The Arriviste, page 7
They seemed to sense my remoteness and tried to breach it. They threw snowballs at me from the bus stops. From within the pandemonium of the buses themselves, they pressed their sluglike tongues against the misted rear windows. When that didn’t get much of a rise out of me, one boy hiked down his trousers and squashed his buttocks against the window.
Once again, I’d treated Bud badly. What was it about him that provoked me? My animosity was spontaneous, like an older brother’s, without the allegiance that underlies an older brother’s bullying. It wasn’t under my control, I didn’t quite mean it. But it was there. It had even struck Mickey, and a thing had to be truly conspicuous before he’d pick up on it.
Bud had insinuated himself into my affairs and found out more about me than I’d have liked him to know. But it was possible that this knowledge also bound me to him. He had become, if not a friend, a felt presence, an observer of my existence in Dunsinane. His intrusions, or the threat of them, helped keep my feet on the ground. With Joyce gone and Vicky away at school, I was spending time on my own. I didn’t mind the solitude. But there were moments adrift, spells in which I couldn’t be sure whether I was waking or dreaming.
Bud had a knack for taking me out of myself. He’d drop by or call or appear on my visual or mental periphery. His entrances were varied—varied and, the more I thought about them, not the impositions that I’d take them to be. Not always anyway.
I was thinking about them as I sat at a red light on my way to the 7:38. The new station wagon’s violet interior was suddenly oppressive, the seat belt was like a halter, the steering column a trap. My throat was dry; a suffocating heat blew from the defroster. I pressed a button to lower the glass—the whine of the motor was like the mewing of a stray cat—stuck my head out the window and drew in the fresh air. The snow had stopped. It was getting colder.
The light turned green. On the mall beside the boulevard, a French pastry shop and a macramé boutique had opened. A Jack LaLanne health spa was on the way. At the pipefitters’, a man in a mackinaw spread a tarp over a truck bed. A woman in rubber coveralls scattered melting salt around the entrance of the local animal shelter. Snow covered the prow of a boat bobbing on the inlet.
As I pulled into the station parking lot, I saw Irene on her way out. She stopped and rolled down her window. Tiny creases ran from her cheekbones to the corners of her eyes.
“I’m glad to run into you. I’ve been wanting to apologize.”
“Apologize? What for?” I asked. I knew what for.
“You’re right—how clumsy of me! Enough said.”
A car pulled up behind me. She leaned toward me, breaking the plane of the open window with the top of her shoulder and the crook of her arm.
“I’d better move along,” I said.
She stared straight at me, but there was nothing disarming or intimidating about it. “Our house mustn’t seem very warm after a housewarming like that. I hope you’ll give it another chance.”
I’d have liked to turn around and give it another chance right then. Scintillas of covetousness: our neighbors’ wives are the vestals of suburbia. “On the contrary, your house couldn’t be more inviting,” I told her as I pulled away.
The waiting room was jammed. I got a cup of coffee but had left my copy of the paper at home. The kiosk was sold out. The machines on the platform were empty as well. A faint wind rippled the surface of my coffee. The sky was still low and gray, except where it was pierced by a white light. Its reflection off the rails and lampposts and roofs was sharp, a light that affronted the eyes both with its drabness and its glare. We were all squinting under our hats and fishing in our overcoat pockets for sunglasses we’d left in our Windbreakers.
An outbound train hurtled past. I went to the edge and looked through the glare down the tracks for the inbound. There it was in the distance, the light bouncing off its silver siding. My averted gaze landed on Bud at the bottom of the stairs to the overpass. I saw him in profile, his head wagging, shoulders swaying under his coat, feet twitching inside his wingtips. He was talking to a hatless man who was shielding his eyes from the sun. The hatless man laughed, then snorted.
I was walking down the platform when the train pulled in and idled with its doors closed. A crowd gathered before them. The fog on the windows was so thick that the doors might have been metal sheets. When they slid open, the revealed passengers looked like prisoners unaccustomed to daylight.
There was no point in looking for a seat. The aisles were mobbed. I was lucky to find a free hanger and a space for my coat. I hung it up and, retreating to the small space between the rack and the partition and putting my briefcase on the floor between my knees, leaned against the Plexiglas and closed my eyes.
“You made it,” I heard a voice say but didn’t open my eyes till I felt a hand on my shoulder. “You made it,” Bud repeated. He was standing beside me, before the window with the fire extinguisher behind it.
A man on the other side of the partition kept flicking his Zippo. The flint was obviously gone, but he wouldn’t stop. I was about to lean across and give him a light when someone beat me to it.
We were quiet for a while. The car was overheated and stuffy, dampness coming off coats and umbrellas and galoshes, the fluorescent light pooling at our waists. One man breathed down my neck; the brim of another’s hat grazed my ear. Peering through the corner of a window at slate roofs and slate-colored clouds, I wondered how many other passengers I myself was irritating. None showed it, but none would. Among peasants or soldiers there’d have been jokes or songs. We kept to ourselves, more like lobsters in a tank. Where lobsters would have brandished their rubberbanded claws, we raised our elbows and flourished our newspapers.
We pulled into Flushing, where the train sat at the station for a minute or two, fresh air pouring through the open doorway. I glanced across the platform at the billboards beside the opposite track. They were the same as at every other station on the line—“Double Diamond Works Wonders,” “Beanz Meanz Heinz,” “I’m Margie. Fly me,” “Should a Gentleman Offer a Tiparillo to a Lady?”—but when the wind came up and made the snow swirl around them, they reminded me of figures inside snow globes. And again that morning, things seemed insubstantial and dreamlike. I closed my eyes, drew in air sweet with exhaust, ran a fingertip over my lips, and sealed them. I fell into a measured trance. The light penetrated my eyelids in shadowy waves and bars that allowed me to believe as they hovered that I had only blinked. I didn’t sleep. Or if I did, I dreamed that I was in a crowded train on a snowy morning.
I opened my eyes, and the gold thread peeking from the knot on Bud’s tie pierced the gray of my reverie. “See this guy?” Bud thrust his copy of Fortune at me. “I used to know him.”
I knew of the man myself, and what I knew didn’t make me want to know more.
We left the billboards behind for bramble-choked chain-link fences, warehouses with broken windows, rusting trestles and disused bridges, ailanthus branches bending under the weight of crows, the backs of brick houses and weedy half-paved lots.
Bud poured over the article about his old acquaintance. “He’s got himself thirty rooms on Lake Geneva, fountains, pools, stables, hot-and-cold running girls . . . ”
“I happen to have it on good authority that he’s hustling.”
I noticed the throbbing in his temple and looked past it, at the blue and orange corrugated tiles of the new baseball stadium, like a dormitory for a race of giants.
“Really!” he exclaimed, and went back to his Fortune.
The scenery raced past too quickly to provide distraction: locust trees shuddered in our blast, signs for Serval zippers and Bohack’s and Singer sewing machines passed by faster than any fly could be zipped or any stitch sewn.
“A hustler, is he? I guess I’m not surprised.” Bud creased the magazine and put it in his inside pocket. “Still . . .”
There were general signs of restlessness. The man who’d been flicking his lighter went back to it. A passenger fought his way past us to the rack though it was too soon for putting on coats. An overhead fan switched on. A belt snapped and continually slapped the pulley. As we approached the tunnel and the car dimmed, the slapping grew unseemly. The lights flickered, and the rustling of newspapers grew more furious.
“I mean, just think of it,” he continued, his hand in the air, and tried two or three times to complete his sentence. The hand was slow to drop.
The sound of the train racing through the tunnel became deafening without being especially loud. We were under water, and its pressurized clatter echoed across all registers. I leaned toward Bud. “Where are you from?”
He brushed back his curl, smoothed down his collar, fussed with the crease in his pants. “Why do you ask? I mean, the fact that you ask, it’s a surprise.”
The train went dark. The naked bulbs hanging on the tunnel walls cast a dim light but we could barely see farther than the ends of our own noses.
“I come from there.” He pointed—westward, I think.
“From the bottom of the East River?”
He chuckled, and the jigsaw edges of his teeth faintly glowed. “I grew up in . . .” I lost him. The pressure inside the train had dropped. It became noisier, though not really louder. Somewhere between his lips and my ears a vacuum was sucking up the syllables.
“I can’t hear you!” I shouted.
“Oh, well.” He shrugged, then leaned toward me and spoke directly into my ear. I couldn’t miss a word now. “It was one place after the next.”
The lights came on, the overhead fan switched off, the belt stopped flapping; the car grew quiet. The train slowed and lurched to a stop. Steam puffed from the valves as the doors opened and we were swept onto the platform and up the stairs. I’d never have found a cab in this weather, so I headed for the IRT. Bud was taking the same line in the other direction, and we stayed together.
The crush in the subway was even worse than it had been in the train. Service had been out earlier in the morning. An hour’s quota of commuters marched through the tunnels as if to the siege of Broadway. It was impossible to advance against so many. We found ourselves standing with our backs to the wall, like gunfighters making ourselves slim.
“Maybe we’ll have better luck upstairs,” I said, finding myself speaking softly. The tunnel was oddly quiet given the density of the crowd. Above the footfall, one heard only a repetitive murmur, a dull chant echoing from the tiles.
“It can’t go on like this,” Bud replied. “It’s just a wave.”
We got our chance, though not because there was any letup. There were more commuters, and more, till they were packed so tightly that they slowed themselves down. Loss of momentum made them less imposing.
Bud and I waded in. We turned sideways, lowered our shoulders, raised our briefcases, and marched, all the while mumbling excuses and having them mumbled to us in turn. It was only amid the crowd that I understood that this repetition of the phrase “excuse me” was the murmuring I had heard from the side. It sounded devotional. The rapt expressions on the faces of those I crossed, their remote gazes and shuddering lips, bespoke pilgrimage.
The crowd thinned, and the air in the wider passage seemed alpine. We hurried through an intersection lined with newspaper kiosks, flower stands, and shoeshine men and descended to the 1 train, trailed by the odors of ink and shoe polish. “It was good of you to offer me that ride this morning,” I said on the platform.
“Spare me the bushwa, Neil.”
“No, really. I’m grateful to you.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Well, don’t be fooled.”
Our trains came at the same time. I got into mine and watched through smudged windows as he got into his and found a place between a woman in an Ultrasuede raincoat and a man who had stuffed half a kaiser roll into his mouth. The doors to both cars remained open.
A wino lay sleeping on the platform with a bottle beside him. A man rushed down the steps and into my train and clipped the bottle as he did. It tumbled and the booze began to spill from it, but the wino didn’t wake up. Bud hopped out of the car, righted the bottle, and got back in before the doors shut.
A few feet from Bud, a young man hanging onto a strap caught my notice. He was familiar to me, but no matter how I studied him I couldn’t say why. As his train started to pull away, he faced me full on and his eyes mesmerized me. They were my son Peter’s eyes, the grown-up’s eyes that Peter would have had.
chapter four
In the subway we had fought our way through a mob together. For a moment we were more than neighbors, we were comrades. Then he went downtown and I went up.
When I next saw him our common cause had faded and we were back where we’d been, with him looking for something from me that I could easily grant but still begrudged him. Things might have been simpler if I hadn’t had anything that he wanted.
But what would there have been between us without it? Bud wanted things. So did everyone else in the neighborhood. Ambitions were defining characteristics, as public as physical features, without the shame attached to deep desires. They were traded on, placed at the forefront of personality. Pure friendships among the new arrivals were rare. They did business with their friends and befriended their colleagues, and if I was a stranger to them it was probably because they couldn’t tell what I wanted. But then, sometimes neither could I.
It was easier for me to tell what I didn’t want. On an evening the following week, what I especially didn’t want was to be where I had agreed to go, to a boat club on a local bay where Mickey docked the yawl he liked to sail from Westchester. But he hadn’t sailed it this time. It was January and the day, almost evening now, was too cold and the water too rough.
The club was out of Mickey’s way, not on Bud’s or mine either, and figured to be gloomy. But Mickey insisted that we meet there. He preferred to do business where he didn’t have to worry about being overheard; his voice tended to boom after he’d had a couple of drinks. “And you know what, Neil?” he asked with false pluck. “If we meet there, it’ll make me feel that I’d gotten to sail.” He should have said it would make him feel that he’d gotten lucky. He could never get over the fact that during Prohibition the clubhouse had been a brothel, which thrilled him as though it were one still. He’d act especially highhanded, treating the hostess—who’d been there since the bad old days—like a madam and the waitresses like whores.
“One would think you hadn’t been out all year,” I’d said. He’d gone to Puerto de Habòno for the holidays and was just back. He’d have spent plenty of time on the water.
“Well, it would seem that way. The Caribbean weather let me down this time.”
“But you told me you’d gotten only one day of rain.” He had never come home uncooked.
“One full day, I meant. It was spotty the rest of the time.”
I arrived right before Bud was due. Mickey had asked me to come well beforehand to confer with him, but I was too late for that. I’d spent the day in meetings and had had to force myself to turn up at all. I wanted to spend time with Vicky. Her Christmas break was winding down. She’d gone on vacation with Joyce for the first part and used her stay with me to catch up with her friends: one in particular, a weak-chinned guitar-strumming gawk in denim and desert boots with whom she’d sit around singing inane songs about all the flowers having gone da da da, dee dee dee and who had little more to say to me than “peace”—not a bad choice if one was going to limit oneself to a single word, I had to admit.
Mickey’s back was to the bay; only a milky light reached it through the thick clouds, but the olive-drab wavelets skipped and jigged. I took the seat across from his before he had a chance to declare his annoyance by not getting up. “I’ve been here for nearly half an hour,” he hissed. “Nearly half an hour.” He leaned forward in his wing chair, grabbed his crossed leg at the shank, and squeezed. “Only you, Neil. You’re the only person in the world who keeps me waiting. Know what I’d do if Jeanette made me wait like this?” I didn’t dislike Jeanette enough to consider the question. He looked at his watch like someone who already knows the time and said, “We might as well just wait for him. There’s no point in trying to figure anything out now.”
He was dressed in winter-weight summer clothes—captain’s dark blazer and light-colored trousers of a heavy weave. They were what he wore after returning from the Caribbean. He’d had them for years. They were tight on him now, starchily pressed, fatly creased, the lining mildewed. The outfit still served its purpose, however, which was to show off his sunburn, the one he had said he hadn’t gotten this time. His hair was longer than usual and bleached by the sun to unmixed patches of gray and dirty blond. Bay Rum wafted from his dewlap.
I offered no excuses but only lit a cigarette for him, then one for myself, the snapping shut of my lighter punctuating my first drag. How often in my life had this sound and this taste corresponded in this way, I wondered. I caught myself wondering and recognized my dread of the upcoming performance, which would really be no performance at all but a genuine episode that had been repeated often enough to ring false. Mickey would lay on the charm with a trowel, become part preacher and part clown, and if the business we’d come to discuss was mentioned at all, it would be as an excuse for a budding friendship.
I don’t know whether this was a tactic of his. He might have had some idea of small talk as a blunt weapon for wearing down the other man’s resistance. It had never worked, at least not while I was present. My resistance always broke before the other man’s. Maybe Mickey counted on my impatience to get them down to brass tacks. But maybe not. It always looked as if he’d go on jabbering all night. He was possibly lonely enough to hold court with whoever was in a position to have to endure it. I can’t say. What I can say is that although the scene played to the same end, it was always spontaneous. There was no calculation in my attitude, and there might have been none in Mickey’s. We were businessmen, not conspirators. Some had done well in their partnerships with us. Others hadn’t.
