On the Roof
HE WAS A SENIOR CREDIT INVESTIGATOR NOW FOR Textile Banking, a man to whom the younger men came for advice. He had his own cubicle and a pool secretary. Even though he himself was comparatively young, he was, he felt, entitled to wear an oxford gray suit and a homburg. She’d laughed at him when he first bought the hat, and her deadbeat summer friends from the beaches and bars of Coney Island and the Rockaways laughed, too, though they didn’t know him, didn’t even know his name. All they knew was that this boring office slave had managed to land Estelle. She was some piece of ass. They figured he’d been married before, because Estelle occasionally talked about some whining bitch and her brat who wanted more money, more money, always more money. And he’d just, finally, gotten a raise, for God’s sake. He emerged from the rooftop cupola and there they were, five tanned young jerks, sitting under an awning they’d rigged out of blankets and sheets they’d tied to and draped over clotheslines and poles. Estelle looked up and moved away, slightly, from some redheaded slob with his arm around her shoulders, but only slightly. She called out to him to come on over and have a cold beer in the shade. “You won’t even need a hat!” she yelled, the cunt. She laughed delightedly, and the slobs laughed even more delightedly. They were drinking his beer, they were eating his food, they were spending his money, they were, maybe, of course they were, fucking his wife. His wife. Jesus Christ Almighty, what a horse’s ass he’d turned out to be. He stood in the brutal sun, sweating in his oxford gray suit and gray homburg and black wing-tip shoes; in his black silk socks and black garters and white shirt; in his dark-blue tie and gold tie clasp. He smiled cheerfully and waved at the wonderful gang of carefree youths. He couldn’t wait to join the fun! Off came his homburg as he started toward them. It would be a cinch to throw her off the roof, but not today. Not today.
A Familiar Woman
IF HE SHOULD OCCASIONALLY GO INTO A SALOON ON THE way home from work, he’d often see her at the bar or at a table, in a purple velvet dress or a black gabardine suit. On the subway, she’d be standing, holding onto a pole, reading The Sacred Fount. She’d turn up on the street, in shorts, or in a suede jacket over a long flowered skirt. She’d be everywhere, although, as you may guess, she was but existent in his imagination. That’s the wrong word, one that is often used when the uncanny must be brought to heel. Perhaps madness, brief and flickering, is the word that covers these phenomena more accurately. Perhaps not. When he’d arrive home, there she really, as they say, really would be, in her actual, solid flesh. He would not look at her, but would change his clothes prior to making drinks for both of them. And although she had possessed, in the ruckus of their lives together, a purple velvet dress, a black gabardine suit, and a suede jacket, as well as more than one long flowered skirt, and many pairs of shorts, he would refuse to remember this fact, refuse to remember her owning or wearing these clothes. And the next day or week or month he’d find her again as he always found her, in a saloon, on the subway, turning into him as she rounded some corner, both of them far from home.
In the Diner
IN THE DINER, THE THREE YOUNG MEN EAT — STUFF THEIR faces, is an apt phrase — and patronize the waitress with happily disingenuous compliments on her pink polyester uniform, her hairdo and the net that covers it, her white crepesoled shoes. They ask her opinions on pop stars, hip-hop artists and grunge bands, her thoughts on music and clubs of which this exhausted fifty-three-year-old woman has never heard. And so she stands dumb before them, smiling the smile of the impotent insulted everywhere. These remarks and questions are delivered with a ponderous seriousness tempered by candid grins and occasional unsuccessfully stifled bursts of laughter. When they finish, they walk outside into the night and their interesting and valuable lives, and as one steps off the curb to look for a cab, he is, for somebody’s reason, or on somebody’s whim, or by somebody’s mistake, shot to death from the rear window of a car that is slowly moving down the street. His two friends, terrified, look at him sprawled in the wet, bloody gutter, his head half shot away. One says, “Jesus, Ray, Jesus,” over and over. The waitress picks up a paper napkin at their vacated table and finds beneath it her quarter tip. A nice touch for the morrow’s story in the Daily News.
Happy Days
IN THE PARLANCE OF THE ANONYMOUS YOUNG MEN WHO hung out, for years and wasted years, on the corner in front of the candy store, he’s the sort who thinks who the devil he is. He was born of Anglo-Saxon stock into an old exhausted and corrupted family with its roots in New England since before Napoleon was a cadet — another quaint locution much bruited about on the corner. He went to excellent prep schools, from which he was never in the least danger of being expelled, although for the rest of his life he obliquely suggested that he had been a wild student. From these he went on to Yale. Many of these years were spent ingesting drugs, if he is to be believed, the sly rogue. He was almost like the young men on the corner, for he understood them so well; he might as well have been one of them — tough, flexible, and distrustful of crude irony. Ah yes. This moment of adventure, as he later wryly called this period, served as the rough bona fides to remove him from the privilege that was and would always be his. Then he began to write fiction. His short stories and then his first two novels possessed the nice ability to tell readers, with subtle ironies meticulously sprinkled among suburban motifs, what they were certain they already knew: and did, a bright comfort. Touches of incest helped the prose considerably. So his career went well. Soon he became, if he is to be believed, an alcoholic, a lucky break, as the cynics on the corner might have said. For his alcoholism was prelude to his drying out, getting straight, choosing love and life, and realizing that simply being alive is, after all, good. This new venture into his psyche served as the entrée to ore, as he called it, for a “harrowing, courageous, and, finally, sadly redemptive” memoir, written in “fiercely intelligent prose,” in which he confesses to numerous flaws, failings, weaknesses, and sins, and implies that he does not, ever, expect to be forgiven for the things that he has done to friends, family, and loved ones. His forgiveness nonetheless ensues, and to the merry tune, as the guys might say, of more than reputable sales. He had unspoken fantasies of winning the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or both, but settled for a week on the Times’s “And Bear In Mind” list and a respectable film option. He hoped that John Cusack would play him in the movie that would surely be made, one that would be, he hoped, harrowing, courageous, and, finally, sadly redemptive. He might have said, however, film, the word favored by the young fellows in front of the candy store.