Every brick I unearthed from the dust and chalky mortar, cleaning it off with a steel brush and wet flannel rag — which made my hands red and sliced with little lines all over — became part of the house I was building in my mind for this woman. New York Slim they would call her. The house would be on the seashore, where you could look out the window and sigh in a big way. For her, even a special sighing room.
The old hotel we stayed in had rail balconies on the inside floors where you could lean and look down into not much of a lobby, your feet on a gone tan carpet.
It felt good to be tired and cut up at the end of the day, just showered and looking down at the lobby with your hair slick. You felt you were a working man. I had a red kerchief tied around my neck like a European working man, all shot with working blood. A whole new energy came through you. This was before I began to drink and smoke, and I would not feel like this, clean and worthy and nicely used in the bones, for many more times, for a great long while. The only problem was that there was absolutely nothing to do. The town might have been named for a Polish patriot who led American troops in the Revolutionary War, but the glory just mocked you in a town where shops slammed shut at five to prevent any history whatsoever beyond twilight. We had no car and had read all the magazines backward. There was a bare courtesy light bulb at the bus station, and we actually went to stand beneath it, hoping to invite life. But nothing. A man who hated to move ran a restaurant up the way and we soon got tired of his distress. Nobody even played checkers there. Gloomy John Birch literature would fall off the checkout counter, and there were flags bleached to pink and purple in a bottle on it too, seeming to represent a whole other nasty little country.
I leaned and watched the lobby for New York Slim to walk in, lost in Kosciusko, Miss., and looking for me. I would look at my watch and curse fate, giving her just a few more minutes. Then I would curse her and tell her I was through. Natalie Wood, or more probably her cousin from the South, Lee Wood, would come instead. I had seen West Side Story that year, and Natalie was slowly replacing New York Slim. When New York Slim did finally get here, there would be hard words, tears, and it would be tough to tell her she had lost everything — the brick house on the seashore, the sighing room, my drollness, everything — and that I was giving it all over to one of the Miss Woods. There was nothing I could do about it I’d say, it was an affaire de coeur, sorry. The fact is I was going mildly insane. I peered harder into the lobby. All you saw was a solitary whiskered gruff man, probably retired, not even reading a magazine, but looking straight ahead in a sort of shocked anger that put some fear into you. He was not the denizen of an interesting passionate play by T. Williams, as you might hope, but a horrified sufferer of age bound to a colorless tunnel, as if his stare were tied in a knot at the end of it. His face was spotted red, from waiting, I thought. Someday he would just disappear into the wallpaper, which also had red spots in it. Though he’d been without applicants for a long time, in my mind I made him into a smoldering corrupter of the young. We never said a word to him.
In my own town a man named Harold, old enough to be a teacher, was attending the college. Harold, who lived in an attic apartment, was balding and already a man with a heavy if not lengthy past. He had been drafted during the Korean War but had not gone over there with the army until the truce was signed, so that his adventures in the East, for which he had made a lurid album he showed me, were all done in peacetime. The photographs showed a bunch of men in fatigues hanging around in squads, the usual thing, but then there was a whole woman section too. Harold was still in love with these Asian women — I believe they were Japanese — from around where he was stationed. But I had never met a man in love this way, this very meticulous strange way. One of the women had her legs open, and Harold had pasted a straw flat on the photograph running off the picture to the margin and a small photo of his own face. The straw went from her private parts into his very mouth. He had written More, More, More! in the margin. I had seen a few pictures of naked women, but this one drew me back again and again, especially when Harold was out of the room, because I had never seen a woman so seriously and happily showing herself. A dark riot of nerves came over me when I saw her face, so agreeable to the camera. Harold was a very thin man with white hairy forearms, just weak sticks, and narrow in the chest, also hairy above his shirt opening. It must have been a time when American GIs were overwhelmingly popular over there. Harold did not seem like a man who could support this weird Asiatic “love,” yet there were other women — none of them whores, he pointed out — who had loved him, and were also photographed coiled around Harold. Some were full naked or not, and some were playing with each other, happy. Their eyes were all for Harold, who gleamed brightly into the camera, younger and more prosperous than now, a bitter student on the GI Bill.
Harold was a smoker of those short cork-tipped but unfiltered Kools. He wore black high-top sneakers, decades before they were necessary, with irony, for artistics everywhere. The startling denominator in Harold was that he was capable of great passions high and low. I saw him stare at the woman on the street below his place, an abandoned woman I found out later, who walked the bricks smoking a long cigarette in a holder. I’ve never seen so much smoke come out of a person. She would walk slowly along in the regular fog of a ghostly cinema, staring ruefully at the brick streets. She was the daughter of a town scion, a remarkable chemistry prof who was also the mayor, and lived with him on the other side of the block. But her lot was lonesome and bereft. She was one of those women who’d had a single lifetime catastrophe and never recovered, beautiful for the tragedies of T. Williams but now almost unheard of, when everybody joins something and gets well.
“She needs me,” Harold spoke, watching her with deep concern. “That woman needs my love, and here I am selfishly withholding it from her.” But Harold, I thought, she’s the mother of one of my classmates — she’s very, very old. Harold went on condemning himself for not stepping out to the curb and offering his “love” to her. Her son, my elder contemporary, was a person of almost toxic brilliance, scowling and reviling any collection of people in every room I ever saw him in. Another friend later explained that the woman died of a heart attack in that same house, with her son, then an MD, attending. Or rather, more just technically witnessing, as my friend had it, using chilly terms like infarction and fibrillate. Then she was gone—bam, he had said, as he struck his palm with a fist. I saw the wide and high Victorian house as a place of almost epic coldness, a hint of sulphur in the rooms. Harold stayed at the sill, hanging in the window between thought and act, the shadow on a film always in my head, like a ghost on a negative.