NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (47 page)

“Yes,” I said to Mrs. Bangs, “it’s true. Harold has been very loyal.”

“And you made a joke out of him for your own gain.” Mrs. Bangs had tears in her eyes, but she wouldn’t stop.

Oh God, I said to myself. Aloud I said, “Honestly, I didn’t think of it that way.”

“Well, you should have, because I do. I work hard to keep this house nice, and quiet for my husband so he can concentrate on his writing. And you come along and treat it all like some kind of dirty joke. My husband is nobody to laugh at, Mr. Harlow.” Now she was weeping openly.

“Harold,” I said miserably, “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right, kid.” Harold cracked his knuckles. “The missus just got upset, what with me not having any luck lately with my own stuff. But I’ll hit one of these days, just like you did.”

“I know you will,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“It’s just a question of time. Maybe I won’t make it like you did, but I’ll make it. You and I work in different ways, is all. I have to make things up. I couldn’t write about what happened to me, or about my family or friends. I couldn’t do that.”

Even as I backed out of that artificially lit, artificially lived-in room, mumbling apologies to the couple whom I was seeing together for the first—and last—time, my heart was hammering triumphantly in my chest. Harold had put his nicotine-stained
finger directly on the difference between us, a difference on which I was ready to stake my life.

For when the chips were down, Harold would never dare; and I always would. Even on his own limited terms, his caution condemned him to failure, since, immured in his dark study and his immature fantasies, he shrank not just from human beings but from the materials of his own life; while my ruthlessness, of which I had not known myself capable, assured me that, with all the failures in store for me on all the hall tables of my future, I was bound for certain ironic petty successes (even though they were to be most gallingly belated), bought at a price Harold would never be prepared to pay.

And so, victory strangely mingled in my heart with self-disgust at seeing that it was Harold and not I who had defined the boundaries separating us, I slunk from his room and from his wife’s contempt and despair. I could be bold on paper, I would be bold on paper again, I was certain of it now. But I would always be a coward in other ways.

A few weeks later the semester was over and I tiptoed out of the Bangs house with my two valises and my laundry bag, leaving the final week’s rent in an envelope on the accursed table so as not to have to face Harold or Mrs. Bangs again. And that summer, my love affair with Elaine already dying, I returned to the lifeguard’s job and to my typewriter.

THE BALCONY

T
heir room had seemed ideal at first sight. High-ceilinged and airy, it had a cool, shabby, clean appearance that was most inviting. Madeline stepped to the jalousies and tugged at them gently, and as the sun came streaming through, outlining her slight figure, she turned to smile at her husband.

“It
is
nice,” she said. “It looks out on the street. Very lively.”

Brian nodded to the hotel owner’s wife, who stood at his side, the huge door key in one hand, a scrub brush in the other.
“Muy bueno, Señora
. We’ll take it.”

But they should have known better, for it was hardly their first day in the country. No sooner had Brian lugged their bags up from the lobby, and Madeline shaken the wrinkles out of their folded clothes, than they were stunned by a roar that started at the corner two stories below and seemed to increase in volume and intensity as it blasted through the open window, driving directly at them. They stared at each other, almost frightened. Then Madeline walked to the window and looked down.

“It’s one of those trailer trucks—what did you used to call them in Kansas?”

“Semis. But for God’s sake, it sounds like he’s driving it right into the bedroom.”

“It must be because the street is rather narrow and the walls are so high. They almost seem to slant inward, toward the street, as they go up, so maybe it’s—” Madeline seated herself in the wicker rocker and rubbed at her ankle—“something like an optical illusion, only for the ears.”

“Always the invocation of science. Has it struck you that the
Avenida Juarez happens to be the main drag for all the bus and truck traffic out of town?”

“Did it strike you? It was you who marched us up here from the bus station because you didn’t want to be right in the town square.”

“I wanted to save money. And it just occurred to me about the highway.” He was about to say more when the air was filled with a shrieking whine, punctuated with a series of rhythmic rattles. Brian winced. “They’re zeroing in on us.” He raised his voice. “Madeline! Pack up that stuff and let’s blow. I never heard anything this bad in Florence, not even in Rome.”

“It never did us any good to move in Italy, either. We could never afford the kind of place that was quiet, could we? Come, let’s go for a walk and look over the market. Maybe it’ll be quiet tonight, after supper.”

But the city, for all its pleasures, was no more quiet than any other Latin town. Children played tag, women bickered in the market, an old Indian hawked noisemakers, a young blind beggar girl moaned from her shawled huddle on the spittle-stained sidewalk.

They bought a pair of unyielding huaraches made from old truck tires for Brian, an impractical comb carved by hand from one piece of wood for Madeline, and a kilo of red bananas that they could peel and munch on as they strolled the musical streets. They tried to figure out the tub of humming insects casually guarded by a yellow-toothed old lady, and what the dignified and distant Indian squatting on his shredded scrape could earn even if he were to sell every one of his little pyramid of speckled apples. Then the seasonal afternoon rains came, and they paused, taking shelter under the hospitable awning of a sidewalk café for a leisurely coffee. But there, across the road, under the overhang of a building that hardly protected her from the straight down-driving rain, knelt the blind girl in her black tatters, her rebozo stretched tautly across the narrow curve of her shoulders. At her side a naked baby a year old, perhaps two, a stick of bamboo clutched in his small fingers, dabbled his other hand in the water that gushed furiously from the drainpipe next to him, while his mother continued to move her lips in the singsong whining chant
that was now inaudible above the drumming of the summer rain:
“Por amor de Dios, por amor de Dios.”

In sudden fury, Brian grasped Madeline by the forearm. “Do you see that? She doesn’t even stop her pitch in a thunderstorm. Nobody to listen, nobody could hear her anyway, but she keeps right on wailing.”

“I’m sure the poor thing was trained to beggary from childhood. It’s particularly horrible when you think that there’s no need for it any longer.”

“I suppose you mean atomic energy and all that crap. Well, in the meantime I take it as a personal affront. If I emptied my pockets into that baby’s dirty little paw, what good would it do?” He held up his hand to forestall her reply. “I know, I know, charity isn’t the answer. But I don’t want to write to my congressman, I just want to paint.”

“You might have thought of that before you suggested that we come to an underdeveloped country.”

“Logic again. Why is it that your logic is always based on sentimentality? You know, I read someplace that they rent those babies by the day, the beggar women. Very effective with the tourists.”

“Brian, you go to the most disgusting extremes to protect yourself from pain. Even if that was true, would it make the baby’s plight any the less terrible? Or her mother’s? Or this girl’s?”

“How would you know? You’re worse than your mother, always exhibiting her self-satisfaction by making like a mother. You haven’t even got the excuse that she does.”

Madeline said, almost inaudibly, “And whose fault would that be?”

“All right, I shouldn’t have said that. But you know, I think if you lived in a world without misery, you’d have to invent some in order to be happy.”

“I’m getting out of here. The rain’s stopped.”

Brian folded some bills under his saucer and hastened after Madeline, who was already striding up the street. He took her arm and slowed her pace as they crossed the Zocalo. There was noise there too, but it was more what they had hoped for, the rattling soulfulness of a strolling mariachi band, and with the help
of the players the time passed more pleasantly until the late dinner hour.

After they had eaten, however, they were both very tired and ready for bed, and there was no excuse for them to stay away from their room. The hotelkeeper barely inclined his bald dome away from his vacant contemplation of the evening paper as they passed before the desk and mounted to the second floor. At the head of the broad stairway they came abruptly upon the hollow open square off which opened the dozen rooms of the second story. The emerging stars and the wedge of moon, riding slowly through a soft bank of clouds, illuminated the begonias and cactuses in their terra-cotta pots on the margin of the open square.

“Be careful, Brian,” Madeline murmured. “The tiles are still slippery from the rain. A cactus spike can really hurt if you fall on it.”

“It isn’t the rain that worries me, it’s the noise.” Brian closed their door behind them. “I know you’ve heard this routine before, but if they’re going to be pounding at us all the time, what kind of work can I get done in the next couple of weeks?”

“Sometimes I wish that we could trade places. I wish that you had to listen to those seventh-graders snickering while you were trying to show them color values, and trying to think what to make for supper, and where to go that would be cheap on our vacation. If you had to, you’d do it, that’s all.” Madeline turned back the bedcovers and began to step out of her skirt.

“That’s what you said in Mexico City, and I still couldn’t draw a line, with all that racket. The difference between you and me is that you love what you do,
especially
when it’s unpleasant. But I hate to paint, I admit it, it hurts. I welcome any little distraction.”

“Haven’t I always done my best to protect you from distractions?”

“Yes, you have, baby, and I love you for it. Now do you mind if I read for a while?”

“The light won’t bother me. But I do need my sleep.”

“Of course you do. How else could you have the strength to take care of me?”

Somewhere below, the doors of a cantina swung open, and a
roar of laughter, followed by a tenor raised in romantic song and a bellowing protest, floated up to their window. Madeline raised her head from the pillow to stare anxiously at her husband. His lips were set in a thin line; his large pale eyes stared unseeingly at the book before him.

“It’ll surely stop soon,” Madeline whispered. “After all, they need their relaxation too.”

“From what? You don’t have to whisper—
they
can’t hear
you
.”

“Do you really believe that rotten propaganda about them sleeping in their sombreros all day? Because if you do I—” She could not finish; at that instant a semi came blasting up the highway and shifted gears at the corner beneath them with a grinding clatter and a rising howl that seemed aimed deliberately and directly at their hearts.

They stared at each other, united in despair.

“Maybe if we closed the windows part way…”

“Part way won’t do.”

“Then let’s—” Madeline raised her voice as a motor scooter howled and howled higher and higher, straining as it swung around the heavy truck.

Brian hauled himself out of bed and clopped to the window. “If I close these jalousies we’ll stifle.”

“We can open the door.”

It was a bad night. They tried everything, but in the end it was useless. If they barricaded themselves they could not breathe; if they allowed air in, they were engulfed by the shock waves of the street noises. Only toward dawn did the sounds subside at last, so that they could drop off finally with nothing but the calls of the awakening songbirds to punctuate their fitful slumber.

Early in the morning two small girls began to play with an inflated rubber ball in the open patio beyond their door. The ball smacked sharply each time it struck the terrazzo, with a loud report like gunfire, and the voices of the little girls were shrill.

“Those damn brats. Let’s get up and have breakfast.”

“Brian, I’d try to find us a place in the country, but where? What will you do? You claim you can’t work without stimulation.”

“
I
claim. How about you? Don’t you like to see different faces sometimes too?” Tugging at his trousers, Brian stared red-eyed at
his wife. “Are you going to start in on me before breakfast? Are you going to tell me what I know better than you, that I ought to be painting all year instead of just trying to sketch in the summer? Are you going to put in for a medal because you haven’t saddled me with kids and a mortgage?”

Madeline replied in a very steady voice, “I am going downstairs to see if they can’t give us a quieter room.”

“The idea being that we could fight better on a good night’s sleep, is that it?”

“If you like. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Somewhat abashed, Brian temporized. “I’ll order breakfast while you negotiate. Would you like
huevos rancheros
? Papaya?”

“Lime with the papaya, please.”

There was a vacant room on the far side of the court, the quieter side; its small balcony overlooked only the local street. After breakfast they packed up and hauled their stuff across the sunny patio to the new room.

The morning sun, streaming in through the open windows and throwing the intricate shadows of the wrought-iron balcony across the woven-fiber rug, made everything seem at least bearable, and hopefully even pleasant.

“I guess this might do, don’t you think?” Brian asked his wife.

Madeline replied, a bit doubtfully, “The movie house is just across the way.”

“At least it doesn’t open until four o’clock. Then I think you get a triple feature for your four pesos and you go home.”

What they did not know was that the blind beggar woman was in the habit of stationing herself with her baby on the sidewalk in front of the movie theater every afternoon.

It was several days before Brian himself had this brought to his attention. He and Madeline did in fact sleep better in the new room and in consequence were in a good humor to explore the city at leisure, to sketch and read in the parks and plazas, and occasionally to swim.

One afternoon, when they had returned for a siesta in the shade of their high, dark, airy room, Madeline stepped onto the balcony to hang their bathing suits out to dry. As she glanced across the street, she uttered an involuntary cry.

“What’s the matter, Madeline?”

“Oh, nothing. There’s a blind woman in front of the Teatro Alhambra. She looks just like the one that’s always at the entrance to the public market.”

Brian jumped to his feet. “Let’s see.” Wrapped in a towel, his bare feet slapping on the tiles, he joined his wife and peered down, following the direction of her finger. “That’s my girl friend. And there’s the baby. He sits there sucking at that damned sugar cane as though he’ll never have a care in the world. Dopey little bastard.”

He took his sketch pad and pen from the round wicker table and dragged the armchair forward so that its front legs hung out onto the little balcony. Then he sat down and began at once to draw.

Madeline watched over his shoulder for a moment as the figures began quickly to emerge from the blank pebbled paper. She touched her fingers tentatively to her husband’s sparse, wind-ruffled hair, smoothing it into place, and said almost shyly, “You’ll get arrested if you don’t put something on.”

“Later, later,” Brian muttered impatiently, and continued to sketch swiftly, whistling almost soundlessly through his teeth as he worked.

Pleased, Madeline tiptoed back inside, picked up an orange-backed Penguin novel, and stretched herself quietly across the bed.

Every day thereafter Brian took up his post on the balcony, sometimes sitting, sometimes leaning against the wobbly wrought iron, staring down at the lively panorama below him and occasionally, but less and less frequently as the days slipped by, trying to draw: brown women with pale-green woven baskets on their heads, barefoot children slapping at flies and at one another as they ran laughing around carts and burros, sunglassed and sombreroed tourists staring impatiently, pink-faced, at the unconstrained life around them—and always, shortly before the movie opened its doors to the townsfolk and peasants, the blind woman squatting in her tatters with the nude infant at her side and her terrible empty eyes upraised, keening softly her dreadful demand.