"Is that your cat, Marley?" Sherman said. "It's insane."
"No, it isn't my cat," I said. "I don't know how the fuck it got in here." Then a thought occurred to me: I went and opened the door to the hallway. Then I went back to the bathroom. "Here, kitty," I said. "The door's open now." I avoided its eyes while I bent over, trying to reach Sherman's crutches without going into the room. The animal turned around and sprayed some distasteful fluid right at me. It had good aim, and got me all over my arm and chest. Then it let out another war cry. "Keep the crutches," I said. I went into the living room.
"God, Marley, this place is freezing," Sherman said, pulling an old shawl over himself that was covering a hole in the couch.
"Have some more vodka," I said. "This place has been freezing cold for months, that's why I stopped paying the rent. And now that son of a bitch is evicting me."
"Well, did you try talking to him?" Sherman said.
"I tried," I said. "But when I call him he has this goddamn answering machine and never returns my calls."
"Where does he live?" Sherman said.
"Downstairs."
"Go see him!" Sherman said. "Go see him and tell him you're dying in here, and there's a monster in the bathroom, and you're going to sue the pants off him!"
This was something that had not previously occurred to me. Swallowing another glass of vodka, I stood up and went out to tell that rotten bastard just what I thought of him.
Old Vardig lived down in the basement. I knocked on his door and had to wait five minutes or so. I could hear his crabbed shuffle as he grumbled to the door. "Who is it?" he said.
"Emergency!" I said. "Emergency! I'm from the ASPCA, open the door at once!"
This trick seemed to work; old Vardig opened the door and I slipped in. Jesus, his apartment was even worse, if such a thing was possible, than my own. It was furnished with a variety of old cast-out furniture, broken chairs, and a sort of rotten desk with one leg held up by books. No windows, and old scabbed walls, cracked from the water pipes, which were covered in a fine, furry mildew.
"What do you want, Mr. Mantello?" old Vardig said. He had the accent and persona of many nationalities—a big handlebar mustache encrusted with food, but whether this was an Armenian, Greek, Spanish, or Jewish mustache I couldn't say. The room had a rank smell; I saw he was in the middle of heating up some kind of food on a gas burner. And there, lying on the chair, was a big, sleeping cat—it might have been the brother or son to the monster that had taken over my bathroom upstairs. Old Vardig looked at me with soulful eyes. "I was just heating up a little soup for dinner," he said. "Care to join me?"
I thought to myself, Don't let the fact that he is pretending to be a kindly old geezer, all alone in the world, fool you. This guy is a rat, collecting rent and not bothering to heat the place at all.
He was a wheeler-dealer and conniver who owned half the buildings for miles, though he acted as if he were poverty-stricken, obliged to live in the basement and feed himself off cans of ravioli and peanut butter. But his arms were in good shape, burly, and sticking out from his gray slobbery undershirt.
Oh, I was in a rage: his basement hovel was toasty warm. He had a couple of kerosene heaters going, no wonder he was so deranged, he probably suffered from some kind of carbon monoxide poisoning. Still, I knew he was very timid in his soul, I was going to force him to listen to me. He bustled at the stove, pretending I had come down for nothing more than a chat. "So, how goes it with you?" he said.
"Listen, Vardig," I said, "I have a sick friend upstairs. I'm trying to paint. Damm it, I need the heat. You haven't heated this fucking dump all winter."
Vardig shook his head; his brown eyes appeared luminous and filled with sensitivity. "Marley, I'm glad you told me this. You know, this is the first complaint I've had, it's a good thing that someone told me. It's a shame you didn't tell me earlier, but just stopped paying your rent—you know I had to evict you, and I already have a new tenant lined up. You'll be out of here by Monday, I believe that's right. Well, there's only one thing to be done, so the new tenant doesn't suffer. I'll get some more oil, have my son take a look at the burner when he returns ..." And he showed me to the door, still jabbering.
I was speechless, I couldn't understand how I had just been bullied in such fashion. The man was a veritable magician, he had hypnotized me for the length of time it took to show me to the door. I banged on the door once or twice, but he didn't answer. Finally I went back upstairs.
"The man is insane," I said. "Is that cat still in the bathroom:
"Yeah," Sherman said. "I didn't see it come out, anyway. How am I going to get my goddamn crutches?"
"Listen, you'll stay here until the cat leaves," I said. "I'll fix us some supper."
For dinner I made up a large bowl of pancake batter, omit- ting any kind of baking powder or soda because I liked my pancakes to be very thin, though for some reason they always came out soggy—like large, flat, lumpy maggots. But this didn't stop me from trying again. I cooked up the cakie-wakes on the burner in a bunch of margarine. There wasn't enough margarine to keep them from burning, so I added some Crisco.
While they were cooking I suggested to Sherman that I help him around the loft so I could show him the paintings I was working on. I took his arm and slung it around my shouders and dragged him to the back of the place. "I want you to get a good look at the big canvas," I said.
"What is it?" Sherman said.
"It's going to be a painting of Ulysses getting home after his twenty years of wandering," I said. "This part is where he's being greeted by his filthy old dog. Right now it's just a rough outline, but I plan to make the dog one of those beagles that should have been put to sleep long ago, overweight, with not much hair left anymore: not even able to get up on all four legs, only the front, and with a soft, pleading look in his rheumy eyes."
Sherman shrugged. I could tell he wasn't too impressed. "Don't you think that Ulysses shit has been painted enough times already?" he said.
"You don't understand," I said. "Ulysses is going to be this kind of wild-eyed guy with a beard, wearing a denim jacket and blue jeans—like Larry Rivers or Larry Poons. Late forties, the kind of artist you see hanging around a bar, hasn't made it and never will. Not exactly talentless, just gets enough attention from time to time to make him feel justified in leeching off a wife who has to support him and the kids—a minor member of a school."
"Which is how you think I'm going to turn out," Sherman said.
I ignored this. "Anyway, Ulysses gets home and his wife is living in a sort of Cape Cod beach house. Stuck between a hamburger joint and an ice-cream stand: he's back after twenty years to see if his wife has got a couple of dollars she could maybe loan him ..."
Well, I was all excited just talking about it. But something in my words depressed Sherman. "You're not exactly in sync with the times, Marley," he said. "Maybe you know something I don't, but your work seems like a lot of stuff that was done in the late seventies."
I pushed his arm off my shoulders and let him try to balance on one leg. "Oh, look, I don't mean to turn on you," Sherman said. "It's just that whenever you start talking, I think about Lacey. I know I wasn't easy to get along with, I have this tendency to sulk and stuff, but I mean if it wasn't for all those ideas you put into her head I know we'd still be together. Can't you give her a job and tell her good things about me this time?"
All of a sudden I could smell something peculiar emanating from the stove. It had taken me awhile to notice it; that cat shit was an effective block to all other odors. "Aw, fuck, the pancakes!" I said, running to the stove and leaving Sherm in the middle of the room.
While I was juggling with the burning pancakes on the stove, the telephone rang. "Could you get that!" I yelled to Sherman.