A Strange Commonplace Read online

  Pearl Gray Homburg

  THE 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

  HERE 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

  THERE 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

  THE 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

  THE 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

  “WE ARE THE DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE,” THE young man says, gesturing behind him toward a shadowy group of people, “an
d 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

  WHEN 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

  WHEN 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.

  Happy Days

  MAUREEN HAD BEEN SLEEPING WITH HER BOSS, PIERRE, for six months. Everybody called him Blackie, even the stock boys. He was such a good sport about everything that he didn’t mind at all. He’d told her that he was going to leave Janet, it was only his daughter that kept him from walking out on her right now, she’d turned into such a nag—nothing that he did was ever good enough for her. Surprisingly, out of the blue, as Maureen put it, he showed up at her apartment one Friday night about nine o’clock, carrying a suitcase. “I did it,” he said. “That’s that.” They made love all night long and it was just wonderful, although she made him leave very early in the morning because of her nosy neighbors—all she needed was gossip reaching the Swede landlord. The next day when he came over for lunch he told her that he and Janet had been fighting like cats and dogs all week long; she’d found a book of matches from the Parisian Casino, and although he did his best to lie—he hated to lie, even to Janet—about what he was doing in a Union City roadhouse, it wouldn’t wash. She said that she knew all about roadhouses and what went on there and what went on after people left them, and she knew what sort of women men took to those places. And then she said, and Blackie was struck dumb by it, that she knew damn well what woman he’d taken there and did he think she was a complete fool that she didn’t know what was going on all these weeks and with that scarf that Maureen—she said that woman—gave him for Christmas? A silk scarf, and a potted plant for the dumb little wife? Did he really take her for a complete fool? The fight went on from there, and on and on, and then it would simmer down, but start up all over again. That’s why he hadn’t been able to see his sweetie all week. He didn’t tell Maureen that he and Janet had made love before and after all the episodes of their serial quarrel, and that their lovemaking was better than it had ever been in their eleven years together, it was hot and kind of dirty. It looked as if maybe things were going to blow over for a while so that he could talk to Janet, choose his own time to leave, explain things to little Clara—but then yesterday she woke up ready for battle, started in all over again with the scarf business. She must have been lying in bed stewing about it. That scarf had really gotten under her skin and there was the old song and dance about it, silk, made in Italy, B. Altman’s, the works! And how he never gave her anything nice, he never took her anywhere, when was the last time they went out to dinner in a nice restaurant, oh Jesus God! And then she mentioned, the bitch, that maybe Maureen had also bought him his hat, that makes him look like an ambulance-chasing shyster. Blackie went upstairs, without a word, packed a bag, and came down to tell her that he wasn’t coming back, he’d call her. Janet yelled at him, actually she screamed at him that she didn’t want him to call her ever ever again and that he’d never see Clara again and that she hoped he’d die and burn in hell along with his whore. Blackie sat back on Maureen’s sofa and she patted his leg, shaking her head. She got up and brought him a cup of coffee. She was wearing a tight skirt and he reached out and touched her leg. She looked at him and smiled. “Why didn’t you wear your scarf, darlin
g?” she said. He looked up at her and smiled back, his hands under her skirt, caressing her thighs. He’d looked for the scarf high and low and it hadn’t been in his closet or dresser drawers, or anywhere, and he figured that maybe Janet, she could be very mean, had thrown it out. “Thrown it out?” Maureen said, pushing at his hands and stepping back from him. “You let her throw it out?” Her expression was cold, her face closed and pinched. Blackie looked out the window at the cold Saturday streets, trying to think of an answer to the envenomed question. Christ, she made a really lousy cup of coffee.

  Claire

  DOCTOR NAPOLEON GETS OFF THE ELEVATOR AND TELLS her that he knew that she’d come to the office, despite what he’d heard. She doesn’t know what he’d heard. “I’m Claire,” she says. “Of course,” he says, “there’s always a chance that a regimen of internal crosswords might arrest the disease. They’ve made such great advances in so many years of medicine.” He looks at The Memoir, which he has taken out of his pocket, and smiles. “Where’s your friend, the high-school boy writer? Isn’t he a little young for you?” He turns and opens a stainless steel door marked CAUTION HAZARD ENTERTAINMENT, and walks through it. She is mildly surprised to find that she is wearing nothing but her slip and a pair of paper slippers, one of which says MICKEY and the other MINNIE. Doctor Napoleon stands in front of her, his arms folded, and asks her about her offensive smoking at the party, “and by the buffet! That’s not a good idea with multiple myeloma. Why aren’t you in a hospital gown?” He is at the nurses’ station, talking to two nurses and shaking his head resignedly. She goes back to her room and the good-looking but boyish entertainment coordinator is sitting on the bed, smoking her last cigarette. “Oh, oh,” he says. “Caught red-handed. I surrender.” She takes her slip off because of the strict instructions she memorized while still at home, and stands at the side of the bed, in another slip, her arms held straight at her sides. He gets up and looks out the window. “They all ought to go back to Chelsea, and what the hell happened to that neighborhood? You too!” She gets into bed and lights a cigarette from a pack that she finds under the counterpane. He and Doctor Napoleon speak in whispers in the little bathroom, the door to which is only half-closed. “Have the other women finally left for Los Angeles?” the doctor asks. “In their New York clothes? They were supposed to wear their hospital gowns!” She puts her cigarette out and lights another, then offers the pack to Doctor Napoleon and the entertainment coordinator, who, she realizes, is a young black man whose name is Ferlon Grevette. This surprises her for she knows that young black men never get sick enough to go to the hospital. “You’re very bald,” she says to him. She gets off the bed, straightens and smooths her skirt, tucks in her blouse, and steps into her new pumps. But she can’t open the door, even though it has no lock. She turns, in tears, to Doctor Napoleon. Her blouse has fallen open and her breasts are exposed. “The door,” she says. “I’m dying and the door’s closed. Am I?” “It’s time for some entertainment,” Doctor Napoleon says, but Ferlon Grevette has left. “Let’s get into that gown now, Claire, shall we?” Doctor Napoleon says, smiling foolishly. “Your breasts are beautiful, but multiple myeloma doesn’t care.” He begins to eat his stethoscope. “Licorice,” he says. “One of my little jokes to lighten things up a bit.” “That’s in The Memoir,” Claire says, pulling her slip on.