The Pawnbroker (21 page)

Only her own body suggested grossness and superfluity.

"A lot of woman for so little living" was her own selfeffacing joke. It convinced her family and her friends that she was well-adjusted and wholesome. Well, she supposed she was, really, in spite of the guilty images to which she was susceptible in the early morning or late at night, at those times when her body betrayed her because of its idleness. She felt the heavy swing of her breasts and thought of all the babies she could have nourished, moved the wide strength of her hips and felt furtiveness like a pain at the thought of the man they could have brought joy and comfort to.

But only the vulnerability of her first waking defended those thoughts. She threw her powerful legs over the edge of the bed and so flung herself bravely into the day. Smiling dignity, that was one of her poses; there were worse ones. Just as long as her eyes were open, as long as she continued to laugh at herself whenever her poses began to impress her as truth, she would not become grotesque or pitiable. Having hungers, she must admit them to herself and not dress them in some other guise, like those childless spinsters who dressed their dogs in sweaters and caps and talked to them in baby talk.

She washed thoroughly in the shower, brushed her teeth for a full five minutes, brushed her shiny brown hair a hundred counted strokes. And then, mildly Spartan, stared square into the mirror at the round, immaculate face, the clear eyes with the beginnings of age mapped in the little intersections around them. It was like morning calisthenics of the spirit, that gazing unflinchingly at her plain, plumply healthy face and, as with calisthenics, she was invigorated by facing clearly who and what she was.

Not that she was completely tranquilized by that, only that she took the weights of unhappiness from a firmer footing. As she dressed, she noted again her firm, rather gross body and she felt a touch of regret. Now, it was not self-pity, though, but a form of disapproval—she had been brought up to abhor waste in any form. And this somehow recalled the face of Sol Nazerman to her, because she sensed a vast waste of spirit in him. In her pity for him, she exposed herself to an old hurt, too, for she felt hope throb in her where she had thought there was only scar.

"Oh that poor man," she said aloud as she sipped coffee and stared from her kitchen window toward the distant glint of the river, with its bridges like a child's erector-toy in the morning haze. But she didn't like the patronizing sound of that. Where did she get the idea that he required her pity? She had no idea what went on behind that puffy, alien face. "If he could only be brought out of himself a little..." But then she warned herself against self-deception. Now, now, Marilyn old girl, let's be clear about our motives. Let's not pretend altruism when there is even a suspicion that the return is the most important factor. Yes, Sol Nazerman was a man. But he seemed so full of suffering that she guessed he was not so vulnerable to a woman, after all. Besides, she was rather protected against coveting him as a man, for he was unattractive physically, indeed, seemed old and remote and out of the context of man-woman relationships. But if she had no personal profit in mind, was she perhaps a professional do-gooder?

Somehow she thought that she was innocent of that, at least as far as he was concerned. There was a profounder disturbance evoked in her than she experienced among the impoverished children she worked with. Something vast and nameless seemed to drag at her spirit when she looked at him or even thought about him. It was as though a great, distant wailing came to her ears, and she felt she could not live in the same world with that sound without trying to do something about it.

She washed out her cup and saucer and set them in the drainer. Then she closed a drawer, shut a cupboard door, and straightened the slightly biased plant next to the phonograph. Finally she gathered herself for the day at the Youth Center; she loaded her brief case with notebooks and pencils and pads and smiled at the ineffectual aspect of the tools of her trade.

When she was in the doorway of the apartment, half out in the hallway already, she turned to gaze back inside a little absently, as though she might have left something behind. And in that pose of musing, her finger resting beside her mouth, the brief case weighting one side of her, she spoke aloud to the empty rooms.

"I will just have to be a pest with him. I'll keep after him. He has too much pain for one person. I can tell by his eyes...."

He was busy from the hour of opening. People drifted in quietly, one after another, as though some momentous message had reached them, as though each of them came in answer to a great, silent call. They milled around expectantly with their mobile lips, their ill-shaped teeth and stained, veinous eyes, waiting their turn with ponderous patience. And Sol looked up at each succeeding face with a sort of horror for the appallingly long gauntlet before him.

Over the heads of the nearest, he saw others still outside, looking in at the display of the windows or just staring at the hot light of the street in an indecisive way as they jingled their tiny treasures, uncertain about what they could gain inside.

"What do they think it is—Bargain Day?" Sol muttered.

Over at the other counter, Jesus Ortiz handled his share of the traffic calmly and efficiently. Occasionally he called out some question to his employer, and Sol answered vaguely or agreed with some likely guess. But mostly Ortiz operated with complete self-confidence. There was something reminiscent of Sol in his mannerisms, in the way in which he busied himself with things out of his customers' view when he wished to show disdain for a request, in his habit of returning the object of pawn to reject a demand, in the silent shake of his head, which left no doubt about his firmness, and in the single spasmodic nod that signified agreement. And all of it might have been some unconscious evidence of respect for his teacher as well as pride in a thing well learned.

In contrast, Sol seemed dazed by the great volume of customers. He looked up frequently to peer out at the street, and felt the weariness from the start; he had a strange feeling that all the city's millions waited in line outside, that he might be there behind the counter for eternity, dealing with succeeding generations, endlessly bargaining, arguing, and struggling against the ugly, benighted faces.

The objects that people handed over and for which they showed expressions of loss, or regret, or anger at him for taking, all turned cheap and valueless in his hands. He became filled with the idea that he was building a tower of junk, struggling and draining himself to amass nothing. Sometimes he looked up for the face of his assistant as though trying to find sanity in what he was doing. But there would be Ortiz, slim and calm in his vitality and offering no reassurances at all. So he tried to let his mind range out beyond the quietly murmurous crowd, to think wildly of the size of the world, to try to picture other remote ends and strivings, only to finally be forced back into what
he
was doing. For him, then, the core of life was there in all its reality; brutal, wretched, and grasping. This was what he was down to; below this, there was nothing. So he clung to that harsh actuality as to an abrasive, whirling rock, terrified, furious, and hopeless.

A coffee-colored man in a black Loden coat, and goateed and horn-rimmed, took a loan on a shiny trumpet. A tall effeminate youth pawned a woman's watch and argued about the price in a high, strained lisp. A chunky Negress wearing fancy harlequin glasses, taking her perpetually pawned heating pad out of hock, spoke in the minimum of monosyllables. An athlete with a closely shaved dense beard that made a shadow on his very dark skin took a loan on a bag of golf clubs and a pair of hockey skates, and his expression said with dismal common sense that he was too old for that stuff anyhow. Puerto Rican women in two stages of life (the disastrous beauty they are prone to and the sudden ruin that follows so early) came and went like a repetidous parody. A man with a brown, Lincolnesque face and wearing an orange shirt pawned his wife's wedding ring. A trio of boys with hollow warrior faces made loans on identical navy-blue suits. A sleepily majestic Negro, who looked like a Swedish king, offered an elaborate truss for money as solemnly as if it were his own insides being proffered. A Chinese-eyed mulatto who wheeled a television set in on
a
dolly stood bored and tough, and took the first offer with such odd softness of speech that it seemed the words barely made the trip to his lips. A fat, sad white made a hopeless request on his pocket watch, then took Sol's offer with only the slight lengthening of breath that might have been a sigh. A boy no more than fourteen who claimed to be twenty, and tried to raise money on a cigarette case made of tin, cursed professionally when Sol refused him, and threatened malevolence from his vicious turkey-chick's face. From all walks, runs, and stumblings of life they came, and their supply never was exhausted.

Sol's head began to come apart by the middle of the afternoon. It was as though a crack, begun at the base of his skull in the morning, had now widened to the point where his brains could spill through at any moment. He felt driven to scream, and even opened his mouth; but suddenly he found quiet and emptiness. One late beam of sunshine cut through the dust of the recent stampede. He looked at it for a long, numbed minute. Then he slowly raised his harrowed face like a very old man.

Jesus Ortiz smiled at him and nodded confirmation that they had been through that assault and were there to tell the story.

"What are you smiling at?" Sol asked in a croaking voice. He felt that tremulous irritation the old feel at the sight of something young and fresh looking.

"I guess I like my work," Ortiz answered.

"Aha. And perhaps you would like to have a shop of your own?" Sol asked with deceptive blandness. "One like this—perhaps this very one?"

"I wouldn't mind it." Ortiz looked around slowly. "1 would make systems and all. And I would put my name on the door in gold letters—Proprietor, J. Ortiz. Yeah, I comin' to think this a good business for me. Like the surprises—you get a lot of surprises in a business like this. You never know when a special item gonna come you way here. A great diamond, a old, old piece of gold jewelry,
valuable
things..."

Sol began to laugh, a harsh, devilish sound in the quiet.

Ortiz looked at him curiously, his face tight and wary.

"Why you laugh, Sol? Is it so funny what I say?"

"Oh no, no, it is really not funny at all. And you want this so badly that you would do almost anything to get it?"

Ortiz didn't answer. He stared guardedly at the Pawnbroker, wondering what the Jew knew or thought he knew.

"Yes, of course you would," Sol said in a distantly musing voice. It was as though he felt a perverse pleasure at recognizing the shape of the walls that closed on him.

"It's a way to make money, ain't it? You say makin' money is the big thing youself. Ain't nothin' else matter much, do it?" He spoke from where he stood, still behind the other counter, and there was something oddly formal in their conversing across the store like this: the quality of a debate or a trial in which the issues were mercurial and ever-changing.

"No, that is right, nothing," Sol answered. He stared at the empty floor where lately so many customers had been. "And even that, sometimes ... it, too, can turn to dust. No matter, though..."

"Yahh."

"Is it not funny how they pile in here like that for hours on end, and suddenly—no one."

"It funny," Ortiz agreed.

They spent some time contemplating nothing, while outside the store the street unrolled its seamless, unexciting tableau whose background changed color subtly with the waning daylight.

Finally Ortiz asked in a sleepy voice, "What was that you was startin' to tell about them real-good diamonds?"

"You won't see any of those in here," Sol said.

"Maybe not, but I want to know, just in case...."

"Well, what is the difference." He sighed and then replenished the exhaled breath. "The very best, of course, are the rare fancies. They come in all kinds of strange colors, like bronze and canary and even black. But aside from those, which are very, very rare, the best of the others are the jagers, which are a sort of brilliant sky blue inside, like a burning core of daylight. Then-you have the wesseltons, which are a harder, more metallic blue. After that you have the river diamonds and the crystals...."

And, hardly conscious of what he was saying, almost soothed by the litany of his own voice, Sol unfolded more of his peculiar craft, and Jesus Ortiz drank it in thirstily, sensing without knowledge that a deep hollow in him filled with the Pawnbroker's voice. Sol ran his fingers over the dusty oratorical award under the counter as he talked; Ortiz toyed absently with the small silver medal on his chest. But both of them seemed to listen to some third person as their eyes gazed vaguely at the street.

Until suddenly the Pawnbroker seemed aware of the remarkable lapse of time. He frowned and took off his glasses to clean them.

"Enough already, Ortiz. Straighten up around here a little," he said coldly.

"Sure thing," Ortiz said. "Class dismiss, huh?"

Sol scowled questioningly.

"You know, you my teacher. I'm the student to you," Ortiz said with a grin on his fine, dark face.

"You are nothing to me," Sol said savagely as the phantom pain suddenly shot through him.

Ortiz shrugged, but his face turned to a starched mask and the soft ease of daydream in his eyes was blown away like clouds before a wind. And after that there was no more between them until he left for the night.

When he was gone, Sol moved around the store carefully, to favor the great split in his skull. He straightened, he brushed, he picked up pieces of paper and squinted at them, unable to derive any meaning from them. Every so often he stopped, with his hand up to his mouth, imitating someone who is so busy he has to decide which of his pressing chores to do next. And then, faithful to his small impersonation, he went on doing nothing in particular. He adjusted the position of an old dueling pistol in the glass case, picked up one of the cheap, imitation Black Forest hunting knives and held it point up in front of his face before putting it down in a slightly altered position beside the dueling pistols.