Presence: Stories

  “Yes,” she said and took his arm and they walked together past his sister’s empty house. She kissed his shoulder, and he looked at her, grinning and surprised, for she did not make such displays. He grunted, quite pleased, and she held him tighter, feeling the sun on her back like a blessing, aware once again of Stowe’s deep reliability, and her own. Thank God, she thought, for good sense! Joseph, she remembered, had wanted her very much that morning in his hallway. And she walked in silence, cherishing a rapture, the clear heart of those whose doors are made to hold against the winds of the world.

  “Still,” she felt the need to say, “it’s rather a shame about them.”

  He shrugged and bent over to part the roadside weeds, reached in and brought out a young toad whose squeaks made him laugh. And suddenly he tossed it to her. She shrieked, reddening with anger, but then she laughed. And as sometimes happened with them, they just stood face to face, laughing down at each other with an enormous heartiness.

  [1961]

  Fame

  Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars—minus the ten percent commission, that left him six hundred and seventy-five thousand, spread over ten years. Coming out of his agent’s building onto Madison Avenue, he almost smiled at this slight resentment he felt at having to pay Billy the seventy-five thousand. A gaunt, good-looking woman smiled back at him as she passed; he did not turn, fearing she would stop and begin the conversation that by now was unbearable for him. “I only wanted to tell you that it’s really the wisest and funniest play I think I’ve ever . . .” He kept close to the storefronts as he walked, resolving once again to develop some gracious set of replies to these people, who after all—at least some of them—were sincere. But he knew he would always stand there like an oaf, for some reason ashamed and yet happy.

  A rope of pearls lay on black velvet in the window of a jewelry store; he paused. My God, he thought, I could buy that! I could buy the whole window maybe. Even the store! The pearls were suddenly worthless. In the glass he saw his hound’s eyes, his round, sad face and narrow beard, his sloping shoulders and wrinkled corduroy lapels; for the King of Broadway, he thought, you still look like a failure. He moved on a few steps, and a hand grasped his forearm with annoying proprietary strength and turned him to an immense chest, a yachtsman’s sunburned face with a chic, narrow-brimmed hat on top.

  “You wouldn’t be Meyer Berkowitz?”

  “No. I look like him, though.”

  The man blushed under his tan, looked offended, and walked away.

  Meyer Berkowitz approached the corner of Fiftieth Street, feeling the fear of retaliation. What do I want them to do, hate me? On the corner he paused to study his watch. It was only a quarter to six, and the dinner was for seven-fifteen. He tried to remember if there was a movie house in the neighborhood. But there wouldn’t be time for a whole movie unless he happened to come in at the beginning. Still, he could afford to pay for half a movie. He turned west on Fiftieth. A couple stared at him as he passed. His eye fell on a rack of magazines next to the corner newsstand. The edge of Look showed under Life, and he wondered again at all the airplanes, kitchen tables, dentists’ offices, and trains where people would be staring at his face on the cover. He thought of shaving his beard. But then, he thought, they won’t recognize me. He smiled. I am hooked. So be hooked, he muttered, and, straightening up, he resolved to admit to the next interloper that he was in fact Meyer Berkowitz and happy to meet his public. On a rising tide of honesty, he remembered the years in the Burnside Memorial Chapel, sitting beside the mummified dead, his notebooks spread on the cork floor as he constructed play after play, and the mirror in the men’s room where he would look at his morose eyes, wondering when and if they would ever seem as unique as his secret fate kept promising they would someday be. On Fifth Avenue, so clean, gray, and rich, he headed downtown, his hands clasped behind his back. Two blocks west, two blocks to the right of his shoulder, the housemen in two theaters were preparing to turn the lights on over his name; the casts of two plays were at home, checking their watches; in all, maybe thirty-five people, including the stage managers and assistants, had been joined together by him, their lives changed and in a sense commanded by his words. And in his heart, in a hollowed-out place, stood a question mark: Was it possible to write another play? Thankfully he thought of his wealth again, subtracted ten percent commission from the movie purchase price of I See You and divided the remainder over ten years, and angrily swept all the dollars out of his head. A cabdriver slowed down beside him and waved and yelled, “Hey, Meyer!” and the two passengers were leaning forward to see him. The cab was keeping pace with him, so he lifted his left hand a few inches in a cripped wave—like a prizefighter, it occurred to him. An unexplainable disgust pressed him toward a sign overhanging the sidewalk a few yards ahead.

  He had a vague recollection of eating in Lee Fong’s years ago with Billy, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get him a TV assignment (“Meyer, if you would only follow a plotline . . .”). It would probably be empty at this hour, and it wasn’t elegant. He pushed open the bright-red lacquered door and thankfully saw that the bar was empty and sat on a stool. Two girls were alone in the restaurant part, talking over teacups. The bartender took his order without any sign of recognizing him. He settled both arms on the bar, purposefully relaxing. The Scotch and soda arrived. He drank, examining his face, which was segmented by the bottles in front of the mirror. Cleanly and like a soft blow on his shoulder, the realization struck him that it was getting harder and harder to remember talking to anyone as he used to last year and all his life before his plays had opened, before he had come on view. Even now in this empty restaurant he was already expecting a stranger’s voice behind him, and half wanting it. Crummy. A longing rose up in him to face someone with his mind on something else; someone who would not show that charged, distorted pressure in the eyes which, he knew, meant that the person was seeing his printed face superimposed over his real one. Again he watched himself in the mirror behind the bar: Meyer the Morose, Sam Ugly, but a millionaire with plays running in five countries. Setting his drink down, he noticed the soiled frayed cuffs on his once-tan corduroy jacket, and the shirt cuff sticking out with the button off. With a distant feeling of alarm he realized that he was meeting his director and producer and their wives at the Pavillon and that these clothes, to which he had never given any thought, would set him off as a character who went around like a bum when he had two hits running.

  Thank God anyway that he had never married! To come home to the old wife with this printed new face—not good. But now, how would he ever know whether a woman was looking at him or at “Meyer Berkowitz” in full color on the magazine cover? Strange—in the long memorial chapel nights he had envisaged roomfuls of girls pouring over him when his plays succeeded, and now it was almost inconceivable to make a real connection with any women he knew. He summoned up their faces, and in each he saw calculation, that look of achievement. It was exhausting him, the whole thing. Months had gone by since he had so much as made a note. What he needed was an apartment in Bensonhurst or the upper Bronx somewhere, among people who . . . But they would know him in the Bronx. He sipped his second drink. His stomach was empty and the alcohol went straight to the back of his eyes, and he felt himself lifted up and hanging restfully by the neck over the bar.

  The bartender, a thin man with a narrow mustache and only faint signs of Chinese features, stood before him. “I beggin’ you pardon. Excuse me?”

  Meyer Berkowitz raised his eyes, and before the bartender could speak, he said, “I’m Meyer Berkowitz.”

  “Ha!” The bartender pointed into his face with a long fingernail. “I know. I recognizin’ you! On Today show, right?”

  “Right.”

  The bartender now looked over Meyer’s head toward someone behind him and, pointing at Meyer, nodded wildly. Then, for some reason whispering into Meyer’s ear, he said, “The boss invite you to havin’
something on the house.”

  Meyer turned around and saw a Chinese with sunglasses on standing beside the cash register, bowing and gesturing lavishly toward the expanse of the bar. Meyer smiled, nodded with aristocratic graciousness as he had seen people do in movies, turned back to the bartender and ordered another Scotch, and quickly finished the one in his hand. How fine people really were! How they loved their artists! Shit, man, this is the greatest country in the world.

  He stirred the gift Scotch, whose ice cubes seemed just a little clearer than the ones he had paid for. How come his refrigerator never made such clear ice cubes? Vaguely he heard people entering the restaurant behind him. With no warning he was suddenly aware that three or four couples were at the bar alongside him and that in the restaurant part the white linen tablecloths were now alive with moving hands, plates, cigars. He held his watch up to his eyes. The undrunk part of his brain read the time. He’d finish this drink and amble over to the Pavillon. If he only had a pin for his shirt cuff . . .

  “Excuse me . . .”

  He turned on the stool and faced a small man with very fair skin, wearing a gray-checked overcoat and a gray hat and highly polished black shoes. He was a short, round man, and Meyer realized that he himself was the same size and even the same age, just about, and he was not sure suddenly that he could ever again write a play.

  The short man had a manner, it was clear, the stance of a certain amount of money. There was money in his pause and the fit of his coat and a certain ineffable condescension in his blue eyes, and Meyer imagined a woman, no doubt the man’s wife, also short, wrapped in mink, waiting a few feet away in the crowd at the bar, with the same smug look.

  After the pause, during which Meyer said nothing, the short man asked, “Are you Meyer Berkowitz?”

  “That’s right,” Meyer said, and the alcohol made him sigh for air.

  “You don’t remember me?” the short man said, a tiny curl of smile on the left edge of his pink mouth.

  Meyer sobered. Nothing in the round face stuck to any part of his memory, and yet he knew he was not all this drunk. “I’m afraid not. Who are you?”

  “You don’t remember me?” the short man asked with genuine surprise.

  “Well, who are you?”

  The man glanced off, not so much embarrassed as unused to explaining his identity; but swallowing his pride, he looked back at Meyer and said, “You don’t remember Bernie Gelfand?”

  Whatever suspicion Meyer felt was swept away. Clearly he had known this man somewhere, sometime. He felt the debt of the forgetter. “Bernie Gelfand. I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t recall where. Where did I know you?”

  “I sat next to you in English four years? De Witt Clinton!”

  Meyer’s brain had long ago drawn a blind down on all his high-school years. But the name Gelfand did rustle the fallen leaves at the back of his mind. “I remember your name, ya, I think I do.”

  “Oh, come on, guy, you don’t remember Bernie Gelfand with the curly red hair?” With which he raised his gray felt hat to reveal a shiny bald scalp. But no irony showed in his eyes, which were transported back to his famous blazing hair and to the seat he had had next to Meyer Berkowitz in high school. He put his hat back on again.

  “Forgive me,” Meyer said, “I have a terrible memory. I remember your name, though.”

  Gelfand, obviously put out, perhaps even angered but still trying to smile, and certainly full of intense sentimental interest, said, “We were best friends.”

  Meyer laid a beseeching hand on Gelfand’s gray coat sleeve. “I’m not doubting you, I just can’t place you for the moment. I mean, I believe you.” He laughed.

  Gelfand seemed assuaged now, nodded, and said, “You don’t look much different, you know? I mean, except for the beard, I’d know you in a minute.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” Meyer said, but still feeling he had offended, he obediently asked, “What do you do?” preparing for a long tale of success.

  Gelfand clearly enjoyed this question, and he lifted his eyebrows to a proud peak. “I’m in shoulder pads,” he said.

  A laugh began to bubble up in Meyer’s stomach; Gelfand’s coat was in fact stiffly padded at the shoulders. But in an instant he remembered that there was a shoulder-pad industry, and the importance which Gelfand attached to his profession killed the faintest smile on Meyer’s face. “Really,” he said with appropriate solemnity.

  “Oh, yes. I’m general manager, head of everything up to the Mississippi.”

  “Don’t say. Well, that’s wonderful.” Meyer felt great relief. It would have been awful if Gelfand had been a failure—or in charge of New England only. “I’m glad you’ve done so well.”

  Gelfand glanced off to one side, letting his achievement sink deeply into Meyer’s mind. When he looked again at Meyer, he could not quite keep his eyes from the frayed cuffs of the corduroy jacket and the limp shirt cuff hanging out. “What do you do?” he asked.

  Meyer looked into his drink. Nothing occurred to him. He touched his finger against the mahogany bar and still nothing came to him through his shock. His resentment was clamoring in his head; he recognized it and greeted it. Then he looked directly at Gelfand, who in the pause had grown a look of benevolent pity. “I’m a writer,” Meyer said, and watched for the publicity-distorted freeze to grip Gelfand’s eyeballs.

  “That so!” Gelfand said, amused. “What kind of writing you do?”

  If I really had any style, Meyer thought, I would shrug and say I write part-time poems after I get home from the post office, and would leave Bernie to enjoy his dinner. On the other hand, I do not work in the post office, and there must be some way to shake this monkey off and get back to where I can talk to people again as if I were real. “I write plays,” he said to Gelfand.

  “That so!” Gelfand smiled, his amusement enlarging toward open condescension. “Anything I would have . . . heard of?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, one of them is down the street.”

  “Really? On Broadway?” Gelfand’s face split into its parts; his mouth still kept its smile, but his eyes showed a certain wild alarm. His head, suddenly, was on straighter, his neck drawn back.

  “I wrote I See You,” Meyer said, and tasted slime on his tongue.

  Gelfand’s mouth opened. His skin reddened.

  “And Mostly Florence.”

  The two smash hits seemed to open before Gelfand’s face like bursting flags. His finger lifted toward Meyer’s chest. “Are you . . . Meyer Berkowitz?” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Gelfand held out his hand tentatively. “Well, I’m very happy to meet you,” he said with utter formality.

  Meyer saw distance locking into place between them, and in the instant wished he could take Gelfand in his arms and wipe out the poor man’s metaphysical awe, smother his defeat, and somehow retract this very hateful pleasure, which he knew now he could not part with any more. He shook Gelfand’s hand and then covered it with his left hand.

  “Really,” Gelfand went on, withdrawing his hand as though it had already presumed too much. “I . . . I’ve enjoyed your—excuse me.” Meyer’s heavy cheeks stirred vaguely toward a smile.

  Gelfand closed his coat and quickly turned about and hurried to the little crowd waiting for tables near the red entrance door. He took the arm of a short woman in a mink wrap and turned her toward the door. She seemed surprised as he hurried her out of sight and into the street.

  [1966]

  Fitter’s Night

  By four in the afternoon it was almost dark in winter, and this January was one of the coldest on record, so that the night shift filing through the turnstiles at the Navy Yard entrance was somber, huddling in zipper jackets and pulling down earflaps, shifting from foot to foot as the marine guards inspected each tin lunchbox in turn and compared the photographs on identity cards with the squint-eyed
, blue-nosed faces that passed through. The former grocery clerks, salesmen, unemployed, students, and the mysteriously incapacitated young men whom the Army and Navy did not want; the elderly skilled machinists come out of retirement, the former truckdrivers, elevator operators, masons, disbarred lawyers, and a few would-be poets, poured off the buses in the blue light of late afternoon and waited their turn at the end of the lines leading to the fresh-faced marines in the booths, who refused to return their quips and dutifully searched for the bomb and the incendiary pencil under the lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches leaking through the waxed paper, against all reason unscrewing the Thermos bottles to peer in at the coffee. With some ten thousand men arriving for each of the three shifts, the law of averages naturally came into play, and it was inevitable that every few minutes someone would put his Thermos back into his lunchbox and say, “What’s Roosevelt got against hot coffee?” and the Marines would blink and wave the joker into the Yard.

  To the naval architects, the engineers, the yardmaster and his staff, the New York Naval Shipyard was not hard to define; in fact, it had hardly changed since its beginnings in the early 1800s. The vast drydocks facing the bay were backed by a maze of crooked and curving streets lined with one-story brick machine shops and storehouses. In dark Victorian offices, papers were still speared on sharp steel points, and filing cabinets were of dark oak. Ships of war were never exactly the same, whatever anybody said, and the smith was still in a doorway hammering one-of-a-kind iron fittings, the sparks falling against his floor-length apron; steel bow plates were still sighted by eye regardless of the carefully mapped curves of the drawing, and when a man was injured, a two-wheel pushcart was sent for to bump him along the cobblestones to the infirmary like a side of beef.

  It was sure that Someone knew where everything was, and this faith was adopted by every new man. The shipfitter’s helper, the burner, the chipper, the welder; painters, carpenters, riggers, drillers, electricians—hundreds of them might spend the first hour of each shift asking one stranger after another where he was supposed to report or what drydock held the destroyer or carrier he had been working on the night before; and there were not a few who spent entire twelve-hour shifts searching for their particular gangs, but the faith never faltered. Someone must know what was supposed to be happening, if only because damaged ships did limp in under tow from the various oceans and after days, weeks, or sometimes months they did sail out under Brooklyn Bridge, ready once again to fight the enemy. There were naturally a sensitive few who, watching these gallant departures, shook their heads with wonder at the mystery of how these happened to have been repaired, but the vast majority accepted this and even felt that they themselves were somehow responsible. It was like a baseball game with five hundred men playing the outfield at the same time, sweeping in a mob toward the high arching ball, which was caught somewhere in the middle of the crowd, by whom no one knew, except that the game was slowly and quite inconceivably being won.