Authors: Hortense Calisher
“Might as well be modern about it,” he said. Behind him, the generations, row upon row of Hasidim, nodded comfortably back.
Outside again, the four parted with a bright “Come
see
!” and a murmured “Well
do
that!” The Pagani couple walked on without speaking. It was some blocks before either of them spoke.
“Brr-r,” said Elizabeth. It was almost a question.
For half a block or so, he didn’t answer. She had trouble matching his irregular pace to hers. Then he stopped short, put her hand through his arm, and answered her. “Brr-r.”
Half another block on, she giggled. “She thought we weren’t married.”
“Mmm.” He tightened the arm around hers.
She was encouraged. “A baby. A
child
. As if he wasn’t quite sure himself what.”
“I predict a marshmallow. Large, white—and beaded.”
She simply exploded. “I kept thinking of what I’d do her in, but I couldn’t quite—and that stuff around her neck?”
“Molasses coconut.”
“On the nose.”
Arms around each other’s waists, they tramped on in an energy of closeness.
“David. Why’d you say that. That you were in films?”
He shrugged, looking up at the façade of her mother’s apartment, just reached. “Let’s scram soon, huh. Your mother likes the Coast that much, she’ll stay on all winter, she and Jacques having such a ball.” Mrs. Jacobson’s letters were a steady inventory of their buying, though her going into business had not been further mentioned. His father had reported with amusement her conquest of the sour, lanky septuagenarian, who was teaching her how to “collect.” She in turn reported dutifully that his father was well, that is, the same.
“Da-avid.”
The elevator closed on them before he answered. “Why’d you say that, about Spring Street.”
They rode up in silence, examining the brown dry-cereal grain of the cage. But when he urged her out with a mild cuff from behind, she recognized a familiar, faintly vying signal.
Under the light of the one lamp they had left burning, a heavy cloisonné vase with a silk shade like a pagoda, the long double room, cleaned that morning, received them aloofly, as established as a gallery. He parked the house keys on the pagoda, where they slid and hung, flipped on the “side-lights” that shed a tawny, not-quite-other-century glow, and fingertips to her waist, propelled her lightly, rhythmically down the room. “A—bmm. A-bmmm. A—bmmma, bmma,
Bmmm
-bmm—”
“Bmmm.”
The small Oriental rugs with which the parquet was scattered at first tripped them, then collected around their ankles, finally islanded them. “Bounty. All this bounty,” he said. Front to front, they wound themselves together, eyes closed. “Let’s make tracks soon, hmm.” He whispered it. “Out of here.”
Eyes securely blind, she burrowed deeper. “Carl Schurz Park?”
Rocking idly, she heard his sigh through her flesh rather than her ear. “Let’s not talk any more. At least not about them.”
But in the bedroom, as he was helping her undress, with that gravely ritual interest, almost as if he were unveiling a statue, which often signaled that they were to make love, he was the one who spoke. Usually, he was quiet throughout this rite. Once she had said to him, mock-tough, “Never seen a woman before?” Coloring, shaking his head at her not to spoil it, he had finally replied mock-naïve, “Not till this moment, ma’am.” She knew better now. If they were practiced lovers now, the woman, recognizing certain routines, must nevertheless keep silent; a man’s finesse was to be remarked on only by enjoyment. Her responses, she felt sure, were less predictable, women being more aware of that repetition which was their enemy in life.
He touched the points of her breasts through the thin, Mexican gift-blouse. “Not too much candy. But enough.”
She crossed her arms. “Never you mind. We have one—it’ll at least be human.”
“Oh, she wasn’t so bad. He’s the one bugged me. She was even kind of sweet, there at the end.”
“Mitzi? Why, she’s hard as nails, always was. She knows all the answers, you know—in that smug way? As if there aren’t any questions. Him—he’s a nothing.”
“You want one—we could,” he said. “Of course, not by the end of March.”
“On the allowance? Mm-mm, thanks. I can wait.”
“Can you?” He uncrossed her arms and drew her down.
In his embrace, she stirred reminiscently. “Fat, smug bitch.”
“Oh, you girls, you always want to get even,” he said. “He’s the one bugged me.”
In bed, they lay separately; they had talked too much. Neither wanted to admit that desire had lapsed, an occurrence too new to be without scare.
“You want the light out?” she said.
“No…but you know what? I think I’m getting tired of that audience.” On Mrs. Jacobson’s many, plump pillows, they lay in a direct line with her wedding picture on the bureau, flanked by both sets of grandparents, each in the formal dress of the period, each in its coupled frame. “I tell you what. Whyn’t we go to your room?”
During their stay here, they had never done so. Although they had once made love there, in fact—on a weekend Mrs. Jacobson was away—the first time, the bed was of course a single. It had seemed natural to take over the other bedroom, in a latent way even revengeful. Now, going down the long corridor, each felt an obscure sadness. As they passed the bathroom, he inflected his head; she shook hers. It was the time just after her period, in the time they considered safe.
Her bedroom lay untouched in its blend of the frivolous and the intense, a museum air, less than a year away, into which she could almost step back if she tried. As in any unused place, old odors had returned to it, a babyish sweat from the books and games, some later sachet-stink of her early teen-age.
“Grow your hair again, hmm?” he said.
“You old roué.”
“Still…” he said. “I wouldn’t go back to that other time, would you?”
“No.” Though this was true, for a minute she felt like crying for woes unknown but suspect, as if it were the day before her period, instead of after.
The narrower bed forced them together. Let’s not talk, his hands said, let’s not talk. Under this, the burden of their choices fell away. With the last flicker of thought, she felt that they were not repeating anything; this was different. Both were smiling now, the fixed lip-stretch of lust rising. Spontaneity was gone, but this hard joy was as strong. If there was a revenge in it, its object had changed. This time they were cuckolding each other—their former selves. Afterwards, they lay purged, hands locked. By next morning, they had forgotten. In the future of their life together, that night had no marker. If they remembered it at all, it was as the night before they found their place, the one that was really theirs, where they began again—from the beginning.
E
LIZABETH, WHO FOUND IT
, always thought of it afterwards as waiting for her, centered in its own day, one of a special oyster-chill, damp with port sounds and the decayed vegetable, salt port smell, of an air limned with the fewest, cleanly distractions to the eye. A sculptor’s day, she said later to David. Later on, she came to be familiar with such days as indigenous to these old streets below bridges, in-between days as to season and light, predictable on any sunless one that was neither icy nor burning. With these, there came often the memory of the couple she had found in the place when she arrived. They clung to it like the small bootjack burr one pried from the cuff of an old hiking sock, discarding a past winter with it, only to find, further down, another of the same. Even when the loft had become so much hers and David’s, so crammed with their goods and the history of its changes under their stewardship that they and it were an entity to their friends and themselves, the image of that other couple, ovaled in their stewardship, recurred to her without warning—a superscripture that her brain had encircled for her with a sweep of the pencil, noting underneath: “Retain!” David, of course, never saw them.
The ad had listed, “Living-lofts, various sizes, convertible, artists’ or sculptors’, some bridge views.” Over the phone, the young man who answered seemed both eager and fumbling. “Yes, we’re the ad. We’re the ad, yes.” When he tried to explain what he called “the setup,” an amateur kindness broke through—this was no sharp owner or agent, yet he was partisan. “Oh, it’s going to be a wonderful setup!” he said, when he heard that she and David were artists. “You’ll see. You better come down.” When he heard the part of town she was coming from, he gave her subway directions as if to a foreigner. Otherwise, he was scrappy and referential, as if to some private club whose nature on sight would be clear to her. She was to come up the stairs and yell for him—Maury. “Just yell ‘Maury.’ Or ring at Ivan’s. Ivan’s the one managing the place. He’s the only one got a bell.”
Usually, she ran like hell for bright chances which either came to nothing, or for which she arrived too late. The good ones were always gone by half-past yesterday. Today she dawdled, as if—as she marveled to David later—something in her consciousness, either forward or guardian-angel, already knew its destiny. Outside the subway, she turned east on a last, truck-rumbling big thoroughfare, then south. She passed a housing development made of that wrapping-paper-colored brick which always seemed to set a careful, welfare limit on what the people inside should aspire to, its walls angled for a sun it could not seem to catch. Within, Puerto Rican voices swooped like parakeets. After that, the streets were dead-beat, beat-down; walking between underfoot glass, worn soft and cloudy, and a sky like pavement, she looked into the green bottle-bottom eyes of empty stores. Down a vista more south than easterly, a viaduct cut off the street like an embankment, yet left it with that vague promise of exit which streets near water always have. Spring Street, dimly north and west, could not be far as city distances were reckoned, but its fussy jazz of small manufactures, that she had once taken for basic, was nothing like this—even in today’s Saturday rest. “Here” wheeled off into the sky with a dockside energy, or slipped down toward the slow compulsion of the water itself, lapping old stairs in a beveled quiet that had not been made of a Saturday. This was the island’s tip or edge, where the city had begun. Taking a turn, she lost herself centerwards again, even catching sight now and then of the high, bank-real Atlantis of Wall Street, but from low streets with names lifted from some old euphony, called Cliff, Pearl, Gold. The squared-off New York she had been brought up to was gone, into some foreign Amsterdam she would never recover after that day, along which she walked, flushed and dreaming, on her thin, uptown heels, through air that smelled of fish and other verities, in a brown dusk of closed coffee companies with a hint of Tudor to their roof lines. At last, treading the circle one expects of dreams, she found it, first inquiring of a lone truckman who shook his head, then a postman unloading from mailbox to sack, who nodded. “That’s it, must be that big old building near the viaduct. The old piano factory. Some people living in it.”
Like several other river ends she had passed, it was called a “slip,” and under the viaduct, the cross street she had been hunting was still a cove. For one second, she saw the large, dust-gray structure for what it was, old but not old enough, not dark or queer or battered enough for any kind of grace—then never again. In the sun motes dancing against the flabby stone, sunny stone, something of what the building must have—footage and on its top floors a sight of water—united forever with what she had to have it be. The two sides she circled had no door, one old lading entrance, closed. Trucks hummed above, but below here, she could hear her own footsteps—how came this silence that she herself seemed to be making? Against a door in the third side, flat and stepless, she leaned almost drunken, hearing herself tell David: “The air is oyster down there. The moments file by like Indians.” No—telling herself, in the same way she used to press her body, eyes closed, against her bedroom door, muttering softly to it what she yearned to say against the not-yet-met body of a man. Suddenly she was frightened at her own dallying, with almost the same girl-fright she had had back there. Others were up and doing, out after the pearl of price, while she murmured to a door. She pushed at the door, which gave to her hand. Inside, the light was as refulgent brown as an old stable, smelled of cracked wheat. A black iron stairway spiraled up into the shadows, ropes hanging in the shaft, dark.
“Maury.” She was out of breath. Inhaling deeply, she called again. “Mauaury.” And again. Nothing answered her. But this must be the place. Looking up to where the Jacob’s-ladder stair disappeared, she spoke inwardly, like an irritated child to its nurse, to that presence in which, when needing it, she still believed. I must have it, live here. No encouragement came, saying, “You will.” But then she heard, from high up, “Co-oming!” and the rapid twiddle of feet on the stairs, down story after story, going round and round with the rising hop-two-three used by children or very young people. On the last few, she could see him, a very tall boy of about her own age with a high head of dark hair—a Modigliani head, its legs, in tight black pants, moving the way such a head’s would, a marionette performing double-jointed variations around the norm. He settled in front of her with a final hop. She saw that he was not really so tall, just very narrow. But not the norm? Some of the homos at the League wore those pants, but some of the beards too and even a few boys in her crowd—none of whom were. The pants made them move like that; they had mostly discarded them. Not that they minded the others, or did not have friends among them, but they were never the crowd.
“You the one called?” His voice was normal, only shy, like his smile.
Her heart leaped at such innocence. Then no one else had. She nodded. “How many are there here? Lofts, I mean.”
“Five, we put in, when Ivan started here, a year ago. He don’t bother to change the ad. The landlord makes a dollar—maybe he’ll put in some more.”
“He’s the landlord then, Ivan?” she said.
“Who,
Ivan
?” He was gravely amused, the way a porter might be at a child, who when told that this is the Tsar’s palace, asks who is the Tsar. “He should hear you. No, he’s the one dreamed up this setup; he’s on our side. Ivan Kostec. He’s a sculptor.” He pronounced it “skolpteh,” his inflection Bronx or Brooklyn, all reverence.