Found in the Street (12 page)

14

“Gad, what a way to hold a meeting!” Natalia said two minutes after she was home, having deposited her boots and also Amelia's on newspaper inside the apartment door.

Jack had been delighted to escape the downpour and also the parents' meeting—he had forgotten the name of the organization—but he listened to what Natalia had to say about it. Elaine Armstrong had been there with son Jason, but not Max, and the chair-person, a Mrs. Cova of whom Jack had heard before, had tried to get the kids to vote separately, then along with their parents on the question of a gym room versus a table-and-chair room for the second room in an apartment on Bank Street. This apartment, two rooms in it, was to be a parking place for kids in the afternoon interim between school closing and when their parents got home from work. Supervision was to be voluntary and rotary, and no parent could use the facility unless he or she offered supervisory service one afternoon in ten, or one afternoon in however many kids would be accommodated.

“This Madeleine Cova,” Natalia said, coming back into the living-room, having changed her slacks for pajama pants, “is sick-makingly sweet, listening to everybody, never making decisions, oh no. That's why these damn things take so long.”

“A scotch, madame,” said Jack, handing Natalia a Glenfiddich.

“Oh, thanks, Jack. Well, I know, I won't face being a chairperson myself. 'S matter with a chairman, I'd like to know.” She sipped and laughed. “But here it is nearly half-past eight!”

“Wah!” Amelia took a run and hurled herself face down on the sofa, then looked at her parents, grinning. “Yackety-yack!”

“And what've you been doing while I was representing parenthood?” Natalia brushed her hair back from her face.

The rain had made darkish stripes in her hair, giving her a savage look that Jack had seen before, and he liked it, liked watching her hair fade back to its normal color which was indescribable, something like gold with a rough surface, unpolished. “I wrote to Uncle Roger,” Jack said. “Told him about the yak book and—the
Dreams
book coming out for Christmas. They're hurrying it and I should get some copies in a couple of days.”

“Oh? Nice. When'd you hear this?”

“Dartmoor, Aegis called up this afternoon and told me.—Is anybody getting hungry?”

“
I
am hungry!” Amelia yelled.

It was one of the evenings Natalia was to cook, and she had made spaghetti sauce that morning before leaving for the Katz Gallery. Finally, they both got dinner. The kitchen was big enough for two to work without bumping into each other. The telephone rang when the spaghetti was almost done, and it was Louis Wannfeld, Jack could tell when he leaned an ear into the living-room and heard Natalia's laugh, her slow voice. Of course it could be Sylvia, Jack realized, though Sylvia didn't phone as often as did Louis. Jack put the salad on the table, then went to Natalia.

“Spaghetti's
done
!”
he whispered.

Jack served. Amelia in a shrill voice demanded her pillows to be put on her chair, she couldn't find them. Natalia did sign off, pleading that the spaghetti was done, and came to the table smiling.

Louis' friend Bob, she said, had got himself into a mess at Berlitz where he was taking French lessons. It was a story of mistaken identity between Bob and a teacher of Italian, resulting in Bob's being taken to the podium in a room full of Italian students. Jack barely hung on and rather missed the punch line, but gave a polite smile. Then Natalia had to look for Amelia's bib, spaghetti being a messy dish, and found it on the back of the kitchen door.

Jack had just made espresso coffee when the phone rang again. Natalia answered.

“Jack?”

“Who is it? Joel?”

“It's a girl.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Sutherland, this is Elsie. I guess you spoke to the old creep?”

“I certainly did, yes. A few days ago.”

“Well, he's laying off the shop here, thank you for that, but he's bugging me around my
house
now!”

Jack heard a clatter of dishes in the background. Elsie was phoning from the café. “Hanging around your house, you mean?”

“Yes, and trying to talk to me. Now I'm wondering if I
should
talk to the police? What do you think? One of our friends, a fellow, nearly socked him the other night. But that just seems to make him madder. I'm not afraid to talk to the police, because I think I'm justified. But what do you think, really?”

Jack tried to think. It didn't seem wise to say, “Sure, go ahead.” There ought to be some other way.

“You still there?”

“Yes,” said Jack. Then he heard a crash like that of a metal tray falling, and a female voice saying, “. . . where you're
going
?”

“Wow!—Ha! Soup all over the floor here! I'm sorry to call you from here, but we had our phone cut off at home. Mistake about the bill . . . paid it, so the phone'll be back on in a . . .” Her voice faded in another din, this time that of a machine grinding.

Natalia set Jack's espresso on the bookshelf near the telephone base.

“Elsie, I'll talk to my wife. I promise. I'll think about it. Don't do anything in a hurry. Can you phone me again after—”

“Later tonight?” she interrupted. “Sure. Till how late?”

“Midnight. All right?”

That was all right.

Jack picked up his coffee and walked toward the table. Amelia passed him and switched on the TV.

Natalia sat at the table, and she looked a bit tired. “What was all that?”

“That,” said Jack, sitting down, “was the girl we saw dancing that night.”

“What night?”

“In that disco. The blond girl. The good dancer.”

“Really?—How does she know our number?”

“It's because of this old guy on Bleecker, the one who found my wallet. He's been pestering this girl—for months, it sounds like.”

Jack told Natalia about going into the Seventh Avenue café the night of Natalia's birthday, when he had taken a walk, and seeing Linderman talking to a waitress whose name he had learned that night, Elsie. And that night, Elsie had mentioned Linderman's moral lectures to her. Jack told about running into Elsie near the Grove Street drugstore, and her insisting that he take a look at her Minetta Street place, which she had shown him as if it were a model of respectability. He finished by telling Natalia about his rather painful conversation with Linderman in his apartment on Bleecker.

“Why didn't you tell me all this before?” asked Natalia, amused.

“Because I thought it might worry you.—Linderman. The old guy lives so close by.” Jack said as if to himself, “I really don't want to make an enemy of him.—Have you ever seen him, do you think, with his black and white dog? He looks in his middle­fifties, about my height.”

Natalia shook her head. “Don't think so.”

“Just as well.—Elsie's going to call back tonight. She wants to know if I think it's a good idea if she speaks to the police about Linderman—bugging her.—What do you think, darling?”

Natalia turned in her chair. “Amelia, dear, just a little less loud? Please?”

“Yes, Mummy!” Amelia turned the volume down.

“I can imagine it's annoying,” Natalia said. “But why's she asking your advice?”

Jack picked up the gold-rimmed lighter and lit the cigarette Natalia had put between her lips. “Well, I'm older—and maybe the only person she knows who knows this guy. Not that I
know
him, but—”

“But?”

“Well, it crossed my mind—what kind of cop Elsie might talk to. Might be the kind of cop who'll say she must be provoking the old guy.”

“Provoking?” Natalia said in a throaty voice, and she chuckled. “Does she, do you think?”

“I'm absolutely sure she doesn't.” Jack was smiling too. ­“However—what do you think I should say to her about the police when she calls back?”

Natalia raised her eyebrows, her shoulders. “Since it's been going on so long, maybe she should talk to the cops. A couple of cops.”

While Natalia tidied up, Jack urged Amelia in the direction of bed. Sometimes he had to read something to her, though Amelia was a fair reader herself now. But to be read to was a luxury that Amelia relished. Tonight Jack read to her out of a wide thin book about ducks, and he put on his droning, sleepy voice which sometimes put Amelia to sleep and sometimes gave her the giggles. Tonight his somnolent voice worked. Jack dared to bend and touch her round cheek with his lips. Her long fair hair spread in a lovely, abandoned way over her pillow. Jack straightened and stretched, and looked around Amelia's room in the dim light of the bedside lamp. At least five art exhibit announcements were propped up on her small chest of drawers, all with color reproductions of a painting. He or Natalia, sometimes both of them, took Amelia to galleries, and Amelia was never bored. But she didn't like Rembrandt, Jack remembered from a recent trip to the Met, and he smiled at the thought. Amelia's own artistic efforts were thumbtacked to the inside of her room door. In one water color two figures were having cups of something at a table—clumsy in form, perhaps, but a well-balanced composition all the same—all in red. He put out the light.

“I'll talk to that girl when she calls back. If she does. I'd sort of like to hear what she says.” Natalia sat on the sofa in pajamas now. The TV was still on.

“Would you?” Jack smiled, surprised. “Thanks, honey, because I swear I'm not sure what to say about the cops. Wish we knew a cop personally.”

“Unless you think she'd mind talking to me,” Natalia added.

“No. She's not that type, shrinking violet. Not at all. She remembers you from that disco. She said she thought you looked interesting—different, she said.”

“Interesting! Ha!”

Jack was in the kitchen, tying up the garbage bag, when the telephone rang. He let Natalia answer it. It was not quite 11.

“Yes, Jack told me,” Natalia was saying on the telephone.

Jack deliberately didn't listen, shook out another plastic garbage bag, fresh and noisy, and stuck it into the metal bin. He went down the hall to his workroom, turned on the light, and his eyes fell at once on the yellow-on-red drawing of Elsie on his table, propped against the back wall. Nice action in those curves, he thought. He could hear music when he looked at it, drums and a pulsing beat.

“Jack?” It was Natalia behind him.

Jack had jumped. “What?”

“Well, I must say Elsie talks a blue streak! And she
is
funny. Of all people for that old nut to pick on,
this
girl!” Natalia laughed. “She's the free-as-the-breeze type.”

“Isn't it true—as Louis would say. So what did you advise her?”

“Oh. We didn't get into the police business. I suggested that she get some friends together and they all follow Lindman home and heckle
him
for a change. Scare him just once.”

“Linderman.”

“Linderman. Anyway, it might do the trick. Elsie told me he's scared of her punk friends even now. She calls them punks.”

“Mm-m. But the police, no, eh?”

“She thinks the police might not discourage him, and he might tell the police she's living in a whorehouse or some such. Bet she's right. I also said, why not find another young girl who's about to lose her morals or whatever, and see that Linderman meets her.”

Jack smiled. “But Elsie's so attractive.”

“True.” Natalia looked at Jack's worktable. “Is that Elsie?” She moved toward the drawing which stood among several others. “It is, isn't it?”

“Yep, I did it after the disco evening. Clever of you to recognize her.”

“That's a good drawing.”

Jack said nothing, but he appreciated the tone of Natalia's voice, not a tone she used often. Jack felt pleased.

“I'm having coffee with her tomorrow morning at eleven. At that place on Sheridan Square with the glass front. You know?—Want to come?”

Jack knew the place with its enclosed front terrace. “No, you go. See what you think.” He smiled. “I don't think she'll bore you.”

15

Very early one weekday morning, Ralph Linderman rode homeward on a Seventh Avenue bus that was nearly empty and abominably overheated. Twice he changed his seat, trying to avoid gushing hot air that he thought might even singe his clothing. The heat intensified the stink of captured air in the bus, the stench of dirty woolen clothes, stale grease, body odor, even garlic. It was worse, Ralph thought, than what blew up from subway grills in the sidewalks when a train ran underneath, a gust like a belch of an ugly dragon monster, long dead and putrefying. That subway smell was of old metal-on-metal, of oily dust moist with human breath, the semi-trapped air of hundreds of subway cars and tunnels whose atmosphere had never been completely changed since the subway cars had started running. He could throw in the smells of chewing gum and discarded cigarette butts, spit, vomit and piss down there. Ralph hated the subways. They were dangerous as well as being hideous.

“You might allow people to open a window,” Ralph said to the bus driver just before his stop, “since you've got the heat up so high!” Ralph hadn't been able to open a window, though he had tried two of them.

“Then we'd have complaints about a draft,” said the black driver.

“Must be ninety in here. It's roasting!”

“Exit at the rear, sir, and no talkin' to the driver.”

The driver stopped with deliberate abruptness, nearly throwing Ralph off his feet.

The cold December air felt good, and Ralph inhaled deeply. He had been thinking, on the bus, about buying a new overcoat, and his thoughts returned to this pleasant prospect. He had ample money, he reminded himself, but he was thrifty by nature, which he didn't consider a fault, in the long run. Was not the world full of people who overspent and made themselves miserable, lost their friends by borrowing and so on?

Ralph aired God in the pitch dark, making it short this time, and promising God a longer walk later. He kept his promise at 11 a.m., when he went out to buy some groceries and the
Times.
He might have walked down Seventh to the coffee shop where Elsie worked, since he fancied a coffee and Danish just then, but they wouldn't let God in (did that apply to other dogs as well?), and besides Elsie's shift started around 6 p.m., Ralph thought. It was a pleasure merely to look at her, Ralph realized and admitted to himself. He didn't have to talk to her, or lecture her, as Elsie put it. Goodness, no! And at least once he had gone into the café, without the dog, and said absolutely nothing to her, not even nodded a greeting, not even made an effort to sit where she might wait on him. This served two purposes in Ralph's opinion: one, he could enjoy being near her, watching her moving, smiling to people, talking, and two, he imagined himself the image of her conscience, sitting on a stool at the counter. Yes, seeing him, she would recall the things he had said to her about guarding her character and her health while she still had them. Cheerful things he had said to her, and why did she scorn them?

A couple of hours later Ralph was walking south from Fourteenth Street, where he had taken the crosstown bus westward, carrying a rectangular box with his new overcoat in it. At home, Ralph spoke to God and aroused the dog's interest before he opened the tissue-lined box.

What a beauty it was—for a hundred and sixty-seven dollars and thirty-eight cents! The overcoat was dark blue with dark blue satin lining, flaps on the two side pockets, an inner pocket, and a loop at the back for hanging. Ralph put it on in front of his largest mirror, a swinging mirror that sat on his chest of drawers.

“What d'y'think, God? Pretty neat, isn't it?”

The dog barked and pranced around, sniffed at the overcoat's hem.

Ralph put on all his living-room lights, and tilted the mirror to have a look at the lower part. Finally, he undid the stiff buttons and hung the coat carefully.

In the afternoon, he awakened in what was for him the middle of the night, and recalling his overcoat, felt no desire to go back to sleep. The winter sun came thin and bright through his bedroom window. Ralph never drew his curtains. Daylight did not affect his sleep. Sutherland's questioning him about his wife,
ex­
wife Irma, had upset him, and he realized the upset had even led him to buy the overcoat—
something
nice, something to make him forget the silly woman, in a way. How she'd prided herself on her cuteness, her prettiness so ephemeral! What did she look like now? In her mid-fifties? Men wouldn't flock now, just because she gave them the eye. Sex-obsessed too, he had thought. But no. Ralph had come to the conclusion that her sexy demands—she had meant them to seem sexy, at any rate—had been only another of her ways to annoy him, put him down. Indeed, it had! Of course he'd read about women having five orgasms to a man's one. But they could also fake it. As for Irma—Well, it might have worked out, if she hadn't been so shallow, so like a spoilt child, with no need to work, no need to do anything but keep house and go to the beauty parlor, and manicure her toenails. Why had he taken her writing aspirations so seriously? Out of a misguided courtesy, respect? Ralph reproached himself here: he had been stupid to marry such a silly woman, and for that he had no one to blame but himself. And of course he'd become impotent, for the simple reason that he hadn't even liked Irma after five or six months, certainly hadn't been enamored of her any longer. He wasn't impotent, as he had been able to prove to himself by masturbation, an activity he didn't really enjoy. Pleasant for moments, to be sure, but in the abstract, as a pleasure or as a substitute for something—well, was it necessary? He never imagined anything, any woman, when he did this, certainly not centerfold girls with big breasts, the usual arousers. No, indeed. He never imagined Elsie either. Unthinkable! He felt just the opposite, about Elsie. He couldn't conjure up in imagination a Prince Charming worthy of her. No, he thought only of himself during this activity, which he indulged in maybe once or twice a year, he wasn't at all sure about how frequently. He thought only, yes, I can make it, no problem. Irma had been wrong. He wasn't a freak with some kind of block in his head about this. If Ralph wished to be bitter or vindictive, which he didn't, he could “blame” Irma, because she had let him down as a person, as the twenty-four-year-old girl he thought he had married. He had thought there was some substance to her. She had had a job in a real estate agency as secretary when they met. Her parents had a house in town, respectable people, one older married brother, Ralph remembered Irma had had. Ralph didn't want to recall all that, because it was all negative, and he always got back to blaming himself. He'd been in love, to be sure. Dangerous state, a state to make bad mistakes in.

How had this train of thought started? With the conversation with Sutherland, of course. Irma. Impotence. Masturbation. Ugh! Ralph felt a vague shame about masturbation, which had nothing to do with his childhood, when a parent might have said, “Stop that!” and in fact Ralph could not recall his parents ever having said that to him. Ralph realized that Irma had planted a bitterness in him against all women, a fear of them, though he quite realized that not all women were like Irma.

Ralph got out of bed, having decided to test his overcoat against the elements, in this case, now, nothing more than a chill day. He shaved with his safety razor, annoyed still by the memories of Irma in her pink dressing gown at 7 in the morning when he shaved before going off to work. He'd probably have made his own breakfast on most of those mornings. Often she taunted him, because he had not been a success in bed in the morning. Hard to make love with your mind on the clock. And who'd have earned their living if he had let the carpentry shop slide? Damn her! Wisps, mere wisps, these memories, little pale ghosts like the lather bits he flung from his razor into the basin.

Ralph dressed and put on his overcoat. From a shelf in his front closet he took a round fur cap which he had bought a year ago and hardly worn since. He tried it on. Black rabbit fur, it was, with ear-flaps, rather Russian-looking.

Thus attired, and without God who could wait for his airing around 7, Ralph strolled off southward on Bleecker. He was tempted to walk through Minetta Street past Elsie Tyler's house. It was half past 5, she might be coming out of her house on her way to work, and he might see her. And then he might not. He realized that he wanted her to see him in his smart new coat. If he did see her, he intended to say in a friendly manner, touching his cap, “Afternoon, Elsie!” and walk on.

Yet another irritating matter crossed his mind as he waited to cross a street: the electricity people in his mother's town were dunning him about a bill he had paid by check long ago, but sent to the wrong branch office, it seemed. And her town church expected him to honor “a pledge” his mother had made to contribute a hundred dollars a year, and could he, etc. which amounted to seventy-three dollars still due for this year. Ralph had neither sent it nor replied, but the church's requests kept coming. If such a misguided pledge were not kept, it was no reflection upon the family's honor, in Ralph's opinion.

But why pain himself by thinking of all that on such a nice afternoon? There was Elsie's three-storey house, dark red like some of the others, yet special to Ralph because Elsie lived there. Its door was closed. Ralph kept his eyes on the house as he walked along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. The street was short and narrow with a crook in it. Once there had been Minetta Brook along here, and Ralph fancied that there was a depression where Minetta Street ended in Minetta Lane, which crossed it.

Suddenly Elsie's house door opened, voices male and female mingled, and someone laughed. A young girl and two boys came out, and Elsie was behind them, turning to pull the door shut.

“There!—Look!” Elsie cried to her friends.

There was a whoop from the others, and Ralph realized that he was the center of their attention. Ralph walked faster.

“Creep!” said a girl's voice behind him.

“Hey! Let Elsie alone! You hear us?” roared a male voice.

“Sex maniac! . . .”

“Who've you screwed lately?”

“Ha-ha! He can run! Look!”

Ralph felt both shame and fury. He wasn't running, just walking as fast as he decently could, and the few paces in Minetta Lane to Sixth Avenue seemed endless. A boy in sneakers had loped in front of him with arms outstretched as if to block him.

“Fuck off, ol' motherfucker, we're gettin' the cops onto you!”

Where was Elsie in all this? A boy struck Ralph's shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Cut it out!” Ralph yelled. “Leave me alone!”

“Leave
him
alone!” cried a girl's shrill voice, and this was followed by laughter.

“Yee-aye! Skit! Skit, y'bastid!”

“And don't come back! Don't come around again, see?” A boy with rouge on his face, with lipstick, said this to Ralph straight into his face. The boy danced backward and looked at Ralph through nearly closed eyes whose lashes bore black dust or grease. “Fuckin'
creep
!”

Ralph lowered his head and plunged uptown on Sixth Avenue.

“Hah! . . . Ha-ha-haa-aa! . . . Run, boy! Beat it!”

The voices mingled. An ashcan lid slithered past Ralph on the sidewalk, making a horrid grating sound. Passersby stared.

But he had finally put some distance between himself and them. Ralph slowed his pace, breathed deeply, looked straight ahead, and as soon as he had a red light, he crossed to the west side of Sixth.

Ralph walked right into them. The three—not Elsie, where was she?—had somehow crossed Sixth too.

“Where you headin'?” asked the unmade-up boy.”We're goin' with you! Ain't we?”

“Yeeow,” replied the rouged boy.

Ralph strode toward home, but the boys, both of them, kept leaping in front of him, brushing his shoulders and sides as he headed toward Bleecker. But why go to his house, Ralph thought, and ducked into a restaurant, went through its storm door and through its second door.

“We're not serving yet, sir,” said a waiter.

“The telephone—”

The waiter looked reluctant, but made a gesture toward the telephones at the back.

Ralph walked between empty tables, looked behind him, and saw one of the boys coming in. Words were exchanged, the waiter fairly hustled the boy out, supported by another waiter. And outside, they lingered, Ralph could see them. Ralph pretended to be making a telephone call, to talk. When he looked at the glass door again, they were still outside. They weren't going to leave, he realized. With the telephone against his ear, his lips mumbling nervous nonsense, Ralph suddenly saw Irma laughing at him as she withdrew a cigarette from her dark red lips, eyes closed with laughter at him, long wavy hair down to her shoulders, shaking. Bitch!

He hung up, started for the door again, knowing that it was inevitable that he face them, raised his head, said, “Thank you,” to the two waiters, and went out.

“Here he comes!” cried a boy.

Now Ralph saw Elsie smiling at the other girl, apparently saying good-bye, near the downtown corner: Elsie had to go to work soon. Elsie's smiling eyes met his before she turned and trotted away. His shoulders back, Ralph walked uptown, the direction of home.

And it was the two boys who kept pace with him, who banged his shoulders from behind, who walked on either side of him.

“You leave Elsie alone, you hear? Or we'll fix you, man! You
bananas
!”

“Fuckin' creep, fuckin' creep!” This boy laughed merrily, as if he were doing a pleasant job now.

When Ralph turned into West Fourth, the boys were still with him. Their words were horrid. Ralph glanced around for a cop. Where should he go? He was not going to be pursued to his very doorstep! To the point of having to close the first front door against them, when in fact that door didn't or didn't always lock, and Ralph knew that the boys would push it open behind him, follow him to his apartment door and through it, if they could.