Since that time Harry had been working on what he hoped would be his masterpiece. The story of his life. O’Neillian, he called it.
“Sounds like chameleon,” said Breckie. Her work took a lot out of her.
“It’s about the ragtag American family and the lies we all tell ourselves.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
Harry had been writing the play for years. Mostly he worked at night, tucked in out of the neighborhood’s gaud and glare, letting what he called “the writing fairies” twinkle down from their night perches to commune with his pen. He was very secretive about his work. He had never shown Breckie more than a page of it, and the two or three times he had taken portions to the photocopier’s it had sent him into the flush and sweat of the shy. It wasn’t that he didn’t have confidence in it. It was simply that the material felt so powerful to him, its arrangement so delicate, that a premature glimpse by the wrong person might curse it forever. He had drawn heavily from his life for this play. He had included the funniest family anecdotes, the most painful details of his adolescence, and the wrenching yet life-affirming death of his great-aunt Flora, Fussbudget Flora, whose dying word had been “Cripes.” He had suffered poverty for this play, and would suffer more, he knew, until its completion, living off the frugally spent prize money and the occasional grant he applied for and received. When his cash was low, he had, in the past, done such things as write articles for magazines and newspapers, but he had taken the work too personally and had had too many run-ins with editors. “Don’t fuck with my prose,” he’d been known to say in a loud voice.
“But, Harry, we need to shorten this to fit in an illustration.”
“You’re asking me to eat my children so you can fit in some dumb picture?”
“If you don’t want a picture, Harry, go publish in the phone book.”
“I have to think about this. I have to think about whether or not I can really eat my children this way.” But once he had nibbled at the limbs, he found it was not such a far cry to the vital organs, and soon Harry got good at eating his children. When his articles appeared, often there were two pictures.
And so Harry stopped writing journalism. He also turned down offers to write for “the movies, those pieces of crap” and had had to resist continually the persistent efforts of a television producer named Glen Scarp, who had telephoned him every six months for the last four years, since Harry had won the prize—“Hey, Harry, how’s it goin’, man?”—trying to get him to write for his television series. “TV,” Scarp kept saying, “it’s a lot like theater. Its roots are in theater.” Harry never watched television. He had an old black-and-white set, but the reception was bad because he and Breckie lived too close to the Empire State Building, the waves shooting out over them and missing the apartment altogether. Once in a while, usually after he got a call from Glen Scarp, Harry would turn the TV on, just to see if things had changed, but it was always a blare of static and police calls from the squad cars that circled the block like birds. “We’re going to have to face it,” he said to Breckie. “This television is just a large, broken radio with abstract art on the front.”
“I can’t live like this anymore,” said Breckie. “Harry, we’ve got to make plans. I can’t stand the whores, the junkies, the cops, the bums, the porno theaters—you know what’s playing at the corner? Succulent Stewardesses and Meat Man. I’m moving. I’m moving to the Upper West Side. Are you coming with me?”
“Um,” said Harry. They had talked once about moving. They had talked once about marriage. They would have children, and Harry would stay home and write and take care of the children during the day. But this had troubled Harry. During the day he liked to go out. He liked to wander down the street to a coffee shop and read the paper, think about his play, order the rice pudding and eat it slowly, his brain aflame with sugar and caffeine, his thoughts heated to a usable caramel. It was a secret life, and it nourished him in a way he couldn’t explain. He was most himself in a coffee shop. He imagined having a family and having to say to his children—tiny squalling children in diapers, children with construction paper and pointed scissors, small children with blunt scissors, mewling, puking children with birdhead scissors or scissors with the ears of a dog—“Now, kids, Daddy’s going to a coffee shop now. Daddy’ll be back in a while.”
“Are you coming with me?” repeated Breckie. “I’m talking you get a job, we get an apartment in a building wired for cable, and we have a real life. I can wait for you only so long.” She had a cat who could wait for anything: food, water, a mouse under a radiator, a twistie from a plastic bag, which, batted under the rug, might come whizzing back out again, any day now, who knew. But not Breckie. Her cat was vigilant as Madame Butterfly, but Breckie had to get on with things.
Harry tried to get angry. “Look,” he said. “I’m not a possession. I may not even belong with you, but I certainly don’t belong to you.”
“I’m leaving,” she said quietly.
“Aw, Breck,” said Harry, and he sank down on the bed and put his hands to his face. Breckie could not bear to leave a man with his hands to his face until he had pulled them away. She sat down next to him, held him, and kissed him deeply, until he was asleep, until the morning, when it would be, when it was, possible to leave.
The first few weeks of living alone were difficult, but Harry got used to it in a way. “One year of living alone,” said his old friend Dane in a phone call from Seattle, “and you’re ruined for life. You’ll be spoiled. You’ll never go back.” Harry worked hard, as he always had, but this time without even the illusion of company. This time there was just the voice of play and playwright in the bombed-away world of his apartment. He started not to mind it, to feel he was suited in some ways to solitude, to the near weightlessness of no one but himself holding things down. He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn’t want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue. It would be like writing a play, the cobbling in the night, the great cavity of mind that you filled with voices, like a dark piñata with fruit.
“Tell me something wonderful,” he said to Dane. He would lie on his bed, the phone cradled at his cheek, and stare lonesomely at the steeple made by the shadow of the bookcase against the wall. “Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.”
“You’re always writing one of your plays on the phone,” said Dane.
“I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime.”
“It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea.”
“Ah,” said Harry.
Downstairs every morning, when he went to get the paper and head for a coffee shop, there was Deli, the hooker, always in his doorway. Her real name was Mirellen, but she had named herself Deli because when she first came to New York from Jackson, she had liked the name Delicatessen, seen it flashing all over in signs above stores, and though she hadn’t known what one was, she knew the name was for her.
“Mornin’, Harry.” She smiled groggily. She had on a black dress, a yellow short-sleeved coat, and white boots. Scabs of translucent gray freckled her arms.
“Mornin’, Deli,” said Harry.
Deli started to follow him a bit up the block. “Haven’t seen your Breck woman around—how things be with you-all?”
“Fine.” Harry smiled, but then he had to turn and walk fast down Forty-third Street, for Deli was smart and sly, and in the morning these qualities made him nervous.
It was the following week that the trucks started coming. Eighteen-wheelers. They came, one by one, in the middle of the night, pulled up in front of the 25 Cent Girls pavilion, and idled there. Harry began waking up at four in the morning, in a sweat. The no
ise was deafening as a factory, and the apartment, even with the windows closed, filled with diesel fumes. He put on his boots, over his bare feet, and threw on his overcoat, a coat over nothing but underwear and skin, and stomped downstairs.
The trucks were always monstrous, with mean bulldog faces, and eyes of glassy plaid. Their bodies stretched the length of the block, and the exhaust that billowed out of the vertical stovepipe at the front was a demonic fog, something from Macbeth or Sherlock Holmes. Harry didn’t like trucks. Some people, he knew, liked them, liked seeing one, thought it was like seeing a moose, something big and wild. But not Harry.
“Hey! Get this heap out of here!” Harry shouted and pounded on the driver’s door. “Or at least turn it off!” He looked up into the cabin, but nobody seemed to be there. He pounded again with his fist and then kicked once with his boot. Curtains in the back of the cabin parted, and a man poked his head out. He looked sleepy and annoyed.
“What’s the problem, man?” he said, opening the door.
“Turn this thing off!” shouted Harry over the truck’s oceanic roar. “Can’t you see what’s happening with the exhaust here? You’re asphyxiating everyone in these apartments!”
“I can’t turn this thing off, man,” shouted the driver. He was in his underwear—boxer shorts and a neat white vest.
The curtains parted again, and a woman’s head emerged. “What’s happening, man?”
Harry tried to appeal to the woman. “I’m dying up there. Listen, you’ve got to move this truck or turn it off.”
“I told you buffore,” said the man. “I can’t turn it off.”
“What do you mean, you can’t turn it off?”
“I can’t turn it off. What am I gonna do, freeze? We’re trying to get some sleep in here.” He turned and smiled at the woman, who smiled back. She then disappeared behind the curtain.
“I’m trying to get some sleep, too,” yelled Harry. “Why don’t you just move this thing somewhere else?”
“I can’t be moving this thing,” said the driver. “If I be moving this thing, you see that guy back there?” He pointed at his rearview mirror, and Harry looked down the street. “I move and that guy be coming to take my spot.”
“Just turn this off, then!” shouted Harry.
The driver grew furious. “What are you, some kind of mental retard? I already told you. I can’t!”
“What do you mean, you can’t. That’s ridiculous.”
“If I turn this mother off, I can’t get it started back up again.”
Harry stormed back upstairs and phoned the police. “Yeah, right,” said Sgt. Dan Lucey of the Eighteenth Precinct. “As if we don’t have more urgent things in this neighborhood than truck fumes. What is your name?”
“Harry DeLeo. Look,” said Harry. “You think some guy blowing crack in a welfare hotel isn’t having one of the few moments of joy in his whole life. I am the one—”
“That’s a pretty socially responsible thing to say. Look, mister. We’ll see what we can do about the trucks, but I can’t promise you anything.” And then Officer Lucey hung up, as if on a crank call.
There was no way, Harry decided, that he could stay in his apartment. He would die. He would get cancer and die. Of course, all the best people—Christ, Gershwin, Schubert, theater people!—had died in their thirties, but this did not console him. He went back downstairs, outside, in nothing but his overcoat thrown over a pajama top, and a pair of army boots with the laces flapping. He roamed the streets, like the homeless people, like the junkies and hookers with their slow children and quick deals, like the guys down from Harlem with business to transact, like the women with old toasters and knives in their shopping bags, venturing out from Port Authority on those occasions when the weather thawed. With his overcoat and pajama top, he was not in the least scared, because he had become one of them, a street person, rebellion and desperation in his lungs, and they knew this when he passed. They smiled in welcome, but Harry did not smile back. He wandered the streets until he found a newsstand, bought the Times, and then drifted some more until he found an all-night coffee shop, where he sat in a booth—a whole big booth, though it was only him!—and spread out his Times and circled apartments he could never ever afford. “1500 dollars; EIK.” He was shocked. He grew delirious. He made up a joke: how you could cut up the elk for meat during the winter, but in the months before you could never housebreak the thing. “Fifteen hundred dollars for a lousy apartment!” But gradually the numbers grew more and more abstract, and he started circling the ones for eighteen hundred as well.
By March, Harry found himself gassed out of his apartment, roaming the streets, several nights a week. He went to bed full of dread and trepidation, never knowing whether this particular night would be a Truck Night or not. He would phone the landlord’s machine and the police and shout things about lymphoma and emphysema and about being a taxpayer, but the police would simply say, “You’ve called here before, haven’t you.” He tried sounding like a different neighbor, very polite, a family man, with children, saying, “Please, sir. The trucks are waking the baby.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the police. Harry called the Health Department, the Community Board, the Phil Donahue people. He referred to Officer Lucey as Officer Lucifer and cited cancer statistics from the Science Times. Most of the time people listened and said they would see what they could do.
In the meantime, Harry quit smoking and took vitamins. Once he even called Breckie in the middle of the night at her new apartment on the Upper West Side.
“Is this an awkward time?” he asked.
“To be honest, Harry, yes.”
“Oh, my God, really?”
“Look, I don’t know how to tell you these things.”
“Can you answer yes-or-no questions?”
“All right.”
“Shit, I can’t think of any.” He stopped talking, and the two of them breathed into the phone. “Do you realize,” he said at last, “that I have three plantar’s warts from walking around barefoot in this apartment?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do now.”
“A barnacled sole. That’s what I am.”
“Harry, I can’t be writing your plays with you right now.”
“Do you recall any trucks hanging out in front of our building, running their engines all night? Did that happen when you were here, when we were living together, when we were together and living here so much in love?”
“Come on, Harry.” There was some muffled noise, the seashell sound of hand over mouthpiece, the dim din of a man’s voice and hers. Harry hung up. He put on his Maria Callas records, all in a stack on the phonograph spindle, and left the apartment to roam the streets again, to find an open newsstand, a safe coffee shop that didn’t put a maraschino cherry on the rice pudding, so that even when you picked it off its mark remained, soaked in, like blood by Walt Disney.
When he trudged back to his apartment, the morning at last all fully lit, falsely wide-eyed and innocent, the trucks were always gone. There was just Deli in the doorway, smiling. “Mornin’, Harry,” she’d say. “Have a bad dream?”
“You’re up early,” said Harry. Usually that was what he said.
“Oh, is it daytime already? Well, I’m gonna get myself a real job, a daytime job. Besides, I’ve been listening to your records from upstairs.” Harry stopped jangling his keys for a moment. The Callas arias sailed faintly out through the windowpanes. “Isn’t that fag music, Harry? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like fag music. I really like that song that keeps playing about the VCR.”
“What are you talking about?” He had his keys out now, pointed and ready to go. But he kept one shoulder turned slightly her way.
“V-C-R-err,” sang Deli. “V-C-Dannemora.” Deli stopped and laughed. “Dannemora! That girl’s in Sing Sing for sure.”
“See you,” said Harry.
On his answering machine was a message from Glen Scarp. “Hey, Harry, sorry to call you so early, but hey, i
t’s even earlier out here. And wasn’t it Ionesco who said something about genius up with the sun? Maybe it was Odets.…” Odets? thought Harry. “At any rate, I’m flying into New York in a few days, and I thought we might meet for a drink. I’ll phone you when I get in.”
“No,” said Harry out loud. “No. No.”
But it was that very morning, after a short, cold rain, just after he’d opened the windows and gotten the apartment aired out, that the bathroom started acting up. The toilet refused to swallow, gurgling if Harry ran the kitchen faucet, and the tub suddenly and terrifyingly filled with water from elsewhere in the building. Somebody else’s bath: sudsy water, with rusty swirls. Harry tried flushing the toilet again, and it rose ominously toward the rim. He watched in horror, softly howling the protests—“Ahhhh! UUUaahhh!”—that seemed to help keep the thing from overflowing altogether.
He phoned the landlord, but no one answered. He phoned a plumber he found in the yellow pages, some place advertising High Velocity Jet Flush and Truck Mounted Rodding Machine. “Are you the super?” asked the plumber.
“There is no super here,” said Harry, a confession that left him sad, like an admission that finally there was no God.