“Rehearsing in the Russian manner, are you. You’re looking for a certain perfection of tonal combination and perfect pitch to be performed by a big-time vituoso, are you. You’ve got a deadline, have you. Well, you’re a bullshitter. Who the fuck has ever heard of you. Nobody. Nobody. And nobody is ever going to hear of you.”
Drawing her mink tighter around her, I thought I could see tears in her eyes. And better than the daggers that I thought were there. And just as she nearly had the taxi door closed, she said something to the taxi driver and opened it again and said her final parting words.
“Well, whoever it was, in the Russian manner you were fucking, you were pumping your personal genes into her. Well go ahead, pump some more. All she’ll beget is a fucking nonentity like you, who’s so prurient he gets a hard-on over a horny old hag like my adoptive mother. And don’t you ever think you’re ever going to get a penny of my money that you married me for. You Irish bastards always think you’re the cat’s meow. Good-bye. And meow, meow.”
Left standing there, the harshness of her words ringing in my ears I watched her taxi disappear around the corner onto Fifth Avenue. And found myself saying to myself, Hey gee, kiddo, you poor goddamn fortune hunter, you need a fucking break. I walked the few blocks up and over to Fifty-seventh Street to the Art Students League. Looking up at its darkened windows, the building seemed closed. It sure didn’t start with Butterfield 8, but I scribbled my less revered, newly installed telephone number in a note to Aspasia to call me in the morning, and found a place to put it in the door. At the nearby late-night grocery store I bought a tub of walnut ice cream. Walking down Seventh Avenue my feet now feeling frozen cold, I stopped and looked into the windows of the crowded Stage Delicatessen, remembering and reminded of the sharp smell of sauerkraut on the air in the zoo, as two figures came out, talking.
“You know, Sidney, always remember I’m ready to show the way. You’re an upper-echelon-type person. But I wouldn’t want your perfect sense of culture to be like an obstacle and slow you down in commerce. Otherwise, I’m convinced you’re outstanding.”
“I’m glad you said that, Arnold, because you’re sincerely the kind of person in whose direction I’d like to travel.”
Listen and you can hear sensible words spoken by these people who could be composers, playwrights, or actors. Scoffing back over a beer their massive thick corned beef sandwiches swabbed with mustard and dipping their forks into mouthfuls of coleslaw. Ticket brokers to the big Broadway musicals. Stagehands who shift the sets backstage. On their momentous salaries replenishing their energy to be able to go sit with the newspaper and study their investments on Wall Street. Some pretentious fucker just the other side of the steamed-up window, shooting his cuffs with gold links the size of mountain boulders and a big round diamond ring on his pinky finger. Showbiz habitués. Cigars in their mouths. Shiny fabrics on their backs, fancy shoes on their feet, and shirts pleated down their chests. Who keep the serious composer down. Before I shake a fist through the window at the inmates and leave before they call the police, I stop to wonder. And remember that just tonight I overheard Sylvia shouting at her adoptive mother, as she now calls her, back at Sutton Place and she was shouting, “Don’t you tell me what the fuck to do.” It was in reply to Drusilla’s quieter words, spoken first.
“Is there any way you can think of to treat him well. He might then be your liege man.”
“Why. Are you going to treat him well.”
“If you don’t Sylvia maybe somebody else will.”
Now left friendless on the street this could be my life. Heaped upon one the burden of someone who thinks you are a failure. Sneering and running off to better things. Away from a nobody. Well who the fuck isn’t a nobody. When you finally end up at best a name on a stone in a cemetery. She asked me to marry her and then turns around to tell me I married her for her money. What was I supposed to do, throw a tantrum, say I can’t marry you because she was rich. But all that’s happened is I’ve got poorer. She didn’t like it when I said that in the glow of glory the igniting spark of disaster always lurks. Boy did that little aphorism stop her to think for a few seconds. Hard now to recall that we had in the earlier days of our association done impromptu things like to actually go for an ice cream soda. One day I even prevailed on her to take the subway. Because she didn’t take subways. Because the Witherspoon Triumphingtons didn’t take subways. And had never been on one in her life. So I blurted out. Holy Christ millions do it every day. Let’s go to Coney Island. Which sports its slogan as the sand bar that became the world’s largest playground. She was both suspicious and amazed. And stunned silent on the subway train one could see she was wondering which way to go and what to do to get out. Any second I thought she might jump up from her wicker seat and run for it. And finally we got out at Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island. We went munching hot dogs along the boardwalk and on the hard sand washed by the gray green ocean. I showed her the shell of a horseshoe crab thrown up on the shore and hoping to make an impression said it was one of nature’s most ancient creatures. From the top of the Ferris wheel we could see for miles to the horizon and the distant ships at sea. And turned upside down in the Cyclone, we could see the ground. Then on the roller coaster they called the Gravity Road she was as cool as ice in the front car and grinning as it plunged on its tracks like a stone and seemed headed into oblivion and it scared the living shit out of me. On firm land again, I yawked up my frankfurter and sauerkraut while she tried not to be seen to laugh. We visited the freak shows, the penny arcades and went on the carousel, the folksy music of the organ throbbing away. Screaming squirming children and every nationality passing by. It turned out to be both the happiest and most miserable day I ever spent with her. Sylvia saying, “Holy gee wizz, hey, has all this been here all this time way out here beyond Canarsie. It’s real humanity in all its forms, flavors and colors.”
Coming back on the train between the Eighteenth Avenue and Ditmas Avenue stations, we were assailed by some kids in an empty car. I was standing looking at the map, reading the subway stops and without making too much of a nightmare of it I was trying to work out how to take the free transfer on the Culver shuttle to the Fourth Avenue line in order to get off the subway at a stop near Pell Street without a nightmare of taking the wrong train and ending up in Canarsie. I felt a poke in my back, and as I turned around, a long-bladed hunting knife was pointed at my heart. His associates grinning behind him, a spokesman kid in a black leather jacket adorned with a skull and crossbones now pointed the weapon lower, at my crotch.
“Hey daddyo I’ll cut your balls off if you don’t give us all your money. And the lady’s money, too.”
“Hey kid, hold it a second, let’s talk.”
“You don’t talk, daddyo. I talk. I give the orders.”
“Kid, why you wasting your time. You could be running a big business with your gang there behind you.”
“I said shut up, daddyo and give us your money fast, or I’ll cut you.”
“If you so much as move a muscle, kid, I’ll knock your head off.”
The kid moved a muscle. Jabbed out the knife. Caught me in the shoulder padding of my jacket as I sidestepped and grabbed his wrist. The knife blade cut through my sleeve. But my fist landed on his jaw so hard, it sent him on a fly halfway down the train. His brave jeering associates retreating just as we were pulling into the Ditmas Avenue station. The knife wielder minus his knife, scrambling up off his back, his face spouting blood as he ran, following his confederates out the train door. Nearly knocked over a woman getting on the train, who screamed. As the train pulled out I could see the gang through the window, racing toward the exit on the platform. One of them had enough theatrical flair to stop, and his thumb stuck in his teeth, made a Mafia curse sign at me. Then the darkness again of the tunnel as the train continued on its long way toward its final destination in the northern Bronx. And I missed the free transfer on the Culver shuttle. Sylvia sat silent all the way back to Manhattan and Delancey Street, where we got a free transfer back downtown to Canal. I thought she’d been left in shock. But it slowly became evident she was on the side of the marauding gang. And showing that, despite wanting to avoid rubbing shoulders with New York’s subway millions somewhere buried in her psyche there was a strong streak of sympathy for the criminally minded downtrodden.