NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (28 page)

So in the early hours of the morning Imago sat up in bed, the faint rays of dawn glowing on her enchanting breasts, and cradled Peter’s weary head in her arms. Pressing his damp tousled hair against her smooth belly, she rocked back and forth, crooning
contentedly, “You’re a little dear, that’s what. A dear, do you hear? A dear, a dear!”

In the following weeks Imago Parson consumed Peter as though she were a flame and he a candle, melting slowly under the fierce heat of her ardor. Her dark warm bed was a temple wherein he performed the mystic rites required of him as dancer and lover. For now he was persuaded that he who danced, loved, and he who loved, danced; and it was the assurance that he was realizing his dream, even if in an unexpected way, that sustained Peter in the more difficult daylight hours with his beloved.

Imago was Lotions Editor of
Chic
magazine. It amused her to demand that Peter call for her, for she liked to have a cab waiting on Madison Avenue, and she enjoyed flaunting Peter at the Hormones Editor, an elderly debutante with whom she was continually feuding. Peter even learned to shop in the drugstores for Imago’s personal requisites. He was saddened when he discovered that she took the most elaborate precautions in order to keep from becoming a mother; and it was with the greatest reluctance that he purchased those items which seemed so important to Imago. When he had to wait at the rear of the Boring Pharmacy (“Nothing Ever Happens To Our Customers”) until everyone else had left so that he could whisper his order, Peter felt that his love for Imago was stretched to its uttermost point.

Yet he was willing to go on, and indeed he was led to recognize the justness of Imago’s criticism of the way he lived. She resented the time that he spent with Mama Blight, Angus Mondschein, and Freddy; and Peter had to admit that his outside life was irrelevant to the act of creation that he performed repeatedly for her delectation.

Furthermore, Imago was unutterably annoyed, as she put it, when she learned that Peter had answered an advertisement in the
Journal-American
and gotten a job. In fact she became so angry that her Halloween eyes grew bloodshot and inflamed—and Peter could seek refuge from her accusing voice only in his work.

The ad had read:
Wide-awake livewires needed by Market Analysis and Tip Sheet Organization. Big commissions positively
guaranteed to young veteran go-getters fast on their feet. L.A.F. earned $185.72
LAST WEEK!!

The President and Managing Director of Matso was a cadaverous, seedy young man named Moe Spleenwell who wore a sweater coat sprinkled with moth holes and who formed bubbles at the corners of his mouth when he spoke. His office was an incredibly small hutch in a rabbit warren on lower Broadway. Peter was astonished to find that the entire building was broken up into hundreds of tiny wallboard cubicles, each fitted with a desk, two chairs, and a telephone. In most of those into which Peter could see, men with dark blue beards were shouting into telephones, scraping the breakfast egg from their flies, or adding up columns of figures in the margins of their morning newspapers. The open glass doors were inscribed with names calculated to bowl over the casual visitor: Global Findings Corp., International Union of Public Opinion Research Interviewers, Hemispheric Federation of Jute, Hemp, and Tweed Importers, and one more modestly lettered, Chaleh Manufacturers’ Association of Greater New York.

“You’ll do!” shouted Spleenwell, when Peter had done no more than introduce himself. “Pronounce your name clearly—names are basic, Shifty—and extend your hand in a manly grip. I’m going to teach you how to SWING into action.” He broke off abruptly and commenced staring out his tiny dusty window at the street scene below.

He stared so long that Peter grew uncomfortable and began to think that perhaps Spleenwell had forgotten all about him, half-hidden as he was behind high stacks of Matso literature. But in a moment Spleenwell leaped to his feet, flinging his lank black hair out of his eyes and crying, “Plans, dreams, plans! Come, Shifty, let’s repair to the ready room. There’s money to be made!”

He hustled Peter out of the cubicle and down to the street, where he began to march uptown at a great rate of speed.

“Are we going to take a bus, Mr. Spleenwell?”

“No, no, call me a cab!”

Inside the taxi Moe Spleenwell said to the driver, “To the Hotel Splendide, just as fast as you can.” When the taxi careened to a stop at their destination, he leaped out and ran indoors with
his head lowered, as if it were raining. Peter paid the driver and hurried after his new employer.

The Hotel Splendide was a furtive-looking structure on the ragged fringe of Times Square; the Turquoise Room of the Hotel Splendide was rented by Spleenwell, it appeared, as a classroom for his salesmen.

Matso was a regular bulletin offering inside information on stock market fluctuations, advice on evading federal trade regulations, and suggestions on dumping the surplus war materials of the last three conflicts in which the United States had been involved. It was mimeographed on butcher paper and delivered once a month, wrapped in a plain envelope, by messenger. Peter nudged his right-hand neighbor and whispered, “Why don’t they mail it out?”

“Messenger boys are more impressive. Besides,” hissed the young man, “don’t you know of the penalties for using the mails to defraud? You should—they’re listed in Matso.”

Peter also learned that Moe Spleenwell put out every issue of Matso singlehanded in his Broadway cubbyhole. This took him about a day and a half each month; the rest of the time he spent at the race tracks, grimly losing the money that his salesmen had earned for him. Peter was somewhat surprised to observe that the Matso Master Salesmen, far from resenting Mr. Spleenwell’s deep interest in the horses, admired the skill with which he managed to keep their working hours at a maximum and his own at a minimum.

At the close of the session all of the salesmen arose, linked arms, and chanted the company anthem. Moe Spleenwell blew harshly on a pitch pipe, dropping spittle as he shook his hair out of his eyes, while his agents sang happily, “Matso is tops, it never stops, it never flops! When Moe’s got the dope, why should we mope?”

Peter was issued a Matso Minute Man’s kit. It included a pearl-gray Homburg two sizes too large (for which he was billed $11.23), a zipper briefcase initialed Z.B.—“for Zipper Briefcase,” Moe Spleenwell explained with a chuckle ($6.57), a set of three thousand Matso calling cards ($1.74) on each of which Spleenwell insisted that Peter print his name with a ballpoint pen, and a
supply of give-away reminder pads ($9.18) containing useful information for potential subscribers, such as the signs of the Zodiac, the date of Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s execution, and the finishing times in the track and field events of the 1912 Olympic Games. If the pages of the reminder pad were riffled rapidly one could catch glimpses on the paper’s edge of an unclothed girl engaged in an unmentionable activity.

“Gosh,” Peter muttered. “I’ll have to sell millions of subscriptions before I break even on what I owe already.”

“Good boy!” shouted Spleenwell, who had overheard this remark. “Sour pusses starve, Shifty, but you’ll ring the bell.”

Peter felt a little ridiculous when he set out, his initialed briefcase sagging with Matso material; and when his oversize Homburg fell over his eyes he was almost run over by a crosstown bus.

For the first few days Peter was unhappy with his work. He would have been extremely lonely, meeting so many people, if it had not been for Imago. And yet something about the city was congruent with his mood: a sense of loss, of something once sought for but long since forgotten, in the faces of all the people, corresponded to his own temper.

One day, while he was hot on the trail of a jobber who was interested in learning how he could legally export to South Africa twenty thousand silk ties hand-painted with obscene pictures, Peter looked down nervously. A little boy of five or six, clutching the remains of an ice-cream sucker, was trying to slip his sticky little fingers into Peter’s free hand. He looked straight up at Peter with his grimy earnest face and said, “Cross me, Mister?”

Peter felt his heart turn over. “What’s that?”

“Cross me, Mister?” the little boy repeated impatiently.

Peter walked slowly across Seventh Avenue with the child’s hand firmly enclosed in his own. At the far side of the street the boy pulled his fingers free as soon as his feet touched the curb. He raised his hand in farewell and ran off without another word, leaving Peter standing on the corner staring after him.

Turning the incident over in his mind, Peter finally decided that he had been so moved because never before had anyone shown such complete faith and trust in him. He could not keep from contrasting the image of the little boy skipping down
Seventh Avenue with the memory of himself only the night before, cavorting elatedly before his shadow on Imago’s stippled wall. Imago, clapping her hands in delight, had bedecked her glowing nude form with metallic bracelets and, shaking a pair of gaily painted gourds (souvenirs of a Mexican vacation), had rattled out a frenzied accompaniment to his gyrations.

Peter could not wait to speak to Imago about the little boy. At the last minute he decided to visit her that evening instead of going to ballet class.

He inserted the key that Imago had given him in her door and stepped noiselessly into the foyer, intending to surprise her. But there on the love seat only a few feet from him lay a boiled dress shirt, white, rumpled, and shaggy, like a polar bear, with a yellow enameled jewel gleaming dully on its surface, like a polar bear’s eye.

Peter recoiled. He bumped into a plaster of Paris forearm splint which Imago had gotten from a lovesick interne so that she could wire it into a lamp, it smashed into smithereens at his feet—and instantly the apartment was ablaze with light.

“How dare you!” growled Gripping Rotheart, sitting erect on the bed, his thick red hair flaming fiercely on his head and chest.

“You’ve broken my lamp!” wailed Imago, real tears flowing into her fingers as she pressed her hands to her hot cheeks.

Peter picked up the pieces and placed them on the love seat. Then he turned and left Imago’s apartment for the last time.

For the first time in his life, Peter was afflicted with insomnia. Night after night he lay in his little room, staring up at the dark ceiling. The disappointments he had suffered were of the kind, he supposed, that people got used to as they grew older—but he didn’t
want
to get used to them.

In desperation Peter tried to put himself to sleep by reading the pamphlets that Angus Mondschein had given him; but they only reminded him of Angus (who now avoided him in the hallway), and when they did succeed in putting him to sleep he only had nightmares and awoke sweating and unhappy.

His waking life, selling for Moe Spleenwell, seemed to grow
steadily more unpleasant, but for some days Peter could not bring himself to admit that it was anything more than his own depressed state of mind which made so many people appear cruel, acquisitive and cold-hearted.

The crisis came one day while he was wandering through the shiny overheated catacombs beneath Radio City. Turning a bend in the corridor, so that suddenly he could see the rich people, the Europeans, and the tourists lunching under the awnings in Rockefeller Plaza, he came upon a group of sightseers listening to a blue-uniformed girl.

“Three hundred million tons of solid rock,” she was saying briskly, “were blasted through, solely that you might stand here and marvel at modern science and American civilization.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Peter cried. “Even Angus Mondschein—”

Everyone turned to look at him. The guide compressed her lips and folded her arms as though she were waiting for Peter to disappear; but her listeners pounced on him as though he were a sneak thief. One little beady-eyed man pointed his rolled-up umbrella at Peter and said, “Where’s your button, Mr. Wise Guy?”

It was true that everyone else wore a large button pinned over the heart. But Peter replied indignantly, “I don’t see what that’s got to do. I’ve got a right—”

“Oh no you don’t, smarty. You didn’t pay, and you’ve got no right, none at all.”

“But I—”

Someone shouted, “Go on back to Fourteenth Street, you troublemaker!”

Disheartened and puzzled, Peter escalated up from the cavern. He mounted a downtown bus that would take him to Fourteenth Street, as they had suggested, and seated himself in the rear.

At Union Square Peter arose and walked to the front, but the entrance was blocked. The driver was engaged in an altercation with a fat Negro woman who had attempted to pay her fare with a five-dollar bill.

“You got a hell of a nerve, lady!” the driver yelled.

“I got nothing smaller.”

“I never saw nothing bigger, either. You ought to pay double.”

“Don’t get smart.”

“All right then, here’s your change!” He emptied the pennies from his change-maker and hurled them angrily at the woman. Soon the floor was carpeted with coppers which she stooped to pick up, muttering curses while the driver continued to fling pennies at her. At last she could stand it no longer and began to belabor the driver about the head with a heavy handbag.

The passengers sat quietly. Some watched the fight openly, grinning uneasily, but most shoved their faces into their afternoon papers, or simply gazed languidly out the windows at the sweating crowd waiting to board the bus.

“Isn’t anybody going to do anything?” Peter asked in a loud trembling voice. He remembered how he had cried out, seeing the fiery sun behind the bus that had brought him to New York so recently. How different his excitement had been then! “People can’t live like this. There isn’t time!”

“The kid’s right.” A husky laborer spoke up to the driver. “We haven’t got time to horse around. Give her the change and let’s get going.”

“Come on, lady,” another man said to the Negro woman. “My boss is waiting for me. Take the pennies and let’s go.”

“That’s not what I meant!” cried Peter. He stepped between the driver and the Negro woman, holding them apart with his arms. “Why don’t you make up? Don’t you want to do anything better than this with your lives?”