“Are you coming with me?” repeated Breckie. “I’m talking you get a job, we get an apartment in a building wired for cable, and we have a real life. I can wait for you only so long.” She had a cat who could wait for anything: food, water, a mouse under a radiator, a twistie from a plastic bag, which, batted under the rug, might come whizzing back out again, any day now, who knew. But not Breckie. Her cat was vigilant as Madame Butterfly, but Breckie had to get on with things.
Harry tried to get angry. “Look,” he said. “I’m not a possession. I may not even belong with you, but I certainly don’t belong to you.”
“I’m leaving,” she said quietly.
“Aw, Breck,” said Harry, and he sank down on the bed and put his hands to his face. Breckie could not bear to leave a man with his hands to his face until he had pulled them away. She sat down next to him, held him, and kissed him deeply, until he was asleep, until the morning, when it would be, when it was, possible to leave.
The first few weeks of living alone were difficult, but Harry got used to it in a way. “One year of living alone,” said his old friend Dane in a phone call from Seattle, “and you’re ruined for life. You’ll be spoiled. You’ll never go back.” Harry worked hard, as he always had, but this time without even the illusion of company. This time there was just the voice of play and playwright in the bombed-away world of his apartment. He started not to mind it, to feel he was suited in some ways to solitude, to the near weightlessness of no one but himself holding things down. He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn’t want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue. It would be like writing a play, the cobbling in the night, the great cavity of mind that you filled with voices, like a dark piñata with fruit.
“Tell me something wonderful,” he said to Dane. He would lie on his bed, the phone cradled at his cheek, and stare lonesomely at the steeple made by the shadow of the bookcase against the wall. “Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.”
“You’re always writing one of your plays on the phone,” said Dane.
“I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime.”
“It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea.”
“Ah,” said Harry.
Downstairs every morning, when he went to get the paper and head for a coffee shop, there was Deli, the hooker, always in his doorway. Her real name was Mirellen, but she had named herself Deli because when she first came to New York from Jackson, she had liked the name Delicatessen, seen it flashing all over in signs above stores, and though she hadn’t known what one was, she knew the name was for her.
“Mornin’, Harry.” She smiled groggily. She had on a black dress, a yellow short-sleeved coat, and white boots. Scabs of translucent gray freckled her arms.
“Mornin’, Deli,” said Harry.
Deli started to follow him a bit up the block. “Haven’t seen your Breck woman around — how things be with you-all?”
“Fine.” Harry smiled, but then he had to turn and walk fast down Forty-third Street, for Deli was smart and sly, and in the morning these qualities made him nervous.
It was the following week that the trucks started coming. Eighteen-wheelers. They came, one by one, in the middle of the night, pulled up in front of the 25 Cent Girls pavilion, and idled there. Harry began waking up at four in the morning, in a sweat. The noise was deafening as a factory, and the apartment, even with the windows closed, filled with diesel fumes. He put on his boots, over his bare feet, and threw on his overcoat, a coat over nothing but underwear and skin, and stomped downstairs.
The trucks were always monstrous, with mean bulldog faces, and eyes of glassy plaid. Their bodies stretched the length of the block, and the exhaust that billowed out of the vertical stovepipe at the front was a demonic fog, something from Macbeth or Sherlock Holmes. Harry didn’t like trucks. Some people, he knew, liked them, liked seeing one, thought it was like seeing a moose, something big and wild. But not Harry.
“Hey! Get this heap out of here!” Harry shouted and pounded on the driver’s door. “Or at least turn it off!” He looked up into the cabin, but nobody seemed to be there. He pounded again with his fist and then kicked once with his boot. Curtains in the back of the cabin parted, and a man poked his head out. He looked sleepy and annoyed.
“What’s the problem, man?” he said, opening the door.
“Turn this thing off!” shouted Harry over the truck’s oceanic roar. “Can’t you see what’s happening with the exhaust here? You’re asphyxiating everyone in these apartments!”
“I can’t turn this thing off, man,” shouted the driver. He was in his underwear — boxer shorts and a neat white vest.
The curtains parted again, and a woman’s head emerged. “What’s happening, man?”
Harry tried to appeal to the woman. “I’m dying up there. Listen, you’ve got to move this truck or turn it off.”
“I told you buffore,” said the man. “I can’t turn it off.”
“What do you mean, you can’t turn it off?”
“I can’t turn it off. What am I gonna do, freeze? We’re trying to get some sleep in here.” He turned and smiled at the woman, who smiled back. She then disappeared behind the curtain.
“I’m trying to get some sleep, too,” yelled Harry. “Why don’t you just move this thing somewhere else?”
“I can’t be moving this thing,” said the driver. “If I be moving this thing, you see that guy back there?” He pointed at his rearview mirror, and Harry looked down the street. “I move and that guy be coming to take my spot.”
“Just turn this off, then!” shouted Harry.
The driver grew furious. “What are you, some kind of mental retard? I already told you. I can’t!”
“What do you mean, you can’t. That’s ridiculous.”
“If I turn this mother off, I can’t get it started back up again.”
Harry stormed back upstairs and phoned the police. “Yeah, right,” said Sgt. Dan Lucey of the Eighteenth Precinct. “As if we don’t have more urgent things in this neighborhood than truck fumes. What is your name?”
“Harry DeLeo. Look,” said Harry. “You think some guy blowing crack in a welfare hotel isn’t having one of the few moments of joy in his whole life. I am the one—”
“That’s a pretty socially responsible thing to say. Look, mister. We’ll see what we can do about the trucks, but I can’t promise you anything.” And then Officer Lucey hung up, as if on a crank call.
There was no way, Harry decided, that he could stay in his apartment. He would die. He would get cancer and die. Of course, all the best people — Christ, Gershwin, Schubert, theater people! — had died in their thirties, but this did not console him. He went back downstairs, outside, in nothing but his overcoat thrown over a pajama top, and a pair of army boots with the laces flapping. He roamed the streets, like the homeless people, like the junkies and hookers with their slow children and quick deals, like the guys down from Harlem with business to transact, like the women with old toasters and knives in their shopping bags, venturing out from Port Authority on those occasions when the weather thawed. With his overcoat and pajama top, he was not in the least scared, because he had become one of them, a street person, rebellion and desperation in his lungs, and they knew this when he passed. They smiled in welcome, but Harry did not smile back. He wandered the streets until he found a newsstand, bought the Times, and then drifted some more until he found an all-night coffee shop, where he sat in a booth — a whole big booth, though it was only him! — and spread out his Times and circled apartments he could never ever afford. “1500 dollars; EIK.” He was shocked. He grew delirious. He made up a joke: how you could cut up the elk for meat during the winter, but in the months before you could never housebreak the thing. “Fifteen hundred dollars for a lousy apartment!” But gradually the numbers grew more and more abstract, and he started circling the ones for eighteen hundred as well.