One chilly day when I’d been cleaning, I suddenly stopped, took my army jacket off the back of the red chair, and walked into the kitchen. “I’m going out for a while,” I called in to where Marilyn lay on the daybed.
She looked up, then frowned. “You don’t even have your shoes on …!”
“I know.” I stepped out the kitchen door and pulled it to behind me.
Barefoot on the hall’s tile, I slid one arm and the other down the jacket sleeves. My jeans were ones I’d gotten from my cousin and slightly too long. Going down the stairs, when I stopped on the marble landing, I got the backs under the foot, between my heels and the grey-white stone — in one of whose worn depressions, under the reticulated glass in the hall window, a foot-wide amoeba of yellow water glimmered, with three butts afloat.
My plaid shirt (with no sleeve buttons and a large hole in the elbow) was open. I didn’t button it up now but just zipped frayed drab halfway up in front of it. Coming out through the vestibule, I walked down the cold stoop.
The air was still.
The sky was gray.
Between two cars, I stepped over a broken beer bottle onto the street’s smoother macadam, and crossed to the alley. On the far sidewalk, I glanced back at our second floor window behind the fire escape, to see if Marilyn had gone to look after me.
But she hadn’t.
With the mechanical glances at the pavement for glass of the barefoot New Yorker, I went out through the alley and walked toward Avenue B. I hadn’t even taken my notebook with me, which was unusual. Past the drugstore, I strolled on for another block. At the corner, I lifted some change from my pocket. Coins slipped by my fingers. Two nickles lay on my palm.
Though subways had just gone up, the Staten Island Ferry was still a nickel each way.
Among the other coins, there’d be the subway fare to and from the boat. I began to zig-zag up toward the Astor Place stop.
Inside the turnstile, while I stood next to the worn red counter of the news kiosk, I started looking at the headlines of the various papers stacked there. I went from one to the other, my hands in my pockets, reading whatever text was on the page. After a minute, the man who’d been stacking papers beside me went in, sucked his teeth, and put his fists down behind the green and yellow boxes of chewing gum. “You wanna buy somethin’?”
I glanced at him.
“I asked you, you wanna buy somethin’?”
I looked back at the papers.
“Hey, I’m talkin’ to you! You wanna buy somethin’? You don’t wanna buy somethin’, get away from the fuckin’ papers, huh?”
I looked at him again.
“Hey, I’m talkin’ to you! You wanna buy somethin’? Just tell me: Yes or No?”
I frowned, questioningly.
He looked uncomfortable. Finally he said, “Jesus Christ, get away from the fuckin’ papers, will you?”
I blinked.
“Get away!”
I stepped back, turned aside. I hadn’t shaved that morning. Maybe, I thought, I should grow my beard back.
From where she stood at the edge of the platform by one of the columns, a young woman with low heels, short hair, and a black coat glanced at me, very seriously.
On the subway, I sat with my heels in the aisle, hands in pockets, and toes up, looking at the people pointedly not looking at me. It was about three and not very crowded. Somewhere before South Ferry, I remembered my dream of § 6.611. I think I laughed. I walked up the stairs, came out of the station, and continued on up into the ferry terminal — to slide my nickel between the steel lips of the green stile; and pushed through.
I’d thought to linger in the waiting room, looking at the concessions along the walls (postcards, magazines, candy bars …), watching the passengers; but at the far wall the long metal doors were already rolling back on the small wheels on their high rails. And the lights above the door said the boat was in. The dozen people standing there began to walk forward. I walked between the wooden benches to follow them.
Moments later, by wheels and chains and pulleys, as I came down the ramp onto the upper deck, the engine thrum rose. I walked through the cabin by the hotdog and hamburger concession and out to the back deck. After another minute, the boat lugged out from the dock, beginning its hugely attenuated, slow motion sway. Above the top of the cabin, I saw the city slip to the side. We floated out between, then banged once into, the sagging wall of pilings.
Cold air pried like a shoe horn under my collar. What I hoped — realized, indeed, I’d been hoping it for several days — was that someone, maybe not too different from me, might simply start speaking to me, warmly, understandingly.
I wouldn’t speak in reply.
But I wouldn’t have to.
If there was something sexual in the meeting, it would be silent and known. But as I glanced at the elderly woman to my left at the waist-high gate before the chain, then at the two businessmen — one holding his gray hat and, with napping coat, turning now to go back into the cabin — I knew I wouldn’t find it here. Back inside, I walked down the gritty steps, looking out the scarred and stained windows over gray water without feature, to wander the oily plates between the parked cars on the boat’s lower level.
Before we pulled into the far slip, I went up on the passenger deck again.
You had to go out, around, pay another nickel, then come in again. In the Staten Island terminal’s waiting room, I sat on the benches a while. Then I walked around a bit.
Among the concessions, in one corner was a florist booth. It was made of green wood — like a shoeshine parlor. Inside was a refrigeration unit with glass doors. Outside, on a green wooden step, stood some cardboard vases, like the ones in which my father had occasionally received particularly cheap floral presentations for funerals. One was full of some scraggly orange flowers. Along a ledge at the booth’s top were clamped some small spotlights. Shafts of yellow beamed down, one falling on some roses leaning over the rim of an earthen pot. In the terminal’s high hall, the dark and dusty hue of paint flaked from an old barn, their lapped petals were menacingly beautiful.
Puttering busily at the counter inside, the guy running the place was fifty, squat, balding, and probably Irish. Out at the elbows, his maroon cardigan showed a dirty striped shirt beneath. A two-inch pencil was stuck behind one ear, and he looked like he should have been chewing a cigar stub — but he wasn’t. He wore gray workman slacks and new high-topped basketball sneakers, striated rubber around the toes and rubber circles over the ankle’s black cloth, suggesting the sorest of feet or an even worse orthopedic infirmity —
Because sneakers on an adult (in that time when construction workers rode to their jobs on the subway wearing jackets and ties — however beat up — perhaps with their workshoes on, perhaps wearing a knitted cap, only to change into overalls at the site) were almost as rare then as my lack of shoes.
Half a dozen years later, indeed, bare feet on urban kids would flower as commonly as poodles on Park Avenue in spring. But as I stood, watching the man, the stall, the flowers, I realized I’d only seen people barefoot in New York streets twice before in my life. Once, when I’d been leaving the 135th Street subway station, I’d watched a very tall black man in black suit and clerical collar coming down the steps, followed by two equally tall black women in nun’s outfits. The man’s immense feet were naked. As they passed me, at each step long toes sliding from beneath the habits’ hems, I realized the smiling women were barefoot too. The one nearest me, on her dark foot had a bunion on her little toe the size and color of an unpeeled almond. Chatting together in a foreign language (were they some kind of reverse African missionaries?), the three had walked by as I turned to stare. The next time was at night in the Village, perhaps a couple of years later, when some seventeen-year-old kid with lots of curly red hair, a blue plaid shirt, and one hand and arm shortened and deformed by a birth defect, ran down the steps of a coffee shop on the east side of MacDougal Street to sprint past Marilyn and me, and — as I turned, surprised, to watch — vanished around the corner of Bleecker, so that the last I saw of him was the street light on one, then his other, naked heel, with just the lozenge of pavement dirt at their center. Such unshod incidents were rare enough so that, wondering what people might make of me, I remembered both now.