Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 8

  “Te amo, te amo,” he calls out to the Nun. It’s as close as he can come to speaking Latin, a dead language that he hopes will sound sacred to her.

  A miscalculation, for the Nun evidences little, if any, feeling for either dead languages or the Conductor—make that the ex-Conductor. Apparently, she has not confused him with the streetcar any more than a hijacker confuses the pilot with the airplane. Apparently, it is the streetcar itself she desires, that incredible conveyance with blue voltage sparking at the junctures of overhead cable, a vehicle part city, part dream.

  Ding, ding. A blue spark crackles, electricity enough to depopulate Death Row jolts the rear wheels, and the streetcar embarks toward the destination she has chosen.

  Swaying from the hand strap with his bound hands clasped as if in prayer, Sister Mary Martin can make out the lettering the Nun has cranked at the front of the streetcar, although, as it appears backward, he must decipher it letter by letter. D-O-O-W-S-N-E-V-A-R. Doowsnevar. R-A-V-E-N-S-W-O-O-D. That was never on his route! He’s never heard of such a street or neighborhood before.

  But then, he can’t help wondering if he’s experiencing partial amnesia from that concussion with the missal. The blocks the streetcar rattles down look only vaguely familiar, but perhaps that’s because he’s been displaced from his customary perspective gazing down rails of narrow-gauge track from the front of the car. Careening from the hand strap as the streetcar races between corner stops, he thinks the ride seems more herky-jerky than he remembers.

  “Move to the rear!” the Nun yells over the hiss of pneumatic doors opening and slamming shut on the surprised faces of commuters who have not been given the chance to board.

  In the rear, the ex-Conductor twirls from the hand strap, abstractly fingering his beads, feeling disoriented, forgotten, suffering like a martyr on the verge of a mystical experience.

  “Je t’aime, je t’aime,” he whines.

  No answer. Clearly, the Nun couldn’t care less about Romance languages. Through the rear window, among the crowd of commuters that wildly pursue the streetcar, futilely grasping for the grillwork on the rear platform, he can see vaguely familiar faces. Isn’t that flushed gentleman furiously waving a transfer in his fist as if bidding farewell Mr. Hedmund, his old English teacher who used to warn him, “Martin, you’re a dreamer and when dreamers wake, sometimes they find themselves digging ditches or punching transfers on streetcars”? And that gimpy black man trying to hook the grille of the streetcar with his cane, isn’t that Coach Bender, complete with his old football knee, who used to warn him, “If you don’t open your eyes and smell the coffee, Marty-boy, you’re going to blindside yourself.” And that heavyset bleached blonde who’s just tripped over her purse and is now being trampled by the others running down the curving streetcar track—take away twenty years and forty pounds and she might have been the woman who used to sign her letters to him the Girl of Your Dreams, a name she later shortened to GOYD.

  He can’t recall GOYD’s real name anymore, but the mere thought of her now in the context of his current situation leaves him no choice but to reevaluate his relationship with the Nun. Tears, unsuccessfully searching for tracks on his face, roll helter-skelter down his cheeks as he realizes that now, when he has finally discovered that love is surrender, he’s been wasting his time trying to surrender to the wrong person. It’s not the Nun herself but her example that he should identify with. She’s obviously a woman with the courage of her convictions, unafraid of commitment no matter the sacrifice it entails, someone willing to discipline her life around a vow. Had he committed himself to the streetcar when he was its conductor, perhaps it would have remained faithful to him and never seduced the Nun. His sins all become achingly clear—his insensitivity, his blindness (those letters the Girl of Your Dreams would write to him came, after a while, to be addressed to Dear Mr. Oblivious—later abbreviated to Dear Mr. O, as if she were writing love letters to a cipher), and the worst sin of all, lack of passion: he’d taken being a conductor for granted, treated it as merely a job, an identity he stripped off with the uniform, when, dear God!, it was his life.

  Dear Mr. O strikes his head despairingly against the chrome handrail. Advertisements to which he’s long been oblivious swim before his eyes. So these are the daydreams of silkier hair and ageless complexions upon which the hordes filing past him each day dwelled as they embarked on their journey together. He remembers all those days, weeks, years that he and the streetcar, now improbably named Ravenswood, have shared, intimately connected no matter how much traffic or how large the crowd. While commuters sat gabbing, or lost in newspapers, or gazing blankly out the window, Martin had registered, just below the threshold of consciousness, each nick in the track, hitch in the cable, surge of current, subtle whir, and shifting of gears. Oh, for those luminous hours between morning and evening rush, merrily clanging along on schedule down sunny streets.

  He becomes bitter, glares at the Nun bouncing and chuckling on his air cushion seat, and wishes he could beat her knuckles bloody with a ruler, could make her stand in a corner with aching arms outstretched balancing a Bible on each palm, could deprive her of recess and banish her to the wardrobe closet.

  But the Nun, now no longer a nun but a conductor in her own right, seems oblivious to all but the streetcar. Throttle open, bell clanging, and a fine sweat gathered like a mustache along her upper lip, suddenly boisterous as a gondolier, she breaks into song, its melody a cross between “funiculi funicula” and a hymn, its lyrics a psalm.

  Although the Lord be high above

  He doth recall the lowly

  And deep within the secret heart

  The Lord shall surely know thee

  Her flashing teeth bite into the apple from the Conductor’s lunch bag. Each crunch of the apple seems transmitted to the streetcar as if spikes of electricity were driving it forward in a more and more abandoned way, and Martin remembers drives down a country two-lane in his old Camaro with the Girl of His Dreams beside him, unzipping his trousers, urging him, Faster, faster, as if the way she touched him were actually propelling the car. If a motorcycle cop had been pursuing them then the way cops are pursuing the streetcar now, it would have looked to him as if the female passenger suddenly vanished, and though Martin was gripping the wheel and it was his foot on the gas, the Camaro was responding to what her tongue was doing.

  I’ll love Thee with mine own true heart

  Before the world I’ll praise Thee

  Your love was there before the start

  Thy mercy doth amaze me

  With an enormous jolt, haloed in blue lightning, the streetcar leaps the track, and as it hurtles airborne Martin glances out the back window to see if he might catch one last glimpse of that woman who’d reminded him of GOYD. Instead, he sees the motorcycle cops pitching headfirst over their handlebars and the crowd pulling up in a way that’s almost ceremonious, like a procession of mourners who have allowed the hearse to escape, as the streetcar plunges through a canopy of trees.

  Ex-Conductor Martin, who was once so aware of any imperfection in the smooth steel rails, now feels the streetcar grinding savagely over earth, kicking up dust, crashing through bush. He feels his connection with the machine of whose identity he was once a part, slipping away, its familiar track a fading memory. He thinks of all the streets they’ve been down together, streets with their misleading, disappointing names: Blue Island—just an asphalt aisle through bankrupt factories; Sunset—a street perennially in the shadow of tenements; Tree Haven—an artery of concrete paved in broken glass. Why don’t those streets bear the names that tell their stories? Grand View with its pawnshops, bars, and crack houses should be called Dead End. When was the last time the stains on treeless Mulberry actually came from ripened berries? Better to call it Blood Street. And that noble-sounding intersection of Lincoln and State deserves to be Hooker and John. But Ravenswood is Ravenswood.

  The doors whoosh open long enough for the commuters of the woods to file on. Thei
r somber dress makes Martin grateful for the first time that he is wearing the black robes of the Nun. The shadows of their cloaks darken shafts of sun. The Nun who has become the Conductor continues her hymn:

  How precious are Thy thoughts to me

  How great Thy loving kindness

  How blind the man who cannot see

  That God will ease his blindness

  But the commuters of Doowsnevar can only croak in a split tongue that must be older than any dead language.

  A blur of vegetation streams by, limbs whapping the windows; humidity beads into sweat on Martin’s shaved head and streams down his wimple. He joins with his fellow commuters in croaking a hymn he didn’t know he knew, like when he was a child and prayed in Latin, never really understanding the words or what it was for which he prayed.

  Brisket

  Their pale, plump skins scorched almost to bursting, the Thuringers invited a plaster of brown mustard.

  The stacked pastrami was decked out in zooty 1950s colors: blushing pink meat in a carapace of black pepper.

  There was corned beef awaiting horseradish, kosher franks and kraut, dangling salamis, tukus, house hickory-smoked turkey, trout, sablefish, and two kinds of knishes—thin kasha and golden squares of potato—slaw, paprika-dusted potato salad, fried onions and schmaltz, green tomatoes, kaiser rolls, baguettes, pumpernickel. I’d been walking around all day in the cold and it all looked good. But finally, when my turn in line arrived, I decided to invest my last few dollars in the garlic-kissed brisket on rye.

  “Young man, I’m going to make you a very nice sandwich,” murmured the old, bald server, wearing a stained white apron.

  He said it conspiratorially, his lips barely moving, drawing me toward him in order to hear, as if it were something he’d rather the owners of the establishment not get wind of. A secret between the two of us, not for the ears of the others behind me in line.

  He glanced up into my eyes and held them as if he’d taken a personal interest in me, which was more than I could say for the secretaries and interviewers in the personnel offices where I’d spent the last six weeks filling out applications for jobs while my money ran out and I moved from friend to friend, crashing from apartment to apartment, sleeping on sofas and floors as if I’d never grow up if I stayed poor. His face, crosshatched in lines, was set in the comically tragic expression he’d practiced until it had become his permanent physiognomy. He must have been making sandwiches for a long time, must have seen a lot of hungry faces staring back at him from the other side of the glass partition.

  Maybe he’d learned to read faces at a glance and could read in mine that a desperation I’d never felt before was setting in. That I needed a helping hand. That I’d caught enough of a glimpse of what it meant to be down, homeless, jobless, walking the streets hungry to last a lifetime.

  Or maybe to get through the day he allowed himself now and then to take a liking to the face of a perfect stranger. A face that perhaps reminded him of himself when he was young, or of someone in his past, the way that, riding the subway and watching all the people with jobs filing on, I’d sometimes see a woman who would remind me of an old girlfriend in another city, a city I should have stayed in, a girlfriend I should have stayed with. That same girlfriend who once told me, “You’ve got a working-class face.”

  Maybe he thought so, too.

  “See?” he said, surgically trimming off the fat with the tip of his carving knife, and then scraping the trimmings across the cutting-board counter, leaving a trail of grease. That’s when I noticed the numbers tattooed on his wrist. I’d seen the faded marks of the death camps on the wrists of tailors in that neighborhood before. Those tattooed numbers still shocked me into a sense of dislocation. The brutal reality of history crowded out the mundane present. I wondered what he thought when he looked at his wrist every day. What horrible memories did he overcome each morning? When I saw those numbers I felt ashamed. Here I was spending my last few bucks—big deal! I would survive.

  “How about some nice scraps for your dog?” he asked, gesturing with his knife to the pile of trimmings that he’d been accumulating from mine and other sandwiches. Attached to the fat were hearty-looking ribbons of brisket. There was at least another meal there.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, still with that confidential tone as if something preferential were going on between us.

  Working in a practiced methodical sequence, he wrapped the trimmings in waxed paper and the waxed paper in a sheet of brown butcher paper which he expertly folded into a neat, tight, easily concealed packet before taping it and handing it toward me. “Only two dollars.”

  “Two dollars?”

  “For your dog,” he said.

  I thought he’d been offering to give them away and suddenly I felt like a total fool. All at once it struck me that whatever had made me naïve enough to think the scraps might be free was the same impulse that had landed me in my current situation: out of work, living from friend to friend, missing a woman in another city, a woman who’d already given up on me.

  “I don’t have a dog,” I told him.

  “You just said you had one.”

  “I used to have one.”

  “You forgot you don’t have a dog anymore?” He couldn’t get over that someone could make such a mistake.

  “I had a dog but he died. I still say yes out of force of habit.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your dog.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “He was a schnauzer named Yappy. Happy Yappy I used to call him. He sure would have liked those scraps.”

  “Maybe you have a cat?”

  “No cat,” I said.

  “You sure now?”

  “Positive.”

  “Want a garlicky pickle with that?”

  “How much?” I asked. I’d learned my lesson.

  “Comes with the sandwich.”

  Alms

  After Mr. Kronner’s daily constitutional down Eighty-sixth to the river and back, Mattie wheeled him under the scaffolding and into the lobby. Workmen had been refurbishing the building for months and the dark scaffolding had come to seem a permanent feature. At least they’d installed an automatic door and a ramp so that Mattie no longer needed help pushing the chair through the entrance and up the short flight of stairs to the elevator. Valentine, the doorman, still would usually push the chair along with her as if the incline required his added muscle. She and Valentine had a running conversation going in which Valentine would tell her new places in Astoria where he’d find fruits and fish from the islands.

  “Hey, Chicken Legs, guess what I find at the market?” he’d ask. “Old wife! Fresh on ice, not smelling, not frozen. Never thought I’d see old wife in this city, me son.”

  Valentine was from St. Croix. Back home she’d heard that the Crucians thought they were better than Tortolans. “Just because they on Uncle Sammy’s dole,” her mother used to say. But here in New York, it was as if she and Valentine had been childhood friends. Mattie didn’t mind that he called her Chicken Legs; she knew that it was his way of giving a compliment.

  Today, Valentine merely waved from where he stood at the curb tugging at the leashes of three shivering whippets while hailing a cab for Mrs. Takamura so that she could take her dogs for a run in Central Park.

  At the service elevator, which Mattie always used when she was pushing the chair, one of the men working on the building held the elevator door while Mattie wheeled in Mr. Kronner.

  “Excuse us, sorry, thank you,” Mattie said as she accidentally rolled the chair over the man’s foot.

  The man nodded, as if apologizing for not speaking because his mouth was full—he was chewing a sandwich. He squeezed on behind Mattie and the door closed.

  He was wearing a Glidden’s paper painter’s cap and jeans that looked clean even though there were spots from faded white paint or maybe from bleach along the thighs. In the loop below his right pocket, a claw hammer hung. Otherwise, he was non
descript, one of those mutt-like guys with a stubbly beard and an acne-pitted face who could have been Hispanic or black or Mideastern or even white. It wasn’t how he looked that was important so much as how he didn’t look—not one of the homeless that you couldn’t walk down Eighty-sixth without being accosted by, begging for a handout or trying to sell you StreetWise, or some paperback book or magazine they’d fished out of the trash and spread out in a sidewalk display. Did anyone ever buy any of those books? There was a homeless man who stood at the intersection on Third with a spray bottle and a rag and would wash windshields, and a little man called Pygmy with a bag and a whisk broom wired to a stick who followed people walking their dogs and offered, for a dollar, to clean up after them. Yesterday, over by the park along the river, a homeless man had come up to her, holding in his hand a green parakeet that must have escaped somebody’s house, and tried to sell it. The bird looked so luminescent and delicate in the man’s dirty fist that Mattie would have liked it, if only to release it again, but Mr. Kronner made it clear that they were to give nothing to people he considered bums. The man on the elevator wasn’t a bum and he wasn’t some gangster like the kid with dreadlocks she’d just seen on Eighty-sixth, prying in broad daylight with a piece of pipe at the lock on a delivery bike chained to a stop sign and cursing passersby aloud as if it were their fault he couldn’t snap the chain. Instead of work boots, the man on the elevator wore tennis shoes—but they weren’t high-tops. And he was eating, like a workingman too busy to break for lunch, tearing at a croissant sandwich wrapped in foil so that his dirty hand wouldn’t soil his food. That simple act of gobbling lunch on the fly made him seem unthreatening, and he’d held the door open so politely, too. He smiled at her.