Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (27 page)

“Bob! What’s the matter, there, Bob? You lost in thought or something? This where you live?”

When he parked the cab at the curb and got out, it was the first time I’d even seen him in his working clothes: a twill cap, a buttoned sweater and one of those columnar change-making gadgets strapped to his waist; and when we shook hands it was the first time I’d seen his fingertips stained a shiny gray from handling other people’s coins and dollar bills all day. Close up, smiling or not, he looked as worn out as I felt.

“Come on in, Bernie.” He seemed surprised by the crumbling doorway and dirty stairs of the house, and also by the white-washed, poster-decorated austerity of our big single room,
whose rent was probably less than half of what he and Rose were paying uptown, and I remember taking a dim Bohemian’s pride in letting him notice these things; I guess I had some snobbish notion that it wouldn’t do Bernie Silver any harm to learn that people could be smart and poor at the same time.

We couldn’t offer him any ginger ale and he said a glass of plain water would be fine, so it wasn’t much of a social occasion. It troubled me afterwards to remember how constrained he was with Joan—I don’t think he looked her full in the face once during the whole visit—and I wondered if this was because of our failure to return that invitation. Why is it that wives are nearly always blamed for what must at least as often as not be their husbands’ fault in matters like that? But maybe it was just that he was more conscious of his cab driver’s costume in her presence than in mine. Or maybe he had never imagined that such a pretty and cultivated girl could live in such stark surroundings, and was embarrassed for her.

“I’ll tell you what I dropped by about, Bob. I’m trying a new angle.” And as he talked I began to suspect, more from his eyes than his words, that something had gone very wrong with the long-range building program. Maybe a publishing friend of Dr. Corvo’s had laid it on the line at last about the poor possibilities of our material; maybe Dr. Corvo himself had grown snappish; maybe there had been some crushing final communication from Wade Manley, or, more crushingly, from Wade Manley’s agency representative. Or it might have been simply that Bernie was tired after his day’s work in a way that no glass of plain water would help; in any case he was trying a new angle.

Had I ever heard of Vincent J. Poletti? But he gave me this name as if he knew perfectly well it wouldn’t knock my eye out, and he followed it right up with the information that Vincent J.
Poletti was a Democratic State Assemblyman from Bernie’s own district in the Bronx.

“Now, this man,” he said, “is a man that goes out of his way to help people. Believe me, Bob, he’s not just one of your cheap vote-getters. He’s a real public servant. What’s more, he’s a comer in the Party. He’s going to be our next Congressman. So here’s the idea, Bob. We get a photograph of me—I have this friend of mine’ll do it for nothing—we get it taken from the backseat of the cab, with me at the wheel kind of turning around and smiling like this, get it?” He turned his body away from his smiling head to show me how it would look. “And we print this picture on the cover of a booklet. The title of the booklet”— and here he sketched a suggestion of block lettering in the air— “the title of the booklet is ‘Take It from Bernie.’ Okay? Now. Inside the booklet we have a story—just exactly like the others you wrote except this time it’s a little different. This time I’m telling a story about why Vincent J. Poletti is the man we need for Congress. I don’t mean just a bunch of political talk, either, Bob. I mean a real little story.”

“Bernie, I don’t see how this is going to work. You can’t have a ‘story’ about why anybody is the man we need for Congress.”

“Who says you can’t?”

“And anyway I thought you and Rose were Republicans.”

“On the national level, yes. On the local level, no.”

“Well, but hell, Bernie, we just had an election. There won’t be another election for two years.”

But he only tapped his head and made a faraway gesture to show that in politics it paid a man to think ahead.

Joan was over in the kitchen area of the room, cleaning up the breakfast dishes and getting the dinner started, and I looked to her for help, but her back was turned.

“It just doesn’t sound right, Bernie. I don’t know anything about politics.”

“So? Know, schmow. What’s to know? Do you know anything about driving a cab?”

No; and I sure as hell didn’t know anything about Wall Street, either—Wall Street, Schmall Street!—but that was another depressing little story. “I don’t know, Bernie; things are very unsettled right now. I don’t think I’d better take on any more assignments for the time being. I mean for one thing I may be about to—” But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about my UP problem, so I said, “For one thing Joan’s having a baby now, and everything’s sort of—”

“Wow! Well, isn’t that something!” He was on his feet and shaking my hand. “Isn’t—that—something! Congratulations, Bob, I think this is—I think this is really wonderful. Congratulations, there, Joanie!” And it seemed a little excessive to me at the time, but maybe that’s the way such news will always strike a middle-aged, childless man.

“Oh, listen, Bob,” he said when we settled down again. “This Poletti thing’ll be duck soup for you; and I’ll tell you what. Seeing as this is just a one-shot and there won’t be any royalties, we’ll make it ten instead of five. Is that a deal?”

“Well, but wait a second, Bernie. I’m going to need some more information. I mean what exactly does this guy do for people?”

And it soon became clear that Bernie knew very little more about Vincent J. Poletti than I did. He was a real public servant, that was all; he went out of his way to help people. “Oh, Bob, listen. What’s the difference? Where’s your imagination? You never needed any help before. Listen. What you just told me gives me one idea right off the bat. I’m driving along; these two kids hail me out in front of the maternity hospital, this
young veteran and his wife. They got this little-biddy baby, three days old, and they’re happy as larks. Only here’s the trouble. This boy’s got no job or anything. They only just moved here, they don’t know anybody, maybe they’re Puerto Ricans or something, they got a week’s rent on their room and that’s it. Then they’re broke. So I’m taking them home, they live right in my neighborhood, and we’re chatting away, and I say, ‘Listen, kids. I think I’ll take you to see a friend of mine.’”

“Assemblyman Vincent J. Poletti.”

“Naturally. Only I don’t tell them his name yet. I just say ‘this friend of mine.’ So we get there and I go in and tell Poletti about it and he comes out and talks to the kids and gives them money or something. See? You got a good share of your story right there.”

“Hey, yeah, and wait a minute, Bernie.” I got up and began dramatically pacing the floor, the way people in Hollywood story conferences are supposed to do. “Wait a minute. After he gives them money, he gets into your cab and you take off with him down the Grand Concourse, and those two Puerto Rican kids are standing there on the sidewalk kind of looking at each other, and the girl says, ‘Who
was
that man?’ And the boy looks very serious and he says, ‘Honey, don’t you know? Didn’t you notice he was wearing a mask?’ And she says, ‘Oh no, it couldn’t be the—’ And he says, ‘Yes, yes, it was. Honey, that was the Lone Assemblyman.’ And then listen! You know what happens next? Listen! Way off down the block they hear this voice, and you know what the voice is calling?” I sank to the floor on one trembling knee to deliver the punch line. “It’s calling ‘Hi-yo, Bernie
Silver
—away!”

And it may not look very funny written down, but it almost killed me. I must have laughed for at least a minute, until I went
into a coughing fit and Joan had to come and pound me on the back; only very gradually, coming out of it, did I realize that Bernie was not amused. He had chuckled in bewildered politeness during my seizure, but now he was looking down at his hands and there were embarrassing blotches of pink in his sober cheeks. I had hurt his feelings. I remember resenting it that his feelings could be hurt so easily, and resenting it that Joan had gone back to the kitchen instead of staying to help me out of this awkward situation, and then beginning to feel very guilty and sorry, as the silence continued, until I finally decided that the only decent way of making it up to him was to accept the assignment. And sure enough, he brightened instantly when I told him I’d give it a try.

“I mean you don’t necessarily have to use that about the Puerto Rican kids,” he assured me. “That’s just one idea. Or maybe you could start it off that way and then go on to other things, the more the better. You work it out any way you like.”

At the door, shaking hands again (and it seemed that we’d been shaking hands all afternoon), I said, “So that’s ten for this one, right, Bernie?”

“Right, Bob.”

“Do you really think you should have told him you’d do it?” Joan asked me the minute he’d gone.

“Why not?”

“Well, because it
is
going to be practically impossible, isn’t it?”

“Look, will you do me a favor? Will you please get off my back?”

She put her hands on her hips. “I just don’t understand you, Bob. Why
did
you say you’d do it?”

“Why the hell do you think? Because we’re going to need the ten bucks, that’s why.”

In the end I built—oh, built, schmilt. I put page one and then page two and then page three into the old machine and I
wrote
the son of a bitch. It did start off with the Puerto Rican kids, but for some reason I couldn’t get more than a couple of pages out of them; then I had to find other ways for Vincent J. Poletti to demonstrate his giant goodness.

What does a public servant do when he really wants to go out of his way to help people? Gives them money, that’s what he does; and pretty soon I had Poletti forking over more than he could count. It got so that anybody in the Bronx who was even faintly up against it had only to climb into Bernie Silver’s cab and say, “The Poletti place,” and their troubles were over. And the worst part of it was my own grim conviction that it was the best I could do.

Joan never saw the thing, because she was asleep when I finally managed to get it into an envelope and into the mail. And there was no word from Bernie—or about him, between the two of us—for nearly a week. Then, at the same hour as his last visit, the frayed-out end of the day, our doorbell rang. I knew there was going to be trouble as soon as I opened the door and found him smiling there, with spatters of rain on his sweater, and I knew I wasn’t going to stand for any nonsense.

“Bob,” he said, sitting down, “I hate to say it, but I’m disappointed in you this time.” He pulled my folded manuscript out of his sweater. “This thing is—Bob, this is nothing.”

“It’s six and a half pages. That’s not nothing, Bernie.”

“Bob, please don’t give me six and a half pages. I know it’s six and a half pages, but it’s nothing. You made this man into a fool, Bob. You got him giving his dough away all the time.”

“You told me he gave dough, Bernie.”

“To the Puerto Rican kids I said yes, sure, maybe he could give a little, fine. And now you come along and you got him
going around spending here like some kind of—some kind of drunken sailor or something.”

I thought I might be going to cry, but my voice came out very low and controlled. “Bernie, I did ask you what else he could do. I did tell you I didn’t know what the hell else he could do. If you wanted him to do something else, you should’ve made that clear.”

“But
Bob
,” he said, standing up for emphasis, and his next words have often come back to me as the final, despairing, everlasting cry of the Philistine. “Bob,
you’re
the one with the imagination!”

I stood up too, so that I could look down at him.
I
knew I was the one with the imagination. I also knew I was twenty-two years old and as tired as an old man, that I was about to lose my job, that I had a baby on the way and wasn’t even getting along very well with my wife; and now every cab driver, every two-bit politician’s pimp and phony bugler in the city of New York was walking into my house and trying to steal my money.

“Ten bucks, Bernie.”

He made a helpless gesture, smiling. Then he looked over into the kitchen area, where Joan was, and although I meant to keep my eyes on him, I must have looked there too, because I remember what she was doing. She was twisting a dish towel in her hands and looking down at it.

“Listen, Bob,” he said. “I shouldn’t of said it was nothing. You’re right! Who could take a thing six and a half pages long and say it’s nothing? Probably a lot of good stuff in this thing, Bob. You want your ten bucks; all right, fine, you’ll get your ten bucks. All I’m asking is this. First take this thing back and change it a little, that’s all. Then we can—”

“Ten bucks, Bernie. Now.”

His smile had lost its life, but it stayed right there on his face
while he took the bill out of his wallet and handed it over, and while I went through a miserable little show of examining it to make goddamn sure it was a ten.

“Okay, Bob,” he said. “We’re all square, then. Right?”

“Right.”

Then he was gone, and Joan went swiftly to the door and opened it and called, “Goodnight, Bernie!”

I thought I heard his footsteps pause on the stairs, but I didn’t hear any answering “Goodnight” from him, so I guessed that all he’d done was to turn around and wave to her, or blow her a kiss. Then from the window I saw him move out across the sidewalk and get into his taxicab and drive away. All this time I was folding and refolding his money, and I don’t believe I’ve ever held anything in my hand that I wanted less.