Women and Men

  But to be taken as having a lust for lads, to be admitted to an inner sanctum where I was expected to linger loathsomely over the pictures of naked striplings, such as those displayed on segregated racks marked ALL BOYS in the corners of peep-show anterooms, was too vile a misapprehension not to correct, with brutal candor if necessary.

  However, before I could produce the words that the scowl of indignation yet withheld, she had got to the door, inserted and turned a key, and thrown one switch that ignited, in the hesitant two-stage blink of fluorescents, a series of ceiling fixtures, the lines of which were so extended in distance as apparently, in the well-known effect, to converge. There was much more space back there than I had realized…And no pornography of any sort. The long room was ranked with tables holding pots and pans.

  I recovered quickly. “You people are in housewares? I thought you were some sort of publishers.”

  Instantly she fingered out the lights, closed and locked the door. She returned the glasses to her face, enlarging the hostility of her eyes, then gave me a wrinkled nose and marched in silence to her desk.

  “Well,” said I, “you call yourself a press, after all.”

  Seated now, she took a deep breath and said: “‘Press’ is the boss’s name!” She winced incredulously at me. “You know, in ten years nobody ever got that wrong? I mean, that’s dumb!”

  I must have taken the second brownie at this point, though unconsciously. “Ganymede’s his first name?”

  She rolled her eyes behind the lenses. “Ganymede’s another thing. There’s a story there that’s kinda cute. It’s the pressure cooker, you know…No, I guess you don’t. Well, we distribute it exclusively, and our name being ‘Press,’ well, figure it out. But many years ago”—she assumed a maudlin purse of mouth—“the teeny little daughter of the president of the pressure-cooker makers, sitting in her high chair at mealtimes, banging her tiny little spoon, would try to say, ‘Give me meat!’ But what it sounded like, you see, was, ‘Ganymede!’”

  Her dirty look returned. “Now you know, and now I’ve got work to do.” She turned to the typewriter on the metal stand at her right elbow and began to punch its keys.

  I had consumed half the brownie before her final speech, her back to me, made me realize that I had so much as lifted it off the plate: “Next time, buy your own lunch. That’s the cheapest trick I ever saw.”

  As I stepped into the hall, I reflected that at no time had she recognized me as a neighbor, which might mean that my appearance was even less distinctive than I thought.

  I had exulted too soon over the absence of nutshells in the Homemade Bakery’s brownies. With my final bite of the one I held, I almost broke a tooth on some small adamantine object.

  I spat it into my hand. It was a tiny cylinder of metal, with a rounded-conical tip. It was a slug of lead. It was very like a bullet that could have been fired from a .25-caliber Browning automatic.

  5

  As it happened, the woman with Ganymede (which I still thought a damned deceptive name) was correct: the brownies were the only lunch I ate that day.

  When I returned to my office, Peggy was yet there, from which presence I gathered that nothing untoward had occurred. I showed her the slug and told her where and how I had come upon it.

  At first she foolishly insisted it was rather the tip of a ball-point pen. I realized I held it too close to her eyes, and pulled my hand back to accommodate her aging vision.

  “You really should get glasses, you know.”

  “When you get a toupee,” she riposted in sheer Irish spite. My temples had not receded nearly that far. She still squinted. “I wouldn’t know a bullet from…”

  While she groped for a word sufficiently preposterous (and found it: “…ballot”), I said, maintaining the low voice I had assumed so that I might not be heard down the hall: “Would this suggest the Ganymede people were involved?”

  Peggy put her hands flat on the desk top, her attitude of sweet reason, and said: “Russ, I ask you, what connection could there possibly be between some hoods and some people who sell pressure cookers?”

  “You were always aware of the nature of their business?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? The name’s certainly obvious enough.” She made her nose and mouth into the momentary mask of wryness. “And it so happens we have a Ganymede cooker at home, Mr. Smarty.” At this point she pursed her lips in the same fashion as the woman next door and began the same sanctimonious tale: “Do you know the cute story of the name? It seems this little baby used to call for her food—”

  “I know it,” I said curtly, and kept repeating the phrase throughout the narration, which she continued relentlessly notwithstanding.

  When she had finished, I said, rolling the bullet between thumb and forefinger, “The plot thickens. But no one else has been slain, to my knowledge. And, more importantly, I’ve got work!” I put a hand into my pocket, separated one of the hundred-dollar bills from the other two, and brought it forth. “And a nice retainer. Run down to the bank and change it, and you can keep half.”

  Peggy seized the greenback and, unbuttoning the collar of her blouse, dropped it into her bosom. “I’ll keep it all, thank you, sir! You now owe me only two hundred and seventy-five bucks as of last Friday.”

  “Hey, hey!” I protested.

  “You’re lucky I don’t demand the other two hundred Washburn gave you.”

  She had of course listened through the plywood partition, but what baffled me was that neither he nor I had mentioned the amount he had generously deposited in my palm, as opposed to the one-fifty I had asked.

  Furthermore, she added even more smugly: “I’m on poor Mrs. Washburn’s side. He looked pretty”—she leaned forward and pantomimed the twisting of a television dial —“you know…”

  “The man simply neglected to zip his fly. That could happen to anybody.”

  “If it happens with you, you’ll never see me again.”

  “Peg, I’m going out on this assignment. I won’t be back till tomorrow. Eventually, in fact quite soon, you’ll get all of what I owe you. At the moment I need the rest of the money on hand to get into my apartment again.”

  She cocked her eye. “Two months in arrears at two seventy-five per? How far will two hundred bucks get you?”

  “At the moment, all I need is ten, maybe a twenty, for the super. The building’s owned by a gigantic absentee company. It takes forever really to evict anybody in this city, especially when you stay on good terms with the functionaries actually on the premises. You have to use New York’s inefficiency and anonymity for your own benefit, Peggy. It’s also morally better to think in terms of the individual. You don’t get nearly so bitter if you regard bus drivers, cabbies, and so on as persons like yourself, much put upon by the pressures of urban life, but for all that human undernea—”

  Peggy slammed a drawer shut with a report that effectively terminated one of the little efforts I made from time to time to sweeten her world view, on the rare occasions when my own had got less acrid.

  “I’m taking the afternoon off, also,” said she. “It’s the first time in weeks I could afford to.”

  I didn’t argue with this solipsist logic. “With my compliments,” I said. “It’s been a strange day, and God knows I took enough punishment, but money’s the best bandage for any wound.” Toying with the bills in my pocket, I also felt the cold little bullet I had put away there.

  My gun lay at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft. The giant corpse had vanished without a trace, along with the two fake cops who had borne it out. My client Washburn denied being either the person referred to by Bakewell or the person of the same name who had signed the letter, which had also disappeared. A raspy voice had addressed me as “Teddy” on the telephone. “Newhouse” was the English translation of “Villanova.” Finally, a slug had been found in a brownie.

  I resisted making another hasty decision to dismiss the Villanova affair altogether; I merely moved it out of the foregrou
nd. Riding the down elevator with Peggy, who when the door closed backed into a comer of the cab and pressed her palms against the walls, I looked again for bloodstains and again saw none.

  Then I asked, “Why are you standing like that?” She had an inevitable way of doing things that irritated. Now it was as if she feared being goosed.

  “It’s crazy, I know,” she admitted. “But I have a tendency to motion sickness.”

  At the corner outside we diverged as she headed for the subway and I towards my apartment building, which was but several blocks south on Third Avenue. Not having answered the natural need that had asserted itself in the final moments with Washburn, I stepped up my pace, penetrating the sidewalk congestion oblivious to the individuals who made it up, each the hero of his own tragedy or farce, most no doubt involved in both at once, as I believe it was Schopenhauer who stated in a Teutonic bon mot. Elsewhere he deplores the cracking of whips heard in the streets of his day, then the implements of coachmen and not exclusively the furniture of S & M get-togethers. As I used to tell my students, a work should be read in the context of its time.

  Between my apartment building and the sidewalk was a yard-wide fragment of lawn behind a margin of box hedge too stunted even at the peak of its luxuriance to need trimming—and thus a jurisdictional dispute among the maintenance men was avoided: in snowtime no doorman would so much as scrape the threshold with the side of his boot, and the certified janitor could never be found. In this strip of pasture a large animal now grazed, a great Dane to be specific, no doubt the pet of a small person who lived in a tiny apartment, though no owner was in evidence at the moment. As I swung jauntily in off the public sidewalk, under the canvas canopy with its old L-shaped tear that blew back in rainstorms and admitted water to flow down the neck of him who awaited a cab, the tremendous beast, assuming the middle-distance stare of canine preoccupation, hunched itself and defecated abundantly. The wind changed, and I was swept into the lobby on a stream of fetor.

  The doorman, who emerged only to rout toy poodles, sat inside on the shiny pea-green couch otherwise seldom used—it was in fact banned both to residents and their guests, and of service only to building employees and the postman, who, having hidden his cart full of week-old mail, would loaf there and glower at tenants.

  The doorman was feeding on a meatball hero sandwich and leaning at an extreme angle so that the tomato sauce would drip on the couch and not in his lap. Thus he did not mark my entrance, and I gained the elevator in a feat of eventlessness. He and the colleagues who manned the portal on the other shifts were often distracted: either that was the explanation or they themselves had stolen the remainder of the lobby furniture. When I had moved in, two years before, the couch was flanked by matching end tables bearing tall lamps of false copper with a fake patina; and a mirror, framed by the raptorial wingspread of a gilded (and deformed) eagle, had hung on the parallel wall above a chair upholstered in glossy maroon plastic.

  I deboarded on the fifth floor and took the route, with its three turns, to my quarters, 5K, behind the elevator shaft, in the far right rear of the structure. I had what in New York is called a studio apartment, i.e., one room, in this example fifteen by eight, with a kitchenette counter behind louvered doors, and a compartment in which basin, toilet, and bath were such close neighbors that I was obliged to open its door to bend for the toweling of my body below mid-thigh.

  Still, it was home and not having used it for two—no, almost three weeks, I looked forward to reclaiming it, especially to using its water closet, which was exclusively mine—quite a valuable possession, as one who has had to share a sanitary facility is soon brought to understand. Speaking of which takes me back to my childhood, when our bathroom was controlled by my sisters; and when they were physically absent, the place was festooned with their wet underwear.

  New Yorkly, my portal was locked by three arrangements from outside and a fourth, a chain, when one was in residence. Now that I had fled its humiliating message, the advertisement of my delinquency in rent had vanished, leaving four shiny little diagonals where the Scotch tape had been fingernailed off the matt-black surface of the door. I keyed the trio in series—standard latch, Segal deadbolt, and Police, and reached around the jamb and lifted from its floor slot the inclined iron brace of the last-named, and pushed in.

  I was prepared for a musty odor. Instead, soon as I had closed the door behind me I smelled a sweet, almost sickly bouquet.

  Well, that mystery could wait at least until I visited the bathroom, opening the door to which I was assailed and almost overcome by a cloud of the same scent. The top of the toilet tank was cluttered with bottles, jars, and vials. And there, so near as to brush my shoulder when I stood in the current attitude—wide Bakewell, that human mountain, would have to stand outside the door to perform the manly act—were my old bugbears: articles of female underwear hanging wetly from the rod of the shower curtain.

  So again I retained my water, spun around with such energy that my flailing elbow hooked the clammy, clinging cup of a brassiere and brought it along four feet into the outer room, before it fell to the Rya rug just ahead of the sling chair of rust-colored suede, impeccably maintained for twelve months (by never being used) but now defaced with a dark, sleek-surfaced stain, free-form, probably oil, forever ineradicable.

  Against the eastern wall, across the room from the windows that offered a close-up of the ruin of the neighboring building—still at the stage at which it had been arrested by a strike of the demolition workmen four weeks before—my convertible couch was opened to the double bed ordinarily secreted within its bowels by this time of day.

  Even before marching to my only closet, throwing open its door, and seeing my extra shoes, habitually arranged by pairs in the forefront, now heaped in the rear to give ground to a white-hided valise the like of which I had never owned, and hanging from the rod various garment all in gayer colors and most of more delicate fabrics than my own clothing, which had been ruthlessly bunched to the far left, I began strongly to suspect that another person than I, and of another sex, had recently been on the premises.

  I needed a drink. When last at home, I had washed down my meager repast (a length of pepperoni, a doorstop wedge of rattrap cheese, seven green grapes) with a glass of Almaden Mountain White. The rest of the bottle should be yet in the fridge: turned to vinegar, perhaps, but I had no alternative.

  I repaired to the kitchenette and opened the half-refrigerator tucked under the Masonite counter. My modest California plonk, necessarily lying on its side owing to the narrow space between the wire shelves, had been transformed into a bulkier bottle with a protuberant mouth swathed in metal foil. I withdrew its heavy, dark-green, moisture-beaded body. The label too had been altered: it now read Veuve Clicquot.

  Inspecting the rest of the interior, I saw I had been robbed of: an encrusted jar containing a quarter inch of Mr. Mustard; a blob of butter already rancifying three weeks earlier and in addition once melted and subsequently congealed in its greasy paper; a slice of dark-edged liverwurst. These were but all I could remember; no doubt there had been other items of like quality.

  The thief had made replacements: beluga caviar in glass and a tunnel-tinned loaf of Strasbourg pâté de foie gras. These delicacies were as yet untasted.

  Now, it was my kitchen, in my apartment, and an intruder had used it freely without my permission—yet the kind of chap I am, though loving nothing more than caviar unless it’s foie gras, and worshiping champagne above all fluids, I put all of these away after my salivating inspection. The fridge might be mine, but the comestibles were not. I might have dipped into them had they instead been pressed ham, egg salad, and a bottle of Bud. I was even conscious of taking a kind of toady pride in the usurper’s superior tastes. Drinkless, I returned to what should have been the living area but was yet the bedroom, and looked for a place to sit other than the stained suede, seeing which I was flooded with indignation again and concomitantly remembered my need to urinate.
r />   I strode to the bathroom, coming upon and picking up the damp brassiere, nasty thing, en route. Having to free my hands of it before I proceeded with my own business, I hung it up again, alongside the underpants and other items of damp lingerie hanging from the rod above the tub. I habitually kept the shower curtain (a rather vulgar one, left behind by the previous tenant, of shiny plastic imprinted with orange water lilies against a background of Prussian blue) closed even when not showering, because of the condition of the tub, the porcelain of which was badly pitted by the pox of use and stained by a rust against which scouring powders were impotent.

  It occurred to me that if my bathroom was to be used, without my permission, for hanging wet laundry, the latter might as well be dried more efficiently: given such ventilation as was available in a tiny compartment without a window, i.e., not plastered against plastic. I took the articles from the rod and hurled the curtain away with a clatter of its rings.

  Bakewell’s body lay in the bathtub.

  “Lay” is a poor verb for the work it must do. The tub was considerably shorter, of course, than my office couch and inserted tightly within two right-angled walls, allowing no overhang at either end. His knees were therefore pointed towards the ceiling, his chin embedded in his chest. Surely the rigor had set in by now. I did not probe him to confirm this assumption. Nor did I entertain any plan to dispose of the body discreetly.

  I went out to the phone, a wall-mounted instrument over the kitchenette counter. I discovered I still held the moist underwear. I flung it away with some difficulty, the wet fabrics being tenacious. I spun the three digits of the police emergency number—and heard nothing but the raspy revolutions of the bent dial. I remembered then that I had had the service disconnected when I made the decision to live in my office till the wind changed.