“Have you been to see your mother?” asked Gershon.
“No. Have you?”
Gershon smiled and adjusted his suspenders. “No, no, not me. I trust you to go see her once in a while. I leave it to you.”
You walked on, your heads down.
“It takes a weight off my shoulders knowing that you go there once in a while. And it isn’t like I like you should see that place.”
Two girls leaned against an iron railing and played with their hands joined, swinging their hands without looking at each other, with growing nervous giggling that finally shook them into silence. One of them raised a hand to her mouth. The other covered her face with both hands. They joined arms again and leaned against the iron railing without looking at anything.
“Maybe one day we ought to go together,” you said.
Gershon shook his head, not once but several times.
“You mean it’s no use?”
“You know it’s no use, Lizzie. The doctor told me the last time I went. Not even me she recognizes.”
“Do you know what she does?”
“No, I don’t know anything.”
“I do.”
“What does she do?”
“She says over and over again the same things she said that afternoon.”
“Yes, yes.”
Boys in white shirts stood arms on each other’s shoulders at the newsstand kiosk and thumbed cowboy magazines and magazines with pictures of nude males. They swelled their biceps and wrestled without laughing.
You and Gershon went down the iron stairs.
“Careful, Lizzie. Don’t slip in your heels.”
The Negro porters gathered at the bottom of the steps were laughing. You stopped and said, “Excuse me,” to pass through. One of them put on his red cap and said something vulgar as you went past holding your skirt in with your hands and Gershon stopped and said, “Dirty niggers,” and showed them the badge that he wore pinned to the lining of his coat. The Negro put his hand to his cap and grinned, “Sorry, capt’n,” and you walked along the deserted platform beside the public rest rooms.
“I have to go, Daddy.”
“Why? Come in and visit with me a little.”
“I have to study for an exam tonight.”
“Think about it. You don’t want to go back home?”
“We’ve already talked about that.”
“Don’t living alone make you feel sad?”
“I’ve already told you. I dont want to live there again. You don’t need me. Now you’re free, as you’ve wanted to be.”
“I’m asking you, Lizzie, if it don’t make you sad to live by yourself.”
“No, it doesn’t. I’m fine.”
“Come in here with me for a little.”
“This is where you work?”
“Sometimes. I cover the whole station. Why are you laughing?”
“I’m laughing from love, Daddy. It’s seeing you working as a policeman.”
“Well, the world should keep turning.”
You followed him through a narrow door that he opened with his key. He removed the padlock and put it in his pocket. A short corridor with piled-up, unused lockers. The stench of urine.
“So you’re fine, you say. Just fine.”
“I am, really. I swear it.”
“Because you are sleeping with that boy.”
“That’s none of your business.”
Gershon closed one eye and put the other to a tiny hole in the wall. With the butt of his cigar between his teeth, he whispered: “We become invisible. Sure we do.”
You smiled. “It smells in here, Daddy.”
Gershon began to laugh, his teeth biting down on the cigar. In the shadow his broad laughing face was like a theatrical comic mask. He took you by the arm as his laughter came out thick, halting, speckled with spit.
“Look, Lizzie.”
“What?”
“Take a look, I’m telling you.”
Laughing at first, you put your eye to the peephole. You saw an old man’s hands and heard whispers you could not understand. Gershon squeezed your arm. The smells of urine and disinfectant were overpowering. You peeped again and saw their pants and the hand of the boy taking the old man’s hand in the public rest room next door. You moved away silently.
“This is the third time I’ve caught that old pig,” Gershon said. “The kids never come back, but the old bastard never learns.” He looked at you for a long time. “Well, it’s all in a day’s work.” He patted your cheek. “You should come back with me. I’m all alone. For all that your mother rubbed me the wrong way, still…” He laughed and then sighed and you turned your back. “Are you coming for Sunday supper, Lizzie? I have to go take care of this now.” You shook your head and went out onto the platform again.
And that weekend you had to yell over the sound of the sea as you lay in Javier’s arms and begged him to take you away, to the ocean before anywhere, so that you could know him, for here you were separated from each other: the feverish sea of Long Island, that sea of your lies, that sea that rises in flames to embrace the coast while Javier points, with the same hand that today rubbed your neck in the Volkswagen, and recites poetry about the sea, naked, a foreigner, a man from another world, with a different skin, olive-colored, with black curly hair whipped by the wind of a summer storm, hair that makes his eyebrows even darker and his eyes darker too, the shadow on his unshaven cheeks, and you went out on the wet beach with him in brown rain that you both welcomed, both of you wearing sweaters that you pulled off to run toward the waves of the foaming, agitated Atlantic, slate-gray, cold as lemon, hard, and dove in and swam in the effervescent foam. At last you knew each other. He held you against his chest to protect you from the high waves and while the rain pattered against your heads he murmured: “Like the clean new earth. The earth of the beginning, before it’s touched, built upon, scratched open. Earth before man’s first death. Earth where no one has been buried. Ligeia … Ligeia … Ligeia … Ligeia.”
Man does not surrender wholly, neither to angels nor to death, except from the debility of his feeble will.
“I live in a hotel now, Lizzie. In a hotel you come and go as you please. You eat by yourself and when you want to eat. You don’t have to talk even to the waiter. In the evening you go to the movies. And maybe you make some friends in good time. Maybe you even play golf with them. If you want to see me, ask for Johnson. Gershon Johnson. They will know at the desk.”
* * *
Δ “I was waiting for you,” you said, Pussycat.
Franz looked at you doubtfully. You shrugged your shoulders and tied the tails of your white shirt around your waist.
“I tell you, I was. I knew you were coming. And now here you are.”
You walked to your record player and listened to it for a moment. Pretty woman, have mercy on me. You didn’t laugh, Isabel. You took the record off and looked at Franz. A graying blond German wearing a blue shirt, gray trousers, no shoes. His shirt unbuttoned. You unplugged the record player and the flickering dim light in the room brightened perceptibly. But you were still almost in shadow. You were wearing only the shirt and you played with it, showing and then hiding, hiding and then showing your pubis, soft as a tongue of the sea. He stood beside the door and began to feel aroused. You could sense that as you walked toward him. Through the open window came distant hushed voices and lost horns and tires on the highway and boleros from the loudspeakers around the plaza where you had strolled during the afternoon. You stopped and stood before him and he knelt to kiss what you were offering him. Young, soft, clean, Isabel, after so much washing that afternoon, lacking that taste of rotted seafood that earlier you had given to Javier. Dry now, clean. But now maybe your juices would flow again.