or so there had been no gathering
shriveling tremble inside him and it had seemed he might be done with
it, he remembered being in a cramped and sultry theater with his wife,
watching _Hedda Gabler_. He got through an act all right, but when
Hedda tossed the writer's book manuscript into the furnace, he stood up
in the stifling theater, shouted "Aye," and ran through the tiny exit,
where he sat on the curb and waited for his wife.
Toward the end of it, he went everywhere with his arms folded tightly
in front of him, as though he were naked in the snow. He bit down hard
on things then, whatever was available--the drapes, a coffee cup, the
corner of his desk--and yet there came over him, too, during this
time, a kind of wild and gurgling courage he had never had before.
Once, he ran with teeth clenched through a crowded train station, as
though he were a quarterback going downfield, lashing out at people
with his elbows, bulling along with his shoulders. One man said, "What
do you think you're doing?" And Stern hollered back, "I didn't see
you. You're insignificant-looking." When a cop stopped him for running
through a stop sign, Stern heard himself saying, "Is this your idea of
a crime? With what's going on in this country--rape and everything?"
It was a perspiring, released kind of feeling he had when he was at
his most desperate, and it gave him courage one day to seize a girl
in his building who had seemed unapproachable. Tall and blond, with
horn-rimmed glasses, she had a tight-skirted, whiplike body and spoke
with a shrill, slightly hysterical British accent. Stern saw her in
elevators for the most part, talking to a girl friend, a book on some
declining civilization always pressed against her high, intellectual
bosom. The word "problem" seemed to crop up in her every sentence.
"That's one of my problems."
"The man undoubtedly has a sexual problem."
Stern thought she was maddeningly intellectual and wanted to be with
her in her small, book-lined apartment, kissing her hair as she
discussed declining civilizations, spending long hours working out
sick, tangled sexual problems.
One day outside the building, he took her arm and said, "This is crazy,
but I don't know any other way to do it. I've seen you a lot in the
elevator, and I'm in pretty bad trouble now, and I wonder if you'd mind
my just walking along awhile with you."
"I have to meet someone," she said.
"I'm in pretty bad shape," Stern said, holding on to her arm. "I've got
a whole bunch of problems and I have to just tell them to someone."
"Yes," she said, freeing herself with a shrill little laugh. "But I
don't like men's hands on me."
At the tail end of it, with courage forming along the bottom of him
like vegetable shoots, it pleased him to make detailed and shocking
phone calls to his mother and sister.
"I actually chew on drapes," he told his mother at midnight. "I pull
at my skin and I won't have my job for long. I expect to go into an
institution and not come out of it."
"I haven't had that in my life?" she said. "I haven't had much worse?
I've had the same thing. You can't scare me."
"How would you like to see your son peeled off the fender of a speeding
car? It's going to happen, you know."
And to his sister, long-distance, he said, "Oh, it's a breakdown, all
right. Dying doesn't scare me in the least. It'll be in about a week
or so. They're going to find me in a tub. I'll bet you're amazed that
I can discuss it so calmly. Bet it really shakes you up to think it's
happening to your own brother, who used to tell all those jokes."
He expected that if it ever did end, it would peter out, with a little
less trembling and choking each day, but it surprised him by finishing
up abruptly in a quite unexplainable way after a talk with a Polish
woman who had come to clean his house.
Through it all, amazingly, he had never thought once of the kike man.
Sliding down the mountain, he had been too busy casting about for
things to clutch to think very much about who had pushed him. If the
man had stopped him on the street, Stern, hunched over, fists planted
in his waist to quiet the erupting, might have brushed on by and said,
"I have no time to fool around."
On the night that it ended, his wife had gone to the movies, and Stern,
a crawling, bone-deep shiver coming over him, had flicked off the
television set and found the Polish woman on her knees in the broom
closet. A small, pinched wrinkle of a woman, she seemed to have been
made from a compound of flowered discount dresses, cleaning fluid, and
lean Polish winters. She shook her head continually and muttered pieces
of thoughts, finishing none of them. Stern talked to her for two hours
and found her scattered, wise-sounding incantations soothing.
"You just can't," she said, rolling her head from side to side. "I mean
you just don't go around.... You got to just ... sooner or later.... I
mean if a man don't.... This old world going to.... When a fully grown
man.... Rolling up your sleeves is what...."
To which Stern said, "Oh God, how I appreciate this. I think I'm going
to be able to get hold of myself now. I really do. Sometimes you just
get together with a certain person and it really helps. I think I'm
going to be all right. And, you know, as long as I live, I'm never
going to forget this and the help you've given me. I really think I'm
going to be able to stop it tonight."
"Sure," said the woman, rolling her head from side to side. "Of course.
I mean you just ... you got to.... There comes a time...."
And that night, when Stern's wife came home, he said, "I think I'm out
of it." In bed, he relaxed his grip on the headboard, and then, just as
swiftly as it had come over him, it more or less disappeared.
* * * * *
He told someone in his office, "I had the mildest nervous breakdown in
town. I didn't miss a day of work. It was pretty lousy, but all of
a sudden you just come out of them." The two phrases "hanging on to
desks" and "jumping through my tail" had great appeal to Stern, and he
used them often to describe what had happened to him. He remembered
a hairless boy with moonlike jowls who years back had worked for his
company and had begun one afternoon to run into the water cooler. For
two years, the boy had disappeared, taking mute and vacant vacations
with his wife, renting clapboard houses and just sitting in them; Stern
remembered seeing him on the street, looking white and clean as though
someone had sponged him down. He looked up this boy's phone number now,
called him, and said, "I just came out of one like yours. No water
cooler, but I did a lot of hanging on to desks. I had to do it to keep
from jumping through my tail. What are you doing with yourself these
days?"
"Just sitting around," said the boy.
Stern had not thought of time or weather or clocks and dates and
punctual changes of underwear, and he was certain that great clumps of
dust had settled over his life; somehow, though, as he had choked and
skidded and clutched at people's arms, he had managed to mail things,
too, and pay dry cleaners. He expected to find his son making far-off,
wistful comments about "new daddies" he would like to have, and yet
the very first of the new evenings the boy tapped him on the shoulder
and said, "Now can we play?"--as though he'd been waiting for Stern to
finish tying a shoelace. "Yes," said Stern, falling to the floor. "I'm
down here on the floor trapped and the only thing that can get me up is
if someone touches a secret place on my ear three times and then taps
me with a banana." The boy followed instructions delightedly, and Stern
leaped up to shake his hand, saying, "Thank you for saving your daddy.
I now owe you one hundred giraffe tails."
Stern looked at a calendar and saw that it had all worked out fine,
ending on the first sharp and crackling day of October; now he would
be able to draw winter down on himself and his family like a shade,
huddling in his house and taking soups for strength. He had been too
agonized and out of breath to think about his stomach, and it amazed
him that it was not leaping with a fresh crop of ulcers; it seemed
to be doing all right, the glue holding firm on a cracked china cup.
Maybe that was the trick. Go into a tumbling, frenzied period and your
stomach simply wouldn't have time to concentrate on ulcers. The idea
was to set up small, diversionary troubles in other parts of your body,
way out on your fingers or inside your head. But what if now, with
things quieter, a new batch got under way?
He wanted to take the previous weeks in his hands, crush them down to
snowball size, and examine them close to a light bulb so that he would
understand them if they happened again. It seemed a time to talk,
finally, about dramatic central things, death and wills and horrible,
long-buried family crises from which lessons could be drawn. First
he called his insurance man, who said, "Before we go any further,
remember, you can't dictate from the grave." And then he called his
mother, telling her, "I really want to have a talk now. You don't know
what hell I've been through."
"I know what you've been through and, believe me, I could tell you a
few things. I could tell you things that would stand your hair on end."
"All right, tell me them then."
"Don't worry," she said. "I could tell you plenty. I could fill up
books if you really wanted to listen."
"Meanwhile you haven't said anything."
"Someday, when you're ready, I'll say plenty. Then you won't wonder
why I take an occasional drink. And then, years later, you'll tell
people, 'I had some mother.'"
He met his father for dinner in the city, and much of the conversation
had to do with the machinery of the meeting. "How long have you been
waiting?" his father said, outside the restaurant. "I thought I'd take
a cross-town bus, get myself a transfer, and then walk the extra two
blocks over to Sixth. If I'd known you were going to be early, I'd have
come all the way up by subway and the hell with the walking. How'd you
get up here?"
"I just got here," said Stern. "I want to talk over some things with
you."
Inside the restaurant, Stern's father kept grabbing the elbows of
waiters and customers, turning to Stern, and saying, "You know how long
I know this guy?" Stern would guess, and his father would say, "I know
this guy for seventeen years" or "We go all the way back to 1933,"
bobbing his head up and down, as though to testify he was telling the
truth, however astonishing the statement may have seemed.
During dinner, Stern said, "I went through a cruddy period. I don't
know what in the hell hit me."
"I heard," said his father. "You know how I feel about you, though,
don't you?"
After a while, his father said, "How do you plan on getting back? I
think, in your situation, your best bet is to walk over west and catch
a bus going downtown. Lets you off slightly north of the station. You
can duck down and walk the rest of the way underground or, if you like,
you can grab a cab. I haven't figured out how I'm going home myself...."
* * * * *
Often now, for the first time since it had happened, Stern was able to
see the bitter episode in his recent life for what it was: an ignorant
remark, a harmless shove, no one really hurt, much time elapsed, so
what. Yet, other times, the thought of it became unbearable and he
would try to shore up his mind against it. Then it was as though his
head were a leaky basement which Stern patrolled from the inside,
running over with plaster each time a picture of the man down the
street threatened to slide in through a crack. One night, the basement
leaked in so many places he could not get to them all.
He had come back after a short visit to what his son called "the
slippery houses," a group of high, slanted, darkening hill peaks, all
clumped together in a tilted village with cottages stuck on the sides
like canapés. "We ought to get out of our house and see what it's like
around us," Stern had said to his wife and son, but they had always
wound up taking a silent, peculiar drive to this one place. Their car
could barely make it up the hills of the careening village, and Stern
wondered what kind of people lived in such a strange, slanted place. It
seemed you would have to be lowered down to your neighbor's house, if
you wanted to do any visiting, and then hoisted back. He wondered what
kind of tilted lives the people inside the houses led, what kind of
wobbly activities they were up to, and whether they would come clinging
and suction-footed to the door if he rang the bell. In all the visits,
they saw only one person who lived in the village, a pointy-headed boy
of the sort who was always being sent to town with bread and cheese and
several farthings and then set upon immediately by rascals.
Back home after the drive that night, Stern's son asked him if
dinosaurs were good, and when Stern said, "There were all kinds," the
boy asked, "How about pirates? Were any of them daddies?"
"Some pirates were daddies," said Stern.
During his troubled, spinning weeks, Stern had often brushed by the
child, saying, "No elephants, no whale questions," and gone to hold
on to something or to lie somewhere in a sweat. Now, as though to make
up for his brusqueness, he held talks with the boy on an almost formal
schedule.
"I can remember being inside Mommy," said the child, taking off Stern's
shoe. "I knew about the Three Stooges in there. Now I'm taking your
foot's temperature. It's quarter past five."
During dinner, the boy said, "Were you ever a magician before you
became my father?"
"Right before," said Stern.
"Could you tear a Kleenex into a thousand pieces and then turn it back
into a whole Kleenex again?"
"I could do that one."
"Do you learn about the inside of soda at college?"
"I don't know," said Stern. "I don't know that. No soda now. No
pirates. I'm just going to sit here." He was eating an apricot dessert
then, and he began to breathe so hard he thought something would fly
out of his chest. "I've got to go out and get some air," he told his
wife.
"Is it all right for daddies to go out in the dark?" asked the boy, and
Stern said, "If they're very careful."
Outside, walking on leaves, Stern could not catch his breath and
wondered if he should call a cab. He saw himself walking all the way
to the man's house only to collapse, wordless and exhausted, on the
doorstep, having to be put outside near the garbage for someone to see
and take home. He thought it was unfair for him to be depleting his
strength in a long, cold walk while the man sat in a tasteless but
comfortable armchair, his forearms bulging after a day at the lathe.
When he had gone a few hundred feet, he thought of turning around and
telling his wife where he was headed or at least leaving a note on the
porch so that someone would know his whereabouts in case he wound up
cracked and bleeding, the life seeping out of him, yet completely out
of public view. He imagined people saying of him later, "The funny part
is they could have saved him if only they'd been able to find him in
time." He thought that perhaps he would find a man on the way, have him
stand by, and, as soon as Stern's head hit a pipe or something, speed
off to get an intern. The cold snapped about him now and seemed to have
made everything a little harder. There would be no soft earth to fall
into, and any contact at all with the ground would mean great, tearing
skin scrapes.
When he was halfway to the man's house, it crossed his mind for the
briefest instant that the fluids drained from the bodies of unconscious
people, and as a precaution against this embarrassment he stopped to
urinate in some leaves. He was worried about being completely unable
to talk when he got to the man's house, knocking at the door and then
standing there, cold and choking, while the man inspected him. He had
heard that if you did some physical exercise, tension would flow out of
you, and once, before an important job interview, he had run briskly
around the block. "Have you been running?" the interviewer asked,
and Stern said, "I didn't want to be late." The run had checked the
tension, but Stern had gasped incoherently through the interview and
come off poorly.
Now he began to jog a little through the leaves; when he came to the
man's house, he took a long time before actually setting foot on his
property, a move which somehow would have made the visit irrevocable.
He thought of just putting his heel inside the fence, crushing the
grass down a bit, and then going back home and getting his mind so
elastic and sophisticated he'd be able to see that crushing a little
grass was defiance, too. It didn't have to be face-punching. But when
he put one foot inside, he took another step, too, and then another, a
man going into a cold pool, and then walked the rest of the way to the
door at a brisk, routine pace, as though by walking routinely he could
turn this into a routine call.
There was a simple stone walk through some short grass and a step
leading up to a brown oaken door. He had expected the house to have
some memorable characteristics, symphonic music to play when he
actually set foot inside the fence. He knocked on the door and suddenly
shook with hope that the wife would answer and say she was sorry
but the man was attending a meeting of the Guardian Sons. It was an
election meeting to select officers who would be even more pinched and
thin-lipped than the old crew. He would say to the woman, "Your husband
said something to my wife and I want to say I know about it and he's
not getting away with it. You tell him that." Then he would be able to
go back home, his mission accomplished. After all, he had tried. It
wasn't his fault the man was not in.
The man opened the door and Stern blinked to see him better, startled
that although he stood only two feet away, he still could not really
make out his face. It was as though he were looking at the man through
an old pair of Japanese binoculars he had once bought. They were
expensive, but Stern had never quite gotten them adjusted right and
always saw things better with his eyes. He could see that the man was
shoeless, however; wore blue jeans and a T-shirt; and kept his head
cocked a little in the incredulous style Stern remembered so clearly.
The beer had taken some effect; he seemed a little heavier than Stern
recalled. His arms were about the same, perhaps a little thicker in the
foresection than they had seemed to be from the car.
"Are you the man who said kike to my wife?" asked Stern, happy he had
only short sentences to get out.
"I think I remember that."
"About a year and a half ago?"
"That's right."
"You shouldn't say that, and we're going to fight."
"All right. Let me get my slippers on."
Stern had not expected any delays, and when the man closed the screen
door he thought of how little insurance he had and wondered if he
could call out, "Excuse me just a minute," and run back to take out
another policy, then return. He wanted so bad to live he would have
settled right on the spot for being a bedpan patient all his life. If
only there were someone with whom he could enter into such a bargain.
The man came back and said, "Come on around back here," walking toward
the rear of the house, and Stern did not follow. He remembered that he
had not brought along an observer to run for an intern and wondered
if he could hail one now, not to stop the fight, but just to stand by
and watch it and know that it was going on. He thought that maybe the
man's wife was watching through the shades and, if Stern's head were
opened, _she_ would call for help, waiting first until he was almost
through. He wanted to stop what was happening, take the man aside,
and say, "Look, the important thing was for me to come down here. Now
that I'm here, there doesn't have to be any fight. I didn't think I
could make it, but here I am, and why don't I just go back now?" But,
instead, he followed the man to the backyard and said, "I don't know
how to begin these." The man paused a moment and then hit Stern on the
ear, a great freezing kiss covering the entire side of his face. The
lobe seemed to slide around a little before settling in one place, and
Stern was so thrilled at still being alive he jumped a little off the
ground. But then his joy was erased by a warm shudder of sympathy for
the man, who had been unable to knock him unconscious with the blow. It
was as though all those years at lathes, building arm power, had gone
to waste. More because it seemed to be expected of him than because he
felt anger, Stern tried to throw a punch in the smoothly coordinated
style of a Virgin Islands middle-weight he had watched on TV, but it
was as though a belt had been dropped over him, constricting his arms,
and the blow came out girlish and ineffectual. Lowering his voice
several octaves, as if it were he who had delivered the ear kiss, he
said, "Don't talk that way to someone's wife and push her," and only
after he had said it did he realize he had fallen into an imitation of
an old deep-voiced high-school gym teacher who used to say, "Now, boys,
eat soup and b'daders if you want your roughage."
"Shit I won't," said the man, and Stern said, "You better not," still
blinking to see the man's face. He saw his socks, though, faded blue
anklets with little green clocks on them. They were cut low, almost
disappearing into his slippers, and reminded Stern of those worn by an
exchange student from Latvia at college who had brought along an entire
bundle of similar ones. Now Stern felt deeply sorry for the man's
powerful feet, which were always to be encased in terrible refugee
anklets, and for a second he wanted to embrace them.
His ear began to leak now, and he walked off the man's lawn, not sure
at all how he had done. The hot flush of exhilaration that had come
with the punch stayed with him awhile, and yet when he had gone halfway
back to his house the cold flew into his shirt and rode his back and he
began to shake with fear of the man all over again. Inside his house,
his wife was sponging the dinner table and said, "What happened to your
ear? It's hanging all off."
"I had a fight with that guy from a year and a half ago. The one who
said the thing to you. I can't understand it. I was all right for a
while, but now I'm afraid of him all over again."
"That's some ear you've got," she said.
"Ears never worried me," he said. "I don't understand why I still have
to be afraid of the bastard. Come on upstairs." They walked to the
steps and his wife said, "You go first I don't like to go upstairs in
front of people." And Stern went on ahead, annoyed at being denied
several seconds of behind glimpses.
Upstairs, in his son's room, he looked at the six or seven children's
books on the floor. Pages were torn out of them, and Stern wondered how
the child was ever to become brilliant on so ratty-looking a library.
Once, in some kind of sheltering, warmth-giving act he really couldn't
explain, Stern had bought children's rugs and hung them all over the
walls. The boy had said, "Rugs on the wall?" And Stern had answered,
"Of course, and we put pictures on the floors, too. We eat breakfast at
night and get up in the morning for a bite of supper. This is a crazy
house."
Now Stern walked around the room, touching the rugs to make sure they
wouldn't fall on his son's face. Then he said, "I feel like doing some
hugging," and knelt beside the sleeping boy, inhaling his pajamas and
putting his arm over him. His wife was at the door and Stern said, "I
want you in here, too." She came over, and it occurred to him that
he would like to try something a little theatrical, just kneel there
quietly with his arms protectively draped around his wife and child. He
tried it and wound up holding them a fraction longer than he'd intended.