He entered his three-windowed study, raised the cracked green shades without looking into the street
and arranged himself at his desk. From the top drawer he removed a portion of manuscript. Harry felt a momentary sense of loss, regret at having given his life to writing, followed by a surge of affection for the imaginative self as he read yesterday’s page and a half and found it solid, sound, going well. The book redeemed him. Another two or three months ought to finish it. Then a quick last rewrite of the enterprise—call it third-and-a-quarter draft—in about three months, possibly four, and he’d have it made, novel accomplished. Triumph after just ten years. The weight of a decade lay on his head but neither cracked nor crushed—the poor head. Harry felt an impulse to inspect his face in the bathroom mirror, tired gray eyes, often bloodshot, utilitarian lips, wry, thinning, he thought, as the years went by, interested nose, observer too; but successfully resisted. A face is a face: it changes as it faces. The words he writes on paper change it. He was no longer the young man, twenty-seven, who had started this book, nor had any desire to be. Time past is time earned unless the book was badly conceived, constructed, an unknown lemon; then it’s dead time. Perish the thought.
Lesser, as he wrote, was sometimes a thundering locomotive, all cars attached except caboose, cracking along the clicking tracks into a country whose topography he suspected but did not know till he got there. Lesser explorer. Lesser and Clark overland to Manifest
Destiny. Or maybe Mississippi steamboat with booming, splashing paddlewheel, heartrending foghorn, and other marvelous inventions. Not a bad metaphor, boat. Lesser in short-masted bark with a puff of wind in its sail on the Galilean Lake, trying to spy out on the apostolic shore what it’s all about. Lesser sculling on the Hudson, seeking Hendrik, listening to the booming bowls in the metaphysical hills; or rowing to music on the sweet-flowing Thames: he loved the moving English water. Better still, the artist as broad swirling river, flowing freely amid islands of experience, some dense green, luxuriant, treeful; others barren, soft sand with wet footprints; the flow embracing multifarious isles and islets, in flood tide spreading over each and all beyond both muddy riverbanks of life and death.
“Whereof my bowels shall sound like a harp”—Isaiah.
Without looking up at the windows at his side the writer imagined the wintry day beyond, crystal bright, lit cold beauty; glad of its existence but without desire to be in or of it, breathe its stinging glow into his half-retired lungs, live it. This sort of pull and push he had long ago quelled in the self else he would never have seriously written. He itched with desire, as he wrote, to open the nearby closet and stare at his box of accumulated manuscripts. He also half masted an erection—creativity going on. Harry scribbled with a
growing sense of pleasure as the words flowed fruitfully down the page. Already he tasted the satisfaction of a good morning’s work done. In the afternoon he would type what he now wrote with his fountain pen in longhand. Who was it who had said he thought with his right hand? After work he would make his bed, shower warm and cold—hot was out of the question, and afterwards listen to some of his records with a drink in his paw. Tonight an unexpected party, possibly a lay with a little luck; with more a bit of human love in a mad world. You got to use words but you got to use more than words. Lesser knew the doorbell was ringing and went on writing. It rang insistently.
It rings forever.
Levenspiel ringing.
The writer sits at his desk and talks through two rooms. He knows the words and music, they’ve sung it together many times before, begun with assertions of mutual regard. Each proclaims consideration of the other. Lesser promises to get out as soon as he can so the landlord can knock over his building. Levenspiel, a thick-chested -man whose voice lives in his belly, swears he wants the other to write the best book he can; he respects serious writers.
Goatskin siren, stop piping to my heart.
Then to business: The landlord is just back from a funeral of a close relative in Queens and thought he’d stop by to say hello. Have a little mercy, Lesser, move out so I can break up this rotten house that weighs like a hunch on my back.
Lesser argues he can’t leave in the middle of a book. If he did, in his present state of mind it would take him six months to overcome distraction and get back to work, not to mention the chill he’d have facing material he’d lost the feel of. You have no idea how it changes when you’re away from it. I’m afraid what will happen if my conception shifts only a little bit. You don’t know what you’re asking, Mr. Levenspiel.
We’ll find you a nice apartment somewhere in the neighborhood where you’ll be more comfortable than in this bad-smelling place. So if you stopped writing a week or two it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Suppose you got sick and had to go for a while to the hospital? You’re as pale as a dead fish, Lesser. You need more action, more variety out of your poor life. I don’t understand how you can stay in this lousy flat every day. Think it over and listen to reason, for your own benefit.
I’m listening. I’ve worked hard, Levenspiel. It’s my sacrifice more than yours. I’ll finish soon if you have patience. My last book, for reasons I won’t go into, was a bomb. I have to redeem myself in my own eyes with nothing less than a first-rate piece of work. I’ve practically
got it done, but the last section, I confess, is resisting a little. In fact it’s beginning to crock me out of my skull. Once I hit it right—it’s a matter of stating the truth in unimpeachable form, the book will be off my chest and your back. I’ll breathe easy and move out overnight. You have my word on that, now go away, for Jesus’ sake, you’re eating up writing time.
The landlord’s voice grows gentler though his big fist rhythmically pounds the locked door.
Hab rachmones, Lesser, I have my own ambition to realize. I’ve got fifteen years on you, if not more, and I’m practically naked as the day I was born. Don’t be fooled that I own a piece of property. You know already about my sick wife and knocked-up daughter, age sixteen. Also I religiously go one afternoon every week to see my crazy mother in Jackson Heights. All the time I’m with her she stares at the window. Who she thinks she sees I don’t know but it’s not me. She used to weigh ninety pounds, a skinny lady, now she’s two-twenty and growing fatter. I sit there with tears. We stay together a couple of hours without words and then I leave. My father was a worry-wart immigrant with a terrible temper who couldn’t do anything right, not to mention make a living. He wiped his feet all over my youth, a bastard, thank God he’s dead. What’s more, everybody
—everybody—
wants financial assistance. Now I have an opportunity, even with my limited capital—I can get a Metropolitan Life loan—to set up
a modern six-story apartment building, five floors of big-room flats over a line of nice stores, and make myself a comfortable life if that’s still possible in the world of today. Every other goddamn tenant has left out of here for a $400 settlement. You I offer $1,000 cash and you look at me as if I have a social disease. What’s more, you bitch to the District Rent Office and tie me up in red tape with what not—with examiner trials, rehearings, and court appeals that’ll take my lousy lawyer another year and a half to untangle it all. Outside of your $72 monthly rent, which doesn’t a half pay for the oil I use on you, I have no income coming in from here. So if you’re really a man, Lesser, a reasonable being, how can you deny me my simple request?
What about your tenement in Harlem?
I don’t know where you find out such things, Lesser, maybe it’s because you’re a writer. That building I inherited from a crippled uncle, let him stay forever in his grave. It’s a terrible trouble to me for reasons you know well of. I’m not speaking racially. All I’m saying is it loses me money under the present conditions. If this keeps up I’ll have to abandon it. It’s a disgusting state of affairs nowadays. Rent control, if you aren’t afraid to listen to the truth, is an immoral situation. The innocent landlord gets shafted. What it amounts to is you’re taking my legal property away from me against the Constitution.
You have an easy out, Levenspiel. Add to your projected
plans for the new house you intend to build twenty percent more apartments than you’re tearing down, and according to the regulations you can give me an immediate boot into the street.
A long sigh inducing heavy breathing.
I can’t afford that, Lesser. It means another whole floor and possibly two. You have no idea what building costs are nowadays, twice what you estimate, and till you got the house standing, three times what you figured. I admit I had that idea before, but Novikov, my high-rise partner died, and when I thought about another partner, or to try to borrow more cash, I thought no, I will build it according to my dream. I know the kind of place I want. It’s got to be comfortable to my nature. I want a smaller type house. Also I’d rather deal with five-six storekeepers than twenty-percent more tenants. It’s not my nature to go after people for rent. I’m more sensitive than you give me credit, Lesser. If you were a less egotistical type you would realize it, believe me.
Lesser searches his mind. I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do that might be helpful. I’ll sweep the halls and stairs of the building once a week. Just leave me the janitor’s broom. I don’t write on Sundays.
Why not, if you’re so anxious to finish your book so you can’t even take off a day to move?
An old habit, the spirit rebels.
What do I care about the feshtinkineh halls here? All I want is to be able to pull this sonofabitchy building down.
The writer speaks from the depths of his being:
“It’s just this last section I have left, Levenspiel. I’ve been working on it the better part of a year and it’s still not right. Something essential is missing that it takes time to find. But I’m closing in—I can feel it in my blood. I’m proceeding within a mystery to its revelation. By that I mean whatever is bothering me is on the verge of consciousness. Mine and the book’s. Form sometimes offers so many possibilities it takes a while before you can determine which it’s insisting on. If I don’t write this novel exactly as I should—if, God forbid, I were to force or fake it, then it’s a dud after nine and a half long years of labor and so am I. After that folly what good can I expect from myself? What would I see when I. look in the mirror but some deformed fourassed worm? And what’s my future after that with the last of my movie money gone?—redemption in another book I’ll maybe finish when I’m forty-six and starving to death?”
“What’s a make-believe novel, Lesser, against all my woes and miseries that I have explained to you?”
“This isn’t just any novel we’re talking about. It has the potential of being a minor masterpiece. It exemplifies my best ideas as an artist as well as what life
has gradually taught me. When you read it, Levenspiel, even you will love me. It will help you understand and endure your life as the writing of it has helped me sustain mine.”
“For Christ’s sake, what are you writing, the Holy Bible?”
“Who can say? Who really knows? But not while you’re making that fucking racket. How can I think if my mind hurts already from the sound of your voice? My pen is dead in its tracks. Why don’t you go somewhere and let me work in peace?”
“Art my ass, in this world it’s heart that counts. Wait, you’ll get yours one of these days, Lesser. Mark my words.”
His booming fist echoes in the hall.
Lesser had given up writing and gone to read in the toilet. After the noise had departed he once more urged forth the pen, but it no longer flowed though he filled it twice. He willed but could not effect. The locomotive, coated with ice, stood like a petrified mastodon on the steel-frozen tracks. The steamboat had sprung a leak and slowly sank until clamped on all sides by the Mississippi thickened into green ice full of dead catfish staring in various directions.
Though agonized, best pretend you have stopped writing of your own accord. The day’s work is done; you are relaxing in the can. It says in this book, “I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an Epic Poem”—Coleridge. Lesser shuts his eyes and reads through the last pages of his ms. He tests his fate: He lives to write, writes to live.
The writer stands on the roof in the midst of winter. Around Manhattan flows a stream of white water. Maybe it is snowing. A tug hoots on the East River. Levenspiel, resembling mysterious stranger if not heart of darkness, starts this tiny fire in a pile of wood shavings in the cellar. Up goes the place in roaring flames. The furnace explodes not once but twice, celebrating both generations of its existence. The building shudders but Harry, at his desk and writing well, figures it’s construction in the neighborhood and carries on as the whining fire and boiling shadows rush up the smelly stairs. Within the walls lit cockroaches fly up, each minutely screaming. Nobody says no, so the fire surges its inevitable way upwards and with a convulsive roar flings open Lesser’s door.
END OF NOVEL
A WET DOG WITH A BLEEDING EYE hopped up six flights the next morning, and clawed and yelped at Lesser’s door. Although it made piteous noises, Harry grabbed the mutt, alternately whimpering and snarling, by a frayed rope collar around the neck, and by offering a bony bit of stale bread every so often, succeeded in enticing him down the stairs and out of the house. It should be so easy with Levenspiel.
As he trudged up the stairs, Lesser heard muted cries, distant wailing—was there a funeral parlor on the premises? He had heard sounds of the sort before, unspecific, floating. Hard to say where or what—seemed to unpeel from city noise—unearthed?—and sing in a strange tongue. That’s if you owned a certain kind of ear, not always a blessing. Hunting a real enough source of whatever it was he heard, Lesser stopped at the fifth floor and listened in the hall, his ear pressed against a knobless apartment door for telltale interior noises, possibly crowbar wrenching at
a screaming wall? the landlord sneaking in a secret blow? Not bloody likely so long as the last legal tenant hadn’t been formally noticed—you couldn’t tear down a fifth floor without displacing a sixth, even if it managed to stay afloat a while; still a palpable fear. He feared for the house and what was worse sometimes feared the house. The flat, as Lesser listened, resounded of mournful winds, Aeolus’ bag. Why do wailing winds, nothing human, give off human sounds? He pushed the door and entered listening: pure deep silence. Harry wandered from room to room, the empty former kitchen minus stolen sink, a cracked washtub remaining; the living room a rectangular circle of naked hairy men disporting themselves on three walls; both bedless bedrooms despoiled; the bathtub filthy with residues of piss. Silence flowered into primal noise, utter deep silence: graveyard music.
He felt in the house, legacy of Levenspiel’s visit? stronger than ever before, a presence other than himself. Nothing new but who now? Private Eye snooping for one cause or another?—you never know all the regulations of eviction. Anonymous caller drifting up from floor to floor without plan or purpose except a concealed dagger? Home is where, if you get there, you won’t be murdered; if you are it isn’t home. The world is full of invisible people stalking people they don’t know. More homeless strangers around than ever
before. God since the dawn of man should have made it his business to call out names: Jacob meet Ishmael. “I am not my brother’s brother.” Who says? Back in his study he wrote hurriedly, as though he had heard the end of the world falling in the pit of time and hoped to get his last word written before then.
One early morning when the writer, with his paper bag of bread and milk, was letting himself into his triple-locked door, he could have sworn he heard the sound of typing coming from one of the flats fronting the hall, and for an odd minute played with the thought he had left himself hard at work somewhere around while he was out getting his groceries. Lesser turned, facing the dimly lit hall.
The empty hall was empty.
Straining, he listened, and though he listened not to hear, heard the dulled clack of surely a typewriter. He felt, despite his familiarity with the sound, as though he were hearing it for the first time in his life, sensation not unmixed with competitive envy. He had been too long on one book—here was somebody writing another? Lesser felt a loss of body heat and was about to be prickly necked but gave it an afterthought: typing was typing, a typewriter, at least when
in use, no lethal weapon. Still came the discomforting after-afterthought: who was the unknown typist?
Entering his flat, Harry stowed away his groceries and returned to listen in the hall. He walked stealthily past one shut door and one missing. He dipped his head into the dark open room. Nothing he could truly hear. Scouting the other side of the hall, he paused longer before each door to the end of the floor, tightly attentive to whence the continuous clicking. Again crossing the hall he located it finally next door to his, in Holzheimer’s flat, astonished to have wandered far to find it close.
He was wishing Holzheimer were here to keep him company in this unpeopled place. Of course the old man was gone; and besides he couldn’t type. The door was ajar. Lesser, head bent, listened. Plak plak plakity plak. Had Levenspiel set up a spy office here, CIA sub-headquarters for tuning in on Harry Lesser engaged in writing a subversive novel? Every letter he typed on paper, neatly bugged, flashed on a screen in the Attorney General’s office, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.? To end the suspense he gave the open door an adventurous thrust and it squeakily swung in. He was set to run but nobody emerged; he had to enter.
In Holzheimer’s former kitchen, facing the wintry windows, sat a black man at a wooden kitchen table, typing, his back to Lesser. Though the room was perceptibly
cold—the radiators and steam pipes removed, pipe openings sealed to prevent flooding, he wore overalls cross-strapped over a green hand-knit sweater rubbed through at the white-shirted elbows. The black seemed at first a large man, but it turned out that his typewriter was large, and he, though broad-shouldered, heavy-armed, and strongly built, was of medium height. His head was bent over an old L. C. Smith, vintage of pre-World War I, resembling a miniature fortress.
The man, head bowed in concentration, oblivious of Lesser, typed energetically with two thick fingers. Harry, though impatient to be at his work, waited, experiencing at least two emotions: embarrassment for intruding; anger at the black intruder. What does he think he’s doing in this house? Why has he come?—where from?—and how will I get rid of him? Who’s got the time? He thought of phoning Levenspiel, but maybe he had booked the act. Having waited this long for acknowledgment of his presence—it was not in him to interrupt a man writing—also for a few basic facts of information, he waited longer. The black must have known someone was standing there because the open door created a draft and once Lesser sneezed; but he did not turn to look at him or whoever. He typed in serious concentration, each word slowly thought out, then hacked onto paper with piston-like jabs of his stubby, big-knuckled fingers. The room shook with his noise.
This endured for five full minutes as Lesser fumed. When the typist turned his head, a goateed man, darkly black-skinned, there seemed in his large liquid eyes poised in suspension as he stared at the writer a detachment so pure it menaced; at the same time a suggestion of fright Lesser felt reflected Lesser’s. His head was large, lips moderately thick, sensuous, nose wings extended. His eyes, in concentration, swelled; but he was youthful and not bad-looking, as though he considered himself not a bad-looking man and that helped. Despite the chill he seemed to be sweating.
“Man,” he complained, “can’t you see me writing on my book?”
Harry apologetically admitted he had. “I’m a writer myself.”
That brought forth neither lightning nor thunder, nor small degree of admiration. The black stared at Lesser as though he hadn’t heard, and the writer thought he might even be a little deaf until the man reacted: breathed in relief—knew now he wasn’t dealing with the landlord? Had been bluffing? A smile seemed possible but did not come to pass.
On the table at the black writer’s left lay a pile of well-worn, somewhat soiled, manuscript from which it seemed to Harry an unpleasant odor rose. He noticed then the man had his orange work shoes off and was sitting there writing in white wool tennis socks. Even now he wiggled his toes. Hard to say whether the sulphurous
smell came from the manuscript or the feet on the floor. Maybe it’s me, Lesser thought, smell of fear? Anyway, something malodorous.
Then to make his point, the point of it all—the reason he had waited to speak to the black and give notice —Lesser said, “I live here alone in this building, alone on the floor. I’m trying to finish a book.”
The stranger responded to the news, rolling his eyes in thought.
“Baby, it’s a hard and lonely life.” His voice was low, resonant, raspy. As though relating a decision decisively arrived at, he then remarked, “I’ll be working around here daily as of now on and according to the way circumstances go.”
“You mean Levenspiel’s letting you?” Lesser felt on the verge of frantic. He saw in the man’s presence on the floor a serious threat, perhaps latest variation of the landlord’s tactics of harassment.
“Which cat is that?”
“The owner of these premises, hard-luck guy. Haven’t you met him—I mean wasn’t it his suggestion that you work here?”
The black casually denied it. “I got no interest in any Jew landlord. Just come on this place while hunting around and entered quickly. I found this table in the cellar and the chair in a room down under here, but the light is better up high so I moved them up. I been looking for a private place to do my writing.”
“What sort of writing if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Now that’s a personal question and what I am writing is my own business.”
“Of course. All I meant, out of curiosity, was are you writing fiction or something else?”
“It might be fiction but ain’t nonetheless real.”
“Nobody said it wasn’t.”
The black said his chick was an Off-Broadway actress. “Mornings when she ain’t out working, which is whenever she ain’t rehearsing, the apartment’s too tight for the both of us. She hangs around mixing up in my thoughts and I can’t get my ass to my work. I’m not saying I don’t appreciate her company, especially when my meat’s frying, but not when I have something I got to write.”
Lesser nodded; he knew the story.
He told the stranger Levenspiel had been trying to force him out so he could wreck the building.
“But I’m rent-controlled so he’s stuck with me for a while. Harry Lesser’s my name.”
“Willie Spearmint.”
No handshake though Harry was willing, in fact had stuck out his white paw. There it remained—ex—tended. He was, in embarrassment, tempted to play for comedy: Charlie Chaplin, with his moth-eaten mustache, examining his sensitive mitt to see if it was a hand and not a fish held forth in greeting before he told it to come back home; but in the end Lesser withdrew
it, no criticism of anyone intended or implied. Who said anybody had to shake somebody else’s hand? That wasn’t in the Fourteenth Amendment. He was tempted then to explain that he had, as a boy, for years lived at the edge of a teeming black neighborhood in South Chicago, had had a friend there; but in the end skipped it. Who cares?
Lesser felt ashamed he had bothered Willie Spearmint. If a man typed—a civilized act—let him type where he would. Mind your business.
“Sorry I interrupted you. Better be getting back to my own work now—on my third novel.”
No response from Willie other than the absentminded descent of a nod.
“It was a surprise to find somebody else up here typing away. I had got used to being the only man on the island.”
Though tempted not to—he bit his tongue for time was of the essence, he was late getting to work—Lesser heard himself say, “Well, pardon again, I hate interruptions myself. Still, knock on my door if you have to, should you need something—eraser, pencil, whatever. I’m in the flat on your left and generally free in the late afternoon after the day’s work, the later the better.”
Willie Spearmint, obviously a dedicated man, stretched both green-sleeved arms aloft, wiggling his stubby fingers with ease and contentment so that
Lesser envied him, then bent over the large black machine and, focusing on the words, went on plakity plak as before. If Lesser was still present he didn’t seem to know it.
Harry reflected in his study how much he had liked, all things considered, being alone on the top floor. I think of myself as a lonely guy, which is to say I am the right man for the work I do, which is to say, in these circumstances. I may hate going up six dark flights wondering who am I going to meet next, man or beast—but otherwise I’ve enjoyed this big empty house. Lots of room for the imagination to run around in. Fine place to work when Levenspiel is somewhere collecting his rents, or otherwise keeping busy. The truth of it is I could do without Willie Spearmint.
Shortly after noon—after a nearby siren yelped for a few seconds to remind one, if he had forgotten, of the perilous state of the world—Willie kicked on Lesser’s door with the heel of his shoe, holding in both arms, in fact weighed down by it, his massive typewriter. Lesser, for a surprised second, couldn’t imagine why he had come, was startled by the sight of him. Willie
wore a blue-and-purple sack-like woolen African tunic over his overalls. His hair wasn’t Afro-styled, as Lesser had thought, but combed straight as though against the grain, with a part on the left side, and raised in back like a floor plank that had sprung up. The stringy goatee flowering under his chin lengthened his face and seemed to emphasize the protrusive quality of his eyes, more white than brown. Standing, he was about five ten, taller than Lesser had imagined.
“Could I park this gadget here till the morning? I would hate to have it stolen out of my office. I been hiding it in the closet but that ain’t hiding, if you dig.”
Lesser, after hesitation, dug. “Are you through for the day?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing, I only thought—”
“I go on from eight to twelve or thereabouts,” said the black, “full four hours’ work and then goof off—visit friends and such. Writing down words is like hitting paper with a one-ton hammer. How long do you stay on it?”