And he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and then he writes it again, and he cannot get it just the way he wants it. And as he writes it, the years pass; he marries and divorces, and he marries and divorces again and then again; children are born, and he is still writing the poem, and he cannot get it the way he wants it. Sometimes he can’t see it anymore. He is under the poem, and it is threatening to crush him. He wants the bullshit out of it; don’t you see? B.K. hopes to purify MS. of all B.S. and climb said hill, and he cannot get over it. There are days when he feels he is pushing the poem toward the top, and he can almost see the other side, but then, like Sisyphus, he cannot get it to roll over the summit.
And so one morning in October, the false Kleinfeld is gently easing a turd from his aged ass into poorly functioning toilet bowl in aforementioned rat hole with the window shade slightly raised for viewing traffic below and large warehouse building across the street, where renovations have been underfoot for quite some time, and he sees her again, the woman he has seen often, nearly every day for many months, and has heard tell about, the tall, striding woman with a pair of tits that make his heart stop. There she is again in another coat, a fern-green number with wide sleeves and some kind of built-in scarf that sweeps over her shoulder. Kleinfeld has an idea that the woman has a closet with nothing but coats in it and another for boots, since those changed, too. She is wrapped up daily, he thinks, in the magic of money, which means simply this: You can tell she isn’t thinking about the coat or the boots; they just are. The poor wear their prizes — the gleaming new leather shoes, the just-off-the-rack sweater, the expensive gloves — with a stiff self-conscious air that gives them away. No, her mind is on greater things, he says to himself. You can tell by the little V between her eyebrows, a philosophical wrinkle, he believes, not a run-of-the-mill V carved in deep by sick worry about rent money and groceries. Hadn’t he spied her once, quite by accident, on the remote F train reading Schelling? God help us, the woman was reading Friedrich von Schelling on the F as calmly as if she were gliding through theDaily News. The old Bruno, the speed demon, had looked into Schelling once as an undergraduate and had taken a bad fright, equaled only by his opening up the Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who also scared the boy witless. This was not some regular dame. No, this was a doll with high tastes, with ideas dancing in her head like fireflies. The lady’s hair was a jumble of curls and her eyes were big and wide and dark, and she had a long neck and wide, square shoulders, and that day, that October morning, as she crossed the street below him, just as she had crossed it many times before, he saw something vulnerable and hurt cross her face that came like a breeze and, as it blew, she suddenly looked very young. Her mouth, her brows, her eyes all contributed to the expression, which didn’t last long, but it seemed to Kleinfeld’s double, sitting there on the pot, boxers around his ankles, that the pain he had seen and she had felt had come and gone with a single grievous thought about someone.
That vision kicked him loose. It kicked loose the kid, the base stealer, the poet of pizzazz, of confidence, and that lost charmer, the original Kleinfeld, returned, at least for a moment, and I (for it was I, the Bruno Kleinfeld of old) wiped my ass hastily but thoroughly, grabbed the jeans and shirt lying in a heap before me, whisked my jacket off the hook near the door with its four locks, checked the pocket for keys, hurtled down the stairway, out the door into the street, and chased the lady like some half-cocked troubadour. I yelled, “Stop!”
She stopped and turned. She wasn’t my Harry yet. Oh no, she was the lady with the coats, who had swiveled on her boot heels to look down at me. She was tall, and the childlike look of vulnerability was nowhere to be seen. Her brows came together disdainfully, and I felt the loser rising up, the miserable faker, but it was too late. I stuck out my hand. “Bruno Kleinfeld, your neighbor. I wanted to meet you.”
Harry, the stranger, smiled just a little, and took my hand. “Good to meet you, Mr. Kleinfeld,” she said.
I kid you not, the sun came out from behind a cloud at that very moment and lit up the street, and I grabbed the moment, for that is what we must do if we don’t want women to pass us by, and I said, “A fateful luminosity!”
She looked confused. What had I meant? What did she think I had meant? I could see her struggle to understand. She smiled, embarrassed.
“The gods approve!” I blurted.
She examined me silently. I have rarely known anyone who took such a long time between sentences. Finally, she said, “Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld?”
She reminded me of Mrs. Curtis, my ninth-grade biology teacher at Horace Mann. Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld? This is America. Who says, “Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld?” except high school teachers?
“Of us,” I said, “of our fortuitous meeting.”
“I thought fortuitous meant by accident, by chance. It looks to me as if you’ve chased me down.”
Harry and I agreed on the dialogue up to that point, word for word. The exchange was branded into what would become our mutual brain. We tussled over the next part of the scene. I still swear up and down and across and under and in every direction that I dove right in and asked her to dinner. She swore that we went round and round with the word fortuitous and that I had obviously blocked it out because she got the better of me in the etymology department. Latin, forte—by chance. The word does not mean “fortunate.” I know that! I had merely hoped that she had not noticed my wild pursuit of her post-dump (which she knew nothing about until later when I confessed that she had brightened my bowel movements many a day). Harry had a pedantic side, a persnickety grammar-teacher side that sometimes made me nuts. You thought about fortuitous, and you thought you said what you thought about it, but you never did. It happens. It happens. That’s what I told her, but she didn’t believe me.
I’m not sure which Bruno Kleinfeld showed up at the restaurant three nights later. The character who shaved beforehand was the same old louse of useless recriminations. What woman would want the asshole in the mirror who’s been writing the same poem for twenty-five years, who teaches two creative writing classes at Long Island University for twelve thousand dollars a year, who does freelance copyediting and a book review here and there for next to nothing, who’s a failure with a capital F ? Anxiety cramped my lungs, and I puffed shallow breaths while I ironed my good shirt, the one my daughter Cleo had given me for my birthday the March before. On top of that, I’d borrowed the hundred bucks to take Harry out from Louise, the woman down the hall, who had waggled her finger at me and said in her screeching voice, “This isn’t charity, Bruno, you’ve got to pay me back!” My heart was running a marathon while I stood stock-still, and I had started to sweat in the clean, pressed shirt. The tension was paralyzing. I stood in front of my door for about five minutes. The force that pushed me through it was loneliness — the bad, restless, anguished, pulverizing kind of loneliness I felt I couldn’t abide anymore.