The man directed a dead stare at the facing wall. There was something so stark about him that Albert thought he had no right to look. He hadn't seen George in several months, or longer even, and George looked different, thinner, smaller, severe, sitting under a radio on a shelf, the music so foreign to the figure of the man that Albert felt a need to turn it off.
But he stayed where he was in the dim passage. He was seeing something completely concealed, an unwhisperable thing under the standoff man, the taciturn man hard to befriend. He felt guilty looking into the room and guilty again moving away, backing away, but he backed away quietly and turned toward the light of a dangling bulb.
He went down the wrong passage and into a narrower place, pipes running horizontally along the walls and a cloacal stink beginning to emerge. He walked over a grated drain where the smell was profound, a sorrowful human sewage, and it took him a while to find a door that led outside.
Mike the Book had a flourish he did with his hand. It was broad and Roman, a flat hand moving parallel to the earth as a gesture of burial or a way of writing finis to something significant.
That night Albert and Klara made love in the moonlight. It was sweet and easy and seemingly endless, a love so lost to time he felt they'd found a spirit-life that would protect them from human flaw, with a small fan buzzing in the corner and an aria drifting from a radio on a fire escape somewhere.
He wasn't sure who she was, lying next to him in the dark, but this was something they could overcome together.
8
Up on the roofs, the tar beaches, they put suntan oil on their arms and legs and sat on blankets wearing shorts, the girls did, or jeans rolled to the knees, and they oiled their faces and sat listening to a portable radio until the heat was too intense to bear and then they sat a little longer.
They sang the week's top songs along with the radio, down the list from forty, and they got the words, the pauses, the dips and swerves, every intonation point-blank perfect, but only the songs they liked of course.
The tar softened and fumed and the heat beat down and the green gnats stuck to their bodies and across the way the pigeon kid sent his birds into spiral flight with a bamboo pole, and waved a towel at times, and whistled like a traffic cop, and his flock mixed in midair with a rival flock from a roof three blocks away, a hundred-birded tumult and blur, and younger birds flew with the wrong flock and were captured and sometimes killed, dispatched within the rules by the rival flyer of the other roof, and after a while the girls had to leave because the sun was just too smoking hot, singing lyrics as they rolled their blankets up.
They took the bus out to the beach and people kept crowding on and Nick got jammed in the back with Gloria instead of Loretta. They stood hanging from the straps and every time the bus turned or stopped there was a certain amount of body contact that was unavoidable, except they could have avoided it, and Nick reacted deadpan and Gloria smiled and this was a ride that took approximately forever.
Section 13 was the pickup section at the beach but they put their blanket down at the first available space because they were here with each other and the beach was just as crowded as the bus.
Guys rode the shoulders of other guys and hand-fought, the riders, in shallow water.
Blankets with radios, food, rented umbrellas, sand bodies crammed together, cardplayers, sailor hats, suntan oil.
Loretta came out of the water and he threw her a towel, the only towel they'd brought, four people, and he watched her stand above the blanket, in a vast sand nation of blankets, the horseshoe beach stretching to a rock jetty in either direction, and he watched Loretta shake the water off her hair and finger-stick the towel in her ears.
A guy stood on his hands before toppling into a blanket he didn't belong to and there were looks and words and people brushing sand.
Juju stood up to put oil on his body.
"Let them see you/'Gloria said.
"The weight lifter," Loretta said.
"Show them your forearms, Juju."
"It's funny what you can do on a beach," Loretta said, "which if you did it on a street corner, they'd throw stones."
"Flex for them, they're watching," Gloria said.
An ice-cream vendor made his way among the blankets, wearing all white, his face gone pink in the high sun, and if you bought a two-stick pop you'd never get to the second half before it melted in your hand.
Nick hit the water and went deep and felt the shatter-shock when he emerged, lungs tight and eyes salt-burned, the bracing change of worlds.
Women removed the wet bathing suits of their children with the kids wrapped in towels and then dressed the kids, underwear and all, still in towels, like writhing magic acts in the desert.
Loretta was facedown on the blanket, asleep, sand sticking to her back, and he rested on an elbow next to her, blowing softly on her shoulder.
They had the rear seat of the bus to themselves on the ride back, the motor right below them, heat beating up, and they dozed on each other's shoulders, faces sun-tight and eyes stinging slightly, tired, hungry, happy, the bus belching heat beneath them.
He stood in the dark hallway and watched her.
"Gloria, you're so bad."
"I'm not bad. You're bad."
"Ibu're so bad."
"If I'm bad, what are you?"
"Gloria, come here, Gloria."
"What do you want?"
"Come here a minute."
"What for come here? Come here for what?"
"You're a cunt, Gloria."
"What do you want?"
"You're a cunt, Gloria."
"Say something nice, Nicky."
She was smiling, he wasn't.
"You're so bad. You're really bad."
"I'm bad? Who's bad?"
She was rolling her hips under his hands and smiling.
"Ibu're a cunt in and out and up and down. You're an all-over cunt through and through."
"Try and say something nice for a change," she told him.
Nick carried the last crate of empties up through the hatchway and slid it into the side of the truck. Then he sat in the truck with Muzz the driver, who had sweat running through his shirt and eating up the colors, turning the whole shirt gray.
"I say all right."
"Let's move."
"I say all right. But this is ridiculous," Muzz said.
"Let's go, let's go."
"I got up this morning. I cun't believe it. I said to myself."
"Drive, drive, I'm dying."
"You take your salt pills? Take your salt pills."
When they were stopped for a light a car nudged them from behind.
Muzz looked into the side mirror.
"You hit my bumpah you fuck."
The guy in the car said something.
"You hit my bumpah you fuck."
The guy said something.
"You trying to do?" Muzz said.
The guy spoke into his windshield.
"Tell him," Nick said. "Where'd you get your license?"
Muzz put his head out the window but did not turn toward the car behind them.
"Where'd you get your license to drive that piece of shit?"
The guy said something into the windshield.
"Tell him Sears Roebuck or what?" Nick said.
Muzz looked into the mirror, his face an inch from the glass.
"Sears Roebuck you fuck?"
The light changed and people began to blow their horns,
"Get mad," Nick told him. "Tell him you'll ram your tire iron up his ass."
Muzz had his face an inch from the mirror, enunciating slowly into the glass. Sweat was running along the crease in his lower back, down into his pants. They were blowing their horns back there.