30 Pieces of a Novel (76 page)

when it
wouldn't turn you forced it. So now what am I going to do? Come on, you're fifteen, what are you doing, crying? Okay, I'm sorry,” and put his hand on Gould's shoulder. “I never hit you before or at least in anger, or at least not since I was six or so, that what you're thinking? So it's over, so you weren't hurt, so stop blubbering like a baby. I said I'm sorry. Accept my apology—that's the right thing to do—and then see if you can help me get the rest of the key out.” They couldn't, even with Robert's penknife. “Stay here. Policeman comes, or someone whose car I'm blocking, tell them what you did with the key and that I had to go get a locksmith or garage mechanic, but don't leave the car even if you have to pee. You have to pee now, go to the coffee shop and I'll stay here. And here's a buck; get yourself a soda,” and Gould shook his head and Robert went to the coffee shop, probably to ask where the nearest locksmith or service station was. A locksmith came a short time later and got the key out. Robert had a spare key—“I was thinking of telling you earlier but didn't want to ease your mind too soon; then you'd never remember what you did and it would only happen again”—and they drove off. “Always carry a spare. That's my advice for the day, if not the century. Wrap it in something, seal what you wrap it in with tape, and tuck it into a part of your wallet or billfold, like the change purse if it has a zipper or snap, but where it could never fall out. That's the way to never locking yourself out of your car. And whatever you do, don't leave your car keys with your fifteen-year-old brother or son. God, can they be dolts. Excuse me. So, all forgiven, tears dried?” and Gould said, “I didn't have tears. I just felt bad and only might have looked like a kid crying,” and Robert said, “Oh, yeah, like you really believe that, but now let's forget it for good.” Each served as best man for the other's wedding. “Listen,” Robert said, “I wouldn't trust anyone with the ring, not even my dearest brother, so let's say I give it to you right before I walk down the aisle—or the minute before, so nobody will see us and think I feel you're unreliable—in a private room where you're supposed to be helping me get ready.” “Anything you say, though I would encourage you to start trusting me. But if this will make you feel more relaxed for the main event, okay,” and Robert said, “It's not that, or maybe it is, or something, perhaps, of what you said—now I'm confused. But just go along with my short-lived idiosyncrasy and uncertainty and inability this minute to understand why they suddenly exist, please.” Gould's wedding, by comparison, was small, thirty people at the most in the apartment he and Sally had been living in for two years, and the day before it he asked Robert to hold on to the wedding rings for him—“I'm afraid of losing them. But then I always get flustered and forgetful when the big occasion is me; do you remember my bar mitzvah?”—and Robert said, “Not at all. And holding on to your rings would be irresponsible of me, because where would I keep them? Same place as you. In a box or plastic envelope in the top dresser drawer with my underwear and socks. But I'm in a hotel room for two nights with only so-so security, so do it yourself and spare me the possible ignominy of losing them or not taking the right precautions to prevent them from being stolen, and give them to me a minute or two before the ceremony. That's what I did with you, though I don't recall if it was for the same reason.” Robert started helping Gould get jobs while they were both in high school. (But he's already mentioned something along those lines. Helping him get a raise, then.) Robert had got him a job delivering belts to dress and coat houses for the belt factory he was a shipping clerk at, and one day at work he said, “Look, this has gone on long enough. Go tell Mr. Wachterman you'd like a raise. When he asks how much, say thirty cents an hour would be equitable. And say ‘equitable' rather than ‘fair.' Not that you need a brain for what you do or that he doesn't already think you're bright. But these people always have to be reassured how smart you are by the words you use and big non-school books you carry. And they, not being too educated or interested in books, associate intellectual brains with goodness and honesty and quick thinking for practical rather than underhanded things, and he'll feel he's got a winner in you in that not only don't you petty-steal from the firm, as most of the delivery boys do—scissors, buckles, and so forth—but he only has to tell you a route or something to do once and you got it down pat. And you deserve the thirty cents for the heavy bales you push and unload and the half year you've worked here at the same salary,” and Gould said, “I can't ask him. He'll fire me. When he thinks I'm ready for a raise,
he'll give
me one; and whatever it is, I'll take, since it'll be more than I've been making,” and Robert said, “This is the Garment Center, you dimmy. Here, until you demand more, you slave for life at minimum wage, if they can't finagle it some way where you get less. And if you are taken advantage of like that, I look bad for not having taught you about the dog-eat-dog practices that go on here and how to dance around them and get what's rightfully yours,” and Gould said, “If I ever get to feel I'm not being paid equitably for what I do, and they don't offer me a raise, I'll tell them I'm leaving. If they then offer me one because of what I said, fine, I'll tell them. But if they say, ‘Goodbye and good riddance to you, pal, because you're nothing to us,' fine again, because I'll look for a new job,” and Robert said, “Bushwah; you're just afraid of speaking up for yourself,” and he said, “Not true, I don't think it's up to me to make the first move,” and Robert said, “But I already told you how they think. As for getting another job, if you leave like that you'll have a work record of quitting, which'll make it harder for you. And if someone's thinking of hiring you and calls Wachterman for a reference, since in your application you usually have to give the last two places you worked, you think he'll give you a fair one? No chance. He'll void all over you, say you were a sluff-off, slob, and petty thief: you name it. Because he'll know you'll have told the new place why you left—the money. So to counter it, because he wouldn't want the company or him looking bad, he'll say you were paid above minimum wage but still did a lousy job and finally quit, and if he were this guy he wouldn't hire you. So learn something from me for once. The only credit you get around here is when you stand up for yourself without being high-horsey or saying it in a way their dimwit minds might think is disdainful or insulting,” and Gould said, “I still can't ask for one,” and Robert said, “Then I'll do it for you and maybe you'll learn something from that,” and he said, “Don't!” and Robert went to Wachterman's office, knocked first, put on a deferential face, and straightened his tie, and came out a few minutes later and said, “I told him you were too shy and respectful to ask him yourself and he said he likes that quality in a young man, but more for a son-in-law who isn't coming into the business, since it's not anything that'll make anyone more money. And then, though it hurts, he's giving you twenty-five cents an hour more starting in two weeks,” and Gould said, “You were lucky he didn't fire you,” and Robert said, “What are you talking about? They love me here and would never let me go. How do you think I got you the raise? I insinuated they'd lose us both if he didn't come up with one for you,” and Gould said, “How'd you do that without actually saying it?” and Robert said, “Ways.” Robert went to lots of parties and often invited Gould—But first the work he did in a store window. Robert got a job in which he wrote
The Autobiography of a Very Ordinary Young New Yorker
, as he called it, in the window of a stationery store made up to look like a cluttered writer's studio. He was looking for a Christmas job during his long school break, couldn't find one that paid more than minimum wage, got this idea while walking past the largest stationery-typewriter store in midtown, and went in and proposed it. He'd sit in the window for a month from eight to seven, time off to go to the men's room and to quickly eat his breakfast and lunch at the typing table, and write the first draft and then the final one using only the store's merchandise. He told the owners it'd show that their typewriters can take eleven hours a day straight of heavy pounding from a guy who looks like a weight lifter, besides being a big draw and getting the store plenty of attention, a man completing a book-length manuscript in a store window on a main thoroughfare. The life he'd write about, he told Gould—and each page would be taped to the window for people on the sidewalk to read and there'd be scratch pads attached to the window outside for them to write comments and criticisms—would be partly his own, partly Gould's, partly anything he could think up or include that would seem plausibly part of the autobiography. (So this, probably, was when he first thought of writing fiction, or did the store window come
after the article
about underground streams in Greenwich
Village?
Thinks about it. After, by about a year, as the article was written when Gould was still in high school.) There'd be a few heroics in the work: jumping in front of a bicycle that was about to run down a baby in a stroller, which Gould did the year before and busted his shoulder; giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an already dead man who'd collapsed in a theater lobby, something their mother did without knowing how to do it when she was in her twenties; grabbing a thief on the street and holding him in a headlock for
the police
, which Gould and a friend did when a woman yelled that her pocketbook had been picked; facing down a robber with an umbrella and a samples case, which their father did in their building's vestibule—but all things Robert would say he'd done and that the samples case was a book bag and the resuscitation saved the man. “Got to beef up the piece to keep the reader, though not make it too maudlin, since things like this never seem to happen to me, and it can't be only because of my size.” So mostly just ordinary experiences while growing up in New York: family life, shul, the only Hebrew school student there the rabbi didn't from time to time whack on the back of the neck; getting adult jobs when he was in his early teens, Charlie Chaplin, Oona O'Neill, whom he was more impressed at seeing that same evening because of her father; being beaten out of a cab by Peter Lorre (“You have to run faster than that, son, though I won't argue with you if you insist it's yours,” and he said, “Not at all, sir; it's an honor to let you have it”—opening the cab's door), then next day sitting in the Paramount Theater behind Sydney Greenstreet, who was laughing so hard Robert couldn't make out what was being said on the screen. Wanted to tell him of the coincidence but thought it the wrong time and place. Boyhood crushes on movie stars (Gene Tierney, June Haver, Veronica Lake); bribing a third-grade classmate to show him one of her nipples in the narrow coat closet by giving her his last Indian penny; tips on how he meets women in bookstores (“Excuse me, but did you notice if that book you have was the last copy on the shelf, because I was interested in it too,” or “Excuse me”—since he never tries picking up a woman who isn't browsing through the fiction, poetry, or literary criticism sections—“but do you have any idea which is the better version of Wordsworth's
Prelude
, the 1805 or 1850?”); admitting he's never been able to come up with a good way to pick up women in art museums except maybe to hang around the famous Ingres painting in the Met or the Tchelitchew at the Modern and ask the woman who's looking at it—or if she's only walking past, then to beg her pardon and stop her—if she knows how to pronounce the painter's name; but nothing in the manuscript about sex other than the girl's nipple, which he'd call “one side of her chest.” Brief account of each of the fourteen scars on his head: getting in the way of a swinging baseball bat or stickball broomstick or flying hockey puck (when he was playing on roller skates); falling on his mother's pinking shears; several times failing to stoop as he went through a door; tipping over a chair he was leaning back on; crashing a party with his friends, and the girl's mother—because he was the biggest, his friends pushed him in first—smashing a guitar over his head; frozen on one foot while playing Statues and falling off the top of a stoop wall into an areaway…. The ten people in his life he feels have done the worst damage to him, five of them his elementary school teachers and an assistant principal in the same school (“Principal with a P-A-L, for the assistant principal is your pal”). Short chapter on his family's history: folks growing up on the Lower East Side and moving uptown when they got married and all his grandparents immigrating to America from small Polish villages, though his mother always held that her folks were Austro-Hungarian and only started speaking Polish to communicate to their help in New York. Ending with him walking by this store, disappointed at not being able to find work that paid more than minimum wage, as he wanted to save money to take a student ship to Germany in June to visit as many of Thomas Mann's old haunts as he could afford, and getting the brainstorm, as he called it, for the job when he saw the typewriter and typing table and supplies in the window and immediately going into the store to speak to someone about it. Gould, on his lunch or dinner breaks from his Christmas salesman's job in a midtown department store, often stood on the sidewalk in a crowd and watched Robert typing, closing his eyes in thought and then springing them open to jot down notes, sharpening a typewriter-eraser pencil, using some chemical solution to wash off the ink stains on his fingers after he changed the typewriter ribbon, which the store manager let him do twice a day because he wanted the print legible, putting things like manuscript pages and photographs and his Social Security and Selective Service cards and college photo-ID through a new machine called a Xerox copier—the manager wanted him to demonstrate this product, which wasn't selling well yet, as much as he could and to show by his expression how easy it was to use and how much fun he had copying the personal documents and photos—taping new finished photocopied pages on the window and, for a few minutes at the beginning of every hour, reading the comments that were brought in to him and answering some of them by holding up a blackboard on which he chalked responses like