An Apartment
HERE IS A GROUND-FLOOR APARTMENT, THE CYNOSURE of which is a Philco floor-model radio, circa 1935. It sits between two closed windows, which look out on an empty urban street. Each window is half-covered by a dark-green roller shade, whose pulls cords move, almost imperceptibly, in a current of air that may come from underneath the door to the outer hallway. There is a studio couch in one corner of the room, covered, somewhat carelessly, with a multicolored crocheted afghan. Against the wall directly across from the radio a gleaming back-lacquered table holds the bronze figure of a lioness, her mouth open in a roar or snarl. She is looking at a black teapot, its surface covered by a gold dragon in basrelief. There is no other furniture in the room save for a floor lamp near the studio couch, its torn shade askew. At its base is a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its label smeared with what appears to be dried blood, and a pink two-way-stretch girdle. Through a door to one side of the table can be seen a small room in which an unmade single bed takes up the floor space not occupied by a small, badly worn dresser and a battered cardboard carton, sides bulging with its unknown contents. Another door, to the other side of the table, opens onto a kitchen, on whose flower-motif linoleum lies a woman of perhaps thirty, supine in a flower-print housecoat and black high-heeled pumps. She is probably drunk, but she may be dead. The radio, it is clear, has been on all the time, albeit very softly, and at the moment is broadcasting Russ Colombo’s 1931 hit, “Prisoner of Love.” On the stoop to the right and just below one of the apartment’s front windows, a woman, dressed in a flower-print housecoat and black high-heeled pumps identical to the dress, or, perhaps, costume of the woman on the kitchen floor, is smoking a cigarette and drinking from a quart cardboard container of beer. She seems to have not a care in the world, as the phrase has it, but this is far from true.
Saturday Afternoon
THERE WAS LITTLE SENSE IN HIS CALLING HIS DAUGHTER, because he knew that after her first exclamations of surprise, perhaps even falsely delighted surprise, she would list her various illnesses, those that she had suffered for the past twenty-five years, those that were recent or current, those that were as old pals, and those that were arcane and malign invaders who would never be understood by any doctor on the face of the earth, including her brilliant yet wanting specialists; but all, without doubt, were his responsibility if not his doing; she would whine about her teenaged son, his grandson, a boy whom he had never seen, a boy who had, just once, called him and said, “I’ll write you a long letter, Grandpa"; and with the regularity of death, she would ask for a loan, a small loan, one to drive off or placate her bitch of a guinea landlady, who lived, it seemed, to collect her unjust money from his daughter, her ill and hapless victim. And there was no sense in calling his son, who would be, surely, according to the curt words of Tracy or Dawn or Steph or Donya, the latest modern dancer-schoolteacher-addict with whom he was, at last! happily, even joyously, living, asleep, after a hard night of hard work at his hard yet mysterious and fulfilling and creative job. So he would sit and sit, looking at his shelves of books, wondering, for hour after hour, which one he should read, or reread, or whether he’d be better off just looking at their familiar spines. Was there any reason to read anything, ever again? So he would sit, occasionally laughing, not at himself, precisely, but at the fact of himself, that he should be so ludicrously and persistently alive. He would sit and smoke and think of old friends and old enemies, either dead or scattered across the smug, benighted, self-pitying republic. In a sense, they had all disappeared in one way or another, and just as well, just as well. And he wondered if a few of those who were alive were absurdly thinking of calling their children, tentatively and hopelessly thinking of this simple act. Because he had to believe that they, too, were alienated from their children and unknown to their grandchildren; otherwise, the touch of normalcy that would inform their lives, were the opposite true, would destroy him completely. They had to be as strangers to the strange and thankless adults who were their children and who, it had to be, hated them, or, more exactly, held them in disinterested contempt. He sat, smoking, as the sun faded, clouds slowly covered the dimming sky, and it began to rain on the cold Saturday streets.
The Jungle
THE TARZAN MOVIE ON TELEVISION VAGUELY LOCATED some fugitive emotion that he couldn’t sharpen or clarify. He took a swallow of the Majorska over ice and was suddenly snapped from the Hollywood jungles and their symmetrical trees to what appeared to be a female robot that was singing a deafening and machined jingle, thrusting its smoothly contoured and metallic mons veneris, packed neatly into the crotch of what appeared to be aluminum jeans, at the viewer with a maniacal regularity. In the animated corpse’s hand was a can of some soft drink, O.K.! It was swinging its long blond hair from side to side, still singing, its smile fixed in uncontrollable electronic ecstasy, O.K.! It was, sure it was, essentially, a mobile cunt, perfectly engineered and animated to sell things: to Christian fundamentalists, professors of biochemistry, terrorists and plumbers and bus drivers, housewives and attorneys, to the salt of the earth, to the world, to him. They all understood. So did he. He took another swallow of the cheap vodka and was back with Johnny and Maureen and the chimp and the stampeding elephants in the grainy background. What did this remind him of? Why did he feel so bad? Couldn’t he get into the campy spirit of the aluminum people who had been responsible for scheduling this petrifying movie? Couldn’t he obey the robot and her metallic pudendum and buy her soda? He started to sob and thought that he was really going crazy, or drinking too much, or both. A man of fifty-six crying over a movie that was set in a cardboard jungle.
Snow
THE TUNNEL IN THE SNOW LEADS TO A WARM KITCHEN, vinegary salad, ham and baloney and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again, nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of the January day, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.