False Entry (31 page)

Down the block a few stragglers waited for the bus. When it came I pressed forward with them and sat down on one of the long front seats that faced in. I knew the strata of the buses also, on these crosstown routes always more mixed and original, with people less sluggishly in context than they were on the avenues, men whose self-priming touches to hat or collar suggested that their confidence was out of its district, women who worried at each signpost and clutched their purses like women abroad in a foreign land. I stared absently at my
vis-à-vis
and they vacantly back, no doubt registering the facts of me according to their own lights and preoccupation. Surely the nature of a crowd is that everyone in it thinks himself the godly observer—the others are always the crowd. But in the subway and elsewhere when men are disposed
en face
, it has always seemed to me as if, for the purposes of travel, each man subsides, in truce, to the homunculus. Here, in a subserving silence so remarkably without overseer, a man may examine his opposite as if the latter were a bit of jeweled dirt, and for this no gauntlet is ever thrown down. And suddenly I was reminded of what my years here had made me forget, of how in those first weeks of wandering the city, what had surprised me, awed me most of all, was this great conspiracy of silence. In towns such as I had come from the streets are a constant ripple of nods and tipped greetings, a bath of human acknowledgment And before that, in London, I had been a child, to whom all elders are a single, high sentry mouth from which one takes as scripture the handed-down distinction between the seen and the heard.

But as I had first walked the streets of New York I had been filled with amazement. Here and there on the tenement stoops there were clusters, and the bicker of children. Yet even these people put their necks in the yoke when they went on the main streets, abroad; a chance encounter with a known had a tinge of embarrassment at its edges, as if one had been surprised incognito; even lovers and families fell proudly silent in a kind of disownment, and only the inanimate, unleashed and braying its triumph, gave tongue. It’s this, I thought—as the bus came to the end of the line, the driver said nothing, and we all disembarked—that makes the countryman say he cannot bear the noise of the city. What he finds unbearable is the non-noise of the human.

A clump of schoolgirls came toward us, all shoots of arm, gawk and hair. They were speaking to each other but really to “the gallery” hung in each heart like a collective valentine just opened that morning. They rolled past us like a huge sweetmeat ball sugared with giggles, leaving an eddy of smiles or annoyance behind. We dispersed around them, each of us taking his way alone, and as I stood looking down the long street with its busy rodent-fringe of shops, I could see perhaps fifty or more like us, a congress of fifty human beings passing each other as silently as if under edict, like people who walk about under some mutual concept that all assent to and none has authored, under a ban of tyranny or war.

I turned westward with some of the others, toward the Hudson. How sunshine muddies the thinking I thought; the absurdity is mine. The city merely makes demonstrable, in broad daylight and in numbers, the final distance between psyche and psyche, between C sharp and D flat, between one and one. A distance to be yearned over occasionally in private, but sensibly welcomed—as the naked bum blesses its trousers—when abroad. The city is nothing more than anonym on the avenue, in place of anonym at home in double bed or at family table, at his analytical desk or on his painfully self-examining knees. This is the feverish sensibility of the truant still tied to his memoir, I thought—now it’s time to go home. Nevertheless, I continued walking.

Ahead of me on the broad thoroughfare, two or three of my compatriots on the bus were still with me going my way—and perhaps one or two behind. Did I really wish to know them, and why? Ego, no doubt, in part—the concatenation of thirty-five persons and Mr. P. Goodman on an east-west bus on a particular afternoon in the year of our Lord, April, either has a significance toward which all their past lives have tended them, or none—in which case neither has he. In which case neither
is
he. Or
who
? But the whole of it was that I was still in fact greedy to know them all, not themselves but their single story in all its variable, in each of which perhaps there was a chip of mine. And if I could, I should have wished to know not only theirs but all the street’s and the city’s, like some emperor, sadder and less satiable than Alexander, who knew that the world to be conquered never ends, being round.

Behind me the footsteps dropped off. Up ahead, only one of the crowd on the bus still led me, a small, elderly woman hobbling along with jerky neatness, as if her long skirts concealed an endless wheel of paper-doll feet that one after the other came down. I trailed her, if only because I have always had a hard time making myself let go of the casual, knowing how subtly afterwards it may be seen to have woven itself into the choice. Then too, we were approaching the university neighborhood and this gave me a practical reason—I have always been adroit at finding them. For I still meant to keep my evening appointment with myself. If I cannot approach through the depth, I thought, then I shall probe downward through the surface—even if it means doing as the encyclopedist does in the office, even if I should have to record the “
I
” as if it were another’s, as if it were “he.” And these blocks, though not for long, were the next environ in the memoir.

The woman ahead, eyes bent, was covering the ground with the tortoise intentness of the elderly. She turned into the doorway of one of the large apartment houses that front the river there, her slow pace allowing me time to make my direction nonchalantly hers. This too was the impersonal advantage of the city. We stood together inside, in front of an elevator that descended somewhere above us with a servile sighing, like an omen that had to please everybody. I knew these old lobbies well, their ochered Ionic plaster and dirty marble from which the corporation had long since removed the Oriental rugs and Queen Anne thrones of their prime, leaving behind only what could not be removed and was valueless—their echoing, anachronistic space. Above, the middle middle class lived with its pretensions and its roomers, the professor housing the student, the salesman hanging on to his debts by his expense account, while their wives, hunching their collars through the Puerto Rican side streets, protested “the river, the park for the children,” meanwhile keeping up an elegy in tune with the elevator—“running down, everything running down.”

The old lady, about seventy, had the classless neatness peculiar to some elderly women, flesh faded serviceably toward soap, past
crème
, long since pensioned off into its black. I had a fancy that she lived here; this neighborhood, as I knew from my college days, was among other things the habitat of the in-between relict of indeterminate age, ancestry, and bundles. One passed them so constantly, each under her artifact, a black hat, shaped like a pot or a dusty meringue which changed its shelf perhaps but never its season, that after a while they became the same one, recurring like a figure on a willow plate of blurred, indefinable pattern, or on some humble karma wheel.

The elevator was a long time in coming. I studied my lady as one might a shell plucked from a beachful; her eyes were cast down. Faint iodine stains on the white hair told of blondeness fifty years before. A long nose, patient with its own length, a Hapsburg lip, slightly trembling, one Manila paper bag—was she dispensing or receiving?—on which thick leather gloves with a gift shine to them firmed themselves now and again to a crackling in time with the lip. Her cheap scarf caught my eye; there was always something. Printed with clowns and balloons in the crudely coy dime-store art intended for children—chosen by a child perhaps, or borrowed from one. She might be academe’s widow or salesman’s mother-in-law. She might be anybody. This was her mystery.

To the left of the elevator there was a tenant directory; from it I picked an imaginary destination—Gerber, 10A, on the top floor, from which I might then walk down, taking a survey perhaps, hunting a room—I had no plan. It seemed odd to have none, after so many years of meeting, as strangers, those with whose dossiers I actually was so often secretly armed. But here, of course, I had no intent to enter her life past her door. Madam, I am investigating accident. Specifically, the accident toward which all our lives may have tended us, and, except for my action, veered us away. I intrude no personal acquaintance; I crave merely a bit of cosmic gossip—what history it was sat so silently next to mine. Doubtless there is no connection other than the slight fortuity of existence. Pardon this amateur philosophizing—I attended school in this neighborhood, at the innocent age when such problems had force.

The elevator door opened and I followed her inside, stepping to the rear, although, except for the operator, an old Negro whose hat was his uniform, we were alone. Her form, bowed in front of me, had the simple, touching curve, drawn by a master, that comes with age. Perhaps I might hurt a fly, I thought, but toward you, rest assured, I intend none. Nevertheless, as we rose slowly together, I felt a heavy sadness. Probing, I recognized it for the familiar, sad portent that comes to us when we are about to enter a relationship; the shiver that comes even on the brink of love—as we descend knowingly toward what will change us—and will have its attendant crimes.

As it happened, no plan was necessary. We stopped at the third floor. The old woman fumbled in her purse, then turned to the operator. “You know whether she’s home still? I forget my keys.”

“I dunno,” he said. “I don’ take nobody down from there since I get back from lunch. I seen the kid walk down.”

“They let him go out like that,” she muttered. “A baby.” She put her glove on the old man’s sleeve. “You wait, yes? I give you a quarter anyway.”

“Dunno if the super’s around,” he answered. “And he never give me no passkey.” But he waited.

She rang a bell at a door down to the left in the dark hall. After a long interval it opened, to a muffled exclamation. We heard the old woman’s whisper, “I forget my keys to that place. I have to come back.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ma,” said a voice, “that’s the second day you’ve lost this week.”

“You won’t lose, you won’t lose,” said the old woman. “I go back tomorrow. They don’t care.”

“All right, all right. Well, come on in, what you standing—?”

“I’ll go down again. I’ll go sit in the park by Johnny.”

“Now listen. How many times I got to—” The voice jammed, then went on. “The kid don’t
want.
He’s gone on eight years old.” There was another pause. “Well,” said the voice, “out or in?” After a moment the door closed.

The old man peered out of the elevator, then shook his head. “How do you like that?” he said. “How do you like that! She do that to me two-three times already. Ain’t never seen no quarter yet.” He put his hand on the starter. “Where to?”

“What’s her name?” I said. “I see her around now and then, but I don’t know her name.”

“Don’t know, sir. She ain’t a tenant.”

“But she lives here.”

“Eyuh. Come last month. Six-seven bags I tote in for her, that th’ oney quarter I seen yet.” He chuckled. “But she ain’t a tenant,” he added fretfully. “Forty-eight tenants here. Got enough on my hands keeping track those.”

“Oh, she rooms then.”

“Eyuh, she rooms,” he said. “Got her a room in her daughter-in-law-’s house.” A buzzer rang sharply. “Coming,” he muttered, and looked at me again, inquiring.

“Ten,” I said. “Ten.” We rode up slowly, the cables sighing. How easy it was to follow, I thought. Got her a room in her daughter-in-law’s house. On the way out, I slipped him a dollar. He looked at me, mouth open.

“Some of her quarters,” I said, and I heard his “Yessuh,
yessuh
!” break into chuckles as the door clanged and he went down.

There was a window wide open in the hallway, and I leaned on its sill for a few moments, looking down at a court, a side street, and the riverside park. Up here the wind brought in a steady precipitation, settling on my arm, grinding like carborundum between the tiled floor and my heel. I knew this day too at this hour, the long, straight shadows peculiar to an island rectangular, as if the side streets, in dark, animal file, advanced on the avenues, and at one strike of the lights fell back and fawned. I still felt the portent. The lone history I had forced my way upon had not slaked it. Down below, the crowd moving on looked speciously joined. Ten flights up, however, need not be mistaken for the aspect of eternity, I thought, and walking on tiptoe, but taking my time about it like a reluctant conspirator, I went down.

Outside, I walked downriver. The western sky was peachblow. Under its drag of light, over the seal-colored palisades, one could almost believe in a chariot descending the other side. Above us the welkin was forming, a blue that steadily accreted toward the dome, toward that mythological center which never leaves our hearts, born as we are of a race of whom each must believe, against all acquired knowledge, that wherever he stands is under the apex of the sky.

Once more it was the hour of other people’s assignations. One grows to know, sometimes very late, that the private phenomenon one has nurtured so secretly in the breast is common to all. This hour that had grown along with me, up, up from my childhood, that I had brought along with me from Tuscana, had long since come to seem to me especially identified with the multifarious city—the hour when the lights went up willy-nilly in every breast and the unlucky held their breath at the sight of the lucky ones streaming by car, on foot, by wire toward their love or even their hate, their ambition, their piety—somewhere. I turned my back on the river that doubled its plangent depths on the other side of the low wall as suggestively as a sky, and walked rapidly eastward through the blocks that led toward Central Park. The streets were mediumly soiled here with a living, neither high nor low, that lacked the black, bituminous drama of impoverishment, and people moved on them still in the convention of silence, but under the pre-lamp, powdery air of evening, one could find a rhythm in that susurrus, as if they came forward in coda, subscribing toward a silent tune. The phlox were moving. They came forward singly, in pairs, and single again as I was—the vicious, the sweet, the broken and the indomitable, all intermixed, as who knew better than I? But my back was to the light and their faces touched to unison by the sunset compline. The ordinary were advancing; this was the ordinary thing. Once more I looked in at their window frame, this time holding the old woman’s history in my hand like a bit of jeweled dirt that had begged for notice, like a visa thrust into my palm. They bloomed quietly toward me and past me, face linked to domestic face in that temporary gilding, each moving patiently under the small arc of its personal death, pitting its slight shadow against the interplanetary sky, shadow to shadow, speciously joined. I walked hopelessly faster to annul them, like a man pacing his hitherto perfectly controlled garden and caught there by a sudden hallucination in which bushes burn voices, corollas clap their tongues and the power of the inanimate pollinates the air. Shadow pressed to classless shadow, they surrounded me and passed me, and I hurried through them as if I were in danger of being snatched into the orbit of the wheel they turned on, drawn forward into the blur of the willow plate. Then the street lamps glanced on, spreading a garish light even more reasonable than day, and I escaped.