Roger's Version (8 page)

The blocks here were broken into narrow old-fashioned shops. A flower shop, a beauty parlor, a laundromat, and a store proclaiming B
AIT
& T
ACKLE
, the window full of lures and hooks that could not be cast into water for many miles around. In wobbly red letters a haberdasher was G
OING
O
UT OF
B
USINESS
. A small dress shop on the corner advertised
Halloween Costumes for Playful Adults:
the faces of animals—pigs, a tusked boar, a snarling wolf—lay amid lingerie and lace underwear
like slabs of meat on chips of shining ice. L
ARGE
E
GGS—
49¢ a Dozen! With Any, $10 Purchase 1 Doz Per Customer
. The poverty all about me was being appealed to with the warning that dozens and dozens of eggs could not be appropriated by this come-on scheme. M E G A B U C K S
You Could Be Our Next Millionaire!
And yet those that did win, I had noticed, in their newspaper interviews seemed bewildered by the sudden burden of money, and some hesitated for days before claiming the loot, which would dwarf and mock the lives they had led hitherto.

The shops ceased and there was a blank in the boulevard while railroad tracks crossed it, the disused speckled tracks of some spur line that vanished into a region of large blank-sided buildings, a gypsum-colored pocket of hard industry not yet transformed into artists’ lofts or high-tech labs. The newer university science buildings lay beyond this industrial tract. The university and its money permeate the city; the city’s buildings and quadrangles are embedded in tracts of university-owned tenements, and there is even, many miles away, a hilltop preserve, bequeathed in the previous century, where forestry students in hard hats and leather leggings study and chop and thoughtfully chew twigs to earn their degrees.

I was seeing with Dale’s still-religious eyes. Across the tracks, I saw on the renewed sidewalk a dog turd of extraordinary blackness, a coiled turd black as tar. A certain breed, or an unusual meal? Or an unvarnished wonder, an auspice, like the intensely green puddle? And then I passed a tombstone store, a glass-fronted office beside a gravel lot crowded with carved and polished marble. A rose-colored headstone held, in a niche between bas-relief pillars, an open book of just six words chiselled into its two pages.

ONE

There was a typographic elegance to it, for the lefthand words got longer and the ones on the right dwindled. Dale Kohler, having left my office, would certainly have paused and mused here, grappling in his mind to make the connection between the frozen plea cut mechanically into this metamorphic stone and the cosmic furnace of the Big Bang amid whose grotesque and towering statistics irrefutable proof of divine supervision was locked. The spontaneous irregularities of the mottled texture of the marble were not unlike those minute but indispensable departures from homogeneity within the primeval cosmos, when all matter now installed between here and the farthermost quasars was squeezed smaller than a basketball and so hot the quarks themselves were still unglued, and monopoles were more than hypothetical and matter and antimatter engaged from nanosecond to nanosecond in a fury of mutual annihilation that by some mysterious slim margin of preponderance left matter enough to form our attenuated old universe.

The irrepressible combinations of the real! A very tall, willowy young black, with a shaved head and upon its baldness a many-colored skullcap, was carrying balanced across this spectacular head like a fantastic turban one of those padded semi-chairs, having a back and arms but no legs, with which people prop themselves up in bed; the thing was bright peach in color and wrapped in a transparent plastic that crackled as we passed, while crossing in opposite directions the sunken, tarred-over railroad tracks. Was this exotic black man, demographic studies to the contrary, a compulsive nighttime
reader? Or was he dutifully taking this prop to an aged grandmother or great-uncle? The black family, though statistically in shambles, still has its sinews of connection; facts in summary never quite match facts in the concrete; every new generation gives America a chance to renew its promises. These hopeful, patriotic thoughts entered my mind straight from Dale’s naïve soul.

A brick fire station, built at an angle to the street, bore high on its side a painted mural of George Washington receiving, without visible pleasure, what seemed to be an extension of credit from a delegation of similarly knickered and deadpan establishment men. Next to the station stood a huge old civic building, built in two-tone brownstone on the model of a Venetian palazzo; its deep Byzantine entrances were plastered with election posters, its soft steps had been worn into troughs by the feet of a century of petitioners. In the vicinity of these public buildings the street underwent a tiny surge of gentrification: a row of three-deckers painted in bohemian colors such as lavender and lemon housed a boutique, a health-food store, and, most venturesomely, a shop called A
DULT
P
ASTRIES
, which advertised in the window
Erotic Cakes and Droll Candies
. What shapes this drollery might take I felt Dale’s mind but lightly play with. The shape and mucilaginous infolded structure of our wrinkly human genitals did not, evidently, amid many phenomena that did, strike him as an argument for God’s existence. I pictured his waxy face, breaking out in a masturbator’s pimples. I felt superior to him, being sexually healthy ever since Esther took over from ungainly, barren Lillian. My second wife when unmarried had been a flexible marvel in bed, her underparts in the sunlight of our illicit afternoons fed to my eyes like tidbits of rosy marzipan.

After its jocular grab at prosperity, Sumner Boulevard
slumped downhill and its pedestrians took on a refugee desperation of appearance. On one curb paused an addled man so fat he looked like clothes hung out to air, swollen on the line by wind. In passing close to him I saw the skin of his enormous and preoccupied face to be afflicted with some foul eczema, layered like peeling wallpaper. On this same corner a building, its lower floor reshingled in stylishly irregular shades, had survived a fire in its top floors, which had left charred window frames empty of sashes; but the bar downstairs continued open, and sounds from within—the synthetic concussions of a video game, a muted, mixed-sex laughter—indicated a thriving business, well before the Happy Hour though it was. The view down the thoroughfare now included steel girders blotchily painted in anti-rust orange: a lead-in ramp to one of the bridges that cross the river, in whose polluted eddies, I now had reason to suspect, fish awaited local fishermen.

Prospect Street. Named for a view long since eclipsed. Here I turned, for Verna’s telephone-book address was on this prospectless street, a few blocks farther along. Some of the houses still had pretensions to being homes, with mowed little front lawns and painted religious statuary (the Virgin’s robe skyey blue, the Baby’s face clayey beige) and flower beds still bright with the round hot button-heads of red and yellow mums. Most of the houses had given up pretensions: the yards were weedy to the height of a man’s knees, and bottles and cans had been tossed into them as if into a repository. The façades were unpainted even where curtains or a tended flower box at an upstairs window indicated habitation. The owners had slipped away, whether through misfortune or an accountant’s unscrupulous calculations, leaving the buildings on their own, like mumbling mental patients turned out on the street. Some had progressed deeper into dilapidation, and
were plainly abandoned and no doubt trashed within, their doors and windows plywooded over though there must be back doors and basement windows whereby drug addicts and the homeless could force access. Even the trees here, weed ailanthus between the houses and a few spindly locusts staked along the curb, looked frightened, their lower branches broken and their bark aimlessly slashed.

I walked along, and in five minutes came to the project where Verna lived. I had driven past here perhaps a dozen times in the ten years we have lived in this city. Four blocks of run-down working-class neighborhood had been demolished in the JFK era to make a yellow-brick Camelot of low-cost housing. The architectural rigor of the interlocked complexes—U-shapes set back to back, each U enclosing a parking lot or a playground for the young or a small green space with benches for the elderly—had remained, but the sanitary vision of the planners had in many details surrendered to human erosion. Rude paths had been worn in shortcuts across sweeps of grass; hedges had been battered and benches hacked; some basketball stanchions had been bent to the ground as if by malicious giants. One received an impression of overpopulation, of random human energy too fierce to contain in any structure. Slowly the playgrounds, originally equipped with relatively fragile seesaws and roundabouts, had evolved into wastelands of the indestructible, their chief features now old rubber truck tires and concrete drain pipes assembled into a semblance of jungle gyms. A glittering sleet of broken glass fringed the asphalt curbs, the cement foundations.
SE PROHIBE ESTACIONAR
. Another sign warned that
Owners of
A
BANDONED OR
U
NREGISTERED
A
UTOMOBILES
Will Be Prosecuted
. No one seemed to be about, at this hour of mid-afternoon. As if under an enchantment I passed unobserved into the entryway whose number, 606, corresponded
to Verna’s address in the telephone book. Inside the building, locks had been smashed or disassembled and replaced by padlocked chains threaded through the holes. The stairwells ascended through a complex cave odor of urine and damp cement and rubber-based paint, paint repeatedly applied and repeatedly defaced.
TEX GIVES BEST HEAD
, one fresh spray-can motto ran, signed with flourishes,
MARJORIE
. On the next landing, the same spray can, in an identical style of script, boasted
MARJORIE SUCKS
, signed
TEX
, with an elaborate X that somehow bespoke the signer’s brave hopes for his future.

I had seen the name Ekelof pencilled on slot 311 inside the door down below, beside the tarnished mailboxes. On the third floor I walked down a long corridor. It was bare, though holes and irregularities in the walls remembered where things—decorations, amenities—had once been fastened to it. First I went the wrong way; the numbers mounted in even increments. I reversed myself and came to a door where the numbers 311 existed as faint ghosts, pierced by old nail-holes, in the celery-green paint. My hand was lifted to knock when on the other side of the door a small child babbled, babbled on the gleeful moist verge of language. My hand froze, then descended, not too solidly. Also from within I could hear music, a piping, brassy female singer. She sang rapidly, indignantly. I knocked again.

Something scraped, there was a slap, the babbling stopped, and I could feel eyes looking at me through the tiny peephole. It had been a number of years since I had seen little Verna. “Who is it?” Her voice was croaky and tense and faintly honking, as if a metal tube were involved in its production.

I cleared my own throat and announced, “Roger Lambert. Your uncle.”

The door’s smooth painted surface had a look of holding much evidence, were homicide detectives to come and dust it for fingerprints. Verna opened the door, and the draft of warm
air this released carried a scent with it, a musty odor as of peanuts or stale spice, a sullen, familiar, Midwestern smell. I was stunned. This was my sister, Edna, when we were both young.

But no, Verna was an inch or so shorter than Edna, and had a coarse shapeless nose inherited from her blond fool of a father. Edna’s had been rather fine, with sculpted nostril-wings that flared when she was being provocative and that sunburned all summer long. I sensed in Verna a dangerous edge that in my half-sister had been sheathed by middle-class caution. Edna had talked a tough and naughty game but ended by obeying the rules. This girl had been pushed beyond the rules. Her eyes looked lashless and had a curious slant. She stared at me for a long glazed second, and then quite disarmingly smiled. Her smile was childish, showing many small round teeth and bringing up a dimple in one pale cheek. “Hi, Nunc,” she said, very slowly, as if my long-awaited arrival were obscurely delicious.

Verna’s face was too wide, her skin too sallow, her light brown eyes too slanted, and the skin surrounding them too puffy-looking for her to be a beauty; but she had something, something that was trapped and spoiling here. She had curly, stringy hair, chestnut color with locks of induced platinum, and was wearing only a terrycloth bathrobe. The skin of her throat and upper chest looked pink and damp. “I should have called,” I said, in recognition of the obvious fact that she had been taking a bath. “But this was rather on an impulse,” I lied. “I found myself walking this way.”

“Sure,” she said. “Come in. Don’t mind the mess.”

The room was pathetically furnished, with a hideous purple shag carpet that must have come with the place, but it did have a view toward the center of the city: in order of recession, an opposite corner of the project, some asbestos-shingled three-deckers with many television aerials, a billboard advertising
suntan lotion, a dome of the university’s riverside campus, the summit of a skyscraper with its glassed-in observation deck and rotating skyview restaurant, and the day’s hurrying clouds, their leaden centers and luminous unravelling edges. Beneath this view, on a plastic milk crate, a television set performed silently, the distressed actors of a daytime soap opera reduced to mime. Elsewhere, a few mismatched chairs stood around a card table: here someone, to judge from the many colors of stain on its cardboardy dark surface, painted.

“I was in the tub having a toke,” the girl was saying in her small, rather endearingly reedy voice, “and I thought you were probably somebody else.” This to explain the immodesty of her robe, which came only to the center of her thighs. Her legs, from which any summer tan had faded, seemed shapelier than I remembered Edna’s as being, with smaller, pinker feet and tighter ankles. “Shut up, Poops,” she said indolently to her little girl, who was pointing at me and crowing an almost-word that was “Baa” or “Daa.” The child was topless, dressed in paper diapers. The apartment felt overheated, the radiators sizzling with steam. Perhaps the gentle stench of wasting food came from the room behind a drab maroon curtain hung with big plastic rings from a mock-gold bar. I was fastidiously conscious of my gray suede gloves, my Harris-tweed coat with leather-patched elbows, my gray cashmere muffler.