What Is All This? (43 page)

I open my book. I begin reading from the beginning of the sentence I was in the middle of before when I first heard that double knock. I finish the sentence and am reading the next sentence when someone, male or female, or maybe two males or two females or one and one, or even a trained dog or either a male or female and a trained dog, or either one male or female and two trained dogs, or up to around six dozen or so people and trained dogs of the same sex or evenly or unevenly mixed, knocks two knocks in quick succession on my door.

I put the book down. First I put a bookmark on the page I was reading and shut the book. But first I uncrossed my legs and continued to hold the book open and listened for any sound or voice or bark or sniff behind the door or human or animal scratching or more knocks on my door. Then I shut the book and said “Yes?” No one answered. Then I stood up and put the book on the chair and listened. No sound. Now I go to the door and say “Who's there?”

Someone rang his bell several times, then said “Mr. Samuels—you in? It's only me, so open up.”

Bert closed his book, leaned forward in his chair to listen.

“Mr. Samuels, I'm telling you, it's not the city or real estate people; it's Anna Kornman.”

He walked quietly to the door and put his ear against it. He of course knew who it was, her ugly singsong voice as recognizable as any he'd ever known. It's just he thought she might be with those people she mentioned.

“What do you want?” he said. “And who is it I hear out there with you?”

“Hear? What do you hear? There's nobody with me. And I got some real important news to tell you.”

“So tell.”

“Not from behind the door I won't. What do you take me for?”

“Sure the police aren't waiting with you to grab me?”

“Grab you? This is America, isn't it, and you've done nothing wrong that I know.”

“Okay.” He opened the door, looked both ways in the hallway as Anna came in, then slammed it shut and locked it. Some plaster above the door fell and splattered when it hit the floor.

“Excuse me,” he said, looking at the crumbling plaster and peeling paint hanging from the ceiling.

“Excuse you I should say. You think I was the Gestapo or something the way you act.”

“Just being cautious.”

“Yeah, but to snoop around and slam the door like that I never saw.”

“I know what I'm doing. As for the cheap paint job, that's just another thing you got to expect from piker landlords.”

He bent down, wriggled his shoulders till he heard the bones crack, and shoveled the plaster pieces into his palm and dumped them into an empty ashtray on an end table. “So out with it,” he said, brushing his hands. “What's this urgent thing you got to tell me, because I'm very busy.”

“You sit around here doing nothing all day and you call that busy? Remember, I made this trip for your benefit.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Now what is it?”

“Nothing that important, seeing your attitude.”

“If it was nothing, you wouldn't've come. I know you, Anna.”

“I could've come just to talk to someone, and given that ‘important' business just to get in here. It gets lonely, only you and me in this empty old building.”

“Anytime you want to move, just say the word. The new owners will gladly hand you a relocation fee of a couple of thousand easy and cart you out like you was a princess.”

“All I said was this place still unnerves me some—especially the painted X's on all the windows of the tenants who left. A shiver, a real shiver I get when I see them.” She clenched her teeth and wrapped her arms around her chest, as if she were standing ankle-deep in snow. She sat, banged a cigarette pack against the arm of the couch, and pulled out the cigarette that popped up and put it between her lips. She fingered through her pockets, came up empty-handed, and looked at Bert searchingly.

“Excuse me?” he said.

She pointed to the end of her cigarette and mumbled something through it.

“I don't smoke, but thank you.”

She took the cigarette from her mouth. “My God, you think living in the same building with you thirty years I know you don't smoke? But matches you got for your stove, right?”

He handed her the box of matches he kept in the side pocket of the coat he had on. Then he looked away, not wanting to catch another glimpse of her cynical, grinning face.

“So you don't smoke, eh? Well, it's nice you at least got ashtrays.” She struck a match against the flint on the box. With one eye closed and the other squinting down her nose at the flame she held to the cigarette, she drew in a satisfying first drag. Three puffs quickly followed, leaving her surrounded by smoke.

He waved his hand before him, though he stood about ten feet from the nearest arm of the smoke. “Now what is it you came to say?”

“Give up you don't,” she said, laughing large holes through the smoke in front of her.

He just stared at her.

“First of all, those real estate people were here to see me yesterday,”

“I know that.”

“So, to come I didn't have to at all, I see.”

“Did I say I knew exactly why they came?”

“Yeah, but everything I say you seem to know beforehand. Who knows; maybe it's not that important to tell anyway,” and went to the window.

What she probably means is she had nothing new to tell him, he thought. Because for one thing, she knows he misses nothing going on in the building. Especially now, with everything being so quiet—even the radiators stopped knocking two weeks ago when the landlords were allowed to turn the heat off to freeze them out—the slightest noise outside moves him to the window. Few days back it was a bunch of cats fighting. Later that day, drunks arguing over a bottle of booze as they sat on the entrance steps. Two mornings ago it was a policeman, bundled up in earmuffs and a nicely tailored blue coat, running his nightstick against the courtyard's brick wall and looking for vagrants who might have moved into the unoccupied apartments for the night. And yesterday, the three men she referred to, representatives of some big outfit that had bought the building from Mr. Shine and wanted Anna and himself, now the only holdouts, to leave so they could raze the building and put up a seventeen-story luxury apartment house in its place. It was curious why they also hadn't come to see him as they'd been doing regularly the past few months. Probably they gave up with his shrewd bulldog-like stand and were now preparing their final, higher offer. He smiled, just at the possibility, but hoped they'd hurry up with it before he came down with pneumonia and was taken away in an ambulance and forced to give up the apartment because of his absence.

Anna was standing with her back to him by the window, blowing smoke rings against the pane. Just look at her, he thought. Looking like the same skinny wreck she was thirty years ago, even though she's wearing several sweaters and God knows what else under her housecoat. What does she think she's staring at anyway? Maybe a few months ago—when they first started to hold out—there were still a few old people sunning themselves in their beach chairs along the courtyard walls, but now?—nothing. It was so like them to take the first offer and run out of here, when if they'd listened to him they could have, all sticking together, milked the landlord for way more. Already, just Anna and him, he's worked the real estate men up to two thousand, and before he's through he figures they should get four thousand each, plus the maybe five hundred extra for moving costs. After all, their reasons for staying are as valid as the company's for tearing the place down, for the building's still in good condition and was getting decent rents. And then, what are they planning to put up anyway?—for he's seen the architect's drawing of the apartment house nailed to the empty brownstone next to his. A nice drawing they'll be putting up, with plenty of trees and pretty shrubbery around it, but an apartment house it isn't. Someone's got to be blind not to see that this cheap white-tiled tombstone will be completely run-down and a hazard to its tenants in five years, but just let him try and argue this point, let him try and tell the city what he knows and has seen in other similar new buildings, and they'll call him a crank and a crackpot like they do to all the poor people his age and maybe find some way of stopping his Social Security checks and locking him up for good. So he keeps quiet on this, and that he's holding out for all he can squeeze out of them. Instead, he argues he's grown very attached to the apartment—why not, after more than half a lifetime here?—and he could never get another like it in the city for the same rent, and there's also his civic rights, so no amount of money or pressure will ever force him to leave.

Anna was back on the couch. Down to her last drag, she blew the smoke through her nostrils and snuffed out the cigarette in a tea-stained saucer she'd been using as an ashtray.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but you couldn't have used the ashtray? I eat off that plate.”

“It has that paint and plaster in it and I thought it'd burn up.”

Oh God, he thought, how this skinny, frightened-looking woman has stayed in the building and resisted the real estate people so long remains a mystery to him. She's obviously cleverer and stronger than she makes herself out to be, and is probably out to profit from her stay as much as he is, but he still has to hand it to her for sticking with it-though for the life of him he'll never tell it to her face.

“You're so quiet,” Anna said. “Anything wrong?”

“No.”

“You think they'll come back today? They're getting pretty persistent.”

“Depends what you told them yesterday.”

“You ask like I caved in to them.”

“Just curious, that's all.”

“Well, for one thing, I told them nothing. They just talked, and I'll tell you something: they were very gracious, very gracious indeed. Hats off on their laps and everything—you should've seen them.”

“Nice clothes I know they got.”

“Dandies like that in my living room, I ask you. Even being so polite to ask me if I'd mind them smoking.”

“So what happened after?”

“‘
Mind?
' I told them. ‘I should mind? Smoke all you like,' I said.

‘Me, I also smoke.'”

“I meant, what they say about getting you out?”

“You know: the same old story. If I leave they'll give me bonuses to knock my eyes out.”

“What are they giving now?” he said.

“I didn't ask. But they mentioned fifteen hundred, maybe sixteen. They weren't too definite.”

“Four thousand they'll give at least—but what's the difference? To me it wouldn't matter what they offered.”

“Same thing I told them. I like the Upper East Side, I said, and a place like this I couldn't get nowhere else, so horses it'll take to move me to Brooklyn.”

“What they say to that?”

“First, that I'm your stooge—and which I'll tell you I didn't like hearing such a lie. And two, that if they wanted, they could have the city down our necks before we know it—and with no promises they'll then give us what they originally offered. They said the city's very sympathetic to them, with half their planned apartment house already half-rented out.”

This I can believe,” he said. “All the city wants is property taxes—that's all; no concern for the little man—and bigger and more classy the building, more the tax.”

She nodded, got another cigarette and tamped it on her thigh. Bert stood up after she lit it, and walked to the window. He hated the stench of tobacco, especially cigarettes. She waved a cloud of smoke away from her, and said “Truthfully, Mr. Samuels, how long you think we can hold out like this?”

“I don't know. Indefinitely, maybe.”

“I don't think I can do it that long. It's almost December now, and soon it'll be much too cold with no radiators going, five sweaters and heaters or not.”

“So give up then—go!”

“No need to get so excited.”

“But it's obvious you're caving-in to them. So just do it and be done with it I say.”

“Be done with what? Please, be reasonable.”

“So don't then,” his voice toning down.

“I'm not. For look, some rights I got also, no? Throw me out into the street, who do they think they are? Build for us cheap you think they could do instead.”

Rights my eye, he said to himself. But ask her to give the real reason she's holding out, and she'll say with this big innocent look “Me? I should do that?” If she'd only admit the truth once, he'd probably tell her why he's staying too. It'd be good getting it off his chest to someone, and then united in purpose like that they might be able to drive the relocation fee up to five thousand.

“Did they say anything more about me?” he said.

“Some. They said ‘You know him well?' and I said ‘Well? For thirty years I know him, and very well. A nice man, quiet and friendly'—that's what I told them.”

Thanks.”

“It's the truth. Then they went on about how you're all the trouble. That they think you're crazy and for my own safety I shouldn't be in the same building alone with you, and how they can't even speak to you anymore, since the last time when you threw them out. Crazy, I said, you're not. And for you to throw them out I couldn't understand.”

They accused me of holding out only for the money, which you can understand made me upset.”

That they told me also. Something like you'll get no more than you deserve and what's the going rate. What did they offer you if I can ask?”

“Doesn't matter.”

“How much, though?”

“Same two thousand they offered two weeks ago.”

“You've been offered two thousand? Then I'm going to get two thousand. Moving costs excluded?”

“Maximum of three hundred,” he said, “but if it costs less I can't keep the balance.”

“Keep? Just watch me try to move for three hundred with all my furniture. ‘Brooklyn,' I'll tell the mover, and he'll laugh in my face.”

They say anything else about me?”

That was it. It was sort of like you wasn't living here in a way.”

“Not living here? Oh, I'm living here, and they know it full well. Excuse me a second.”

He strutted into the kitchen, put water in the kettle, and set it on the stove. Gas and electricity and water they still had, thank God, he thought, but only because he was smart enough to contact, after the city didn't get back to him, a tenants' protective organization, saying how he thought his unhumanlike landlords were about to shut everything off.

“You know what especially made me uneasy,” she said when he got back, “was the way they blamed me for pushing back the demolition date. I mean me, I should do that?”