The bell rang. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
334 East 11th Street was one of twenty units, none identical and all alike, built in the pre-Squeeze affluent ’80’s under the first federal MODICUM program. An aluminum flagpole and a concrete bas-relief representing the address decorated the main entrance just off 1st Avenue. Otherwise the building was plain. One night many years ago the Tenants’ Council, as a kind of protest, had managed to knock off a segment of the monolithic “4,” but by and large (assuming that the trees and prosperous shopfronts had been no more than polite fictions to begin with) the original renderings published in the Times were still a good likeness. Architecturally 334 was on a par with the pyramids—it had dated very little and it hadn’t aged at all.
Inside its skin of glass and yellow brick a population of three thousand, plus or minus (but excluding temps), occupied the 812 apartments (40 to a floor, plus 12 at street level, behind the shops), which was not much more than 30 per cent above the Agency’s original optimum of 2,250. So, realistically, it could be regarded as a fair success in this respect as well. Certainly there were worse places people were willing to live in especially if you were, and Birdie Ludd was, temporary.
Right now, at half past seven of a Thursday night, Birdie was temporary on the sixteenth-floor landing, two floors down from the Holt apartment. Milly’s father wasn’t home, but he hadn’t been asked in anyway, so here he was freezing his ass and listening to someone yelling at someone else about money or sex. (“Money or sex” was a running gag on some comedy show Milly was always playing back to him. “Money or sex—that’s what it all boils down to.” Yuck, yuck.) Meanwhile someone else again was telling them to shut up, far off and nonstop, like an airplane circling the park, a baby was being murdered. HERE’S MY LOVE, a radio sang. HERE’S MY LOVE. IF YOU TAKE IT APART, I MAY DIE. I MAY DIE OF A BROKEN HEART. Number Three in the nation. It had been going through Birdie’s head all day, all week.
Before Milly he’d never believed that love was anything more complicated or awful than just getting goodies. Even the first couple of months with her had only been the usual goodies with a topping. But now any damned dumb song on the radio, even the ads sometimes, could tear him to pieces.
The song snapped off and the people stopped yelling and Birdie heard, below, slow footsteps mounting toward him. It had to be Milly—the feet touched each step with the crisp whack of a woman’s low-heeled shoe—and a lump began to form in his throat—of love, of fear, of pain, of everything but happiness. If it were Milly, what would he say to her? But, oh, if it weren’t…
He opened his textbook and pretended to be reading, smearing the page with the muck he’d got on his hand when he’d tried to open the window onto the utility shaft. He wiped the rest off on his pants. It wasn’t Milly. Some old lady lugging a bag of groceries. She stopped half a flight below him on the landing, leaning against the handrail, and set down her bag with an “oof.” A stick of Oraline was stuck in the corner of her mouth with a premium button on it, a trick mandala that seemed to spin as she moved, like a runaway clock. She looked at Birdie, and Birdie scowled down at the bad reproduction of David’s Death of Socrates in his book. The flaccid lips formed themselves into a smile.
“Studying?” the woman asked.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m doing all right. I’m studying.”
“That’s good.” She took the pale-green stick out of her mouth, holding it like a thermometer, to study what was gone and what was left of her ten metered minutes. Her smile tightened, as though she were elaborating some joke, honing it to an edge. “It’s good,” she said at last, with almost a chuckle, “for a young man to study.”
The radio returned with the new Ford commercial. It was one of Birdie’s favorites, so lighthearted but at the same time solid. He wished the old witch would shut up so he could hear it.
“You can’t get anywhere these days without studying.” Birdie made no reply. She took a different tack. “These stairs,” she said.
Birdie looked up from his book, peeved. “What about them?”
“What about them! The elevators have been out of commission for weeks. That’s what about them. Weeks!”
“So?”
“So, why don’t they fix the elevators? But just try to talk to the area office and get an answer to a question like that and see what happens. Nothing, that’s what happens.”
He wanted to tell her to rinse her hair. She talked like she’d spent all her life in a coop or something instead of the crummy subsidized slum tattooed all over her face. According to Milly it had been years, not weeks, since the elevators in any of these buildings had been working.
With a look of disgust he slid over toward the wall so the old lady could get past him. She walked up three steps till her face was just level with his. She smelled of beer and spearmint and old age. He hated old people. He hated their wrinkled faces and the touch of their cold dry flesh. It was because there were so many old people that Birdie Ludd couldn’t get married to the girl he loved and have a family of his own. It was a goddamned injustice.
“What are you studying about?”
Birdie glanced down at the painting. He read the caption, which he had not read before. “That’s Socrates,” he said, remembering dimly something his Civilization teacher last year had said about Socrates. “It’s a painting,” he explained. “A Greek painting.”
“You going to be an artist? Or what?”
“What,” Birdie shot back.
“You’re Milly Holt’s fellow, aren’t you?” He didn’t reply. “You waiting down here for her to come home?”
“Is there any law against waiting for someone?” The old lady laughed right in his face, and it was like sticking your nose inside a dead cunt. Then she made her way from step to step up to the next landing. Birdie tried not to turn around to look after her but he couldn’t help himself. Their eyes clinched, and she laughed again. Finally he had to ask her what she was laughing about. “Is there a law against laughing?” she asked right back. Then her laughing disintegrated into a cough right out of some old Health Education movie about the dangers of smoking. He wondered if maybe she was an addict. She was old enough. Birdie’s father, who had to be ten years younger than her, smoked tobacco whenever he could get any. Birdie thought it was a waste of money but only slightly disgusting. Milly, on the other hand, loathed it, especially in women.
Somewhere glass shattered, and somewhere children shot at each other—Acka! Ackitta! Ack!—and fell down screaming in a game of guerilla warfare. Birdie peered down into the abyss of the stairwell. A hand touched a railing far below, paused, lifted, touched the railing, approaching him. The fingers were slim (as Milly’s would be) and the nails seemed to be painted gold. In the dim light, at this distance, it was hard to tell. A sudden surge of unbelieving hope made him forget the old woman’s laughter, the stench, the screaming; the stairwell became a scene of romance, a mist of slow motion. The hand lifted and paused and touched the railing.
The first time he’d come to Milly’s apartment he’d walked up these stairs behind her, watching her tight little ass shift to the right, to the left, to the right, and the tinsel fringes of her street shorts shivering and sparkling like a liquor-store display. All the way to the top she hadn’t looked back once.
At the eleventh or the twelfth floor the hand left the railing and didn’t reappear. So it hadn’t been Milly after all.
He had a hard-on just from remembering. He unzipped and reached in to give it a couple half-hearted strokes but it was gone before he could get started.