She was a tiny, delicate girl. Tiny. Delicate. Like a cell of botulism.
How had it happened? How had something so pure and innocent and—the word seems alien to me, but somehow appropriate—charming become so demented, so twisted and destructive? Could it have been me…could it have been that I had taken Stephie from paths she knew, paths that led deeper into the darkness of her own fears and past torments, and tried to lead her on a new path, out of the darkness? Was it that? Or is it preordained that some men will instinctively seek out those women who are worst for them, women who are good with other men but become evil in the hands of the wrong one? It tormented me, it haunted me, as the days went by and we continued to hurt each other in terrible, unnameable ways. Little ways that would have no meaning taken individually, but collectively painted a haunted canvas by Tchelitchew or Max Ernst.
There, existing in a chilly, tormented half-world of metamorphosed loneliness and vague desires, I sought ways to bedevil myself. I went far out of my way to discover trouble, to cultivate it, to urge its flagellant attentions on myself. Perhaps that was it: perhaps it was the smell of desperation and hopelessness on me that had attracted Stephie. Now, later, thinking on it, I have no doubt that a healthy man, someone not seeking the nit-picking of bits of destruction, would have avoided her.
Stephie was a Typhoid Mary, a plague-bearer, and only someone desiring illness would have rubbed up against her.
One night I had a date with her—it was my single night-off from the bookstore; usually I took the subway during the still hours after work; Times Square at three A.M. is another world, filled with weird types and wanderers who will never find their paths out of the darkness; riding to Brooklyn in that peculiarly No-Doz-chilled world was a surrealistic experience—and I had stopped off to buy her a trinket. It was a silver lavaliere; it had only cost a few dollars, but there was always this intense feeling in me that I might break through her wall of strange and disturbing distance with a word, a gift, a kiss, a gesture. I never did, of course, but the attempts were constantly being made.
I see them now as adolescent attempts to buy her, but at the time I thought they were unselfish. Was this a refusal on my part really to give of myself? Was it perhaps an attempt to gain without offering myself exposed? Did I sense she had the power to cut and hurt?
With the little silver pendant in its nest of cotton, the box tucked into my pocket, I vaulted to the balcony. The doors were locked.
I waited, sitting against the cold night with my back to the French doors, until early morning. I fell asleep that way, and only chance prevented the beat cop from seeing me there like some fetus-positioned cat-burglar. She didn’t come home till almost three that afternoon. By then I was so sunk into a waiting stupor that even when she opened the French doors and I fell sidewise, half into her room, I didn’t realize she had come back.
Her explanation: she had spent the night talking ballet with the “boys” at one of their co-op apartments; yes, she had known I would be there; no, she hadn’t considered it important to phone me or leave a note; if she was gone she assumed I would leave, ride the long ride back to Manhattan, and be ready to see her another time.
We went for our blood test that week. She had to hold my hand when the doctor took the sample. I was poor, and wrote an uncle of mine in New Mexico, who owned a jewelry store, asking him for a ring. He sent a lovely but inexpensive modern band.
Why? Because it is far better to be lonely with someone than to be lonely alone.
I was frightened of Stephie, I knew it was all wrong, she was killing me by obscure, dangerous degrees, but I needed someone. And in that unfathomable way all those who seek to destroy themselves share, I wanted her. What was worst for me, I needed most. Still, I had no understanding of her; I didn’t really know her, and we were both running headlong down that path into the darkness, hand-in-hand, knives in backs.
It was a little like going mad.
We went to an art movie on Lexington Avenue, midtown; a dark and depressing thing that seemed perfectly suited to my being with Stephie. As the weeks had gone by I had started smoking more, my thoughts were strange, devious, my work at the shop hadn’t suffered because there wasn’t that much imagination needed for it, but I was more easily upset, nastier to customers, shorter with the creeps who sought the clinical sex books; my nights alone were introspective, troubled. We were walking back to the subway on Lexington when we saw a crowd.
Stephie hurried me along and as we came abreast of them Stephie pointed up. Everyone was watching a ledge fifteen floors up. A man was standing there, his hands finger-spread against the sooty brick, his feet half-hanging over the edge.
His eyes held me. Even fifteen floors below him, I could see the whites, gigantic, milky, terrified. He didn’t want to jump…whatever had driven him onto that ledge, he was like me, he was me…he wanted to fight it, but it had driven him there and he was held by it. But he wanted to live.
I glanced at Stephie, started to say something.
Her face.
How can I explain it so it will hold the impact it held for me then? How can I describe the expression of her face, the way she ground her teeth together, the contortion of her tiny features, the almost purple light across her cheekbones, the way her fists were clenched so tightly they went white. She wanted him to jump.
She didn’t say a thing. I heard her. She was silent. I heard her!
Jump! she was saying, with her clenched teeth, her fists, that awful purple light playing across her face, Jump! The sight of him tumbling, going down, trying to fly the way falling men do with arms out, twitching. That was what she wanted to see. My throat went as dry as if I had chain-smoked for an hour straight. It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
I don’t remember whether he fell, or was saved, or crawled back inside of his own volition, or whether we simply walked away. I don’t remember. It didn’t matter; just as what happened to me didn’t matter. That guy up there was doomed—if not now, then sometime soon—just as I was. Something was destroying him, and something was destroying me. It didn’t matter whether we fell now or later. It didn’t matter. It had to happen.
Eight days before we were to go to City Hall—Billy and Stella were to be our witnesses—I learned who Stephie Cook was. I was allowed to discover how deep the layers of rust and decay on her soul were.
Jump!
We had been robbed at the bookstore on Broadway…well, almost robbed. Davey Haieff, the manager of the shop, was a rough number, who called the tourists and perverts who shopped for “different” books in our shop kadodies. We were just at the slack period of the evening, nine o’clock when most of the out-of-towners were free of dinner at the tourist traps and had made the eight-thirty curtain at the theaters…and we were loafing it.
That was when the four teenagers came in. They were like any other four teenagers you can see cruising Times Square, digging trouble. One of them meandered toward me in the back of the store, keeping his eyes on the showcase filled with Italian stilettos, Samurai swords, Solingen steel hunting knives—the sort of deadly looking but perfectly legal hardware sold to impress the yucks back home. I followed him, noticing that the other three hung around the raised cash register counter behind which Davey waited, watching, always watching everyone in the tiny shop.
“Can I interest you in a knife?” I asked the kid.
He was taller than me, by at least six inches, and the way he wore his T-shirt indicated he worked out on the parallel bars at the PAL gym. He looked more Bronx than Brooklyn; but they all looked pretty much the same, really. “Yeah, how ’bout that thing there.” He jabbed a finger at the locked glass showcase, indicating a sixteen-inch Italian steel clasp-knife.
I grinned. This was my specialty. I could operate one of the clasp-knives by wrist action faster than any switchblade on the market, illegal though they were. We weren’t allowed to sell switches or gravity or shake knives, so I had mastered the technique the better to push the m
erchandise we could sell.
Just as I unlocked the case, the other three made their move. I had the knife in my hand as one of them came up with an ironwood billy club and took a swing at Davey. I saw the action from the corner of my eye, and it was like a Mack Sennett comedy, sped up fifty-times normal.
Davey reached down, in and out, and up all in one fluid motion, and belted two of them with the rubber hose he kept there for just that purpose. They went down instantly, one of them open above the eyebrow with a five-inch gash that blinded him with his own blood. The third one bolted into the street.
My customer stood where he was. He had to, I had whipped open the knife and jammed it against his windpipe as I saw Davey move. It made a tiny indentation in the flesh, and he was still standing, staring wide-eyed at it when the cops came to take them away.
Davey told me to take the rest of the evening off.
I took the subway to Brooklyn and arrived just before ten o’clock—six hours earlier than usual. The balcony was vaulted, the doors thrown open and I bounded into the room carrying two popsicles, like something out of The Thief of Bagdad.
Stephie wasn’t alone. She wasn’t in bed, which made it worse.
A man would have driven me insane, I would have probably killed them both, I was so keyed up by the violence from the action in the shop. But it wasn’t a man. I was stopped. I stopped. I was stopped, nothing but stopped. You understand what I am saying? Just stopped and stared and couldn’t speak, and was so stopped I knew I was saying things to myself. Don’t ask what I was saying, I have no idea.
Two girls lay on the bed, sucking on each other. Stephie sat naked, cross-legged on the floor, watching them with that same terrible expression she’d had while watching the man on the ledge.
One of the girls on the bed lay perfectly still as I came bursting in, playing possum, not stirring to draw attention. The other looked up and went white, deathly pale, the way I had written it a million times in my inadequate stories that avoided true confessions like this because they were improbable, written for sillyass housewives who would swallow only improbability. And I was part of it. They stared at me, all three of them. The first girl blankly, the second with fear—a puffy moth of a girl whose suntanned body seemed gross and fleshy to me—and Stephie, defiantly.
She wore a wedding ring. But not mine.
She wore a ring all right. On her little finger, left hand. A wedding ring—a lesbian’s token of love and commitment. I was ill.
Had she been on the bed with one of them, it might have made some difference, then there would have been a reason, I could have rationalized. But watching…
I dropped the ridiculous popsicles and stumbled toward them, thinking I was moving back, away from them. The pudgy girl leaped off the bed, glistening with sweat, and flattened like a sack of brown sugar against the wall. “Don’t hit me,” she cried, “I can’t stand pain…don’t hit me!”
Stephie recrossed her legs in front of her, and her eyes were cold, dead, like a pair of gravestones. And at that moment, I understood. At that moment, school was out. What a complete, callow stupid hayseed I had been! She had used me as a cover, would have gone to the extreme of marrying me to cover. Why? What did I care? Her family, her job, the world in general, what did it matter? She had used me, and I was used up.
Then she sort of…lightly laughed. She let loose a Snow White giggle that sliced like a butcher’s blade right through my stumbling consciousness and drained me of all energy. It was silly, and it hurt.
Watching.
She had been watching.
The one lying there still. Still as dead. If I lie silently here no one will hurt me. Fright. The room stank of it.
The other, against the wall. Terrified. Of me. The gross, hurting man. And my Stephie…watching.
Watching it all. Smiling endlessly.
Somehow, I got out of there, and back to Manhattan. Somehow.
Did I go by subway…was it underground or was I some sort of dead man on the way to the river Styx? Did I think about it, did I see that scene again and again? I don’t know. I can’t remember. Never!
I didn’t know what to do.
I found Aggie and managed to tell it all, what I could tell, so driven out of my mind was I at the thought of her watching them on that bed…those dykes! He gave me a drink, and then called a girl he knew. She was a West Indian and she smelled of oregano. It couldn’t have been worse.
Oddly, I kept feeling the doctor’s needle in my arm, drawing the blood for the test, all through it. Everything was shaded in crimson.
I never saw Stephie again. The ultimate cliché for the ultimate hackneyed pain-story. Unfortunately, life is not a magazine story, with a sharp ending and a clear-cut moral; it drags on, there are sloppy ends, little after-touches, occasional phone calls, taperings-off that dull the edges of the most magnificent of tragedies. So it was with my Stephie, my woman-child and her Arctic chill. I later heard she had contracted tuberculosis and was suffering with it rather than asking her parents in New Jersey for money to see a doctor. Some called it grace under fire; I came to think of it as empty bravado, one more footfall on a path to self-destruction. She knew what she was doing. Stephie had chosen that way, all-knowing.
I missed her. Terribly. I was alone, once more, and now I was alone with the knowledge that Stephie and I were very much alike; the victims of the world; too weak to win.
I didn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing I could use it as story-material. It wouldn’t play; it was too much a tearjerker, too obviously probable to be a story; reality often stinks.
In any case—
Don’t believe them. It’s possible. You can keep a good man down.
—New York City and Chicago, 1960
A PRAYER FOR NO ONE’S ENEMY
“Did you get in?” He turned up the transistor. The Supremes were singing “Baby Love.”
“None’a your damn business, man; a gentleman doesn’t talk.” The other one peeled a third stick of Juicy Fruit and folded it into his mouth. The sugary immediacy of it stood out for a moment, then disappeared into the wad already filling his left cheek.
“Gentleman? Shit, baby, you’re a lotta stuff, but you aren’t one of them there.” He snapped fingers.
“D’jou check the plugs ’n’ points like I said?”
He switched stations, stopped. The Rolling Stones were singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” “I took it into Cranston’s, they said it was in the timing. Twenty-seven bucks.”
“Plugs ’n’ points.”
“Oh, Christ, man, why don’t you shine up awreddy. I’m tellin’ you what Cranston said. He said it was in the timing, so why d’you keep sayin’ plugs ’n’ points?”
“Lemme use your comb.”
“Use your own comb. You got scalp ringworm.”
“Get stuffed! Lemme use your damn comb already!”
He pulled the Swedish aluminum comb out of his hip pocket and passed it over. The comb was tapered like a barber’s comb. Gum stopped moving for an instant as the other pulled the gray shape through his long brown hair in practiced swirls. He patted his hair and handed the comb back. “Y’wanna go up to the Big Boy and get something to eat, clock the action?”
“You gonna fill the tank?”
“Fat chance.”
“No, I don’t wanna go up to the Big Boy and drive around and around like redskins at the Little Big Horn and see if that dopey-ass chick of yours is up there.”
“Well, whaddaya wanna do?”
“I don’t wanna go up to the Big Boy and go round and round like General Custer, that’s for damn sure…”
“I got the picture. Round and round. Ha ha. Very clever. You oughta be in Hollywood, well what the hell do you wanna do?”
“You seen what’s up at The Coronet?”
“I dunno, what is it?”
“That picture about the Jews in Palestine.”
“Who’s in it?”
“I dunno, Paul Newman I think.
”
“Israel.”
“Okay, Israel, you seen it?”
“No, y’wanna see it?”
“Might as well, nothin’ else happening around here.”
“What time’s your old lady come home?”
“She picks my father up at seven.”
“That don’t answer my question.”
“Around seven-thirty.”
“Let’s make it. You got money…?”
“Yeah, for me.”
“Jesus, you’re a cheap bastard. I thought I was your tight close buddy?”
“You’re a leech, baby.”
“Turn off the radio.”
“I’m gonna take it with me.”
“So you ain’t gonna tell me if you screwed Donna, huh?”
“None’a your damn business. You wanna tell me if you screwed Patti?”
“Forget it. Plugs ’n’ points, you’ll see.”
“C’mon, we’ll miss the first show.”
So they went to see the picture about the Jews. The one that was supposed to say a very great deal about the Jews. They were both Gentile, and they had no way of knowing in advance that the picture about the Jews said nothing whatever about the Jews. In Palestine, or Israel, or wherever it was that the Jews were.
It wasn’t even a particularly good film, but the exploitation had been cunning, and grosses for the first three days had been rewarding. Detroit. Where they make cars. Where Father Coughlin’s Church of the Little Flower reposes in sanctified holiness. Population approximately two million; good people, strong like peasant stock. Where many good jazz men have started, blowing gigs in small roadhouses. Best barbecued spareribs in the world, at the House of Blue Lights. Detroit. Nice town.
The large Jewish Community had turned out to see the film, and though anyone who had been to Israel, or knew the first thing about how a kibbutz functioned, would have laughed it off the screen, for sheer emotionalism it struck the proper chords. With characteristic Hollywood candor, the film stirred a fierce ethnic pride, pointing out in broad strokes: See, them little yids got guts, too; they can fight when they got to. The movie was in the grand, altogether innocent tradition of cinematic flag-waving. It was recommended by Parents’ Magazine and won a Photoplay gold medal as fare for the entire family.