The Tenants (8 page)
Authors: Bernard Malamud
“There’s no bread in my pants, man. That’s one of the things Irene and I were arguing about. Her new show is postponed and one of her nags on me, though her old man walks on bread, is to worry about when it’s not coming in, and she keeps bugging me to get a gig. I told her, ‘Sister, I have to start my new book off and I don’t give a living shit who is slaving but it won’t be me except on my writing.’ I said if she was short on confidence in me I will find me another bitch.”
“Forget about money. I still have a few bucks in my bank account.”
“That’s fine and dandy of you, Lesser, but could we take the chance of putting another table and chair in just after this bust? Suppose those birdturds come back here today?”
Lesser agreed. “Let’s wait a day or two and meanwhile you work here and I’ll work at my desk.”
“Right on.”
Two difficult days later, neither Levenspiel nor the cop having returned to the hunt, they bought Bill an unfinished maple table, a cane-bottom, solid black chair, a folding cot, and a tasseled, old-fashioned floor lamp with a marble base. Lesser tried to persuade him to move down a floor or two but he objected because there was no view lower down.
“What view is there up here?”
“I like to look at the roofs, man.”
He was, however, willing to move across the hall into Mr. Agnello’s former flat that had the toilet that sometimes flushed.
They carried the new furniture up the stairs during the evening, with the assistance of Sam Clemence and a friend of his, Jacob 32, a modest gent, Bill said, though Lesser was not comfortable in his presence. Jacob 32, who had uneasy eyes and a pencil-line mustache, was not comfortable in Lesser’s presence.
They swept and mopped up the rooms with Lesser’s broom and wet mop. The writer also gave Bill a worn afghan for his cot.
The next afternoon they found a typed notice pasted on Holzheimer’s door: NO TRESPASSING OR ILLEGAL ENTRY UNDER PENALTY OF ARREST! IRVING LEVENSPIEL, OWNER !
The landlord fortunately had not looked into Agnello’s apartment. But after that, Bill, worrying about his new possessions, agreed to move down to a not-bad back flat on the fourth floor, the opposite corner from Lesser’s. He and the writer hauled down the furniture. Bill wrote busily every day, including Sundays, but after another week he and Irene made up and he returned to her apartment, though only for weekends.
“Like I concentrate better when I don’t see her during the week,” Bill told Harry. “1 got my first chapter in the breeze at last. If you see cunt you want cunt though she is pissing a lot lately so it ain’t that much of a problem.”
“Pissing?”
“She’s got cystitis and you can’t ball them then or the germs might penetrate in you and then you have to piss all day.”
“Really?”
“That’s what I hear. Irene has this on and off. It started when she was a little chick. She has that and some other hangups I got to be patient with, but that’s the nature of her nature.”
“What sort of hangups?”
“She was a fucked-up nigger-struck chick when I took her on. She had nothing she believed in herself. I straightened her out in the main ways because I gave her an example, that I believed in my blackness.”
“What does she believe in now?”
“Me more than herself, and sometimes she believes in God, which I don’t.”
He said nothing more about her.
“I’m writing hard,” he told Lesser. He wore wire-framed, blue-tinted granny glasses and had grown a bushy mustache to go with his goatee.
Bill had nailed up pictures of W. E. B. Du Bois,
Malcolm X, and Blind Lemon Jefferson on the wall of his new kitchen-office. It wasn’t a bad place to work, Lesser thought, though it looked a little barren and wasn’t so well daylit as the upstairs place. A wash of shadow hung in the light.
Malcolm X, and Blind Lemon Jefferson on the wall of his new kitchen-office. It wasn’t a bad place to work, Lesser thought, though it looked a little barren and wasn’t so well daylit as the upstairs place. A wash of shadow hung in the light.
Although Lesser feared it would not be long before Levenspiel chanced on Bill’s new furniture, he left a bottle with six red-and-white carnations in it on a shelf in his new office.
“Luck with your new book,” he wrote in large letters on a sheet of typing paper. Partly he left the flowers in relief to have Bill out of his flat. Lesser felt he hadn’t worked in an age.
Bill, perhaps embarrassed by the carnations, said nothing in the way of thanks for anything, except once he remarked there might be a diddle of black in Lesser’s blood.
In the Babylonian past a black slave socks it to a white bitch from the Land of Israel?
Bill insisted on showing the writer the first chapter of the novel he had recently begun. Lesser asked him not to just yet, but Bill said it would help him know if he had started off right. He said this was a brand-new book although there were some scenes from the other novel, brought from Mississippi to Harlem, where most
of the action would take place. Bill asked Lesser to read the chapter in his presence. He sat in Harry’s armchair, wiping his glasses and looking at a newspaper on his knees as the writer, chain-smoking, read on the sofa. Once Harry glanced up and saw Bill sweating profusely. He read quickly, thinking he would lie if he didn’t like the chapter.
of the action would take place. Bill asked Lesser to read the chapter in his presence. He sat in Harry’s armchair, wiping his glasses and looking at a newspaper on his knees as the writer, chain-smoking, read on the sofa. Once Harry glanced up and saw Bill sweating profusely. He read quickly, thinking he would lie if he didn’t like the chapter.
But he didn’t have to. The novel, tentatively called
Book of a Black,
began in Herbert Smith’s childhood. He was about five in the opening scene, and nine at the end of the chapter; but in truth he was an old man.
Book of a Black,
began in Herbert Smith’s childhood. He was about five in the opening scene, and nine at the end of the chapter; but in truth he was an old man.
In the opening scene, one day the boy drifted out of his neighborhood into a white neighborhood and couldn’t find his way home. Nobody spoke to him except an old white woman who saw him through her ground-floor window, sitting on the curb.
“Who are you, little boy? What’s your name?”
The boy wouldn’t say.
In the afternoon this old-smelling white woman came out of the house and took the boy by the hand to the police station.
“Here’s a boy that’s lost,” she said.
He wouldn’t answer the white pigs when they asked him questions. Finally they sent in a black cop to find out where he belonged.
“Can’t you talk, boy?”
The boy nodded.
“Then talk and tell me where do you live at.”
The boy wouldn’t answer.
The black cop got him a glass of milk to drink, then lifted the boy into his car and drove into Harlem. They walked from street to street, the policeman asking people sitting on the stoops if they knew this kid. No one did. Finally a fat black woman, fanning herself though the day was cool, said she did. She led them two blocks up the street to the tenement where she said the boy lived.
“Do you live in this here house?” asked the cop.
“He sure do,” said the fat woman.
The boy said nothing.
“You sure are a terror,” said the cop. “If you was mine I would blast you ass.”
In a flat on the top floor of the house they found the mother drunk in bed. She was naked but did not pull up the blanket.
“Is this you boy?”
She turned her head and wept.
“I asked you to tell me is this you boy?”
She nodded and wept.
The cop left the boy there and went downstairs.
The woman wept.
The boy smeared a slice of stale bread with some rancid lard and went down to the street to eat it.
In the last scene of the chapter the mother has a visitor who drops in every other night.
… He was an ofay who liked to pretend to talk nigger talk. It made him feel good to do it though it was fake black talk. He did not come from the South, he came from Scranton, Pa. He came to my mama because she charged one dollar and it wasn’t before long that he used to get it for free. And also my mama did all the things he wanted her to do. Sometimes he left us a loaf of sandwich bread on the table or a can of pears, or string beans, or mushy canned fruit. I remember he left a can of tomato paste that my mama smeared on the bread and gave it to me to eat. Sometimes he also gave her two packs of Lucky Strikes. My mama was about twenty-seven years then and I was nine years old. On the street they called this guy “Rubber Dick.” He was a tall stringy Charlie with long legs and a big prick. He liked to take it out and show it to me and scare me off. I hated him and had thoughts to kill him off with my zip gun but was afraid to. I told my mother to warn him to stay out of the house but she said she didn’t mind having him for company.
“Is he comin here tonight?” I asked her.
“Well, he jus might.”
“I hope he dies before he gets here. I hope I kill him if he comes in this here room.”
“I gon wash your mouth with soap if you say that word again.”
“I got nothin to be shame of.”
“He treats me real fine. Las week he buy me a pair of pretty shoes.”
I know he didn’t buy her no shoes.
I left the house but when I came back to eat some supper, he was there, smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette.
“Wheah at is Elsie?” he asked me in nigger talk and I said I didn’t know.
He looked at me in a way that was supposed to witch me and he sat on the bed with a shit smile on his mouth.
“I gon wait for her.”
He told me to come over to him on the bed, he wouldn’t hurt me.
I was scared so nauseous I thought if I moved one teensy bit I would crap in my pants. I wanted my mother to come back fast. If she came back I would not mind what they did to each other.
“Come heah, boy, and unzip mah pants.”
I told him I didn’t want to.
“Heah’s a nice tin cints piece you kin have.”
I didn’t move at all.
“Heah’s a quotah mo. Now unzip mah pants and the money is yo’s. Bof the dime and the quotah.”
“Don’t take it out, please,” I asked him.
“Not till you show me kin you open yo mouf wide an covah yo teef wif yo lips like this.”
He showed me how to cover my teeth.
“I will do it if you stop talking nigger talk to me.”
He said honey he would, and also I was a smart boy and he loved me very much.
He was talking like a whitey again.
Lesser said it was a strong chapter and praised the writing.
“How is the form of it?”
“It’s well formed and written.” He said no more than that, as they had agreed.
“Damn right, man. It’s strong black writing.”
“It’s well written and touches the heart. That’s as much as I’ll say now.”
Bill said that in the next chapter he wanted to get deep into the boy’s black consciousness, already a fire of desire and destruction.
He lived that day in a potless triumphant high.
That night both writers, over water glasses filled with red wine, talked about being writers and what a good and great thing it was.
Lesser read aloud a passage he had written in a notebook; “I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world.”
“Who said that?”
“John Keats, the poet.”
“Fine dude.”
“And here’s something from Coleridge: ‘Nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise.’”
“Copy that down for me, man.”
Depressed, one useless morning, dispossessed of confidence in himself as writer, as he sometimes was, Lesser, shortly before noon at the Museum of Modern Art, stood before a painting of a woman done by a former friend of his, a painter who had died young.
Although he had sat at his desk for hours, that day for the first time in more than a year Lesser had been unable to write a single sentence. It was as though the book had asked him to say more than he knew; he could not meet its merciless demands. Each word weighed like a rock. If you’ve been writing a book for ten years time adds time to each word; they weigh like rocks—the weight of waiting for the end, to become the book. Though he struggled to go on, every thought, every decision, was impossible. Lesser felt depression settle on his head like a sick crow. When he couldn’t write he doubted the self; this expressed itself in reservations about the quality of his talent—was it really talent, not an illusion he had dreamed up to keep himself writing? And when he doubted the self he couldn’t
write. Sitting at his desk in the bright morning light, scanning yesterday’s pages, he had felt about to throw up: language, form, his plan and purpose. He felt sick to death of the endless, uncompleted, beastly book, the discipline of writing, the overdedicated, ultimately limited, writer’s life. It needn’t be so but was for Lesser. What have I done to myself? So much I no longer see or feel except in language. Life once removed. So against the will he had taken the morning off and gone for a walk in the February sun. Lesser tried to put his thoughts out of mind as he walked. He named his unhappiness “depression,” and let it go at that; for though he presently resisted everything concerned with writing he could not forget he wanted more than anything else to write a fine book.
write. Sitting at his desk in the bright morning light, scanning yesterday’s pages, he had felt about to throw up: language, form, his plan and purpose. He felt sick to death of the endless, uncompleted, beastly book, the discipline of writing, the overdedicated, ultimately limited, writer’s life. It needn’t be so but was for Lesser. What have I done to myself? So much I no longer see or feel except in language. Life once removed. So against the will he had taken the morning off and gone for a walk in the February sun. Lesser tried to put his thoughts out of mind as he walked. He named his unhappiness “depression,” and let it go at that; for though he presently resisted everything concerned with writing he could not forget he wanted more than anything else to write a fine book.
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