them

“You can’t get much poorer.”

  “Then how do you live?”

  “I get along.”

  “But, for a poor person, you talk as if…as if it didn’t matter. I thought poor people were different, I thought they were mainly black…”

  He took her hand as if charmed by this and tried to raise it to his mouth, but she drew away. Then, confused and embarrassed, she reached out to him and allowed him to take the hand. Jules gnawed gently at the knuckles. The girl laughed. “Stop that. Go away,” she said.

  “But I live here. I can’t go away.”

  “Here? You live here? Do people live here?”

  She looked around, staring. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m saying. It just looks as if they’re tearing things down here. Buildings. But some buildings are still standing, people can still live in them. I’ve been feeling strange since Saturday night, I haven’t been able to eat much…”

  For a moment she stood motionless. Then, suddenly, she pushed past Jules and ran back across the street, in the direction they had come from. A Negro driving a junk truck shouted at her.

  “Hey,” Jules cried, “where are you going?”

  He ran after her and headed her off, driving her toward a doorway. She ran with her hands pressed up against her face. “You don’t want the police to pick you up, honey. You’ve got to be careful,” Jules said. He knew he had to talk to her, to say a certain amount of words. A familiar wheel was moving, a wheel of physical logic, and he felt himself carried along with it. The girl huddled in the doorway, hiding her face. Jules took hold of her shoulders from behind.

  “You’d better let me go,” she said. “I want to call my father.”

  “I’ll find you a telephone then.”

  She turned. She tried to get past Jules, but he blocked her. “That’s the wrong direction,” he said. “No telephone there.”

  She tried to get away but he took hold of her hair, gripped a handful of it and wound it around his fist. The girl stood motionless. She closed her eyes, her face screwed up into a look of pain and concentration. She took hold of his fist and tried to open it. She pried frantically at the fingers. “I’ll call the police,” she said.

  “Honey, the police will do worse than this. They’ll get you in the precinct garage and when they’re through nobody will give a damn about you, not even your father.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “It’s all true, everything I say is true.”

  She looked at him. Laughter rose in her, she couldn’t help it. Jules smiled. He felt his smile like a strip of magnesium across his face.

  “Where is there a telephone? Is there a store near here, or something with a telephone?”

  “I’ll find one for you.”

  “You won’t find it! You won’t help me!” She managed to loosen his fingers and pushed his hand away. “I think I’ve been down here, lost, for a long time. I have this feeling that I’ve been down here, with you or someone like you, and with them.” She looked sideways, hatefully, at people in the street, Negroes mainly, who were passing her and Jules without paying much attention to them. “I can’t remember my own telephone number at home. All sorts of numbers deliberately fly into my head to confuse me.”

  “If your father’s name is in the telephone book you could look it up,” Jules said.

  “I don’t have a dime.”

  Suddenly weary, with that peculiar drawn smile, she stepped backward into the doorway. A slanted shadow fell across her body. Jules followed her. He crooked his arm around her neck and kissed her. He pressed himself up against her, sensing his agitation as if from a distance, vague and dull in spite of the girl’s frightened warm breath and her warm mouth. He kissed her eyelids. He caressed the back of her neck, under her hair, and twisted the top button of her dress; it came off at once and fell away. Both he and the girl straightened jerkily, as if someone had shouted at them. Jules stepped back to let her go.

  “I can find a telephone by myself,” she said.

  She started off again, but he took hold of her arm to turn her in the other direction.

  She gave in. She hurried that way, and Jules stopped to pick up the cheap button that had fallen from her dress. He followed her, wondering at the hysterical energy of her legs and thighs. Her hair blew in the wind. He could imagine her shrewd terrified eyes, her still face. At the next corner she waited, looking from side to side. She looked like a frightened horse, covertly frightened. The neighborhood was partly burned-out, partly demolished. Jules came up behind her and stroked her head, as if she were a frightened horse. “I have something for you,” he said. He tried to force the button through her buttonhole. She pushed him away, laughing. The button went through the hole and fell out again and rolled on the sidewalk.

  “I can’t stand this,” the girl said. She looked as if she were about to run blindly out into the street, into traffic. Jules put his arms around her. She did not move. Over her head the sunlight looked filmy, as if photographed. In one direction the avenue was closed off by black and yellow blockades. Pavement was torn up. Great barrels of refuse lay tipped over; children were playing in it. A long-haired boy on a motorcycle slipped past the barriers, bouncing on the rutted ground, heading away. Jules embraced the girl from behind, feeling her heart beat and wondering why it did not mean more to him. Her heart was beating. She was alive.

  “If you come this way I can find you a telephone, anything you want,” he said. He led her down the street to the building he lived in. An old man, a white man, was sitting on the bottom step but did not bother to glance up. Jules and the girl stepped politely around him. He led her up to the first landing, where she stopped. She stumbled as if faint. Jules stroked her head and shoulders, frowning down at her; he was waiting for something to begin in him. In another second it would begin. The vision of that broken-up street came to his mind, filmy with sunlight, crossbars and blockades of yellow and black stripes, and a big diamond-shaped shield that said DEAD END. He took hold of the girl’s ear with his teeth. He ran his tongue around the whorls of that ear, wondering if it seemed a familiar shape and a familiar taste.

  “I can’t stand it, please…” the girl whispered. She was leaning back against the railing and she turned clumsily to him.

  Jules embraced her lightly. They smiled at each other. “Which way were you going, here? When I met you?” said Jules. “Were you heading upstairs or downstairs?” He helped her up onto the next step. With his hand at her elbow he walked with her to the third floor, then steered her gently to the right.

  “What is this place? Where am I?” the girl said.

  She flicked the ends of her hair out, in the same gesture flicking out the tips of her fingers. He saw that she was not carrying a purse. Her dress was badly wrinkled in back. The muscles of her legs showed white and dangerous, and at the backs of her knees tiny blue veins grew sharper, then indistinct, as she walked. He wanted to bend down to kiss the backs of her knees.

  “I could leave now,” she said. “I could be back home in time for dinner.”

  Jules pushed open the door to his room. It was unlocked. The room had only one window, without a curtain. Jules’s eyes were drawn to a dark shape on the edge of his unmade bed—maybe a cockroach?—and his instinct made him turn the girl around so that she wouldn’t see, and, stooping over quickly, as if in a mock bow, he knocked it to the floor. A dead cockroach.

  The girl closed her eyes. Jules took hold of her. He knelt down before her and rubbed his face against her. Gradually he was overcome by senseless dreamy violence that had become his best instinct, his emergency instinct. A vision of that excavation site flashed to his brain again and again. He could very nearly see the motorcyclist bouncing up onto the broken concrete, readjusting his grip on the steering wheel, heading off to ride along the edge of the expressway; he was sorry he hadn’t looked more closely at the cyclist…The girl began to push at him, but
not hard, her fingers uncoordinated and wild as Jules’s rising passion. She was saying something, telling him something important. A warning! He had to stop! But Jules knew he did not have to stop. He did not have to do anything. He pulled her down onto the bed and lay with his palm hard against the base of her skull, holding her sweating and hypnotized, and he felt himself an impersonal force holding her by the back of the neck, not especially Jules and not anyone else, hardly even a man, but in the shape of a man.

  He thought of Mort, Mort saying, Now I soar, now I’m plunging…, and the urgent fancy of those words matched his passion, which surprised him with its violence, and an instant after it was over he removed himself from the girl and lay beside her. A coating of sweat had formed on his body, like a miracle.

  The girl was whimpering. “I didn’t want to come here…I don’t know what place this is…I don’t know who you are…I don’t love you…I can’t even think who you are…” She began to cry.

  Jules’s eyes ached. He lay still and waited for his heart to slow.

  The girl said, “If I could love you it would be different…”

  “It’s all right.”

  “But I don’t even know where this place is…”

  After a while he got up to look for his cigarettes. They had fallen out of his pocket and were on the floor, tangled in a bed sheet. He said, “Once I thought it wouldn’t be possible to live without love, but it is possible, you keep on living. You always keep on living.”

  “You what?…What?”

  “You always keep on living.”

  6

  “So you copped that mousy little girl? Where are you hiding her?”

  “I’m not hiding anyone.”

  “She’s white, at least? At least she’s white?”

  “I wouldn’t touch a Negro,” said Jules.

  “You bastard, I know you wouldn’t. I know it.”

  Jules looked out the window. A car was passing idly in the street: he fixed his attention on it. Who was in the car, where were they going? Was it a worthy destination? When the car passed out of sight, Jules’s attention was fixed upon a neutral, empty space, harmless.

  “What did you do today, Jules? All afternoon?”

  Jules was fascinated by that empty space.

  “Go to another movie or what? Jules?”

  “Went to a movie.”

  “Which one? Where?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Is something wrong, Jules?”

  He said nothing. Silence began to fill up inside him.

  He turned from the window. The heat in this apartment was oppressive; outside it was steamy, in the 90’s. June was past and now they were in July of an interminable summer. Jules kept wiping his face but there was no use, a new film of perspiration appeared; his eyes stung. He sat down on the edge of Marcia’s bed. In the bathroom Tommy, her four-year-old, was leaning over the bathtub, playing. Jules was helpless before a vision of that child falling and cracking his head in the tub. He could see the blood. His vision backed to the vision of a woman settling herself in a shining white tub, into very hot water. The water shimmered about her body. Her body was pale and beginning to flush from the heat of the water…Jules felt sick and his imagination buckled.

  Marcia was stroking his hair. “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I’m going to make Tommy and myself some sandwiches, just sandwiches. Do you want one?”

  “No.”

  “Some potato chips?”

  “No.”

  Marcia was silent for a while. Her silence was not quiet; he could feel her nervousness. Then she said angrily, “What do you do all day? I don’t believe you’re exhausting yourself with that little bitch—she’s all doped up, everybody says. Where are you hiding her? Did you make a deal with the police? Not that I give a damn, but I have to face people. Mort is always latching onto me and asking where you are.”

  Jules closed his eyes. He felt her stroking his head but there was no pleasure in it; she continued angrily, as if afraid to stop. He was running down, running out. The very air was distorted. Objects might melt in it. His body might turn to fat, melting, while the pinpoint of energy at its very center—Jules Wendall—became hard and bitter and useless, like a grain of sand or grit.

  “We’ve known each other for five months,” Marcia said. “Do you realize it’s the middle of July? Already? Doesn’t it mean anything to you—this, me?”

  Jules tried to piece together her words.

  “Doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And Tommy, do you love him too?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood for a moment, leaning over him. He heard her sigh. She said, “Well, I’ve got to make something for us to eat. Come out in the kitchen, talk to me.”

  Jules did not follow her. He remained sitting on the edge of the bed. On the window sill was a small plant in a bright brown ceramic pot; its leaves were a little limp. The earth in the pot, dried, had shaped itself into tiny, vivid, hard-looking balls. Like pebbles. Jules went into the bathroom and took Marcia’s plastic cup and filled it halfway with water, then returned to water the plant.

  Marcia leaned around the corner from the kitchen, peering in at him. “Oh, thanks for doing that, I keep forgetting,” she said. Jules left the cup on the window sill and sat down again on the bed. “Jules, are you all right? Are you taking something? Please tell me.”

  He said nothing.

  “Are you taking something?”

  “No.”

  “I’d be afraid for Tommy if you were. Please tell me—”

  “No.”

  “But what is this about a girl? Is there a girl? Her name is Vera?”

  “There might be.”

  “And what about her?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you love her?”

  Jules had an unclear, sudden hallucination of beasts—transparent beasts in the space between himself and the kitchen doorway.

  “But what does it mean to you?” Marcia said.

  “What does what mean?”

  “Anything.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The animals in their transparent shapes melted back into the damp air. Jules felt slightly relieved.

  “I’m sure they’re going on strike,” Marcia said, “those goddam Teamsters, going on strike again, and if they do he’ll lay me off, I know it. I’ll be the first to go. Out looking for a job in the middle of the summer, Jesus Christ! I wish I could get out of here.”

  Jules said nothing.

  “Anywhere would be better than this, anything. I don’t know how the hell I ended up in this filthy city…”

  Tommy slipped on the wet floor but did not crack his skull. He picked himself up. Jules saw that he was in pain and he felt the impulse to go to him, but he did not move. The boy began to cry.

  “Oh, God!” cried Marcia. “What did he do now?”

  She ran to him and bent down, to hug him. Now Jules looked at her. She was a strong-boned woman in her late twenties, with blond hair so light as to look unreal; it was cut short to show the bottoms of her ears. On the street, walking, she had a swinging, open, healthy look; inside she had a slightly harassed, impatient, look. She hugged Tommy and made a face at Jules over the boy’s shoulder.

  “Oh, you’re always falling down! You dope! Aren’t you a dope? Well, you’re all right now, you didn’t get hurt at all. No cut, no scratch, nothing! All right?”

  She stood. Tommy went back to his play.

  “Why is he always so hot? He must have a fever. I don’t know what the hell she feeds them at that place. I should take him out of there, but if I get laid off I won’t need her. I can lie around here and do my nails. I can go to the movies with you.”

  Jules noted how strong the bones of her face were, even in
this warm air. He himself felt no strength. He felt as if all his strength had drained out of him, dissipated into the air of this room and of other rooms, adding up to his past. Marcia, more desperate than he and more cunning, had lost none of her strength though her husband had left her two years before, walking out, saying he was headed for Canada. This struck Jules as somehow familiar but he could not say why. Had Furlong mentioned Canada? It was strange to Jules how familiar everything seemed, as if like the walk to and from his room, the entire world added up to a few sights and sounds that had to be used over and over again. With Marcia, lying in bed with her, he could feel his soul browsing idly amid the tumbled sheets and pillows, gone blind, even his fingers blind to the body of this woman, who could have been any woman. His own desire for her was a desire for any woman. He was lost in it, but not seriously lost. He could return. He recalled playing a game with some kids many years ago, himself a kid, leading them with wooden swords through a warehouse basement, and at that time the Jules in himself, the essential Jules, had been strenuous and impatient, already formed. Now, thirty years old, this Jules lay asleep or dying, drained of himself. He could sit forever on the edge of this bed, which belonged to Marcia. She was talking to him now. She came home after working all day, typing out order forms for a trucking concern, typing all day long, taking the bus back and forth, and now she was home with her son and her lover, who was Jules, her face slightly flushed with…with what?…concern for her son’s mishap, or love and anxiety for Jules, for her “family”?

  “Well, maybe it will turn out for the best if those bastards do strike. Maybe we could get out of here,” she said.

  Jules did not answer. He did not look at her.

  “We could go to another city, maybe. Jules? My God, what kind of a person are you—I mean, what kind of a state are you in? It’s hopeless, with you—you just sit there. I must be crazy trying to get something out of you, anything.” She drew both hands up against her forehead in an impatient, masculine gesture, rubbing her temples with the palms of her hands. Jules thought of how impossible it was to love her, to love any woman who rubbed her forehead that way, rubbing perspiration off it. “What are you thinking about, Jules? Why don’t you look at me?”