The Pawnbroker (13 page)

He had just finished unlocking the store when Marilyn Birchfield came in. She moved in out of the low sunlight, her face just a shadow at first, with the brightness behind her.

"Good morning, Mister Nazerman. May I come in?"

Now the fluorescents flickered on, and he saw her matronly figure, clad in an azure-blue dress. Her face appeared astoundingly innocent and young-looking.

Sol fixed his eyes on the flush of pink that ran across her round cheeks and over the bridge of her nose.

"A little sunburn," she said with a smile. "I often take my sandwich over to the river and eat it there. Perhaps one day you'll join me?"

"Thank you, but I take my lunch in the store," he answered, fussing with pencils and paper clips on the counter. Then, at a loss for occupation, he looked up at her with bland patience. "Was there something you wanted?"

"Oh, the same old things, really—money, signatures, sponsorships, knowledge," she said.

"I thought we had straightened all that out." His voice was frankly cold now. An odd twinge of disappointment puzzled him.

"I never give up. But, really, I found myself walking. It was so early. And then I saw you and I said to myself that it would be nice to visit. Neighborly, you might say."

A cool refreshing breeze seemed to have followed her into the store, and Sol just nodded uncertainly.

"I'm not a very good sleeper," she said musingly, leaning one elbow on the counter and staring at an ivory abacus. "It doesn't seem to matter what time I hit the hay—five o'clock comes and I'm through with sleep. Oh, I've heard jokes about what keeps spinsters awake," she said, blushing so the sunburn seemed to flow all over her face. "But the truth is I never had a night's insomnia until I came to New York and began working for the city. The way these people live! Misery, the misery. I feel it even in my own apartment, as though it were in the air. In Springfield, my father used to have to pound on the door to wake me. It's very strange. Do these people affect you that way?"

"No," Sol said. "They do not affect me at all." With pointed rudeness, he began studying the list of pawned items.

She looked at him for a moment and then composed her face to mildness.

"If you will forgive my curiosity, you are foreign born, aren't you?"

He looked up at her suspiciously, beginning to vibrate under her childlike examination. In his state, he could well do without this plump woman with the schoolgirl face and manner.

"Yes, I am foreign born. Now then, Miss ... Miss..."

"Birchfield," she supplied.

"Miss Birchfield. I am not a socially inclined man. You force me to say this; you seem to have no sense of discretion, much like a silly child who has no instinct for her listener's unwillingness to talk."

"You would be surprised about children," she said quietly.

"I am not friendly. I have no patience with passing the time of day. You solicited me the other day and I gave you five dollars; a generous offering. Come back next week and I may give some more. Otherwise, I have nothing for you. I could not coach basketball or ping-pong or the baseball even if I wanted to. I have lived a life quite alien to the Boy Scouts and the basketball...."

And then, just when he had her on the point of angrily humiliated departure, her eyes fell on the blue numbers on his arm. Her eyes went dreamy with pity, and she looked back up to his strange, ugly face with an exasperating humility, armored now beyond his insult.

"I am sorry, Mr. Nazerman," she said. "You're right, and I apologize. Surprisingly, there are times when even
I
recognize my tactlessness. I guess I was irritated by your manner when I first came in, and I probably decided, half consciously, to work you over."

"Why apologize? My manner has not changed for the better, has it?"

"Not really, I'm afraid," she said with a little laugh. "But now, somehow, it doesn't bother me any more."

He groaned in exasperation.

She leaned over the counter toward him, her face appearing bright through the bars of his little cage, her plump, scrubbed hands only inches from his.

"Will you accept my apology?" she asked.

"Yes, yes, I will accept it. Now leave me alone." He sounded petulant to himself and he wondered at the ridiculousness of this encounter he had done nothing to deserve. "Whatever you say is fine with me. Now if you please..."

"Then there is the possibility of our being friends?"

"Yes,
friends,
" he agreed, as to a lunatic, and raised his eyes to the dusty ceiling, where a nickel-plated tuba coiled like a strange serpent.

"And, that being the case, you will join me for lunch tomorrow by the river?" she said mischievously.

"All
right,
anything, please..."

"I'll be by at twelve tomorrow, then," she said, waved gaily, and took herself out with her peculiarly awkward walk, which made it seem that some eternal adolescent inhabited her full, womanly body.

The Pawnbroker stared at the empty doorway with a dazed look for some time. Finally he sighed a sound of great bewilderment. What kind of joke was this? He needed that crazy woman like a second nose. But, oddly, her delicate, laundered smell clung to his nostrils with insidious stubbornness, and he began his work still haunted by it.

His first customer had a slyly insane face full of open sores. He walked cautiously over to the counter, his arms wrapped around one of those greasy, skinlike bags.

"Valuable piece of goods here," the man said, his skinny little body exhaling a stench of old illness. "Got it off a rabbi friend of mine. Real authentic, valuable."

He reached into the bag and pulled out a velvet Torah cover, glittering with silver thread and with gold-embroidered collars that had fitted over the scrolls' handles.

"What are you doing with this?" Sol snarled.

"He
give
it to me, the rabbi," the little man whined. "Ain't it worth to you?"

"Take it out of here, you and it together," Sol said.

Jesus Ortiz came in, but before Sol had a chance to say a word to his assistant, the store was suddenly full of customers.

For a long time they were busy estimating, haggling, exchanging quick professional signals from time to time. They were a strangely matched team engaged in an even stranger performance, giving mercy with the backs of their hands, touching the odd flotsam of people's lives, removing old dreams for the loan of brief new ones, nodding to each other over the innocent heads, negating, winking coldly, holding up fingers in cryptic exchange.

Some people shouted, others laughed good-naturedly, a girl cried. The smells of poorly washed people, of cheaply perfumed bodies, of the poverty-stricken, of the diseased, all filled the store to crowd the Pawnbroker and his graceful, delicate assistant. The shelves grew a little more crowded with the assorted remains of people's idyls, and Sol's hands lost the feel of air from the greasy handling of money.

Only near noontime was the store suddenly empty. Jesus looked over at his employer with a tiny conspiratorial smile, and Sol acknowledged it with a tight-lipped nod and a shrug.

While Jesus wrote up the descriptions of the merchandise he had taken in for pawn, Sol looked around with a puzzled frown. He was seeking a logical reason for a peculiar phenomenon; in the wake of all the ugly, dirty smells, he still had the scent of something sweetly laundered in his nose.

That afternoon he barely managed civility for George Smith. But the obvious preparation in the little man's appearance made him feel too weak to be as brutal as his impatience demanded. He knew by some unseen evidence that George had a chart, drawn in pen and ink, which had the date of each pawn, the listing of prospective items for pawn, the tentative dates for redeeming things (allowing a discreet interval between pawning and redeeming). Sol just didn't have the courage yet to humiliate him and drive him away, as he wanted to.

"I've been reading this
Preface to Logic,
you know," George said, settling himself comfortably against the counter. "And I came to this one part that goes along with what we were talking about the other day. He's talking about the logic of fiction, this time. So he goes on to show how Aristotle in his
Poetics
says that poetry is truer than history...
truer than history,
mind you."

"That's the book by Morris Cohen?" Sol said, writing up the transaction without the usual gracious delay.

George nodded happily and went on talking. He could disguise quite well the frequent appearances of indifference in the Pawnbroker; a man who is hungry enough can subsist on the most meager nourishment. So he talked, a momentary scholar, the high, clean tower of his mind swept for now of all the writhing hungers, the lusts delegated to a dark cellar by the purity of his mind's desire. He would have been happy as some garrulous, mildly virile old professor, surrounded by books and occasional listeners, indifferent to his body, dreamless.

Sol stared at him deafly for several minutes, watched how the frail, tautly bound face changed expression, flashed, exhorted, conducted, reflected ideas and pleasures. And although he had no sense of rapport with the tan-skinned little man, no patience with George's feverish dusting of the great ideas, he suffered him for about ten minutes, allowing even those minimal shrugs and nods that made the monologue possible, until he could stand no more.

"Yes, I know ... but look, George," he broke in softly, "could we continue this the next time? The truth is I am rather busy now."

George smiled wanly, his disappointment barely concealed. He had been there for only ten minutes or so. Well, perhaps he hadn't really brought anything exciting this time, just a rehash of their previous talk. And then, he usually came in later in the day, when it was apt to be less busy. Oh, but he had something in store for the Pawnbroker next time! He had been saving Spinoza for a real ideal time, some afternoon when he would have something quite valuable to pawn and thus deserve more time in the store, maybe a half or even three-quarters of an hour. What a richness of exchange would be between them then! He could hardly wait.

"I'm apt to be in early next week, maybe even the end of this week. Have something interesting for you then, Sol," he said.

Sol nodded with a trace of a smile, which faded the moment George Smith was gone.

He felt a need for air. He walked out to the street and stood facing the distant railroad bridge, framed by the perspective of the tawdry store fronts. The air was thick and hot, worse even than inside the store. People walked past him, cars moved and honked, the trains under the street shook the pavement, a boat hooted from the river a block away. There was no relief in sight. He looked up; the sky stared down at all the stone and brick, a pale-blue monstrous eye that lumped him and all the other ridiculous creatures with the filthy city.

He hissed slightly through his teeth and turned back into the store. He had almost reached the counter when he realized someone had come in while he was facing down the street. He turned into the unpleasantness of the blue-eyed Negro's flat gaze.

"What can I do for you?" Sol asked evenly.

The blue-eyed man just pointed toward the counter without moving his chilling glance from Sol's face.

A gleaming, oversized harmonica lay there in an opened, blue velvet case. Sol looked it over briefly, noted the button that made sharps and flats, the famous German name. Normally, he wouldn't bother with a harmonica, but this was a very good one, a professional instrument of considerable value, which might have sold for fifty dollars or more.

"It is a nice little mouth organ. I can loan you ten dollars on it."

"Gimme the ticket, I want the ticket," Robinson said in his dry basso. He stood absolutely still, his cadaverous face as icy and patient as a fine hunter's. Only a little tic in his jaw indicated the possibility of turmoil under the dark, motionless surface.

While the Pawnbroker wrote up the description of the transaction, Jesus Ortiz came down from the clothing loft. He stood for a moment at Sol's shoulder, exchanging a look with Robinson, and when Sol glanced up at the two of them, neither offered an excuse for what might have passed between them.

"Don't sell that horn, Pawnbroker," Robinson said in that bottomless voice, which betrayed its disuse and solitude. "I gonna be back for it."

"You just bring your ticket. It will be here," Sol said.

"I bring my ticket," Robinson rasped in somber promise, his eyes on Jesus Ortiz.

Sol watched the ash-gray suit move stiffly out of the store. Somehow, from the rear, the man looked only old and impoverished, so that he could almost forget the inhuman menace of the stripped face, the eyes that had nothing to lose.

"I have a funny feeling about that man, Tangee's friend. I do not trust him. That suit, it strikes me as the kind of clothing they give a man when they release him from prison."

"Well, you don' trust no one anyhow, Sol. Ain't that the secret of your success?" Jesus asked.

"Correct," Sol answered, his glance veiled from his assistant. "I trust no one."

For a few minutes there was an abrasive quality in the silence. Jesus did some wrapping of parcels in the little office while Sol worked over the list of things to go to auction.

But by degrees the harshness dissolved, and the fantastic conglomeration of the shop claimed their unconscious moods. Again they were riven by the complexity, the intricacy of the tools of people's survival. And each, in his own unthinking way, responded to a tiny, sad abrasion in his spirit. Each of them pitied, without knowing he pitied, the pathetic paraphernalia with which humans made walls. The glossy woods of old violins, the dented brasses of tuba and trumpet, the curving eye of camera, the wink of gold and silver from a thousand castoffs made a light for the Pawnbroker and his assistant to work by, to abide in, and so to become more complex themselves; for that light was of a unique and mysterious quality. What Jesus Ortiz aspired to, he sensed in the Pawnbroker even though he did not recognize the shape of his aspiration. And what the Pawnbroker wanted had nothing to do with desire; he apparently yearned toward nothingness and in the part of him not apparent there was still darkness and terrifying growth.