All this I can give you, Fred says.
You look up at the sky for help, but no one is there.
3. In the dark
It’s your life, Matt Kolb, not mine, though I follow you everywhere like a wraith on a string. I’m your invisible twin, your benchmark: I see you when you’re sleeping and I know when you’re awake. You’re snoring now in your overheated little studio apartment on Lexington Avenue. Your mouth is wide open; I’m sure I could see your tonsils if you had any.
Now you’re awake. You shower, shave, go down to the Greek’s for breakfast (two scrambled eggs, bacon, white toast). This is your ninth winter in New York, isn’t it, and what have you done with all those years? You lived on money from home, drew pulp illustrations of women in diaphanous draperies (five dollars apiece — they didn’t pay the rent); then you were an assistant editor at twenty-five dollars a week, then a reader for a literary agency, had an annulled marriage, and now you are a stripper in an offset platemaking shop. You’re traveling the wrong way on the rainbow, maybe, but you like this job because stripping (which doesn’t involve taking your clothes off) resembles the mimeography you used to do in high school, and because it gives you an appetite.
The platemaking shop is south of Canal, on a grim street of granite and wrought iron. Every morning, when you go there, you enter a big room with three glass-topped drafting tables along one wall, a fourth on the opposite side. Today the room is decorated with green and red crepe paper stapled around the walls; a scrawny Christmas tree cowers in the corner like December Morn. A radio is playing “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”
As you stand in the steamy warmth taking off your gloves and overcoat, you see that half a dozen people are already here. Lisa Gorman, one of the partners, is at her desk sorting envelopes and talking quietly to her gofer, Beth Bamforth. Lisa’s pink smock covers a multitude of bulges; Beth, who is young and willowy but long in the jaw, wears a violet wool dress. Jacob Stenzler, the badger-bearded chief stripper, is at his station on the left side of the room, and so are Tom and Rachel on the right.
Lisa’s business partner, Paul Trimm, a silent man who never seems to do anything but carpentry, stands by his workbench contemplating a piece of pine. His bulldog pipe is in his mouth. The shelves he builds always disappear into the platemaking room. How many shelves can they need back there?
As you hang up your coat, the door opens on a cold breeze; the platemakers, Angelo and Norman, enter together, slapping each other’s shoulders as if to brush off invisible snow, and crowd you a little as they take off their overcoats. Angelo is nineteen, smooth and muscular as a dolphin; Norman, curly-haired, is in his thirties. “Hallelujah, brother!” says Angelo. Then the two of them, arms around each other’s shoulders, dance like Dorothy and the Tin Woodman into the back room. Rachel Huffman, the new stripper, applauds; the rest look on without expression, except for Jacob, who exhales a cloud of pipe smoke as if there were a gnat in it.
Beth is handing out manila envelopes to the strippers. She puts two on Rachel’s table, three on yours, and gives you a pink smile. There is a bond between you> she is educated and believes you are too because of the way you talk. On your right, Tom Donnelly is sitting with his hands in his pockets, rumpled as usual, staring at his tabletop. Tom is a former partner in a platemaking shop, dumped long ago for some unknown disgrace. Today he looks as if he’s wearing yesterday’s shirt. He has steel-gray hair, not much of it, gray eyes, black-rimmed glasses. He’s a legend in this room. At the water cooler one day Lisa made some remark about his pot belly, and Tom replied, “I’ll put mine up against yours anytime, Lisa.”
“Everything okay?” you ask him.
He speaks out of the side of his mouth without turning his head. “I’m just sitting here saying ‘Shit.’”
“Buck up,” you say, “only ten more days to Christmas.”
Tom snorts. You flick the switch that illuminates your table, open your first envelope and look at the negatives. It’s a poster ad for a kitchen gadget; the headline, in transparent letters on the black background, reads:
SLICES ANYTHING!! ONLY $1.95!!!
You tape a sheet of yellow paper to the table and begin aligning the two negatives on it, one halftone-screened, the other not. You tape them down at the comers and begin cutting away part of each to make one composite negative that the boys in the back room will use to make the plate.
Rachel’s hands with their many bracelets are still in her lap. She is a handsome, high-colored young woman dressed today in purple and green. “Oh, boy, have I got a stummick cake,” she says. “I was to my brother’s on Long Guyland last night? I nevva shoulda ate the asparagus, it makes me bilious.”
You offer her a Tum. “Would this help?”
“Maybe, if I took the whole bottle.” A funny catch in her voice where the double t in “bottle” should be.
When Rachel goes to the water cooler with her tablet, Beth leans down to you confidentially. “Did you hear the glottal stop?” she asks, smiling. She puts the same funny pop in the middle of “glottal.” You don’t know how to reply: what is a glottal stop, exactly?
When Rachel gets up again, you try several times to reproduce the word as she spoke it. Tom rumbles, “Something wrong with your goddam throat today, I guess.”
“No.”
“Want some advice?”
“Sure.”
“Put a sock in it.”
You turn the yellow paper, tape it down again, and cut away the center portion. There are still a few transparent specks on the negative. You dab them with opaquing fluid; it is violet-brown, redder when it dries. You drop the finished job in your out basket and pick up another envelope.
Rachel is back, cautiously cutting her yellow paper. An exclamation; she sucks a broken fingernail. Angelo appears from the back room wearing what at first looks like a gray wig, but is in reality the head of a dirty mop held behind him by Norman. The radio is playing Jingle Bells; Angelo turns it off, then strikes an attitude with one hand on his heart and the other extended toward Jacob Stenzler. He sings,
Rachel is red-faced with suppressed laughter; Jacob and Lisa look gloomy. Beth at her station and Paul at his workbench seem bewildered.
Angelo bows repeatedly. “Thank you, thank you, you are so kind.” He kisses his fingers, waves them right and left; then he and Norman disappear through the doorway. Lisa and Beth are deep in conversation. Perhaps Angelo has gone too far this time; but after all, it’s Christmas.
You go to the toilet, a malodorous closet built of gypsum board. Inside, on one wall an untrained artist has drawn the outline of a naked woman; some critic has scraped away the whole crotch with a knife blade. On the opposite wall a quatrain has been censored in the same way:
You target two floating cigaret butts, pull the chain and send them whirling down to darkness. Where will they end up, in Australia, spinning clockwise?