Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 9

  “Thank you,” Mattie said again. She was always saying thank you around Mr. Kronner, as if trying to make up for the fierce, angry way he stared at everyone, not that he could help it. His face was stuck in that expression. If Mr. Kronner had not been there she might have said what she was thinking, which was to warn the man to be careful not to accidentally bite off a piece of foil that would then touch one of his fillings.

  “No problem,” the man said between chews.

  Mr. Kronner stabbed the 25 button with his cane, as was his habit. It was the only time he used the cane. Certainly he couldn’t walk or even use it to help him stand. He was like a child about wanting to press the elevator buttons. The doors closed and the car ascended.

  “What floor you want?” Mattie asked. “He’ll press it for you.”

  “Twenty-six,” the man mumbled, his mouth stuffed.

  “Only goes to twenty-five,” Mattie said.

  He’d balled up the foil and stuffed what was left of the sandwich into his mouth and put his hand out as if to say, Sorry, can’t talk just now.

  They rode in silence to twenty-five and when they reached it, the man stepped out to hold the door open again, barring her way at the same time. He took out his hammer and braced it between the elevator door and the doorjamb.

  “I got a knife,” he said to Mattie. “You need to see it?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “You heard me. You need to see it or do you believe me that this is happening?”

  “I believe you,” she said quietly.

  “You should. This is the Big Apple, babe.”

  “What you want? He’s old,” Mattie said, looking down at Mr. Kronner. His eyes were wild-looking, the left one bulged and roved about seemingly with a will of its own that made it appear even more furious-looking than his right eye, which was watering. Above his eyes, his eyebrows perched like gray wings of some bird of prey. He refused to let Mattie or anyone trim those eyebrows. His hawk nose was like a peeling beak. He leaned forward on his cane.

  “What’s his problem?” the man asked.

  “Had a stroke.”

  “He shouldn’t be looking like that at me. Crabby old motherfuck.”

  “He don’t mean nothing.”

  “Empty the purse, gimme the old man’s wallet. Gimme the watch.”

  “No wallet,” Mattie said. “I carry the money in my purse.”

  “Where you get that accent, girl?” the man said, falling into a mocking accent.

  “Tortola,” she said.

  “What you do for this nasty old piece of white cheese, Tortola, besides wheel him around like a baby?”

  Mattie said nothing.

  “You play with his old pud?”

  She said nothing.

  “A fucking Timex! And there’s only twenty fucking dollars in here,” he said, throwing down the purse.

  “That’s all we ever carry.”

  “Who’s in his apartment besides you two?”

  “His son, Val,” Mattie lied. “Home from college.”

  “Pull your dress up.”

  “Please,” she said.

  “Don’t argue with a knife, stupid Tortola.” He slipped a thick black-handled jackknife out of his pocket and opened it up. The blade looked tarnished and dull, dirty like the hand that held it. “See, you didn’t believe me.”

  “I believed you.”

  “Nice skinny legs. Shaving them, I see. They don’t shave their legs down in Tortola, do they? You come here to New York and get trendy, girl?”

  Mattie was crying, silently. She glanced at Mr. Kronner, who sat with his usual impassively fierce expression but his left eye roving and gleaming as if out of control.

  “Pull down the panties. Maybe you be shaving your pussy, too.”

  She stared at him.

  “Listen, Tortola, I’m taking a chance taking extra time to fuck with you, so don’t mess around or I’m gonna have to be mean. What I tell you to do you fucking do, crybaby. It’s Mr. Crabby Cheapass’s lucky day. He’s gonna get a little show for his money.”

  *

  Two weeks later, when Mattie was wheeling Mr. Kronner across Eighty-sixth Street at Second Avenue, the old man suddenly stuck his cane into the spokes of a delivery bike and sent the Asian kid riding it flying headlong over the handlebars into the back of a cab. The kid lay dazed on the street, his arms flailing in a mess of crushed white cartons spilling soup, noodles, and sauce. He was trying to get up, swearing or pleading for help in a language Mattie didn’t understand a word of, while the cabbie, a Hindu in a turban, stood by his open door on the driver’s side waving traffic by and shouting after his passenger, who was fleeing the cab through the other door, apparently without paying his fare.

  “Not my fault, not my fault!” the cabbie repeated.

  A homeless man who’d been waiting by the light, the only person besides her, as far as Mattie could see, who’d witnessed what Mr. Kronner had done, stared at Mr. Kronner, who sat in his chair looking impassively fierce, but his left eye roving and gleaming in a way that Mattie had seen only once before—on the elevator that day they’d been assaulted. She thought the roving of his eye had been a symptom of panic then, but now it somehow suggested a crazed mirth. The homeless man had retrieved Mr. Kronner’s cane from the street, handed it back to him, and was now staring Mattie in the eyes. She recognized him from among the other homeless men she passed each day. He was the man who had tried to sell her the parakeet he’d caught. He nodded hello, then stretched out his hand, and Mattie opened her purse and gently laid a crisp twenty-dollar bill onto his dirty, trembling palm.

  Here Comes the Sun

  A strawberry blonde slams out of the conch-shell-pink Paradise taxi and, strappy white heels dangling from one hand and a sisal purse from the other, walks barefoot across the hot sand, her eyes fixed on the sea.

  Not so much as a glance at the goats munching sea grapes, at the guinea fowl shrieking among shorebirds, at Itchy Mon, the brindled mongrel sniffing after her perfume, which is perhaps what prompts him to lift a leg against an ylang-ylang tree. Not a glance even at the mounds of faded pink conch shells that mark the graves of the fishermen buried where they once fished shark from the beach—Shark Beach—and don’t be telling the tourists it’s called that, me son—night fishing that by the blaze of driftwood bonfires looked like a tug-of-war with the ocean. Anchor chain for leader, a rotted goat head for bait, Rest in Peace.

  The living attract no more notice from her than the dead. She passes the Coco Mon, his machete whittling green coconuts down to their water; and a Charles Atlas with skin the color of squid ink, who’s walking on his hands; and Itchy Mon’s master, whose face beneath a disheveled straw hat is shadow and a smile as he clonks from a steel drum the only song he seems to know; and the dancer with a gray, dreadlocked beard, Neptune wearing a hula skirt of dying octopus and conducting with a trident spear.

  Near the water’s sloshing edge she stakes out a towel-sized patch of sand—not that she has a towel—drops her bag and high heels, then kneels, unbuttons her white cotton blouse, and slips it off.

  Her lacy white bra exposes less than a bikini top. Still, Basinio Davis, tall for his age, a junior high kid who wants to go to the States and play for the Chicago Bulls, has witnessed a legend: I was there, me son, the day this blanc lady comes to the Shark and takes off her clothes.

  There’s a constellation of freckles under her bra straps. She squirms out of her black skirt. Her white panties reflect the sunlight. She folds the blouse on top of the skirt, weights them with her flimsy shoes, and, sisal bag for a pillow, stretches out on the bare hot sand. Me son, only the little kids run around this beach in their undies. Once some French showed up and went topless, but that’s different.

  It’s how she’s stripped off her clothes. Not like some exhibitionist, but like a woman who no longer feels there’s time to be conventional. Despite the streets in town lined with free-port shops, there apparently wasn’t time enough to buy
a swimsuit or a souvenir towel or even a tube of lotion to keep her pale skin from burning. Maybe she came to this island for a quickie divorce and has a plane to catch back to someplace buried in snow. Maybe she’s dumping some cheat she once worshipped in the way she just knelt before the sea. Or maybe a man who loved her too much is letting her go, maybe it has become unbearable for him when business associates learn how casually her clothes are discarded.

  If it were you, would you hail a pink Paradise taxi and find your way to where you could be a total stranger for an afternoon, on a nameless beach on the native side of the island? Would the sound in your mind be the scream of a guinea fowl, the lap of the sea, or the lilting notes from an old man playing a perpetual-motion “Here Comes the Sun” on the pans?

  Her eyes are closed. No one asks, What is it you hear? She wouldn’t answer anyway.

  But oblivious though she’s seemed, she must feel the stares because she raises her head suddenly as if determined to confront the gaze of whatever creep can’t summon the courtesy to give a woman alone on a beach she’ll never have the chance to see again a moment’s peace, and her eyes meet the eyestalks of a dozen ghost crabs waltzing sideways around her body.

  And I say it’s all right.

  Coat

  A coat from another life comes up behind him and like an old flame slips its limp arms around his shoulders. He watches as they dance in the mirror—he and his coat. He slides his arms into its sleeves. His hands fill up its pockets.

  Look at the street, that avenue of wind we used to flare, my coat and I. He knows that one can’t step into the same street twice, and yet he’s returned to this city looking not for the eternal, but for whatever has survived.

  Nothing has changed, the coat believes. It’s said a coat can make the man, but the coat knows that the man shapes it as wind does a sail. It’s a man who brings a coat to life, then shrugs it off and leaves it waiting.

  All the time spent hanging in the dark on the hunched shoulders of the wooden hanger from the Hotel Luna seems to the coat merely an extended change of season, a predictable cycle in which nothing more significant than weather has happened. Take a coat off; put a coat on. What occurs in between isn’t the coat’s concern.

  The coat may be right, the man thinks. He recalls the impulse to go away and leave the coat behind, but not what, if anything, he was hoping to find. Now it seems almost as though it were someone other than himself who was off strolling in shirtsleeves and sunglasses through a palpable brightness—a figure in rolled-up duck pants disappearing down a dazzling road that unaccountably ended in a maze of goat trails twisting into mangroves where the only other pedestrians were mobs of crabs brandishing their claws like machetes. Perhaps whoever it was behind those mirrored sunglasses is still throwing a shadow where the sea slops over rotten tennis shoes; perhaps whoever it was has made his way past smoldering coal pots and old men slapping down dominoes outside of rum shops, to one of a run of hotel rooms that seemed to rotate beneath the crank of a ceiling fan, rooms smelling of empty bottles, with scorpions in the shower and closets that were never meant for an overcoat, rooms in which each morning he sorted through a mildewed suitcase of strewn laundry for a shirt without discolored underarms.

  And all the while he was gone, the coat hung suspended and believed that the man, too, hung somewhere, in storage, asleep on a hanger of bone, dreaming as the coat dreamed, of snowy light shafting through dusty windows into a drafty warehouse of disrobed mannequins.

  Put a coat on, and it’s resurrected, standing tall in a full-length mirror, a timelessly fashionable knee-length gray-green herringbone reappraising itself at the threshold of a familiar reflection.

  What if stepping back into a life could be as simple as slipping on an old coat? Suppose, as if in some tale, the coat might serve as a magic raiment that a man beloved by a goddess puts on to receive a gift of power, the way an ancient hero might attire himself in invincible armor, a cloak of invisibility, winged sandals.

  It’s not invisibility or armor that the man needs, but a coat of attachment, a garment that when buttoned back on might reconnect him to the time when he was still recognizably himself before he stepped over the border of who he’d meant to be. He turns from his reflection, which also turns, retreating into the mirror and refusing to follow him out. The coat doesn’t retreat, and the man allows it to guide him as they step onto the street.

  It was a labyrinthine route we used to take, the coat recalls, a journey via fabulous conveyances that instead of detachment should have caused a daily astonishment: down the vanishing steps of escalators, through turnstiles that one cranked with the hip thrust of a lover—long lines of commuters bundled in coats, thrusting, each morning, through ringing turnstiles. A dash along underground corridors, past blue switches still burning from night. Doors slam. The train shoots through the tunnel like a memorandum through a pneumatic tube.

  The man in the coat emerges, a part of the crowd with its collective consciousness of fragmented headlines and daydreams, filing into a glass door revolving like a device that sorts crowds back into individuals. He ascends in an elevator that climbs a glass column as silently as a fever reading in a thermometer. Chrome doors slide open onto a floor of office space where walls of windows eye-level with the undersides of smoldering clouds overlook the gray projections of downtown. Beside each desk, a coat draped with the banner of a scarf waits on a hook shared with an umbrella. The man, still wearing his coat, sits at a desk, flicks on the computer, recalls his password DeusAderit, which he lifted from the inscription on Carl Jung’s tombstone: Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit. Called or uncalled, God is present. He types, Welcome back, but the words refuse to appear on the screen.

  Evening: luminescent empty offices stacked against the sky; the cry of a street musician’s trumpet counterpoints the percussion of rush-hour L trains. A misty drizzle dissipates the odor of mothballs and the coat releases its true scent, not smoke or the perfume absorbed in restaurants or bars, but woolliness that the man imagines to be the smell of sheep musky with salt fog on some craggy island in the North Sea. The man doesn’t mind when the coat hurries them past Goodwill and used-clothing shops. He doesn’t mind stopping when the coat, vain as always, pauses to regard its reflection in the black plate-glass window of the Twenty-first, a bar where they would go regularly after work for an Irish whiskey. Just a quick one to burn off the aftertaste of a workday, though more often than not he’d end up throwing dice for drinks with a boisterous bunch from the “Subs”—the Foreign Subsidiaries Department.

  “Max, old boy, take off your coat and stay awhile,” they’d urge.

  When the Subs said they regarded themselves as a cosmopolitan crowd it meant that that was an evening when they were drinking cosmopolitans. There were cosmopolitan evenings, Manhattan evenings, Black Russian evenings, mojito evenings, highball evenings, absinthe evenings …

  “Max, my friend,” one of them—Willis—might ask, “have you ever endured a time when something in your life felt as corrosive as the rim of salt on a margarita?”

  And another—Ricardo—would add, “Ah, Max, our dead-language scholar, always the loner, did I ever tell you, my friend, how I once had a girlfriend named Carmelita who made me feel like the libre in a Cuba libre. Have you ever loved a woman like that, Max? Skin the shade her name suggests, and when she was aroused, a smell to her body of scorched sugar and fermented cane.”

  “Salute!” the Subs would chant in chorus, raising their Cuba libres to Ricardo.

  With the coat flopped over an empty barstool beside him—as it is now—Max would drink a simple double whiskey, or two, or three. And when finally back outside—as he and his coat are now—he’d feel flushed with the addicting mix of excitement and anesthesia that drinking in the early evening never failed to bring on. He feels that flush again. Welcome back, the words that refused to form on the computer screen, glow on the window of the bar. The reflection makes it appear as if the coat is alone, with no one we
aring it, as if it stands levitating, ghostly beneath a dripping awning.

  Evening surges in gusts. While he was inside the bar the drizzle became a drumming rain. Rain falls in four dimensions. Whether the window of the Twenty-first reflects the present or the past is uncertain. In the present, memory smells like rain and there’s time to inhale breath after breath. But in the past, where remembering is inconceivable, Max needs to catch a cab or he’ll be late for a first date with a woman he’s met earlier that day in the employees’ cafeteria. She was sitting by herself sipping a coffee and reading a paperback. He sat down at the next table and asked, “Good book?”

  “Not bad.” She smiled. “Dante.”

  “Shhh,” he cautioned, “you don’t want to say things like that too loud around here. It’s bad enough that you’re making a spectacle of yourself reading in public.”

  “It’s for a night class I’m taking,” she said.

  “No excuse,” he told her. “A class in what?”

  “‘A History of Visions.’”

  “You must be new. I haven’t seen you before.”

  She’d been hired a week earlier, she said, as a receptionist in Foreign Subs. Stationing her at the desk out front must be giving Subs a continental flair, he thought. With her dark glossy hair and olive eyes, she looked as if she might speak with a foreign accent. Her All-American name, Betty, didn’t seem to fit.

  Later, she’ll tell him how even as a child her name felt like an alias. Once, she asked her mother, “Why’d you name me Betty?” and her mother answered, “Dear me, I don’t recall.” She’ll tell him that as a child she felt that her mother might be an imposter, too.