NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (7 page)

“Barney, go back to school. You ought to be teaching. The longer you put off your Ph.D. the harder it’ll be.”

“You bore me, man. Don’t make me bore you. My draft board won’t let me, it’s the middle of the year anyway, I haven’t got the money to do it on my own, I can’t get a teaching fellowship with all these jobs shot out from under me … Come on,” he wound up irritably, “let’s play.”

I felt there was more to it than that, but for the first time in our friendship there were things we couldn’t talk about. I hadn’t been able to tell Deelie (I never saw her alone) that Barney desperately needed help to break out of his trap. I couldn’t explain to Barney my conviction that we were moving, all of us, to a point of crisis. Did our lives have to be compressed into narrower confines, bounded by the twin measurements of ambition and fear?

Daily my confidence shrank. On the streets the girls’ dresses grew longer as they scurried, like so many mindless mice, to let out their hems in accordance with the dictates of Dior. In the bars, the elevators, the Federal Building where I used to chew the fat with Dante Brunini (he never seemed to turn up any more when I was there), the men’s faces grew longer as they took the bit between their clenching teeth and bent their necks to the supposedly necessary burdens of metropolitan manhood.

I rang doorbells in search of an apartment, the way I had as a newly fledged civilian. But now nobody was interested in what I was, or in my hopes and dreams. Nobody had any apartments either. That is, nobody except a ferret-faced couple who wanted two thousand dollars for the wicker porch furniture they had furtively imported in the dead of night.

The decorating DeFees, however, had turned up both an apartment and key money to buy their way into it. When they had
finished stripping walls down to the bare brick, rewiring, and installing new floors and false ceilings, they threw a big party to celebrate—and also to announce discreetly their going into joint business. It was perfectly plain to Pauline and me, when we arrived and pressed their shiny buzzer, that the DeFees were scrambling into a milieu far removed from the likes of us, in terms of both décor and guests.

We were barely out of our coats when Eleanor DeFee took us on an escorted tour. All too obviously she was bucking for a photo spread of their careful apartment in
House Beautiful
(“Two Careers, Two Lives, One Charming Home”). It was all gracious and elegant, from the black and gold inlaid tiles of the foyer to the Somali masks set into the living room walls in cunningly lit shadow boxes, and the imported terrazzo in cool seaweed around the lavabo. There was even a French coffee grinder on the kitchen cabinet beside the Italian espresso machine.

As for the guests, they seemed to me to fall into two groups, mingling for two distinct purposes: our old friends, there to stare and to measure their own ambitions against the DeFees’ acquisitions; and a new crowd, invited because they could be of use to the DeFees and their pals in the future. I was separated from Pauline (public policy at these gatherings) and unloaded by Eleanor DeFee at the side of a dean’s wife, who was sitting straight up in an Eames chair, smiling fixedly at nothing. I lit her cigarette (her first, judging from the way she manipulated it) and we began to talk at each other, desperately, about the charming apartment and the imaginative décor. Just as things were petering out, we hit on the clever expedient of chatting about our spouses.

I peered through the growing crowd of overdressed and overcautious people, all rotating slowly, delicately, through the film of smoke and talk, balancing cigarettes and glasses as though they glided on eggs, instead of taupe broadloom, or feared to disturb the invalid in the bedroom beyond. Finally I spotted Pauline at the modular bookcase, deep in discourse with my cousin Zack, of all people.

“That’s her,” I said, in a sudden access of honest pride. “That’s my wife, the little one. The beauty.”

“Aren’t you a lucky fellow! Now let’s see, where’s Fred—oh
yes, right there at the fireplace. You see, the distinguished-looking man? I think it’s wonderful for him to get out with younger people. He finds them so stimulating.”

The dean was being stimulated by none other than Peerless Willie, who was urging his own pipe tobacco mixture on the older man. He was also urging himself. Before my eyes he was changing from Peerless Willie to Bill, he was laughing less, he was using his fiancée at his side as further proof of his stability, he was adopting chin-stroking and agreeable politenesses. It might take him a dozen years, but he would make Chairman of the Department, of that I was sure.

I was rescued from the dean’s wife (and she from me) by Barney, along with the cleanest-cut Negro I’d ever seen.

“Thank God,” I said to him, after he’d drawn me aside. “What a drag.”

“Old boy,” he demanded solicitously, “are you shy with new faces?”

“It isn’t the new ones, it’s the careful ones, so anxious to say the right things about Sartre, Henry Wallace, Chaplin, Le Corbusier, Stravinsky.”

The Negro laughed, but only to be polite, because he was one of the careful faces—scrubbed, handsome, polite, and so refined that he made me feel like a boor and a yokel. Barney introduced him as a pianist who was working as accompanist to a famous Negro singer. The singer was thinking of having her apartment redone by the DeFees; in consequence—or in anticipation—they were courting this fellow, who was so starched that his arm creaked every time he extended it with his monogrammed butane lighter. Fortunately he spotted bigger game and was shortly sniffing their spoor, not forgetting, however, to take courteous leave of us.

“Why so sour?” Barney asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong. Everything is so right that it’s deadly, from their copy of
Verve
at the careless angle on the coffee table to their bamboo and glass cups. That piano player goes with the cups—the whole crowd does.” I poked him with my elbow. “Let’s go talk to Pauline and Zack.”

We hadn’t seen Zack in some time. He looked Barney up and down. “Well,” he asked, “where’s Deelie?”

“She told me she’d be along later.” Barney gnawed at his lip. “So she said, anyway… How’s the book going, Zack?”

I don’t know whether Barney had simply wanted to change the subject or to embarrass Zack. In any case, Zack’s answer stunned me.

“I’m packing it in for now, kid. Going home, day after tomorrow, to Syracuse, before the money runs out. My sister’s husband has offered me a hell of a good job in his ad agency, too good to turn down. I’ll get back to the book after I’m in the swing of the job.”

I stared at my cousin. He looked me in the eye without flinching, my only near relative, who had told his family to go blow so he could live in a crummy sailors’ rooming house in Chelsea and work undisturbed on his novel.

“Well,” he said, “guess I’ll go circulate.”

We all watched him move off through the crowd, glass gripped in his hand, confident but wary, much as he must have glided, the beady-eyed rifleman, through the New Guinea jungle.

I said, “Another one bites the dust.”

“Don’t hate everybody,” Pauline said to me quietly, “just because they’re dying to make out and you’re not.”

“Pardon me,” said a pretty brunette in a tight black dress, who had been introduced to us earlier as some connection or employee of Milton Berle’s, “do you know that couple? The man looks so familiar…”

I looked out at the foyer. There, just inside the door, arm in arm, stood Dante and Cordelia. They had been walking in the rain, their faces were damp and flushed, Dante’s coat collar was turned up dramatically, his curly black hair glittered with raindrops. He was smiling expectantly, showing his fine teeth and his complacent pride in having brought a belle to the party. He hid nothing, it was hardly necessary; but then neither did Deelie. Each had dashed greedily to grasp for something momentarily exciting—and useful.

At my side Barney uttered a grunt that ended in a moan as he broke away from us and made for the bedroom. Before I could think of what to do or say, or even fully understand, Barney was in the foyer and plunging for the door with his coat over his arm,
his face white, ignoring the couple who were making their way into the throng of ambitious decorators and editors and young academics on the make. The door slammed behind him and he was gone.

“I’m going after him.”

“No.” Pauline shook her head. “Leave him alone.”

“I can’t stay here any more. I don’t want any part of it.”

“We’ll go in a few minutes. But let’s not give anybody any satisfaction.”

We did it Pauline’s way. After a while we said our good nights and slipped away unnoticed. We said nothing to each other all the way home (except for neutral remarks on the subway platform: “Do you want a
Times
?” “No, thanks.”) until, at our very door, Pauline put her hand on mine.

“He’ll be back.”

“It won’t be any good. It’s all over.”

I lay all night thinking about Barney, and about those two who had betrayed him. And us, I wondered, what about us?

When I got to Manhattan the next morning, instead of going to work I took the Grand Street bus on over to the East Side. I hastened down the bleak street with the bitter wind whipping stained sheets of newsprint about my legs.

Marya’s building, that great rotting corpse, was more ghastly than ever in its loneliness now that foundations were actually being dug around it for the new projects. Gloved workmen were hauling away the debris of the toppled structure next door. I mounted the three flights to her flat, past walls which stank of wet and rotting plaster, on floors which had heaved from the wrecker’s ball swung against the groaning neighboring beams.

She was gone. I stared at the padlock on her door, shook it, pounded senselessly in a frozen rage on the panel. The building was quite empty. Where had they taken her? I sat down on the steps in the cold, the dirt, and the echoing quiet, and tried to think. No one knew I knew her. She didn’t even know my last name, or care. We were torn apart as effectively as though she had indeed died.

And if I could find her? What difference would it make, what good would it do for me to come upon her homeless in a Home, or bewildered in a project apartment with thermostat and engineered kitchen?

I got up and blew my nose and brushed myself off and walked out of the tenement without once looking back. In my mind it was already pulled down.

When I got home to Brooklyn I set to work at once on my census reports. When Pauline arrived I told her that I was up to date and prepared in good conscience to quit. And prepared too to leave the dingy inadequate apartment where we had spent all our nights, our nostrils filled with the nocturnal scents of real and dreamed-of gardens. And to leave the city, where I had found my love and been so happy—and where I could never be happy again.

When I first went to the suburbs in search of a place where we could rent a small house, raise a baby, and go into business, Barney gave me a skeptical farewell. “You’ll be back soon. One winter on the moors, and you’ll head back for civilization.”

He was wrong. But since he was New York born and bred, he had never quite understood how passionately I had needed New York, nor how abruptly that need had been quenched.

I got a G.I. loan—it was Herman Appleman who put the idea in my head—to start a music and record shop. I did well not because I am a brilliant businessman, but because LP’s came out, and I rode the wave of the culture boom. Who could go wrong? I had Pauline to help, too. Her brother came in with me after we saw him through college and he put in his time in Korea. With him in the shop, and a woman at home to watch the kids, Pauline and I are free of an evening to go to New York.

Every so often we get together with Barney and his wife. They own a very substantial house on Avenue J, with a two-car garage and a big lawn, for Brooklyn. We don’t find a lot to talk about. I had made the mistake of nagging at Barney, in those early months of his misery and loneliness, to get out of industry and back to graduate school. At last, after even the draft had finally blown over his head, he turned on me and cried angrily, “Would you ask
a thirty-year-old arthritic to go into training for the Davis Cup matches? Why don’t you lay off?”

I think too that Barney was aggrieved at me for a while for having introduced Dante Brunini to our crowd. Certainly it was after he found out about Cordelia and Dante that he said to me, apparently apropos of nothing in particular, “It’s always bad to mix your business life and your social life.”

That shook me. “But that’s why we were happy in New York for a while. Everything was of a piece—work, play…”

“Life doesn’t work out that way.”

It hurt to hear him say that. But I knew then that we were going to have to go our separate ways. At least I had my music. Barney had neither his music nor his math.

Sometimes we still make a foursome of it and meet at the theater or at Town Hall, but Barney is not very good company. He is not just balding, he is embittered. His wife seems pleasant enough, so are their children, and he has done well—even better than I—as an executive in a toilet supply service owned by a wealthy brother-in-law. Always the brothers-in-law! But he is disappointed in himself in a way that makes me want to turn away and go.

I don’t think it was just Deelie. Surely Barney would have gotten over her sooner or later, Dante or no, because she doesn’t seem to wear well. After Dante she married twice, unsuccessfully; first a producer and then a vague European man of the world. From time to time I heard of her, a little high at art show openings and quite striking at first nights; once I bumped into her at a lavish impersonal cocktail party given by a record company to greet the arrival of stereo—she barely knew me.

She never did become an actress—the last I heard she was promoting the talents of a welder of fifteen-foot-high towers of crankcases and pistons—but Dante Brunini stuck at it. He has had some luck on TV as Dan Bruno. He wears a built-up shoe and is better looking than ever, and I read an item in the
Times
recently about his signing for a supporting role in a Tennessee Williams play. I still don’t like him, and I can imagine what he has done to get ahead.