A Strange Commonplace (5 page)

Pearl Gray Homburg

T
HE OLD MAN WEARS A PEARL GRAY HOMBURG, BRAND new from the looks of it. He opens the apartment door and enters the long dim hallway, then leans heavily against the wall and bangs the door shut. He sighs deeply, the sigh, in a practiced glissando, becoming a pathetic moan, which, however, ceases abruptly. For he remembers, as he remembers every night, although he tries not to remember, that there is nobody in the apartment to hear his sighs and moans, to ask him if he is all right. His goddamned wife is dead, his brothers are dead, his daughter is dead, his son is somewhere at sea or in the Army, who cares where he is, and Claire, his niece Claire, has been dead for so long that he hardly thinks of her any longer. But her beautiful face does come to him on occasion, in dreams, as they say, or daydreams. He takes off his homburg. Pearl gray is the only proper shade for a homburg. He walks down the hallway, the old floor creaking under the worn runner. Claire would be about sixty-five had she not died. Whore that she was, he has nothing to reproach himself for, never did. His pearl gray homburg is the proof of that. His oxford gray shadow-stripe suit is the proof of that.

An Apartment

H
ERE IS A GROUND-FLOOR APARTMENT, THE CYNOSURE of which is a Philco floor-model radio, circa 1935. It sits between two closed windows, which look out on an empty urban street. Each window is half-covered by a dark-green roller shade, whose pulls cords move, almost imperceptibly, in a current of air that may come from underneath the door to the outer hallway. There is a studio couch in one corner of the room, covered, somewhat carelessly, with a multicolored crocheted afghan. Against the wall directly across from the radio a gleaming back-lacquered table holds the bronze figure of a lioness, her mouth open in a roar or snarl. She is looking at a black teapot, its surface covered by a gold dragon in basrelief. There is no other furniture in the room save for a floor lamp near the studio couch, its torn shade askew. At its base is a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its label smeared with what appears to be dried blood, and a pink two-way-stretch girdle. Through a door to one side of the table can be seen a small room in which an unmade single bed takes up the floor space not occupied by a small, badly worn dresser and a battered cardboard carton, sides bulging with its unknown contents. Another door, to the other side of the table, opens onto a kitchen, on whose flower-motif linoleum lies a woman of perhaps thirty, supine in a flower-print housecoat and black high-heeled pumps. She is probably drunk, but she may be dead. The radio, it is clear, has been on all the time, albeit very softly, and at the moment is broadcasting Russ Colombo’s 1931 hit, “Prisoner of Love.” On the stoop to the right and just below one of the apartment’s front windows, a woman, dressed in a flower-print housecoat and black high-heeled pumps identical to the dress, or, perhaps, costume of the woman on the kitchen floor, is smoking a cigarette and drinking from a quart cardboard container of beer. She seems to have not a care in the world, as the phrase has it, but this is far from true.

Saturday Afternoon

T
HERE WAS LITTLE SENSE IN HIS CALLING HIS DAUGHTER, because he knew that after her first exclamations of surprise, perhaps even falsely delighted surprise, she would list her various illnesses, those that she had suffered for the past twenty-five years, those that were recent or current, those that were as old pals, and those that were arcane and malign invaders who would never be understood by any doctor on the face of the earth, including her brilliant yet wanting specialists; but all, without doubt, were his responsibility if not his doing; she would whine about her teenaged son, his grandson, a boy whom he had never seen, a boy who had, just once, called him and said, “I’ll write you a long letter, Grandpa"; and with the regularity of death, she would ask for a loan, a small loan, one to drive off or placate her bitch of a guinea landlady, who lived, it seemed, to collect her unjust money from his daughter, her ill and hapless victim. And there was no sense in calling his son, who would be, surely, according to the curt words of Tracy or Dawn or Steph or Donya, the latest modern dancer-schoolteacher-addict with whom he was, at last! happily, even joyously, living,
asleep,
after a hard night of hard work at his hard yet mysterious and fulfilling and creative job. So he would sit and sit, looking at his shelves of books, wondering, for hour after hour, which one he should read, or reread, or whether he’d be better off just looking at their familiar spines. Was there any reason to read anything, ever again? So he would sit, occasionally laughing, not at himself, precisely, but at the fact of himself, that he should be so ludicrously and persistently alive. He would sit and smoke and think of old friends and old enemies, either dead or scattered across the smug, benighted, self-pitying republic. In a sense, they had all disappeared in one way or another, and just as well, just as well. And he wondered if a few of those who were alive were absurdly thinking of calling
their
children, tentatively and hopelessly thinking of this simple act. Because he had to believe that they, too, were alienated from their children and unknown to their grandchildren; otherwise, the touch of normalcy that would inform their lives, were the opposite true, would destroy him completely. They had to be as strangers to the strange and thankless adults who were their children and who,
it had to be,
hated them, or, more exactly, held them in disinterested contempt. He sat, smoking, as the sun faded, clouds slowly covered the dimming sky, and it began to rain on the cold Saturday streets.

The Jungle

T
HE
TARZAN
MOVIE ON TELEVISION VAGUELY LOCATED some fugitive emotion that he couldn’t sharpen or clarify. He took a swallow of the Majorska over ice and was suddenly snapped from the Hollywood jungles and their symmetrical trees to what appeared to be a female robot that was singing a deafening and machined jingle, thrusting its smoothly contoured and metallic
mons veneris,
packed neatly into the crotch of what appeared to be aluminum jeans, at the viewer with a maniacal regularity. In the animated corpse’s hand was a can of some soft drink,
O.K.
! It was swinging its long blond hair from side to side, still singing, its smile fixed in uncontrollable electronic ecstasy,
O.K.
! It was, sure it was, essentially, a mobile cunt, perfectly engineered and animated to sell things: to Christian fundamentalists, professors of biochemistry, terrorists and plumbers and bus drivers, housewives and attorneys, to the salt of the earth, to the world, to him. They all understood. So did he. He took another swallow of the cheap vodka and was back with Johnny and Maureen and the chimp and the stampeding elephants in the grainy background. What did this remind him of? Why did he feel so bad? Couldn’t he get into the campy spirit of the aluminum people who had been responsible for scheduling this petrifying movie? Couldn’t he obey the robot and her metallic pudendum and buy her soda? He started to sob and thought that he was really going crazy, or drinking too much, or both. A man of fifty-six crying over a movie that was set in a cardboard jungle.

Snow

T
HE TUNNEL IN THE SNOW LEADS TO A WARM KITCHEN, vinegary salad, ham and baloney and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again, nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of the January day, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.

Rain

“W
E ARE THE DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE,” THE young man says, gesturing behind him toward a shadowy group of people, “and Rockefeller Center is a place of meeting for us and all other prisoners of love. We are Catholics.” They all stand in front of an elevator that is, although dark and grimy, much like the elevators in what he recalls is named the Our Lady of Angels Building at 165 West Forty-sixth Street. It’s raining very hard as they step off the elevator and he is permitted to join them as they move quickly down the street. “I’m having a Charms myself,” the young man says affably. He is not quite the same young man who was on the elevator but he is the same in certain ways that are something, something, he can’t think of the word—intransigent? “Catholic,” the young man says, and puts his palms together in mock prayer. Mickey! “Mickey?” he asks, but the young man ignores him. They walk out of the rain into a crowded street and stop, he and Mickey, in front of the Three Deuces. “The Deuces” he says, and turns to Mickey, who is gone, along with all the others. Charlie Parker is inside the club, right now, and he’ll get to hear him play again. He walks into the long room, at the end of which is the little bandstand, empty. There’s nobody at the bar, either, or the tables. A woman arrives on the bandstand from backstage. She’s in a black-and-silver evening dress that needs cleaning. She starts to sing “Prisoner of Love,” and he calls out “Bird!” He’s on the street, the rain soaking him through. He’ll go home to his wife if he can find the subway, where the hell is the subway, it used to be right there on Forty-ninth Street. “The Catholics are down there,” a man rushing by says, “over on Father Duffy Square.” He wants a smoke and puts his hand into his pocket but his cigarettes are a soggy mess. “Wings?” he says. He hasn’t smoked Wings since he was a boy. His wing-tip shoes are oozing black dye or polish, no, they’re dissolving. How will he get home without shoes?

The Alpine

W
HEN LITTLE CHILDREN WERE TAKEN TO THE ALPINE by their fathers on Saturday afternoons, they were expected to be frightened by Tarzan and his wild treetop screams, his sinister humanoid ape friend, his somehow bewildered yet attentive half-naked companion, Jane; by the faceless Spider and his clubfooted shuffle and clump, forever out of the reach of Dick Tracy; by the grinning foreign fiends who were the perverted enemies of the Daredevils of the Red Circle. They were expected to cry, to drool, to drop from their sticky mouths their Charms lollipops onto their bright candid scarves, to know that they and their fathers were soon to be assaulted by the huge black-and-white monstrosities that jerked and shifted and rumbled and glared out at the dark from the glitter of the screen that ordered and dominated all of life above the passive and awestruck and terrified audience. These children were expected to become hysterical, to have their Charms decorate, as sweet multicolored jewels, their clothes, to present faces that were flushed red and wet with tears. And then their fathers would hoist them to their chests and carry them out to the cold, brilliant afternoon streets, and home. These fathers often began, sooner or later, to carry on, as they used to say, with other women, and were then, suddenly, nowhere to be found: not in the Alpine, nor the jungles of Africa; not in the dark streets of the threatening metropolis, nor in the secret lairs beneath those streets, lairs favored by the depraved Orientals who worshiped evil gods. They were gone, these fathers, and warm memories of their presence, invented or elaborated tales of doting words murmured to calm endearing childish terrors, and the hopeful deluded beliefs of the sad and bitter women who did their best and then did their best again would not serve, ever, to return these men from the delicious sexual folly that they had expectantly embraced, and were, as often as not, crushingly betrayed by.

A Wake

W
HEN SHE HEARD FROM A FRIEND THAT HE’D DIED IN the Whitehall Street subway station of a massive, as they liked to put it, heart attack, she decided to go to DeRosa’s Funeral Home in the old neighborhood to pay her respects, as they liked to put it. Then she decided that she wouldn’t. His first wife, knowing
her,
would surely be there, wronged, cold, and distant, but civil in that perfectly vulgar way that she’d learned from Christ knows how many carefully smoothed movies. And she’d no doubt have one of her young deadbeat
boyfriends
along, some twenty-five-year-old two-bit grifter with a habit and a ponytail, in a curiously ill-fitting Hugo Boss or Armani suit that had exhausted another one of her credit cards. But then, who had known him longer than she? So she would go, after all. She’d see the old neighborhood anyway, the restaurants that had been saloons, the cocktail lounges that had been diners, the Burger Kings that were once pizzerias with breezy summer gardens in back. Why let the vengeful, adulterous, grasping shrew play her part in comfort? She could wear her purple velvet dress with a black silk jacket, black pumps and stockings, or the black gabardine suit that was almost like the one he’d always liked, or said he liked. She’d knock the eyes out of her head, whatever she wore. Here I am, you bitch, looking better now than
you
looked when you walked all over him and fucked everything in sight. But she really wasn’t going to go. Let the dead bury the dead. As they liked to put it.