Coney (15 page)

“Of course,” he answered. “My God, that is all you needed. Leave Menter to me.”

He poured two glasses of wine.

“My deepest sympathies on your great and tragic loss.”

It was the exact phrase she had heard countless times after handing him a note bearing the name of the deceased and the bereaved's name and relationship. She merited only the mechanical, phony solemnity.

“I suppose,” she said, “he was not a bad man. Although he made my life miserable anytime he could.”

“Why speak ill of the dead? As your people say:
Alov ha Shalom
. May peace be with him.”

She looked at her savior from the black beards. He might as well be Jewish. But he wasn't, and his skin was the color of her angels. She could close her eyes in the arms of an alabaster angel.

He unknotted his tie and began to unbutton his shirt.

“Draw the curtains and shut the light,” she said.

“Still, after all this time?”

“Still. I don't want to see you naked or you to see me. It's dirty.”

He sighed resigned exasperation.

As she lay down beside him, she spoke to her purpose, seizing the latitude conferred by her grief.

“A husband I never loved or wanted. A child I never wanted. I got pregnant to get out of the house,” she lied, having faith only in embellishment. “Pregnancy was a solution. I didn't think beyond it.”

“Velia, there is no need to tell me all this. I do not believe you, in any case. You are distraught with your loss. In such a state you are liable to say anything.”

“Believe me, Luigi, believe me. I am telling you a truth I have
never told anyone. Now you are closer to me than my husband. And that is how it should be.”

They made passionless love, Velia thinking,
He is mine as never before
, and Luigi panicking because he could not see clearly how, in an orderly fashion, to rid his professional and personal life of this threat.

As they dressed, she reminded him:

“Don't forget that gangster Menter.”

“Of course.”

Menter, it suddenly came to him, was the solution.
I looked the other way on some renegade, nonunion shops he operates in. Now he can repay me.

A
FTER ATTENDING THE CHAPEL CEREMONY,
A
BA TOOK THE SUBWAY
to his favorite Harlem whorehouse.

Proximity to death was one of life's many stimuli that agitated his desire to handle a woman, to wander his hands over all the grab bags of pleasure with which God had endowed his afterthought perhaps as recompense for chronological neglect.

When a psychiatrist friend had explained that the orgasm was the closest living approximation of death, therefore
la petite mort
, Aba, who believed that demons crafted all enigmas of life, had accused him of consorting with the French, convicted overintellectualizers.

In truth it was not the pursuit of orgasm that possessed him, but the yearning for tides of warmth his fingertips could capture and let flow through his body.

Once at a poetry reading he had watched a young Negro maid wearing a white serving outfit dole out food from a buffet table. Her icy, cocoa-colored skin, not completely covered by the uniform, promised a tactile romp of savagery and tenderness. He had held out his plate while his eyes swooned and his hands itched.

That evening he had made his first trip to a Harlem whorehouse, a path well traveled by Yiddish writers and actors seeking the thrills of unJewish, African abandon and elevation to the level of just another white man.

The Madam had asked him, “You want anything special?”

“They're all special,” he had answered, watching the black
flesh covered only by blacker bras and panties parade by.

In a tiny room, the whore, a chunky woman of indeterminate age, quickly threw off her underclothes and lay down on the lumpy bed. She twitched her wide nostrils as if preparing them for something, then shut her sad eyes and said, “Masie say you just want it straight”—a finger descended to her pubic hair—“but maybe it ain't so. The mouth is extra.”

Without removing his clothes, he lay down beside her to examine his first Negro woman. At once he thought oneness, harmony. The brown nipples on the brown breasts, the dark pubic hair curling under the dark thighs, blended into an uninterrupted expanse of sexual nourishment. No wonder Solomon, that experienced archsensualist, had turned boy in the hands of Sheba.

He asked her to lie on her side. He lay one palm on her back and slid the other under her onto a breast. He slowly smoothed his way down. The distinct sensations lifted from each contour vied for attention, confusing his brain into a drunken dizziness. By the time his fingers found her clitoris and the other hand savagely spread her buttocks, a long orgasm had wet his underpants.

Now, following a more conventional act, he reboarded the subway: He looked at his watch: seven-fifteen, still time to make the shivah.

At the 96th Street subway stop another favorite of his erotic gallery boarded: a scrubbed-sterile, button-nosed, ghostly white blonde, directly off the American assembly line. The product that had scored a direct hit on Celine's gonads.

She sat and read
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Calling on Kafka to metamorphose him into a spider, he sat down beside her.

“You've won,” he said.

She looked up, averting his eyes, scanning the car for possible help.

“You have won a friend and I am ready to be influenced.”

She was relieved. It was only a pickup, not a madman. She blew air onto the book.

“Clever. Now leave me alone.”

A Bronx accent wafted on currents of drugstore perfume and
powder. He wished for the sickly, sweet odor of Juicy Fruit gum to increase his pleasure.

“Wouldn't you like to practice what is being preached?” he said. “Mr. Carnegie himself once said to me:
All reading and no playing make Jack and Jill wallflowers.
”

She finally looked at him but only to make plain that what followed were her final words:

“You sure like to talk. Why don't you get off at Union Square and stand on a soapbox.”

He had misjudged. She was an informed person. Good conversation was the way to her heart.

“I don't like to approach you in this vulgar way,” he pleaded, “but what does one do in America? In Europe, where I come from, as you can tell by my Charles Boyer accent, you see a beautiful woman and you write her a note. I tried that once in America …”

He told of being taken by Harry to Ebbets Field to see his first baseball game. It had been a bewildering experience, further muddied by Harry's excited explanations of why men dressed in boy's knickers tried to beat each other over the head with a wooden club and then ran in circles. More comprehensible had been the behavior of his fellow spectators, who, having paid money, regretted the expenditure and cursed everyone on the playing field in terms he had never before heard expressed so openly.

Bored, his eyes had roamed the crowd, landing on Carmen, seated in the next section of seats. She cheered her matador not with a rose between her teeth, but with delicate nibbles on a hot dog, which she chewed gently before circling her orange lips with a long, curled tongue. He had to meet her. But how? She told him by raising her hand and signaling to the circulating hot dog vendor, a pimply faced teenager wearing a surgeon's white outfit. He wrote on the small notepad he always carried with him:

“Miss——. I do not know your name. But I do know you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Where can we meet?” He signed it:
Your slave.

He called the hot dog seller, bought one, then gave him the note with instructions to wait for a reply. The boy resisted until a nickel was dropped in his palm. She read the note and looked up. The boy pointed at him. He stood, swept an imaginary cape across his body, kicked the bull as it went by, and bowed. She passed the note to someone beside her and pointed. He congratulated himself on his conquest. Harry tugged at him to sit. He was obstructing the view of people who were now threatening him with the same mayhem they planned to visit on the players.

He watched an emissary from his beloved, a muscular teenager wearing an olive-colored T-shirt a shade deeper than his complexion, make his way toward him. The youth stopped at his row, reached past Harry, grabbed Aba's shirt, and pulled him erect. The Roman face bared its teeth and growled:

“You dirty old bum!”

Harry grabbed the assassin's arm with both hands.

“You leave him alone!” Harry shouted.

Around them, the spectators were calling for a good thrashing of “the shitty Giant fan.”

His attacker turned to Harry.

“Whoever dat is to you, tell him to lay off my sister or I'll change his face.”

He slapped Stolz. The force unhinged his jaw. The spectators cheered the gladiator as he strode back to his seat. Stolz ground his jaw back into place, thinking,
Olé
!

During the recitation, in which Stolz had acted all the roles, even slapping himself somewhat painfully, the woman's face had not strayed from her book. However, behind him there had been low laughter.

The woman said to the book:

“Serves you right. You know, I got a brother too.”

Close to his left ear he heard the crack of a baseball struck by a bat followed by a high-pitched voice which rode words up the musical scale:

“Steeerike threeee. Yer out!”

He turned, almost rubbing noses with a Negro woman of about twenty-five. He remained close, examining her chubby face: luminous, black eyes, a jutting, aggressive chin under the canopy of round, glossy purple lips. Nesting behind her left ear, a white camellia highlighted the sheen of her straight black hair, pulled into a tight bun. Gold hoops dangled from her ears. Inside each was a die—four black dots on one, three on the other, Underneath her tan, belted raincoat, he glimpsed taffy décolletage.

“You a funny dude,” she said.

“I'm glad someone thinks so.” He tilted his head toward the reader. “May I join you, or would you prefer that I send a note?”

“Come ahead,” she said, shifting herself.

Sitting beside her, he was seized with body-twitching shivers. Paradoxically, he began to sweat. He imprisoned his hands under his buttocks.

“You OK?” she asked.

He nodded.

“You all talked out?”

“No. No. I was just admiring your flower. Carmen would have done better with a camellia. It's the same message, only more exciting. The real Carmen, that is, not my brother-plagued one.”

“You talk like those landlord Jewish cats in Harlem.”

“Jewish cats?”

“Yeah.”

“How can you tell a cat is Jewish? How can a cat own …”

She laughed.

“Oh man, we got us a real live square here. A cat is a person. A human-type being. That's what a cat is.”

“Aha. And a dog?”

“A dog is a ugly mama.”

His first days in America had been like this. He had learned English in school by studying Shakespeare. In America, Shakespeare was a greenhorn.

“A mama of what, who?
Oy
. Maybe we should tell names. I am Aba.”

“I'm Leslie.”

“
Oy
. Leslie is a boy's name. More code.”

She straightened and pushed out her profile.

“Do I look like a boy?”

“Decidedly not.”

“What do you do for bread. Oops! How do you make a buck?”

“I am a poet. It does not buy me much bread. And you?”

“I sing.”

Of course, he thought. Her voice is a siren song.

“What do you sing?”

“What I feel.”

At 42nd Street, the Dale Carnegie pupil rose. At the door, under a toothsome photograph of Miss Rheingold, she turned toward them and said:

“A perfect couple.”

“I knew she was intelligent as soon as I laid eyes upon her,” Stolz said. “She knows a perfect match when she sees one.”

“Don't jive me.”

“I won't, if you don't jive me.”

“You know what jive mean!”

“No, but it can't be good.”

“You one smart dude.”

“I'm a cat and you a mama.”

“That's what it is.”

“When can I hear you sing?”

“Tonight. Right now if you want. I'm on my way to a gig.”

Exiting the subway at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, they walked to a nightclub. Backstage, in a tiny room dedicated to a long, illuminated mirror, Leslie threw her raincoat to the floor, revealing a cluster of camellias pinned to her left hip. She stood facing him, back arched. Before he could embrace her, a Negro wearing a porkpie hat, burst in and pulled her to him. He tried to kiss her, but she dodged, saying:

“Got to go on soon. No smearing.”

They separated.

“Willie,” she said, “this is Aba. He a subway masher.”

Willie's palm gyrated.

“Solid, man.”

“Yes, solid.”

Willie spoke to Leslie:

“You holdin', baby?”

“Uh, huh.”

“Let's get down to it.”

She held up her palm.

“Aba, Willie and me has a little music business to talk private. You go outside and ask for Barney. Tell 'em Leslie said to give you a table. OK?”

“Thank you,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Willie.”

“Solid.”

Barney instructed a waiter to set up a small table near the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Cafe Society proudly presents … Miss Leslie Jones!”

The spotlight caught her walking as if on an errand elsewhere, then, surprised at the setting, casually acquiescing to its requirement. Behind her a piano, guitar, bass and drums launched into a lively tempo. She sang:

Who do you think is comin' to town?

You'll never guess who—