Acquainted with the Night (17 page)

We returned to the dining room, to the work we had barely begun, but after a few moments the rumbling, bustling noises and the sounds of footsteps became so loud that I excused myself and started down the hall to investigate.

Three men in single file were walking out of my bedroom and towards the front door of the apartment. They were short, dark, thin men dressed in white painters’ clothes and white caps, and their shoes were spattered with paint. My face froze. Then I remembered the long fire escape outside my bedroom window, and I understood. They must have been painting the outsides of the window frames and had used my open window to get back in, the quickest, safest way. They appeared harmless and left without noticing me. It was odd that I hadn’t been told of this arrangement in advance, but odd things do happen in apartment buildings these days. Superintendents are lax and take liberties with long-term tenants. I was just beginning to breathe again, accommodating this oddness and planning to mention it to the super in a diplomatic but firm tone, when two more people emerged from my bedroom and headed for the front door. Young women, one black and broad-boned, with a large Afro, and one white and slender, with blond hair in a straggly bun. Each one wore patched blue jeans and leather boots and carried a cork board about a yard square. The black woman had a Mexican-style striped poncho over her shoulders. A moment later more painters entered, followed by more young women in jeans carrying cork boards, cardboard boxes, and shopping bags. I watched as a bustling traffic moved in and out of my apartment, the painters silent—gliding, it seemed—with their paint cans and brushes, and the young women lively and chattering, with an air of purpose.

My instinct was to call Ron, but I didn’t obey it. No, this was my place and I would handle it on my own. I strode down the hall and into the bedroom. A painter was climbing out the window onto the fire escape. The two young women with the Afro and the straggly bun were in there also, with several others. In the center of the large, bare room were things I had never seen before—green velvet cushions with fringes, and tall brass vases or urns that looked vaguely Oriental and might have been used in a religious rite; they held peacock feathers. The women were moving these objects here and there, stepping back to observe the design, moving them again.

I should have accosted them right then, but I went to see what was going on in the outside hall. I think I wanted to see how far this strangeness extended. I hoped I was not hallucinating because of the mononucleosis. I hoped the strangeness was not confined to my apartment. For the first time in a long while I wanted to feel common cause with my neighbors. Form a committee. Fight this latest infringement on tenants’ rights. I did feel relief of a sort when I opened the door. Painters, the ordinary painters I had seen all week, were working on the window frames with serene up-and-down strokes. Over near the elevator was a small crowd of very real young women, black, white, and Oriental, wearing colorful shirts and dangling beads. They carried folding tables, cartons, and bags filled with all sorts of merchandise—pots, jewelry, ceramic tiles—and they were clearly headed for my door. I realized that the strangeness had nothing to do with simplicities like inside or outside my apartment. It would extend as far as I could see. And where I could not see—well, that was like the tree falling in the forest.

I shut the door quickly and returned to the bedroom. Two young women brushed past me, and their touch, slightly electrical, shocked a response out of me.

“What’s going on here? What do you think you’re doing? This is my bedroom, not a public thoroughfare!” I said it to the large black woman with the Afro and the Mexican poncho, who had an air of authority.

“Yes, we know that.” She was bent over, rummaging through a carton, and barely looked at me.

“Well, then pack that stuff up and get out!” I managed to sound properly outraged, but underneath I was afraid. They kept unpacking their things as if they hadn’t heard.

Then the black woman stood up straight and turned in my direction. She had a square, smooth face with regal cheekbones, and seemed limitlessly self-assured. Eyeing me, she pulled off her poncho and carefully folded it into smaller and smaller triangles. At last she spoke, with the forced and finite patience one uses with a nuisance. “This is the Annual Upper Manhattan Crafts Fair, and we’re getting our stuff organized.”

“You’d better get it organized and out right this minute! I’ve never heard of anything like this. A fair! It’s a felony!”

She turned back to her work to show that the conversation was over. A few women began setting up folding tables between the vases and the green velvet pillows.

A wave of exhaustion swept over me, a common aftereffect of mononucleosis. Even so, I thought of grabbing one of the heavy brass vases and brandishing it at their heads. I didn’t. As intruders, they might be armed. Their multipocketed jeans, their loose ponchos and Mexican sweaters and colorful Pakistani shirts with endless folds could easily conceal weapons. Daggers. Even the dense recesses of their abundant hair.

I stepped back into the hall. “Ron!” I called. “Come here quick and help me!”

A moment or so later my accountant ambled down the hall.

“What’s all this?” he asked in his judicious way. Ron is not easily shocked. He works with money, after all, which represents human desire in its crudest form. For some clients he has managed to yoke into balance enormous fluctuations of investment and reward, that is, of desire and gratification.

“I don’t know. It’s a madhouse!” I waved my arms and babbled. “They say it’s some kind of crafts fair, God only knows. But look! In my apartment! I mean—how can this be? Just get them out, will you?”

As I spoke, painters glided back and forth with their brushes and cans. They ignored the young women, a dozen or so now, who were setting things up on the folding tables. My bedroom is an airy corner room, twenty-four by thirty. That they had chosen it for their fair was really a supreme irony, because I had striven so hard all these years to keep it empty, for my fantasies. My mystery stories, I mean. The room has almost no furniture. In my mind I would use it as a blank stage. I would furnish it, and it would become the setting for any scenes I imagined.

Ron gazed into the bedroom and then off to the left, into my study, a small adjoining room where I had not even thought of looking. In there were my own cork bulletin boards with notices and clippings, my own work spread out on the desk and the studio couch. Also in there was a young woman I knew from down the street.

“That’s Penelope!” I gasped. She was setting up a loom the size of a harp, which held a half-finished rug in brilliant reds and blues. Other rugs were piled on the floor, their bright colors peeking through brown paper wrappings.

“Oh, do you know that one?” asked Ron.

“Sure, she’s a neighbor. A weaver.” I chuckled. I had never before connected her name with her trade. “Penelope. A weaver!” I began to laugh uncontrollably. “Don’t you get it?”

Ron seemed baffled, but he stared at Penelope with curiosity. I stopped laughing.

Penelope was tall and lithe, with a sheet of straight black shining hair. Her oval face was radiant; possessing a perfection of line seen in Renaissance paintings. Botticellian, but more earthy. She was perennially cheerful, the kind of person who predicts that the sun will shortly come out even on the grayest of days, which was why, though I couldn’t help liking her, I avoided meeting her on the street, especially in winter. Her vivacious greetings in that pure, ringing voice were like a shower of ice pellets, and made the cold air crackle around my ears. She believed in raw sprouts and home-baked bread. She had put up Thank You For Not Smoking signs in the lobbies and elevators of all the buildings on the block. Often I had seen her from my window, setting out at dawn in her white satin shorts, not so much jogging as breezing to the park while a wan crescent of moon still hung in the sky.

Still, her presence was reassuring. The others might be her friends. She might have told them of my spacious bedroom, which she had been in once or twice when I was sick and she kindly brought over a jar of pills from the drugstore. The fair was still an outrage, but an outrage with links to the real world. The perpetrators could be dealt with in the usual ways.

“You take it easy. I’ll go in and talk to her,” Ron mumbled. “See what I can do.”

He entered the study and approached Penelope with his guarded savoir-faire. She shone her cheerful countenance upon him and began to speak. Giving an explanation, I presumed—I couldn’t hear above the bustle of painters and women. I stopped a young painter just climbing in the window. He had a pleasant face, obscured by an extraordinarily thick black mustache.

“Look here,” I said quietly. “I understand that you have to be here because you’re working. I wish someone had told me, but okay. But would you help me get rid of these other people? They have no business here. I don’t even know who they are.” He looked blank. “It’s a crime. Don’t you see? Trespassing.”

He smiled a chilly, close-mouthed smile that altered the shape of his mustache, and replied curtly in a thick and unfamiliar language.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Don’t you speak any English?”

“It’s Greek,” one of the young women told me. She was arranging a bouquet of huge paper flowers in a wine flask.

“Greek? Do you know Greek? What did he say?”

“He said he only works here. He can’t get involved.”

I tried several other painters but they all spoke Greek. If indeed it was Greek—how could I be sure? They gave the same answer; after a couple of times I recognized the syllables.

The black woman with the Afro, evidently a potter, unwrapped smoky-blue mugs and bowls and set them on a table with little cards stating their prices. A pair of women who looked like sisters, with berry-red cheeks and masses of savage black curls, hung silver chains with finely worked medallions from pushpins on a board. Another unwrapped small stained-glass plaques. So it went: from the cartons and shopping bags, as from a cornucopia, flowed batik scarves and silk-screened T-shirts, wall hangings, macramé plant holders, crocheted shawls and purses, embroidered carpet bags, leather belts and pouches, hand-painted ties—a tribute to the fertility of hand and eye. My bedroom abounded in life and color. I had to admit the fair possessed a certain chaotic beauty.

“Where’s the grill?” the black woman called loudly, as she pulled a loop of raw pork sausages from a paper bag and held them high in the air. It was a loop so long I could have jumped rope with it. I was a champion rope jumper in my youth, and for an instant I wished I had kept it up, so I could be one of them and jump rope at their fair with the loop of sausages.

“It’s outside in the hall. I’ll get it,” the blond woman said.

“Oh, no! That’s the limit!” I tried unsuccessfully to block her path. “You’re not doing any cooking in here! This is my bedroom!”

“Take it easy, lady.” And she looked at me briefly with menace in her eye, but perhaps it was only indifference. It was clear they had no idea who I was. They didn’t read, they did handicrafts. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. It was hard to imagine that they were Penelope’s friends. Penelope had always been courteous and observed the proprieties. Surely she would have introduced them, asked permission ... ?

I tried to see what sort of progress Ron was making. Penelope had spread out a few of her rugs, one over my typewriter. She was standing quite still, close to Ron, her arms hanging innocently at her sides, and was listening to him in a heartfelt and earnest manner. She was practically palpitating with earnestness. Ron was posed stylishly but a bit self-consciously with one foot up on my chair, a hand resting on his knee, and the other hand propped against the wall. Every so often he gave a shy shrug and a little laugh. Penelope smiled in her fresh, vibrant way, and made small humming nods of agreement, meaning, Oh yes, I understand perfectly. Oh yes, it’s amazing, I’ve had exactly the same kind of experience:

The nerve of him! In my house and amid my calamity! On my time,
conquistador!
He worked fast; from this encounter could come another of those whining five-year-old children for me to feed cookies to. Who knows, maybe he was in collusion also. Maybe his coming over this morning had something to do with the crafts fair: he and his children, ah, those sly children, keeping me occupied while the women were slipping in. Of course! He hadn’t been bothered by the noise when we were trying to work, he hadn’t rushed to help when I called him, he hadn’t seemed shocked by the crowd in my bedroom.

I wondered what Penelope, with her counterculture convictions, would think were I to tell her that Ron smoked, drank, ate all sorts of high-cholesterol foods, watched television avidly, called grown women “girls” and used phrases like “fresh flesh,” loved money, had no scruples about devising artful tax shelters for big corporations, drove a gas-guzzling Lincoln Mark IV, had been a lieutenant in the army and was proud of it, etc. Most likely she would find sociological excuses and vow to take him in hand. Principles bend easily when mating is involved, I have noticed.

“What’s happening?” I called to him sharply. “When are they getting out?”

He turned in surprise, as if he had forgotten all about me. “We’re coming along,” he said. “We’re negotiating.” Penelope giggled in a skittish way I wouldn’t have thought her capable of.

I wheeled round to face the women. “Everybody out! Out out out!” I shouted as loud as I could. “This minute or I’m calling the cops.” Not one of them paid any attention. I shoved into their midst and was about to fling their wares to the floor, but as one woman leaned over a carton I thought I saw something metallic glinting in the back pocket of her jeans. I was alone. They could finish me off in no time.

I would call the police, which I should have done at the start. But not here. On the kitchen phone. Suddenly I remembered the children, left alone for so long, and was sick with dread. Something terrible might have happened to the children. In a story it would have. It would fit right in with the aura of the bizarre and the sinister. What would I do? Ron might not even care—he had defected utterly. I had no hope of extricating him from Penelope’s web. Maybe they were not even his children. Maybe they were just props.