The next day he had a private interview with the actor, a thoughtful and humorous fellow a little older than the others, a little down on his luck; it might well have been another, but Martin wanted only him. And in Martin’s vest and jacket, with his hair combed back off his forehead, with Martin’s habit of thrusting a hand in his pants pocket and jiggling loose change, he really did, in a way, at a short distance, look like Martin, though anyone could see it was only an actor. In the course of the day Martin explained to the man, whose name was John Painter, everything he needed to know: the habits of Martin’s day, the morning meetings with the manager, his favorite soup. Of course the idea wasn’t to fool anyone, but only to complete the cast of characters. During the afternoon he took Painter with him on his rounds, pointing out an attractive courtyard dwelling on the twenty-sixth floor that he might wish to occupy, lingering over a wooden Indian who raised a cigar to his mouth and blew a thick, slowly turning smoke ring, presenting the actor with a key to the boiler room. In the evening Martin took the elevator down to the department store and wandered among the deserted, brightly lit aisles before stopping at the clothing department to buy a shirt collar.
The next morning he went down early to buy his paper in the lobby and wait for the barbershop to open. In the barber’s chair he closed his eyes for a moment and at once he was back in the Vanderlyn: his bellboy jacket felt tight around the chest, luggage creaked, buzzers rang, from the street came a clatter of wheels and hooves. He would transfer the title of the Vanderlyn to Emmeline Vernon, she could do with it as she liked. At breakfast he read his paper over steak and eggs, then folded it twice and left it beside his plate. He pushed back his chair and nodded at the three dream-women, who were just then entering with their demon-smiles, and as he stood up there rose to his nostrils a faint, pleasant odor of violet water and scented soap from his close-shaved cheeks.
He walked through the lobby to the heavy glass entrance doors, and when he pushed one open he stopped: the light was so bright that he had to shut his eyes, even though at this early hour he stood in the building’s shade. Suns danced in the red of his closed eyes. He hadn’t left the Grand Cosmo for a long time.
Carefully shading his eyes he made his way down the steps and across the light-filled warm shade of the avenue to the low wall of the park. On a dark green bench a white-haired woman in a black dress sat feeding pigeons from a paper bag. The fat sleek birds strutted about with their chests stuck out, their shot-silk throats shimmering pink and green. Martin entered the park and walked along a sunny-and-shady path matted with blackish-brown leaves. Through the trees he could see flashes of the river. After a while he stepped off the path onto a downward slope, into green-black shade spattered with spots of sun. Only then did he look up: through branches crowded with little green leaves he saw a patch of blue — a blue so blue, so richly and strangely blue, that it seemed the kind of blue you might find in pictures of castles in books of fairy tales, after you peeled away the crackly thin paper. It occurred to Martin that it was early spring.
He came to a place where the trees were more widely spaced, and sitting down in the grass he leaned back against a trunk and took off his hat. A light smell of hair oil rose from the leather sweatband. Carefully he placed the hat on one knee. The dark hatband had a silky shimmer that brought to mind the throats of the pigeons. Through the trees he could see the river and the red-brown Palisades. A sunny barge was moving slowly along. Sometimes it failed to come out from behind a trunk at the precise moment he imagined it should, and then he wished it wouldn’t emerge at all, that it would vanish entirely behind a single tree and never be found again, as though it had slipped through a rent in the world and come out in another place, but immediately it would appear, barely moving, a great cat lazing in the sun. Before him he could see a more open place among the trees, where some boys were playing ball. They had laid down their caps and jackets to serve as bases. At his foot grew a single dandelion, a dark stem bursting into a blaze of yellow.
He had slipped out of his life, he had passed through a crack in the world, into this place. By turning his head slightly he could see the Grand Cosmo through clutches of upper branches. It was still there, it hadn’t vanished quite yet. But neither was it entirely there, half hidden as it was behind the leaves, the faintly moving little leaves, which perhaps were moving only to prevent him from attending closely to the crumbling masonry and falling steel behind them. His neck began to hurt. He turned back to the boys, the trees, and the river.
Martin closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he was aware of a change in the light. The sky was brighter, the sun higher — the day was getting hot. He felt light, transparent. Here in the other world, here in the world beyond the world, anything was possible. For when the friendly powers let go of your hand, so gently that you were barely aware of it, then you needed to hold on to something, or you would surely be lost. You might float up into the too blue sky and never come back. You might dissolve into flickering spots of sun and shade. For when you woke from a long dream of stone, then you wanted to lie there with closed eyes, trying not to hear the sounds of morning, pressing back into your pillow as if by the sheer pressure of your head you could sink back beyond sleep, into your own childhood. But the light was too bright, his left buttock hurt, his calves itched. Martin shifted against the tree. The ridges of bark, long diamonds, pressed into his back. He felt like walking.
Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn’t not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father’s bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn’t not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little place he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.
Notes
1. The first paragraph of Martin Dressler is written as though it were the introduction to a fairy tale. Could this novel be described as a fairy tale? In an interview (Publishers Weekly, 5/6/96), Steven Millhauser said that with the Grand Cosmo, "I wanted to stretch the real into the fantastic without actually snapping it." At what point does the narrative depart from the real and become fantastic?