He came to shop, it being simply good sense, he told himself, as immutable as that rule of the highway that one eats where the trucks are standing, that one should buy where the rich do, go to their bakers and butchers, find out how they come by their vegetables and which fruits they are eating. (And it could be justified economically. Weren’t things more expensive in the slums? Wouldn’t a single Rolls-Royce, properly cared for, last all one’s life, mellowing, blooming with use, ever perfecting itself, cheaper in the long run than the three Fords, two Chevies, pair of Dodges, one Pontiac, two Buicks and trio of Oldsmobiles that was the average man’s portion?) But the fiction that he had come merely to shop wore thin, though to preserve it he always brought something back with him — a Black Forest chocolate cake, a Spanish melon, tins of Dutch herring, Russian caviar, pickled rinds. Now, when he went on these excursions, he went obsessively, growing angry and genuinely dangerous.
He had been safer in Missoula. Even if it had its better neighborhoods and occasional mansion, Missoula was still the West, where wealth was expressed in land no man could walk in a day, and which, for all its vastness, looked no different square yard for square yard — perhaps poorer, actually — than the place where one lay down one’s picnic, and where the stores were franchises one had grown up with: Penney’s, Woolworth’s, Rexall’s and Howard Johnson’s, a two-bit Hanseatic democracy of the ordinary. Chicago was different in kind. In the neighborhoods filled with their Village and Paoli and Chelsea chic that he tramped through, Chicago grieved him, tore at his spirit and opened old wounds he was helpless to stanch. He roamed Rush Street, Old Town, Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue like someone seeking pornography, desire and need clobbering his spirit, drooling before the lush goods in the shop windows, eyeing the young housewives and fashionable women like a soiled madman. He was jealous of the well-dressed children, envying them their door-manned prerogatives and elevator buildings and begrudging them what he imagined would be their French and their quick minds, their nannies and good manners. A sycophant, whenever one bumped into him he apologized, diseased at the figure he cut in front of them. He walked lasciviously past brownstones, studio apartments, tall high-rises beehived with bachelor pads, the shared flats of stewardesses, young lawyers, radio announcers, journalists and photographers, sketching in their perfect taste and lovely freedom, their ease as they idly drummed a steering wheel, double-parked in small, open convertibles, persuaded of their ability with wine, their stereophonics and terrific records. (Tapes; they would be tapes now.) In a leathercraft shop he was annoyed with himself because, unlike the slim owner in the jeans and turtleneck, he was not a homosexual. He watched the young man greet a woman just returned from Europe, looked on as, laughing and talking, the faggot embraced her. Why, he likes her, he thought, he really likes her. Yet she doesn’t mean a thing to him. See how his eyes were open when he kissed her. Mine would have been shut tight and my cock would have been out to here. He hated himself because he was not artistic, light, healthy, easy. If such a girl kissed me I would ask her to marry me.
For more than a week he went to such sections of the city, hunting them like a ghost, restless, yet coveting tweed rather than flesh, wools and leathers more than body and form. Perhaps he yearned for an encounter, but in their bars and cocktail lounges he was silent. Nothing happened, he had no adventure, and after the first strong flush of sexuality he was as before — as he had been all his life — calmly admiring, sedately appreciative, his very hopelessness satisfying his lust by quenching it, by stripping him of illusions and granting him a sort of amnesty. All his life he had disposed of his sexuality this way. His tastes and greeds kept him single, fashion’s narrow bigot.
In despair he turned back to the condominium, hopeful of a ride with Mrs. Riker to the High-Low, the Stop-’n-Shop, the I.G.A., washed up on the condominium as on some shabby strand of the average. Never letting on and nursing his grudge like a gent, but for all that some wild and even noble revolutionary instinct smoldering in him. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Why couldn’t he have the things he wanted to have instead of the things — and those in probate — he had? Secretly he was niggered, chinkified, PR’d. If President Salmi knew his thoughts he’d find a way to break the will.
While the cupboard filled and he waited for his possessions from Missoula, he occupied his time by examining libraries — Northwestern’s was not far — purchasing stocks of paper, ballpoint pens, pencils, a new dictionary, a thesaurus. He priced electric typewriters. He even began to work up some ideas for a new lecture — on condominiums — and though he actually wrote about a dozen pages (perhaps twenty or so minutes of platform time), he worked desultorily and with no conviction that he would ever finish it. Indeed, he was more conscious of himself than ever. He knew he was lonely and began to miss his father, fantasizing a dignified life for the two of them in the apartment together. Actually he knew more people here than in Missoula. What had his life been like there? The same, he decided, certainly the same, yet somehow he hadn’t noticed. Maybe this was a good sign. Perhaps unhappiness wakes you up, a signal to the spirit like a chronic cough. All right, he was up.
He wondered how he’d managed to pass time since his heart attack. If he really was awake at last, then didn’t that make him a sort of Rip Van Winkle? Had he slept twenty years? Who’d robbed him in the night, then, of the beard he’d earned in his long sleep? How did he recognize the cars? Why was he not astonished by the jets circling his head in their holding patterns above O’Hare? Why weren’t the styles strange to him, the length of women’s skirts and the cut of men’s pants? How did he know the name of the President, and why didn’t television frighten him? In aspects other than the impersonal he was a true amnesiac, the public life realer to him than his own. Here he was, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate student — how did he know his age? who’d been keeping track of it for him? — lacking only his thesis for his Ph.D. in…what? (He knew, but could not remember why he’d gone into the field. He had no interest in it. He was no scholar. The collapse of the job market had been the one fortunate aspect of his academic career. Why impose him as a teacher on students who probably had more interest in his subject than he had?) He was certain only that he had been no better off in Missoula than he was in Chicago. It was solely this which kept him from returning there at once.