The shift in topics almost caught Paul unawares; once Ives launched into a set-piece speech he almost invariably continued at length until it had run its course: Ives held himself with the religious fervor of the passionate egoist and all his posturings and attitudes were long and well rehearsed.
“No,” Paul said, “they haven’t turned them up yet. They’re still working on it. I’ve been keeping in touch with the police. They do have one or two leads.”
“Well by God they’d better act on them. I understand it was a group of young ones — teen-age thugs, is that right?”
“Apparently so.”
“A disgrace,” Ives said again, and held up a finger as if to forestall an interruption, which no one had offered. “These young scum grow up in a welfare state where they see that violence goes unpunished and the old virtues are for stupid pious fools. What can we expect of them that’s any better than this random vicious despair? These radicals keep arsenals in their attics and advocate the overthrow of an economic system which has graduated more people out of poverty than any other system in history. They arm themselves to attack honest hard-working citizens like you and me, and to shoot down beleaguered policemen, and what happens? The public is propagandized into outrage over the behavior of the police in defending themselves and the public!”
Behind Ives’s back Sam and Dundee were exchanging bemused glances of tolerant patience; their occasional nods and affirmative grunts were not quite patronizing enough to alert the old man.
Things went on in their peculiarly arcane fashion, as if nothing ever changed; and perhaps nothing had changed for Henry Ives and the others. For Paul everything was different; the shape and color of the world was changed completely from what it had been.
That night across the dinner table he said to Sam, “We’re all born into this society congenitally naive, you know. And those of us who don’t outgrow it become the liberals.”
“Oh now wait a minute, Paul, you can’t—”
“But I can. I most certainly can. Who has a better right than I do?”
It was a question to which neither Sam nor Adele chose to reply.
“It came to me a little while ago what we really are, we liberals. We demand reforms, we want to improve the situation of the underprivileged — why? To make them better off materially? Nuts. It’s only to make ourselves feel less guilty. We rend our garments, we’re eager to show how willing we are to accept any outrageous demand so long as it’s black, or youthful, or put by someone who thinks he’s got a grievance. We want to appease everybody — you know what a liberal is? A liberal is a guy who walks out of the room when the fight starts.”
“I think,” Adele Kreutzer said in a light let’s-clear-the-air tone, “we are witnessing the right-wing radicalization of Paul Benjamin.” She had a strong voice; it went with her long narrow jaw. She was thin and dark and wore a faint aura of self-mocking melancholy. “Of course it’s true there’s no way to go on living in New York. The kind of bastards who do these awful things can only survive in cities like this — put them out in a country village and the exposure would be instantly fatal. There’d be no place for them to hide.”
“You may be right,” Paul said. “But I’m not sure running away is the only answer.”
“I can think of another one,” Sam said, and when he had both their attention he continued complacently: “Drop a ten-megaton nuke with the Empire State Building at ground zero.”
“He’s got it,” Adele said gaily, “by George he’s got it!”
Their clowning was weak but it made its point. For the rest of the evening Paul eschewed the subject but he found it hard to keep his mind on anything else; there were chunks of time when he let their conversation pass him by.
He left early, planning to be home by ten-thirty so that he could call Jack. The Kreutzers seemed relieved to see him go; it would be a while, he thought, before they invited him again.
Well, to hell with them. He disembarked from the elevator and crossed the lobby, noticing that their doorman was nowhere in sight. Anybody could just walk in. His jaw crept forward. He went out onto Forty-fifth and searched the street for a cab but there was nothing in sight; the Kreutzers lived far over on the East Side near the U.N. complex and it wasn’t a busy night-traffic area.
The air was clouded with a fine drizzle. He turned up his jacket collar and put his hands in his pockets and walked up toward Second Avenue, avoiding puddles and refuse. He stayed to the curb edge of the sidewalk because the buildings — parking lots, loading bays — were filled with deep shadows where anyone could be lurking. Only half a block from the lights and traffic of the avenue; but places like this seethed with muggers, he knew. Sour spirals came up from his stomach. His shoulders lifted, his gut hardened. One pace at a time up the gray street, raindrops chilling the back of his neck. His heels echoed on the wet pavement.
It was like running a gauntlet. When he reached the corner he felt he had achieved something.
Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet avenue. He crossed it and stood waiting for the roof-light of a free cab to come in sight. Waited several minutes but by then he knew it was going to be one of those nights when there wasn’t a taxi anywhere in the world. He turned a full circle on his heels, making a sweep — nothing. Trucks, the occasional green bus headed downtown, big sedans rushing past with pneumatic hissings, occupied taxis.
A half block north of him a figure staggered into sight under the lights of a storefront: a drunk trying to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Coming right toward Paul. In fear he turned quickly and began to walk west along Forty-fifth Street.
It was early but the neighborhood had a four-o’clock-in-the-morning feeling. He didn’t see anyone at all until he got near the corner of Third Avenue. A young couple came in sight, walking uptown, a pudgy fluffy young man in a flared jacket and a girl in belled slacks with straight hair down to her waist: liberated singles, carefully not touching each other, talking animatedly about something fashionable and banal. Perhaps they were deciding whether to go to her apartment or his; perhaps they had already reached the stage of sharing an apartment, their surnames connected by hyphenation on the mailbox. They looked as if they didn’t like each other very much.
Paul waved at an approaching taxi. Its cruise-light was illuminated but it swished past him without slowing. He fought the impulse to yell at it.
He waited through four red lights before a taxi stopped by him. “Seventieth and West End,” he said through his teeth; sat back and banged the top of his head against the car’s fiberboard ceiling. Was it just taxicabs or were the rear seats of all modern cars impossible to sit in without slouching and cringing? Paul hadn’t owned a car since they had returned to the city from their brief fling at suburban life; other than taxis the only car he had been inside in the past year had been the mortuary limousine.
Through the Plexiglas screen that sealed off the rear compartment he had a bad view of the driver; he had an impression of a huge Negro head, a hard roll of dark flesh at the back of the neck. Neither of them said a word.
A red light ahead was out of synch and the driver avoided it by swinging left on Forty-seventh and heading across town. All along the block west of Eighth Avenue there were girls leaning against the walk in dark doorways. On Ninth Avenue there was a troubleseeking cluster of teenage kids with their hands inevitably in their pockets, faces closed up into an unbreakable apathy. Addicts? Perhaps it was just that nothing short of the most violent brutality excited them any more. They looked as if they were waiting to kill someone.