NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (46 page)

Harold shifted his bony frame in the swivel chair and drew back his lips, showing me not only those store teeth white as his shanks, but his pale-pink gums as well. “You like to think you’re sitting up there and writing for posterity. But first you got to get
published, right? You know what James Joyce went through with his stories? Here, take this copy of
Writer’s Digest
and see what the editors of
Blue Book
have to say.”

The worst of it was that when he gave me something to read I was under obligation to return it and so start a whole new round of conversations. Once I tried to outsmart him by leaving the magazine on the mail table in the hall with a note of thanks. All that happened was that next time I passed, Harold called out, “Hey, Tommy, you don’t have to stand on ceremony, I’m always here. And you don’t have to worry about interrupting me. I can always pick up where I left off.”

All through that autumn I lived half in anticipation, half in dread of those sessions in Harold’s den. Businesslike and implacable, he went on writing his unpublishable yarns about lean, silent adventures and red-lipped maidens on the Amazon or the Yangtze, and I struggled on too with my unpublishable college romances that make me cringe when I recall their ineptitude. Night after night I heard his typewriter, and he reassured me that the sound of mine was music to his ears.

Finally it got to be too much for me. Not the writing, but Harold’s belief that he and I were engaged in the same kind of enterprise. The more I heard his machine, knowing that when it stopped he would seek me out for what he called “shop talk,” the more it graveled me. And so, because I was constrained to leave the rooming house and find another place to write, I regard it as Harold’s doing that I went out and fell in love.

The closest campus building to my rooming house was the old music school, which I had had no reason to visit before. Now as I wandered through its seedy corridors in search of a quiet corner where I could write undisturbed, I was charmed by the mishmash of sounds that filtered out to the hallway—fiddles tuning up like cats in pain, cellos clearing their throats, clarinets showing off, sopranos trilling loudly as if terrorized—sounds that happily bore no relation to my work.

I chose an empty practice room, slipped into a chair with a writing arm in front of the piano, and was deep in my work when a girl walked in and said, “I’m sorry, but I signed up for this room for this period.” She didn’t sound at all sorry.

“You want to practice?” I asked. I was a little stupid not just from surprise, but because she was an excitingly attractive girl, downy, dark and snapping-eyed.

“It’s not just that I want to,” she explained, zipping open her briefcase and placing a Czerny volume on the piano rack. “I have to.”

I persuaded as hard as I could, and finally succeeded in getting her to let me stay on and work while she did her exercises. Elaine was intrigued with my having selected such an unlikely place in which to write. At four-thirty, when she had finished her stint, I walked her to her dorm; then we had dinner together and walked the streets, telling each other about ourselves, until eleven o’clock. The next morning we met for breakfast, and in two days we were in love.

Now we did together what before we had done alone. We embraced on a bench late at night at the edge of town, and I read Yeats aloud to her by the light of the street lamp. Because I had given her
The Tower
, Elaine attuned me to the passions of the Schubert Trios in the record room of the Women’s League. We arose early, anxious to come together, and met at dawn where we could hitch a ride from the milk wagon, breakfasting as we clattered along on a sackful of jelly doughnuts and a container of milk sold us by the driver. We walked, walked, walked, alongside the Huron River, through the Arboretum, past the stadium and on out into the country, on the railroad tracks, under viaducts, across golf courses and meadows, stealing pumpkins and, back in town, scuffling through heaps of leaves piled up for burning.

The happy surprise was not only that I was loved (although I could not stop wondering that I, I of all unlikely people, should cause such a girl’s face to come alive when she caught sight of me) but that I could still do all I had before, and more. My school-work flourished, and I found that, sitting alongside Elaine while she frowned over her scores, I was writing more fluently than ever before.

As winter came on, though, Elaine and I were driven from our meadows, lakeside paths and park benches, and we grew to detest the icy ivy wall of her dormitory, where we ended our days at one o’clock on a Sunday morning clinging not alone but in concert
with rows of other gasping, groping, miserable couples. It was then that I began to realize how much more bold and resourceful than I this seemingly fragile girl was; and it was disconcerting to have to admit to myself that worship and awe were not enough, that I simply did not understand women in general and Elaine in particular. I could not reconcile her delicate frame, her narrow bones, and the way she fitted into the circle of my arms, with her cool determination that we find a way to be alone together. She was only nineteen and had been too busy with her music to run around much with boys, but her eagerness for absolute intimacy gave me the uneasy feeling that she must already have had a string of lovers as long as my arm.

A premonitory shudder went through me, and not just because of the danger involved. But the inflaming vision of the two of us alone together in the darkness, warm, safe, locked in a fast embrace, overwhelmed the compunctions of inexperience. I had already told Elaine all about my rooming house, about the fellows on the second floor who knew that I was trying to write undisturbed and never came up to the attic without knocking, about Mrs. Bangs, who always turned in early. And about Harold, always tapping out his yarns at the dining-room table and leaving the sliding doors ajar so that he could collar me for shop talk.

“It’s perfectly obvious,” Elaine said coolly, “that if you don’t want me to slip in behind you and go on up while you engage him in conversation, you’ll have to put it to him man to man and see if he’ll help us.”

Man to man! Even the wicked glance with which she accompanied that cliché could not quite remove the curse from it. Still, it was worth trying to win Harold’s support, considering that his wife was a devout Methodist Episcopalian, much involved with the Epworth League when she was not mopping or scrubbing. So, after all those weeks of avoiding him, one day I brought Harold his mail.

He had been wondering, he said, why he hadn’t seen me lately and hadn’t even heard my portable clacking away. Was I in a dry spell? He had never had that trouble himself, but he did have a book about writers’ block, put aside for such an eventuality.

No, I assured him, it was just that I had taught myself to write
long-hand. “The reason is,” I wound up, with none of the dash of Robert Montgomery or Melvyn Douglas, “I’ve got a girl.”

Harold cracked his knuckles and scratched speculatively at his stubble, then flicked a kitchen match across his gritty blackened thumbnail to touch flame to the damp butt that hung from the corner of his mouth. He was not the sort to get his kicks from prying into others’ sex lives. “Well,” he opined, releasing smoke through his nostrils, “as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work.”

I hastened to reassure him. And I went on, with a glibness that surprised me, to tell Harold how Elaine had inspired me, and how well we worked together, and what a shame it was that she couldn’t keep me company in my room while I typed just as I did her while she practiced her scales and sonatas.

Without changing expression, as though he hadn’t been listening, or simply wanted to change the subject, Harold mumbled, “The missus has got an Epworth League meeting this Saturday night, right after supper. Myself, I’ll take advantage of the peace and quiet to lock myself in here and get some typing done.”

My temples started to pound when I realized what Harold was telling me. The next few days passed in such fevered anticipation that I scarcely noticed how matter-of-factly my sweet Elaine took Harold’s clearing the coast. When I think of it, she was not unlike those coeds I hear about nowadays, who move in and out of their boy friends’ rooms as casually as if the boys were their brothers. People weren’t all that different when I was in school; it was just that love was a little more difficult, and you had to be more circumspect—unless, like Elaine, you were born self-assured and knowing what you wanted.

After the first rapturous nights we grew almost careless, up in our hideaway. Once I concealed Elaine in the shower when Mrs. Bangs suddenly shuffled up the steps bearing soap and a light bulb that she had forgotten to bring up earlier; another time I had to throw on a bathrobe and run my fingers through my hair at eight-thirty in the evening to answer Mrs. Bangs’s buzz—two short, three long—summoning me to the telephone.

But we managed to keep our rendezvous all through the winter without being discovered, thanks not only to the tact of my
housemates (some of whom were envious, others amused) but even more to my accomplice and accessory in fornication, Harold Bangs. Never once did he become sly or leering when he made his offhand remarks about his wife’s comings and goings. All he asked in return was that I continue to acknowledge our literary fellowship, which I could do only in the most begrudgingly reluctant manner.

Neither of us had been having what you might call a smashing success with our respective efforts, unless you were to count the handwritten note of encouragement I’d gotten on a story rejected by
Esquire
. But Harold was unquenchable, and unchangeable in his absolute self-assurance that one day the gates would be opened for him by the elect, while I, if somewhat more prey to self-doubt and occasional despair, was buoyed up by Elaine’s avowals of faith in me.

Elaine liked the idea of my being a writer. “I want success for you even more than I do for myself!” she cried one night, and I was transported. When the Michigan
Daily
announced a spring writing contest, Elaine went after me to enter it. I had never gotten mixed up with the campus literary crowd, even to the extent of submitting my stuff to their magazine. To Elaine I explained that they were a bunch of poseurs, big-city intellectuals trying to impose their tastes on us provincials; but in my heart I dreaded the possibility of rebuff. It was one thing to be honorably rejected, no matter how often, by unseen editors in high places, but it would be quite another to be brushed aside as unworthy of publication even in a campus magazine by people of my own age.

I don’t know whether Elaine understood the real reason for my hesitancy. In any case, she swept away the ostensible ones, and by repeated assurances of faith convinced me that I should enter the competition, which called not for a short story or a piece of journalism but for a character study, a portrait of someone unusually odd or interesting. The winner was to be awarded a hundred dollars plus publication of his sketch.

If I say that it was Elaine’s idea for me to write about Harold Bangs, I hasten to add that I accepted it enthusiastically and gave it all I had. To be sure, I changed his name, calling it “Howard: Portrait of an Unsuccessful Hack”; I changed his habitat from a
rooming house to a trailer, in which he wrote science fiction while his wife was out demonstrating kitchen ware at neighbor-hood parties; and I doctored him up in other small ways that would, I felt sure, prevent his being recognized by anyone but the other fellows in the house, such as giving him a wooden leg instead of bad lungs. But I retained the essentials, the stacks of incoming and outgoing manuscripts, the clattering old typewriter, the glass ashtrays choked with butts, the smell of dead cigarettes and the feel of falling hair, and above all the look of Harold the happy fanatic, with his sleeve garters, dead-white skin, and cadaver’s growth of whiskers, tapping out his malformed fantasies at the mahogany table from which he never rose, embedded forever in that gloomy room like a dead dictator in a wax museum.

Well, I won. It was a sweet day, with a girl to embrace me on the street when I told her the news, with teachers and other skeptics to call out congratulations, with the spring air invading even my stuffy attic room while I composed my letter home of pardonable triumph and vindication. Then came word that the
Daily
had sold my sketch to an intercollegiate press association for syndication across the country.

For a day my article was everywhere, and for a little while I was a hero, at least to Elaine and to myself. But then my stories began coming back, seemingly faster than ever, with the same printed rejection slips. And one night as I was sorting through the dismal mail on the hall table, a voice called out to me from beyond the dining room’s sliding doors.

“Mr. Harlow, would you come in here?”

It was Mrs. Bangs. But what would she be doing asking me into Harold’s sanctum? With the bad news tucked under my arm, I moved uneasily down the hallway to see what was up. To my astonishment Mrs. Bangs was standing beside Harold, her red and roughened hand resting on his rounded shoulder. Before she could say anything, however, he spoke.

“Congrats, Tommy, on the prize and the sale. I knew you’d hit if you stuck at it.” For once he was not smoking, and his hand seemed to tremble as he passed it along his bristles. His shoulder blades jutted like a twin hump.

I peered at him across the student lamp, but before I could
thank him Mrs. Bangs said, her voice shaking. “You have chosen a poor way to repay confidence and friendship. Harold is too polite to say it, but you have disappointed us both.”

I was sick with embarrassment. I stammered, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, blinking rapidly. “You knew who you were writing about. It would have been different if we had been mean to you, or intolerant. But you never had a better friend here than Harold. Isn’t that true?”

What did she know? I stared at Harold. Had he told her? Nothing like that showed in his face. He looked wretched, but not as though he had given me away. On the other hand, how did I look? Fortunately his den had no mirror.