Away from Home (20 page)

“Just a photographer’s flashbulb,” Mort said. “Modern living.” He gestured. “You like that? They’ve got television here to record the crash, but no one’s figured out how to keep the building up.”

The roving reporter came by with his microphone and stopped beside them. “Did all of you live in this building?” he asked them in Portuguese.

Mort stood up. “Just me,” he answered.

“American?”

“More or less.”

“What is your name, Senhor?”

“Mort Baker. Do you mind if I ask
you
some questions?”

“Please, Senhor.”

“Do you know why this apartment is going to fall?”

“It is the foundation,” the reporter said. “The ground is too soft, too wet. You see, the two buildings on either side are standing very well. So the builder thought the ground would hold this building also.” He shrugged. “But for some reason, it did not.”

“You would think they would know,” Mort said.

The reporter opened wide, innocent eyes. “But how can anyone know?” he asked reproachfully. “Those two buildings stand, this one falls. The ground could not hold all three of them.”

“Excuse me, Senhor,” Mort said. “I hope you will not think I am impolite. But do you think that if the builder had used less sand in the concrete this building might not be now going to fall?”

The reporter looked scandalized. “Oh, no,” he said. “The buildings in Rio are very well built! You must use concrete in a tropical country. It is the soft land underneath that makes the buildings fall, not sand in the concrete. You can look at most of the buildings that fall down lately. You will see how well built they are. The buildings always fall down in one piece.”

“That’s well built,” Mort said. “I always feel safer in an apartment house that I know is going to fall down in one piece. Thank you, Senhor.”

“Is nothing. Thank you, Senhor.”

The reporter moved away into the crowd. Neil began to laugh. Mort gestured at the leaning building. “One piece,” he said. “It’s nice to have security, isn’t it?”

“I think we need a drink,” Neil said.

“We can lock all the suitcases in our car,” said Margie. “We can still watch everything from the café on the corner.”

They carried the suitcases and cartons and statues in shifts to Neil’s car, which because of the crowds he had been forced to park two blocks away. By the time they got to the outdoor café all the tables were already taken by the curious, their chairs turned to face the leaning building. The waiters rushed in and out happily, doing a capacity business, offering advice and words of wisdom about other buildings which had fallen during the past year. The most famous fallen building was a new one, which had toppled shortly after it was completed, even before all the new tenants had had time to move in.

One waiter said six buildings had fallen in the past twelve months. Another said twelve buildings had fallen in the past six months. “Have you noticed that expensive new building down the street?” someone asked. “It has a great crack in the front of it already. It will fall by next year.” No one seemed either indignant or surprised that this would happen. They seemed to take the crashing of apartment buildings philosophically, as one accepts the crashing of airplanes, and as much less of a tragedy because you could not get out of a doomed plane in advance, suitcases and all, the way you could from an apartment house.

Neil ordered three glasses of
chopp
beer. He ruffled Margie’s hair and smiled at her, and she smiled at him. He had taken to being very demonstrative in public since they were no longer sleeping together. At first it had puzzled Margie and filled her with pain and sympathy for him because as soon as they were alone together inside their apartment he left her scrupulously alone, and she thought he might be using these public moments to feel the touch of her he so desperately wanted. But then she realized that Neil was too restrained for that. He was all pride. He could never paw her and brush against her like a high-school boy with a shy date, pretending it was horseplay or an accident. Neil received no more pleasure from these public contacts than she. It was pride that prompted them, a public avowal that he and his wife were just like anybody else.

Mort Baker shook his head. “It’s great to see two people who really
have
something together,” he said. “Like you two. Some of the married people I know are like two enemies who find themselves sharing a cab. Like one of them is eating garlic and the other one has his feet on the first one’s seat, but they can’t stop the cab and get out because there aren’t any other taxis. I always think you two have one of those crazy, lucky marriages.”

“We do,” Neil said.

Margie smiled weakly. “I guess we can stand each other,” she said, trying to keep it light. “It’s been five years.”

“That long …” Mort said, sounding rather amazed.

“My parents have been married for forty years,” Neil said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said Mort. “I meant, that long to be happy. I can’t remember being really happy for more than three consecutive days.”

“That’s because you don’t settle down,” Margie said. She wasn’t quite sure whether what she was saying was a pose or whether she really felt so motherly and righteous. “You ought to find a girl you love and get married.”

“Margie’s always trying to marry everyone off,” Neil said fondly. He stroked her forearm where it lay on the table.

“She could marry me off in one minute,” Mort said. “If she were available.”

“You mean me?” Margie said. She laughed. “Thank you. Do you hear that, Neil?”

“He has good taste,” Neil said. “That’s why we’re friends.”

They all drank their beer. There was an air of friendship among them, and Margie felt secure. Once in a while they would glance toward the spotlighted area where Edificio Apollo was about to crash down, and that gave their entire meeting an edge of danger, of excitement. Margie looked at Mort. He was nice, she thought; a really
nice
person, even though he went off on occasional “honeymoons” with girls. And he was funny. The girls never seemed to mind their honeymoons without marriage, and they always flirted with him afterward on the beach, as if hoping he would take them on another. “Honeymoon” was his own term, and he really made it that way. Neil had told her some of his stories, the ones she was not supposed to let on she knew. He always took the girl away from Rio, because if you lived in Rio all your life it wasn’t that exciting. And he might starve for a week afterward, but every day the hotel room would be filled with flowers. She remembered before Edificio Apollo had been built, when Mort was living in a rooming house of sorts. Even his landlady had liked him. He wasn’t just any lover; he was a real Brazilian-type lover,
muito sympatico
. “He is not here, the American,” Mort’s landlady would say to callers. “He is in Porto Allegre on his honeymoon.”

Neil gestured at the waiter for more beer. Margie covered her half-empty glass with the palm of her hand and shook her head. She hardly drank anything any more; she hardly needed to. There were so many things to enjoy: the beach, the sun, the ocean, the sounds and sights of people in the street, books, her records, even her long evenings alone with Neil. At first she had felt the old panic when he walked near to her or touched her lightly, but then she realized that when Neil had said, “Never again,” he had meant it. So with the vanishing of fear the need to dull her senses disappeared—for she realized now that alcohol had dulled them, not heightened them as she had pretended to herself. In a way, these summer days were the happiest Margie had known during her entire marriage, and although the thought often occurred to her that her life with Neil was abnormal and even portended disaster, yet she was happy. She loved him more now, when she was no longer afraid of him, than she had ever loved him before. Perhaps her parents had been right, perhaps love grew between married couples and transcended sex, until the couple was as one: blood relatives, identical twins, even Siamese twins, bound by a blood line of wordless communication.

She remembered feeling about her parents that they had never slept together as lovers—except for the appearance of herself and her brother Tommy, which at least proved irrefutably that they had twice. She wondered what her mother would think if she ever knew the relationship that existed between Margie and Neil. I can’t give you any grandchildren, Mother, because Neil and I never do that. And her mother would look at the ground, or the wall, terribly embarrassed, terribly hurt, and ask, Are you fighting? Don’t you love each other? Her mother would never think to ask, Are you in trouble? Or is he? Her mother never thought anyone was sick or troubled in the mysterious areas that linked the mind and body inseparably together; even the two young bachelors who shared a small apartment on the same floor as the Hafts, who dressed in trousers so tight they could hardly bend their knees and took turns walking their elaborately coiffeured French poodle. The bachelors would stare straight ahead when Margie and her mother were in the elevator, one pouting, the other with the iciest round blue eyes Margie had ever seen. Those eyes and the look they gave her made her shudder. And her mother would often say wistfully, “I wonder why those two good-looking boys never go out with girls. I guess they can’t find one they think is good enough.”

“What are you dreaming about, Margie?” Neil asked.

“I dreamed I went to a house-falling in my Maidenform bra,” she said lightly. She smiled at him, and at Mort. “You two should be glad there’s a woman here who’s not trying to monopolize the conversation.”

Neil and Mort pushed back their chairs. “Let’s go back and get our ringside seats.”

They walked back to the building and stationed themselves in front, at a safe distance, among the crowd. “Imagine,” Neil said, “how many unhappily married men are going to be left without their
garçoniers
when this house falls.”

“What’s a
garçonier?
” Margie asked.

“It means ‘little boy’s apartment,’” Neil said.

“No, really!”

“It’s a small apartment married men rent when they want to be lunch-hour bachelors,” said Mort. “They keep it by the year and they take girls there. To play. Hence, little boy’s apartment.’”

Margie smiled at him. “You sound the faintest bit disapproving. Or am I hearing noises in my head?”

“Hell,” Mort said, “I am disapproving. What the hell do people have to get married for if they want to wreck it? We have to be a little bit better than the savages, not that there’s much difference except the savages have more sense.”

“I learn more about you every month,” Margie said.

“That’s a pretty big-time handicap,” Mort said wryly. “I’m with me every day and I haven’t got the scene figured out yet.”

Neil put his arm about Mort’s shoulders and the other arm around Margie’s waist. “You’ll have a lot of time to get to know each other when Mort is living with us,” he said. He looked at both of them with pride—his friend and his wife. For some reason she could not understand Margie felt resentful. She was not even quite sure whom she felt resentful toward. Neil was being magnanimous, inviting an attractive bachelor with a lover’s reputation to live with him and his wife, absolutely certain that nothing would happen between them. He smiled at Mort like the perfect husband and lover, confident and generous. And why not, Margie thought. He knows his wife doesn’t care for
any
man. And then she realized why she felt resentful. She felt cheated somehow, short-changed. How much better it would be if Neil felt about her as if she were a real woman, whose fidelity he could feel confident of just because he was her man, not because she was a sexless child or a stick of wood!

She drew away from both of them and stood by herself. “Look,” she said. “I think it’s tilting! Look, look!”

A sigh of pleasure and excitement went up from the crowd. The newsreel cameras from the television station began to whirr. The roving reporter crouched over his hand microphone, holding it up to his mouth with both hands and speaking excitedly into it. A small, fat photographer, dressed in sweat-drenched whites, pivoted about snapping pictures, first of the building, then quickly of the faces of some of the watching mob, then quickly again to the building. He looked like a whirling dervish. A little boy had been eating a Kibon bar and stopped with his mouth wide open in awe, clenching the ice cream in his fist until it melted and ran down over his shoes.

Slowly at first, as it were a movie in slow motion, the building began to lean and to crack from its displaced weight at almost the same time. It seemed about to break in the middle. This is one that won’t fall down in one piece, Margie thought excitedly. There was a rumbling sound, but you could hardly hear it because everyone in that huge crowd was jabbering and squealing and crying out at once, poking each other, pointing, jumping up to see. Two girls were holding each other’s heads, their eyes closed, and screaming as if they actually knew what was going on. There seemed to be two definite groups: the people who had lived in the building and had never seen this phenomenon before, and the people who always came to watch buildings fall down and were enjoying every moment of it. There was even an ancient beggar woman, dressed in what looked like a bundle of dirty laundry, who looked as if the only thing keeping her alive this late in life was this show before her.

Up until the last moment you could see that it was an apartment house. You could see the windows, some with curtains or draperies visible through the glass. The lights had gone out. It was a living building, where people spent their lives, and then it was sick and toppling, and then it fell dead, still at that last second a building, with a thunderous crash and a cloud of dust, and lay flat, enormous, lying across trees and sidewalk alike, the dust still rising about it. A huge section of it, consisting of several stories, lay intact. Your thought was: Why is that building sideways instead of upright? And then you saw the white porcelain toilet lying on the rubble-strewn lawn in the bright grass, like a weird lawn ornament.

“Look, Mamai!” a little girl cried out. “There is my bedroom wallpaper!”