“Yes,” I say, “that’s the thing about freedom.”
Avila’s offices are downtown. He is not a criminal but a divorce lawyer, and his place of business reflects this. It is in with the good stores and better office buildings in that three- or four-block section of the city that is our Fifth Avenue.
The day is a reproach to my heart, as though, like all old men on a splendid day, I precede Nature, am there by sufferance, time’s professional courtesy. I have left my topcoat behind, but no matter. God sees through me, knows it’s only old Alexander Main down there in His high-rent Cincinnati, no boy, no boulevardier, only the sullied Phoenician with sin and history like shit in his gut. God sees through my bright caps, knows what’s beneath them, sees right down to the gums, the pink base of my being, the cloudy tracings in which the teeth stand parallel as staves. And under the gums the cementum-sheathed roots hooking bone, seeking wild handhold and purchase like some apraxic mountaineer. God knows my jaws.
Still, here I am. If nothing else my money entitles me. (I have written my will. I am to be buried with my cash. It will line my coffin like salad, so that one day the archaeologists will find me, lightning will strike, the earth move, the state push through a thruway, the new ice age bulldoze me a thousand miles south, scientists of some distant time catalog me, my bones like leftovers in the wormy lettuce of my fortune, Alexander’s ragtime bond, gone surety for himself, in on bail. Perhaps, if they still exist, space will be found for me in the case of some future museum, the fingertips of schoolboys on my glass, smudging the watch face of my crystal isolation.) Meanwhile I usurp pleasure from the fine day, shudder in the faint chill of the spring breeze blowing through Cincinnati’s Lego boulevards, in our Lego America. Down the big street I go where the skin of one building merges with the skin of the next in Siamese connection, a long Chinese wall of architecture, past an outdoor cafe with a little low white fence propped on the wide white street like a playpen that must be folded each night and taken in from the weather. Awning shows. As if Cincinnati were a port city, some sailcloth town. A waiter moves in and out among the tables, not in uniform but in a light gray suit, wearing an old boy’s tie beneath a vest crisscrossed with watch chain and trophied with the keys of elective societies.
I gaze in at the clean store windows — there’s our century’s real art, in its window trimming — like sets for a perfected life. I enjoy other people’s good taste. Things are set off, isolated in high fashion’s splendid cages — a beautiful desk and beautiful chair off-center in an immense window. In another, on a luscious rug, across the arm of a superb Wassily chair, is a Braemar cashmere, pale green as the open spaces on dollar bills. A kiosk bristles with bright announcement — a Ukrainian dance troupe, Lipizzaner horses, the Black Theater of Prague, the Stones, the Black Watch — the posters projected on the tall cylinder like foreign countries painted on a globe. I am surprised they are printed in English and not French. Even the air smells French — chestnuts, Gauloises and gasoline. Ahead of me a girl steers down the street with her hand deep inside the back of her boyfriend’s trousers, using his ass as a tiller.
I pass another sidewalk café. An elegant woman sits beside a man who wears the whitest turtleneck I have ever seen. His cavalry twill trousers are custom-made, bespoke slacks. Elbows on the table, the two lean toward each other in intense affinity over their empty coffee cups. I look down to read the message in the crumbs of their brioches on the white cloth, a Morse code of dough and crust. Further on, workmen in ladder trucks lift Easter decorations into the thin trees, long strips of gold foil in light rigid frames, exactly the size and appearance of bedsprings. When I passed here two days ago they were up only to Pogue’s Department Store; now they have gone another two blocks, inching their way the long length of the avenue like a golden blight.
I enter the new office block and refer to the huge directory that takes up almost the entire width of one black marble wall. I locate the number of Avila’s suite — I have never been here before — and tell the operator I want the eighteenth floor. He stops the car between floors, turns to me and takes a crude wooden box from his pocket. There is a sort of Hawaiian scene painted on it. He is going to show me a magic trick. “You smoke?” Without waiting for me to answer, he lifts the lid and demonstrates that the box is empty; then he opens it again and there are four cigarettes in it. They look stale and have lost tobacco at both ends. He laughs. He has plastic hearing tubes in his ears like tiny drains. “Maybe I get you one of this. Three dollar.”
“Say, do that one again.”
“You smoke?” He lifts the lid and the box is empty. He opens it again and there are the four stale cigarettes. “Three dollar. I get you one?”
“Nah, it’s a trick,” I tell him.
Avila’s suite of rooms is as much a stage set as the store windows. Behind the façade of the steel and glass skyscraper the architect has contrived dormers, queer shapes to the rooms, here let in and there let out like a suit off the rack. I am eighteen stories above the street, but I could be on the second floor of someone’s two-story colonial in the suburbs. On the walls of the anteroom (I have no appointment; the secretary has asked me to wait) are great blown-up photographs, grainy as money, large as flags. The furniture here is not like office furniture at all. I recall the waiter’s good suit. It’s too much for me — spring, style, the future.
The secretary says I may go in and I head down a corridor like a hallway of bedrooms. Avila greets me outside a door, a man in his mid-thirties, jacketless in black trousers and vest, long lengths of bright white shirt-sleeve dropping through its arm-holes like acetylene. He shakes my hand and leads me by it into his office — how passive I have become — which looks as if it has been decorated by emptying three or four of those store windows. His desk is a drawerless slab of white marble five feet long and a yard deep on legs of Rhodesian chrome. At the wall to my right is an antique breakfront, old lawbooks behind golden grillwork like a priest crosshatched in a confessional. A cigarette lighter on his desk like a silver brick. A large round stand-less lamp white as a shirt-front bubbles on the marble, and the carpet, long pelts of creamy wool, has the appearance of bleached floorboard. An eighteenth-century French console table doubles itself against a mirror. Only the chair I sit on is invisible to me. Taste. Taste everywhere. A tasteful office in a city pickled in taste.
Avila does not go behind his desk but takes a seat at the other end of the room in a chair upholstered in nubby hand-woven linen. He wears his clothes well. I see him sockless as a Kennedy in wet tennis shoes; I imagine his rich man’s articulated ankles. I see him on his low, wide bed, the giant strawberry print of his king-size sheets. I see him pluck parking tickets from the windshield of his sports car; I see him hand them to his secretary to pay.
“Look,” he says, “I wasn’t expecting you. As a matter of fact, I was just going downstairs for a trim.” He has an actor’s indeterminate haircut. “The barber’s right in the building. Why don’t you come with me? We can chat while I’m in the chair.”
It’s out before I can think. “But it’s perfect. Nothing needs to be done to it.”
“Oh,” he laughs, “appearance is nine-tenths of the law. I have a standing appointment with my barber every day at this time. A divorce lawyer depends a lot upon transference. Like a psychiatrist.”
We are in the same elevator I have just come up in, but the man who showed me the trick is gone, sucked into history. It bothers me that I will never see him again. I don’t know how I know this.