He seemed to be waiting for a reply, but before it could be given he turned and walked away rapidly, leaving Allbee alone under the lamp.
12
LEVENTHAL strode home blindly and rapidly, his stout body shaken by the unaccustomed gait. Perspiration ran from his bushy, lusterless hair over his dark skin. He was thinking that he should have done something, slammed Allbee on the head, not let him off. He felt he had answered stupidly, although he did not know what he should have told him; he was unable to remember all that had been said. But as the first throbs of anger began to pass into soreness, it began to appear to him that he had known all along, all through the conversation, what to do and had failed to do it, that he had been unequal to what was plain, clear, and necessary. “I ought to have done it,” he thought, “even if it meant murdering him.”
Just then, the blink of a yellow light in the middle of the street started him into a trot. An eddy of exhaust gas caught him in the face. He was behind a bus. A tearing of gears carried it forward, and he came up on the curb, breathless. He rested a moment and then went on, gradually slowing to his ordinary pace. His head ached. There was a spot between his eyes that was particularly painful; the skin itself was tender. He pressed it. It seemed to have been the dead center of all his staring and concentration. He felt that his nerves were worse than ever and that his rage had done him harm, affected his very blood. He had an impression of bad blood as something black, thick, briny, caused by sickness or lust or excessive anger. His heart quickened again. He cast a glance behind. Several people were going in the other direction. “Let him better not come near me,” he muttered. His brain was clearer, and the single thought of murder that had risen in it was gone. However, he regretted not having hit Allbee and would almost have welcomed another chance. What was the use of wasting words on such people? Hit them! That was all they understood. A woman in the movies whom Mary had asked to remove her hat, two or three years ago, had turned around and uttered some insult about the “gall of Jews.” Woman or no, Leventhal had had a powerful desire to drive his fist into her head, tear the hat off. He had afterwards argued with Mary that there were times when that should be done. “Where would it get you?” was Mary’s answer. Practically, she was right, no doubt; she knew the value of staying cool. But he regretted it. Oh, how he sometimes regretted not slapping off that hat. With his father it had at least been “gib mir die groschke,” a potentially real compensation. “But what about me?” Leventhal asked with an arrested upward glance of his large meditative eyes. There was a murky redness in the clouds, absorbed from the neon lights and the clock tower on Fifth Avenue. His father had believed in getting his due, at any rate. And there was a certain wisdom in that. You couldn’t say you were master of yourself when there were so many people by whom you could be humiliated. As for Mary, she must have been thinking, in answering, of the night he had pushed her, years ago in Baltimore. Perhaps she wanted to remind him of it. Of course, there was no excuse for that. But he still felt that the woman’s hat should have been snatched off and hurled away.
And he uttered a low, unwilling laugh when he recalled how he had stood, just stood, without the presence of mind to realize that he was being insulted. It did have to do with presence of mind, exactly as in the case of Dunhill, the linotyper who sold him the unwanted ticket. With Allbee there was the added confusion that he brought off his insults with an air of discussion. When he started out, even though he made a crooked joke here and there, he seemed to be speaking impersonally. But all at once he said something in earnest that was terrible. Of course, he was sick. He himself had brought up the subject of disease, so he must be aware of it. But did his sickness, whatever it was, account for what he said, or would good health only have given him the strength to keep it to himself? Some people, gentle to begin with, were kind when they were sick. Leventhal said to himself, impatiently, “There are two billion people or so in the world and he’s miserable. What’s he so special?”
Mrs Nunez was standing on the brownstone stoop. She and her husband had just returned from a Sunday outing. She carried gloves and a red patent-leather bag. Her hat was a white straw with cherries on the brim. Her Indian face was small, but she had an ungainly, full-hipped figure. She wore a close-fitting striped suit, her shoulders were raised, her bosom was high, and her lips were parted as if at the end of a long breath. Mary, whom nothing escaped, had once said about Mrs Nunez’ suits, “I don’t see why she wears them. She could look very pretty in silk prints.” Till then Leventhal had scarcely noticed her. Now, when she said good evening and he nodded to her, he remembered this and had a moment of intense longing for his wife.
“Were you caught in the rain?” said Mrs Nunez.
“No, I slept through the whole storm.”
“We were in Prospect Park to see the flowers. My brother works in the hothouse. My, it was terrible. A tree fell down. The lightning hit it.”
“That must have been frightening.”
“Terrible. We were inside. But I was scared. Oh, awful,” she said with a release of breath. “Your missis coming back already?”
“Not yet.”
She drew the gloves out and worked them with her long brown fingers whose size and strength he noted in absent-minded surprise.
“Coming soon?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, too bad, too bad,” she said in her light, flat, rapid way. Leventhal had often paused at the Nunez’ door to listen, entertained, to their quick-running Spanish, not a word of which he understood. “Too bad,” she repeated, and Leventhal, with a glance of surmise at her small face under the white brim, wondered what hint her sympathy might contain. There was a burst of music above them; a window was thrown open.
“I’ll be a bachelor for a month or so yet,” he said.
“Oh, maybe you enjoy yourself anyhow; makes you a change for a while.”
“No,” he said bluntly.
He went into the foyer where Nunez’ dog scampered at him, jumping up. He bent and clasped the animal, and rubbed its head. It licked his face and pushed its muzzle into his coat under his sleeve.
“She’s crazy about you,” said Nunez from the doorway. “I think she smells you coming.” He was polishing his glasses with a flowered handkerchief of his wife’s. Beside the bed, in his room, there were beer cans and newspapers.
“That’s a friendly dog. I have a soft spot for dogs myself.”
“Up, Smoke,” said Nunez. “Do hounds ever faint, Mr Leventhal? Sometimes I think this one is going to faint when you rub her belly.”
“I don’t know. Do animals faint? Does anyone faint from pleasure?”
“Somebody,” Nunez joked. {A lady with a weak heart, maybe. Look a” that, on her back. Look a” that chest on her.”. He put on his glasses and held the edge of the door. The red of the foyer and the yellow of his flat were drawn on its black panels. His sport shirt was open, and a religious medal swung over the twist of hair between the muscles of his dark, reddish breast.
“Come in and have a beer,” he said.
“I can’t, thanks, I have something to do.” Leventhal remembered that he had not yet reached Elena. It occurred to him, moreover, that Nunez had been a witness to his scuffle with Allbee in the hall. He looked at him uncomfortably and moved toward the stairs.
For the third time he got no answer at Villani’s and he began to be anxious. The Villanis had young children, and young children had to be put to bed. It was already after eight. “Maybe I’d better go out and see Elena and Phil,” he said to himself. “I don’t have anything to do tonight.” But his concealed thought was that Villani’s absence was a bad sign. He set out again, nodding to Mrs Nunez on the stoop as though he saw her for the first time.