Goodbye, Columbus (15 page)

He pointed to the fluorescent bulbs with the nearly empty champagne bottle. “You call that a light? That’s a light to
read
by? It’s purple, for God’s sake! Half the blind men in the world mined themselves by those damn things. You know who’s behind them? The optometrists! I’ll tell you, if I could get a couple hundred for all my stock and the territory, I’d sell tomorrow. That’s right, Leo A. Patimkin, one semester accounting, City College nights, will sell equipment, territory, good name. I’ll buy two inches in the
Times.
The territory is from here to everywhere. I go where I want, my own boss, no one tells me what to do. You know the Bible? ‘Let there be light—and there’s Leo Patimkin!’ That’s my trademark, I’ll sell that too. I tell them that slogan, the
poilishehs,
they think I’m making it up. What good is it to be smart unless you’re in on the ground floor! I got more brains in my pinky than Ben got in his whole
head.
Why is it he’s on top and I’m on the bottom!
Why!
Believe me, if you’re born lucky, you’re lucky!” And then he exploded into silence.

I had the feeling that he was going to cry, so I leaned over and whispered to him, “You better go home.” He agreed, but I had to raise him out of his seat and steer him by one arm down to his wife and child. The little girl could not be awakened, and Leo and Bea asked me to watch her while they went out into the lobby to get their coats. When they returned, Leo seemed to have dragged himself back to the level of human communication. He shook my hand with real feeling. I was very touched.

“You’ll go far,” he said to me. “You’re a smart boy, you’ll play it safe. Don’t louse things up.”

“I won’t.”

“Next time we see you it’ll be
your
wedding,” and he winked at me. Bea stood alongside, muttering goodbye all the while he spoke. He shook my hand again and then picked the child out of her seat, and they turned towards the door. From the back, round-shouldered, burdened, child-carrying, they looked like people fleeing a captured city.

Brenda, I discovered, was asleep on a couch in the lobby. It was almost four o’clock and the two of us and the desk clerk were the only ones in the hotel lobby. At first I did not waken Brenda, for she was pale and wilted and I knew she had been sick. I sat beside her, smoothing her hair back off her ears. How would I ever come to know her, I wondered, for as she slept I felt I knew no more of her than what I could see in a photograph. I stirred her gently and in a half-sleep she walked beside me out to the car.

It was almost dawn when we came out of the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. I switched down to my parking lights, and drove on to the Turnpike, and there out before me I could see the swampy meadows that spread for miles and miles, watery, blotchy, smelly, like an oversight of God. I thought of that other oversight, Leo Patimkin, half-brother to Ben. In a few hours he would be on a train heading north, and as he passed Scarsdale and White Plains, he would belch and taste champagne and let the flavor linger in his mouth. Alongside him on the seat, like another passenger, would be cartons of bulbs. He would get off at New London, or maybe, inspired by the sight of his half-brother, he would stay on again, hoping for some new luck further north. For the world was Leo’s territory, every city, every swamp, every road and highway. He could go on to Newfoundland if he wanted, Hudson Bay, and on up to Thule, and then slide down the other side of the globe and rap on frosted windows on the Russian steppes, if he wanted. But he wouldn’t. Leo was forty-eight years old and he had learned. He pursued discomfort and sorrow, all right, but if you had a heartful by the time you reached New London, what new awfulness could you look forward to in Vladivostok?

The next day the wind was blowing the fall in and the branches of the weeping willow were fingering at the Patimkin front lawn. I drove Brenda to the train at noon, and she left me.

Autumn came quickly. It was cold and in Jersey the leavey turned and fell overnight. The following Saturday I took a ride up to see the deer, and did not even get out of the car, for it was too brisk to be standing at the wire fence, and so I watched the animals walk and run in the dimness of the late afternoon, and after a while everything, even the objects of nature the trees, the clouds the grass, the weeds, reminded me of Brenda, and I drove back down to Newark! Already we had sent our first letters and I had called her late one night, but in the mail and on the phone we had some difficulty discovering one another; we had not the style yet. That night I tried her again, and someone on her floor said she was out and would not be in till late.

Upon my return to the library I was questioned by Mr. Scapello about the Gauguin book. The jowly gentleman
had
sent a nasty letter about my discourtesy, and I was only able to extricate myself by offering a confused story in an indignant tone. In fact, I even managed to turn it around so that Mr. Scapello was apologizing to me as he led me up to my new post, there among the encyclopedias, the bibliographies, the indexes and guides. My bullying surprised me and I wondered if some of it had not been learned from Mr. Patimkin that morning I’d heard him giving Grossman an earful on the phone. Perhaps I was more of a businessman than I thought. Maybe I could learn to become a Patimkin with ease…

Days passed slowly; I never did see the colored kid again, and when, one noon, I looked in the stacks, Gauguin was gone, apparently charged out finally by the jowly man. I wondered what it had been like that day the colored kid had discovered the book was gone. Had he cried? For some reason I imagined that he had blamed it on me, but then I realized that I was confusing the dream I’d had with reality. Chances were he had discovered someone else, Van Gogh, Vermeer … But no, they were not his kind of artists’. What had probably happened was that he’d given up on the library and gone back to playing Willie Mays in the streets. He was better off, I thought. No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head if you can’t afford the fare.

Let’s see, what else did I do? I ate, I slept, I went to the movies, I sent broken-spined books to the bindery—I did everything I’d ever done before, but now each activity was surrounded by a fence, existed alone, and my life consisted of jumping from one fence to the next. There was no flow, for that had been Brenda.

And then Brenda wrote saying that she could be coming in for the Jewish holidays which were only a week away. I was so overjoyed I wanted to call Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin, just to tell them of my pleasure. However, when I got to the phone and had actually dialed the first two letters, I knew that at the other end there would be silence; if there was anything said, it would only be Mrs. Patimkin asking, “What is it you want?” Mr. Patimkin had probably forgotten my name.

That night, after dinner, I gave Aunt Gladys a kiss and told her she shouldn’t work so hard.

“In less than a week it’s Rosh Hashana and he thinks I should take a vacation. Ten people I’m having. What do you think, a chicken cleans itself? Thank God, the holidays come once a year, I’d be an old woman before my time.”

But then it was only nine people Aunt Gladys was having, for only two days after her letter Brenda called.

“Oy, Gut!” Aunt Gladys called. “Long
distance!
”

“Hello?” I said.

“Hello, sweetie?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What
is
it?” Aunt Gladys tugged at my shirt. “What is it?”

“It’s for me.”

“Who?” Aunt Gladys said, pointing into the receiver.

“Brenda,” I said.

“Yes?” Brenda said.

“Brenda?” Aunt Gladys said. “What does she call long distance, I almost had a heart attack.”

“Because she’s in Boston,” I said. “Please, Aunt Gladys…”

And Aunt Gladys walked off, mumbling, “These kids…”

“Hello,” I said again into the phone.

“Neil, how are you?”

“I love you.”

“Neil, I have bad news. I can’t come in this week.”

“But, honey, it’s the Jewish holidays.”

“
Sweetheart;’
she laughed.

“Can’t you say that, for an excuse?”

“I have a test Saturday, and a paper, and you know if I went home I wouldn’t get anything done…”

“You would.”

“Neil, I just
can’t.
My mother’d make me go to Temple, and I wouldn’t even have enough time to see
you.
”

“Oh God, Brenda.”

“Sweetie?”

“Yes?”

“Can’t you come up here?” she asked.

“I’m working.”

“The Jewish holidays,” she said.

“Honey, I can’t. Last year I didn’t take them off, I can’t all—”

“You can say you had a conversion.”

“Besides, my aunt’s having all the family for dinner, and you know what with my parents—”

“Come up, Neil.”

“I can’t just take two days off, Bren. I just got promoted and a raise—”

“The hell with the raise.”

“Baby, it’s my job.”

“Forever?” she said.

“No.”

“Then come. I’ve got a hotel room.”

“For me?”

“For us.”

“Can you do that?”

“No and yes. People do it.”

“Brenda, you tempt me.”

“Be tempted.”

“I could take a train Wednesday right from work.”

“You could stay till Sunday night.”

“Bren, I can’t. I still have to be back to work on Saturday.”

“Don’t you ever get a day
off?
” she said.

“Tuesdays,” I said glumly.

“God.”

“And Sunday,” I added.

Brenda said something but I did not hear her, for Aunt Gladys called, “You talk all day long distance?”

“Quiet!” I shouted back to her.

“Neil, will you?”

“Damn it, yes,” I said.

“Are you angry?”

“I don’t think so. I’m going to come up.”

“Till Sunday.”

“We’ll see.”

“Don’t feel upset, Neil. You sound upset. It is the Jewish holidays. I mean you
should
be off.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m an orthodox Jew, for God’s sake, I ought to take advantage of it.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“Is there a train around six?”

“Every hour, I think.”

“Then I’ll be on the one that leaves at six.”

“I’ll be at the station,” she said. “How will I know you?”

“I’ll be disguised as an orthodox Jew.”

“Me too,” she said.

“Good night, love,” I said.

Aunt Gladys cried when I told her I was going away for Rosh Hashana.

“And I was preparing a big meal,” she said.

“You can still prepare it.”

“What will I tell your mother?”

“I’ll tell her, Aunt Gladys. Please. You have no right to get upset…”

“Someday you’ll have a family you’ll know what ifs like.”

“I have a family now.”

“What’s a matter,” she said, blowing her nose, “That girl couldn’t come home to see her family it’s the holidays?”

“She’s in school, she just can’t—”

“If she loved her family she’d find time. We don’t live six hundred years.”

“She does love her family.”

“Then one day a year you could break your heart and pay a visit.”

“Aunt Gladys, you don’t understand.”

“Sure,” she said, “when I’m twenty-three years old I’ll understand everything.”

I went to kiss her and she said, “Go away from me, go run to Boston…”

The next morning I discovered that Mr. Scapello didn’t want me to leave on Rosh Hashana either, but I unnerved him, I think, by hinting that his coldness about my taking the two days off might just be so much veiled anti-Semitism, so on the whole he was easier to manage. At lunch time I took a walk down to Penn Station and picked up a train schedule to Boston. That was my bedtime reading for the next three nights.

She did not look like Brenda, at least for the first minute. And probably to her I did not look like me. But we kissed and held each other, and it was strange to feel the thickness of our coats between us.

“I’m letting my hair grow,” she said in the cab, and that in fact was all she said. Not until I helped her out of the cab did I notice the thin gold band shining on her left hand.

She hung back, strolling casually about the lobby while I signed the register “Mr. and Mrs. Neil Klugman,” and then in the room we kissed again.

“Your heart’s pounding,” I said to her.

“I know,” she said.

“Are you nervous?”

“No.”

“Have you done this before?” I said.

“I read Mary McCarthy.”

She took off her coat and instead of putting it in the closet, she tossed it across the chair. I sat down on the bed; she didn’t.

“What’s the matter?”

Brenda took a deep breath and walked over to the window, and I thought that perhaps it would be best for me to ask nothing—for us to get used to each other’s presence in quiet. I hung her coat and mine in the empty closet, and left the suitcases—mine and hers—standing by the bed.