But in another moment, one flourish of liqueur, he was singing “When Yuba Plays the Tuba Down in Cuba” in an elegant tennis-club drawl, with soft shoes, and then, in the space of a spin, hitting every note of defiance in “Was I Drunk, Was He Handsome, and Did My Ma Give Me Hell?”
Schenck whistled appreciation. “Ugo, you should go on stage.”
Clammy and pale, Ugo lipped the Chartreuse bottle, groping for any chair. “All the hells of Dante,” he said vaguely.
SCHENCK rose earlier than usual on Christmas Day, which was not white. He went downstairs to the shop and retrieved the Times from in front of the door. Back in bed, vivified by two full tumblers, leafing quickly toward the crossword, he found this among the death notices on page 18:
GLASSER — Jean-Pierre. Beloved husband of Ciel, loving father of Todd, Mimi, and Sara, dear brother of Simone Taubman, adored uncle of Mario, cherished cousin, devoted godfather, and friend to many. Pre-deceased by parents Bernard and Rosa Glasser of Deerfield Beach, FL. His warmth and generosity of spirit touched all who knew him. A proud fighter, he died as he had lived, with passion. Memorials will be appreciated to the Topaze Research Foundation, or American Ballet Theatre.
In 1969, Jean-Pierre Glasser had put up money enabling Schenck to open the bookshop, at that point stocked mainly with Schenck’s personal collection. Devoted godfather, and friend to many. They had met by chance in the lobby of the Carnegie Hall Cinema, at a showing of Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Schenck admitted reading the subtitles, that his native German had been distant, indistinct, a passing wind. Harmony of emigres! (Glasser was a Jew from Quebec.) They had dinner that night and enthused over Dietrich the humiliator. In this phase, Schenck was looking around for an ally.
He studied the ice cube remnants in a puddle at the bottom of the tumbler. They were opaque now, not glassy as before, and shaped like charcoal briquettes. He recalled his discovery of baseball that ’69 summer, wearing a Mets cap everywhere: impenetrable laws of assimilation. And that vivid afternoon in the new shop — which people stumbled quickly in and out of as though it were an occupied toilet — when he reached his ice water epiphany during the listless late-Sunday innings of a televised doubleheader, that first experience of calm, silvery perfection from tongue to glottis to gut.
Schenck completed the puzzle, except for an unfair corner where “Spiny shrub” was crossed with “Former 5-franc coin in Brussels.” The clock read nine-fifteen, and he could not think of anything to do.
ON Wednesday he waited for Sheila until 2 a.m., but her light never came on. Could she have relatives to visit? He felt lower than he had the night before, alone with bad news then, and without a single clear remembrance of Christmas childhood, the sweet sadness of which might have been balm. The deficit was not of his memory, but of the past itself, which was evidently tainted with self-erasure, a slow rot working from the inside out.
He was aground in the present, dreaming of Sheila nearly all the time now. In these dreams she was always severely clothed, like a governess, rigorous and strict in her speech and behavior. So he was afraid to sleep, late as it was, afraid not of the dreaming but of waking into the naked fact of her absence from the window. He stayed up all night reading James’s Transatlantic Sketches, drinking his water.
And he did not open the shop on Thursday, but instead hiked uptown to the park, shivered on a bench near Belvedere Castle. There were blowing papers, decrepit pigeons, and a smoky, tenuous sky to complete the scene. Schenck’s appearance might have been one of pathos or absurdity or fecklessness or withdrawal, any and all; or within lines firm and definitive, he might be the emblem of aging, a painter’s subject (or object) with brown, oatmeal-grain coat against green bench slats, a messily furled umbrella resting across his knees.
Gloveless, his hands twinged and tingled so badly that they could not stand the pressure of his pockets. He hurried down Madison Avenue, losing the race with nightfall. Already there were happy drunks, and surly drunks, and to complete the scene, store windows dressed with plush reindeer and cotton snow.
Blue exhaust clouded in his way led to a mental picture: Sheila coming back to the city on a bus, coming away from a company town in western Pennsylvania, from the diligent miseries of her visit. Schenck’s rarely exercised imagination frisked with detaiclass="underline" the artificial tree, the wreath of painted pine cones, Father pouring rum from a holiday decanter, kidding unpleasantly; diabetic Auntie with her blotched face and white fur slippers; icicles cracking off the eaves outside; her now unfamiliar bedroom with a fresh box of Kleenex and a clock that ticked too loudly; and finally, knees together, handbag grasped to her stomach, there on the bus reviewing the variations of her life, indifference and cruelty, chords and arpeggios.
ON Friday, when he came to open up, a man was waiting at the door, a junkie with a carton of worthless paperbacks. Schenck gave him ten bucks, realizing they’d all come now, and thinking: Let them. It had just begun to snow, lightly, in dry, tufted flakes that were easily blown.
He looked through his shelves, at a tissue fold-out map from an Alpine geography, at photographs of Bedouin herders, Alban Berg, a Kyoto hotel; at the ludicrous jacket copy of a Baroness Orczy romance, and recognized the absence of a coziness that should by rights have been there, inside the steamy heat with snow feathering against the windows, among his books and books and books in their hammer-dented, varnish-wanting shelves.
He closed at noon, no sales recorded, and went to the Hellas for lunch. There, beside the steam table, like Italians in a barbershop, the brothers had taped postcards of home, a scenic hill town overlooking the Aegean. Outside, the snow was building. There was no wind. Schenck thought: All my insurance is up to date. The meat loaf was dry, and needed extra gravy; the green beans spurted warm water when bitten.
Morning came dry and crisp and gray. Schenck ironed his corduroy jacket, shaved carefully. His hat was tight, both hands throbbed, but the arrangement of smudges on white wall seemed lovely, undifficult. He went slowly, like someone his age, planting both feet on a step before the next move down. At the empty street he paused for minutes. Children stared, and he turned the corner, thinking of all that had not proved inexpressible across an air shaft. There was her name on the bell board. The bridge swayed. He decided to flip a coin.
BY THE NUMBERS
[1]
THEY WORKED AT THE enclosed mall in King of Prussia. They wore plastic nametags, the corporate logo above a deep groove accommodating a Dymo label. Jenelle for the record store, Courtney for the bookstore. They had received reprimands for lateness.
[2]
Dinner is interesting. The plastic bag doesn’t melt in the boiling water. You cut off the top with scissors and lobster Newburg comes out.
From the paper: “Dartmouth Warnell, 19, of North Philadelphia, while attempting to escape from police custody, was shot and killed in the parking lot of the Afro-American Cultural Museum. A warrant for driving-while-suspended had been outstanding.”
The table is a phone company cable spool which occasionally insinuates a splinter. The VCR format is unchic: Beta. The movie from the rental store traces an anchorwoman who finally turns into a werewolf on the air. They’ve seen it before.